He would have been happy that the woman wasn’t going into battle today, if the position of the carrier itself hadn’t been so hopeless. Bondarevsky had been struck by her resemblance to Svetlana-not so much in face or feature as in the way she carried herself, the way her mind worked so closely attuned to his own-but it wasn’t until she was wounded aboard the picket ship that he realized how much he’d come to care for her these past few months. It would have been almost too much to bear if she’d gone out there in a fighter like Svetlana, and never come back.
Her eyes met his. “Take care of yourself out there, Jason,” she said quietly. It was the first time she’d ever used his given name. “Don’t forget, you owe me a date when we get back to Landreich.”
His eyes strayed to the swell of her breasts under the khaki uniform she wore, then back to her mocking eyes. “I’ll be there,” he said. He would have taken her in his arms, but he was conscious of other eyes on the two of them.
“I’ll be there,” he repeated, and turned to leave the briefing room. It was time for battle.
Flight Wing Briefing Room, FRLS Mjollnir
Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System
1141 hours (CST)
“My thanks to you, darlin’ of the flight deck, for making sure my wee bird can fly today,” Aengus Harper was saying. A last-minute fault had threatened to ground his Strakha and keep him out of the action today, but Sparks had taken personal charge of the techies who had traced the glitch down and corrected it in time for him to go back on the roster.
If Harper was going to the on a suicide mission, he intended to do it in the cockpit of a fighter, not sidelined as he’d been all these years.
Sparks didn’t answer. He followed her gaze to where Bondarevsky and Travis were talking, then looked at the tech officer again. “Does he not know, then, that you love him, lass?” he asked.
She met his eyes and flushed. “What makes you say that?” she demanded.
“I’ve seen the look a time or two before, lass,” he said. “Even put it in a few ladies’ eyes, from time to time. You’ll not be denyin’ that you’re in love with him, will you now? And for a long time, I’d say.”
She nodded reluctantly. “A long time. But he was in love with another pilot back then, until he lost her on the Kilrah raid. After that…well, he was just getting over her, and I was just a techie petty officer besides.”
“And later?”
“We almost…got together once,” she told him. “But the timing was still wrong. He made it a rule not to fraternize with the junior officers once he became captain of a carrier… and just when I thought he wasn’t going to be my ship’s captain any more, we drew another assignment together.” She looked away. “After that, I decided I didn’t want to trade the friendship I knew we had for a romance I wasn’t sure we could ever manage. Now…it looks like I’ve lost him again. To another pilot, too.”
“You should tell him how you feel, lass.”
She shook her head. “Not much point in it now, Aengus. The last thing he needs is to have something like that laid on him now. And everyone says we won’t be coming back from this one. So I lose him one way or another…better I don’t cause him any more grief.”
“You’re one in a million, Janet McCullough,” Harper told her. “And if you weren’t head-over-heels for that one over there I might be trying to court you myself.”
“Save it, flyboy,” she told him. “Or did you forget you’ve got a launch coming up?”
Strakha 800, VF-401 “Shadow Cats”
Approaching Baka Kar, Baka Kar System
1148 hours (CST)
“Eight-zero-zero, good shot,” Bondarevsky said. He pushed the fighter’s throttle forward and felt the gravitic differential pushing him back into his seat as the Strakha accelerated. “Good shot!”
“Roger, eight-zero-zero,” Boss Marchand replied.
He checked the status of his cloak and nodded inside his flight helmet. No one he’d ever heard of had ever tried launching a stealth fighter with the cloak on, but it had gone off without a hitch. The deployment plan called for the Strakhas to get off of the flight deck early, with cloaks up to hide the launch from prying eyes. It would make the operations cycle easier once the full Alpha Strike went forward later…and it guaranteed that the Strakhas would be in position for a very special mission before the Cats suspected anything was amiss.
One by one the rest of the squadron joined him, though his sensors continued to show surrounding space empty save for the carrier herself. When all eight of the cloaked fighters were assembled, Bondarevsky switched on his commlink once again. “Asgard, Asgard, this is Loki. Launch completed. Proceeding to designated target.” In honor of the carrier’s name-and perhaps in memory of Viking Jensson as well, the codenames for the various elements of the strike mission were drawn from Norse mythology. Asgard, the home of the gods, was the carrier, while the cloaked Strakhas operated under the name of the trickster god, Loki.
“Loki, Asgard, copy,” came the reply from Lieutenant Vivaldi. “Make sure you sting the bastards a couple of times for me!”
The Strakhas, unseen, undetected, raced inward toward Baka Kar.
Combat Information Center, FRLS Mjollnir
Entering Baka Kar Orbit, Baka Kar System
1208 hours (CST)
“My God, what a monster,” someone breathed, and Geoff Tolwyn agreed. He had once thought Behemoth was a truly impressive piece of machinery, but the huge bulk of the Kilrathi dreadnought was something unimaginably larger and more terrible. The huge space station and repair dock alongside was larger, but not by much…and space stations didn’t generally fly under their own power.
Or carry sufficient weapons to wipe out a fleet or lay waste a planet.
Still unchallenged, the carrier was on final approach. Dahl and Murragh were busy talking to the station controllers, requesting final approach clearance, ostensibly so they could dock with the station and arrange resupply and repairs for Karga. He had been concerned about allowing the Kilrathi to play too big a role in the operation, in case one of them harbored more loyalty to his race than to his Prince, but the encounter with the picket boat had proved he could count on Murragh and the others. Tolwyn could safely ignore that entire facet of the attack. It was in good hands. At any rate, most of the attention at the station was bound to be focused on the distant skirmishing around the jump point, where Xenaphon, Durendal, and Caliburn were playing tag with the ever-increasing force of Kilrathi ships closing in on them from all parts of the system.
Richards was playing it canny out there, avoiding combat. The three Landreich ships could dodge away from almost anything their size or larger, altering vectors in plenty of time to avoid coming into range of a Cat ship’s guns. It would take a carrier with fast-striking planes to bring them to battle, and so far the only carrier they’d detected in motion was still close to an hour from the scene of the fighting. A second carrier was reported near the station, but its power readings indicated that it had suffered some heavy damage-probably the one Kevin Tolwyn had reported as taken out of action by the pirates at Hellhole.
“We have clearance,” Vivaldi announced. “Port side approach.”
“Very good,” Tolwyn said. “Just where we hoped. Mr. Clancy, I’ll thank you to steer for the port side of the station. And make sure you take us in close across the bow of that beast.”