Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (25 page)

“Sir,” his TAO broke in on the terrible spectacle, “We’ve got another destroyer to starboard and light cruiser coming up in support.”

Captain Coward glanced over at the bridge TAC console and saw that it was so. “Very good, Mr. Porter. Lock forward tubes on that cruiser—fire as soon as you have a solution. Tickle up that nosy tin can with a missile barrage, please. If she doesn’t take the hint, lay alongside with guns. We gotta discourage this sorta thing.”

*     *     *

As the shuttle pilots and gunners ran through their prelaunch checks, and the embarked sections finished securing themselves, calling off by the numbers with Anders acknowledging, Captain McKenzie broke in on Min’s privileged command link.

“Min, are you seeing this?”

“Yep.” Lewis had also gotten the new TACREP and she popped up the schematic on her xel. Wallace was heavily engaged on the far left and hammering them in fine style but Adenauer was shifting a destroyer squadron and two heavy cruisers down towards the monitor anyway . . .

Goddammit
.

She recomputed the trajectories and engagement envelopes. Glowing time ticks distributed themselves across the plot even as Kell put the implications into words. “When you get there, you’ll have half an hour before those ships close. Call it twenty minutes, if you're gonna get clear. Min, do you wanna rethink this?”

“No, I don’t wanna fuckin’ rethink this”—grinding the words between her teeth. Half an hour might do. Twenty minutes—not so much.

“Lemme at least call Belvoir. Maybe she can throw a scare into ‘em. Buy you—”

“Kell—”

“Wait one. New data . . .” Kell’s voice, still urgent, now had a different undertone. It sounded like . . . excitement? “Min, DESRON 6 broke through on the far left—
Shannon
and
Vanguard
following with DESRON 5. They’ve doubled up ‘em up!”

Two destroyer squadrons and a couple of cruisers
inside
the Halith position?
That might collapse Adenauer’s whole position on that flank—

“Wallace has committed
Sambre
and
Falklands
—DESRON 8 engaging—
God damn
, how they’re laying it into them! Adenauer’s detached
Jena
and
VanScheer
. I think we—Oh my
God
!”

Silence. Min loaded the new data and waited for her display to refresh.

When it did, she saw the pulsing red icon at the center of Adenauer’s right-flank division; heard Kell’s awed voice, not much above a whisper: “
Orlan’s
blown up.” Adenauer’s most powerful ship after
Marshall Nedelin
—two thousand people suddenly turned into charred meat and light.

“Okay, Kell—” Min sucked back the breath that had just left her in a rush. With
Orlan
gone and his flank crumbling, Adenauer would have to divert those ships or Wallace could cut them off and kill them. “That’s our prompt to get this party started. Let’s go make this baby our bitch.”

McKenzie nodded. “Very good, Captain. Boost in one.” Then Kell gave her a private look, still pale. “But I have to say, Min, if this isn’t the goddamndest most harebrained op I’ve ever heard of, it’s close. Even for you.”

“Don’t worry about it, Kell.” Min smiled fondly at the other woman. “Just do what you can for ten minutes. Once we blow their hatches, it’ll be all over but the shouting.”

“You got it, sister. Good hunting. And don’t forget there’s a massage you still owe me.”

“I won’t. See you on the other side, Kell—if not on this one.”

Wave after wave of Halith fighters streamed in. Time after time, the outnumbered pilots of TF 34 rose to meet them. Watching the relentless struggle from
Trafalgar’s
CIC, his gut churning, Huron clenched his jaw every time a light winked off the Boards—another companion lost—and found himself breathing hard after each Dom sortie was repulsed. They were doing themselves proud, racking up an exchange ratio of five to one or better, but they were doing it at prohibitive cost.
His
people, his friends, going down in flames out there while he stood
here
, taking up space, using up oxygen, contributing
nothing
.

They’d been at it for two hours now, without a pause. Losses were at twenty percent and mounting. The Dom task force was creeping in, slowly but inexorably, and sooner or later, they’d figure out how little actually stood in their way. Huron figured it would be sooner. Once losses climbed to between twenty-five and thirty percent, they wouldn’t be able to cover all the sectors adequately and the exchange ratio would start to shift in the Doms’ favor. At around thirty percent casualties, their sortie rate would drop, and if it got much worse than that, the entire situation would start to collapse.

The way things were going, Huron calculated that point was not above an hour away. Shariati’s battlecruiser squadron, lurking off their flank like a pack of wolves, might tear the Doms up some but they’d never stop them, and once the Doms discovered the ‘tanker fleet’ they were after was a phantasm, Outbound would be wide open.

He checked the Boards again.
Concordia’s
wing was fully engaged.
Trafalgar’s
hanger was empty except for half a dozen birds, including his, and N’Komo’s squadron, which had just landed and was being hastily rearmed and refueled—all nine of them. Ensign Dance was flying with them now, and even Lieutenant Tole was out there, despite not having been officially requalified.

Glancing around CIC, he observed the highly ordered, frenetic activity. Harmon was in deep with her team of fighter directors, managing the battle like she was conducting an orchestra. N’Komo was reporting the ready status on his surviving birds. The commodore was currently on the bridge—and enough was fucking enough. He unfurled his xel and tapped up his crew chief, WO Moreno.

“Angel,” he said when Moreno’s sweating face appeared, his voice low but savagely clear, “get my bird hot and on the line in five minutes.”

“But, sir,” Moreno protested, mopping the side of his sturdy neck, “I was told—”

“
Do it
.” Huron snapped his xel shut and, without another word, strode from the compartment.

Leaving his squadron’s ready room, Huron was half way to the flight deck when the fighter boss paged him. He answered with a frown but kept his tone just on the right side of gross insubordination.

“Not you, Huron,” Commander Harmon told him with a scowl. “The commodore wants you in CIC.”

Swearing inwardly, Huron acknowledged, turned and made his way back to the ready room to get out of his flight gear and back into uniform. As he entered, he found Kris putting on her flight suit with painful deliberation.

“What are you up to?” he asked, unsealing his gloves.

“They just called all pilots,” Kris replied tersely, wincing as she fought on a boot. At that moment, the address system blared out another fleet-wide call for all remaining flight officers to man their fighters, repeated once and punctuated with a short pause followed by: IMMEDIATELY.

“See what I mean?” she said with a hint of a smile.

“I do,” Huron said, and resealed the glove he’d been about to take off.

*     *     *

Huron and Kris boosted clear of
Trafalgar
, Huron’s fighter shy almost quarter of its nominal fuel load. He’d ordered Marino to cut it short when he walked up—he wasn’t about to take the chance Harmon (or worse, Shariati) would notice what he was up to and stop him with a direct order.

Easing back to eighty-percent thrust, he activated his sensors and scanned the battlespace. The action was all down and to their right. Even now, N’Komo’s skeleton squadron, which had launched just ahead of them, was arcing over to join in. The Doms had been hammering away on that axis for an hour now. Huron didn’t like it. They were bunching up in a narrow zone, where TF 34 could more effectively concentrate its defense. If you wanted to sucker punch someone, that would be exactly what you’d do: hit repeatedly on the same place until you trained the response into your opponent. Harmon might have thought of that, but what options did she have? If they let up to go look around for more trouble, the Doms wouldn’t
need
to land a sucker punch—their knockout blow was right there.

God damn it
. He throttled back to two-thirds.

Kris pinged him on the burst link. “What’s up, sir? The hotspot’s over there.”

“I think maybe we have some claim-jumpers lurking out here, Kris. Cool it down and swing out wide left. I’d guess ‘em to be dead ahead, but maybe I’m just getting paranoid. Go take a look.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Veering off to the right to give them the best aspect possible, he started to tune his ESM suite. All it showed was dark and quiet.

Maybe a little
too
dark and quiet?

“Sir?” Kris’s voice came over the burst link, making him grin. She was always polite at the start of a mission. Pretty soon it’d be just “Huron” and when things got really hot, she tended to slip into less complimentary forms of address.

“Whatcha got, Ensign?”—playing along.

“Train over to two-six-nine. Use convolve kilo-five. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

He did. He grin broadened. “They have a flock of drones running phase-conjugate cancelers. My-my-my.” Those drones would also screen
them
from whoever they were shielding—as long as he and Kris were careful. It took him less than a minute to work out an approach. He keyed up Kris.

“What’dya say, Ensign? Shall we go peek under their skirts?”

Kris, looking over the approach he’d linked to her, laughed. “You gotta dirty mind, sir.”

“It’s a gift. Close up and let’s go have some fun.”

Eight minutes later, they were coasting above the enemy formation and Kris pinged him again.

“Huron, is this your idea of
fun
?”

“What?”—his tone cheerfully innocent.

“I count about forty of the fuckers down there.”

“More like fifty-odd, I think.”

“Oh great. You
did
notice it’s just us out here, right?”

“No one else to get in our way then.”

Kris muttered something he couldn’t make out over the link (maybe a good thing, he reflected).

“C’mon, Kris. I thought you were hungry.”

“Starving. Just wanna make sure you weren’t completely AWOL here.”

“Alright then.” He set his T-Synth to designate a flight that was trailing the main formation. “See those three guys at the back? Shitty formation discipline. Let’s show ‘em the error of their ways. Then we can go raid the buffet.”

“Roger that!” He could actually hear the grin in her voice. Bunched as tight as they were behind their covering drones, the Doms had almost no shot at seeing two lone fighters coming up in their drive cones.

“First kill leads? Guns only.”

“You’re on!”

They broke hard right, stooping as one on the unsuspecting targets. Flattening out behind them, their cannon opened up at short range, and two Doms disappeared in smears of light—Kris’s first by the shadow of a hair. The third flared into a ball of plasma moments later—no telling who got him.

“Hey, no fair!” Kris snickered. “You lemme win that!”

He loved to hear her happy. “Never look a gift horse in the mouth, Kris. Check that flight at 4 o’clock low—wanna tag-team those guys?”

“Absolutely!”

“Okay—you got the lead. Wing over left, take angels minus ten, select zone five, and let’s send ‘em to the Promised Land.”

“
Ohhh yeah
!”—a paean of joy.

With a gratified smile, he followed her down.

Tag-teaming was a stalking technique that obviated the need to achieve burn-through against a target’s shields. What made this possible was a phenomenon called shield flutter: a momentary dropout as the shields dumped the energy of a missile strike or gun burst. Neutron guns produced the most flutter, but their rate of fire was too slow to exploit it. However, a second fighter, following behind on an exact trajectory and firing weaker but longer-ranged plasma cannon in precisely timed bursts, could. Since the lead fighter also masked his partner, the victim, thinking himself under attack by a single fighter and perhaps overconfident his shields, rarely knew what hit him.

It required an extraordinary degree of coordination—informed opinion held it to be the most difficult evolution two fighters could pull off—but when done right, it was as if the target had no shields at all. Huron had pioneered the technique in the last war with Geoff N’Komo (Jantony Banner and Pavel Heink had copied it once it became known), and as good as Geoff was, Kris was even better. Success depended one how quickly the two pilots were able to sync up: only rarely would they get more than four bursts before the target broke. Huron and N’Komo could sync reliably by the third burst, Banner and Heink did roughly as well, but Huron and Kris routinely synced on the second, and sometimes on the first. It was chiefly this technique that had elevated Kris into the upper reaches of the active kills list in just a few short months.

Now, these six potential victims, still coasting along unconcerned in two three-fighter vics, promised to raise her score even higher. Kris lined up on the trailer of the second vic, and Huron slid in behind her. The trick to syncing up was, perhaps ironically, music: a piece they both knew well. The leader picked it, and Kris selected one of her favorites, an old guitar-laden, acousto-optic power ballad, and cranked up the volume. The music blasting over his helmet set, Huron watched the lock indicator on his T-Synth, slaved to Kris’s through their CEC link, and tensed his finger on the trigger. It pipped, he waited two fast beats, squeezed gently and they were back in business.

Two minutes, fifty-one seconds later, Kris and Huron burst through a cloud of glowing debris and burned hard for the swarm of fighters up ahead. By now, the Doms had noticed that seven of their number had just been wiped out of the universe in what must have seemed to them an eye blink, and they were starting to react. But they were rattled, as yet uncomprehending of what had just happened to them, and their response was ragged. Streaming in to attack, they bunched up, masking each other’s fields of fire and generally stepping on their own toes.

Last mistake you lil fuckers‘ll ever make
, Kris thought as she closed on Huron’s wing and they scissored in together. They’d broken out of the tag-team for this phase, and she was taking a moment to find something else to listen to. In the lull, she could hear him humming over the burst link—a tune she thought she recognized. Then she caught a few words: “I looked over Jordan and what did I see . . .”