She pulled out fifty of the large kilocredit coins, and shoved them in her pocket. Then she put the rest back into the sack and dropped it into the hole, taking another careful look around before she covered it up, and slid the concrete back in place.

  She put her hand in her pocket, running her fingers through the coins. She tried to rest her body if not her mind. Sleeping would be too dangerous, but she had to wait until the curfew was over before she could go back into the streets, and there was nothing to do but sit there quietly, watchfully…waiting for morning.

  IT proved to be a difficult task in its own way, staving off boredom, holding back sleep. But she managed it, through sheer discipline if nothing else.

  Daybreak finally came. It was almost time to meet Yantis.

  Almost.

  The curfew extended for another twenty minutes, and the last thing she needed was to get caught with a pocket full of platinum coins. She’d be lucky enough if the Kriegeri she’d lost the day before hadn’t managed to get enough of her on their scanners to put together a decent image. Having every trooper in the District searching for her wasn’t going to make things any easier.

  She sat and closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply and trying to center herself. She’d known her mission would be dangerous, but even earlier, as she’d realized that she wouldn’t be able to get off the planet, that she would have to send Pegasus back without her, it hadn’t seemed quite real.

  She looked around again and tried to suppress a full body shiver, without success. Whatever she managed to do, whatever information she was able to get back to her people, she was stranded.

  Sitting there in the cold predawn dusk, alone, it felt very real.

  Chapter Nineteen

  CFS Wolverine

  950,000,000 Kilometers from Planet Danovar

  Santara System

  Year 321 AC

  Clint Winters sat in the captain’s chair on Wolverine. The escort ship hadn’t been built to accommodate an admiral, but the ship’s skipper had vacated his position the instant Winters stepped onto the bridge, casually ignoring the admiral’s efforts to deter him with an intensity that bordered between hard-edged respect and well-meaning insubordination.

  “Push up the thrust, Captain. Let’s see if we can get one fifteen out of the reactor.” That was a lot, and Winters knew he was pushing his luck, and that of everyone on Wolverine. But he also knew, if his escorts didn’t get into position soon enough to save at least some of Stockton’s bombers, he would very likely witness the functional end of the war in the next few hours. The escorts had to knock out some of those Hegemony fighters, or at least distract them long enough for Stockton’s wings to escape.

  “Engineering reports reactor output at one fifteen, Admiral. The chief engineer warns he cannot guarantee how long we’ll be able to maintain those levels.”

  “Understood.” Winters did understand. He just knew it didn’t matter. The engineer would do his best, he was sure of that. But best or not, there was no other option. Getting there too late would be as bad as not getting there at all, and even though the other ships were farther forward, he needed to be up with them, both to cut comm delays in transmitting orders, and simply because he had to be there.

  “Admiral, the cruiser line is engaging the Hegemony escorts.”

  Winters snapped his head around, watching on the Wolverine’s main display as the cruisers opened fire, ravaging the approaching line of enemy ships. It was something that had been fleetingly rare in the war against the Hegemony, a force of Rim warships fighting with significant weapons superiority. That was an indirect effect of the price the bomber wings had extracted from the enemy. The Hegemony had stripped virtually every ship-to-ship weapon from their smaller craft, replacing them with more point defense batteries to engage fighters. It was a change that had made perfect tactical sense. At least until that moment.

  Winters watched, with no small level of satisfaction, as the cruisers tore into their Hegemony counterparts, while enduring only sporadic and largely ineffective return fire. It was the mirror image of the nightmare he knew Stockton’s people were enduring, but it still roused his feral side. He’d always tried to approach war as a professional, but he was only lying to himself when he tried to deny he enjoyed watching thousands of Hegemony spacers blasted to oblivion. They had killed too many of his spacers—too many of his friends—for him to look on things with cold analysis. He didn’t feel good about the thirst for blood he felt, but that didn’t make it any less real.

  The cruisers were taking a terrible toll on the enemy, at least on a ship-to-ship basis. But they were vastly outnumbered. The Hegemony point defense armaments weren’t a serious threat, not to cruisers at least, but the fact remained that even after the cruisers took down hundreds of their enemy counterparts, a portion of the Hegemony force was going to get through to hit Stockton’s retreating squadrons.

  Winters almost ordered the frigates to come about as well, to join the cruisers in their fight, but he knew that was impossible. The smaller escorts had to hit those Hegemony interceptors, or Stockton’s wings would be exterminated before they even reached the Hegemony escort line. He’d just have to deal with the surviving enemy escorts later. Somehow.

  “All point defense batteries…prepare to fire as we enter range.” Winters knew his gunners would have a hard time hitting targets as small as fighter so far out, but the Hegemony pilots were rookies—had to be rookies—and incoming fire would at least distract them from their pursuit of the Rim wings.

  At least that’s what Winters was hoping.

  “All ships report gunnery stations ready, Admiral.” Wolverine’s captain had settled into an effective role as Winters’s aide, and he was doing a good job of it. The admiral thought about taking the officer with him when he went back to Constitution, but he flashed back to his own days in his first independent command, and the way a pompous admiral would have had to drag him from his con to stick him in a staff position. He let it go. Wolverine’s captain deserved to see the fight through with his people.

  And they deserved him. Clint Winters had always prided himself on his focus on the rank and file spacers, and he wasn’t about to change that anytime soon.

  His eyes darted back to the display, to the gauge showing the ranges. Wolverine was still well out of range, but the rest of the line was closing fast. They were still maybe ten thousand kilometers too far out, but that was no impediment to seeing how much his people could rile up their green enemies, even if the chance of scoring any hits was slim to none.

  “All ships…open fire.”

  * * *

  Damn, that was close…

  Stockton could feel the sweat pouring down the back of his neck like waves. A quick glance confirmed his own gut calculations. That last shot had come within seventy meters of his ship. That was close. Beyond close in the context of space combat.

  The Hegemony pilots were rookies, he could see that well enough in the roughness of their maneuver and in the tentative way they attacked. But their equipment was top-notch. The targeting systems were every bit as good as the ones Stockton and his people had, and maybe even better. And constant retreat and evasion drained any pilot, even star aces like Stockton. You could jerk around and dodge fifty shots, but if you missed the fifty-first, you were just as dead as a pilot who took the first blast amidships.

  Stockton had evaded at least fifty close calls over the past hour, but that last one had come a hair’s breadth from finishing his illustrious career then and there.

  Over a thousand of his people were gone already, and the Hegemony fighters were sill pursuing, still taking out more with every passing minute. He’d done some rough calculations, and the results were about as grim as they could be. Maybe five hundred of his ships would make it, at least without the intervention of the approaching frigates. The Rim escorts were the last hope most of his people had. Stockton didn’t like seeing the fighter corps desperately waiting for assistance to bail it out of a jam, but just then he was ready to take any help he could get.

  A jam you got them into. Stockton knew on one level, the Colossus was a deadly danger, and he’d done the right thing in ordering the double payloads. The only thing he could have done.

  He also knew that right thing was getting hundreds of his pilots killed. He’d had no way of knowing the Colossus carried fighters, but he wasn’t in a mood to let himself off the hook…and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed inevitable the Hegemony would eventually deploy their own attack craft. He and his pilots had ensured that with the deadly toll they’d extracted in battle after battle. He’d worried about it a hundred times, tried to imagine how it would happen, how he would deal with it when it did. And then he let himself get caught flatfooted. Worse, even…his scheme of double-loading his ships couldn’t have been timed any worse.

  You managed to wait until they were ready to launch their squadrons, and you accommodated them and walked right into a trap, without so much as enough laser power to heat up some soup.

  In a strange way, he found the self-hatred useful. Berating himself for the losses, for his lack of perception, somehow helped him stave off the stark terror, not only of what he faced personally, but of what the loss of so many bombers meant to the overall war effort. There was no point of thinking about tomorrow. He wasn’t even sure there would be a tomorrow. The present was his problem, and the only one that mattered.

  “All wings, adjust vectors to 320.180.240. We’re going to go right past those friendly escorts, hugging the port side of their formation. Those frigates are already firing, and that’s going to give these Hegemony bastards something to think about besides frying us.”

  He tapped his own controls, bringing his ship toward the line of frigates, even as the acknowledgements poured in. His bombers were moving at close to one percent of lightspeed, and that meant it would take some time for the realignment to be completed. But there was enough distance—just—to the escort line. If his people could hold out for another twenty minutes, even fifteen, they just might make it back.

  Stockton didn’t know who had sent the escorts forward—probably Admiral Barron or Admiral Winters—but whoever it was just might have saved some of his bombers. “Keep power output maxed the whole way No letup, none at all.” He knew that order would kill some of his pilots. The harder they pushed their reactors, the more would suffer failures and malfunctions. Catastrophic breakdowns would destroy ships in an instant, but with the Hegemony ships tight on the formation’s tail, even minor malfunctions would be fatal. Every one of his pilots who couldn’t run, who couldn’t get away, was going to die.

  Even those who escaped the enemy would still be in danger if they took too much damage. The formation would be moving at close to 0.02c when they got past the escort line. Any ship that lost power would be unable to decelerate as they neared the launch platforms. They would zip past their motherships and into the depths of space, far beyond the range of any rescue efforts.

  Whatever happened, Stockton knew it would be the darkest day in the history of the fighter corps. For all his fame, all he renown and praise heaped so often upon him…he was the officer who had led the massed fighter wings, not only of the Confederation, but of the entire Rim, to their doom.

  To hell with it. We will fight the enemy, in the darkness or in the daylight, a thousand of us, or one alone. Any one of us is a threat to them, unless they can kill us all…

  Which, he knew, they just might do.

  * * *

  “Stay on the enemy bombers. Ignore the escort craft.” Krimack knew his orders were easier given than followed. His squadrons had enjoyed an unmatched superiority in the combat so far. He’d expected to have a significant advantage against the enemy bombers, but he hadn’t dared to imagine an edge as great as the one destiny had given him.

  The bombers were completely without weapons apart from their payloads. Not an anti-fighter missile, not a laser turret, nothing. Not on any of them. His people had swarmed in unopposed, and for the first two hours of the battle his casualties had totaled exactly three, and each of those had resulted from equipment malfunction.

  All through training, he’d dreaded facing the enemy squadrons, even in their cumbersome bombers. His pilots were inexperienced, and Hegemony training had always stressed teamwork and deemphasized the importance of individual action, which was the emphasis of effective fighter tactics. He’d had to fight a basketful of preconceived notions just to get his people to where they were, which was nowhere near the equal of their enemies. Not yet, at least.

  Now, the easy killing is over. They’re going to get an expensive lesson…

  The interceptors had stayed tight on the bombers, gunning them down in whole sections. But now they were in range of the enemy’s escorts.

  The point defense batteries had opened fire just two minutes before, and he’d already lost two hundred ships. He’d almost ordered his squadrons to break off. They’d won a great victory, taken out half of the enemy’s bomber wings. That would have a tremendous impact on the war, and on later battles. But it wasn’t decisive, at least not totally so. The Colossus had come to break the enemy’s will to fight, and he’d seen too much of the grim stubbornness of the Rimdwellers to feel confident they would ever yield while they retained the ability to fight. Only the complete destruction of their heretofore unbeaten bomber wings could assure their capitulation.

  And that was worth taking any losses necessary.

  “Maintain contact and continue fire.” It was a repetitive battle cry, perhaps, but he was going to do whatever was necessary to keep his people in the fight. Kriegeri didn’t run. They were trained for battle from early childhood, and unit and national pride was everything to them. But they were human beings, too, and the pilots were the first of their kind, thrust half-trained into an unfamiliar situation. Krimack wasn’t taking any chances with morale.

  He angled his throttle, changing his thrust vector and subtly altering his course, just as a series of laser blasts ripped through the space he would have occupied. He knew the concept of evasive maneuver, and the logic behind it, but it was still far from natural, even for him. The rest of his pilots were worse off, of course, and that was becoming evident in the suddenly growing loss figures.

  Krimack turned his head back toward the casualty display. Over four hundred. More than fifteen percent of his total strength. Gone in a matter of minutes.

  “All ships, maintain fire. Take down as many of those bombers as possible.” Krimack was beginning to realize he was going to have to withdraw his squadrons. He felt the victory he’d craved, the annihilation of the enemy wings, slipping away. His squadrons were already in range of the escorts and paying a heavy price. And it would take time to decelerate and to pull away. His wings had come to trap the enemy bomber forces, and to destroy them…and to a certain, perhaps partial, extent, they had done just that.

  Now they were facing the same situation, engulfed by enemy escorts and being gunned down by relentless fire.

  He glanced back at the screen. The Hegemony escorts were pushing through the line of Rim cruisers trying to block them. They’d paid heavily, but they’d massively outnumbered their attackers. Entire sections had been obliterated, but enough had gotten through. The Rim bombers’ ordeal wasn’t over, not by a long shot. The enemy attack craft were moving at extreme velocity. They had no real chance to avoid the oncoming frigates. They were going to endure another attack before they could escape.

  The enemy wings wouldn’t be eradicated, perhaps, but they would be shattered, their confidence badly shaken, and their strength reduced to a fraction of what it had been. Krimack didn’t know if that would be enough to compel a surrender, but it wasn’t his job to know that. He’d done all he could. Seeing the Hegemony’s first strike force destroyed would serve no purpose. If he didn’t pull them out soon, there wouldn’t be any more Hegemony fighters.

  “All squadrons, full deceleration now. Come about and return to base, evasive courses the entire way.” He didn’t know how well his rookie pilots would dodge the incoming fire, or for that matter, whether he himself would manage it. But it was time for his wings to declare victory and get the hell out.

  While he still had any ships left.

  Chapter Twenty

  Spacer’s District

  Port Royal City

  Dannith, Ventica III

  Year 321 AC

  Andi stood utterly straight, her back pressed hard against the wall. She was quiet, as utterly silent as she could manage, even limiting her breath to slow, carefully-executed inhales and exhales. There were Kriegeri out in the street, two or three, at least, and some kind of trouble. For an instant, she’d thought she was done, that they had her. But then she realized they were chasing someone else. She wondered for a few seconds as she hid, whether there was some kind of active resistance operation in the District, but then she realized it was just a pair of drunks or junkies, probably wandering out from whatever wrecked hovel in which they’d spent the night.

  A couple of vagrants were hardly a major threat to the occupiers, but she was still surprised there hadn’t been more of a response. Back in the day, if the Port Royal City authorities had decided to round up a couple derelicts from the District, they’d damn sure have brought more than two or three police. She wondered if the Hegemony had the planet wrapped up so tightly, they’d become overconfident or if something else was going on. Yantis had told her to watch the patrols, but she’d actually been surprised at how few troopers she’d seen.