He went around the loop one last time. The familiar voices called in from the ships: Jees herself, Darc, Torec, This Burden Must Pass, even his own older self, Pirius Blue, all ready to go.
He called, “Squadron. Go to sublight.”
He felt a subtle push as his ship’s drive cut in. The stars ahead swam, blueshifted. In seconds, the squadron’s ten ships reached ninety percent of lightspeed, the optimum for setting up the grav shield. The formation still looked good; the hours of training were paying off.
“On your call, Jees,” he said.
Directly ahead of Jees’s tiny ship the grav shield coalesced. It was like an immense lens that muddled the fierce light of the Galaxy’s heart.
“Shield stable,” Jees called.
“Good work. Form up, form up.”
The squadron edged forward, perfecting the formation.
Already they were no longer even in the same universe as Orion Rock, Pirius thought; tucked up in this pocket cosmos, streaming through the prime universe at a fraction below lightspeed, the Xeelee would be quite unable to see them. That, anyhow, was the theory.
Before going to FTL, his last duty was to check with his own crew. His engineer was Cabel, the best of the bunch. His navigator was a kid called Bilson. A promisingly bright boy, but woefully inexperienced, for one reason or another he hadn’t been able to get the flying hours of some of the others — which was why Pirius had pulled rank and insisted he fly in his ship.
They were as ready as they would ever be.
If you had to ride behind a grav shield, the first FTL jump was the worst. During the endless training flights, that had been learned the hard way. You had to go into the jump at ninety percent light — and come out at the same velocity, smoothly enough to keep the grav shield stable — and keep your formation. They had done it in training; now they had to do it for real.
“Okay,” Pirius called, keeping his voice steady with an act of will. “On my command…”
Locked together by a web of artificial-sentient interactions, the ships jumped as one.
Cohl had seen the squadron rise out of its hangar. The greenships clustered in a tight little knot, right at her zenith.
She had done her duty, here on the surface, forging her links between infantry and flyers. She knew how important she had been to the overall mission, and she had welcomed Pirius Red’s trust in her. But now that it was all about to start, she longed to be up there in those ships, where she belonged. And she wondered if it could be true, as the barracks gossip had it, that there was a Silver Ghost somewhere aboard one of those ships.
The greenships seemed to shimmer, as if she were looking through heat haze. She had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was the grav shield, she thought, wondering.
She whispered, “Three, two, one.”
The greenships, ten of them, squirted out of sight, arrowing toward the very center of the Galaxy. Exultant Squadron was gone.
But a cherry-red glow was rising, all around the horizon.
Her platoon tensed, taking their positions. She gripped her weapon harder, and tried to keep her voice light. “Get ready,” she called.
The ground shuddered, and little puffs of dust floated up before her, immediately falling back. The Xeelee assault had begun.
Pirius felt the familiar FTL inertial lurch deep in his gut, and the shining sky blinked around him.
He hastily checked his displays. His ship had come through fine, he saw immediately, and had fallen back into the universe with its ninety percent lightspeed vector maintained.
Jees reported that the shield remained stable. The plan was to hold their positions for fifteen seconds, while they checked the functioning of the shield and other ships’ systems, and if they had been able to hold their formation in these unique conditions.
But there were only nine ships in the sky, not ten.
“We lost Number Six,” called Bilson.
“I see that,” Pirius snapped. He barked out unnecessary orders for the ships around the gap to close up. The ships were already moving into their well-practiced nine-ship formation, just as they had rehearsed for eight and seven and six, and on down.
One jump, they had barely left the hangar, and already a ship was lost. This mission was impossible.
The others seemed to sense his hesitation. “We go on,” Pirius Blue barked.
“Yeah,” Torec growled. “Nine out of ten through the jump is better than we war-gamed.”
They were right, of course. “We go on,” said Pirius.
“Lethe.” That was Bilson. “Look at that.” He brought up a Virtual feed of Orion Rock, already light hours away.
The Rock was under attack. A swarm of black flies was drifting down over its surface, obscuring the earthworks and weapons installations. Human weapons spat fire in response.
“It doesn’t matter,” Pirius said. “Don’t think about it. Let’s just make it worthwhile. Kick in the jump program. Number One—”
“The shield is still nominal, commander,” Jees called.
“On my command.” Again the sentients locked the ships together; without sentient support, the slightest inaccuracy in such enormous and complicated leaps would have left the squadron scattered over the sky. But the ships’ limited sentience, like every weapon in this immense battlefield, was subservient to human command; this was a human war.
“Three, two, one.”
After the second jump the flight got rougher, and nobody had time to look back anyhow.
Cohl’s own monopole-cannon bank had begun to fire. From its banked muzzles, point lights swarmed into the sky, and at its base she could make out human figures running back and forth, tending its ferocious machinery. This bank was one of hundreds emplaced on the Rock’s surface, all firing now, and looking up she could see streams of sparks, each a minuscule flaw in spacetime, washing up toward the bright blue stars of IRS 16. As its great engines of war opened up, the Rock shuddered and shook. It was almost joyous, as if the Rock itself welcomed this sudden conclusion of its own long genesis.
Ships were rising too, disgorged from underground hangars. Most of them were greenships, but of the standard design, lacking the modifications of Pirius’s squadron. They hastily gathered into tight formations and hurled themselves after the monopole fire. But Xeelee nightfighters came barrelling out of the blue starlight, and those brave green sparks flared and faded, starbreaker light stitching through them.
A whistle sounded on the general comm loop, a sound she had learned to dread. She couldn’t hesitate. She had to lead the way.
Her rifle gripped in one hand, she hauled herself over the earthwork’s lip. She didn’t get the move quite right. Her body was a clumsy, ungainly mass with too much inertia in a gravity field that was too weak, and she sailed perilously high over the churned-up asteroid ground. Light flared ahead of her, a battle already underway around the cannon emplacement. But though a few starbreakers flickered nearby, nobody was shooting at her right now. She didn’t look back. It was up to Sergeant Blayle to ensure the rest of the platoon followed her lead.
She careened down into the dirt, face-first. She was still alive, still in one piece. She was huddled in a shallow crater that afforded her a little cover, a few seconds’ breathing space.
She raised her head cautiously. The monopole-cannon emplacement was still firing, but shapes drifted around it, spheres and ellipsoids, all of them jet black. They were Xeelee drones, and they swarmed around the weapon emplacement like bacteria around a wound — as black as night, chillingly black, in a sky that glowed bright as day. The Xeelee would often send in drones like this as a first wave to try to neutralize a Rock, before deploying the heavier weaponry of the nightfighters and other ships. Even the Xeelee conserved their resources, it seemed.
But already the infantry were doing their job. Shadowy figures threw themselves toward the drones, firing as they arced on their short hops from one bit of cover to the next. Their weapons fired pellets of GUT mass-energy that shimmered as they hurled themselves toward their targets, and then burst open like miniature Big Bangs.