Bolo Brigade (13 page)

Externally, the courier
Black Flash
was a space-black pencil with broad, down-canted delta wings, a sneakship designed to penetrate enemy-patrolled space without being detected. While not invisible to radar or infrared scans, the ship had been crafted with stealth in mind. On radar, the Lightning appeared no more than a meter or two across, a chunk of nondescript space debris. Heat from its fusion power plant was cycled through wing-array dissipaters that minimized the IR track. In an emergency, heat could be stored, then channeled through the laser weaponry for dispersal. The Lightning's chief claim to fame was in her speed and maneuverability. The cranky, high-powered little ships served throughout the Concordiat and beyond as express carriers for packages or non-electronic mail, and as military scouts.

"Twenty seconds to normal space," Commander Ross said. She sighed, extended her long, slender arms above her head, and stretched.

"And then you can be rid of me," Donal said with a tight grin.

"I won't say it's been fun, Lieutenant," she replied. She wrinkled her nose. "The air purifiers in this bucket really aren't up to handling the stink of
two
people, you know." A sharp warbling sounded from the swing-pivot console in front of her chair. "Ah! Here we go!"

Outside, the glowing murk of transpace exploded into myriad, rainbow-hued streaks, each of which steadied almost at once into more familiar objects: a scattering of stars, isolated and cold; a local sun, glowing warm orange off to the right; a pair of largish moons showing three-quarters-phases to the left; and, dead ahead, the gorgeous, half-phase glory of blue and white and green that was the earthlike world of Wide Sky. A viewscreen mounted between the two bridge seats was set to display a view aft and was filled with the teeming suns of the Cluster. It was a silent reminder that they were now well beyond the warmer, friendlier skies of the Strathan Cluster's heart.

Another warning chirped from the console.

"What's that?" Donal asked.

"Proximity alert," Ross replied. "We've got ships . . . big suckers, and lots of 'em."

"Uh, oh." He'd been afraid of this. Wide Sky's space arm was limited to a handful of aging patrol cutters, a couple of light frigates, and eight or ten corvettes assigned customs duties. And freighters and free traders weren't so common in the Cluster that they ever showed up in fleets. "You got a visual?"

"Coming up."

The view aft winked off and was replaced a moment later by a long-range optical scan of a ship, an unknown ship, all curves and bulges, spike antennae and deadly looking weapons turrets. Most of the ship was rust-brown, though traces of an old and sand-blasted paint scheme were still visible—what might have been a black-and-yellow tiger-stripe pattern. A sense of the scale of the thing was evident when a tiny fighter or ship's boat passed in front of the behemoth; the scale sharpened when Donal took a closer look and realized that the second vessel was a corvette or a small escort of some kind, a warship far larger than any fighter. The big vessel was at least a kilometer long, easily a match for the largest battleship in the Concordiat Space Arm.

"I've got sixty-four ships of various masses on my scope," Ross told him. "Eight are monsters like that one out there . . . seven huge ships and one even huger . . . a
big
mama. Twenty-four are big, but low power readings. I think they must be transports of some kind. The rest are probably warships."

"Interesting," Donal said. "I wonder if the fact that those numbers are all factors of eight means anything?"

"Like a base-eight numerical system? Maybe. So what?"

He shrugged. "Anything we can learn about these people . . ."

"Well, I think we're about to learn how they receive unexpected guests," she told him. "I've got bogies vectoring for an intercept. Hang on!"

With the inertial dampers full on, there was no sensation of movement, but the view through the forward bridge window spun wildly as Ross applied full thrust.

Long minutes passed, with no further change in the view ahead save the gradually accelerating growth of Wide Sky as the Lightning plunged across the dwindling kilometers. Commander Ross kept her eyes on her instruments, especially on a small, three-D radar display that showed the relative positions of
Black Flash
and the pursuing vessels. As the blips slowly shifted on the small display, Donal could see what Ross was doing—accelerating hard along one vector until the other ships had started moving to block her, then kicking in a brutal side thrust, jamming the courier into a new vector that took advantage of the displacement of the blockading forces,

Even the courier's damping fields couldn't entirely block the effects of that savage thrust. Donal was slammed against the side of his couch, and his vision blurred. Something like a giant hand clamped down over his head and shoulders, squeezing until he couldn't breathe, until his heart thumped with a laboring beat in his ears and his vision was tinted red. A groan sounded from somewhere aft, a groan that shifted gradually to a shriek of tortured hull braces and plates, and it seemed as though no ship ever made could tolerate such stress.

Then they were through a gap in the enemy defenses five thousand kilometers wide, and Wide Sky was flattening out ahead of them into a blue, cloud-swathed curve of sunlit horizon beneath a jet-black sky.

"I'm surprised they didn't fire at us," Donal said, finding his voice at last.

"They did. We have sixteen missiles tracking us right now, and from the rads they're emitting, my guess is that they're nukes."

"Can you lose them?"

"We'll never know it if I can't."

Something struck the
Black Flash
, a savage blow from beneath that rattled Donal's bones and would have thrown him out of his seat had he not been strapped down. At first he thought they'd been hit, but he saw the truth a second later, as Kathy Ross gripped the flight controls with both hands, fighting to bring the little ship's nose higher.

They'd just hit atmosphere.

Even from the edge of space, the signs of wide-scale, planet-devastating warfare were painfully, starkly clear. Over the world's night side, where oceans gleamed beneath the Strathan Cluster's pale glow, Donal could see the sullen, throbbing orange smears of enormous fires, partly masked by palls of ebon blackness, the glare of burning cities showing through the smoke and ash clouds as if through dirty cotton. On the day side, the cities were invisible, but the clouds over certain locations had an ugly, charcoal cast to them, vast plumes of black spreading downwind from the funeral pyres of a space-faring civilization.

He found Galloway, Wide Sky's capital . . . or what, at any rate, had once been the capital. From the records he'd studied on the way out from Muir, the place scarcely rated the name "city." None of the population centers on Wide Sky had been larger than eighty or ninety thousand people, and most were small clusters of a few homesteads . . . villages, in fact, in distinctly rural settings. As far as he could tell, all of the larger population centers were gone now, smashed to rubble and the wreckage set aflame.

Using the
Black Flash
's long-range optics, Donal zeroed in on what was left of Galloway, riding the planet's terminator on the line between night and dawn. Parts of the city were still burning, and strange machines were laboring in the ruins. It was difficult to see from orbit precisely what was happening, but advanced computer enhancement yielded scenes, viewed from overhead, of a variety of long-legged labor or combat machines demolishing the wrecked shells of buildings, stacking up huge piles of pipe, wiring, steel beams, and junked vehicles, and loading the debris onto transports.

There were hundreds of those last, space-going barges, actually, equipped with contragrav to let them settle slowly, with clumsy yawings and driftings, all the way down through the atmosphere to the ground to receive their loads of scrap metal.

Scrap metal? The invaders, whoever they were, seemed to be frantically ferreting out and grabbing the stuff, in any shape or form. Whole buildings were being demolished; wiring, especially, seemed highly prized, for Donal could see vast coils of copper wiring stacked adjacent to the barge landing sites.

"We need to call in the Concordiat Space Arm," Donal said, more to himself than to his companion. The Strathan Cluster Confederation had a defense treaty with the Concordiat still; besides, Terra would be extremely interested in a high-tech intruder on a human-occupied world, even this far out in the great beyond. "Trouble is, how long will it take for them to get here?"

"I'll tell you one thing, Lieutenant," Commander Ross said, snapping off a row of switches above her head. "It'll take thirty years if we have to rely on standard radio to let 'em know what the story is back on Muir."

"What do you mean?"

"SWIFT's out. Dead. No carrier. I think these guys have a way of jamming it, somehow."

So. No faster-than-light communication with Muir . . . or with the Concordiat, at least not until he could get back to Muir in person, or they could find a way to get clear of the enemy jamming effect.

"Terrific. Can we talk to anybody on Wide Sky?"

"Radio doesn't seem affected. Question is, will you end up getting through to the colonists, what's left of 'em? Or to . . . those
things
?"

Her classification of the intruders wasn't fair, obviously, since they hadn't yet seen one of them. Still, the eldritch cant and form and posture of those work machines down there spoke of an alien twist of mind, something quite outside what humans might find comfortable . . . or comprehensible. Worse was the realization that the invaders had smashed and stripped a world that was both peaceful and nonmilitary. Their army had been small, their space navy smaller. The invaders didn't seem to care about that, didn't care about anything except razing the works of man and looting them of metal.

Donal could understand her disgust.

The ship lurched violently to the side. "Sorry," Ross said. "I'm trying to throw those missiles off the scent. They're still closing."

Involuntarily, Donal glanced back over his shoulder, but there was nothing to be seen there but the doorway leading to the fresher. He felt a sudden, sharp need to urinate, but suppressed it.
Not exactly a dignified way to die
, he thought wryly.
Taken out by a nuke while you're taking a—

The sky outside the cockpit lit up, a savage, sun-brilliant flash of white light. "Don't look!" Ross yelled, her own eyes squeezed tight shut, her head turned away even as the polarizer filters in the bridge windows tried to go black against that intolerable glare. The light faded, and Donal blinked against the fuzzy circles of purple hovering in his field of vision.

"Close one," Donal observed. "For a minute, there, I thought—"

The shock wave struck in mid-sentence, a sickening, hull-rattling shudder that nearly flipped the courier end for end. Somehow, though, Commander Ross kept the craft flying and more or less under control.

"You were saying?"

"Never mind. As long as we're still more or less in one piece." He reached for the radio mike, switching to a military frequency. "Wide Sky, Wide Sky, anyone on Wide Sky, this is the Confederation Space Service Courier
Black Flash
on entry approach from low orbit. Does anybody copy? Over."

He was answered by a faint hiss of static—a hiss that swelled to a deafening howl twice when nuclear warheads detonated in quick succession a few tens of kilometers astern. He repeated the call . . . and again . . . and yet again. Finally, he was rewarded with a faint voice, barely heard through the background hiss.

"—
Flash
, this is Wide Sky.
Black Flash
, this is Wide Sky. We have you on our radar, coming in over our south-central continent in the eastern hemisphere, altitude about one hundred twenty klicks."

Donal glanced at Ross, who nodded curtly. "That's us."

"Wide Sky, we confirm. It looks like the port at Galloway's been plastered. Where do you want us to set down? Over."

"
Black Flash
, there aren't many places left. Most of us who could move, including what's left of our ground forces, have fallen back to Scarba. That's in the western part of the South Sea, about nine thousand kilometers from your present position, on a great circle heading of one-zero-niner."

The Lightning canted suddenly to the right, nose dipping, wings struggling with the thickening air. Donal could see a bit of ionization building up outside, like a faint, pink glow spreading back from nose and wingtips. The static on the radio became sharper.

"I've got them plotted," Ross said. "We're on course. Eighteen minutes."

"Wide Sky, this is
Black Flash
. We're locked in and coming down. ETA eighteen minutes."

Another nuke detonated, washing out the radio spectrum with white noise. By the time it cleared, the ionization of re-entry was so thick that no message would be able to punch through for another ten or twelve minutes at least.

"Can we make it without taking one of those firecrackers up our tail jets?" he asked her.

"Like I say, Lieutenant. You never feel the one that—"

Another detonation lit the sky, the shock wave close behind the light that heralded its approach. The courier fluttered like a leaf, rolling wing over wing as it plummeted through shrieking air, a white plume of vapor boiling out of the shocked atmosphere as it passed.

Long and heart-pounding minutes later, Ross pulled them out of the roll. "I think we're clear," she said. "I don't see any more missiles. They all missed, detonated short, or went wild. And it doesn't look like the bad guys are inclined to follow us, either."

"That's good. I am wondering, though, how the heck we're supposed to get off this rock."

"One crisis at a time, Lieutenant. One crisis at a time. Right now I'm busy praying that this bucket holds together long enough to deliver us both to something like solid ground without smearing us all over the horizon . . . and I suggest that you do the same."

The next few minutes seemed like an eternity, but at last the Lightning punched through the ionization cloud, soaring through thin, cold air at an altitude of fifty thousand meters. Clouds, cobalt-blue ocean, and scattered land forms of green and brown swept silently beneath the delta-craft's keel. A coastline swept toward them out of the east, snow-capped mountains wrinkling up from green-ocher veldts and the darker masses of tropical forest. A world,
any
world, was such an enormous place, varied in terrain, in landscape features, in special beauties and dangers unique to itself.