Chapter Fifteen

"keep the robot repair units working," Norlin ordered. "We'll be back soon and will need the ship in perfect condition." The words burned his tongue. He knew he lied, not only to the crew but to himself. They would never return. Even if the others again assumed their stations on the Preceptor, he wouldn't be in the command chair. Sublieutenants did not command cruisers. He had been lucky and circumstances had smiled on him. The best he might hope for was a pro-motion to full lieutenant. The worst he didn't care to dwell on. Pavel Pensky had died. Emperor Arian did not like hearing his favorites had perished, even in the line of duty. If a scapegoat was needed to assuage the em-peror, Norlin knew where he'd be found. Sub-lieutenants were expendable.

"They've swept the aliens away for us with ground-based lasartillery," marveled Sarov. "I checked before leaving my station. The Death Fleet has pulled back and is allowing near-planet orbits to go unchallenged."

"Good," said Norlin. The last thing he needed was a fight all the way to Button's surface. He hurried to the pilot's couch in the small shuttle craft and dropped into it. The automatic straps closed around him. He ran through the preflight checklist quickly and saw that his program from the Preceptor's main computer had already been loaded. They would follow the course given them by the admiral until they touched down at the main base outside the capital.

"Barse, close the lock. Liottey, check the air system. Miza, Sarov, hang on. Here we go." He hesitated for a moment as Barse cycled shut the airlock door. Then he stabbed the launch button that sent them blasting from the cruiser's cargo bay.

The instant they hit space Norlin knew some-thing was wrong. The readings were off.

"Too little mass aboard. What happened? Liottey?"

"Captain, she's still on the Preceptor.''

"What?"

"Barse. She closed the airlock from shipside. She's still on the Preceptor!"

"Damnation!" Norlin grabbed the microphone and moved the band to his throat. He swallowed once to clear the circuit, then said, "Barse, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

"Cap'n, good to hear from you. Having a nice

. • *\»

trip?

"We're coming back. I'll flay you alive for this."

"Captain, wait," said Chikako Miza. "Enemy ship moving in. Small. Scout class, I'd guess." She worked the small console on the bulkhead next to her couch with as much finesse as she did the larger one on the Preceptor.

"It might as well be a battler," Norlin com-plained. "The shuttle hasn't got anything on it."

"It's got us on it," said Sarov. "Can we land and let Barse do whatever she wants on the cruiser? Let her die if she wants."

"We're a crew. We depend on one another."

"Go on down, Cap'n. Let Baldy enjoy hiding his head in the sand. Me and the cat will have the ship ready to shift when you get back. There won't be a single system aboard that's not tuned to max or better. That's a promise."

"Tia," he started. Norlin cut off his plea for her to rejoin them. His command sensors finally picked up the incoming alien ship. Miza had been right. It was small, hardly larger than the picket ship he had commanded, but its power-level indications ran off-scale. This diminutive ship packed a wallop.

"Sneak ship," said Sarov, peering over Miza's shoulder at the readout. "We don't want to tan-gle with it, and we'd better hope the ground batteries can take it out. We're not going to outrun or outfight it."

"Outmaneuver it?" suggested Miza. .

"Cold day in hell," said Sarov. "We'd need a bundle of luck and a star to wish on." Norlin jerked forward and erased the landing program he had given the shuttle's computer. He put the nav computer on warning status and the controls on manual. The shuttle spun crazily and bounced off the uppermost layer of atmo-sphere.

"What are you doing? Trying to kill us?" Liot-ley's voice reached a shrill scream and was drowned out by the struggling heat exchangers on the shuttle. Norlin bounced them off the thicker reaches of atmosphere again, threaten-ing the integrity of the ship and causing the temperature to rise.

"The sneak ship is on us like a particle drop-ping into a black hole. We're not going to get away." Sarov sounded fascinated by the pros-pect of dying in one-sided combat.

Everyone cried out when Norlin hit the atmo-sphere at a steeper angle. Heat exploded like a bomb inside the small cabin. The heat-exchange units gave up and activated shut-down circuits to prevent further damage.

He put the shuttle into a tight spiral. The computer warnings flashed all over his board. Norlin ignored them. He had to. Only one read-out mattered. The alien ship's tracking equip-ment had proved excellent—too damn good for Norlin's taste.

"We're leaving an infrared trail for it, Norlin," cried Liottey.

"Let's see how good they really are," Norlin said. He tightened the spiral. He had bounced off the atmosphere like a skipping stone on water to kill orbital speed. Now he strained the shuttle to the limits of its design. Molten gob-bets of glue holding together the composite ma-terial came free from the leading edges of the stubby wings. The structural integrity vapor-ized.

"Here goes nothing." Just as he thought the shuttle might break apart, he put the vessel into a shallow dive. The g-forces blacked out Sarov and Liottey. Miza moaned and Norlin clung to consciousness from sheer stubbornness.

"Hot," he muttered. He tossed his head from side to side to get rid of burning-hot sweat drip-ping into his eyes. Everything blurred in front of him except the single readout showing position of the approaching vessel.

The alien sneak ship had lost them in the elec-tronic fuzz of composite gas and the huge cloud of ionized air surrounding them. As it sought them, it strayed.

Lasartillery on the ground spat out reddish purple lances of energy measured in hun-dreds of terawatts. The atmosphere boiled; it was reduced to plasma, stripped of electrons in picoseconds. The tip of this fiery tongue of coherent radia-tion brushed along the side of the sneak ship at the speed of light. Pieces of alien ship tumbled from the sky.

"There," gasped Norlin. "We can land now." He fought the damaged shuttle down. Through a gathering veil of pain-racked blackness, he guided the ship. It had lost its control surfaces; his shoulders ached from the tension of pound-ing the computer in an attempt to fly by the wire. Only after he touched down and skidded four kilometers did he relax.

"Good work, pilot," came the cheery congratu-lations. "You're going to be paying for this wreck for the next five hundred years—and that's only if you get promoted."

"Where am I? How close?" he amended. Nor-lin struggled to match his landing with the area given him by Admiral Bendo.

"Good enough for government work. You're a few klicks from the entrance to base." Norlin turned to see how his passengers had fared. Miza stood on shaky legs and helped Liot-tey up. Sarov bemoaned his sorry fate having fallen in with crazy pilots but seemed otherwise uninjured.

"Out. Everyone out," ordered Norlin.

"That's dangerous," said Sarov. "The hull is outgassing. One small whiff could kill a dino-saur. And none of us are dinosaurs."

"We're not extinct through no fault of our pilot trying," said Miza. Norlin checked the exterior sensors and saw that Sarov was right. He applied enough thrust to move the shuttle along the runway slowly. He ignored the outraged cries from the controller and the rescue squad on its way to take them to the underground bunkers.

"Drop out as I taxi," he told the other three. "They'll pick you up in a few minutes and get you to safety." He watched the tiny vidscreen as it picked up the lasartillery's actinic bolt of pure energy racing into the heavens in pursuit of the Death Fleet.

"What are you going to do? You can't stay in-side," said Liottey.

"Barse is still in the Preceptor. With the sneak ship gone, I can get her off."

"You sound like a genhanced," accused Miza. "There's no way you can pilot this back to orbit, rescue her, and return."

"You can take bets on how well I'll do. Now get out. If you don't, you'll be going back to the Preceptor with me."

The three jumped out the opened side emer-gency airlock, hit the glasphalt runway, and rolled. Norlin saw the trucks racing to them. He swung around, checked the fuel, and decided he had enough—barely. His main concern was the shuttle's structural integrity. The composite ma-trix had taken extreme heat, vibration, and stress reaching the ground. A wing might buckle. A hull plate might give way at a critical moment. Anything might happen.

Norlin applied full power and stood the shut-tle on its tail. He arrowed directly into the sky, an inertial-guidance needle showing the way to the Preceptor. The shuttle computer almost failed to compensate when the ship hit maxi-mum dynamic stress. The air couldn't get out of the way of the blunt nose and swept-back wings fast enough. Then Norlin found himself in

space. The atmosphere clung to the craft with thin tendrils, but the real gaseous blanket lay behind. He pulled the shuttle around and achieved low orbit. Eighty minutes later, he ap-plied braking rockets, rose to a higher orbit, and jockeyed for position to dock with the Preceptor.

"Cap'n, you've got vacuum for brains," came Tia Barse's voice over his earphones. "Why'd you come back?"

"I thought you wanted me to feed the cat."

"You're crazy," the engineer said.

"We're a crew, dammit. We stay together." He had no time to argue with her.

"You're drawing them to us. There's another of the sneak ships. Wow!" Barse whistled as a ground laser spit the craft. "Good shooting. I'd love to check out the servo-mechanisms on the ground lasartillery. They're tracking better than we ever did."

"Get the refueling bay ready," Norlin ordered, not caring how the ground-grippers fired. That they fired accurately was good enough for him. We don't have much time."

"Cap'n, that one. It had come into orbit just behind us when they gutted it."

"Good, glad to hear it." Norlin chewed his tongue as he fought the computer and the shut-tle's balky controls. The chances for another safe landing on the planet in this craft were two: slim and none.

"The sneak ship's got a radiation cannon aboard."

"We've already got one."

"Right, and we can't use it because the power

plant won't handle recharging. Let's take a quick look at their power system. It's not too far."

"You're going to be the death of me—of both of us and the cat," grumbled Norlin. But the idea appealed to him. He felt cocky. He had evaded a sneak ship, had outpiloted it, had de-livered most of his crew to safety on the planet below. He was Pier Norlin, pilot without equal. He could do anything. Norlin shook his head, wondering if he had a concussion and didn't know it. Barse's suicidal tendencies had infected him.

"We get into the shuttle, we go planet-side. That's all we're going to do."

"Cap'n, have a heart. There aren't any other ships from the Death Fleet around. The ground batteries hold them off. And they've got some cute little satellites that lock on to the enemy and chase 'em down. Let's explore."

Norlin cycled open the airlock. Barse stuck her head in. He heard her voice directly and over his comlink. "Please?"

"Got an RRU? Get both the robots and a cam-era probe. I want pix of everything we see on that ship, as well as every piece of equipment the robots can pry loose."

"You're going to make one hell of a captain one day, Cap'n. You're not so bad right now." Tia Barse jumped into a couch, cat under her arm, and studied the readouts. "You're holding this piece of garbage together with a prayer, aren't you?"

"Not much else left," he admitted. Already the

new mission began to pall. Good sense returned as the euphoria of his escape faded.

"Don't back out on me now, Cap'n," she cau-tioned. "I don't want to walk over there. Not after all the good work I've done while you were gone. Amazing how easy it is to work when you're not being disturbed all the time."

"Just you and the cat?"

"You noticed he wasn't on the shuttle?"

"Not until I checked the mass and found you gone."

"I'm touched."

"Only in the head—like me." Norlin applied gentle pressure to the throttle controls and or-dered the computer to get him out of the Precep-tor's cargo bay. They slid easily from the larger ship, spun around their minor axis and jetted over to dock with the alien ship slowly overtak-ing them in orbit.

"Looks dead," he said after several minutes of study.

"The laser beam sliced away the control room. Dammit. I'd love to see how they manage their cannon."

"No sign of hostile activity," he said, keeping a close watch on his sensor readouts. "The crew must have died instantly."

"Damned fine shooting, if you ask me. Let's not stand around with our thumbs up our asses. I want to prowl."

The long, slender needle of a ship had been treated with a dull, radar-absorbent material. Bits flaked off as Norlin gently bounced his shuttle against the ship's hull. Using magnetic grapples, he attached the shuttle to the sneak ship just aft of the hole blown through it by the ground lasartillery.

"Let me get into my suit. You, too, Cap'n. We're starting to lose pressure." Norlin groaned as he saw the life-support-sys-tem readouts. Barse was right. The shuttle leaked atmosphere like a sieve. He scrambled to get into the thin, transparent pressure suit. By the time he succeeded in tumbling and rolling in the free-fall environment, Tia Barse had begun cycling through the airlock. Her suit bulged where the cat hung. The animal's eyes were closed; it was sound asleep.

"Wait. Don't go in there alone!" he cried.

"I'll be back before you know it. Keep the jets burning. I saw signs of incoming. This one must have put out a distress call before they died. I've got the RRU and the probe. Get to monitoring them." Norlin fumed but obeyed. Arguing now only wasted precious time. He glanced at the long-range sensors and went cold inside. What Barse had tossed off so easily was true. A dozen Death Fleet ships blasted for them.

"Hurry. They'll be here in a few minutes, un-less the ground batteries can get rid of them."

"Not this time. I think their entire fleet's com-ing in for the kill. There. Just cut through the bulkhead and into their engine compartment. Can't make blivits out of it. Confused tangle of pipes and wire and spit."

"Start the probe. Get the robot repair unit

working to dismantle what it can. Have every-thing photographed."

"You're babbling, Cap'n. I, know what I want and how to get it." Norlin's mouth turned drier than any desert and half as tasty when he saw how little time they had before the leading element of the alien fleet flashed across their orbit. A warship could release hundreds of independently targeting missiles as it rushed past the cruiser. No amount of supporting fire from the ground could help them if that happened.

The aliens might even think it was worth the energy expenditure to use their radiation can-non. Norlin pictured himself frying inside the flimsy pressure suit and didn't like the idea.

"Got it set up for relay back to the Preceptor. We can get it all in encoded microbursts when the robots are finished. Damn, but I wish I could do it myself."

"Get back immediately. I'm picking up the first data from the RRU and have a few good pix."

"Copy it all. The admiral will want to see it," Barse said sarcastically. "Dammit, Cap'n, don't you understand? I'm doing this for us. The Pre-ceptor can be the hottest ship in the Empire Ser-vice fleet if we steal what the aliens have packed into theirs."

"What do they look like? The aliens?" asked Norlin.

"Who cares? We've got their engines open to us!"

Norlin estimated times and decided they had

outlived their luck. "Back. Now. No argument or I leave you."

"Make a man a ship's captain and see what it gets you," grumbled Barse. "He turns pushy." She returned quickly, checked the sensor relays, and swung into the couch beside him. "You're so anxious to see Sutton II. Let's go see it."

Norlin applied full throttle to the shuttle, ripping off grapples he had forgotten to de-tach. It didn't matter. Getting back to base would require ten times the piloting of the first trip. Pier Norlin amazed even himself by landing just seconds ahead of the first barrage from space.