give us the word, sir,” she said. “I’ll need to check the readiness status on our Starhawks. And I need a new ship.” Her Starhawk had been pretty thoroughly savaged by that last detonation off the Turusch planetoid ship; that she had survived at all was nothing less than miraculous.
“We have plenty in reserve,” Koenig told her. “What we need are pilots. The rest of the squadrons are either on deep patrol, on CAP, or they’ve been nursemaiding transports up and down from the planet for the past eight hours. Your people are as close to fresh as I’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you down on the deck, over the Marine perimeter,” Koenig told her. “See if you can discourage those rioters.”
Allyn blinked. “You want us to strafe them, Admiral?” There were rules about things like that. Firing on civilians … and the people you were supposed to be protecting in the first place at that.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Koenig replied. “But do what looks best to you.”
“Sir, why gravfighters? What about the Nightshades?”
“Every one I have is busy escorting Choctaws right now, Commander. Besides, their railguns are not exactly surgical weapons. I want you in there, exercising a bit more in the way of finesse.”
Allyn had never received a more unpleasant set of orders. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Are you ready for a mission, Commander?” Koenig asked. He sounded concerned. “What’s your med status?”
“I’m good to go, Admiral.” Another small lie, a lie of omission. When she’d gone down to sick bay a few hours ago, they’d ended up putting her on light duty, with the promise of another checkup in twenty-four hours before she could be returned to flight-ready status. Koenig could have called up the records and seen that for himself, but hadn’t. Just maybe she’d slipped through an administrative crack.
“Thank you, Commander,” Koenig said. “Take it easy down there.”
Which left her wondering if he had read the sick bay report, and was letting her choose to lead her people down anyway. “Aye, aye, sir.”
She opened her eyes and looked at the three officers who’d been taking her report. “I’ve just received new orders,” she told them. “I need to go.”
“We heard, Commander Allyn,” Commander Costigan, head of the battlegroup’s intelligence department, said. “I think we’re finished here. Good luck!”
“Finesse, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Hargrave, from America’s tactical department, added with a shake of the head. “I don’t envy you this one, Commander.”
Twenty minutes later she was on the Number Three launch bay access. Tallman, her crew chief, handed her an e-suit helmet and grinned at her. “Brand new Starhawk for you, Commander,” he said. “Try to take better care of this one, okay? I have to sign for these things when you lose ’em!”
“No promises, Chief,” she said, setting the helmet in place and letting the seal fuse with her suit.
“Luck, Skipper.”
“Thanks.”
A vertical access shaft took her down one deck at a half-G acceleration, her impact at the bottom cushioned by a modified tangleweb field. Swiftly, she killed the TW-field and closed the hull over her cockpit, the nanomaterial turning liquid and flowing like black water to seal the outer hull shut.
Finesse, the Admiral had told her. If Nightshade railguns were indiscriminate, what the hell did he think a ten-kiloton Krait was? Or a KK Gatling burst?
“Flight designation Dragon,” the voice of Primary Flight Control said in her head. “Dragon One, comm check. Do you copy?”
“Dragon One, I copy. Systems on line. Ready to boost.”
“Dragon Two,” Lieutenant Howard Spaas said. “Ready.”
“Dragon Three,” Lieutenant Jen Collins added. “Let’s go!”
“Dragon Four,” Lieutenant Katie Tucker said. “Ready for launch!”
“Dragon Five,” Lieutenant Gene Sandoval said. “Good to go.”
Five Starhawks … with the exception of Prim, down on the planet somewhere, all that was left of the Dragonfires.
“We show all Dragons on-line, at full power, boards green and ready for launch,” PriFly said. “Droplaunch coming up in twenty-seven seconds.”
There were three ways to get fighters off of a modern star carrier. Most dramatic, of course, was to fire them out at high-G boost along one of the long twin launch tubes extending up the carrier’s spine and all the way through the huge, water-filled shield cap forward. They could also be simply flown off the launch deck like a Choctaw or any of the other auxiliary spacecraft carried on board the America.
But the third method—the primary means of launching fighters until the development of high-G boost tubes forty years earlier—took advantage of the fact that the carrier’s hab modules were rotating about the ship’s long axis, completing one circuit every twenty-eight seconds to create an artificial, out-is-down spin gravity of half a G—about five meters per second per second.
With a jolt, Allyn’s Starhawk dropped through a sudden, yawning hatch beneath its keel in the launch deck, coming to rest in a small, steel-walled compartment. The hatch overhead slid shut, and she could hear the air in the small chamber bleeding off as the seconds ticked away. The actual launch had to wait until the drop chamber’s outer hatch was properly aligned, to give the fighters the correct vector.
With the compartment in hard vacuum, the lower hatch, the hatch in the launch deck’s outer shell, slid silently open. The fighter rotated in its hanger, facing nose down and out. On Allyn’s in-head display, from her forward optics, she could see stars drifting across the narrow rectangle of her view ahead … a bright orange star—Arcturus, she thought—and a thick scattering of other, less brilliant but diamond-hard pinpoints of light.
And then a piece of the slender orange-and-white crescent of Haris swept into view, as the last few seconds trickled away.
“… and four,” the launch control officer in PriFly announced. “And three … and two … and one … and launch!”
And abruptly, Allyn was in free fall, her fighter sliding off the magnetic grapples and falling out through the open hatch below. As soon as she was clear of the carrier, she switched on her forward singularity, spooling it up to five hundred gravities as she fell away from the America, moving more and more swiftly.
The other four Starhawks fell with her, in picture-perfect formation.
In moments, they were slicing through the tenuous upper levels of the planet’s atmosphere.
MEF HQ
Main Mess Hall
Eta Boötis IV
