Into the Darkness: Crimson Worlds Refugees I (5 page)

Hurley sighed. “It’s not you I’m worried about. But every pilot out there who is not up to this is another fighter and five crew lost.”
And not lost in battle doing their duty, but abandoned, left behind to be hunted down and killed by the enemy
.

“There is nothing you can do about that, Admiral.” There was an odd tone to Wilder’s voice, as if he was only just letting himself realize they had a chance to get out of the system. “You’ve honed this strike force into a razor. This is going to be a tough landing, but they’re up to it. You‘ll see.”

She nodded and gave him a weak smile when he looked back toward her, but she didn’t say anything. Part of her was gratified to have a chance at escape, something she would have thought impossible just a few hours before. But she was still wrestling with the fact that most of her people were dead already killed in the last three days of sustained combat. They’d run sortie after sortie, returning to their launch platforms only long enough to refuel and rearm—and maybe wolf down a quick meal. They’d gone three days without sleep, and every one of them was running on stims. But still they’d gone back, without question, without complaint. And every time they did, they paid a price. Fewer than one in three were still alive, and the thought of losing more people, not in a fight now, but in botched or aborted landings, cut at her deeply.

“We’re coming up on
Midway
now, Admiral. They’ve cleared us to land.”

She flipped on her com unit. “
Midway
squadrons, commence final approach and landing.” All through the strike force, she knew her wing commanders were doing the same, directing their squadrons to their own base ships. But it rested with the individual pilots to manage the landings. Hurley was confident about her own ship—she had John Wilder, and she was willing to wager he was the best pilot in the fleet. But the rest of her people were facing the most difficult landing they’d ever attempted…and their lives were riding on their success.

She watched the display as the four squadrons of her command wing split into two long columns, each heading for one of
Midway
’s fighter bays. Her ship was last on the second line, heading for a landing in Bay B.

The tiny symbols moved closer to the large image representing the flagship. The fighters’ vectors and velocities were almost synced with
Midway’s
, creating an illusion of very slow movement—despite the fact that they were traveling at almost 4% of the speed of light.

Slowly, steadily, the line of dots disappeared as they landed. Hurley watched, so tense she had to remind herself to breathe. She felt a rush of satisfaction as each fighter icon vanished from the screen, five more of her people safely back on
Midway
. Or at least whatever passed for safety for all of them now.

She glanced at the other status reports on her display. One of the fighters landing on
Conde
had come in with its angle of approach slightly off, and it had crashed inside the bay, killing the entire crew. And at least a dozen fighters had failed to match vector and velocity with their landing platforms, falling too far behind or racing ahead. That was a far lower number than she’d expected, but she still felt a wave of sadness. Those crews were as good as dead. The chance of them correcting course and making another approach before the fleet bugged out was close to zero.

“We’re next, Admiral,” Wilder said. His tone was distracted as he focused completely on the approach.

“Very we…” Her eyes darted forward as the fighter’s small emergency lights engaged. She snapped her head back around, staring down at her display. The readout told her at once what had happened. The ship ahead of them had come in too quickly, and it had crashed. The landing bay was an inferno.

“They took out the control station—and the bay is strewn with debris,” Wilder said grimly. Beta bay’s closed, Admiral.”

Hurley felt like she’d been punched in the gut. Normally, they’d just maneuver to the other side of
Midway
and land in alpha bay, but that was almost impossibly difficult at 4c.

Almost. “John…”

“Bringing us around, Admiral.” His voice was like iron.

Hurley leaned back and took a deep breath.
If there’s a pilot in the fleet who can pull this off, it’s Wilder
.

“Brace for thrust,” Wilder said, an instant before 11g of force slammed into the crew. He was overloading the engines, trying desperately to alter the fighter’s vector relative to
Midway
, and maneuver to the other side of the mothership.

Hurley heard a scream from behind her—Janz—and she knew immediately he was hurt. She wanted to turn and check on him, but she was pinned in place by gee forces equivalent to eleven times her body weight.

She could hear Wilder gasping for breath as he sat at his station, barely able to move his hands to work the controls. “Upping acceleration,” he rasped, as the forces increased...12g…13g.”

Hurley struggled for breath as the pressure pushed higher, past her endurance. She could feel herself becoming disoriented. It wouldn’t be long before they all blacked out, she knew—and that would be the end. The instant Wilder lost consciousness their attempt to land would be over. The ship’s AI would cut the deadly acceleration, but they’d be hopelessly out of position, with nothing to do but watch the fleet transit and wait for the enemy to hunt them down.

Suddenly, the crushing pressure was gone, replaced for a few seconds by the relief of freefall. She breathed deeply, filling her tortured lungs with fresh cool air. Her lucidity was returning, and she could feel her head clearing.

“Prepare for deceleration.”

She knew what Wilder’s words meant, and she quickly sucked in another lungful of air before the crushing force returned, this time from deceleration, as Wilder struggled to restore the fighter’s vector to match
Midway’s
. She couldn’t imagine how her pilot was staying focused, and she was amazed at how the ships controls seemed like extensions of his own body. Hurley had been a renowned pilot herself before her success pushed her to the top of the fighter command, but even she was amazed at the display Wilder was putting on. They hadn’t landed yet, but she was beginning to believe that, against all odds, he would pull this off.

“Approaching alpha bay,” he forced out.

Hurley lay back against her chair, unable to even move her head to glance at the display. All she could do was sit where she was and struggle for breath waiting to see if Wilder saved them.

The seconds drew out, each one seeming to last an eternity. The physical discomfort was extreme, almost torturous. And even Hurley was scared. The risk of dying in battle was an unalterable part of war, but there was something primal about the fear of being abandoned, left behind to the enemy. It killed her to see even one of her crews relegated to that terrible fate, and now, unless Wilder could manage to somehow pull off this landing, she and her crew would join them…or just crash in the bay.
That would be quicker
, she thought.
Probably more merciful than the day or two of fleeing and pointless resistance that lay ahead for those left behind
.

“Hang on, everybody,” Wilder cried as he cut the thrust. Hurley felt the relief of freefall, and then an instant later the ship shook hard once and came to an abrupt halt. The momentary weightlessness was replaced by a more normal 1g. She looked out the viewscreen to see a beehive of activity. It was
Midway’s
alpha bay.

“Excellent landing, Commander Wilder. You couldn’t hear it, but you got a round of applause on the flag bridge.” It was Terrance Compton’s voice on the com, and he sounded relieved. “You guys just sit tight while they pressurize the bay.” There was a short pause then:  “Welcome home.”

Hurley let out a long breath.
Yes
, she thought, looking out at the landing bay.
I suppose this is home now…

*  *  *

“Admiral Hurley’s fighters have completed landing operations, sir. Approximately 92% have successfully docked. Another four ships were destroyed on landing.” Harmon’s voice was a bit less grim than it had been. A 92% success rate was far beyond what anyone had dared to expect.

Compton nodded and sighed softly. He was gratified that so many of the fighters had safely docked, but he realized that fourteen of those birds had failed to match course and speed—and now he was going to leave them behind. He imagined the thoughts going through the heads of those men and women, what they would be feeling as they stared at their screens, watching the ships of the fleet slip through the warp gate. They would run from the enemy, he supposed, at least as long as their dwindling fuel supplies lasted. Still, eventually they would either be caught or they’d slip away into deep space, tiny ghost ships, traveling forever on their last heading, their frozen crews still at the controls.

Some of them might try to follow the fleet through the warp gate, but that was just another way to die. Fighters didn’t have enough shielding for the crews to survive the exotic types of radiation inside the gate. The ships might get through, but the men and women aboard would be dead before they reemerged.

This is what command is like, Compton thought. Faced with an astonishing success in leading his people out of the system, and another in the miraculous number of fighters that had safely returned, all his thoughts were on the dead…and those he was about to abandon. As all of his people had been abandoned hours before. He’d found it easy to absolve Admiral Garret for making the necessary choice, but now he was punishing himself for the same thing. It was unthinkable to lose the entire fleet over 70 fighter crew, just as it had been to risk all of mankind for fewer than 50,000. He knew that, and his actions spoke accordingly. But he was still carrying the guilt. As he knew Garret was too.

“Very well, Commodore.” Harmon was a captain by rank, but navy tradition demanded only one officer be addressed as captain on a vessel. Flag Captain Horace was the unlikeliest officer in the navy to give a shit about nonsense like that, but traditions that old stuck, and Harmon received the courtesy promotion when someone called him by rank on
Midway
.

Compton took a deep breath. “Time to first transit?” He knew the answer, but sitting around with nothing to do wasn’t going to help the crew or him.

“
Saratoga’s
in the lead, sir. Projected insertion in three minutes, twenty seconds.”

It was no accident that one of the fleet’s two other
Yorktown
class battlewagons was in the front of the line. Admiral Barret Dumont flew his flag from
Saratoga
, and there was no one Compton trusted more to handle a crisis than the feisty old firebrand of the Second Frontier War. Dumont had been retired when the First Imperium invaded human space, but he’d rejoined the colors when Garret had rallied the navy to face the deadly new threat. Dumont was old, over 100, but he didn’t look or act like it.

Compton had placed
Midway
near the end of the line. The only ships behind her were the six cruisers of the squadron that had decelerated to pick up Kato’s crews. It wasn’t where he belonged, he knew that. But it was where he had to be if he was going to live with himself.

He felt an urge to rush down to the landing bay, but he stifled it. His place now was on the flag bridge. He knew Hurley would be hurting, mourning all the people she’d lost in the last few days, and he resolved to speak with her as soon as events allowed him the time. The whole fleet had suffered terribly in the fighting in X2, but the fighters had been truly decimated. He’d see some medals given out, commendations for the valor of the pilots and crews of Hurley’s squadrons—though he wondered how much meaning such symbols would have in their new reality.

Compton felt the minor disorientation he always did when
Midway
slipped through the warp gate. He looked around the bridge, watching how the rest of his staff reacted to the strange, and still largely unexplained, trip through the portal. The use of warp gates was well-understood, but human science had largely failed to align its understanding of physics with the miraculous effect of simply flying into one of the strange phenomenon and emerging lightyears away. The only thing that was known for sure was the trip was not instantaneous—it took a small fraction of a second to reach the other side, during which time the transiting ships, and their crews, were
somewhere
. Exactly what that meant, whether there was simply some kind of tunnel through normal space—or if the vessel and its crew briefly passed into some alternate universe or dimension—was purely a guess.

“Welcome to system X4, Admiral Compton.” Dumont’s gravelly voice burst through the com unit a moment later. It would take
Midway’s
systems a few minutes to recover from the warp gate transit, but
Saratoga
had been in the system for over an hour. “The scope is clear. No enemy forces detected.”

Compton felt a wave of relief flow through him. All his carefully-crafted plans would have been for naught if his fleet ran into more First Imperium ships in X4. But a clear scope meant one thing—his people had a chance. They were lost and cut off from home. They were exhausted and scared and low on supplies. But they weren’t dead yet. And even that had seemed impossible less than a day earlier.

“Send a fleet communique, Commodore.” His voice was taut, his tension slightly lowered but still there. “It’s not time for celebrating yet. All ships are to set a course for warp gate two and lock into the navcoms. And all personnel are to prepare to get back in the tanks as soon as the cruisers transit with Kato’s people. This is going to be a long stretch. We need to get through this system, and put some distance between us and the enemy, and we need to do it as quickly as possible.”

He knew the First Imperium fleet had to execute a sharp vector change to pursue—and the warp gate would be a bottleneck for a force so large. He didn’t know how long they would try to pursue Garret’s fleet through the scrambled gate or what percentage of their resources would be devoted to the effort. That might keep them occupied for some time. Still, he didn’t doubt his people would be pursued, and he knew the force chasing them would be strong enough to pound his battered vessels into dust.