The eighth torpedo, not quite free of its tube, suffered minor, but significant, damage to its guidance system before it cleared the blast and debris that was all that remained of the Gremlin. As its siblings began their dance of death with the Kreelan cruiser, the eighth torpedo wandered off on its own. Its electronic brain damaged, no longer able to distinguish friend from foe, it circled through space, looking for a target.
Any target.
“Somebody just bought it,” Jodi said as she watched the fireball fade to the residual glow that was all that was left of whatever ship it had been. Not far from it, she saw several smaller explosions silhouette a larger ship that passed through the first fireball, only to explode in its own turn. Torpedoes, she thought to herself. Somebody nailed that Kreelan fucker.
“How much farther?” Eustus asked. He had loved Reza as a friend and commander, but was losing patience with him as a corpse. His uniform was soaked with Reza’s blood, and Reza’s crushing weight in the already cramped cockpit was giving him a case of claustrophobia. The smell was none too pleasant, either.
Jodi checked her instruments. It was going to be a lot closer than she cared to admit. And the margin was not in their favor. “About six minutes,” she said. She was not about to worry him with details, like they were going to be almost a minute short of the fleet’s projected jump-out time. Unconsciously, her left hand pressed forward on the throttles, which were already pegged against their stops. The Corsair was giving her all it had.
All around them, the weapons of the dozens of Kreelan warships in the area were trained on them, but none had fired.
A warning buzzer suddenly went off in Jodi’s ear. “Oh, shit,” she hissed, craning her head, scanning the space around her.
“What is it?” Eustus asked, looking around frantically, although he did not even know what he was looking for.
“A torpedo’s got a lock on us,” Jodi said urgently. “There it is!” Highlighted on the holo display as the ship’s targeting computer calculated the weapon’s trajectory, the torpedo was coming at them from almost directly ahead. “Son of a bitch! It’s one of ours! Hang on!”
She pulled up in a wrenching, twisting corkscrew, hoping to throw the torpedo off, to make it break its lock on her ship. She watched in the display as it passed beneath them, swung around, and began tracking them from astern.
Goddammit, she thought angrily. She could clearly see the human ships now, Gneisenau’s enormous drives shining like a friendly star. But they were too far, much too far away.
“Jodi!” Eustus cried. He was propped up in his seat, looking aft at the torpedo. Forgetting for a moment that he was looking at his own death, he was mesmerized by the sight of the thing, the weapon’s speed sufficient to induce fusion of the hydrogen in space on a molecular level, generating a bow wave of ghostly reddish radiation.
He did not see Reza’s eyes flicker open.
Jodi did everything she knew to shake the weapon, but to no avail. She knew that their time was up.
“I’m sorry, Eustus,” she said as the cockpit filled with the blood-red fusion glow from the approaching torpedo. “I’m so sorry.”
Neither she nor Eustus noticed as metal claws took hold of them, just as the torpedo exploded above the cockpit.
Sinclaire turned away, sickened at the lives he had just seen wasted. And he probably would never know why Mackenzie had done what she did, or even what she was trying to accomplish. But it did not matter now. “That’s it, then,” he said angrily.
“The fleet reports ready for jump, admiral,” Captain Amadi said quietly. Commander Mackenzie had not been with him for very long, but he had enjoyed her company greatly. Her loss, and the effective combat retirement of Captain Carré, was indeed tragic.
Sinclaire nodded. “Let’s be off, then. If you need anything or there’s any news, I’ll be in my cabin.” Two of his finest officers, a good destroyer and her crew, a full Marine regiment, and over a million civilians on Erlang, all written off. He wished he was planetside already, where he could find a nice dark pub and get thoroughly, utterly drunk. He kept his hands close to his sides, hoping that no one would notice that they were shaking.
“Aye, aye, sir.” Amadi turned and began issuing the instructions that would take the fleet home.
In the landing bay, the Marines had been watching the holo display, howling their support of Jodi’s run through the Kreelan lines as if they were at a Marine-Navy soccer game, evening up the score. But the bay was filled with shocked silence as the display showed the icon representing Jodi’s fighter wink yellow and then disappear after her desperate attempts to get away from the brain-damaged torpedo. She and Eustus were gone.
A moment later, the display cleared entirely as the fleet jumped into hyperspace.
The Marines who now belonged to brevet Captain Hawthorne turned away, sadness and exhaustion etched on their features.
Enya found a corner to herself where she slumped down and rested her head in her hands, too tired even to cry. Her world was gone, her people gone, and now Eustus was gone, too. She had nothing left.
“Hey,” she heard someone say, “do you feel that?”
“Feel what?” someone snapped angrily. “Your hand on my butt?”
And then she felt it, too. The air had suddenly grown heavy and still, as if they had dived under water. Her ears popped. As she looked up she was blinded by a searing blue-white flash.
“Explosion in starboard bay!” someone shouted in the maelstrom of lights that clouded her vision. She heard an alarm braying and running feet guided only by flash-blinded eyes. But there had been no sound, just the flash, and then the heavy feeling in the air disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.
As the others crowded their way out of the bay, fearful of a hull breach, Enya stayed in her corner, her eyes shut, waiting for her vision to clear. She did not know the bay like the Marines did, and could just as easily find herself running out the shielded landing door.
After a moment that seemed like forever, she opened her eyes. And there, in a heap of tangled arms and legs on the floor, looking wide-eyed at their surroundings as if they had never seen this place before, were Eustus and Jodi, with Reza’s torn body between them.
“Eustus!” she cried as she leaped to her feet and ran toward them, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. The remaining Marines, shocked by what they saw, slowly gathered around the new arrivals, looking at them as if they were ghosts, the result of a mass hallucination.
“Lord of All,” someone whispered.
“Get Captain Gard to sickbay, now,” Jodi managed, still in shock. She was conscious only of two totally unrelated things: that Reza was somehow still alive, and that she had peed herself. The change of laundry, she decided, could wait; Reza came first. She struggled to her knees as helping hands pried Reza’s talons from her numb shoulder and Eustus’s thigh before they carried the stricken captain at a run to the sickbay. She did not try to dissuade the hands that picked her up, carrying her after him. Eustus, helped by Enya and a babbling Washington Hawthorne, trailed dazedly behind.
Book Three
FINAL BATTLE