Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Fourteen

Jiltanith was good.

Colin had recognized her skill and, still more, her natural affinity for her task, even in the simulator. Now she took them up the long, carefully camouflaged tunnel from Nergal without a single wasted erg of power. Without even a single wasted thought. The fighter's wings were her own, and the walls of their stony birth canal slid past, until, at last, they floated free on a smooth whine of power.

The stars burned suddenly, like chips of ice above them, and a strange exhilaration filled Colin. There was a vibrant new strength in the side-band trickles of his computer links, burning with Jiltanith's bright, fierce sense of flight and movement. For a time, at least, she was free. She was one with her fighter as she roamed the night sky, free to seek out her enemies, and he felt it in her, like a flare of joy, made still stronger by her hunger for vengeance and aptness for violence. For the first time since they'd met, he understood her perfectly and wondered if he was glad he did, for he saw himself in her. Less driven, perhaps, less dark and brooding, not honed to quite so keen an edge, but the same.

The mutineers had been no more than an obstacle when he returned from Dahak... but Sean had been alive then. He had lost far less than Jiltanith, seen far fewer friends and family ground to dust in the marooned Imperials' secret, endless war, but he had learned to hate, and it frightened him to think he could so quickly and easily find within himself so strong a shadow of the darkness that he'd known from the start infused Jiltanith.

He cut off his thoughts, hoping she'd been too enwrapped in the joy of flight to notice them, and concentrated on his own computers. So far, they'd remained within Nergal's stealth field; from here on, they were on their own.

The Imperial fighter was half the size of a Beagle, a needle-nosed thing of sleek curves and stub wings. Its design was optimized for atmosphere, but the fighter was equally at home and far more maneuverable in vacuum, though none of Nergal's brood had been there in millennia. Most of their time had been spent literally weaving in and out among the treetops to hide from Anu's sensor arrays, and so they flew now.

They swept out over the Pacific, settling to within meters of the swell, and Jiltanith goosed the drive gently. A huge hand pressed Colin back in his couch, and a wake boiled across the water behind them as they streaked south at three times the speed of sound. The G forces were almost refreshing after all this time, like an old friend he'd lost track of since meeting Dahak, but they also underscored Jiltanith's single glaring weakness as a pilot.

Atmosphere was a less forgiving medium than vacuum. Even at the fighter's maximum power, friction and compression conspired to reduce its top speed dramatically. There was one huge compensation—by relying on control surfaces for maneuvering rather than depending entirely upon the gravitonic magic of the drive, the same speed could be produced for a far weaker energy signature—but there were always trade-offs. In this case, one was a greater vulnerability to thermal detection and targeting systems as a hull unprotected by a drive field heated, but that was a relatively minor drawback.

The real problem was that the reduced-strength drive couldn't cancel inertia and the G forces of acceleration. Flying on its atmospheric control surfaces, the deadly little ship was captive to the laws of motion and no more maneuverable than the bodies of its crew could stand, and that was potentially deadly for Jiltanith. If she found herself forced into maneuvering combat against a fully-enhanced Imperial in this performance envelope, she was dead, for she would black out long before her opponent.

Still, MacMahan was almost certainly right. If it came to aerial combat, stealth would not be in great demand. It would become a matter of brute power, cunning, reaction time, and the skill of the combatants' electronic warfare specialists, and the first thing that would happen would be that the pilots would go to full power. With a full strength drive field wrapped around her, Jiltanith would be as free of G forces as any Imperial pilot.

Yet the whole object was to avoid any air-to-air fighting. If they were forced to full power, all the ECM in the world couldn't hide them from Anu's detectors... which meant they dared not return to Nergal unless they could destroy or shake off any pursuit and drop back into a stealth regime. Trade-offs, Colin thought sourly, checking their airspeed. Always the trade-offs.

They were up to mach four, he noted, and grinned as he imagined the reaction aboard any freighter they happened across when they came hurtling by ahead of their sonic boom with absolutely no radar image to show for it.

They ought to hit their target in about another seventeen minutes. Strange. He didn't feel the least bit nervous anymore.

"Coming up on our final turn," Colin said eleven minutes later.

"Aye," Jiltanith said softly.

Her voice was dreamy, for Colin wasn't quite real for her just now. Reality was her dagger-sleek fighter, for she was one with it, seeing and feeling through its sensors. Yet he felt the intensity of her purpose and the cat-sharp clarity of her awareness through his own feeds, and he was content.

They swept through the turn, settling into the groove for the attack run, and Geb and Tamman fell astern, increasing their separation as planned.

The huge private estate in the deep, bowl-like valley north of Cuernavaca was the true HQ of both Black Mecca and the Army of Allah in the Americas, though only a very few terrorists knew it. That made it a major operational node, one of the three juiciest targets MacMahan and Jiltanith had been able to identify. Over forty southerners and two hundred of their most trusted Terra-born allies were based there, coordinating a hemisphere's terrorism, and the estate's seclusion hid a substantial amount of Imperial equipment. A successful attack on such a target would certainly seem to justify an immediate strike report to their own HQ.

But there was another fractor in MacMahan's target selection. The "estate's" geography made it an ideal target for mass missiles, for the valley walls would confine the blast effect and channel it upward. The northerners expected the use of such weapons to come as a considerable shock to Anu, for they would provoke consternation and furious speculation among the vast majority of Earth's people, and attention was the one thing both groups of Imperials had assiduously avoided for centuries. If anything could convince Anu Nergal's people meant business, this attack should do it.

Yet the very importance of the target also meant a greater possibility of serious defenses. If enemy fighter opposition appeared, it was up to Geb and Tamman to pick it off if they could; if they couldn't, theirs became the far grimmer task of playing decoy to suck the southerners off Colin and onto themselves, and...

"Shit!" Colin muttered, and Jiltanith stiffened beside him as he shunted information to her through a side feed. There were active Imperial scanners covering the target. At their present speed, those scanners would burn through their stealth field in less than five minutes.

Colin tightened internally as he and his computers raced to determine what those scanners reported to. If it was only an observation post, they'd be onto the target before anyone could react, but if there were automatic defenses...

"Double shit!" he hissed. There were, indeed, automatic defenses—and three fighters on stand-by for launch, though three ships were no indication of an alert. There were at least ten of the little buggers down there; if they'd anticipated an attack, all ten would have been spotted for immediate launch. He and Jiltanith had simply had the infernal bad luck to happen upon the scene when someone was readying for a routine flight. Possibly Kirinal was going somewhere in one of those fighters and the other two were escorts; that fitted normal southern operational procedures.

But it meant the base was at a higher state of readiness than usual, and there were those automatics. He could "see" at least four missile batteries and two heavy energy weapon emplacements, which was far more than their intelligence estimates had suggested.

His thoughts flickered so quickly they were almost unformed, yet Jiltanith caught them. He felt her disappointment like his own. These were the people who had sent Girru and Anshar to butcher Cal's family and Sean and Sandy, but their orders for this contingency were clear.

"We'll have to abort," Colin remarked, yet even as he said it his neural link was bringing his systems fully on line.

"Aye, so we shall." Yet Jiltanith's course never deviated, and he felt her mental touch poised to ram the drive's power level through the red line.

"They'll burn through a good twenty seconds before I get a targeting setup," he said absently.

"Nay, 'twill be no more than ten seconds ere thy weapons range," she demurred.

"Hah! Now you're an EW specialist, too, huh?" Then he shrugged. "Screw it. Full bore right down the middle, Jiltanith. Go for the weapons first."

"As thou sayst, Captain," Jiltanith purred, and the fighter shrieked upward like a homesick meteor.

For just a second, acceleration drove Colin back into his couch, but then the drive field peaked, the G forces vanished, and he felt the shockwave of alarm sweep through the southerners' enclave. The automatic air-defense systems were already reaching for them, but his own systems had come alive a moment sooner; by the time the weapons started hunting the fighter, its defensive programs were already filling the night sky with false images. Decoys streaked away, singing their siren songs, and jammers hashed the scan channels with the fold-space equivalent of white noise.

The ground stations' scanners were more powerful and their electronic brains were bigger and smarter than his small onboard computers, but they'd started at a disadvantage. They had to sort the situation out before they could find a target, and it was a race between them and their human controllers and Colin and the speeding fighter's targeting systems.

There was no time to think, no room for anything but concentration, yet kaleidoscope images flared at the edges of his brain. The brighter strobes of panic when one ground station seemed to have found them. The impossible, wrenching maneuver with which Jiltanith threw it off. The relief when they slipped away before it could establish a lock. His own racing excitement. The determination and intensity that filled his pilot. His own savage blaze of satisfaction as his launch solution suddenly came magically together.

His first salvo leapt away. Hyper-capable missiles were out of the question in atmosphere; they would take too much air into hyper with them, wrecking his mass-power calculations and bringing them back into normal space God alone knew where, but mass missiles were another matter. Their over-powered gravitonic drives slammed them forward, accelerating instantly to sixty percent of light speed, crowding the edge of phase lock. Counter-missile defenses did their best, but the mass missiles' speed and the short range meant tracking time was too limited even for Imperial systems, and Colin heard Jiltanith's panther howl of triumph as his strike went home.

Fireballs blew into the night. Mass missiles carried no warheads, for they needed none. They were energy states, not projectiles, hyper-velocity robotic meteorites, shrieking down on precise trajectories to seek out the ground weapons that menaced their masters.

The small shield generators protecting the southerners' weapons were still spinning up when Colin's missiles arrived, but it wouldn't have mattered if they'd already been at full power. In fifty-one millennia, the northerners had never risked escalating their struggle to the point of using Imperial weaponry so brazenly, and the southerners had assumed they never would. Their defensive measures were aimed at Terrestrial weapons or the relatively innocuous Imperial ones the northerners had used in the past, and they were fatally inadequate.

Jiltanith snapped the fighter around as the Jovian holocaust spewed skyward behind them. A bowl of fire glared against the night-struck Mexican hills, and Colin's computers were already evaluating the first strike. Weak as they were, the base's shields had absorbed a tremendous amount of energy before they failed—enough to keep the missiles from turning the entire estate into one vast crater—and one heavy energy gun emplacement had escaped destruction. It raved defiance at them, and Jiltanith accepted the challenge as she came back like the angel of death, driving into its teeth.

The radiant heat of the first missile strike, added to the frantic efforts of the fighter's ECM, denied the targeting scanners lock, and the guns were on pre-programmed blind fire, raking the volume of space that ought to contain the fighter. But Jiltanith wasn't where the people who'd designed that fire program had assumed she would have to be, and Colin felt a detached sort of awe for her raw flying ability as he popped off another missile.

Unlike the fighter, the energy weapons couldn't bob and weave. The missile sizzled home, and a fresh burst of fury defiled the earth.

Jiltanith came around for a third pass, two more than their ops plan had called for or considered safe, and the ground defenses were silent. Despite the shields' best efforts, the weapon emplacements were huge, raw wounds, and the entire valley floor was a sea of blazing grass and trees, touched to flame by thermal radiation. The palatial estate's buildings were flaming rubble, but the real installations hidden under them, though damaged, were still intact.

One of the ready fighters was already clawing upward, but Colin ignored it. He had all the time in the world, and his final launch was textbook perfect. A spread of four missiles bracketed the target, streaking the fire-sick heavens with fresh flame. There were no shields to absorb the destruction this time, and there was, at most, no more than a microsecond between the first missile impact and the last.

A hurricane of light lashed upward as vaporized earth and stone and flesh vomited into the night, and the fireballs ballooned out, merging, melding into one terrible whole. A second southern fighter was caught just at lift off and spat forth like a molten, tumbling spark from Vulcan's forge, and the pressure wave snatched at them. It shook them as a terrier shook a rat, but Jiltanith met it like a lover. She rode its ferocity—embracing it, not fighting it—and the universe danced crazily, even madder somehow from within the protection of their drive field, as she shot the rapids of concussion. But then they flashed out the far side, and Colin realized she had used the terrible turbulence to put them on the track of the single fighter that had escaped destruction.

Colin needed no evaluation of his final attack. All that could be left was one vast crater. He had just killed over two hundred people... and all he felt was satisfaction. Satisfaction, and the need, the eagerness, to hunt down and kill the single southern fighter that had escaped his wrath.

There was no way to know who piloted that other fighter, nor if it was fully crewed or what weapons it carried. Perhaps there was only the pilot. Perhaps it wasn't even armed.

All Colin would ever know was that he felt a sort of merciless empathy—not pity, but something like understanding—for that fleeing vessel. He and Jiltanith were invincible, and they were vengeance. He bared his teeth and called up his air-to-air weaponry as the firestorm's white heat dulled to red astern, and Jiltanith hurled them out over the night-dark Pacific in pursuit.

His targeting systems locked. A command flicked through his feed to the computers, and two more missiles launched. They were slower than mass missiles, homing weapons with their speed stepped down to follow evasive maneuvers, but this time they carried warheads: three-kiloton, proximity-fused nukes. His eyes were dreamy as his electronic senses watched them all the way in, but in the moment before detonation a third missile came scorching in from the west. He'd almost forgotten Geb and Tamman, and the southern fighter probably never even realized he and Jiltanith weren't alone.

There was no debris.

Jiltanith needed no orders. She swept on into the west, reducing speed, losing altitude, and their drive strength coasted back down to wrap invisibility about them once more. Colin checked his sensors carefully, and not until he was certain they had evaded all detection did she turn and flee homeward into the north while he switched on the fighter's com and activated the fold-space implant he had dared not use in over a month. He felt an odd little "click" inside his skull as Dahak's receivers recognized and accepted his implant's ID protocols.

"Category One Order. Do not reply," he sent at the speed of thought. "Authentication Delta-One-Gamma-Beta-One-Seven-Eight-Theta-Niner-Gamma. Priority Alpha. Stand by for squeal from this fighter. Execute upon receipt."

He closed his implant down instantly, praying that the almost equally strong pulse from the fighter com had hidden it from Anu's people. The coded squeal he and he alone had pre-recorded and tacked into the middle of the strike report lasted approximately two milliseconds, and Dahak had his orders.

And then, at last, there was a moment to relax and blink his eyes, refocusing on the interior of the cockpit. A moment to realize that they had succeeded... and that they were alive.

"Done," he said softly, turning to look at Jiltanith for the first time since they launched their attack.

"Aye, and well done," she replied. Their gazes met, and for once there was no hostility between them.

"Beautiful flying, 'Tanni," he said, and saw her eyes widen as he used the familiar form of her name for the first time. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far, but then she nodded.

"Art no sluggard thyself... Colin," she said.

And she smiled.