Sword Destiny (15 page)

“The name we have given to Seeva, the daughter of Sardar. I killed her husband, Zarin, in single combat and now she wears his armour and hunts for me on the battlefield. So far she has not found me, but she has killed more than a score of our warriors. They hesitate to kill a woman, but she has no mercy.”

Nirad signaled to one of his men and a cloak was quickly passed forward, which he then wrapped around her shoulders. Maryam pulled the cloak close and shivered. In the aftermath of her narrow escape, she felt suddenly weak, but there was still another question to be asked. “You said you knew that I was coming.” Her face was mystified. “How could you know?”

“We were told by Kaseem,” Nirad said simply. “Our High Priest knew that it was you who ran from the steel temple of the blue gods. Somehow he also knew that you were making your way to this breach in the wall.” Now it was Nirad's turn to show bewilderment and he finished with a vague shrug. “Holy Kaseem says that he saw you in a vision.”

Chapter Seven

The long chase between the two inhabited worlds of the solar system had become a much closer race than Zela had expected. Raven and his fleet had made good speed, cutting six days off their return journey time to Earth and Zela had realized that he must have urgent reasons of his own for wanting to conclude his business there and return to Ghedda as soon as possible. Her ships were faster, but not by much, and given Raven's haste and the seven-day start already in his favour, it had taken Zela's fleet the entire flight time at full power to overtake them and close the gap.

Zela had hoped to come up behind the enemy fleet with some element of surprise while they were still in deep space. Instead the Gheddan ships had reached Earth orbit and disappeared behind the blue planet only a few hours before she could come within attack range. She had the choice of following them into orbit or waiting for them to reappear on the far side of the magnificent, slowly rotating globe that now filled almost the whole of their forward viewscreens.

“They may have spotted us before they passed behind the planet.” Kyle voiced the warning calmly. He was now formally promoted to the rank of her Deputy Commander, his position as Blair's replacement confirmed. “If we continue to follow them now, we could be flying into a trap.”

Zela nodded. “It is possible they know we are here. So we will wait. Either they will come out on the same orbit pattern unaware of our presence, or they could appear from any quadrant at attack speed. We must be vigilant.” She relayed her orders to each of the remaining five ships in her formation, giving each one-sixth of the diameter of the planet's horizon to watch. Then the waiting began.

Kananda sat in the navigating chair that had been Kyle's, feeling useless with no part in the running of the ship. On this return voyage, much of the initial wonder of space flight had gone and he no longer had cause to busy himself with the major task of learning all he had needed to know about the languages and history of Dooma. There had been much more time to fret and worry about what had been happening in his absence with Karakhor and whether or not Maryam was in fact on board one of those enemy ships with Raven.

Now the crucial moment was here. At any second they would be involved in a space war to the death, a war of the blue and golden gods that would be fought with their fearsome weapons of lazer fire. There was no going back and no alternative. Kananda found that he was sweating and that his mouth was dry. He would have prayed for an opportunity to fight Raven and all the might of Ghedda with his sword, but he knew that could not be. This battle was ordained by the gods, to be fought on their own terms and with their own weapons among the stars and he could only sit and watch.

The hours passed. The Earth slowly turned, its cloud patterns changing shape and form to permit different glimpses of its land masses and oceans. The smaller, pitted grey disc of its single satellite moon gradually circled upward until it reached a point of balance immediately above the globe. The six Alphan Tri-thrusters hung motionless in space. Aboard them, all eyes were fixed on their viewscreens awaiting the first sign of movement from the Gheddans.

When it happened it was with startling speed. The six Gheddan Solar Cruisers flashed out from behind the haze-blurred rim of the Earth like a volley of gigantic steel spears.

“Top left quadrant, V-formation,” Kyle snapped instantly.

“Attack speed, Rose formation.” Zela gave her commands in the same split second of time and the six Alphan ships immediately surged forward to meet the attack.

There was no doubt now that the Gheddans were aware of their presence. The element of surprise was gone, but Zela had never relied upon it anyway. Her prime advantage was the extra speed of turn that her Tri-thrusters possessed over the Gheddan Solar Cruisers, and the Rose Formation used it to the maximum.

The six Alphan ships flew into battle in two lines of three, one above the other. At the last moment, the elongated box pattern burst open, with each ship peeling away like a petal from a bursting flower. Up, down, left and right, the six ships pulled away in a tight, fast turn, letting the formation of Gheddan Solar Cruisers pass through their empty centre. Then immediately they were spiraling backwards to make the complete somersault loop and come back on the tail fins of the Gheddans.

Only an inspired pilot with an automatic instinct for survival could have survived the manoeuver and Raven proved his own flying skills with an immediate response. The leading Solar Cruiser turned into a fast rolling dive to the left, not quite as nimble as the lighter Tri-thrusters, but fast enough to roll clear of the first lazer blasts from Zela's ship. On his command, the rest of his fleet was spiraling left or right to escape destruction and most of them made it. One Solar Cruiser caught a crossfire of lazer beams and erupted into a colossal fireball of flashing red and blue heat waves. The others passed through the heart of the lethal exploding rose.

There was no more opportunity for refined battle tactics and full fleet coordination. The rest of the battle became a bitter dogfight, with each ship obeying only the instincts and judgement of its own captain.

Zela had marked Raven's lead ship as her priority target and stayed with him. Her white-hot lazer beams slashed across his wake as he pulled away and then she turned after him and fired again. One shot slammed the spinning Solar Cruiser sideways, but it was not a kill. Raven's ship was hurt but still intact. Zela stabbed her firing button again, but then another of Raven's ships hit them with a blast that sent the Tri-thruster reeling across the heavens. The stars spun in a crazy dervish dance in their viewscreen. From behind them came the crack of an explosion, the heat of flames and the stink of smoke. Then a chain-reaction of smaller explosions and blown electrical equipment raced across the bridge. Sparks and flame flashed, fittings were torn from their mountings, and Laurya screamed as a heavy communications speaker flew off the bulkhead and smashed into her where she sat belted into her flight chair.

Zela fought to control the violently spinning ship, shouting urgent commands at Kyle, who was desperately flicking switches in efforts to activate the ship's automatic fire-fighting systems. Nothing was happening and there was no response from Cadel in the engine room. Zela swore and hung on to her manual pilot control. The meteor-scarred surface of Earth's companion moon was hurtling up toward them in her main viewscreen and she used all her strength in a vain attempt to turn them away. Then Kyle unsnapped his harness and flung himself across the flight deck to join her. Their combined weight was only just enough. The ship's nose turned slowly and then the barren surface of the satellite was sliding past below them. A range of the moon's mountains reared up and it seemed that they cleared them by inches.

Kananda had been flung forward in his seat, the leather straps tearing at his stomach and shoulders and almost cutting him in half. In one of the viewscreens, he saw three more fireball explosions and he knew that three more ships had died. Two of them, he thought, had been Alphan Tri-thrusters and only one Gheddan Solar Cruiser, which meant that the odds were again even. The two fleets were an equal match and were systematically destroying each other.

There was nothing he could do to tilt that balance, but the heat on the back of his neck told him that there was another danger. Kyle had failed to activate the automatic defence systems and there was a fierce fire raging behind them. Kananda unsnapped his harness buckles and pushed himself to his feet. There was a hand-held fire extinguisher strapped to the bulkhead wall and he dived toward it. Quickly he snapped the catches and pulled it free. It had a firing trigger and a short hand-held hose and he quickly put out the three small fires that flickered around the flight deck. Then he headed back toward the engine room, stumbling and bouncing off the bulkheads as the deck tilted wildly beneath his feet.

As he passed through the open door, the heat hit him in the face like a physical thing, scorching his eyebrows and burning his hair. Cadel had been flung across the compartment by the blast of an explosion and lay dead with his head crushed against the steel step of the doorway. Flames leaped and raged and Kananda choked as he attacked them with the stream of compressed chemical foam from the extinguisher. Smoke and steam clouds boiled and sizzled around him and he dropped down on to his knees as he continued to hit the base of the flames. Tears streamed from his eyes and blinded him and then the chemical cylinder in his hand was empty. He cast it down and another sharp rolling pitch of the ship threw him in turn back on to the flight deck.

Through squinting, weeping eyes he saw another ship die in one of the view-screens, followed swiftly by another, although he could not identify either of them. The blackness of space was now bright with multiple sunbursts and flaring coronas of death and destruction. All around them was an insane inferno, a madness of the gods that until now he would never have believed possible. It was a nightmare he had no time to contemplate. He found another fire extinguisher and returned to his own battle in the engine room.

 

Zela had the ship back under her control. The vessel was sluggish and heavily damaged, but she was able to turn their nose back toward the battle. There were only three ships visible and intact, two Solar Cruisers and the last of her Tri-thrusters. The Gheddan ships were bearing down on the last of the Alphan fleet, their battle lazers burning white-hot holes through the floating debris all around them. Zela came back into the battle and took them by surprise, turning one of them into another fireball in the same second that the last Tri-thruster was also incinerated.

They were the last of the two once proud fleets, Zela's crippled ship, and an equally badly wounded Solar Cruiser. Like two dazed and semi-conscious boxers, they struggled to bring themselves round in their chosen ring of space. With tight-clenched teeth and a fast-beating heart, Zela watched as the sharp nose of the Solar Cruiser slowly drifted up to face them. It was all a matter of which vessel could bring her lazer banks to bear first and neither of them seemed capable of hurry. Her own ship was no longer fully responsive to the controls and she guessed that the plight of the Gheddan commander was almost identical. She could picture the Gheddan captain and his crew all violently cursing, while she silently prayed.

Slowly, infinitely slowly, the two ships lined up to face each other. Zela could see that her solar-powered lazer banks were almost empty and that she could not afford to waste what might well be her last effective shot. At the same time, if she allowed the Solar Cruiser to get in the first shot, then they would almost certainly die. Sweat trickled down the side of her face and she was aware of Kyle standing tense and fearful beside her. Laurya was moaning softly in her harness nearby and there was blood soaking her uniform from what looked like a broken shoulder.

The white beam of death lanced from the nose of the Solar Cruiser—and missed them, although it was close enough for its heat wave to slam against their bows in passing. The Gheddan captain had fired too soon. Zela dared not give him another chance and pressed her firing button. White fire lanced from their own bows and the Solar Cruiser blew up into a disintegrating halo of fiery matter that could have been the birth of a mini-galaxy. Zela and Kyle both flinched and instinctively flung up an arm as if to protect their eyes and faces as their ship passed through it, the debris bouncing off their hull in a furious rattling storm.

A few moments later the last epicentre of white heat died and they were alone amid the floating wreckage of what had been two fleets. They stared around them with pale, drained faces, and then Kananda emerged from the engine room and came to stand beside them. His face and uniform were blackened and burned and his voice rasped weakly in his sore throat. “The fire is out,” he informed them. “Cadel is dead.”

Zela turned her head to look at him and the stunned horror of it all was still in her eyes. “The battle is over,” she said bitterly. “But I never expected to lose all of our ships.”

Kananda said nothing. In a flash of sudden insight, it occurred to him that in all the battles that had ever been fought, at all levels and on all worlds, perhaps none of the participants had ever expected that they would lose so much more than they could ever hope to gain. Each side would always believe that it was an invincible elite, or that its cause was just and that somehow this would make a difference. Such was the supreme folly of both men and gods. However, it seemed the wrong time to make such a simple observation.

Then Kyle said softly, “I am not so sure that the battle is over. I can only count the wreckage of ten ships, when there should be eleven. The first Solar Cruiser we hit, like us, I think was knocked out of the battle. And I do not think it came back.”

“Raven,” Zela said with certainty. Her fingers flew rapidly over the keyboard of her control panel, bringing every possible angle of view up on to their screens. There was nothing except the widely scattered remains of tangled ship fragments, the distant stars, the Earth itself and its satellite moon.