So It Begins (29 page)

  A few more simulations and the crew worked in lockstep. I began to appreciate what the pilots could do with these ships. My gun, Annie, rotated swiftly and precisely, her barrel rising and falling to track targets as we dropped and turned. My ordnance jockeys could switch warheads with small rockets in under a second.

  Then Fire Control introduced the other gun-cruisers into our simulation and we worked on formations.

  We trained all week, the length of time it took us to get to Bountiful and
Upsilon
Station. We didn’t even need all that time, but the simulations continued anyway. I didn’t mind. They were fun.

  “Alert, ten minutes to realspace reentry,” the XO’s voice came across the neural link.

  All simulations wound down. I looked out along Annie’s barrels at the roil of hyperspace, again wondering if my heart beat fast down in my chamber. This was it. The Tarish System. Bountiful.

  There was chatter on private bands about what we would find. Pickup carriers doing their job in ease and safety with no Aylin in sight? A firefight? Everyone dead and the fight over? We didn’t even know what ordnance to load. My jockeys would give me what I needed in an instant, but I had them load low-yield rockets in case we emerged next to a bogey. I gripped the virtual firing toggles and closed my eyes. We were well trained. We were extraordinarily mobile. We could handle anything.

  “Eight, seven, six,” the XO’s voice counted down to reemergence.

  Proximity alarms blared, too many to be useful. Light and noise and motion. I swiveled Annie hard as we descended into a hornet’s nest, already cut off from the rest of our squadron.

  Aylin fighters, gullwings covered in chevrons, swept past the bow and down the
Glory
. We reacted. They suffered decimating losses as they passed the forward guns, then the midship guns, and finally the aft guns and me and Annie. The survivors circled up in broken formation, probably as surprised as we were to find us here.

  I struggled to hold Annie steady as the bow of the
Glory
plunged. The pilots shoved us down hard, and the hull of an oncoming ship rumbled past, meters away. I couldn’t even tell what it was, we were so close. It was big. The orders came down for the starboard and ventral guns to engage the ship. “Fire at will.”

  The
Glory
pressed forward. Port side faced out, and we held off the gull-winged fighters, taking heavy small-arms fire. There were many fighters, swarming, targeting our drive pods. I kept firing. There shouldn’t be this many fighters with a raiding party. Where had they come from?

  Our pilots kept us tight to the deck, trying to keep us below the firing-plane of the Aylin ship’s gun-batteries. Moving fast. Our starboard and ventral guns flung warheads, cratering the target’s hull in a long stripe.

  We rolled out around her bow and curved back in tight for another pass, scattering fighters. Two sister gun-cruisers passed us high and low, also scarring the hull, also engulfed in fighter swarms. Too many. Small-fire continued to get through.

  In the
simulations
, people died all the time. Compartments depressurized. Whole ships disintegrated. The computer shuffled the deceased to the back of the neural link and you could hear their frustrated grumbling. In battle, people just vanished from the link. It was so quiet and discrete that I could almost pretend this was just another simulation.

  So I posted a running tally of ship casualties behind my eyes to remind me that those rockets flaring across the
Glory
, inches above our hull as maneuvering thrusters pushed us down and out of the way, were real rockets. The fighters whipping across my field of view had to be thinned out. In the simulation it was okay to take mounting small-arms damage so long as you stopped the big threats and won the battle. Here, people died when armor piercing rounds penetrated the battery racks and into the stasis chambers.

  Flames erupted from the Aylin ship in places where we hadn’t dropped warheads. Explosions from within. The captain ordered the pilots to break off.

  As we passed out into the black, still pursued by fighters, I could see that it had been an Aylin carrier. Flames rolled from launching bays. One of our sisters flew in tight behind us and helped clear us of the last of our fighter trail, and I finally got a view of Bountiful.

  This wasn’t an Aylin raid. This was an invasion. They had come in through the kind of lesser system that we typically didn’t defend.

  The Aylin battle line lay in a crescent that started to our port and curved around the far side of the planet. There had to be ten heavy destroyers, and at least five carriers. Scores of smaller cruisers and support ships. They were invading
us
?

  Someone had towed
Upsilon
Station in close to the planet as a defense and she was taking a pounding, but giving back. Magnesium flames rippled from much of her near side. A bright flare signified the death of a nearby Aylin destroyer.

  Dozens of Fleet pickup carriers were lifting off of the near side of Bountiful, trying to get clear under heavy fighter attack. Optimally they can carry twenty thousand people each, but they never achieve close to that in panic evacuations. They were jumping to hyperspace barely clear of the atmosphere, a horrifically risky maneuver but better odds than running the fighter gauntlet.

  “Incoming.” The XO’s voice flashed across the link. Alarms blared again.

  I rotated Annie’s barrel down along the
Glory
’s hull as rockets flared toward us from the Aylin line. A lot of rockets. We fired defensively. We couldn’t survive in the open. We couldn’t afford to waste rockets like this. Our strength lay in flying tight. Twelve of our sister gun cruisers grouped around us as we turned toward the Aylin line. I looked through the forward visual feeds as Aylin fighters rose to meet us. Hundreds, backed by the gun batteries of the destroyers.

  We couldn’t survive this. We were supposed to be stopping raids. The gun-cruisers weren’t meant to go toe-to-toe with destroyers.

  Another flare down the Aylin line. A carrier near Bountiful’s moon split in two, spilling debris. Just as
Upsilon
Station was eclipsed by the planet, I saw two destroyers close with her. She wasn’t long for this world either.

  If nothing else, we had to give the planet rescue carriers time.

  A gun cruiser to my starboard took a rocket square in the bow. Explosions rippled back along her hull like a wave as compartment after compartment disintegrated. I stared, appalled, then snapped my attention back to incoming. Not a simulation. People were dying. This was real—the start of the war.

  Our forward gunners struggled to intercept incoming. Munitions stores were falling. The captain called for full thrust, and we raced into the teeth of the destroyers. The gullwinged fighters closed, giving us some cover from the rockets.

  Dozens and dozens of gullwings swept past my position. My targeting techs and I picked them off like swatting mosquitoes. Again small-arms fire peppered our hull and the death tally mounted. I lost one of my ordnance jockeys. He winked out. Gone. My remaining jockey assumed control of both loaders.

  The targeting techs alerted me to destroyer proximity and laid a schematic over my eyes. Our squadron captains were trying to implement an attack pattern. The gun-cruisers were assigned four ships to a destroyer on strafing runs up four sides. See if we could peel back their hulls like a banana. See if we could keep their attention away from Bountiful and draw fighters away from the pickup carriers.

  I was once again on fighter duty, trying to hold them off. Sparks chattered up from our hull as projectiles penetrated reinforced steel. One of the drive pods behind me buckled and the pilots ejected it before it could explode. Attitude thrusters on the starboard side roared, trying to keep the unbalanced
Glory
flying straight. I launched a high-yield rocket into our ejected drive pod and it exploded, clearing three gullwings.

  The buckling hull of the Aylin destroyer whistled by, meters from our starboard side, ejecting flames and debris. We were hurting them. We were having success. We just needed to get in tight, and then we were at our strength. Maybe we could fight destroyers.

  “Aft guns, target their bridge. Repeat, target their bridge.” The XO’s voice barked across the link as we and two of our sister gun-cruisers shot past the nose of the destroyer.

  My jockey rolled in warheads and I fired quickly with the other aft guns. Flaming rocket-tails crowded the space between our ships. Gullwings flung themselves into the paths of the warheads in suicide bids to protect the destroyer, but three got through. The bow of the ship bloomed.

  There was no time for celebration as the gullwings swarmed forward again and we evaded down in tight to a carrier. I defended as best I could, making every shot count, preserving my warheads for the sweep around the carrier’s bow.

  Gullwings came down on us in a cluster from above. Midship guns pivoted up, trying to intercept, but the fighters came too fast on a ramming course. The neural link shivered. One of my targeting techs vanished. Alarms shrieked and power levels plunged. I lost the feeds to the midship guns. The burning carrier passed to our stern and I fired warheads at its bow.

  Damage reports scrolled behind my eyes as I squeezed Annie’s virtual trigger. We were still intact, still flying. Swiss cheese. In virtual reality, nothing felt different.

  “Incoming ship,” the XO’s voice barked. “Evasive maneuvers.”

  We rolled hard to port. I lent a small portion of my attention to the forward feeds. A monster bore down on us, brushing away debris in its path. This was a new ship, twice as big as the others. Nearly as big as our dreadnoughts. With horror I watched as four more big ships dropped out of hyperspace to bolster the Aylin line.

  “We have been ordered to retreat,” the captain’s voice whipped across the link. “Fleet has to know the specs on these ships, and we’re the messengers.”

  We joined side-by-side with two surviving sister ships, the
Corsair
and the
Mariah
and rocketed toward deep space, ramping up to required velocity.
Glory
’s three remaining drive-pods vibrated out of sync. Dorsal-midship guns were crushed and silent. More gullwings descended on us as our intentions became obvious, and we meshed our gun crews across all three ships to defend a wider swath of space.

  A gunner died on the
Corsair
and I took control of both of our guns in the gestalt between ships. For the first time I really worried about dying. My body was encased far forward, but the small-fire getting through was like driving rain. I doubted there was anyone left alive in our aft suspension chambers.

  A burst and flare to port. the
Corsair
was down and falling. Our gestalt rippled as her gun crews vanished. I lost contact with the second gun.

  More gullwings swarmed. Annie chattered on full automatic as my munitions stocks ticked away. A destroyer fired, and some of our guns had to rotate back to high-yield rockets to intercept incoming.

  Nearly there. Ten seconds to minimum hyperspace velocity.

  “Sergeant,” my surviving jockey whispered to me, “are we going to make it?”

  “We’ll make it,” I lied.

  A rocket got through, punching through the
Mariah
’s bow and FTL chamber. She fell to our stern. I continued firing, staring at our sister ship.

  The
Mariah
’s bow was gone—FTL drives, communications arrays, forward compartments. There was empty space where the front third of the ship had sheered off. Midship compartments were heavily damaged. The surviving back half of her turned on steering thrusters and sped toward the destroyer, five guns firing high-yield rockets. Some of the gullwings left us to pursue.

  The visual feeds turned hazy as we ascended into hyperspace.

  “We’ll make it,” I repeated, numb.

  What was left of the
Mariah
had sacrificed herself for us. How had they made that decision so quickly? I looked at our own high death-tally. Would they shrink the size of the
Glory
now so it wouldn’t seem so empty? Would there be a morgue somewhere with all of the virtual bodies laid out on steel gurneys?