Thirty-Seven

“Stand by for transpace sequence… Five… Four… Three… Two… One…” The ship’s klaxon sounded twice to announce that Gneisenau had reentered normal space, and the swirling starfields of hyperspace resolved themselves once more into individual points of light.

In the massive port launch bay, Nicole sat in her fighter, impatiently waiting. “What is the matter?” she snapped into her comm link. “Why have I not been launched?”

“Standby, CAG,” the chief of the bay advised. “We’re showing some problems with your catapult.”

Nicole could feel the thumps in the hull as the ship’s other catapults began to hurl the fighters into space. They were not able to launch in hyperspace, of course, since the fighters had no hyperdrives themselves, and if they went outside the hyperspace field of the mother ship, they would find themselves left far behind in normal space.

Merde, she thought, suddenly furious with a passion that frightened her. She needed to get out there! “Pri-Fly,” she said, “get my ship out of here. Now.”

“CAG, the inductor circuit’s fluctuating way outside the safety norms,” the ops chief told her. “I can’t launch you until–”

“Get this ship into space, damn you!” she shouted. “That is a direct order!” Her body felt like it was burning up with fever, and her only thoughts were those of the battle that awaited her beyond the obstacle of a mere piece of machinery.

“Wait one.” The chief had known Nicole for only a month, and suddenly wished he had never met her. He turned to his exec, who shrugged.

“Looks like the thing’s back on-line,” the younger woman said. “Green across the board, now.”

The chief frowned. He did not like it when machines decided to be finicky. It got people killed. His gut told him not to launch the CAG’s fighter, but he was not left with much of a choice. “Stand by, CAG,” he said. “You’re up.”

Nicole’s heart rate picked up as she anticipated the launch. She eagerly watched for the visual signal from the control booth that hung down from the ceiling of the launch tunnel. Red. Yellow. Green.

Her ship suddenly accelerated away from the blast gates, the tunnel rushing past her in a blur as the stars outside seemed to grow larger, tantalizingly closer.

Something went wrong. Without warning, the magnetic field that accelerated the ship, and that was also responsible for ensuring the craft’s safe passage down the center of the catapult tunnel, lost its integrity. Nicole’s fighter slammed against the catapult tunnel wall, the Corsair’s right stub wing disintegrating in a hail of sparks and electrical discharges. The ship yawed further to the right, the slender nose of its hull crumpling under the force, the metal screaming but the sound lost to vacuum. In the cockpit, Nicole reeled from the violence of the impact, the dampers in her ship unable to completely compensate for the horrendous forces that had taken hold of the fighter.

Long before humans could react, the launch safety computer intervened. Terminating the failed launch field, the computer activated emergency dampers that rapidly slowed Nicole’s ship, bringing it to a stop twenty meters short of the tube’s gaping mouth. Blast vents snapped open in the floor and ceiling of the tube; should the fighter explode, most of the force would be directed out the mouth and through the blast vents, lessening the force on the blast doors far behind that led to the vulnerable insides of the ship.

“CAG, can you hear me?” the launch chief asked tensely. He had seen this before. And worse. “Please respond.”

“Oui,” she said numbly. “I am… all right.”

“Get her out of there,” the chief said to the emergency crew that was already pouring through one of the tunnel’s service entrances. “Move it.”

Nicole Carré would not be doing any dogfighting this day.

***

“Sir,” the intel chief said quickly, “it looks like we’re facing two squadrons. One with a heavy division of two battleships and a heavy cruiser, and a second division with three cruisers.”

Sinclaire nodded grimly. The odds were in their favor. For now. Turning to his ops officer, he said, “Order Mackenzie to take out the three cruisers. We’ll handle the other lot.”

“Aye, sir.”

A few moments later, Sinclaire’s orders reached Jodi as she led two Corsair squadrons from Gneisenau toward the enemy fleet.

“Roger,” she acknowledged tightly. She was still unsettled by what had happened to Nicole. She had heard her over the common channel, screaming as her fighter was torn apart in the cat tube. Jodi had bitten her tongue so hard it had bled, as much to keep herself from tying up the channel with her own voice as from fear that Nicole might be hurt. But then the emergency crew had come. Nicole had been all right, just a little shaken up and with a mild concussion.

With difficulty, she pushed the thoughts of Nicole from her mind. Fifty-three other pilots from Gneisenau were depending on her now; as the second most senior pilot, she was in command. She was now the fighter force strike leader.

“Rolling out of your line of fire now,” she told the controller on Gneisenau. She did not want her fighters anywhere near the massive gunfights that would soon erupt between the opposing capital ships.

Like a massive living thing, the two squadrons behind and to either side of Jodi’s Corsair swept toward the three Kreelan cruisers that had the misfortune of being separated from the other ships of the Kreelan fleet.

As Sinclaire watched Jodi’s fighters clear the field, he turned to Colonel Riata Dushanbe, the commander of Gneisenau’s Marine regiment, the Fifty-Eighth African Rifles. “What is it, colonel?” he asked.

“Admiral,” she said urgently, “we’ve finally gotten through to the colony, to some Marine forces there.”

“What?” Sinclaire asked, incredulous. “When the hell did Marines arrive there? Why the hell didn’t MARCENT inform us?”

Dushanbe shook her head. There was no way for her to know that Thorella’s regiment had been dispatched outside of Marine channels in extreme secrecy, and Reza’s contingent – a reinforced company – was so small that probably no one had bothered to report it as being on Erlang. No one had been expecting trouble like this. “I don’t know, sir. Apparently, however many there were, there is only a company left, now. Alpha Company of the Red Legion’s First Battalion, with a First Lieutenant Washington Hawthorne in charge. They’ve only got a single boat to lift their company and some injured civilians.”

“What about the rest of the civilians?” Sinclaire asked. “There are supposed to be over a million people down there!”

“I asked him that, sir. He said he didn’t know other than that the capital and probably the other settlements had been bombarded from orbit and completely destroyed.” She paused. “He also felt sure that a lot more Kreelan ships would be headed this way, and quickly.”

“How the bloody hell could he know that?” Sinclaire muttered to himself.

“Admiral,” Captain Amadi said, “main batteries are within range, sir.”

Sinclaire scowled. Too many irons in the fire, he thought. As always. He turned to his ops officer. “Have Mackenzie pull off a flight to provide escort to the Marines down there. Coordinate it with Dushanbe here.” Then to Amadi, he said, “Captain, you may commence firing.”

***

Jodi had just pulled out of her first attack run, her weapons crisscrossing the lead cruiser with splashes of light and a few minor explosions, when she received her new orders.

“There are still Marines down there?” she asked, mortified. Much closer to the planet than the rest of the fleet, she could see the damage the Kreelans had done to the surface: the blackened pockmarks where cities used to be, clouds of smoke streaking across the emerald surface like rivers of crude oil.

“Commander Mackenzie?” a voice suddenly interrupted on the link. “Is that you?”

“Eustus? Eustus Camden?” she asked, the muscles in her jaws tightening up. Where there was Eustus, there was… “What the hell are you doing here? And where’s Reza?”

“It’s a long story,” the voice came back, scratchy in her earphones. Jodi could sense the strain in it. “Reza is… gone. Lieutenant Hawthorne’s in charge down here, but he’s in back trying to get some more wounded on board. There aren’t many people that survived the attack on Mallory City. Jodi, we’ve got to get out of here, fast.”

“Wait one, Camden,” she said, hauling her fighter up and away from the three enemy cruisers. From here they looked like rakish beetles surrounded by enraged wasps. “Day-Glo, Snow White, Whip,” she said, “form on me after you’ve made your runs.” In perfect sequence, the three pilots acknowledged, and had formed on her wing in less than a minute. “Hangman,” she called to the remaining senior pilot, “you’re in charge. Finish those bastards off.”

“Roger,” Hangman, the second most senior pilot replied. “Good luck, Commander.”

“All right, Camden,” she said after switching back to the established air-to-ground link, “where’s your beacon?”

As the four fighters screamed down through the atmosphere, the warships above them grappled like scorpions in a bottle, engaged in a fight to the death.

But Jodi could not push Eustus’s words from her mind: Reza was gone.