One lucky shot took out a drone — but it exploded, a booby trap. Debris showered, a vicious rain that lanced through the bodies of several troopers before digging itself into the chumed-up dirt. The endless chatter on the comm loops was interrupted by screams, the first of the action, before the morale filters cut them out.
Cohl’s platoon caught up with her. She checked her telltales. One trooper had fallen already, hit by a bit of shrapnel from that drone. Nine left, then, nine huddling in shallow pits in the broken ground.
“Let’s go!” She dug her hands and feet into the dirt and thrust herself forward again, firing as she flew.
Most of the drones sailed through the fire unperturbed. Xeelee construction material was tough stuff. The trick was to hit a drone at a point of weakness, at a pole of an ellipsoid, or an edge or vertex of a more angular shape. The spheres were toughest of all, but you still had a chance if you could get your shot close to one of the little windows that dilated open to allow the drones’ weapons to fire. Aiming was pretty much out of the question, though; all you could really do was add your rounds to the general fire that washed down over the drones. Cohl never even knew if her shots hit the target.
And meanwhile the Xeelee were firing back, with lances of some focused energy that were invisible except where they caught the churned-up asteroid dust.
Another of Cohl’s platoon fell in that hop. Still another was hit after they landed, her left arm sheared neatly off. The trooper was left alive but stunned, and blood briefly fountained, turning to crimson ice. A medical orderly was soon on her. He slammed his palm against her skinsuit’s chest panel. The wound was cauterized with a flare of light, and her skinsuit sealed itself up and started to glow a bright brick red, the color of distress. The medic began the process of hauling the wounded back to the earthworks she had just come from.
Cohl could see troopers all over the surface of the Rock, firing, falling, dying. There was a constant attrition, a hail of killings and terrible wounding that somehow seemed banal. The medic teams were working between the waves of advancing troops, right up to the front line. As casualties began to flow back from the lines all over the Rock, the strange industry of processing the wounded and the dead had already begun. And they still had a hundred meters to fight through before they closed on the weapons station.
Cohl checked her platoon once more. Three down, seven up. “Let’s go,” she called again. “On my mark. Three, two, one.”
And she threw herself into the fire.
Then there were eight.
Two hours in, Number Three suffered an instability in its GUT-energy generator: it had to turn back and run for home base. Pirius suspected that this failure had been human rather than technical. A major challenge in these bastardized ships was to keep the systems balanced to avoid excess stress on the power systems; a better pilot or engineer might have held it together.
But they were all feeling the strain. His own eyes were gritty, his face pooled with sweat that his skinsuit’s conditioning systems didn’t seem able to clear, and his hands were locked into claws by the effort of applying just the right touch to his controls, as he tried to balance the FTL jumps and sublight glides. But he couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse, not for a second, not if he was going to get his own laden, lumbering ship through this, and not if he was to keep his squadron together.
As they inched their way toward Chandra the astrophysical geography was slowly changing. The squadron was now tracing a feature the planners called the Bar: it was the pivot of the Baby Spiral, a great glowing belt of molecular gas that marked the bridge that joined the East and West Arms. Pirius could see the lane of gas like a shining road beneath him. He knew that road led straight to the system surrounding Chandra, the supermassive black hole itself, though that central mystery was still invisible to him.
And if he looked up, through a cloud of lesser stars he could see the bright blue lamps of the IRS 16 cluster. Orion Rock was somewhere up there, its human cargo fighting and dying.
Pirius, tucked into the shield’s pocket universe, saw this in a Virtual display. The light that fell on them through the grav shield was heavily stirred and curdled, but with tough processing you could get some information out of it.
As the fourth hour wore away, the squadron began to attract more attention. Suddenly they had an escort — Pirius counted quickly — a dozen, fifteen, twenty nightfighters, flying in loose formation around them. The Xeelee probed the squadron’s formation with starbreaker beams that folded, wavered, and dispersed as they penetrated the pocket universe. The greenships were able to evade these random thrusts easily enough without bending their formation too far. But the Xeelee weren’t serious; for now they seemed to be more intent on simply tracking this strange new development.
“That’s got to be good news,” Torec called. “They are surveilling us, not attacking. We’re something new, and they don’t understand.”
“Just as well,” Pirius Blue growled. “These lumbering beasts couldn’t defend themselves anyhow.”
“The grav shield is working,” Torec insisted. “The Xeelee don’t have FTL foreknowledge of what we’re up to.”
Commander Darc called, “I think you’re right. And maybe Orion is doing its job; they may not have the resources to spare for—” But he was cut off.
Pirius, immediately anxious, glanced up and to his right. The green spark that was Darc’s ship was falling away from the formation.
“Darc! Number Four, report!”
For an agonizing second there was silence. Then Darc came on the loop. “Leader, Four. A lucky shot, I’m afraid. I lost my engineer. Lethe, Lethe.”
“Can you hold formation?”
“Not a chance. I’m wallowing… dropping out now.”
Pirius’s heart sank. Losing Darc was like a punch to the heart.
But even as he was wrestling with whatever was left of his ship, Darc was watching him. “Squadron leader. Snap out of it. Call the seven.”
Pirius shook his head. “Form up the seven, the seven,” he ordered. Around him the surviving ships swam into the seven-strong formation they had practiced against this eventuality. “But, Lethe,” Pirius snapped, “we just lost our reserve shield-master.”
“In that case,” Jees said, “we’ll have to get by with one. Sir.”
Darc called, “Remember my final instruction, Squadron Leader.”
Darc had sworn to kill the Silver Ghost on Jees’s ship immediately, if it gave him the slightest excuse. Pirius said, “I won’t forget, commander.”
Darc laughed defiantly. “Get it done, Pirius! I’ll see you when it’s over.”
Pirius Red could see the Xeelee had triangulated on Darc: he was at the tip of an arrowhead sketched out by lancing crimson light. It was an oddly beautiful sight, Pirius thought, beautiful and deadly.
Blue said, “He’s taking on our escort. Trying to draw them away.”
“A brave man,” Burden murmured.
“He’s showing us the way,” Pirius Red said firmly. “Form up — Six, you’re slack! What do you think this is, a joyride? Form up, form up.”
He tried to settle down once more to the steady strain of nursing his ship and his squadron, in the wake of the imperturbable Jees. But another distracting display showed him what was happening at Orion Rock, which was now under heavy and concentrated attack. The Rock was fulfilling its primary purpose in the operation, which was to divert Xeelee fire. But such was the energy poured over it that the Rock glowed like a star itself.