Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

Holon raised a perfect eyebrow. 'The Last Line's still in our way,' he pointed out. 'We don't have a safe corridor.'

'Why, my dear Holon, you disappoint me. This was never going to be safe.' Inshiri scowled at the sparkling of the exclusion-zone battle. 'More importantly, we're all going to run out of fuel or clean air soon. Isn't that true, General Secretary?'

Remoran nodded. 'Signal the rest of the insertion group,' he told her. 'We're going in as soon as the First Line starts to move our way.'

The signals were sent, and as Antaea went to reenter the sloop with the others, she could feel the air trembling with the noise of jet engines spinning up. She was one of the last to enter, and found the square of shadow in the hatch a black absence compared with the light of a hundred suns that radiated from the hull.

As she grabbed the edge of the hatch, something tickled the back of her hand. She flicked absentmindedly at it, heard multiple slapping sounds, and looked over to see a bright-spalled bullet hole right next to her index finger. A line of them wandered away across the Thistle's hull. They hadn't been there a moment ago--

Somebody reached out of the hatch and grabbed the lapel of her jacket, hauling her inside, where somebody else was screaming. Little droplets of blood, gorgeous red in the light from the door, spun through the shaft of daylight like minor planets.

Antaea blinked and looked back, in time to catch the head-on view of an incoming missile. It looked just like one of the ones she'd seen in the siege of Stonecloud ...

'Damn it, move!' Jacoby Sarto shifted his grip to her shoulder and pushed her out of the doorway just as another line of bullet holes danced across the wall beside him. He grunted and jerked a foot to his left, while outside, the missile sighed past just a few feet below the sloop.

'Jacoby!' It was her turn to seize him as he drifted toward the starboard bulkhead. The screaming behind them had stopped. Jacoby pawed at his right shoulder with his left hand, wincing. 'Wouldn't move, ya damn fool...'

Somebody slammed the hatch just in time as an explosion flashed outside and the portholes all starred. The sloop lurched to port and then began accelerating. Suddenly Antaea and Jacoby were falling aft with a cloud of men, crates, and blood drops. They landed atop one another and none could move for long minutes as the ship jigged and swerved crazily. More explosions chased them.

When the acceleration eased off a bit Antaea got to her knees to find Jacoby unconscious, two dead men next to him, and utter bedlam as crew and Home Guard officials tried to patch the freely bleeding wounds of two more.

'Help us here!' she demanded, but their attention was on their own. With a curse she dragged Jacoby over to the aft hatch and undogged it just as the acceleration finally let up. She bundled him through and closed the door against the noise.

'Venera! Are you okay?'

'Why?' came the dry reply. 'Were you taking bets?'

'It's Jacoby, he's been hit.'

'Untie me!'

Antaea hesitated for just a second, but Venera said, 'Really, where am I going to go?' Antaea quickly unwove the rope and they turned their attention to Jacoby.

As they worked Candesce's light faded from the portholes, but it was still bright: fire and the glow of distant cities competed with the amber of more-distant suns to turn the skies lemon yellow. The Thistle ran ahead of pursuing Last Line gunboats, with a ragged swarm of bikes and light cruisers as escort. The task of every other ship in the armada was now to keep those pursuers from stopping the Thistle's run at Candesce; so as they soared and ducked and powered past debris clouds and tumbling mines, explosions lit the sky to all sides as attackers and defenders formed a vast cylinder around their trajectory. When Antaea had time to notice what was happening, she found herself thinking of the Thistle as a needle, aimed at the arm of a man who was twisting and turning to get out of its way. At any second one of the questing enemy missiles might find them, or a cloud of bullets, or they might hit a shrapnel cloud at three hundred miles per hour. If that happened, they'd be dead before she knew it; so, she kept her eyes on Jacoby, and her hands pressed against the site where the bullet had pierced his shoulder.

* * *

LEAL COULD SEE the ship approaching them in the wavering projection; but so could everybody else. It seemed pointless to throw out her arm and shout 'Look out!' when this crash was inevitable. She reached for Keir, though, and he wrapped his arms around the back of her chair as the flame-gouting battleship loomed too large for the projection and the bridge went black.

Nothing happened. Then, just as she was about to relax, a tremendous shuddering took them and she was thrown from side to side like a rag doll. It was like the brief trip from Brink to Serenity, but a hundred times worse.

Light returned and the shuddering stopped. The projection screen showed an orange sky full of tumbling ships. Chaison Fanning leaned forward and said, 'Damage report' into a speaking tube.

'Too damned crowded,' muttered an admiral. The fleet was being forced into a smaller and smaller volume of air by the First Line fleet, which surrounded them on all sides. The problem was, any ship that stopped moving became an instant target, so they swirled around and around one another, like a school of trapped fish circled by sharks. The sharks had only to dart in and out again, leaving ever more wreckage in their wakes, and that--like the disabled battleship that had just struck the Surgeon a glancing blow--became a further hazard to the defenders.

'Best I can make out,' one of the semaphore men was saying, 'is that the larger part of the First Line is moving to join Ferance's fleet.'

'We held them as long as we could. Come on, Travis,' hissed Chaison. 'Where's that damned surprise?'

'Any minute now, sir.'

'And you,' Chaison said to Keir. 'You're sure these will give us a miracle?' He held up a piece of paper Keir had