Talons twisted inside my gut at the thought of a thousand crewmembers burned to ash in a half a second. We Marines gave the Fleet a ration of shit for sitting back safe in their ships while we waded in the dirt and got shot at, but as many Fleet spacers had just died in the space of a heartbeat as Marines had died in any battle fought so far. They’d never had a chance, had nowhere to hide, no warning. They were just gone. And somewhere, a thousand casualty notification teams were going to have to find their next of kin and deliver the news in person, and a thousand families who never even thought of death as a possibility would have it delivered to their doorstep.
I tried to imagine how it would feel for them, but I couldn’t manage it. Death had always been a reality for me.
“That’s the first cruiser we’ve lost since the Battle for Mars,” Bang-Bang said, this time remembering to keep it to our private net.
“It might not be the last.”
The missiles were still coming in, so many of them I couldn’t keep track of whether there were enough ships to intercept them all. And they weren’t all aimed at the cruisers. One was easier to track, on an arcing trajectory around the cruisers, heading right down our throats.
The alarm wasn’t one I’d heard before except in the drills we rarely practiced, the announcement that followed it tinged with real panic absent from those drills, which had been conducted with bored obligation.
“All drop ships!” the flight ops officer of the Iwo Jima yelled as if he had to pitch his voice loud enough to carry through the hangar bay instead of just over the intercom. “Launch now! Emergency launch! All hands to escape pods! Launch! Launch! Launch!”
Acceleration slammed me back into the padding of my armor and the view through the tactical display hookup went dark as it cut off.
“Shit!” I didn’t know who had said it, couldn’t focus on the readout in my Heads-Up Display with the pressure, but they summed up my own opinion perfectly.
Six gees, I thought. We had to be boosting at six gees, at least. No more than eight, because I was still conscious, but enough that I felt as if my ribs were about to give way, despite the padding inside the Vigilante battlesuit. I couldn’t lift my chin off my chest and taking a breath seemed to require every bit of energy I had. I clawed at the controls positioned around my left hand and managed to switch the comm input to the drop-ship external cams.
It was a peek out a window compared to the feed from the sensor suite, but at least I wasn’t stuck in the darkness of my helmet. Point Barber filled the view, a kaleidoscope of blue, green, and brown, and a muscle spasmed in the web of my thumb as I switched to the rear feed, needing to see what was happening behind us. The Iwo Jima seemed farther away than I would have thought possible from just a few minutes of boost and I could see her from bow to stern, her nose slowly lifting on a flaring maneuvering thruster as she tried to change course, a desperate and pointless move. She was built for cargo capacity, not speed and agility, and it would take her a solid five minutes to swap end for end.
The missile hit two minutes later.
A new sun swallowed up the ship, and I imagined I spotted the center of it, that one exact second when the fusion warhead ignited, a kernel of starfire at the heart of the Iwo Jima. It was a fantasy, an illusion of my fevered imagination and the pressure squeezing oxygen away from my brain. The fusion explosion was near instantaneous and it took a fraction of a second for the ship that had been my home as much as any other place for the last three years to vanish, disassembled on an atomic level, what wasn’t ripped out of existence burned to vapors.
The Iwo Jima was gone. Everything I owned was gone with her, everything squeezed into a tiny locker built into the bulkhead of my compartment now just floating gas bound someday to fall into the atmosphere of Point Barber. The crew, the flight officers, the maintenance techs. They were dead.
And if the reality of that hadn’t yet hit me, it was only because we were burning through the biggest space battle in the history of humanity in a lightly-armored drop-ship and very likely to join them any second.
11
“Kovacs,” I said, remembering that First Platoon was sharing the drop-ship with us. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. At the moment, I was so damned scared, I could barely remember my own name. “You hearing me, Francis?”
“Y…yeah.” I didn’t know if the hesitation was because of the pressure from the acceleration or from flat-out fear, and for once, I wouldn’t have blamed Kovacs for either one. “I’m here, Cam.”
I wanted to laugh but lacked the spare breath. He almost never used my first name, calling me Alvarez with the sort of disdain only an Academy ring-knocker could put into the word when speaking down to an OCS grad.
“Did you see the Iwo go up?” Which was sounded like a dumb question but wasn’t. I’d been watching out the back cameras, but he might not have had time to switch before the blast.
“Yeah. Shit, Cam, do you think anyone else made it?”
Now that sounded like a dumb question too, because how the hell would I know? But again, it wasn’t, because I could find out.
“Hold on,” I told him, then switched my comms to the drop-ship crew’s net. “This is Lt. Alvarez. Do you have IFF on any other drop-ships?”
Their answer took a moment, and I wondered if they were too shocked by the destruction of the troop ship to bother answering me,
