Heritage of Flight Read Free

uniform only because war broke out and she had no choice; Rafe, half a civ himself ... best not think of Rafe or that last fight when she had finally abandoned their dream of becoming a first-in team, or transferring from the Amherst to the more sophisticated Leonidas . The kids screaming and crying, wetting themselves, some of them, maybe; the civs struggling to hold to some sort of order as the lights flickered to conserve power, sending it to armscomp and the shields, and the comfort of yellow light faded to uterine crimson, then to twilight.
    Her boards showed the haze of screens encircling Leonidas and the Secess'. Just one glancing hit, just one, and metal vapor would cloud those shields, make them visible to the naked eye. The screens hazed as Leonidas 's lasers slashed out. The running lights dimmed on the big ship. Inside, even the thrum of its lifesupport would pause for the space of a gasp, then resume as power flowed away from armaments and throughout the ship, then gathered for the next surge.
    She herself targeted and fired—not mechanically, but with the maniacal precision of a chessmaster forced to choose a move in microseconds. The ship yawed, then resumed attitude. She scanned damage control: assuming nothing else failed, the hit wasn't major. She could press the attack, and she did. Acceleration touched her, pressed webs against her, and apparent motion increased. She fought.
    Once again Leonidas 's lasers seemed to coil and spring; the Secess’ ship returned fire. A pallid haze enveloped both ships, glinting as the white dwarf's savage light struck clouds of frozen vapor into ferocious rainbows. The light intensified about the ships, then widened as power was diverted from other systems into protection.
    "Keep back !” Pauli whispered. Signalling to the three ships nearest her, she headed toward Leonidas , careful to use all available cover to dodge the Secess’ one-man craft. On unattainable Earth, she had heard, there were beasts who fought each season over mates. Their weapons were immense racks of horns which they would lower and aim at one another. But once those horns ... those antlers ... locked, the beasts were too stubborn, or too stupid, to be willing or able to disengage. Some, she heard, died that way, to be found, seasons later, as racks of bleached bones, their fatal antlers still, inexorably locked.
    Once, and once only, she had seen firelock: two ships of roughly equal strength committed, shields and weapons, to destroying one another, as weapons and defense reached a balance in which the captain who diverted power to weapons was instantly consumed as his shields weakened, or the captain who reinforced shields was driven back and driven back until, inevitably, he had to weaken them.
    Firelock ended one of two ways: swift, vicious intervention by ridercraft or another ship; or mutual annihilation as systems failed, or overloaded. A brilliant pilot might elude it; but Leonidas 's master was no such thing. In the past three years, they had started promoting senior engineers rather than strategists in order to safeguard those ships still in good repair. He might not be pilot enough to avoid firelock, but Pauli was about to stake her life on his being a good enough engineer to hold out until the riderships managed to break it.
    They regrouped outside firing range of the two huge ships, now enveloped in light, punishing even as the viewscreens polarized. Half the riders reconfigured as guards against the Secess’ single fighters, while the others prepared for the first of a series of quick onslaughts against the base ship: in fast, fire hard and full power—then out again before the ship's heavy armaments could skewer and melt them at a beam. This would either weaken the Secess’ ship long enough for Leonidas to strike hard, killing or crippling its enemy, or enable Leonidas to pull back and retreat.
    Ship-to-ship transmission crackled and whined in and out of phase, weakened by passage