Ian Douglas - Galactic Corps

Lee watched the star for a full minute, looking through her cockpit’s transparency with her naked eyes, now, rather than using the Wyvern’s electronic feed. Despite the increase in overall brightness, she could look directly into that ruby spark without discomfort, without her helmet’s optics dialing down to preserve her vision.

Possibly what had been triggered was a stellar flare; red dwarfs, especially small ones, often were unstable enough in their radiation output to earn the name flare stars. Such stars—Proxima Centauri, just 4.3 light years from Sol, was such a star—could increase in brightness by as much as two or three hundred percent, in some cases.

Whatever had happened, it was bad. The Xul fleet hadn’t even been inconvenienced by the brightening of the sun, and was continuing to move toward the stargate. The MIEF would be arrayed on the far side, now, in Carson Space, and fighting for its life. Once General Alexander decided that the Xul were going to cross over to Carson Space in force, he would detonate a number of antimatter charges on the Carson Space stargate. That would stop more Xul from crossing over.

It would also strand Lee and any other survivors from the MIEF fighter wings that might still be on this side. Again she tried to engage her ship’s auto-repair functions, tried to bring Pappy 2back on-line, tried to fire up the main drive.

Nothing.

She elected to focus all of her energy on reviving Pappy. The AI could handle electronics repairs better than she.

And it would be nice to have someone to talk to, especially someone who might be able to make sense of the screwy data coming in from the Cluster Space star. It looked like—

Abruptly, the brightening star exploded, growing much brighter, and then still brighter, until the cockpit transparency went black.

Something must’ve delayed the explosion, she thought. That, or the Euler triggerships took their sweet time getting to the star .

She tried shifting back to her Wyvern’s electronic feed, and got nothing but static. Shit! She was cut off now from the outside, unable to see with her own eyes or through the Wyvern’s electronic senses. Apparently, the radiation from the exploding star had knocked the rest of her sensors off-line. She’d been helpless before; now she was helpless and blind.

At this point there was nothing she could do but wait. She noted that the temperature of her outer hull was rising now—at minus thirty degrees Celsius, up over one hundred degrees in the past thirty seconds. She didn’t know for sure how hot it would get. Her Wyvern’s hull integrity might well hold up, and she would survive this initial pulse. The killer in a nova, at least this far away from ground zero, was the cloud of charged particles lagging behind the speed-of-light radiation front by several hours. That would kill her, no doubt about it.

She considered the suicide switch again. It would save the waiting … and possibly some pain. She wasn’t sure just how bad a dose of radiation she was getting right now, but it might be bad enough to kill her relatively quickly, over the course of several hours, say.

If she started vomiting, she would know.

She was determined not to be trapped adrift again, helpless and doomed to a slow death. Once had been enough, nine years ago, at Starwall. The similarity of that incident to her situation now was shrieking at her in the back of her mind.

It would be very easy to end things. Now.

On the other hand, she was a Marine … and Marines didn’t give up, not that easily, anyhow. There would always be time to use the switch later, if things got too bad.

Almost fifteen minutes later, something hit her Wyvern’s hull.

She felt the jar, and heard a sharp, metallic clang through the hull from somewhere aft. It startled her so badly she almost started the suicide switch enable procedure. If the Xul had grappled her fighter and were taking her on board one of their hunterships …

But she also knew that the Xul patterning procedure happened quickly and electronically.

There was another clang, and a sound like metal scraping metal. What the hell was going on back there? Damn it, she wished she could see.

Something banged against her blacked-out canopy. She flinched, then braced herself. If they were coming for her through the canopy …

What she felt next, though, was a surge of acceleration. Zero-gravity gave way to a definite sense of weight, pushing her back against her acceleration couch.

Okay, someone had grabbed her and was taking her some-place. She wondered if the Xul took prisoners in ways other than patterning them and uploading them into a virtual reality within their computer network.

Then her canopy transparency cleared and, once more, she could look out into the emptiness of space. Three large, utterly black shapes surrounded her Wyvern, two just off her bow, one to port, one to starboard, and a third above and slightly behind. That third shape, seen only in dead-black silhouette, had positioned itself between her canopy and the exploding sun; riding in the object’s shadow, her canopy had once again become transparent.

The shapes, she saw with a surge of heartfelt relief, were Wyverns—needle-prowed forward of the cockpit bulge, flat and disk-shaped aft. She could just make out the hull number on the Wyvern forward and to port—identifying it as 2nd Lieutenant Traci Wayne’s ship. The wave of relief nearly left her trembling. Three of the Wyverns in her squadron had come after her. The noises she’d heard were tow cables; fired from special ports in a Wyvern’s hull, several meters of their free ends were coated in nano sheaths that, on contact, welded themselves to the target hull. She was inextricably bound to the two Wyverns forward, now, at least until a signal from the towing vessels deactivated the nano-binder’s programming.

Her first thought was a surging rush of joy. I’m not alone, she thought. I never was . …

Her second was one of anger. Idiots! They should have returned through the gate, not hung around looking for me!

Still, she knew she would have remained.

And she was going home.

Assuming her entourage could get her through the gate, of course. Xul ships were continuing to crowd up close to the gate, anxious, perhaps, to escape the doomed star system. Or anxious, perhaps, just to get at the Commonwealth fleet waiting on the other side. Xul psychology was still largely a matter of guesswork. They were not human, and they did not think in the same ways humans did.

In any case, the three operable fighters and their dead-weight tow would have to thread an unpleasant gauntlet to get through. She could see a Type II making the passage now, moving through the interface at the center of the ring, vanishing from existence as it entered the opening. Five smaller hunterships and one huge Type III hung near the gateway.

Her escorts were beginning to fade slightly as they switched on their phase-shift gear. While not true invisibility, the fighters were just enough outside of normal spacetime that they appeared indistinct and somewhat blurred. Her own phase-shift gear, like nearly everything else on board her damaged fighter, was inoperable. At least, though, the Xul would be tracking only one fighter on its way to the stargate, not four.

Acceleration continued to push her back into her couch. Along with so much else, her inertial dampers were off-line. She hoped Wayne and the pilot of the other towing Wyvern had guessed that, because if they started boosting at a hundred gravities, they would be taking her off the couch with a sponge back in Carson Space. It felt like they were keeping it low, though. She guessed they were pulling about five gravities now, maybe a bit more. Her flight suit was re-conforming to provide pressure in her extremities and gut to keep blood from pooling there.