Heritage of Flight (2 page)

Come on, if you're out there! Fire already!
No pilot who actually wanted to get out and zero Secess’ with virtuoso laserwork outlived his third battle ... sometimes not even his first. But this damnable prowling, waiting for a strike that might come in a second, an hour, or never, made you want to scream or strike first, blindly, in an attempt to find some clear, safe way. She sweated with the need to see something, anything. It built up, as it always did, to a point where she didn't think she could bear it—and then the moment passed, as it always did; and the ships pressed forward, scanning for enemies.

Secess’ out here didn't necessarily mean treachery. Attack could even be coincidence, as ships from both sides sought the No Man's Worlds, seeking to survive in these remote spacelanes by turning scavenger, even pirate. So far, she thought with a sort of chill pride, such scavengers only preyed on one another.

Quickly Pauli ran the armscomp test program again, as she had before Jump and would again, if they didn't suddenly engage the Secess’ and she had to use her lasers for real. Testing was never superfluous. You never knew when your equipment might fail. How long would it be until Alliance ships turned on their own, as well as the Secess', to steal the dwindling supplies of components, concentrates, all the never-to-be replaced stores for which production lines had all but ceased?

Two of the riderships passed by a massive asteroid with a dense metallic core, a deliberate feint to draw out—there! as if they blinked into existence, there glistened the formation standard to Secess’ pilots, a pentacle arrayed along the three axes of space battle. Then another, and another. And where was the base ship that had released them?

Predictable, Pauli thought for the thousandth time. But what was never predictable was the speed with which that formation seemed to materialize, the precision with which the Secess’ flew, their cold ferocity, and the deadly teamwork that made each ship of the five react like a finger on the same fatally capable hand. Almost inhuman, it was: never wearing down or fearing, like the pilots she knew. Like herself. Pilots who tired, whose eyes bleared, whose hands shook, and whose breath came hoarse and husky in the fetid cocoons of lifesupport.

Once, just once, before the captain had entered, wardroom rumor whispered of proscribed biotech, of spies vanished, doubtless suicides or painfully dead on Secess’ worlds in vain attempts to discover whether the babble about clones and augmentation contained even an atom of truth.

She chilled: even a moment's reflection might prove fatal against Secess’ pilots. Whatever else they were, they were geniuses at seizing the opportunity, yes, and one's life with it.

And here they came.

Beyond the five-pointed stars emerged the hull of the Secess’ base ship, not burnished like its riders, but scratched and pitted by micrometeorites into a kind of dullness. At the orders of
Leonidas'
s captain, the riders broke formation, changed attitudes, and engaged the Secess’ pilots. Shrewd targeting set violet-tinged spurts of light ravening into hardened metal and fragile systems. Damn! That one had hit a power source. Scratch one ship. Pauli had known the pilot, who had been no fool, just a little old, a little slow. Too slow for the Secess’ pilots. They were damned fast, like a schizophrenic divided into five separate, murderous intelligences.

The survivors re-formed and accelerated. A whine underlay the white noise in Pauli's cockpit, and the apparent motion of her companion ships increased. She fired quickly, felt the ship jolt to compensate—and that was the first indication that her ship moved at all. Then
Leonidas
shot forward toward the Secess’ so rapidly that she saw it both on grid and in actuality.

Pauli pressed in, one hand thumbing frantically for communications. All around her crackled the chatter of ship-to-ship communications: all chatter from the Alliance side. Never mind jamming: the Secess’ were silent, all save the one cool voice per pentacle that had announced the opening of hellmouth for too many of Pauli's friends.

"They're on my tail ...
cover me-eee!"

Before a wingman could turn to aid him, needles of violet slashed into the ship and it broke apart, fragments spinning, globing around a central core of fire and instantly freezing vapor. That pilot had been unlucky. Usually the Secess’ struck so efficiently that their quarry hadn't even time to see it coming, let alone scream. So, they could be rattled. That, at least, was something. One listed, attitude wobbling; and she fired, taking a ruthless delight in the way that ship veered off, losing control.

"
Daedalus, Amherst ...
” that was the voice of the
Leonidas
's captain. “Get out of here. Prepare for Jump."

"Captain, that last jump ... Engineering reports chip fissures on NavComp. The main boards, not the backups. We can't risk Jump if they melt."

"
Daedalus
, retreat and test then!
Amherst
, prepare for independent Jump. Do you copy?"

"Negative,
Leonidas
, negative,” came Captain Borodin's voice in an unusual display of control. Then, more predictably, he roared, “Not goddamned likely,
Leonidas
. We're backing you up!"

Not with all those refugees and civs on board, they couldn't. “This is—"

"Never mind who you are,
Captain!
My commission antedates yours, and I said I'm backing you up!"

"—this is Federal Security Marshal Arnaut, Captain. On my authority, you will retreat and prepare for Jump. Or you will consider yourself removed from command."

In a battle? Pauli could imagine Borodin's snort at the deskflier who would try an empty threat like that. With that snort would come a return to humor, sanity, and craft. Likely, Borodin would bide his moment, then attack. Sure enough,
Amherst
began a tentative retreat. Pauli signalled her own squadron and accelerated toward
Leonidas
as she headed toward a deadly interception with the Secess'.

"Shields on.
Daedalus
, you too;
Amherst
, faster now, get
back!"
Command crackled over the circuits, faltered, then grew loud again as overused commgear achieved a fragile resolution.

"What kind of people are we if we abandon our own?” came Borodin's voice. Pauli felt an incongruous stab of pride. Despite her promotion—for such it was—to the
Leonidas
, Borodin was still the captain under whom she'd first survived fire.

"Smart ones. You have the kids to protect, remember? You really going to let them see battle again, just when they thought they were safe?"

Pauli grimaced. That marshal was crafty, maybe as smart as Borodin, She wondered if the one on
Amherst
was that clever, too.

She got the nearest Secess’ in the armscomp sights, heard the satisfactory
beep!
of aligned axes, then opened fire. Clean hit! The other three ships in the format flew wide, then re-formed more raggedly as they, and she, rode out the inevitable buffeting.

She could imagine the chaos on the barracksdecks, and her old friends trying to work with hostile civs to calm them down: Ro, who wore a uniform only because war broke out and she had no choice; Rafe, half a civ himself ... best not think of Rafe or that last fight when she had finally abandoned their dream of becoming a first-in team, or transferring from the
Amherst
to the more sophisticated
Leonidas
. The kids screaming and crying, wetting themselves, some of them, maybe; the civs struggling to hold to some sort of order as the lights flickered to conserve power, sending it to armscomp and the shields, and the comfort of yellow light faded to uterine crimson, then to twilight.

Her boards showed the haze of screens encircling
Leonidas
and the Secess'. Just one glancing hit, just one, and metal vapor would cloud those shields, make them visible to the naked eye. The screens hazed as
Leonidas
's lasers slashed out. The running lights dimmed on the big ship. Inside, even the thrum of its lifesupport would pause for the space of a gasp, then resume as power flowed away from armaments and throughout the ship, then gathered for the next surge.

She herself targeted and fired—not mechanically, but with the maniacal precision of a chessmaster forced to choose a move in microseconds. The ship yawed, then resumed attitude. She scanned damage control: assuming nothing else failed, the hit wasn't major. She could press the attack, and she did. Acceleration touched her, pressed webs against her, and apparent motion increased. She fought.

Once again
Leonidas
's lasers seemed to coil and spring; the Secess’ ship returned fire. A pallid haze enveloped both ships, glinting as the white dwarf's savage light struck clouds of frozen vapor into ferocious rainbows. The light intensified about the ships, then widened as power was diverted from other systems into protection.

"Keep
back
!” Pauli whispered. Signalling to the three ships nearest her, she headed toward
Leonidas
, careful to use all available cover to dodge the Secess’ one-man craft. On unattainable Earth, she had heard, there were beasts who fought each season over mates. Their weapons were immense racks of horns which they would lower and aim at one another. But once those horns ... those antlers ... locked, the beasts were too stubborn, or too stupid, to be willing or able to disengage. Some, she heard, died that way, to be found, seasons later, as racks of bleached bones, their fatal antlers still, inexorably locked.

Once, and once only, she had seen firelock: two ships of roughly equal strength committed, shields and weapons, to destroying one another, as weapons and defense reached a balance in which the captain who diverted power to weapons was instantly consumed as his shields weakened, or the captain who reinforced shields was driven back and driven back until, inevitably, he had to weaken them.

Firelock ended one of two ways: swift, vicious intervention by ridercraft or another ship; or mutual annihilation as systems failed, or overloaded. A brilliant pilot might elude it; but
Leonidas
's master was no such thing. In the past three years, they had started promoting senior engineers rather than strategists in order to safeguard those ships still in good repair. He might not be pilot enough to avoid firelock, but Pauli was about to stake her life on his being a good enough engineer to hold out until the riderships managed to break it.

They regrouped outside firing range of the two huge ships, now enveloped in light, punishing even as the viewscreens polarized. Half the riders reconfigured as guards against the Secess’ single fighters, while the others prepared for the first of a series of quick onslaughts against the base ship: in fast, fire hard and full power—then out again before the ship's heavy armaments could skewer and melt them at a beam. This would either weaken the Secess’ ship long enough for
Leonidas
to strike hard, killing or crippling its enemy, or enable
Leonidas
to pull back and retreat.

Ship-to-ship transmission crackled and whined in and out of phase, weakened by passage through the screens. As the riderships poised for their first strike, words emerged from the static created by screens and Secess’ jammers ... “will begin pumping..."

"What?” That cry came from a pilot several hundred kilometers out ... the emissions of her ship shone more clearly on her status boards than the actual ship itself to the naked eye. Pauli knew that one too: before the war had pulled her from her labs, she had had an interest in physics.

"...all Jump-capable ships retreat, prepare for Jump on the mark ... others link with
Amherst
and
Daedalus
... prepare for upconversion."

She remembered now just why the man had received his captaincy. It wasn't just that he was an engineer; it was that he was a weapons specialist. And when he got started talking, he was a spellbinder. One off-watch, he had entertained an entire wardroom with his plans for converting the ship's weapons to gamma-ray lasers. The problem wasn't breaking the atomic nuclei to produce gamma rays—more than one planet knew that to its lasting and highly radioactive sorrow. The problem with gamma-ray lasers lay in pumping the material, then raising it to a uniform energy level from which the actual laser would be fired—all without melting the systems ... even the adamantine components of plated diamond that served shipwide as microprocessors and were all but indestructible ... or letting the laser beam degrade. Thus far, the captain's engineers had managed to store energy from the ship's power plant in what the techs called an isomeric state. The problem was altering its energy level. Where would he find an outside...

An outside source? He had an outside source: the firelock.

"Lee, don't!” Borodin's voice crackled through the fragmented communication, then squealed out. “
Daedalus
, what's your status..."

"Jump plotted..."

"You don't know this is going to work,” Borodin argued.

"We don't know it won't,” came Captain Lee's voice. “In any case, I have been ordered to use any and all means to safeguard your passengers."

Arnaut and those other damned marshals! That was a whole ship out there they were talking about hurling into the equivalent of a very small nova. Not only was the ship not expendable, it had a hell of a lot of fine people on it, friends and comrades of Pauli and the other pilots.

Quickly the pilots conferred on ridership frequencies as, all around them, the Secess’ fighters struck, attempting to break their formations, weakening their chance of ending the firelock. Disobey orders? Retreat? Turn and fight all comers? Counterpointing their hasty quarrel over the best alternative was the captains’ argument:
Leonidas
, stubborn, sure of its strength;
Daedalus
, frantically testing systems and backups; and the
Amherst
. Voices rose and fell, cleared, then phased out as the firelock intensified. Pauli imagined that her short, sweat-damp hair stood on end from the energies that
Leonidas
prepared to harness.