Accord of Mars (Accord Series Book 2) (17 page)

I
heard
a few confirmation replies and a cheer over the radio. I didn’t have a headset, so I was only catching snippets of the conversation, but the pilots sounded as exhausted as they were thrilled. They must have been covering for Kel as she dove in on her insane rescue mission. I winced inwardly, wondering how many had died to win my freedom.

“You’re nuts, you know that?” I said to Kel. I was still amazed she’d been able to pull it off at all.

“So I’ve been told,” she said.

“Thanks for the rescue,” I said. My hands were starting to hurt, but at least my cough seemed to be under control at last. We were zipping clear of the Dreadnought now, all of the fighters scattering. I saw a few more missiles detonate on the front end of the ship. Dad must still be hammering away at it. It was bleeding air, venting flames. A dying bird of prey.

But Perrault might still have one shot left from his main gun. I hoped Dad could stop him in time.

“Shit,” Kel said. The vehemence in that one word made me cold.

“What?”

There was a long pause before she replied. “It’s your Dad. He’s gone to full thrust, and the Hermes crew is abandoning ship,” she said. “I think he’s going to ram it!”

He would, if he thought he couldn’t stop the ship any other way. He’d blow himself and the ship to bits to save the people behind it on Mars. I couldn’t say he was wrong to do it, either. Hadn’t I just been willing to die myself if I could have taken the thing down, a short while ago?

“It’s the main gun,” I said. “The railgun is powerful enough to devastate the colony, if he fires it.”

“So it’s stop the ship or bust, huh?” she replied. She paused again, and then went on. “I have one missile left, Thomas.”

One missile. It seemed ridiculous to even attempt it. One shot, where so many had failed? But if we could get in close enough, target the gun from inside their anti-missile defenses….

“Can you drop it right down their throat?” I asked.

She scoffed. “Can you handle the gees?”

The engine roared, and she flipped the Hawk around. It streaked back along the route we’d just taken to get away from the ship. Missiles soared out to stab at us. Kel swerved, dodged one. Then she flipped the fighter over and the second passed by the cockpit close enough that I saw it flash by. I gulped and hung on. Both of the missiles turned and gave chase, locked on to our engine heat or radar signature.

But then we were closing on the skin of the dreadnought. Kel didn’t just take us in close. She brought us within spitting distance of the hull. She wove a path over the missile tubes and guns protruding from the vessel, darting between them. We weren’t just going fast - we were running alongside the ship so rapidly that it was a blur next to us. I wanted to close my eyes, but found I couldn’t take them from the view.

The missiles tracking us couldn’t keep up, and slammed back into their mother ship. But they had failsafes and refused to detonate this close to the Dreadnought. A shame - it would have been two more holes in the hull, but at least they weren’t chasing us anymore.

Kel fired the nose cannon on her fighter, taking out an anti-missile gun that had started tracking us before it could open fire. She turned sideways to avoid more rounds from some other source I couldn’t even see. And never once did she slow the fighter down.

“Hermes, this is Hawk Leader,” Kel said into the radio. “I have one shot. Taking it.”

Then we were out, flying in front of the ship. I could see the Hermes out there in the distance. It was being hammered, but Dad was still coming in as fast as he could. Dad’s engines could manage twenty gravities of acceleration, and I thought the Hermes must be doing almost that much. It was only a dot in the distance, but we had seconds left.

And we were right in the middle of the furball. Both of the big ships were shooting with everything they had left. My screen showed missiles everywhere, too many to count, with anti-missile fire blasting most of them to bits. Luckily, we were moving so fast that the little fighter was mostly being ignored. Even so, several of the dreadnought’s missiles locked on and gave chase.

I used the copilot’s console to scan the Dreadnought as Kel flipped the ship over and accelerated back in toward the ship’s gaping maw. The railgun muzzle was a huge black orifice in the center of the bow. You couldn’t miss seeing it if you tried. But it was surrounded by a ring of anti-missile guns that I hadn’t spotted before. That must have been why the gun was relatively undamaged. The entire nose of the Dreadnought was a wreck of twisted metal - but that little ring of guns protected the railgun. We needed to get very close if we were going to have a shot.

“Kel, the anti-missile guns-” I said.

“I see them.”

My scan was showing a massive energy surge in the gun. They were about to fire.

“Energy spike in the gun,” I said.

“I see that too,” she replied. “Stop back seat driving!”

She whipped the ship over to dodge gunfire that was aimed our way. Some of the rounds went through the Hawk’s wing, but it didn’t slow Kel’s flying. We were going fast. Too fast. The front end of the ship was going to be on us in seconds.

“We’re going too fast!” I said.

“Stop. Talking.” She spat out the words one at a time, dodging more missiles and gunfire. I could barely keep up with the incoming artillery she was avoiding. It was unreal, watching her like this. I’d always known Kel was a hot pilot, but I’d always seen her flying large ships before. The Hawk was tiny, nimble, and was dancing in her hands.

I gritted my teeth together and hung on for dear life.

“I need you to fire the missile,” she said. “Going to be too busy.”

The console display switched to fire and targeting control. I used the HUD to target the railgun barrel. “Ready!” I said.

“When I say. Not before.”

We weren’t slowing down. The front of the ship grew larger. I kept my finger over the fire button, ready to launch the missile the instant she called for it. But she didn’t call for it. We were on a collision course with the ship. The tube was getting bigger and bigger, and suddenly I realized how she planned to get the missile through the ring of anti-missile guns. I sucked in a breath, hoping she could pull this off, knowing that no one had the reflexes to do it.

Then our Hawk darted inside the front end of the railgun.

A
shower
of sparks exploded from the ceiling as a power relay overloaded and burst in spectacular fashion. The Hermes was built to take serious abuse. But she was coming apart under the lethal missile barrage. And another volley was winging its way toward us. The guns weren’t going to stop enough of them, I could see that already. One lucky hit in a bad spot, and the Hermes might be lost. We couldn’t afford that. Mars couldn’t afford for us to fail.

“Stop forward thrust and bring the bow up ninety degrees,” I said. “Belly toward the incoming missiles, quickly!”

The ship rotated in place. Much of the belly armor was gone, but the Hermes had been designed to take a pummeling on that side. We’d be much more likely to survive the inevitable hits. The trade off was that by rotating, we wouldn’t be able to accelerate any more. We could correct our course a little, but the speed we had was all we were going to get. Every moment counted, and I was loath to give up even a second of acceleration. But if I didn’t rotate the ship, she’d be destroyed before we could ram the Dreadnought.

I hoped the speed we had would be enough, that we’d ram the Dreadnought before it could fire. But watching the energy build up, I had the sinking feeling we were going to be too late. They were about to fire. I’d made my last-ditch rush just a little bit too late, and everyone on Mars was about to pay for my mistake.

We fired another blast of missiles with the last launchers we had at our disposal. They streaked in toward the enemy ship, but I saw the trouble now. Perrault’s vessel had a ring of guns protecting the nose. They’d taken out every missile that might have damaged the railgun. His Dreadnought had taken everything we could throw at it, sustained damage I thought would have destroyed any ship and simply kept coming on. The armor on that thing must have been immense. Nothing we could fire at this point was going to be enough.

“Hermes, this is Hawk Leader,” I heard Flynn say over the radio. “I have one shot. Taking it.”

I watched as she turned around and dove back in toward Perrault’s ship. She wove a twisting path between missiles. Her flying was admirable - amazing even - enough that I could appreciate it even though she had me gripping my chair with white knuckles.

Part of me wanted to order her to abort her run. To get the hell out of there. For her and Thomas to save themselves. I’ve the past few days I’d gone from knowing Thomas was dead, to hoping he might be alive, to knowing he was prisoner aboard a ship I had to destroy - and then at last hearing that he was safe, winging free in Flynn’s fighter. The idea that he was going to live helped make my own impending death more palatable.

Now he was back in danger again, and there was nothing I could do to save him. I felt helpless as I tracked the movements of their tiny fighter on my screen. I could still call her back. I could still order them to retreat. But I knew they wouldn’t listen to me even if I did.

I wasn’t going to give that order. I was willing to sacrifice myself for our world. The men and women who’d stayed on the Hermes were all willing to give their lives as well. If I ordered Thomas and Keladry to retreat, it would dishonor what they were trying to do.

Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to hold my tongue. But hold it I did.

Then they were nose to nose with the enemy ship. I felt the smallest blossom of hope that they might just pull it off, and someone get that one missile in where everything else we had done failed. If Flynn could make that one shot count..!

“Shoot,” I whispered. “Shoot and get out of there!”

The energy buildup in the ship reached a crescendo. Perrault was about to fire the gun. The latest missile volley was moments away from hammering into the Hermes.

And their Hawk vanished from my screen.

For a heartbreaking moment I thought they’d been destroyed, taken out by a missile shot. But their transponder still showed they were in one piece. It took only the next moment to realize where they had to have gone - into the gun itself, the only way to bypass that ring of defensive fire. The Dreadnought’s defensive guns must have been set to prioritize incoming missiles over the Hawks. That last volley from the Hermes was aimed right at the railgun, and it must have kept the anti-missile systems there busy enough that they never had a chance to drench the incoming Hawk with their withering fire.

Then the Dreadnought’s return volley struck us. The Hermes bucked as missile after missile slammed into our belly. The engines shut off, powering down automatically to prevent a catastrophic overload. The lights all over the bridge flickered out, the holotank went dead, and all of our instrumentation went out. Emergency lighting let me see dimly across the stricken bridge.

Another missile slammed in somewhere close. I felt the impact in my teeth. As I watched, one wall of the bridge buckled inward, breaking and coming apart. It was right behind Ensign Jacobs, who was still at his station. Still trying his best.

I undid the clasps holding me in place in a flash and dove across the bridge, taking the young man down in a flying tackle. If I could get us both down behind a console in time, it might protect us from the worst of the blast once it breached the bulkhead. Behind me the wall broke apart, showering the room with jagged chunks of metal shrapnel.

There was pain - sharp, intense. A faint wailing in my ears as my suit notified me that its integrity had been breached, and I was leaking the precious fluid that let me breathe. At first I thought that was why I couldn’t get a breath, but the leak seemed to be slow. My helmet was still full of the viscous stuff. My chest and belly felt like they were on fire, though.

I looked down and saw the tip of a red-tinged chunk of metal protruding from my belly, a little below my ribs on the right. How had that gotten there? I had been face down when the wall blew in.

The fire was blossoming in my back as well. I realized the metal had hit me from behind, and spear-like gone right through me.

There was a roaring in my ears. I was losing consciousness. Too much pain, too much shock and stress. I saw Jacobs under me, struggling to get up, to help me up. His eyes fixed on the metal in my belly and got very wide.

Someone was shouting something over the radio, but it sounded like it was coming from very far away. And then I couldn’t hear it at all anymore.

I
couldn’t believe
the Hawk had fit into the narrow space of the railgun barrel. If you’d asked me a minute earlier, I would have said it was impossible. But there we were, rocketing down the half-mile tube at high speed.

“Fire!” Kel said.

That wasn’t as simple as it sounded. I didn’t have a lock anymore. There wasn’t anything to lock on to in the darkness of the tunnel. As soon as we entered the railgun barrel the automated systems couldn’t find any one thing to focus on, and I was reduced to manual controls. All I could do was lay the targeting reticle dead ahead, push the button, and pray that the missile would hit something that would do enough damage. The Hawk bucked a tiny bit as the missile leapt forward, blazing a bright trail down the dark tunnel. The trail of fire ended abruptly somewhere ahead in a brilliant fireball. It had impacted something, but I couldn’t tell what at first.

Kel was flipping the ship end over end. She fired small maneuvering jets that simply turned the ship around, pivoting on a central axis perfectly. The nose of the Hawk scraped against one wall of the barrel, spraying bright flashes of sparks as metal tore hit metal. Alarms rang inside the cockpit - compression loss. We were venting air. Kel had a suit, but that might get very bad for me in a few minutes.

She braked the ship with everything she had, throwing on so much acceleration that my vision went down to the smallest tunnel. I was close to blacking out. But I saw light where the missile had impacted. Bright light. I hadn’t hit the bottom of the gun, hadn’t even come close. But the missile had torn a gaping hold in the side of the barrel.

Then all at once the Hawk’s thrusters overcame our inertia, and we were moving forward again. We shot out the end of the tube doing five gravities of acceleration and still building up speed. I hoped it would be enough.

Behind us the gun fired. Or tried to fire.

The railgun used powerful electromagnets to accelerate chunks of metal outward. It was like a massive, half-mile long shotgun. By the time the pellets reached the end of the barrel, they would be moving at a non-trivial percentage of the speed of light. Load enough ammo into the gun, fire it off at a significant enough fraction of light speed, and… Well, force equals mass times acceleration. Even a grain of sand could be devastating if it was moving fast enough relative to the target.

I’d forgotten more than half of the physics I’d studied in school, but I knew there was a flaw with the design. It required careful shaping of the magnetic field. If the field was off, then those fast moving deadly bits of metal wouldn’t travel in a straight line. They’d curve. They’d twist. And we’d blown a hole in the side of the tube which served as their containment field.

Much later, I got to view a computer generated image of what we thought happened when Perrault fired the railgun. The rounds continued up the chamber until they hit an eddy in the magnetic field caused by the missile damage. Then they changed course. Chaos theory took over, causing some of the objects to slam into each other. They were moving fast enough that those collisions caused the shots to explode. The explosions spread shrapnel and shock waves that further damaged the barrel. Which caused more collisions, launching a chain reaction of destruction. Within the first tenth of a second of firing, rounds from the railgun were soaring out in all directions, smashing through the hull plating, blasting their way out of the ship in every direction. At about a seconds after firing, something hit the ship’s engines and they lost containment.

Sitting in the rear seat of Kel’s Hawk, I had a first hand look at the apocalypse we’d wrought with that one missile. The ship bent, twisting around itself as magnetism ran rampant and unconfined, while hundreds of detonations tore it apart from inside. Then the ship exploded, the force of the nuclear catastrophe as the engines went up annihilating the back end of the ship completely and fragmenting what was left of the front into thousands of shards of spinning metal.

It was over.

“We did it!” Kel shouted.

“You did it,” I said, grinning.

“Oh my god. I don’t believe I just did that.” Her voice held a tremor. “My hands are shaking.”

“I bet,” I said. “I’ve never seen flying like that. Never even heard about flying like that.” Which was true. On Earth people did crazy things like fly under bridges, but flying into a tube, then flipping over and exiting on precisely the same vector you entered? It wasn’t even possible on Earth. Aerodynamics wouldn’t let you do it. This was a stunt for the history books.

“Let’s get you someplace with better atmosphere,” Kel said. The alarms were still ringing, and the air was getting a little thin. She shut off the alarms. “Mars Station, or the Hermes?”

I searched my radar for the Hermes and didn’t find her right away. Then I saw why. She wasn’t under power anymore. She was drifting, and venting air. Perrault’s ship must have dealt her one last blow before it went down.

“Shit,” she said, seeing the same thing I was. “I know you want to be there, but if they’ve lost power there’s no way I can land the fighter.”

I coughed again. The air was getting thinner, and I was about done in. I wanted more than anything to go look for my father. He was over there somewhere, I knew it. He and his people needed help. But it would have to be someone else providing it. My thoughts were getting fuzzy, and now that the intensity of the fight was over I felt nauseous as well. I looked down at my leg and realized I was still bleeding from the gunshot wound earlier. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? Probably because I was too busy trying to not get dead. But I was feeling it now. My vision was getting a little grey.

“Kel, I’m still bleeding,” I managed to say.

“I’m getting you to the station,” she said. “Hang on, Thomas.”