The ship bucked, as though it were a schooner that had just plowed over a submerged sandbank, then kept on. The stars in the viewscreen shifted drastically, to a totally different sky.
Harcourt went limp. So did the bridge crew—except for Billy. “Jump completed!” he called out. “No bogeys in evidence, no hostiles at all!”
“We’re clear,” Grounder whispered.
“Only for the moment.” Harcourt knew he had to keep them moving. They didn’t dare let up—not for long. “Barney, plot the course for the next jump point. They could be right on our tails.”
“Course plotted and feeding!”
“I might’ve known. Chief! Damage?”
“None from the jump.” Coriander scanned her board. “Just from that one shot that got through—a leak amidships.”
“Patched,” Lorraine’s voice said over the intercom. “But it won’t last long.”
“It doesn’t need to.” Coriander picked up her tool kit. “I’m on my way.”
She had recovered amazingly quickly, Harcourt thought as he watched her slim figure dart out the hatch, a figure that was more remembered than seen. “Keep scanning, Billy. No real reason to expect them to have stationed an intercept out here, but you never know.”
“They will from now on, I betcha.” Billy kept his eyes on the screen.
“You don’t really think they will, do you, Captain?” Grounder asked.
Harcourt shrugged. “You always assume your enemy will do the worst—and the most unexpected, Lieutenant. You know that.”
More to the point, though, he needed to keep their minds off the gallant woman who had died doing her duty, to whom they really should have shown much more kindness…
He felt the guilt sinking within him, fought it, knowing he had only done his duty. It was up to him, though, to make sure she had not died in vain. Whatever it was on Vukar Tag that the Cats guarded so closely, the Admiralty would find some way to use it against them.
Kipling’s lines echoed in his head:
Oh, the Kilrathi were thieves, all right—very vicious, but very competent, thieves—and the revenge for Ramona would follow.
Oh, yes, the revenge would follow.
PART II
END RUN by William R. Forstchen
CHAPTER I
Cleared for landing, Lieutenant Commander Jason “Bear” Bondarevsky turned his Ferret in on final approach. The carrier off his port quarter was the newest addition to the fleet, emblazoned upon its armored bow the proud name CVE-8 Tarawa—and the sight of her did not impress him in the slightest.
His idea of a carrier was more on the lines of the Concordia where, after the mutiny incident on the old Gettysburg, Admiral Tolwyn had taken him in for a tour of duty. With the casualties of the last two campaigns, promotion had been rapid, and he had never dreamed that at the ripe old age of twenty-five he would actually be in charge of an entire wing aboard a carrier… but what a carrier. He shook his head with disdain.
Maniac had roared with sardonic delight when he had heard about the promotion and transfer to this new ship.
“A carrier, you’re kidding aren’t you? Its a damned transport scow and a death trap,” Maniac announced, and Jason could not help but agree.
The CVE class had been a source of intense debate back in the Concordia’s pilot ready room. This new class of ships was a rush job to try and plug the gaps after the heavy losses of the last campaign. Nine transport ships, already three quarters completed, were pulled out of the transport assembly stations and converted into escort carriers; and a single look at her convinced Jason of the folly of the whole damn thing.
There was only a single landing and launch deck, no backup if they should ever take a hit. That was a tactic the Kilrathi were most fond of, and he remembered the surprise strike on the Concordia, which had shut down both launch bays and almost finished the ship off, except for some last minute help from Phoenix and his wingmate, scrambling up from a nearby base. New design doctrine was calling for three, even four launch bays, and now some idiot desk jockey back in headquarters had come out with this.
As he cleared the forward bow he spared a quick look from his approach vector readout to look at the forward defense. A heavy quad-barreled neutron gun was mounted on the bow, obviously cobbled on to the transport’s frame and held together with a little spit and glue. To either side of the approach deck were two mass driver cannons, medium caliber at least. As he came in on approach he had seen two more beam weapons and several launch racks for missiles along the bottom of the ship. He could only hope that at least the missiles had the new gatling launch system that could pop out a spread of ten of the new anti-torpedo rounds in under two seconds.
Jason nudged reverse thrust and kicked in a little lateral move to starboard. The damn entry port was as narrow as a needle’s eye and he felt embarrassed by the necessity of this last minute adjustment. Landing on fleet carriers had spoiled him; there wasn’t the slightest room for error here.
It wasn’t the type of landing the new wing commander should put on in his first approach. He felt a flash of anger with himself, he had violated his own cardinal rule—a mission isn’t over till it’s over so don’t think of anything else till the job’s done.
He cleared the energy field airlock and felt the slowing resistance of air on his wings. There was barely thirty meters of maneuver room inside the hangar and the deck was packed. To his port side was a squadron of F-54C Rapiers. On the starboard side was the squadron of strike fighter/bombers, F-57B Sabres, with the new upgrade of a copilot in a cramped backseat to handle the weapons launch while the pilot continued to fly. He still wasn’t sure if he liked this hybrid design, created specifically for the CVE class, when it was realized that there simply wasn’t enough hangar space for the battle-tested Broadswords. A pilot and flight officer crammed into a space originally designed for one was going to be a tight fit. He wondered if the design boys had thought this one out all the way. That was something that always bothered him—an instrument located in the wrong place might mean that a valuable bit of information was overlooked—or while wasting a second to take a look you don’t see the shot coming straight into your face.
It was far too tight a deck to take a last squirt off the reverse thrusters and Jason punched down hard on the deck, gritting his teeth at the screeching of the landing skids. From the corner of his eye he saw deck personnel step back to avoid the shower of sparks. He slid down the deck, the nose of his ship jerking to a stop just inches shy of the emergency barrier nets. Cursing, he leaned back in his seat and quickly ran through his checkout, ignoring the bump of the ladder and the shadow of a crew chief scrambling up to wait outside the cockpit.
Shutting down the engine pumps, Jason double-checked that all weapons were on secured safety, and then leaned over to toggle the eject safety. After making sure everything was secure he finally toggled off the main engine and shielding circuits. More than one pilot had smeared himself on a hangar deck ceiling by not double-checking the eject safety before shutting down, since a full power failure and shield cut off would automatically initiate ejection unless overridden within five seconds. The design manual said that such an event was not supposed to happen if the ship was shut down in a pressurized environment, but more than one pilot had learned that sometimes the manual just didn’t get it quite right. He hit the canopy switch and it flipped open.