David Gunn - Maximum Offence

Heat flares from his afterburner. And the fighter explodes into a weirdly flattened ball of flame and razor-sharp fragments. Only the shrapnel’s all heading in our direction. On the far side of where the fighter was, lights spark in their millions.

‘ Pull up ,’ shouts the gun.

At this level of g-force, that is easier to say than do. Executing a tight turn, I roll the B79 into the early stages of a loop and begin to climb.

‘ Tighter .’

Bastard SIG.

Somewhere down the line, I black out.

Doesn’t matter, the combat AI keeps me on track, and I’m awake before it can turn one loop into two, or do something stupid like go take a closer look at all those little explosions.

‘What the fuck happened?’

An area of blank space hangs between us and Victory First , with Hekati looking vast behind that. There isn’t a Z7x to be seen.

‘All gone,’ says the SIG.

‘Fuck, how many?’

‘Twenty-three.’

We killed twenty-three fighters . . . ?

‘Fish in a barrel,’ says the SIG, sounding disgusted.

‘Them?’

The gun snorts. ‘Us,’ it says, and tells me why.

We didn’t kill that fighter. It crashed into the inside edge of a force field Victory First threw up the moment this battle began. If the field can destroy their fighter, it can destroy us.

And I have problems that are more pressing. We are almost out of fuel, our oxygen’s nearly gone, and we’re using what is left faster than the converters can replace. Eight people in a B79 bomber designed for three is a shit idea. Even if it was mine.

Also, we’re suffering.

My sight is blurred and my throat sour from the kyp. Haze is sticky with his own vomit, and what didn’t glue itself to the walls or the rest of us now hangs in the air, tiny spit balls of half-digested supper.

As for the others . . .

Colonel Vijay is unconscious. But at least he’s upright and safe in a chair. Looking at him reminds me of a very young General Jaxx, which is weird enough to make me decide to think about something else.

It is the rest who need help.

Shil’s chest rises and falls as she struggles for breath. A shoulder tab on her uniform reads orange. She has taken damage, but it’s not yet fatal. At least, not if we can get help and that’s one hell of a-

‘Sven,’ snaps the gun.

‘ What? ‘

‘You might want to pay attention.’

One whole side is rising from Victory First . if the Enlightened ship is a city, then an entire neighbourhood is detaching itself to lift slowly away. It reveals a hole in the mother ship that begins to close as walls shift and hangar doors move.

Soon the Victory First will look as it used to look. Just a bit smaller. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I demand, pointing to the detached bit.

‘Epsilon-class cruiser,’ says the gun.

We can play question and answer or I can use the kyp. The thought doesn’t make me happy. ‘Using it already, sir,’ mutters Haze.

Blood beads his lip. It wells into little blue spheres and flips free like floating pearls to join the vomit, spittle and all the things we forgot to lock down.

Blue? I think. And then I have my answer.

Oxygen loss starves haemoglobin. In a flash flood, I understand more than I want about human biology. And Haze is human; well, as human as I am. Just as quickly, I dismiss the fact.

Who needs memory when this stuff can be pulled from the air?

The cruiser is epsilon-class, a kilometre long and 330 metres wide. It’s vast, armed with fifty cannons and has flight decks for three combat wings . . . That’s a hundred and fifty Z7x fighters.

A list comes up before my eyes. Battles won by a single epsilon-class.

Victory First is made of nineteen epsilons slotted together. That is the beauty of Enlightened technology. It’s cumulative. The Z7xs fit into the sides of the cruiser, the cruiser slots alongside other cruisers to make the mother ship. If needed, the mother ship can be slotted with others to make . . .

Something the size of a small moon.

A ray-traced sphere flickers into my vision and then goes, along with coordinates that put it half a spiral arm away from us.

Speed?

Faster than we are. Well, the cruiser is. Although it takes time to get ramped up enough to use its ion jets.

And distance?

It could cross the galaxy, if the U/Free ever let it get that far.

All this makes me wonder how we outfight the Enlightened, because we do. Every planet they take, we retake, or take one in its place. The figures are vast, tens of thousands of suns and hundreds of thousands of planets. It seems impossible, beyond counting; until that thought brings the number of stars in our galaxy.

A million million.

Our glorious leader, OctoV . . . And the Uplift’s hundred-braid, Gareisis, the Uplifted and Enlightened. They mean so little to Letogratz that the United Free will accept any solution that stops us fighting. Doesn’t have to be fair. Why would it be? Not much else in life is.

Makes me wish I were still at Fort Libidad, scanning the dunes for ferox and desert tribes. And that makes me wonder what an ex-sergeant, who couldn’t count above twenty until a few months back, is doing counting stars.

‘So,’ says SIG. ‘You’re back.’

It shows me the cruiser on screen. ‘You plan on fighting that?’

‘Got a better idea?’

‘Well,’ it says. ‘We’re out of rockets, our shields are screwed and the power bank for the pulse cannon is critical.’ It pisses me off when the SIG gets snotty.

‘You forgot oxygen.’

The SIG begins to tell me it doesn’t need-

So I point out that unless it’s happy to drift in space with rotting bodies for company, it will factor oxygen in too. It’s still sulking when I use most of our remaining fuel to take us over the top of the cruiser, round the outside of the mother ship and over the edge of Hekati itself.

Red lights start flashing. A buzzer joins in. And, just in case we need more distraction, the crewpit screens override with a critical fuel warning.

‘ Sven . . . ‘

‘Look,’ I tell the gun. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘There’s always a first time.’

The mirror hub is ahead. A small silver castle where the struts meet in the centre of Hekati’s ring. Brightness flares our screens as we get between a mirror and the sunlight it’s reflecting at the glass that gives this habitat its sky. What fuel is left, I burn entering the hub itself and slotting ourselves into a dock.

Obviously enough, it’s fuel we can’t afford.

On the far side of the airlock, Ajac takes one look at my vomit-splashed uniform and steps back. Could be the stink, could be the bloodstained blades on my combat arm, or it could be the foulness of the air belching out behind me.

Iona stands beside him. She’s carrying Colonel Madeleine’s handiwork.

Yanking my combat arm free, I see her glance away. She waits until my old arm is in place before glancing back. ‘Knew you’d return.’

More than I did. Needles pierce flesh. After a second, I flex my fingers. Good enough for what I need to do now.

It takes me a minute to cut the net, remove the straps and begin carrying my crew into the corridor outside the airlock. Shil is first, and she weighs less than I expect. Her right shoulder is dislocated. As I settle her on the deck, she whimpers.

‘Shil,’ I ask. ‘Can you hear me?’

She nods.

‘This is going to hurt.’

A thump of my hand against her shoulder puts the joint back into place.

Spittle dribbles from her mouth; she has bitten her lip and wet herself, although Ajac pretends not to notice. His manners are better than mine are. ‘Can’t see,’ she says.