Somewhere in the middle of that, the SIG thinks cannon, and reduces both fighters to shards of metals, exploding gas and a flash of blinding light. ‘Ungrateful bastard,’ it snaps, when I remain silent.
But I’m too focused to answer.
Anyway, the third Z7x is beginning its run. The pilot is spooked, which makes him careless. This isn’t what he expects. Coming out like that in a group of three, only to be alone. Now, me . . .
I was alone to start with.
And here he is, chasing an enemy towards the edge of the asteroid belt. An enemy who’s just killed both his companions. It is not a big jump to deciding he’s next.
The fighter comes in fast, and I loop, with darkness eating at the edges of my vision until the world becomes a tiny circle of straight ahead. What I need is to get behind the enemy pilot and let the SIG do its thing.
How hard can that be?
As the Silver Fist opens fire, I pull up and it flicks below me. Looping takes all of my concentration, and as we level out again the SIG starts firing. You can see pulse cannon in space. It burns green. Don’t ask me why.
This guy is good. He twists away, and I follow. As he jerks up, I begin to follow him into a loop and suddenly he isn’t there, because he’s out of the loop and back on his original heading. Any moment now, he’ll do a second twist and roll himself behind me.
‘Wait,’ I tell the SIG.
Slipping sideways, I flip the B79 and fire boosters. The kick nails me to the chair and turns my vision to a tiny island of light surrounded by waves of blackness. As we level out, the SIG sights.
Looks like a clear shot to me.
‘Targeted,’ the SIG says.
‘Take it.’
Warnings obviously fire inside the fighter, because the pilot weaves from side to side and then rolls into a dive. There is no gravity out here, but that dive instinct still kicks in.
As we go for a kill, the pilot kicks in extra boosters.
Heat flares from his afterburner. And the fighter explodes into a weirdly flattened ball of flame and razor-sharp fragments. Only the shrapnel’s all heading in our direction. On the far side of where the fighter was, lights spark in their millions.
‘Pull up,’ shouts the gun.
At this level of g-force, that is easier to say than do. Executing a tight turn, I roll the B79 into the early stages of a loop and begin to climb.
‘Tighter.’
Bastard SIG.
Somewhere down the line, I black out.
Doesn’t matter, the combat AI keeps me on track, and I’m awake before it can turn one loop into two, or do something stupid like go take a closer look at all those little explosions.
‘What the fuck happened?’
An area of blank space hangs between us and Victory First, with Hekati looking vast behind that. There isn’t a Z7x to be seen.
‘All gone,’ says the SIG.
‘Fuck, how many?’
‘Twenty-three.’
We killed twenty-three fighters . . . ?
‘Fish in a barrel,’ says the SIG, sounding disgusted.
‘Them?’
The gun snorts. ‘Us,’ it says, and tells me why.
We didn’t kill that fighter. It crashed into the inside edge of a force field Victory First threw up the moment this battle began. If the field can destroy their fighter, it can destroy us.
And I have problems that are more pressing. We are almost out of fuel, our oxygen’s nearly gone, and we’re using what is left faster than the converters can replace. Eight people in a B79 bomber designed for three is a shit idea. Even if it was mine.
Also, we’re suffering.
My sight is blurred and my throat sour from the kyp. Haze is sticky with his own vomit, and what didn’t glue itself to the walls or the rest of us now hangs in the air, tiny spit balls of half-digested supper.
As for the others . . .
Colonel Vijay is unconscious. But at least he’s upright and safe in a chair. Looking at him reminds me of a very young General Jaxx, which is weird enough to make me decide to think about something else.
It is the rest who need help.
Shil’s chest rises and falls as she struggles for breath. A shoulder tab on her uniform reads orange. She has taken damage, but it’s not yet fatal. At least, not if we can get help and that’s one hell of a-
‘Sven,’ snaps the gun.
‘What? ‘
‘You might want to pay attention.’
Chapter 53
One whole side is rising from Victory First . if the Enlightened ship is a city, then an entire neighbourhood is detaching itself to lift slowly away. It reveals a hole in the mother ship that begins to close as walls shift and hangar doors move.
Soon the Victory First will look as it used to look. Just a bit smaller. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I demand, pointing to the detached bit.
‘Epsilon-class cruiser,’ says the gun.
We can play question and answer or I can use the kyp. The thought doesn’t make me happy. ‘Using it already, sir,’ mutters Haze.
Blood beads his lip. It wells into little blue spheres and flips free like floating pearls to join the vomit, spittle and all the things we forgot to lock down.
Blue? I think. And then I have my answer.
Oxygen loss starves haemoglobin. In a flash flood, I understand more than I want about human biology. And Haze is human; well, as human as I am. Just as quickly, I dismiss the fact.
Who needs memory when this stuff can be pulled from the air?
The cruiser is epsilon-class, a kilometre long and 330 metres wide. It’s vast, armed with fifty cannons and has flight decks for three combat wings . . . That’s a hundred and fifty Z7x fighters.
A list comes up before my eyes. Battles won by a single epsilon-class.
Victory First is made of nineteen epsilons slotted together. That is the beauty of Enlightened technology. It’s cumulative. The Z7xs fit into the sides of the cruiser, the cruiser slots alongside other cruisers to make the mother ship. If needed, the mother ship can be slotted with others to make . . .
Something the size of a small moon.
A ray-traced sphere flickers into my vision and then goes, along with coordinates that put it half a spiral arm away from us.
Speed?
Faster than we are. Well, the cruiser is. Although it takes time to get ramped up enough to use its ion jets.
And distance?
It could cross the galaxy, if the U/Free ever let it get that far.
All this makes me wonder how we outfight the Enlightened, because we do. Every planet they take, we retake, or take one in its place. The figures are vast, tens of thousands of suns and hundreds of thousands of planets. It seems impossible, beyond counting; until that thought brings the number of stars in our galaxy.
A million million.
Our glorious leader, OctoV . . . And the Uplift’s hundred-braid, Gareisis, the Uplifted and Enlightened. They mean so little to Letogratz that the United Free will accept any solution that stops us fighting. Doesn’t have to be fair. Why would it be? Not much else in life is.
Makes me wish I were still at Fort Libidad, scanning the dunes for ferox and desert tribes. And that makes me wonder what an ex-sergeant, who couldn’t count above twenty until a few months back, is doing counting stars.
‘So,’ says SIG. ‘You’re back.’
It shows me the cruiser on screen. ‘You plan on fighting that?’
‘Got a better idea?’
‘Well,’ it says. ‘We’re out of rockets, our shields are screwed and the power bank for the pulse cannon is critical.’ It pisses me off when the SIG gets snotty.