“Stop,” Henry ordered. The pilot stopped. Henry gestured. “Iyotake, link in,” he snapped. A virtual image of the XO appeared between the two of them, presented to them both by their internal networks.
“Lay it out, Commander O’Flannagain,” he told her. “Fast.”
“We can’t launch missiles from the bottom of a hole that’s now twice as deep as Raven is high,” the CAG told them. “We’re barely clear to get the SF-One-Thirties out around the hull, but we are clear.
“But we fired off all of our missiles in the engagements with the Drifter starfighters, and the entire battlecruiser is down to thirty-six missiles total,” she said. “So, the XO didn’t want to approve loading the starfighters without your authority.”
“Seven starfighters, twenty-eight missiles,” Henry said aloud. “That doesn’t even leave Raven with a full salvo, so I see the problem. Not following on the flight suit, though.”
“Two of my pilots, Lieutenant Brankovich and Lieutenant Commander Phạm, are in the medbay,” O’Flannagain told him. “Lieutenant Commander Gaunt is dead; his quarters were vaporized when we got hit.
“So, I have seven fighters and five pilots. Five fighters only need twenty missiles, but I don’t want to trust a single twenty-missile salvo to take down a Guardian.”
“If I give you the missiles, they’ll all be full penetrators,” Henry told her. “That will help.”
“The odds are still better with twenty-four than twenty,” she replied. “And as it happens, there is someone else on Raven qualified to fly an SF-One-Thirty. That someone is a double ace with more fighter-on-fighter kills than anyone in the fighter wing and is the third-ranked pilot on the ship for fighter-on-starship kill participation.”
“No.” Iyotake had finally caught up. “We cannot put the commanding officer of a United Planets Space Force capital ship in a goddamn starfighter. That’s a violation of at least six different regulations.”
“Enforcing those regs would fall on Commander Thompson,” Henry pointed out. It was probably unfair of him, but it was true. “But…even putting that aside, Commander O’Flannagain, I only have virtual hours on an SF-One-Thirty. I’ve never flown one in real space.”
“Which still puts you ahead of our shuttle pilots, who are not starfighter-qualified, period,” she told him. “Ser, you’ve kept up your virtual and realspace hours to keep your wings. You’re qualified to fly a One-Thirty.
“There are only six unwounded people on this ship I can say that of,” she concluded. “And taking you out with us, if it comes down to it, might just save everyone.”
“Or kill the captain,” Iyotake replied.
“Iyotake, you’re right,” Henry told his XO. “But we both know you’re perfectly qualified to command a battlecruiser of your own. If something happens to me, you can take over—and Raven isn’t going to win this on her own.
“If we get a clean shot at one of those Guardians, it might be worth it,” he allowed. “But it’s still a terrible idea, O’Flannagain, and we have a lot of other arrows in our quiver first.”
“I’m not planning on taking us all right now, ser,” she said. “I just want to make it clear that when we go out, you go with us. So that we don’t argue about it while there’s a Guardian in weapons range.”
Henry knew he shouldn’t do it. It was a terrible idea, one that risked Raven’s commander…and yet, O’Flannagain was right. Six fighters were more likely to succeed in an attack on a Guardian than five. It could make the difference between a suicide run to buy Raven time and an actual kill that changed the tone of the entire situation.
And he wanted to kill these bastards. He’d never been so angry, so determined to exact a blood toll on the people who’d killed his friends and two women he’d loved, in his entire life. It might be wrong…but it might be right, too.
Either way, he was going to do it.
“You’re right, XO,” he repeated. “But so are you, Commander.”
He looked down at the flight suit.
“You have the con for the moment, Iyotake,” he told his XO. “I’ll be in the loop…but I’m going to go suit up. Authorize the missiles for six Lancers. That still leaves Raven with a full salvo in the launchers—and Song is to start fabricating new missiles ASAP. She’s authorized to draw our materials stockpiles all the way down.”
“It’s dangerous,” Iyotake said after a moment. “But it might be worth it. Whatever happens, I guarantee you the Drifters are not going to see it coming!”
Chapter Forty
The first Charlie charges went off almost an hour later, a testimony to both the slowness of the Guardians’ approach and the thoroughness of their search. The entire meteor swarm was almost half a million kilometers long, but getting within thirty thousand kilometers of the larger asteroids shouldn’t have taken that long.
Henry was leaning against a wall in Raven-Eight’s storage bay, linked into a virtual simulacrum of his bridge while still in position to jump aboard the fighter in minutes if they’d missed something.
“Charlie-Four just blew,” Ihejirika reported, unnecessarily to anyone watching the tactical feed. A dozen five-hundred-megaton fusion explosions made quite the display, even before they tore a three-hundred-kilometer-long meteor into shreds.
“I almost feel bad for what we’re doing to the real estate,” Iyotake said. “If anyone lived in this system, this meteor swarm would be part of their astrology. Maybe even their religion.”
“And if anyone lived in a barren hypergiant star system, I’d actually have considered that,” Henry agreed. “As it is, there isn’t even anything here for people to live on.”
The Guardian he was watching dodged away from the explosions, engines pushing hard to fling the big ship clear of what they clearly thought was a trap…and right into the detonation radius of Charlie-Six.
“I wish we had our guns,” Henry told Iyotake as another meteor blew apart, sending the Guardian flinching back toward the edge of the meteor swarm. “I think they’re a bit spooked, and Bandit Two’s new vector would leave her out of support range from Bandit One.”
“We could send the fighters?” his XO suggested.
“No, that’s not just our Sunday punch, Iyotake; it’s our only punch,” Henry said. “We’ll hold it for when we have no choice.” He considered the display. “Ihejirika, can we manually detonate Charlie-One and -Five?”
“Yeah, we have a relay on the surface with a tightbeam transmitter, but… Oh. I see.”
The tactical officer’s confusion faded before he could even ask. Charlie-Five would create a false sequence, an apparent vector of explosions that might guide the Drifters in the wrong direction. Charlie-One would both look like they were trying to distract from that sequence and be the closest set of charges to Guardian Bandit One.
“Detonating.”
A few seconds passed with lightspeed coms and delays, and Henry nodded to himself as Guardian Bandit Two continued to accelerate away from the center of the swarm—but adjusted her course along the “path” laid out by the detonation of Charlie-Four through Charlie-Six.