Bolo Brigade (20 page)

"I was suggesting the same thing, Lieutenant," Kathy told him. "And they'll need a diversion. Something to open a hole in the blockade long enough for the transports to get away."

Donal felt a small, cold stab of fear. "You have any ideas about that?"

"Yes," Kathy told them. "As a matter of fact I do."

The Conestoga-class transport
Uriel
had seemed small when viewed from the vantage point of a descending Percheron, high above the floating city. From here, however, as he walked out on the transplas-enclosed walkway leading from the towering white city breakwater to the ship's brow, it seemed as though the transport was the most titanic manmade structure Donal had ever seen . . . excepting, of course, the artificial island itself, and the island was simply of such a scale that words like artificial or manmade lost their meanings. The vessel measured nearly half a kilometer in diameter and half that again in length, though only the upper hundred meters or so extended above the surface of the ocean. Several Bolos could have fit comfortably within her capacious holds.

Seen close up,
Uriel
showed her age. Corrosion streaked her outer hull, where plates once painted white had dulled and blackened in ragged patches where the rust was eating through. According to the Port Authority records Donal had studied the day before,
Uriel
was over four hundred years old, having come off the starship ways at Aldo Cerise in 2614. She'd started in the Concordiat merchant service, later been transferred to Rim, and finally been sold to the Strathan Authority in 3001. According to her maintenance records, she'd been due for retirement a good two centuries ago.

Nonetheless, she was a proud old lady . . . and she'd been called on to perform one more vital run. He hoped she was up to it.

The covered walkway was crowded, and Donal found himself being jostled a bit as he made his way toward the ship's main entry port, holding his injured arm up high. A medic had sprayed it with a sealant that kept it numb while letting the burns heal, but it still hurt when someone bumped it, and he had it in a sling. A steady stream of children, making their way slowly out from the breakwater and into the bowels of the huge transport, all but filled the passageway. Despite the jostling, the procession was remarkably orderly and quiet. Few of the kids cried, and all seemed willing to follow the adults assigned to shepherd them aboard. Indeed, the adults with them seemed more fearful than their charges.

He identified himself to the ship's officer who was ticking off names on her data pad at the entrance, then followed the signs in and up, heading for the bridge. It was chaotic aboard; the children were still well-behaved, but
Uriel
's interior was a maze of passageways, corridors, elevators, and compartments; three of the Conestoga's five immense cargo bays had been partitioned into cramped, dormitory-style living quarters, while the remaining two were crammed with food concentrates and water tanks.

It didn't take him long to get lost. Somewhat against the laws of chance, though, he found Alexie fifteen minutes later standing at the intersection of two passageways, an electronic notepad in one hand as she directed traffic with the other.

"Alexie! Thank God! I thought I was going to starve to death in this rat's maze!"

She looked at him coldly, and he saw the resentment in her eyes. She'd made the decision to come, but he knew well that it had been against what she thought was her better judgment.

"I'm glad you're coming," he told her.

Resentment changed, reluctantly, to what might have almost been a tight, tired smile. "I still feel a bit guilty," she told him. "Like I'm running away."

He gestured at the crowds of children filling the passageways around them, the handful of shepherding, scared-looking adults. "You're not running out on
them
. They need you, too."

"We'll discuss the philosophy of cowardice later," she told him, a sharp edge hardening the words. "Right now, I have to get these people checked in and in their quarters."

"They've given me a jumpseat up on the bridge." He smiled apologetically. "But I'm a bit turned around. Army, you know. Not navy. Which way?"

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. "Down that passageway to the end, find an elevator, and take it to the oh-ten level. You'll see the signs."

"Thanks."

She was already talking with a harried-looking woman with a small army of four through six-year-olds and didn't reply.

Following her directions he found the bridge, where Captain Charles Arkin and his bridge crew were making the final preparations for launch.

"Welcome aboard, Lieutenant," Arkin told him curtly when he announced himself. He pointed to a folding jumpseat wedged into a corner of the tiny bridge between the flight engineer and the comm officer's position. "We're boosting as soon as the diversion goes up, and so we're a bit busy right now. Try to stay out of the way."

"Thank you, sir. Uh, will I be able to watch the diversion from here?"

Arkin pointed to a large, curved view screen set against the tangle of cables and conduits covering most of the dome that stretched over the crowded bridge. A larger screen was mounted lower down, in front of the seats occupied by
Uriel
's helm and navigation officers. Currently, it showed the view from a camera mounted high up on
Uriel
's prow, looking back into the city. From here, the damage done two days before by the attacking Malach was shocking, a collection of black, grisly scars across the once immaculate white towers of the city center.

From his position, he could also see one of the ship's repeater screens, showing the camera view from somewhere out in the city. The crowds outside were gone now, though he could make out the shadows of some thousands of people watching from the enclosed safety of some of the larger public buildings near the center of the floating city.

He checked each of the monitors, but his attention was swiftly pulled back to the one on the dome. It showed a map, a Mercator projection of Wide Sky, with the land and sea colors accurately depicted, as though taken from satellite shots. The five floating cities were plainly marked, a cluster of blue dots among the scattered archipelagoes of Scarba. A lone white dot was positioned west of the cities; as he watched, minute by minute, he could just make out its slow, westward drift.

Commander Kathy Ross, flying one of Wide Sky's surviving XK-4000s.

"Okay, boys and girls," Kathy's voice said over the bridge speakers. "Blue Hawk is moving. Punched through Mach three and accelerating. Over the ocean, heading west. No sign of the bad guys yet."

Donal's heart hammered a little harder in his chest. He'd not been happy with Kathy's plan, but ultimately there'd been no real choice. The same argument he'd used on Alexie to get her to come with him to the relative safety of Muir had been turned against him; Kathy had more experience than any of the space fighter pilots on Wide Sky, and the best chance of pulling this thing off and returning in one piece.

"This is Blue Hawk, going feet dry at zero-nine-three-five. Still no sign of the opposition."

Unfortunately, best chance was a relative term, not an absolute. Even in the relatively new XK-4000, a sleek, supercharged high-performance fighter popularly called the Starhawk, her chances of surviving against the Malach orbital blockade were far from good.

"I'm starting to pick up some activity on deep radar," Kathy's voice said. Her fighter was now nearly a thousand kilometers to the west, well past the beach where she and Donal had been shot down three nights ago. "I think they're interested."

A smaller window opened in the upper right corner of the screen, showing a three-D representation of the Wide Sky globe, its continents picked out in graphic white lines. Red dots of light circled the globe, each trailing a paler, curved red line as it orbited the planet. Kathy's fighter was marked in green, drawing a green line around the curve of the planet. Sure enough, as minute followed tense minute, the red dots could be seen to be changing course, swinging out of their orbits to converge on the fast-moving XK-4000.

The hunt, Donal thought grimly, was on.

Commander Kathy Ross took a quick look straight up through the transplex dome over her cockpit, wondering if she could see her Malach pursuers yet. There were lots of stars . . . but she couldn't see any of the telltale moving stars that indicated a spacecraft in low orbit.

She'd crossed the terminator some minutes ago and was flying over Wide Sky's night side, still hugging the surface at an altitude of less than one hundred meters. She was depending on her Starhawk's terrain-following AI for a level of flying precision impossible for any human pilot. With the fighter traveling at almost Mach five now, a mountain or sudden change in elevation would be on her before she could possibly see it and react, even in daylight, even using the craft's sophisticated radar and IR imaging screens, located on her center console to either side of her main Computer Graphic Display.

The CGD was currently showing a computer-painted representation of the terrain she was crossing . . . a narrow valley with sheer-sided cliffs to either side. From second to second, she could feel the slight tugs this way and that as the aircraft adjusted its flight path, keeping clear of the rocky crags flashing past in the darkness to either side.

She glanced up again. Directly overhead, she saw stars . . . by chance the warm and swarming reds and yellows of the Strathan Cluster. She was glad to have a last look at that star-clustered glory; she was not at all convinced that she was going to be able to pull this off.

Still no sign of her pursuers, but she knew they were there. Every few seconds, a set of lights winked from green to red on her threat board, just to the right of her right armrest, indicating various wavelengths of weapons, targeting, and search radars. They were probably having trouble picking her out of the ground clutter at this altitude, especially since they couldn't nail her with a side-looking beam in this narrow defile, but sooner or later they would get close enough to lock on hard.

Then things would get interesting.

Suddenly, she was out of the valley and booming out over the ocean, the shock wave from her Mach five passage raising a plume of spray in her wake fifty meters high. More red lights winked on, as more Malach radars pegged her. Another glance through her canopy, up into star-strewn night. She thought she could see a couple of moving points of light up there, but she couldn't be sure.

Kathy still wasn't entirely sure why she'd volunteered for this run, even if it
had
been her idea to begin with. It had to do, she supposed, with the fact that she'd logged more hours—most of them in singleships like this one—than anyone else on Wide Sky, but that fact alone hadn't demanded that she make the offer.

But she did take intense pride in her proficiency as a pilot, even when the spacecraft was flying itself. The time would come, soon enough, when it would be her brain directing the sleek, black Starhawk, and not the computer. That, she was convinced, was where human warriors had it over the machines like Lieutenant Ragnor's Bolos. Sure, the smart ones were supposed to be able to think, but Kathy was convinced that a human brain made the difference, more often than not.

More than anything else, though, she remembered those crowds of people in their ragged tent city . . . and the hell of smoke and flame and noise when the Malach had struck.

Donal Ragnor hadn't been happy when she'd told him what she was going to do . . . not that he'd any say in her decision. She ranked him, and he'd known she was right in any case. She'd seen it in his eyes.

In the end, she'd assured him that this flight would not be a suicide mission, not the way
she
flew. She'd even been able to convince herself of that, during that long restless and wakeful night last night. All she needed to do was sucker enough of those orbiting Malach ships to chase after her, and she could do that by vectoring on Big Mama, as she'd nicknamed the huge, single transport now in far orbit around Wide Sky. If she could threaten Big Mama, boosting into an approach vector that convinced the lizards that she was attacking their largest ship, they would have to break their own blockade orbits and come after her, just in case. The damned Dinos couldn't be so sure of themselves that they would ignore such a threat.

I hope
. . . .

It was also possible that they would fry her with a single shot from long range, catching her like a moth in a blowtorch flame. Still, she had a pretty good idea now of Malach fleet capabilities. If she could survive the gauntlet, she would break out on one side of the blockade while the Wide Sky transports were breaking out on the other. The XK-4000 was one of those rare space fighters that possessed hyper-L capability. It would be a long, cramped, and hungry trek back to Muir, with stops at Endymion, Carter, and Faraway for pile recharges and life-support overhaul, but she would be able to make it.

I hope
. . . .

So many unknowns.

She checked her nav screen, comparing her position with the position of known Malach ships. Things were getting pretty damned thick up there; it was time to find herself some maneuvering room.

"This is Blue Hawk," she said, keying her com unit. "Going ballistic at zero-niner-five-one. I've got a search lock on Big Mama. Keep your eyes peeled, boys and girls. This ought to really shake those lizards!"

Savagely, she hauled back on the Starhawk's control stick, bringing her nose high until it pointed almost directly toward the Strathan Cluster, then ramming her throttle forward to the last detent.

Thunder howled and shrieked and bucked scant meters behind the thin padding of her acceleration couch and life-support capsule. The Starhawk shuddered, the stick wrenching against her hand, but she held the craft steady as she engaged full burner, punching upward through rapidly thinning atmosphere.

Acceleration flattened her breasts, crushing her, smothering her, the G-counter on her HUD ticking upward past 8.5 to 9.0, then 9.2 . . . 9.4. . . .