“No.”
Mira had a lot of plans in mind, but heaving to for boarding wasn’t among them.
“Time to the camp?”
“Almost three minutes, skipper. The destroyers will have us in range by then.”
Mira nodded. “Clear. Stand by the projectors.”
“Projectors standing by!”
“Gas”—she turned to her second—“make sure the boys below know it’s about to get rough, but I need the cargo crew ready to move.”
Gaston nodded. “They’ll be ready.”
“Never had a doubt,” Mira said with an oddly peaceful smile.
As Gaston watched, it changed from peaceful to predatory in the blink of an eye as she leaned over her wheel, eager, it seemed, for what was to come.
“Let’s have some fun.”
William Everett was pushing his small skimmer as hard as he could, the days of being able to requisition an Imperial reaction craft nothing more than a fond memory. His light skimmer was fast, though, pushing eight hundred miles per hour at the top of the atmosphere, chasing the legion that had just left the central empire a few hours earlier.
At least he now had a name to go with his mysterious arms dealer, or supplier, he supposed.
Mira Delsol.
Delsol was an old family. They’d been with the original Scourwinds when they’d led their people here two steps ahead of the cataclysm. William was more familiar with the Cadrewoman’s father, actually. Nikolai Delsol had been a hard man and one of the top strategists in the empire for many years before he passed on. A good man, but one that few people really knew well, including his own family.
Now his daughter was running guns to loyalist sympathizers.
Honestly, William wasn’t quite certain how her father would have reacted. The Delsols were long associated with the Scourwind dynasty, despite being occasional rivals in the political arena. Nikolai would have fought tooth and nail against any coup attempts, but the old man had been a long-term strategist to the core.
His daughter’s actions were those of a grunt with no view of the big picture.
William wished that he’d pulled her file before he’d destroyed the computers in Cadre command. It would have helped immensely if he could review what sorts of missions she’d been assigned as an operative.
All too often, Cadre personnel became predictable based on the sorts of assignments they drew. In hindsight, even Corian himself had really done nothing more than he’d been trained to do. Most of his assignments had been in the kingdoms downspin of the empire, doing the occasional black work that kept them from building up to strength levels that might challenge the legions.
He’d been good at it.
Once he’d become an enemy of the empire, it was without question that he would turn those skills against the Scourwinds.
So what, I wonder, did you do for the Cadre, Mira Delsol?
“She’s climbing, skipper.”
“I see it,” Commander Kim said as he watched the opening gambits of the battle play out.
The Phoenix and the Thunderbird were closing in with a textbook flanking maneuver, tightening their lines while reducing their sails. That would drop their speed but give them more close-in maneuverability with far less concern about blowing each other’s sails out of the skies.
By the book, solid, and just as he’d expect from the captains under his command.
It was the Andros that had him worried.
She was climbing, scrambling for altitude on four wide sails. Still running at half-mast meant that the ship was already sluggish in the air, but climbing right before an engagement meant that she was intentionally bleeding away her speed.
Speed is life. What is that woman doing?
Both of the destroyers were set to catch her in a cross fire that even the Caleb Bar herself couldn’t easily weather, and yet the Andros was still just climbing.
“Is she heading for the third layer, captain?”
Kim shook his head. “No way she makes it, if she is. The Andros is a fast ship, but at half-mast, she’ll be in the burning skies before she makes the third layer.”
“The Thunderbird reports no response to orders to surrender, skipper. Firing solution is confirmed.”
Kim nodded, his face setting as the decision was made.
“Engage.”
The sails of the two destroyers angled out, pulling to the sides of their ships and clearing the chase armaments as they nosed up into the air and locked in on the target skimmer. A blind rat couldn’t have missed the brilliant silver-white sails a gleaming hull a few tens of thousands of feet above them as the order came through.
As one, both destroyers opened fire with heavy blasters.
Bomb-pumped lase blasts tore out through the atmosphere, plasma sucked along with the energy lighting up the skies.
A prelude to destruction.
CHAPTER 16
“Kill the sails!”
The order was so unexpected that on another ship a moment’s hesitation may have ended them in the next instant, but Gaston acted without thinking, and his hand slammed down on the emergency command even as the horror of what he’d just done struck him.
The Andros Pak seemed to hover for an interminable second as the sails died, but it was only an illusion. She entered free fall instantly, and the crew felt their stomachs lurch up into their throats.
Only Mira seemed unaffected, which struck Gaston as both fair and incredibly annoying as she had been the only one who’d known what was coming. She laughed wildly, twisting the wheel in her hand as the nose tipped down and the Andros started to pick up speed.
Above them the skies lit up with crossing blaster beams, the red traces drawing a cage in the sky that had been destined to carve the Andros to cubes. Instead, Gaston held on for his life and sanity as the mist danced wildly in the distance and the ground appeared ahead of them.
The Andros keeled over at the command of her captain. Though she’d never been designed to fly on her own, the ship was built as a lifting wing, with multiple control surfaces to aid in maneuvering. Mira Delsol was making them do things no one had ever intended, laughing all the way.
“Gunners! Fire as she bears!”
This time there was some hesitation, though Gaston supposed it could just be the length of time it took the gunners to get their hands back on the controls. Then one of the blasters fired, followed by two more, and in short order all of the Andros’s chase guns were pouring fire down on the Thunderbird as the corsair plummeted through the skies, a bird with its wings clipped.
On the deck of the Thunderbird, a lethal rain began pelting anyone in the open and tearing into the armor like deadly hail. The captain spun the ship away from the attack and his sister ship hard, but with the sails minimized and their speed already killed by the very act of putting her nose up to target the Andros, the destroyer was too sluggish to respond quickly enough.