“Yes.” She flopped back down. “So you did. I’m sorry.” I simply didn’t realize you were serious, that you would leave a fellow human being behind, to face . . . that.
“Hey, you did all right,” Sal Yong said. “Lotsa people would have screwed up, they had all that shit thrown at them.”
“Oh, thanks.”
There were mechanical clunks from somewhere behind her as Sewell detached his gaussrifles. “Let’s see about getting that armour off you, Kell. You look like you could do with some field aid.” She felt him touch the suit’s seal catch, and then humid sticky air was sliding over her skin. Her helmet came off, and she blinked dizzily.
Sewell was sitting on a bench above her, holding a couple of medical nanonic packages. Kelly avoided looking at her ribs; the physiological display was bad enough.
“Looks like I’m not the only one,” she said, smiling bravely. His artificial skin was pitted with small deep blackened craters where the white fire had struck, including a long score on the side of his glossy head. Blood and fluid dribbled out of the cracks each time he moved. “Or are you going to say they’re just flesh wounds?”
“Nothing critical.”
“Oh, crap, I’m drowning in macho culture.”
“You can put your gun down now, Kell.”
The nine-millimetre pistol was still in her hand, fingers solidified round its grip. She gave it a bewildered stare. “Right. Good idea.”
He tilted her gently on her right side, then peeled the covering off the nanonic package. It moulded itself to her left side, curving round to cover her from her navel to her spine. The colours of her physiological display changed, reds diluting to amber, as it began knitting itself to her wound.
“Where are we going?” she asked. The hovercraft was moving faster than it had before. Humidity was making her sweat all over, the smell of vegetation was rank, itching her throat. Lying half-naked racing through a xenoc jungle being chased by monsters and cut off from any hope of rescue. She knew she ought to be reduced virtually to hysterics, yet really it was almost funny. You wanted a tough assignment, my girl.
“Aberdale,” Reza said. “According to the LDC’s chief sheriff, that’s where the first reported trouble started.”
“Of course,” Kelly answered. There was a strange kind of strength on the far side of utter despair, she found, or maybe it was just the tranquillizers.
“Kell?”
She closed her leaden eyelids. “Yes.”
“Why did you shoot the baby?”
“You don’t want to know.”
The navy squadron closed on Lalonde at seven gees, crews prone on their acceleration couches with faces screwed up against the lead-weighted air which lay on top of them. When they were seventeen thousand kilometres out, the fusion flames died away and the starships rotated a hundred and eighty degrees in a virtuoso display of synchronization, ion thrusters crowning them in a triumphant blue haze. The Arikara and the Shukyo released twenty combat communication-relay satellites, streaking away at ten gees to englobe the planet. Then the warships began to decelerate.
As the merciless gee force returned to Arikara ’s bridge Meredith Saldana accessed the tactical display. The voidhawks had performed small swallow manoeuvres, taking them to within two and a half thousand kilometres of the planet and curving into orbit ahead of the Adamist warships to which such short-range precision jumps were impossible. But the mercenary fleet was leading the bitek starships a merry dance. Three blackhawks were racing away from Lalonde, striving for the magic two thousand kilometre altitude where they would be outside the influence of the planet’s gravitational field, allowing them to swallow away. Voidhawks were in pursuit. Four of the nine combat-capable independent traders were also under acceleration. Two of them, Datura and Cereus , were heading on a vector straight towards the squadron at two and a half gees. They wouldn’t respond to any warning calls from the Arikara , nor Terrance Smith.
“Haria, Gakkai , go to defensive engagement status, please,” Meredith datavised. The situation display showed him the two frigates end their deceleration burn, flip over, and accelerate ahead of the rest of the squadron.
“What is the state of the remaining mercenary ships?” the Admiral enquired.
“Smith claims the starships remaining in orbit are obeying his orders, and therefore haven’t been hijacked,” said Lieutenant Franz Grese, the squadron Intelligence officer.
“What do you think?”
“I think Commander Solanki was right, and we’d better be very careful, Admiral.”
“Agreed. Commander Kroeber, we’ll send a marine squad into the Gemal first. If we can verify that Smith himself hasn’t been hijacked or sequestrated it may just make our job that bit easier.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The tactical situation warned him the Datura and Cereus were launching combat wasps. Meredith observed in astonishment as each of them released a salvo of thirty-five; according to the accompanying identification codes the starships were small vehicles, forty to forty-five metres in diameter. They couldn’t have held back any reserves—what absurd tactics. The drone armaments began to accelerate from their launch craft at twenty gees.
“No antimatter, Admiral,” datavised Second Lieutenant Clark Lowie, the Arikara ’s weapons officer. “Fusion drives only.”
That’s something, Meredith thought. “What’s their storage capacity?”
“Best estimate would be forty combat wasps maximum, Admiral.”
“So they haven’t left any for their own defence?”
“Looks that way, sir.”
Haria and Gakkai launched a counter salvo; eighty combat wasps leaping ahead to intercept the incoming hostiles at twenty-seven gees. Purple, red, and green vector lines sprang up in Meredith’s mind, as if someone was performing laser acupuncture right across his skull. The combat wasps started to squirt megawatt electronic warfare pulses at each other. Active and kinetic submunitions began to scatter. Two disc-shaped swarms formed, five hundred kilometres across, alive with deceitful impulses and infrared signatures. Electron beams flashed out, perfectly straight lightning bolts glaring against the starfield. The first explosions flared. Kiloton nuclear devices were detonated on each side. Smaller explosions followed as combat wasps blew apart under the prodigious energy impact.
A second, smaller, salvo was launched by the frigates, compensating for the loss.
“Admiral, the Myoho reports the blackhawk it’s chasing is about to swallow outsystem,” Lieutenant Rhoecus called. “Request permission to follow.”
“Granted. Follow and interdict; it is not to come into contact with inhabited Confederation territory.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A vast circle of space burst into pyrotechnic oblivion as the two antagonistic combat wasp swarms collided, as though a giant wormhole had been torn open into the heart of a nearby star. The annular plasma storm eddied violently, radiating down through the visible spectrum in seconds until only nebulous violet mists were left.
Arikara ’s sensor clusters struggled to burn through the conflagration and present an accurate representation of events through the tactical situation display. Some submunitions from both sides had survived. Now they were accelerating towards their intended targets. All four combatant ships began high-gee evasive manoeuvres.
Myoho and its blackhawk disappeared from the display. Granth and Ilex both fired a volley of combat wasps at their respective prey.