There was a brief silence. “Nerves,” said Kelly, with some embarrassment.
“Yeah. Look, forget it.”
A mutter of agreement went round the group. “How long now?” Mairead said.
“Ten minutes to the positions filed with the master tactics computer.”
“Oh, I hate this part,” Del muttered. “Once we get up there and start shooting things, everything will be fine.”
“Assuming we last that long,” Kelly said.
“Hungarian, huh?” said Chel. “Well, Goulash, you’re in for a real show today…assuming we survive the first ten minutes.”
Maj opened her mouth to say something cutting to Chel, but Laurent grinned and said, “Goulash? I like goulash. And if you make it right, with the really hot paprika, it’s got a bite.” He bounced a little in the light gravity, still smiling. “Separates the men from the boys.”
“Paprika?” said Bob. “That’s right, it’s a kind of chile, isn’t it? My dad grows chiles, and he—”
“You can talk about your male macho chile-eating stuff later, for pity’s sake,” Maj said. “Niko, better have a look at the diagram, you’ll see what’s cooking….”
They went over to it, the others following by ones and twos. The hologram was mostly filled with the planet Didion, where the Arbalests would be fighting down and dirty in the atmosphere with many, many others.
“It’s a ‘built’ planet,” Maj said as Laurent walked around the hologram, peering at it. “It may look green…but everything about Didion is artificial. It’s constructed, from the core out…there are thousands of levels. It was the library for all this part of space once, until the Archon moved in and took things over. Now it’s been reamed out and stuffed full of weapons, killerbots, crawling code…you name it. Nasty place, and the nerve center for all the Archon’s operations in this part of space. But there’s a way down inside, and if we can once fight our way down to the surface and get in there—”
“And there, of course, is the problem,” Bob said. The “surface” of the planet on the hologram disappeared to reveal the way into the core — a complex and twisting path of conduits and tunnels.
“It’s a body, with a brain,” Maj said. “What it needs…is a lobotomy.”
“Icepicks R Us,” said Bob. The others groaned.
“Bob,” Shih Chin said with good-natured disgust, “you are so retro sometimes.”
“A lot of other groups are going to be trying to beat us to it,” Mairead said. “We intend to be first…or at least real close behind first.”
“First or nothing,” Chel said. “Death or glory.”
Laurent stood looking thoughtfully at the diagram — the globe, the involved way in to the heart of it, the “sensitive area” hidden at the heart. “This looks,” he said, “kind of familiar.”
There was a subdued chuckle from some of the others. “Yeah,” Shih Chin said. “It’s a reworking of an old archetype. There have been some additions to it, though. Take a look—”
They spent the next few minutes going over the worst of the boobytraps — as much to show them to Laurent as to remind themselves. “The worst things are the shipeaters,” Del said, pointing at the two separate places where the “eaters” were known to have been positioned in the main accesses. “They’re nothing small that you could shoot up. They’re jaws that come out of the walls — they are the walls, actually — and munch you up. Nasty.”
“If you just get shot up and die, you can at least reclaim the points inherent in your shipbuild in another round of the game,” Maj said to Laurent. “But if something completely destroys your ship and you can’t recover the material for salvage, you have to start over from scratch…buy your way back into the construction program and then sometimes wait a month or two before the resources are available to build your new ship….”
“Like real life,” Laurent said.
“All too much like it,” Kelly said.
From the direction of the buildings in their base complex, a klaxon began to sound. “That’s it, troops,” Shih Chin said, and with a look of great relief headed off toward her ship.
“Chinnn!!” Bob and Del and Mairead shouted after her.
“Oh…I forgot.” She came back to the rest of them.
“Ready?” Bob said, putting out a hand.
Shih Chin put her hand on top of Bob’s, and then one after another, the Group piled hands up on top of one another. “Oh, come on, Goulash,” Bob said to Laurent then, and shyly, Laurent put his hand on top of all of theirs.
“Seven for seven,” Bob said. “Or nine, or ten. However many we are. Yeah?”
“Yeah!” they all shouted.
“Now let’s go kick the Archon’s big green butt,” Shih Chin said, “and be back home in time for popcorn and a late movie.”
Everyone headed hurriedly for their fighters. Shortly Maj and Laurent were back in their seats, and all around them the scream of Morgenroths coming up to speed was becoming deafening. “This planet,” Laurent said, nearly shouting over the noise, “it is in this system?”
“Nope,” Maj said. “Fourteen light-years away.”
Laurent’s eyes widened as the nine ships lifted up and away from the surface of Jorkas together, in formation. “And we are going to get there in ten minutes?”
“In about a second and a half, actually,” Maj said, checking the readouts for the sizable part of the Arbalest’s computer which managed the squeezefield synchronization. “If we had a jump gate, it would be even faster. But that uses a lot of power, and the gate structure is vulnerable at either end to sabotage. However, we have enough ships to do it the other way.” She glanced around. The others were slowing down, preparing.
“What way?”
“Hang on,” she said, and meant it. The first time it was always a surprise….
“Ready, Seven?” Bob’s voice came down the ship’s comm.
“Ready!” Maj said. Seven other voices said, “Ready!”
“Synch starts—now!”
The squeezefield sequence cut in. Maj watched the guidance laser jump from craft to craft, knitting them together in a many-times reflected webwork of light. The hypermass augmentation sequence started—
And then the stars streaked in to collapse around them, molded themselves flaming to the shapes of the ships, pushed the ships and their pilots unbearably inward on themselves in a wave of spatially compressed light and a deafening scream of sound—
Everything vanished. And then the stars blazed out again, leaping back out to their proper positions, and leaving the formation of Arbalests falling toward the surface of the planet Didion….
Laurent was gasping. “You — you—!”
“You can either poke holes in the universe to get where you’re going,” Maj said, “which some people suspect is bad for its structure…or you can wrap it around you like a coat, go where you’re going, and then take the coat off again. It’s all the same coat. Everything in it touches everything else….”
That was as much theory as Maj intended to get into at the moment, for there was a lot to do, a lot of instruments to check and double-check in the next minute or so. The cockpit was filling up with nervous background chatter from the others as they did what Maj was doing — made sure the weapons were hot and loose, the Morgenroths answering properly. Below them, streaks of fire and puffs of smoke and long streamers of contrail in the upper and middle atmosphere told them that the Battle of Didion was already in progress, and heating up.
“Ready?” Bob said from his Arbalest, taking squad leadership and point this time out. He had devised the strategy they would be using on the way in, and therefore he got to die first if anything went wrong.