Flight of the Outcast (22 page)

   She had a searing vision of Theron being scoured clean of human life.

   
Sterilize.

   She felt an alien resentment that the Admiral was one of them, was human, and that the Admiral's orders must be obeyed.

   
The main craft. Take the main craft—

   They wanted to take the cruiser. As they had taken the Raider fighters. The Tetras wanted a cruiser—

   Or the one giving the orders wanted them to take it. What admiral would give such an order?

   The
Adastra
had been a dreadnaught, but even so, nine small Tetra craft attacking without warning had all but destroyed it. If the Tetras had command of a cruiser—

   
Find the orb!

   "How am I receiving the Tetra transmissions?"

   
Unknown. We have sustained damage. Someone aboard is
disrupting all communications. Hurry! Find the orb!

   
Someone aboard.

   
Kayser. It had to be Kayser! Whose uncle was an admiral—

   Asteria's trajectory had taken her past the High Docks. She saw two Empyrean fighters ahead, confronting three enemies. She accelerated to help, and at extreme range, she fired, disabling one of the enemy ships. As her fighter flashed past it, she concentrated fiercely:
Where is the orb?

   And she felt a surge of—not emotion, too diffuse to be called that—an urge, an irrational desire, to protect the orb—to keep it safe—alien minds thinking of the orb, thinking of its position—

   
It's under the Docks!

   Garbled transmissions now: "They've retreated!"

   "They're attacking the
Pax
. Guard flight, report in! Who's with us? Guard one here!"

   "Guard three!"

   Silence. Asteria said, "Guard seven! Come with me. There's a Tetra ship near the High Docks. Concentrate your fire on that!"

   She soared away without hearing any acknowledgment. Ahead, above, lay the High Docks, and past it the
Pax,
now fighting desperately. The Docks swelled rapidly in her view as she sped toward it, recklessly using the ship's energy. If she didn't have enough left to get back to the
Pax
or enough to engage the enemy command ship, it wouldn't matter anyway.

   There it was! Nearly invisible, a jet-black, glittering, faceted orb, only tens of meters across. It was already firing missile weapons, tiny streaking lances less than a meter long. Asteria waited until they were moments away, then switched on grav drive, set to its highest level. The repelling force pulsed outward, and the incoming missiles glanced off the invisible barrier. Now the orb was firing lasers—and again she had the uncanny sense of hearing the enemy communications:

   
Fighters protect the command. Command under attack by
two enemies. Fighters protect the command.

   Two? With a sickening lurch, Asteria realized that Guard one had been destroyed. She fired her plasma cannon. The orb twirled, and she missed; but she had locked onto the target visually, and with her heightened instincts, she maneuvered to keep it in sight, the G forces all but pulling her apart. Six enemy fighters vectoring in fast. Now the orb was against the blue of Theron, a stark black shape.

   
You cannot do this. We have allied with the human
command. You cannot do this—

   "Watch me," she said aloud, and she loosed every weapon she had. The orb exploded, and a moment later, her fighter plunged through the wreckage, taking hits. She felt—

   
Ours! Ours! Our—

   The belt.

   Tetra technology!

   That was how she had intercepted their communications—

   But it was no longer Tetra tech. It had molded itself to her physiology, to her mind—

   Everything went black.

he floated in absolute darkness. The fighter had taken

     damage. Its sensors no longer worked. She had no power. No life support.

   
I've got maybe five minutes of oxygen. My last trajectory
will take me straight into the atmosphere of Theron. The fighter
will burn up on entry. So—I'll suffocate, or I'll burn. Which
will happen first?

   She had barely had time to think that before she felt the weird sensation that the belt was growing again. But this time—

   This time, it didn't stop.

   It flowed up her body and down her legs. She had no way of judging time. It could have taken a nanosecond, or it could have taken a full minute.

   She couldn't resist, not in the pressure suit, not locked into the body-contoured confines of the fighter. Not when the flowing metal encased her face. Not when it closed over her head, over her fingers, over her toes, completely armoring her body.

   And then—

   Then she saw.

   Not with her eyes, but through the skin of living metal that had covered her. She saw through the fighter itself, a universe sketched in unfamiliar colors and pulsing with unknown energies. Theron spun before her. The fighter was almost at the edge of the atmosphere. She had seconds left to live—

   But another craft was pacing her. It was not a fighter, but a repair unit, moving too fast for its systems. It extruded claspers.

   
It can't possibly have enough power to lift the fighter.

   She felt rather than heard the sound, transmitted through the fighter hull, of the pincers seizing the fighter. And then the hatch crumpled away.

   "Aster! Are you alive?"

   
Dai.

   "Here," she subvocalized. "I'm here!"

   She
felt
the armor transmit the words in the comm spectrum.

   "Can you get out? I think your pressure suit might have half a minute of oxygen left."

   "I'll try."

   She braced herself and shoved. The crumpled hatch broke free and tumbled away. She pushed herself out of the pilot's cradle—and felt the ripping of the pressure suit. It shredded away.

   But the armor held. She writhed into space, reached for a handhold, and seized the pincers. "I'm holding onto your ship. Let the fighter go, or we'll both be dragged down!"

   The pincers opened, and the repair ship powered up. "Can you hang on? I'll have to try to pull you inside!"

   "Negative!" cried Asteria. "Lift us out with grav drive! I'll let you know if I'm running out of air, then we can worry about getting me aboard!"

   She locked her arms through the struts of the pincer. Between her dangling feet, she saw her fighter, mangled, twirling down toward the planetary surface. Only when it had begun to streak orange did she say, "Are we in safe orbit?"

   "For the moment. All right, I'm going to open the retrieval bay. I think I can route oxygen into it. Hang on!"

   Behind her, the bay hatch dissolved. She hauled herself inside. "Close it!"

   The bay hatch reformed. "How's your ox?" Dai asked anxiously.

   "No readings."

   "Flooding the bay…pressurized. Can you take off your helmet?"

   It was a tight fit. She squirmed and twisted and finally managed to unseal and take off the flight helmet. Her face was still encased in the metal armor that had formed from the belt. "Helmet's off," she said, without mentioning the armor. "What's happening on the
Pax
?"

   "The enemy fighters broke off contact. They're dead in space now. Our fighters are mopping up. Talan's sent a marine detachment to retake the Docks. How did Raiders get so many ships?"

   "From the Tetras," Asteria told him grimly. "They've been capturing Empyrean ships for years. We were wrong about the Tetras. They're not organic. They're something like living machines. Silicon-based. They don't think we're real."

   "What?"

   "They see us as something like Cybots. But that's changed. Someone in the Fleet has allied with them. Some kind of bargain—the Tetras want this system. I saw their minds. They want to—to sterilize Theron, to kill all life on it. I don't know why."

   "The planet's all right. We've established contact. The jamming broke off all of a sudden. They've been cut off because all the orbiting stations were seized a few days ago, but the population's all right." A pause, and then Dai added, "We lost the new governor."

   "I saw it happen."

   "Okay, we're coming up to the ship. This is going to be a rough landing. A lot of systems are down. Hang on."

   It was a very rough landing. But the armor that encased Asteria somehow anticipated every jolt and twist, and it spurred her to brace an arm, stiffen a leg, and hang on for dear life. And at last, just before the bay door dissolved again, the armor retreated, flowed down her body, and became a belt again.

   She crept out onto a flight deck that showed the shambles of battle. Dai hopped out of the repair pod's cockpit. He held out a hand and helped her up. She remembered to breathe again—the armor had taken over the job of supplying oxygen to her, having "learned" that from the pressure suit—and gasped, "How bad?"

   "We lost fourteen of our fifty fighters," Dai said. "Took hull and structural damage. Lost about half of our sensor array. We had casualties aboard too. I don't know how many."

   Asteria saw a familiar face in the crowd on the flight deck. Kain Kayser came toward them, a look of concern on his thin face. "Are you two all right?"

   "We're fine," Asteria said. "Where were you in the fighting?"

   "Me?" Kayser blinked. "I—I was helping, trying to regain communications—"

   "Funny how everything went dead at the crucial moment."

   Kayser's eyes narrowed. "We were doing all we could," he said. "But I'm glad you two are safe." He held out a hand to Dai. "They'll call you a hero for going out in a repair ship to rescue her."

   Dai ignored his hand. "No, they won't," he said. "I did it without orders. I stole the ship."

   "Get to stations!" an officer yelled, and they split up.

   In the engine control room, Asteria learned that the engine crew had not lost anyone. "We were working overtime, though," Skarne said. "The weapons had a high energy demand."

   "What happens on Theron now that the designated governor is dead?" Asteria asked him.

   "Don't know. I expect that the planet will be placed under military rule. It's the first Tetra engagement in this sector, so everything will be on high alert. There will probably be a military governor."

   "Who?" Asteria asked.

   Skarne shrugged. "Admiral Vodros is the ranking officer in this sector. Why are you so curious?"

   "It used to be my home," Asteria told him.

I
t took Empyrean Marines a day to recapture the High

Docks. The survivors on the Docks told what they knew:

    A Raider group based on one of the moons of Cyclad, the first gas giant in the system, had encountered the faceted orb that was in fact a Tetra command ship. Its method still was not clear, but it had enslaved them, used them to pilot a collection of human fighter craft that the Tetras had accumulated. And under the direction of the Tetra command ship, the humans had captured all of the orbital stations around Theron.

    And waited…for an Empyrean warship.

    "This is a new phase of war," Captain Talan announced to the crew. "Reinforcements will be here soon. In the meantime, Theron is under military government. Admiral Vodros will be here in a few days to take command. Until then, we're on guard duty. Before the admiral arrives, we have to make sure that the Tetra influence did not reach the surface."

"Aye, Captain."

   Talan shook her head. "A capture would have been much better. It would have given us a chance to analyze and understand their technology."

   Asteria felt a pulse of anger. "It was a battle, Captain. I was doing my best."

   "A Fleet pilot has to think fast, Cadet."

   Kayser was looking at them. Asteria thought of her suspicions— that Kayser had sabotaged communications, that his uncle had somehow set up the attack—but she had no proof, no proof at all.

   And she was a Commoner.

   "I will try to remember that in the future, Captain," she said, quivering inside with frustration and fury.

   Talan gazed at her for a long moment. "Very well. As you said, you had little time. And then we did defeat the Tetra force. I will note in the official battle report that you served as an emergency fighter pilot and that you lost your craft in the battle, but will also note that you fought well. Do you have anything to say?"

   
Yes! The Fleet is in danger from one of its own officers!

   Asteria bit back the words. Aloud, she said, "No, Captain."

   "Dismissed."

Who should she trust? Who could she trust?

It came down to Dai.

   On the day when two more cruisers dropped into orbit, she told him what she knew.

   "There must be some way of proving this," Dai said.

   "None. But someone reprogrammed a bot to try to kill me. Someone destroyed the main comm circuitry just as the enemy fighters broke out of the High Docks."