rim, one hundred meters from the ship’s spine. A point on the outside rim was moving at twenty-two meters per second, or nearly fifty miles per hour.
The carrier
The landing bay was at the bottom of the stack, closest to the ship’s spine. The rotation of 2.11 turns per minute with a radius of just thirty meters created an apparent gravity of just.15 G-a shade less than the surface gravity of Earth’s moon-but it meant that the turning landing bay was moving at less than seven meters per second.
At the last instant, the AI fired the fighter’s starboard-side thrusters, giving Allyn’s Starhawk a sideways kick to its vector of seven meters per second. For just an instant, the broad landing bay opening appeared to freeze motionless ahead…and then Allyn flashed past the lines of acquisition lights and into the opening.
Where gravitational acceleration or deceleration acted uniformly on both fighter and pilot, making maneuvers feel like free fall, this was altogether different. The tangleweb field invisibly enmeshed the incoming fighter and dragged it down from a relative 300 meters per second to a relative velocity of zero in the space of three hundred fifty meters.
The Starhawk came to rest, and Allyn sagged back against her seat, her vision slowly swimming back to normal after the brutal seven-G decel. Magnetic grapnels unfolded from the overhead, moving her forward and out of the way of the next incoming Starhawk, thirty seconds behind her. They moved her to one of a dozen deck hatches covered over by the liquid-looking black of an atmospheric nanoseal, lowering her smoothly through the clinging seal and into the air and light of the fighter recovery deck. The grapnels deposited her atop an elevator column and released; the column began sinking into the deck, lowering her to the fifty-meter radius level. As she descended, the hab’s spin gravity steadily rose from fifteen hundredths of a G to a more respectable one-quarter gravity.
By the time the elevator column sank into the deck and the cockpit of her fighter melted open around her, Tucker had already trapped and was beginning her descent to the recovery deck, while Collins was in the last ten seconds of her approach.
And Spaas was inbound on final, thirty seconds behind her.
Allyn climbed out of the cockpit and down to the deck, her knees unsteady after seven Gs. “Welcome home, Commander!” a crew chief told her. She nodded and walked aft, unsealing her bubble helmet and tucking it beneath her arm.
An enormous repeater viewall filled much of the aft bulkhead of the recovery deck, large enough to be seen from any part of the cavernous compartment. It showed a camera view looking aft from inside the landing bay, the wide entrance curving upward slightly in a gentle smile, the aft end of the carrier extending back into space from overhead, the stars beyond gently swinging in a slow circle around the carrier’s vanishing point as the hab module continued to rotate. Numbers at the top left of the screen, in green, showed Collins’ approach velocity-282 mps. A second number counted down the seconds to trap: six…five…four…
And then Collins’ gravfighter was
Thirty seconds more to Spaas’ arrival.
She could hear the voice of
“Vector left…vector left…stabilize…vector left…”
The “vector left” was the LSO attempting to fire the fighter’s starboard thrusters, to match its incoming vector with the seven-meter-per-second rotation of the landing bay. The numerals on the screen were red, showing an approach velocity of 348 mps, too fast, too fast, as the countdown dwindled from seven…to six…
“Gravfighter outside safe approach parameters,” the LSO announced, the voice cold and unemotional. The green light above the opening flashed red.
Allyn’s heart was pounding.
“Abort,” the LSO voice continued, impassive, “abort…abort…”
Spaas’ Starhawk appeared, but too far to the left, much too far to the left, and coming in too fast. His ship was dead; he
The incoming fighter
Spaas’ gravfighter clipped the trailing edge of the entranceway. Sparks erupted, and then the Starhawk’s starboard side disintegrated in peeling, fragmenting metal. The port side flipped into an out-of-control tumble, vanishing off the right side of the screen. The light above the bay flashed red.
Allyn could feel the ship crews around her sag as Spaas died-no one could have survived such a crash. They sagged, they turned away. She heard someone nearby mutter, “
Allyn said nothing. Gripping her helmet tightly, she turned away and started walking toward the recovery deck elevators.
She had a report to file, a debriefing to endure.
She felt exhausted and bruised, and every step dragged at her like death.
Gray stared at the ready room repeater screen, unable to tear his eyes away. It was one thing when a squadron mate bought it in a clean, silent flash of light out in space, quite another when you watched them zorch in for a trap and miss the sweet spot by a matter of scant meters.
He didn’t like Spaas. In fact, he’d detested the guy-an arrogant bully, a womanizer, as much the elitist hypocrite as his partner, Collins.
He’d still been family.
Numb, Gray ran through the members of the Dragonfires, startled to realize that where twelve had launched from the
He wondered if the Dragonfires would be disbanded, the survivors sent as replacements to other squadrons.
The hell with it, He found he didn’t care right now one way or another, didn’t care about
But an audio alarm caught his attention, and he switched the display screen to tactical.
God.
Things were about to get damned tight.
