The detonation was more impressive than Grady expected, and he realized he should have put more distance between himself and the starcarrier before setting off the explosives.
Unable to escape the oncoming stream of wreckage, the hapless destroyer—whose shields were still down, no doubt hoping to reacquire a tractor lock on the mysterious intruder—seemed to shake and judder. Its entire shape shuddered beneath the fierce pummeling before it heaved onto its side as sections of its hull disintegrated, bodies of its crewmembers intermingled among the cartwheeling fragments.
An alarm shrilled. Grady didn’t need to glance at the holo to understand what was happening—he instantly recognized the sound: proximity alert. While the destroyer had shielded his vessel from the worst of the detonation, the torrent of debris continued to spiral away from the stricken starcarrier, wreckage from the destroyer adding to the tumult. Gigantic slabs of twisted metal, surrounded by a mist of smaller debris and displaced plasma, clouded the rear camera’s view and closed on the insertion craft.
Grady pushed the control stick forward with one hand, while using his other to tap through a series of commands on the virtual screen, routing emergency power to the engines. He swore as a heavy object hammered the shields, whose strength dropped under the clattering impact. The leading edge of the debris field had reached him. Another crashing blow, and the shields weakened further.
The proximity alarm’s volume grew, sounding frantic to Grady’s overwrought senses, as an even bigger section of wreckage bore down on him, large enough to overwhelm the remaining shield reserve.
37
The vast, spreading tsunami of wreckage bore down on the diminutive stealth ship, whose thrusters emitted a discordant, high-pitched mechanical moan as they struggled to keep ahead of the looming wave of destruction. With a flick of his fingers, Grady silenced the wailing proximity alarm. He had seconds before impact and sensed that the shields—much reduced in strength—would not withstand the pummeling the insertion craft was about to receive.
“Not enough time to plot a sublight course,” he murmured. “I need to boost the thrusters.” His eyes fell on the stealth drive’s display and he clucked his tongue. “More power. That’s what’s required now. And I know just where to get it.” His hand hovered over the controls, and he uttered a guttural curse. “Crushed to death by a debris field of my own making. Or risk being exposed to enemy fire or another attempt to capture me. Not sure I like those odds!”
He made his decision and switched off the stealth engine. A loud ding sounded and a husky, if artificial, female voice intoned: “Warning. Stealth drive manually disengaged. This vessel is now detectable.” Even with death hovering above his shoulder, Grady quirked an eyebrow at the program’s calm manner of communicating. When the message began to loop, volume ramping up, he muted it with another gesture.
Now that the stealth engine was no longer drawing power, he recognized what he had to do. Grady routed every iota of the freed-up energy to the thrusters, saving nothing extra for the shields. If he couldn’t outrun the wreckage, he was convinced the barrier wouldn’t hold, even if reinforced.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. The vessel juddered, then he felt the deck thrum through the soles of his combat boots as the ship shot forward like a stone from a slingshot and soon outpaced the slowing debris cloud.
He heaved a sigh of relief as the flashing red proximity alert faded, then peered at the sensor holo, searching for a clear path away from the imperial fleet. The enemy force was in disarray, Grady noted with a grim sense of satisfaction. Several ships had changed course and were converging on the damaged starcarrier to render assistance. He might yet escape with his life.
His jubilation was short-lived. A new alarm squawked, this time drawing his attention to the tactical overlay: weapons fire. The craft jolted as a hard impact hammered the shields, throwing Grady against the already tightened seat harness.
A fighter—Grady suspected it was the same one that had flown close for a visual inspection of the flagship’s stern and veered off as the destroyer attempted to snare him in its tractor beam—now reappeared. Laser cannons blazing, it had started its attack run, the stealth craft square in its targeting reticle. Two other fighters, further away, were also racing to intercept.
Grady cursed, even as he returned fire, aiming at the closest fighter. He had no illusions that the lightly armed stealth ship would emerge victorious against three incoming Starcasters, similar to the model of fighter he had once flown back in his own reality, though with slight modifications. He was intimately familiar with their capabilities. The best he might hope for was to maneuver and evade fire for as long as possible and try to reach open space to engage the sublight engines.
Even as the thought crossed his mind, he knew it was a forlorn hope. The fighters were rushing to cut off his escape. Turning around would mean heading back toward the enemy fleet, and certain doom. And if he re-routed emergency power to the stealth engine, he would lose momentum before the drive engaged, leaving him a sitting duck.
Worse still, as he scanned the displays, he realized the shields would fail before the stealth drive cloaked him once again. He would soon be completely vulnerable and, hoping to forestall the inevitable, sent some of the extra energy to the shields, while still retaining most of it for the engines.
He bucked and zigzagged, pushing the tiny ship into a sequence of unpredictable moves intended to throw off his attacker’s aim and minimize the risk of a further hit. Another alert shrilled: the fighter had launched a missile. Grady activated the point-defense system and a tiny drone sped off at a sharp angle. It was designed to emit a powerful signal for a brief time, mimicking the stealth craft’s sensor profile. Would it fool the onrushing projectile?
The missile altered course and chased after the drone. Grady clenched his fist and muttered, “Hells, yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” His celebration was stifled as another blast slammed into the shields and the tactical readout screeched. A second fighter was now in range. He punched the weapons controls, an answering barrage of laser bolts pounding the new attacker’s shields, which held steady despite the beating.
Grady knew he was running out of time. He wasn’t able to escape to open space and, despite his frantic, random maneuvers, guessed he couldn’t keep the three fighters off his back for long. As if in response to his desperate thoughts, a harsh tone grated from the console as another missile winged toward him. Once again, he launched a defensive drone, only this time, the projectile ignored the speeding decoy and continued to zero in on the stealth ship.
He had one chance. Could he lose the missile in the debris field? He pulled a tight turn—artificial gravity straining to compensate for the increased g-force—and made straight for the cluster of wreckage. The sudden, unexpected change in direction seemed to take the pilot of the nearest fighter by surprise, and they banked steeply in an attempt to turn and follow Grady. The other two attackers peeled away to avoid colliding with their comrade or each other.
As the floating maze of debris—a confusion of the starcarrier’s mangled propulsion housing and large segments of the destroyer’s ruptured hull—loomed large in his viewscreen, Grady willed the stealth craft to go faster. He had no more power to send to the thrusters without weakening the shields, which he wasn’t prepared to do as tiny but razor-sharp fragments began to patter against the barrier.
His eyes widened when an overlay appeared on the wraparound screen. The tactical system had analyzed his precarious situation and reached a chilling conclusion: the missile was going to hit before he reached the relative safety of the biggest chunks of wreckage. He doubted his weakened shields would protect him from the blast.
A strange sense of calm crept over Grady, and he cracked a soft smile. Was this how his life ended? He reminded himself that he was fighting for a just cause—freedom from tyranny—even if the battle was taking place in a dimension far from his proper home.
As a trainee fighter pilot, he’d dreamed of facing down superior odds in a heroic, death-defying dogfight. Well, it seemed the universe might have heard him and granted his wish. He just had to hope the outcome wouldn’t be terminal.
An explosion bloomed in the rear-view camera, now displayed in a corner of the primary display. The missile had detonated in a silent shimmer of incandescent light, reduced to a tangled mass of spiraling rubble. Had the projectile hit something Grady hadn’t noticed in his wild flight to find refuge—a section of hull plating from the destroyer, perhaps?
The answer came a heartbeat later as a torrent of laser bolts illuminated the area of space behind him. Each of the three pursuing fighters came under a punishing, sustained attack. The rebel reinforcements had arrived!
With their attention focused on the hurrying stealth craft, the imperial pilots had failed to notice the sudden appearance of a series of rapidly approaching points of light, the fresh batch of rebel vessels arriving from New Heb and dropping out of FTL as close to the fight as they dared.
One of the enemy fighters, whose shields Grady had already battered, exploded in a frenzy of fire, light, and shattered components. The surviving two broke off their pursuit and attempted to turn and face the new threat. One managed to shoot off a few bolts before its shields failed under the unremitting onslaught. The other banked away in a panic, misjudged the turn, and plowed into the debris field before breaking apart.
Reaching forward, Grady toggled the comm, using the pre-selected secure channel assigned to the rebel fleet. “Am I ever glad to see you,” he said, his voice warm with joy as he released the tension he’d been holding in. “Things were looking kinda dodgy there.”
“What can I tell you?” came Phil’s voice. “I went back to New Heb to gather up the rest of the reserve fighters and we stopped off for coffee and doughnuts on the way.” His old-new friend chuckled. “I figured you’d be fit to handle matters here without me for a while.”
Grady let out a deep sigh. “Hate to disappoint you, but another few seconds and you’d have been scooping up what was left of me in a bucket.” He eyed the tactical display and eased back on the throttle as the rebel craft zoomed past on both sides, hurrying to join their colleagues already engaged against the imperial task force.
“Speaking of going splat, I see you’ve been busy,” Phil commed. “The starcarrier looks in a bad way.” His tone became more serious. “Sorry we got delayed. The damage to New Heb’s main hangar bay took longer to repair than I’d have liked. That’s why I left the battle here for a bit, to hurry things along at the station.”
“Not to worry,” Grady said as a couple of rebel craft slowed to approach him. “You arrived in the proverbial nick of time, though I’m not sure when my overwrought heart rate will recover. The Gany is hurt, but not yet out of the fight. Still, I’d say the imperials are one confused bunch right about now.”
“Copy that,” Phil said. “I’ve detailed two fighters to accompany you back to Adventurer. We could use her firepower to help give the enemy a whipping. We have them on the run, thanks to you. Time to finish the job and send them scurrying from the sector with their imperial tails between their legs.”
“You got it,” Grady replied as his pair of escorts executed a precise turn and drew parallel with him, all three now heading away from the battle. “Behave yourself during my absence.”
“No promises,” Phil said.
As he arrowed toward the waiting gunship, Grady gave a throaty exhalation. “What do you know—maybe I’m not going to die today, after all?”
38
