STARDANCER Read online

  T'Mar yelled acknowledgment and waved, then set about packing people tightly into each flitter. L'Sil finished starting flitters and came back to help. As soon as everybody was aboard, L'Tan stepped over to start a non-convoy flitter and aimed it at the doors, then jumped aboard the command flitter with T'Mar and L'Sil.

  L'Tan pointed at the lone flitter and yelled, "Everybody! We'll follow that flit out of here and head to the docks to board the Alliance. We should be in the air less than five minutes."

  L'Tan stabbed the remote activation pad and the lone flitter headed past them for the blast doors under full power. She counted to two, then stabbed the pad again. Children and some of the adults screamed as the entire convoy launched forward and gathered speed as it streamed toward the tiny-seeming blast doors.

  The first flitter slammed into the doors like a huge fist, jettisoning its engine module on impact and crumpling into a wad of metal as it shoved the the left door completely out of its track and twisted the right door backward in a severe lean toward the outside.

  The right door might have continued to lean if it had been blown inward, but there was nothing to brace it, and it fell flat only a split second before the lead flitter of the convoy passed over it.

  Surprisingly, there was only sporadic fire from the ground as the convoy arched upward at half the speed of sound. L'Tan had expected much worse, and had expected to see other flitters above the Consulate to prevent flying escapes.

  There were only three such flitters, and they were caught completely off-guard, losing valuable seconds as they maneuvered to chase the convoy.

  L'Tan grinned at T'Mar and L'Sil.

  "They thought they had the place bottled up and might have to chase down a couple of stragglers. Those are civilian flitters. They can't catch us, but knock 'em down anyway."

  As L'Sil and T'Mar picked off the pilots of the Eiranian flitters, L'Tan tapped on her pad and one flitter from each end of the convoy unlinked to take up positions perhaps a mile to each side of the convoy.

  T'Mar said, "The Alliance is probably under attack, too. What's she going to think of our convoy? We can't call them, L'Tan."

  L'Tan picked up her rifle and set it to lowest power and widest dispersal.

  "I can flash a distress code at them with this. Their Tactical people will see it on their boards. Have I missed anything?"

  T'Mar shook his head. L'Sil said, "I hope not."

  As they approached the half-mile wide ball that was the Alliance, they could see that she was, indeed, under attack. L'Tan set the convoy to circle at a distance and began flashing code with her rifle. After two orbits, she set the rifle down.

  "They want to take the Alliance in one piece, but I think they're getting worried," she said, pointing at the flit's screen. "Three more flitters are inbound at thirty miles. Two armored vehicles are approaching from the city. Watch this."

  She detailed one the side-following flitters to strike the armored vehicles. As it descended in a rather flat trajectory, it took a punishing amount of fire from below, but since its trajectory had already been set and its engines turned off, the armored vehicles might as well have been shooting at a huge falling rock.

  The flitter - hampered not at all by ground fire - impacted on the lead armored vehicle at nearly twice the speed of sound. One gigantic blast and then a smaller one from the second armored vehicle obliterated the immediate area and deeply cratered the road to the docks.

  Chapter Three

  L'Tan seemed to come to a decision as she gazed at the sensor screen.

  "You two get everybody aboard the Alliance. I'll try to squash some of this ground fire, then see about the incoming flitters. I don't think they'll come into range of the Alliance's guns, but it's hard to be sure with religious crazies. As soon as all of our flitters are empty, send them up to me."

  She brought the remaining side-following flitter to within a few inches of their convoy flitter, slowed all the flitters considerably, and fought the slipstream as she carefully stepped across the small gap.

  Tapping her pad, L'Tan took control of the lead and tail empty flitters and made them form up on hers, then turned control of the convoy over to L'Sil. With a wave, she aimed her four flitters at the scene below.

  Two men entrenched with a heavy E-rifle behind some machinery looked up in time to see their doom approaching. L'Tan let the other flitters fly over the building as she took her own into the narrow chasm between the building and the machinery without slowing down in the least.

  The two men tried to bring their gun around to aim at her, but it was far too late for that. The nose and fuselage of L'Tan's flitter literally flattened the two revolutionaries against the machinery and the ground. The broad trail of sparks that had followed her through the narrow passage was only briefly interrupted.

  "She's crazy!" said L'Sil. "It's a wonder she has any flitter left. Why the hell didn't she use one of the empty ones for that maneuver?"

  T'Mar quietly said, "She needed the personal touch. They've really pissed her off this morning."

  L'Sil looked at him oddly, then turned to watch L'Tan.

  T'Mar said nothing else as he watched L'Tan climb out of her attack.

  L'Tan banked to aim at another pair of attackers, but they'd seen what had happened to her first targets. When the nose of her flitter came at them, they dropped their weapons and fled.

  Using the other flitters as cover around her, L'Tan stopped long enough to hop down and grab their rifles, then nosed back into the sky. She quickly programmed one flitter to remain between her and the incoming flitters and the other two to stay between her and the ground forces, then began picking off the attackers by leaning out and firing down at them between the flitters below her.

  Many of the attackers tried to knock her out of the sky, but many fled, as well. L'Tan kept firing until one rifle was exhausted, then she threw it at a pair of the men below. One of the men had the misfortune to be where the rifle landed.

  As L'Tan held most of the attackers' attention, L'Sil guided the convoy in close to the Alliance and ordered everyone into the big ship as several lower ports opened for them. Using the flitters as cover, they raced toward the open portals.

  T'Mar stayed aboard the command flitter and fired back until nothing happened when he tapped the trigger button. He quickly threw the rifle away and picked up L'Sil's rifle, risking a glance at her progress toward the ship.

  Four of the adults had been hit, as well as several of the children. However good a plan, there were just too many people running for the ship, and some were bound to fall prey to the beams lancing toward them from the docks.

  L'Sil scrambled among the runners to see if any of the wounded were still alive. Only one child still lived; a boy had been hit in the leg. She grabbed his arm and hoisted him up to keep him moving toward the ship, but the boy soon collapsed.

  T'Mar fired a few more times at a couple of carelessly exposed targets, set the flitters for a ten-second delay before lifting, then jumped off and ran to help L'Sil haul the boy to the Alliance. He grabbed the boy's other arm as he passed them and the two of them literally dragged the small boy aboard the ship at a dead run.

  T'Mar didn't know the rank of the man who met them in the bay, but the man turned to a wall intercom and calmly said, "The children are aboard. Close all ports. All batteries open fire. Clean the area. Repeat: Clean the area."

  The lighter guns of the Alliance had only been fighting a holding action in order to allow time for Consulate personnel to find a way to safety. The daylight outside the viewports suddenly became about ten times brighter as the great ship's big batteries opened up at the dock and surrounding hostiles at point-blank range.

  The guns fired for only a few moments, then were still. T'Mar watched the vid screen on the wall clear and refocus itself. For thousands of paces around the ship, T'Mar saw nothing taller than a few inches. Concrete and steel structures were gone, and what hadn't vaporized had melted and run like hot wax.

>   A huge chunk of the sea wall that had sheltered revolutionaries from Alliance's smaller weapons' fire was missing altogether, along with the revolutionaries that had been hunkered behind it. A thousand feet or so of the raised-platform docking station had disappeared in all directions in the holocaust.

  There was hardly any debris; energy weapons tend to leave little behind. The officer patted the bulkhead and softly said, "Thank you, ma'am," then he walked over to L'Sil.

  "Any more flitters coming in, Captain? Is the flitter pilot coming back down here or is he thinking of saving us all by himself?"

  L'Sil said, "The pilot is Lady L'Tan. She's in one of the flitters that flew our defense and she told us to send the flitters up to her when they were empty. I don't know what she's doing now."

  The guy's eyes widened momentarily, then he rushed to the intercom and said, "Captain! I think Stardancer is in one of the flitters upstairs!"

  "Stardancer? But she's... Are you sure?!"

  "Sure enough, sir. The name's right. Communications are still jammed. We can't tell her to get back down here."

  "Damn. Secure the bay and get back to the bridge."

  "But, sir..."

  "Move it! Tac says there's a shielded nuke on the way. We're clearing port now."

  T'Mar saw the ground move away and realized that 'clearing port' meant to lift off. A shielded nuke? That meant that the energy weapons of the Alliance wouldn't be able to touch it until it was too damned close.

  L'Sil ran to catch the officer and grabbed his shirt as she screamed at him.

  "You can't leave her out there!"

  The officer said, "I can't do anything about it, either. Let go of me, Captain."

  An amplified voice filled the hall and the docking bay.

  "All hands, brace for impact in two minutes, forty seconds."

  The officer said, "Get your people flat on the deck and find something to hang onto. I have to go now."

  He ungently disconnected her hands from his shirt and stepped into one of the lifts, then was gone. L'Sil ran back to the horde of children in the bay.

  "Down! Flat! Everybody down now!"

  L'Tan saw the incoming object on her flitter's screen and realized what it had to be. The flitters above were maintaining their distance from the Alliance; if they'd had any ideas about closing in, they'd have lost them instantly when the big guns wiped the oceanfront clean for nearly a mile in all directions.

  L'Tan brought up the nav computer screen and tapped out a request for coordinates for interceptions according to data available, which was still sketchy at best.

  After programming her flitters and sending them on their way, she headed in exactly the opposite direction at maximum speed. There would be a nuclear explosion, whether one of her flitters blew the nuke or the nuke hit the Alliance. She didn't truly expect to outrun the blast, but it seemed worth a try.

  On the bridge of the Alliance, Captain T'Var said, "Tac, send our heaviest probe at the missile. Set it to self-destruct one mile from target."

  "Yes, sir. It may not be enough to breach the shield, sir."

  "I know. Will you have time to load and launch a second probe?"

  "No, sir. I'll barely have time to get this one out there."

  A moment later, the Tac commander said, "Captain, Stardancer just sent a dozen flitters at the nuke and turned tail. She and the others are going better than Mach 4 in both directions."

  "Thank you, Commander. She's one step ahead of us."

  "Probe launched, Captain."

  The Captain turned to his helm officer and said, "Follow her. Put the Alliance between her and the nuke and get us in close to her as fast as possible. I know what she's doing."

  The Ensign set the course as ordered, then asked, "Pardon, Captain, but what can a bunch of flitters do? That nuke is going to swat them out of the way and keep coming at us. They won't even slow it down, sir."

  "Those are military flitters, Ensign. Civilian flits can't even do Mach 2, and they don't have a destruct code to keep them out of enemy hands. What's more, their engines are designed to haul tons, not just instrument packages. Her flitters have a chance against that nuke's shield. Now, you just get us in so tight she can kiss our hull. Let me worry about the other stuff and keep trying to contact her. Maybe when we're closer we can cut through the jamming."

  "Yes, sir."

  The Ensign had the Alliance within ten feet of L'Tan's flitter when the string of flitters well behind them began exploding, one after the other, as their small fusion engines went critical. The seventh one caught the incoming missile and the probe in its explosion.

  The probe simply disappeared in the flitter explosion. The missile's shields glowed with resistance, then collapsed, which triggered its own explosion.

  L'Tan had turned her flitter nose-up and plastered it to the leading surface of the Alliance, then turned its fields up to maximum opacity.

  She then flattened her seat and watched her screen as her string of flitters began detonating in the path of the oncoming missile.

  Flitters eight, nine, ten, and eleven exploded in the path of the much larger nuclear blast that instantly expanded around them and annihilated numbers twelve and thirteen before those flitters could self-destruct.

  Maybe the smaller blasts of the others even served to slightly blunt the devastating force that overtook the Alliance and the flitter she was trying to protect.

  "Stardancer, Stardancer, respond, please. Stardan..."

  "I hear you, Alliance. Stop yelling. Call me later if we have one."

  The sky brightened beyond the display capabilities of L'Tan's vid screen and she imagined that she could see it happen around the flitter, as well, although she knew that was virtually impossible through her protective field.

  Seconds later the shockwave that was transmitted through the Alliance's hull kicked the flitter off the hull in a high arc. It was all that the flitter's automatic systems could do to cushion the blow enough to keep her passenger alive as the flitter tried to regain control and slow down.

  One by one those systems burned out, sacrificing themselves for their pilot, until all that was left was the tiny reserve system intended for basic life support.

  As the flitter fell from the sky, the reserve computer came on-line, saw that controlled flight was beyond hope, and estimated when to deploy the remaining power in a field effect, opting to simply try to cushion the impact of landing.

  Chapter Four

  The Alliance had been above fifty thousand feet and climbing fast when the nuke exploded. The massive ship was knocked back down to ten thousand feet in the blink of an eye.

  Her power, previously altogether engaged in lifting, automatically rerouted itself to the gargantuan task of engaging a protective field throughout the ship's interior to safeguard her crew.

  As the stasis effect faded, the helmsman snapped to and scanned his board, noting that all engines were into the danger zone as the ship struggled to save itself and its crew.

  "Nine thousand feet, sir. We're still going down. Eight thousand. Seven. Six. Five thousand feet. Sir, she's lifting again! Six thousand. Seven. Eight."

  The Ensign checked his boards again and said, "Captain, the flitter is gone!"

  "Worry about us first, Ensign. In thirty years of service, I've never heard a ship ring like a bell before. Damage report?"

  "None of the sensors on the nuke side are working at all, sir. We won't know until we can go out there. Internal sensors are reading dangerously high levels of radiation three decks deep on that side. Sixty-one dead or missing in quadrant three so far..."

  "Ensign! I can't use that right now. Can we stay in the air? What else is coming at us? Give me the other stuff when we've got time for it."

  "Yes, sir. Engines are undamaged. Clear skies. No other launches detected."

  "Fine! Now, where's Stardancer?"

  "Twenty-eight miles ahead at fifty thousand and falling, sir."

  "Get us there now, Ensign."


  "Anticipated, Captain. We're at our best possible atmospheric speed now, sir."

  "Get us there in ten seconds, Ensign. Get us under her."

  The Ensign paled slightly and turned to look at his Captain.

  "Ten seconds?! Inside an atmosphere? That's against..."

  The Captain drew his sidearm, pointed it at the helmsman, and said, "I won't tell you again, Ensign. Under her, right now."

  Six seconds later the Captain said, "Good. Excellent. Extend a field through the ship's axis and let her down easy on the hull."

  He tapped the Q2 button on his console.

  "Two! Get topside quick for a flitter pilot. She just saved our lives. Let me know as soon as she's inside. We're going up from here."

  "I'm already on it, sir. I saw what you were doing and opened bay two. I'll have the flitter inside in a few seconds."

  T'Var said, "Good job, Two," and tapped his console again.

  "Sickbay, get a crash team to quad bay two. Expect high radiation levels. If that pilot dies, you may as well jump off while you're up there and save me some trouble."

  "Yes, sir. Leaving now. Tac said that Stardancer was here."

  "You heard right. We're probably alive because of her."

  He punched sickbay and the bridge recorder off at the same time and turned back to face the helmsman.

  "That's how it works, Ensign. I say it and you do it. If you ever question me during combat again, I'll shoot you and run your board myself until your replacement arrives. Do you understand me?"

  The Ensign said, "Yes, sir."

  "What's a Captain's first duty, son?"

  "I... ah... The ship, sir?"

  "That's right. It's the same as yours, Ensign. The ship. I'm not going to order you to do something that can't be fixed later. I'm also not going to mention our little incident in the log unless you make me."

  "Sir?"

  "You may think that you may want to mention what just happened between us when we get clear of all this. If you do, your career will be over. Nobody will want a rat on their deck and I'll damned well make a new career of ending your career if you threaten mine. That's as simple as it gets, Ensign. What's your answer?"