“Long hard days have been spent establishing a chain of command, integrating our varied systems, and selecting best practices. Every single one of you deserves credit for making that happen. Now comes the test, the moment when steel meets steel, when courage owns the day.”
A human legionnaire rose at the back of the audience and shouted the ancient Hudathan battle cry:
“BLOOD!”
The audience roared the response: “BLOOD!”
A Hudathan stood, raised his fist, and shouted “CAMERONE!”
Booly smiled, waited for the noise level to drop, and brought the meeting to a close. “You know what to do—so go and do it. Insertion teams Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green will drop about six hours from now. Kick some butt for me.”
The flight of six daggers shuddered as they forced their way down into the planet’s hard, thin atmosphere. Lieutenant Commander Rawlings bit her lower lip. She’d seen combat before, back during the mutiny, but not like this. She had been a watch officer then, standing shoulder to shoulder with the bridge crew, staring into a three- dimensional holo tank as brightly lit sparks fought duels in the dark. This was different. There was the loneliness of her one person cockpit plus the knowledge that five pilots were counting on her for guidance and leadership. One Hudathan, two Seebos, and a couple of
“greenies” right out of the navy’sAdvancedCombatSchool . Rawlings didn’t know which scared her most, their lack of experience or hers. A group of red deltas wiped themselves onto her HUD and Lieutenant Hawa MorloBa, who never tired of being first, made the call. “Blue Five to Blue One . . . bandits at six o’clock!”
Rawlings listened to herself say, “Roger that. Five,” and took pride in the flat laconic sound of the words. ‘Tally ho!”
Clone intelligence claimed that Thraki interceptors were protected by cloaking technology obtained from a race called “The Simm,” and it appeared that they were correct. The enemy interceptors were a good deal closer than she would have preferred. The naval officer “thought” her aircraft to starboard, felt it side slip into a dive, and brought the ship’s weapons systems online.
The others watched her go, followed the officer down, and scanned their readouts. Power was critical, weapons were critical, everything was critical or would be soon.
Flight Warrior Hissa Hoi Beko watched the Confederate aircraft descend, checked her wing mates, and confirmed their positions. The pilot’s weapons, like the rest of her ship, were controlled by the special gauntlets she wore. Each movement had meaning. Index to finger to thumb:
“Safeties off—accumulators on.” First two fingers in parallel: “Ship-to-ship missiles—safeties off—guidance on— warheads active.” The pilot’s displays flickered with each carefully articulated movement. Then, as the enemy fighters came into range, a circuit closed, and her fingers began to tingle. Beko fired and the air war began.
Rawlings heard tone, fired chaff, and rolled. The enemy missile sped past and exploded. The fighter that had fired it pulled a highgee turn and attempted to flee. The rest of the Thraki interceptors did likewise. Both of the Seebos responded with a nearly identical cheer, applied full military power, and gave chase, Rawlings wanted to stop them, wanted to call the pilots back, but wasn’t sure why. Good fighter pilots were aggressive, competitive, and little bit obnoxious. But this was too easy, too tempting, too ... Beko checked her screens and grinned as the enemy ships took the bait. The Hegemony had been most accommodating during the early stages of the Clone-Thraki relationship and shared some of their knowledge regarding Confederate technology. That was how Beko knew the range at which her adversaries would be able to detect her fighters and was able to put that knowledge to work. By leaving two heavily cloaked interceptors behind, and leading the enemy towards them, she and her wing mates had closed the trap.
The Seebos saw deltas appear as if by magic, tried to react, but ran out of time. Rawlings winced as the orange- red flowers blossomed, gritted her teeth, and took the challenge. The Thraki had reversed direction by then . .. which meant that she and her three surviving pilots were about to go head to head with six enemy aircraft. That’s when the naval officer noticed how precisely the enemy was grouped. Because they had a taste for discipline? Or because the pilots were trained to fight tightly controlled machines? Computer controlled machines that behaved in predictable ways? Words followed thought: “Break! Break! Break! Take ‘um one on one, over.”
Beko frowned, and the fur crawled away from her eyes as the oncoming formation seemed to explode. Confederate vessels went every which way as she struggled to understand. But there wasn’t enough time, not at combined speeds of more than a thousand units per hour, and the .sky went mad. The Confederate ships rolled, turned, dove, and climbed. Missiles left their racks, coherent light stuttered toward their targets, and 30 mm cannon shells tunneled through the air. Beko yowled in frustration as the formation disintegrated around her, fired at one of the oncoming ships, and knew she had missed. And then, before she could recover, the interceptor took a hit. Alarms went off, systems failed, and a computer made a decision. The cockpit blew itself free of the ship, a cluster of chutes popped open, and the planet swayed below. Beko saw no less than three of her pilots die or bail out during the next two minutes. Shame filled her heart, and the weight of it pulled the warrior down. The Command andControlCenter , or CCC, was almost eerily quiet. Near disasters, disasters, and total disasters were announced in the same emotionless drone used to describe the most important of victories. It was a large compartment by shipboard standards, buried deep within the Gladiator’s armorclad hull, and the place from which Booly, his staff, and a group of highly skilled technicians ran the assault on BETA018.
Screens lined the bulkheads, video flashed, rolled, and stuttered; indicator lights signaled from the darkness, and “Big Momma,” the ship’s primary C&C computer murmured in the background. Booly cocked his head as the latest summaries came in over the speakers. “Preliminary totals indicate casualties more than 16 percent in excess
