Dark Matter. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ savage smears of white-­and-­orange light, the wreckage twisting wildly into the fighter’s own drive singularity and vanishing in an instant.

      “Good shot!” Gallagher told Truini, but then he had some serious problems of his own: a Black Mamba settling in on his own six and accelerating fast.

      Cutting acceleration, Gallagher spun his Starhawk end for end, so that he now was facing the oncoming Mamba, traveling stern-­first. He selected two AS-­78 AMSO rounds. The acronymn stood for anti-­missile shield ordnance, but they were better known as sandcasters—­unguided warheads packed with several kilos of lead spherules, each as small as a grain of sand.

      “Fox Two!” he called—­the launch alert for unguided munitions, and he sent the AMSO warheads hurtling toward the Mamba. They detonated an instant later, firing sand clouds like shotgun bursts directly in the Mamba’s path. Before the Black Mamba’s AI could correct or dodge, the missile had hit the sand cloud at a velocity so high that the missile flared and disintegrated . . . then erupted in a savage burst of matter-­antimatter annihilation.

      The blast was close . . . very nearly too close. The expanding plasma wall nudged Gallagher’s Starhawk as it unfolded at close to the speed of light, putting him into a rough, tumbling spin. For the next several seconds he was extremely busy, trying to balance his Starhawk’s attitude controls to bring him out of the tumble.

      Then he had the nimble little ship back under control, with tiny Enceladus and, beyond, the looming bulk of Saturn filling the forward sky. Red icons were scattering rapidly past and around him, he saw; those were the enemy fighters. Farther off, still a million kilometers away, a small knot of red icons marked an incoming continent of Confederation capital ships. The big boys were decelerating now, closing on Enceladus and leaving the mop-­up of the defending USNA squadron to their own fighters.

      And Gallagher didn’t see any way he could stop them, or even to get close. The last of Red Flight was gone, now, and the three remaining fighters of Blue Flight weren’t going to be able to do a damned thing about those heavies. His AI’s warbook was busily cataloguing the enemy fleet . . . two heavy cruisers, a light carrier, half a dozen destroyers, a ­couple of monitor gun platforms, a heavy transport . . .

      Jesus! What did they think the USNA had deployed out here on this damned little iceball? Salad Bowl was a civilian research station, nothing more, an exobiology outpost hunting for alien life in the salty deep-­ocean pockets beneath the Enceladean ice. The Starhawk squadron had been placed here to protect against minor Pan-­European raids . . . but what he was seeing here was a large-­scale invasion. That transport was almost certainly a troop ship.

      They might yet manage to do some damage. “Listen up, team,” he called. “We’re on a vector that will take us within ten thousand kilometers of that transport. I think it’s probably a troop ship, okay? Hit that baby, and we might be able to throw a major wrench into the Pannies’ plans.”

      A troop ship meant troops, which meant the Pan-­Europeans were here to occupy Enceladus or some other body in the Saturn subsystem . . . Titan, possibly, or the Huygens ERRF observatory in Saturn orbit. Destroy or damage it badly enough, and those invasion plans would have to be scrubbed. Gallagher had two Kraits left in his armament bays; he would shoot one and save the other as a just-­in-­case.

      “That’s gonna really stir up a hornet’s nest,” Joyce said.

      “Yeah, boss,” Truini added. “And what’s the point, anyway? We have to surrender. We’ve freakin’ lost!”

      Gallagher considered the question. Out here on the cold, empty ass-­edge of the system, concepts like duty and honor just didn’t count for as much as they might back in more civilized areas. Here, you fought for your buddies.

      Or, in this case, the other members of the squadron back in the Salad Bowl, the loaders, manglers, technicians, and all of the other support and logistics personnel that made a squadron work. Not to mention some six hundred scientists, technicians, and support personnel stationed at the Bowl.

      “Yeah, and how are we supposed to do that, True?” Gallagher replied. Another antimatter warhead detonated in the distance, flooding the area with a harsh and deadly light. Surrender was not a matter of simply contacting the enemy . . . not when their electronic defenses were up to prevent attempts to hack into fighter control systems or AIs. “If the Bowl tells us to stand down, we stand down. Until then, we fight, damn it!”

      There was no response . . . and Gallagher realized with a sudden cold impact that Truini’s fighter had vanished from the display with that last detonation. It was down to Gallagher and Joyce.

      “Blue Two calling Fox One!” Joyce announced. “Missiles away!”

      Gallagher programmed the shot and triggered it. “Fox One!”

      “Their fighters are trying to cut us off!

      “I see them.” He considered their options . . . which were few and not good. He considered ducking in Saturn’s rings and immediately discarded the idea. The thicker portions of the rings were too distant—­the outer reaches of the massive and brilliant B Ring orbited over 120,000 kilometers farther in from Enceladus, more than a third the distance between Earth and Luna.

      But damn it, they needed cover.

      Nuclear fireballs flared and blossomed in the distance. The enemy transport was still there . . . but it was no longer decelerating. Maybe they’d done some damage. Maybe . . .

      Something about the data coming up on the alien transport didn’t add up. The ship was longer than a French Orcelle-­class transport—­nearly 700 meters—­and its power curve was closer to that of a battle cruiser than a troop ship. Gallagher called up a magnified image . . . and he stifled a sharp, bitter exclamation.

      He didn’t know what that . . . that thing was, but it wasn’t a troop ship.

      No time for analyses now. He would store the data and hope he lived to transmit it.

      “Okay! Make a run for Enceladus, Karyl. Close pass . . . crater hop if you have to. We’ll see if we can lose ’em in the ice!”

      “Right behind you, Frank.”

      The problem with being so badly outnumbered was the openness out here, with enemy fighters and capital ships now moving in from all sides. If they could get down on the deck of Enceladus, half the encircling sky would be blocked, and the radar and laser signatures of the fighters themselves might be masked by the ice skimming beneath their keels.

      “Enceladus Base, this is Blue Leader!” he called over the tactical channel. “We’re down to two fighters! I think we managed to ding their troop ship, but they’re trying to swarm us! What are your instructions?”

      “Blue Flight, Enceladus Base. You’ve done what you can, Frank. Get the hell clear of battlespace. RTB when you can.”

      “Copy.” RTB—­Return to base—­when they could, if they could. More Black Mambas were streaking toward them, now. If things had been bad before, they were worse now. The enemy fighters were furious at the attack on the Confederation capital ship. Gallagher launched several more sandcaster rounds, then put on a burst of raw, hard acceleration that sent him hurtling toward the fast-­swelling white disk of the moon. He was aware of the crater-­pocked surface growing swiftly larger, of the dazzle from a distance-­weakened sun glinting from the ice plains below . . . and then he was twisting around his drive singularity, fighting to shift his vector to one a little closer to parallel СКАЧАТЬ