The cutter swung hard about, and we tumbled as the deck pitched. Fischig cried out and fell on the ramp, spilling half out of the gently closing entryway. I grabbed him and hauled him inside before his dangling legs could be severed by the vicing ramp or shot by the enemy below.
We were away. I could tell by the angle of the deck and the vibration of the ship's frame that Midas was accelerating hard and keeping low, letting the landscape shield us from the ground fire. Alarm lights flashed in the crew-bay, indicating damage.
'Strap yourself in!' I yelled at Aemos, who was attempting to rise to assist us. 'Fischig, get Bequin in a harness! Yourself too!'
The chastener pulled the terrified girl across the deck and into a seat. I clambered forward, along the companionway, and up into the cockpit.
Midas was pulling on the controls, taking us higher. The blotchy landscape of Damask flickered past beneath us. I dropped into the seat beside him.
'How close?'
The fighters have peeled back, on a direct intercept course. They have altitude in their favour.'
'How close?'
'Six minutes to intercept. Damn!'
What?'
He pointed to the main tactical screen. Behind the smaller bright cursors, larger shapes were moving against the three-dimensional magnetic map of the planet's magnetosphere. Their fleet's moving too. The capital ships. And that's two more fighter wings launched/
They don't want us to get away, do they?' he added.
'With what we know?'
'They won't let us out of the system alive, will they?'
'Midas, I think I've told you the answer to that.'
He grinned, white teeth contrasting sharply with his dark skin in the cabin's half- light.
We're going to have some fun, then,' he decided. His bare hands, sparkling with the inlay of Glavian bio-circuits, darted across the controls, adjusting our course.
'Ideas?' I asked.
'A few possibles. Let me massage the data.'
What?'
Trust me, Gregor, if we've even a shred of hope of getting out of the Damask system alive, it'll be through skill and subtlety. Shut up and let me compute their speeds and intercept vectors.'
We took damage from the ground fire,' I persisted. That hopelessness was seeping into me again, the feeling of having no ability to influence the situation.
'Minor, just minor/ he said distractedly. 'The servitors have got it covered/
He made a course change. From the screen, I saw this brought us around almost side on to the chasing fleet components, drastically reducing their time to intercept and firing range.
What are you doing?'
'Playing the percentages. Playing safe/
The bright globe of Damask was dropping away beneath us, and we were driving out into planetary space beyond the highest orbit points at full thrust.
'See?' he said. Another light had appeared on the tactical screen, moving around ahead of us.
'Standard Imperial battlefleet dispersal. There's always a picket ship positioned on the blind side of the subject world. If we'd kept straight on we'd have flown right into its fire-field/
Lights flashed out in the void beyond the cockpit windows. The picket ship, a medium frigate, was firing anyway, running interference, driving us on.
'It's launched fighters/ Midas reported in a sing-song voice. 'Range in two. Chasers have range in four/
So matter-of-fact.
I looked at the power levels. Every one of the cutter's powerful thrusters was red-lining.
'Midas…'
'Sit back. There it is.'
'What is?'
The small moon was suddenly filling our front ports as we veered around. It didn't look that small. It looked like we were about to smash into it.
I blurted out a curse.
'Relax, dammit!' he assured me, then added, 'range in one.'
We dived towards the scarred, pocked lime-green rock that filled our vision at full thrust. Nose guns beginning to flash; six interceptors of the Battlefleet Scarus elite fighter school followed us in.
SIXTEEN
Void duel.
Betancore's last stand.
Traces.
The moon was called Obol, the smallest and innermost of Damask's fourteen satellites. It was a dented, irregular nugget of nickel, zinc and selenium, six hundred kilometres across at its widest dimension. Lacking atmosphere and riddled with cavities and gorges, it shone with a lambent green glow in the light of the star, ragged terrain features and craters thrown into stark relief.
I was forcing my mind to calm, forcing my pulse rate down. The old mind skills Hapshant had trained me in.
I focused on the data-file for Obol that I had punched up on the screen – nickel, zinc, selenium, smallest of fourteen – not because I wanted to know but because the facts would act as psychopomps, little fetishes of detail to occupy my mind and steal it away from the hazard.
I looked up from the glowing text bar. A jagged crater, vast enough to swallow Dorsay city and its lagoon whole yawned up at us.
'Brace yourselves/ Midas told us all.
Just a kilometre above, he executed his move. By then, we were deeply committed to Obol's gravity and diving at full thrust. There was no question of performing a landing, or even a conventional turn.
But Midas had been flying ships since he was young, schooled in the pilot academies of Glavia. By way of his inlaid circuitry, he understood the nuances of flight, power and manoeuvre better than me, and better than
most professional pilots in the Imperium. He had also tested the capabilities of the gun-cutter almost to destruction, and knew exactly what it could and couldn't do.
What worried me most was what he hoped it might do.
He cut the drive, fired all the landing thrusters, and pulled the nose around so that the cutter began to corkscrew. The view whirled before my eyes and I was flung around in my harness.
The spin seemed uncontrolled. But it was measured and perfect. With the landing jets driving us up away from the vertical, we fluttered, like a leaf, using the corkscrew motion to rob the vessel of downward momentum. Ninety metres from the dust of the crater floor, we flattened out, burning jets hard, white hot, and then arced around as Midas cut the main drive in again.
The ground leapt away under us, and we hugged across it, climbing in a savage jerk to skip over the crater lip.
From the tactical display, I saw all six fighters had dropped back to six minutes
