If it hadn’t been for the fierce gee force Meredith would have put his head in his hands. “Smith, if you get out of this with your life, it won’t be on my account.”
“Well, fuck you!” Terrance Smith yelled. “You Saldana bastard, why do you think I had to hire these people in the first place? It’s because Lalonde is too poor to rate decent navy protection. Where were you when the invaders landed? You would never have come to help us put down that first insurrection, because it didn’t affect your precious financial interests.
Money, that’s what you shits respect. What the hell would you know about ordinary people suffering? You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth that’s so big it’s sticking out through your arse. The only reason you’re here now is because you’re frightened the invasion might spread to worlds you own, that it might hit your credit balance. I’m doing what I can for my people.”
“And that includes nuking them, does it?” Meredith asked. He’d been subject to anti-Saldana bigotry for so long now the insults never even registered. “They’re sequestrated, you cretin, they don’t even know they’re your people any more. This invasion isn’t going to be beaten by brute force. Now, you will broadcast that message, make the mercenary teams turn back.”
The tactical display sounded an alarm. A broad fan of curving purple vector lines were rising high over Wyman, Lalonde’s small arctic continent. Someone behind the planet had launched a salvo of fifty-five combat wasps.
“My God,” Meredith muttered. “Lowie, what are they aimed at?”
“Unclear, Admiral. There is no single target, it’s a rogue salvo. But from the vectors I’d say they were seeking to engage anything in the thousand-kilometre orbit ... Bloody hell.”
A second salvo, of equal size, was curving round the south pole.
“Jesus, that’s a neat pincer movement,” Joshua said. At some ridiculous private level he was delighted he didn’t need any intervention from his neural nanonics to remain calm. He felt his mind function with that same cool reserve which had manifested itself back in the Ruin Ring when Neeves and Sipika appeared.
This is me, what I am: a starship captain.
The Lady Mac’s three fusion drives came on almost without conscious thought. “Stand by for combat gees,” he warned.
“How many?” Sarha asked nervously.
“How high is up?”
Other starships were getting under way, retracting their thermo-dump panels. Three of them launched combat wasps in a defensive cluster formation.
“Remain in orbit,” Smith ordered over the command net. “The navy squadron will provide us with protective cover from the salvo.”
“Like bollocks they will,” Joshua said. The squadron was still four minutes from orbital injection. A sensor scan revealed blackhawks and voidhawks alike racing up for a higher altitude; the slower Adamist starships were following, with three exceptions, Gemal one of them.
The gee force in Lady Mac’s bridge passed five gees. Ashly groaned in dismay. “My bones can’t take this.”
“You’re younger than me,” Warlow countered.
“I’m more human, too.”
“Wimp.”
“Castrated mechanoid.”
Sarha suddenly noticed the trajectory Joshua had loaded into the flight computer. “Joshua! Where the hell are you taking us?”
Lady Mac was rising above the equatorial plane at seven gees, decreasing altitude at the same time.
“We’re going under them.”
“This trajectory is going to graze the atmosphere!”
He watched more of the mercenary starships launching combat wasps. “I know.” It had been an instinctive manoeuvre, opposing every tactic program in the flight computer’s memory core; they all said altitude was the key in orbital combat situations, giving you more room to manoeuvre, more flexibility. Everyone else in the little mercenary fleet was clinging to that doctrine, escaping from Lalonde with fusion drives operating way out on the limit. “Dad was always telling me about this one,” he said in what he hoped was a confident manner. “He always used it in a scrape. Lady Mac’s still about, isn’t she?”
“Your bloody father isn’t!” Sarha had to datavise, she couldn’t expel enough air from her lungs to talk. The acceleration had reached nine gees. She hadn’t known even Lady Mac could produce that kind of drive level. Every internal membrane supplement had turned rock hard. An arterial implant at the base of her neck was injecting oxygen into her bloodstream, making sure her brain didn’t starve. She couldn’t ever remember having to use it before. Joshua Calvert, we are not a bloody combat wasp!
“Look, it’s very simple,” he explained, trying to sort out the logic in his own mind. As usual, rationality was trailing well behind impetuosity.
“Combat wasps are designed for deep-space operations. They can’t operate in the atmosphere.”
“We are designed for deep-space operations!”
“Yes, but we’re spherical.”
Sarha couldn’t snarl, she would have dislocated her jaw bone; but she managed to grate her teeth together.
Lady Macbeth flew over the Sarell continent in forty-five seconds, arching down sharply towards the brown and yellow volcanic deserts. She was three hundred kilometres in altitude when she passed over the northern coastline; the north pole was two and a half thousand kilometres ahead. Seven hundred kilometres above, and four thousand kilometres ahead, the combat wasp salvo spotted her. Six of them abruptly altered course and dived down.
“Here they come,” Joshua said. He fired eight of Lady Mac’s combat wasps, programming them for a tight defence-shield formation. The drones leapt upwards at twenty gees, scattering submunitions almost immediately.
Aft sensors showed the starships in orbit behind and above were releasing more and more combat wasps. Even the Gemal was breaking out of its thousand-kilometre orbit, the old colonist-carrier could only make one and a half gees. And there was no escort, Joshua saw sadly. Far away to the east, barely above the horizon, there was a volley of explosions followed by the unmistakable larger smeared detonation of a starship.
Wonder who that was? It didn’t seem to matter much, only that it wasn’t him.
“Melvyn, keep monitoring the grav-detector satellite data. I want to know if any ships start jumping outsystem, and if possible where to.”
“I’m on it, Joshua.”
“Dahybi, I can’t believe the voidhawks can keep jamming our nodes with all this going on, the second they slip I want to know.”
“Yes, Captain.”
The sensors showed Joshua the attacking combat wasps releasing their submunitions. Particle beams lanced out from both swarms. “OK, everybody, here we go.” He shot an order directly into the drive deflector coils, and Lady Mac lurched downwards.
Meredith Saldana caught the crazy flight vector developing and datavised a request into the tactical situation computer for confirmation. The vector was recomputed and verified. Half of the squadron’s frigates would be unable to produce a nine-gee thrust. “Who’s that idiot?” he asked in reflex.
“Lady Macbeth, sir,” Lieutenant Franz Grese said. “None of the others have triple-fusion drives.”
“Well, if they all suicide on us I shall be a very happy man.”
It wasn’t looking good. He had already changed the squadron’s operational orbit from one thousand kilometres to two thousand three hundred, which would give them a superior look-down shoot-down position—but only if the mercenary ships stayed put. Injection was in ninety seconds. Combat wasps were being launched at a prodigious rate from the mercenary fleet.
Intelligence and tactics programs couldn’t say which were defensive and who was attacking whom. Each of his squadron’s ships had launched a defence cluster salvo.
One of the voidhawks exploded with appalling savagery, and the victorious blackhawk skirted its roiling debris plume to vanish into a wormhole interstice.
“Who?” he asked Rhoecus.
“Ericra, but they
saw the combat-wasp barrage approaching. Ilex has their memory patterns safe.”
Even now, after all the truths he had seen in his cosmopolitan life, Meredith felt the old twang of prejudice. Upon death, souls departed this life for ever. It was the Christian way. They were not to be ensnared in a mockery of God’s living creatures.
You can leave the Kingdom, he acknowledged jadedly, but it never leaves you.
Go in peace, he prayed silently for the dead Edenists. Wherever you roam.
On a more pertinent level he was down to six voidhawks.
“Combat wasps have locked on to the Gemal, sir,” Clarke Lowie reported.
The gee force on the bridge was reducing rapidly as the Arikara slid into orbit.
Thank Christ for small mercies, Meredith thought. “Commander Kroeber, squadron to engage all combat wasps launched by the mercenary fleet. We’ll sort out who’s friendly and who isn’t when events become a little less immediate.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Arikara trembled as a salvo was fired.
“Issue a blanket order for all mercenary starships to cease acceleration and evasive manoeuvres as soon as the combat wasps have been cleared. Failure to comply will result in naval fire.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
When the Lady Mac reached one hundred kilometres’ altitude Joshua withdrew all but five sensor clusters. Wyman’s fjord-etched coastline was directly below. Three hundred kilometres overhead, the two combat-wasp swarms were firing a fusillade of kinetic missiles and coherent radiation at each other. They clashed at a closing speed of over seventy kilometres per second. A patch of sky burst into pure white atomic fury, bringing a transient dawn to the arctic continent’s month-long night underneath.
Eleven submunitions broke through to descend on the Lady Macbeth with cybernetic mayhem in their silicon brains. Two of them were one-shot gamma pulsers. They tracked the hurtling starship as it buffeted its way through the upper atmosphere, then discharged the energy in their electron matrices with one swift burst. The resulting gamma-ray beam lasted for a quarter of a second.
A sheath of ions had already built up around the Lady Macbeth’s hull, a tangerine florescence that radiated away from the forward fuselage in hypersonic ripples. But they were swiftly lost against the incandescent streams of energized helium emerging from the fusion tubes. The stratosphere reeled from the unrestrained tumult of the starship’s passage. Her exhaust stretched out over a hundred and fifty kilometres behind her, evanescing into titanic electrical storms which lashed the sharp icy steppes seventy-five kilometres below with a vigour that threatened to split the glaciers open to the bedrock. Insubstantial green and scarlet borealis spectres cavorted over the ice-encrusted continent in a display which rivalled the bands over the Juliffe in scale.
“Breakthrough!” Warlow cried.
Systems schematics filled Joshua’s mind, laced with red symbols. The hull’s molecular-binding generators, already labouring with the burden imposed by the ion sheath, had overloaded in half a dozen places as the gamma pulses drilled into the monobonded silicon.
He switched back to the flight management display. The thrust from one of the fusion tubes was reducing. “Any physical violation?” The thought of needles of blazing atmospheric gases searing in over the delicate modules and tanks at this velocity was terrifying. Neural nanonics effused an adrenalin antidote into his bloodstream.
“Negative, it’s all energy seepage. But there’s some heavy component damage. Losing power from generator two, and I’ve got cryogenic leakages.”
“Compensate, then, just keep us functional. We’ll be through the atmosphere in another twenty seconds.”
Sarha was already datavising a comprehensive list of instructions into the flight computer, closing pipes and tanks, isolating damaged sub-components, pumping vaporized coolant fluid from the malfunctioning generator into emergency dump stores. Warlow began to help her, prioritizing the power circuits.
“Three nodes are out, Joshua,” Dahybi reported.
“Irrelevant.” He took the starship down to sixty kilometres.
The nine remaining kinetic missile drones followed. They were, as Joshua said, intended for deep space operation: basically a sensor cluster riding on top of fuel tanks and a drive unit. There was no streamlining, no outer fuselage; in a vacuum there was no need for such refinements.
All they had to do was collide with their victim, mass and velocity would obey Newton’s equations and combine to complete the task. But now they were flying through the mesosphere, a medium implacably alien and hostile. Ionization started to accumulate around their blunt circular sensor heads as the gas thickened, turning to long tongues of violet and yellow flame which licked back along the body. Sensors burnt away in seconds, exposing the guidance electronics to the radiant incoming molecules. Blinded, crippled, subject to intolerable heat and friction pressures, the kinetic drones detonated in garish starburst splendour twenty kilometres above the Lady Macbeth.
The Arikara’s tactical situation display showed their vectors wink out almost simultaneously. “Very smart,” Meredith said grudgingly. It took a hell of a nerve to pilot a starship like that—nerve and egomaniacal self-confidence. I doubt I would have that much gumption.
“Stand by. Evasive manoeuvring,” Commander Kroeber said.
And Meredith had no more time to reflect on the singular antics of Joshua Calvert. Punishing gravity returned abruptly to the flagship’s bridge. A third salvo of combat wasps leaped out of their launch-tubes.
Lady Macbeth soared out of the mesosphere, throwing off her dangerous cloak of glowing molecules. Behind her, Wyman’s ice-fields glimmered under eerie showers of ethereal light. Combat-sensor clusters rose out of their hull recesses on short stalks, their golden-lensed optical scanners searching round.
“We’re in the clear. Thank you, sweet Jesus.” Joshua reduced the thrust from the fusion drives until it was a merely uncomfortable three gees.
Their trajectory was taking them straight away from the planet at a high inclination. There were no combat wasps within four thousand kilometres.
I knew the old girl could do it. “Told you so,” he sang at the top of his voice.
“Awesome,” Ashly said, and meant it.
On the couch next to Joshua, Melvyn shook his head in dazed admiration despite the gee force.
“Thanks, Joshua,” Sarha said gently.
“My pleasure. Now, damage assessments please. Dahybi, can we jump?”
“I’ll need time to run more diagnostics. But even if we can jump it isn’t going to be far. Those three nodes were physically wrecked by the gamma pulses. Our energy patterns will have to be recalculated. Ideally, we need to replace the nodes first.”
“We’re only carrying two spares. I’m not made of money. Dad always jumped with nodes damaged and—”
“Don’t,” Sarha pleaded. “Just for once, Joshua. Let’s deal with the present, OK?”
“Somebody’s jumped outsystem,” Melvyn said. “The grav-detector satellites registered at least two distortions while we were performing our dodo impersonation, I think there may have been a wormhole interstice opened as well. I can’t tell for sure, half of the satellites have dropped out.”
“There is no jamming from the voidhawks any more,” Dahybi said.
“OK, great. Warlow, Sarha, how are our systems coping?”
“Number two generator’s out,” Warlow said. “I’ve shut it down. It took the main strike from the gamma rays. Lucky really, most of the energy was absorbed by its casing. We’ll have to dump it when we dock, it’s got a half-life longer than some geological eras now.”
“And I’d like you to stop using the number one fusion-drive tube,” Sarha said. “The injection ionizers are damaged. Other than that, nothing serious, we’ve got some leaks and some component glitches. But none of the life-support capsules were breached, and our environmental-maintenance equipment is fully functional.”
“Got another jumper,”
Melvyn called out.
Joshua reduced thrust to one gee, cutting drive tube one altogether, then accessed the sensors. “Jesus, will you look at that?”
Lalonde had acquired its own ring, gloriously radiant stripes of fusion fire twining together to form a platinum amulet of immense complexity.
Over five hundred combat wasps were in flight, and thousands of submunitions wove convoluted trajectories. Starships initiated high-gee evasive manoeuvres. Nuclear explosions blossomed.
The Lady Macbeth’s magnetic and electromagnetic sensors were recording impulses nearly off the scale. It was a radiative inferno.
“Two more wormhole interstices opening,” Melvyn said. “Our bitek comrades are leaving in droves.”
“I think we’ll join them,” Joshua said. Just for once in her life, Sarha might be right, he conceded. It was the now which counted. Lady Mac was already two thousand kilometres in altitude, and rising steeply from the pole; he shifted their inclination again, carrying them further north of the ecliptic and away from the conflict raging above the planet’s equatorial zones. Another three thousand kilometres and they would be out of the influence of Lalonde’s gravity field, and free to jump. He made a mental note to travel an additional five hundred klicks—no point in stressing the nodes, given their state. About a hundred seconds at their current acceleration. “Dahybi, how is the patterning coming?”
“Reprogramming. Another two minutes. You really don’t want to rush me with this one, Joshua.”
“Fine, the further we are from the gravity field the better.”
“What about the mercs?” Ashly said. It wasn’t loud, but his level voice carried the bridge easily.
Joshua banished the display showing him possible jump coordinates. He turned his head and glared at the pilot. Why was there always one awkward bastard? “We can’t! Jesus, they’re killing each other back there.”
“I promised them, Joshua. If they were alive I said I would go down and pick them up. And you said something similar in your message.”