Warworld: The Lidless Eye (21 page)

“Leino, this is Viggen, I read you; thought we’d lost you for a few seconds there. Nice flying.”

“Thanks. What the devil were those things?”

“Looked like supraorbitals. Some kind of fighter. Insignia makes them pirates, by my guess. Not scruffy ones either, like that Black Hand that passed through here a while back. And pirates would make that sort of pass on ships like ours—arrogant bastards. Shock wave took out four of our boys. Sorry, still no pick up on radar.”

The radios squawked with another signal.

“Break, break, break. This is Viggen Four.” It was the Redfielder pilot who had been at high altitude with one of Leino’s men.

“Go ahead, V-Four,” Viggen said. The Redfielder squadron was indeed well trained. Despite the obvious superiority of their opposition, they had all reformed into flying formation and Leino’s boys were right with them. Leino felt a little better. He was airborne among some of the best Haven had to offer.

Not that it had saved four of them when that supersonic sky-train had gone by.

“I have visual on the spooks, bearing two hundred twenty-seven degrees, very far below your position, closing fast. Doesn’t look like they’re making the same speed as before, sir.”

“Leino, I am to defer to you on this mission,” Viggen’s voice came through with a hard edge of desire. “What are your orders, engage or disperse?”

“My orders for my group were specific that Uossi Suomi ships were
not to fire on your aircraft, nor to engage these things, Viggen.”

“You are breaking up, Leino. “Say again,” Viggen’s signal was crystal clear.

“Leino out.”

Good luck, Viggen
, he thought.
I would very much like to have met you.
Leino banked his craft and watched the Redfielders position themselves for the interception courses that would perhaps allow them a firing pass at the spooks.

“Estimated time for recovery of fighters?” First Rank Diettinger asked.

“Seven minutes, sir. Attack run to commence in twenty-seven minutes, by Second Rank’s program,” Weapons stated.

Diettinger noted the tone in his mention of Second Rank, a respected officer, as dynamic as she was competent, and blooded as a Soldier. The bridge crew resented their reassignment. Saurons, they believed, were Soldiers to fight, not livestock to breed.

Diettinger knew they were only half-right. Saurons were warrior stock, bred to fight.

He kept silent, however. Against his will, he realized he missed Second Rank, too.

“Vil, this is Stahler. Do you see what I see?”

The rhetorical question brought a grin from Fighter Rank Vil. The cattle were actually turning to attack them. Bright flashes of light along the cowls of the antique enemy aircraft revealed the firing of their archaic slug-throwers.

Vil held a straight and steady course, compensating for the loss of lift with vertical thrusters, cutting his speed back as much as possible to give the cattle a target they could not miss. The high velocity slugs flattened themselves against the Sauron fighter craft’s skin and canopy, to no effect.

“My turn,” Vil said quietly. He acquired four of the rear aircraft with his weapons radar; for some reason the attackers actually bearing down on him still did not register on his sensors. No matter. Four light missiles lurched away from the underbelly of his craft, soaring up to the rear aircraft in seconds.

Leino saw the missiles. Instinctively, he allowed the one bearing down on him to come as close as he dared before pulling the stick back and dropping into a hammerhead stall. There was a noise like a pickax piercing a steel drum, and Leino actually saw the missile pass through the thin metal of his upper right wing and fly right on through. The fire from its rocket motor melting a hole around the puncture point and setting his sleeve and headgear aflame.

Either the wing hadn’t offered enough resistance to detonate the warhead
, Leino thought in numb disbelief,
or the proximity fuse had failed. Either way, I’m still alive.

The same could not be said for the remainder of his squadron. Clouds of blast-dispersed smoke hung over columns of flaming debris tumbling downward, glittering in the bright, late-morning sun.

Leino slapped out the fire on his arm and headgear before it could spread to the oxygen supply in his mask; if that happened, he knew, he was gone. Not that he held much hope for himself, now. The vibration in the airframe was rattling his teeth and he could barely hold the stick on a steady course.

He looked over the side to see that the pirates were actually hanging in midair. Resting, he supposed, on vertical thrusters, as the Redfielders circled and fired on them, to no apparent effect. One of the spooks began to ease forward, apparently readying to make another pass.

Leino made a decision and thought of his wife and unborn child. He hoped it lived. If so, he hoped it was a boy. Haven was a bad place for a girl without a father.

“I confess I’m beginning to enjoy this, Stahler,” Vil signaled. “One more pass?”

“We have to leave some of them to spread the news of the
Dol Guldur
‘pirates,’ Stahler replied, “recall time coming up, anyway. Leave that biplane alone and take out as many as you can of those triplane stringbags as we leave.” He decided Vil could have all the ‘fun’ he wished. Stahler had little stomach for slaughter. It was inefficient.

“Good enough,” Vil cheerfully agreed. Despite all their training as Sauron Soldiers, there was something of the freebooter in every fighter pilot who ever lived, and Vil was no exception.

But if all fighter pilots are rogues, then all are heroes to some degree as well, and of those Marinus Leino was a prime example.

The Redfielder craft, Leino knew, were even more fragile than his own. If his ship was rattling fit to shake apart, theirs could not survive another close pass by the spooks. It was obvious to him that another such flyby was about to occur.

From above and to one side, he could see the spooks begin their vectors. Leisurely, almost insultingly slow, they were giving him a wide berth, letting him have plenty of room to run home and spread word of the godlike, star-spanning pirates who had come to call.
Look on our works, Haveners, and despair,
Leino thought with a grim smile.

The taste of blood from his face and gums was salty and warm in his mouth. He spat. Perhaps he could send these fellows back home with a message of his own.

“Surprise,” Leino whispered, as he pushed the shuddering stick forward. The biplane quivered, humming like a guitar string, as it nosed into a dive.

Fighter Rank Vil saw the kite above and to his right begin a dive, and promptly dismissed it from his thoughts. Its pilot had obviously decided to take the opportunity to make his run to safety. The recall signal sounded; at the same moment, another tone went off in the cabin—this one strident, warning. Vil’s radar proximity alarm had activated. And at that moment, Fighter Rank Vil’s Sauron reflexes did something they had never done in all his twenty-two standard years: they failed him—shock had numbed them.

Stahler watched incredulously as the cattle’s obsolete kite slammed into Vil’s right front quarter. The fighter craft’s atmospheric intakes were wide open, supercharging air through the engines for the vertical thrusters. Great chunks of the ramming ship were gobbled up by the turbines which proceeded to shred themselves to bits on the invading materials.

Fuel feed lines ruptured, spraying liquid hydrogen into the empty maw of the gutted turbine housing. Most of the fighter’s insides had been spewed out the rear and bottom fans, along with the remnants of the pilot and his plane. The fuel ignited in the superheated environment; in hundredths of a second it spread to the fuel tanks. Fighter Rank Vil and his ship vanished in a colossal blue-white fireball.

Stahler saw the other kites beating away, almost at ground level by now. He was intensely impressed. Vil had been a Sauron and a comrade Soldier, but even human norms deserved praise for such an act. Ignoring his own recall signal, Stahler executed a slow circle, standard tribute among fighter pilots to a downed enemy since man first took his wars to the skies. Then he nosed the fighter up and took her out of the atmosphere.

Diettinger was mildly surprised at losing one of the supraorbital fighters in combat. When he found out how, he too was impressed. Haven evidently bred warriors.
So much the better. We will need such people
.

The moment the docking bay notified him that Stahler’s craft was secured, Diettinger turned to Weapons.

“Weapons, stand by.”

“Acknowledged, First Rank.”

In the immersion display before him, Haven turned, filling the bridge with its blue-green immensity.
The new homeworld
, Diettinger thought. The Breedmasters were optimistic that the planet’s history and its rugged environment would have produced a hardy strain of humanity, many of whom would be acceptable for interbreeding with the Saurons settling there. And, according to Second Rank, they had already bred fine warriors in the past; Haven was the former home of the Seventy-seventh Imperial Marines. A division that had been a thorn in the side of High Command on more than one occasion, especially at Lavaca.

But before the Saurons could settle, Diettinger would have to be sure they would not be discovered. The Race must survive, at all costs. That meant Haven must not ever be found. Not until its new masters were ready. To that end, Weapons had sent one of the shuttles off to the
Alderson points, setting detection mines and missile pods. The next few ships entering the Haven System, during those perilous few seconds of Alderson disruption, would find a fatal welcome.

“Status?”

“Primary communications centers coming into range of beam weapons now, First Rank. Low-orbit EMP satellite warhead armed, ready for detonation.” Weapons turned. “This is the main concentration in the large lowland valley. All electromagnetic transmission observed on our first pass has ceased.”

Diettinger rubbed his good eye.
My last one
, he thought. The old myths spoke of the god Odin, who had traded an eye for wisdom.
I should certainly hope it made him wiser to lose an eye. I know that it had that effect on me.

It occurred to him, suddenly, that in the legends Second Rank had appropriated for their use, the warrior-king Balor’s one great eye had been a weapon. An eye-like storm cloud dominated the surface of the gas giant around which Haven orbited, making Cat’s Eye the distinctive world of Byers’ Star. Now their disguise was that of minions of a great, flaming orb. Diettinger wondered why, with all these eyes in his thoughts, he couldn’t discern the future of his people more clearly. He shook his head.
Too tired, my thoughts are beginning to ramble.

Diettinger had no real doubts about the course that he had set for his people; and certainly no compunctions regarding the effects that course would have on the teetering civilization of the world below them. Still, he had been at war for almost thirty years. The thought of it all ending with a final, eternal run-to-ground depressed him. He shook his head, sighing at the realization of his own fatigue.
There are few things sadder
, he decided,
than a Soldier with no more worlds to conquer
.

“Begin.”

Vessel First Rank Galen Diettinger gave the order that ended the world.

The first visible action was the detonation of the enhanced EMP devices in Haven’s upper atmosphere. Even as squabbling city-states on the surface finally began negotiating on how best to deal with the “pirates,” their communications ended in mid-word. Weapons’ timing and deployment were flawless.

The
Fomoria
—now the
Dol Guldur
—was large and low enough to cast her shadow on the clouds, lands and seas of Haven as she passed overhead. As that shadow passed, it left a swath of destruction in its wake beyond the experience of any living Haveners.

The orbital surveillance monitoring station where Delancey and Alec waited for the end went up in a massive nuclear fireball. The University of Haven communication center had been quiet since the Castell City nuclear strike. Both had been on the priority targets lists.

At the Uossi Suomi airfield where Flynn was listening to hysterical radio reports before the EMP, no nuclear weapons were employed. Here the
Dol Guldur’s
beams sufficed. The hangars were neatly, almost comically, sliced into collapsing segments, their dusty, oil-soaked interiors quickly catching fire, consuming themselves.

Men ran to and fro, no real sense of direction in their movement, only a frantic, desperate need to put distance between themselves and the scene of destruction. But the destruction was all around them, and running from one ignited hangar only brought them face-to-face with another.

Flynn, alone, retained some measure of calm as he trotted into the field office and spun the big telescope there over to the skylight. The day had been one of Haven’s razor-edged, clear-skied beauties, visibility
unlimited. Flynn was sure he could get at least a glimpse of the attackers’ ships.