Heritage of Flight Read Free Page A

through the screens. As the riderships poised for their first strike, words emerged from the static created by screens and Secess’ jammers ... “will begin pumping..."
    "What?” That cry came from a pilot several hundred kilometers out ... the emissions of her ship shone more clearly on her status boards than the actual ship itself to the naked eye. Pauli knew that one too: before the war had pulled her from her labs, she had had an interest in physics.
    "...all Jump-capable ships retreat, prepare for Jump on the mark ... others link with Amherst and Daedalus ... prepare for upconversion."
    She remembered now just why the man had received his captaincy. It wasn't just that he was an engineer; it was that he was a weapons specialist. And when he got started talking, he was a spellbinder. One off-watch, he had entertained an entire wardroom with his plans for converting the ship's weapons to gamma-ray lasers. The problem wasn't breaking the atomic nuclei to produce gamma rays—more than one planet knew that to its lasting and highly radioactive sorrow. The problem with gamma-ray lasers lay in pumping the material, then raising it to a uniform energy level from which the actual laser would be fired—all without melting the systems ... even the adamantine components of plated diamond that served shipwide as microprocessors and were all but indestructible ... or letting the laser beam degrade. Thus far, the captain's engineers had managed to store energy from the ship's power plant in what the techs called an isomeric state. The problem was altering its energy level. Where would he find an outside...
    An outside source? He had an outside source: the firelock.
    "Lee, don't!” Borodin's voice crackled through the fragmented communication, then squealed out. “ Daedalus , what's your status..."
    "Jump plotted..."
    "You don't know this is going to work,” Borodin argued.
    "We don't know it won't,” came Captain Lee's voice. “In any case, I have been ordered to use any and all means to safeguard your passengers."
    Arnaut and those other damned marshals! That was a whole ship out there they were talking about hurling into the equivalent of a very small nova. Not only was the ship not expendable, it had a hell of a lot of fine people on it, friends and comrades of Pauli and the other pilots.
    Quickly the pilots conferred on ridership frequencies as, all around them, the Secess’ fighters struck, attempting to break their formations, weakening their chance of ending the firelock. Disobey orders? Retreat? Turn and fight all comers? Counterpointing their hasty quarrel over the best alternative was the captains’ argument: Leonidas , stubborn, sure of its strength; Daedalus , frantically testing systems and backups; and the Amherst . Voices rose and fell, cleared, then phased out as the firelock intensified. Pauli imagined that her short, sweat-damp hair stood on end from the energies that Leonidas prepared to harness.
    A short bark, and a spate of sounds comprehensible only as orders silenced the captains until Borodin's deep, slightly accented voice took over the comms. “All ships!” he cried in the archaic slang of a planet probably lost to all of them forever. Slang was better than code for emergency messages. Code could be broken. Slang could only be understood—and the Secess’ had moved so far from Alliance that they no longer shared many of the same referents. “Mayday! Sauve qui peut!" It was the call of uttermost disaster, old even as Earth counted age, a cry for flight so desperate that those unable to keep up must be left behind. And if Borodin sounded it, it could not be disregarded. He was too canny a fighter to cry rout where none existed.
    Pauli's ship sensors fluctuated wildly. The radiation detectors emitted a steady beeping which meant, if she were lucky, a clouded badge and a warning, and if she were not ... she didn't expect to live long enough to have any children, so it made little difference. Firing