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  "Janine …"

  Sorrow suffused her features. "I thought better of you," she said. "I really did." Then she turned her back and walked out of the mess hall.

  The surface of Little B looked black at any distance, but shone pale gray in the circle of illumination cast by Alice's helmet light. The ground felt crunchy under the soles of her boots, and it fractured with every step she took, exposing a layer of dark sand under a frangible crust a centimeter or so thick.

  If the surface had features of any sort she couldn't see them. No hills, no trees, no distant mountain ranges. Not even a crater. For a moment, as the little freighter lifted off behind her, the plain around her was lit up for a hundred meters in every direction. Shadows shot out, elongated crazily, then faded as the ship gained altitude. Three people, an improvised missile launcher, and a pallet of missiles faded into deepening gloom until the ship vanished into the darkness of the sky and they were alone.

  "All right, let's get ready." Alice grabbed the base of the missile launcher, testing it for wobble. "We don't know how much time we have."

  Somewhere directly above her the Morning Breeze was scattering thousands of mines through the void above the back side of Little B, the back side being the side farthest from Black Betty. Thrush was taking a huge gamble. Two gambles, really. He was betting the Dawn Alliance fleet was going to pop out of hyperspace right where the Kestrel had come out, using the moon for cover. And he was betting that no Free Planets ships would do the same.

  Not my decision, thank all the gods for that. I just get to implement his crazy scheme. Or my part of it, anyway.

  There'd been two armed freighters in the system when the Kestrel arrived, not one. The Sunbeam had stayed quiet, listening to the conversation between the Kestrel and the Morning Breeze until her captain couldn't deny there was work to do. Now Sunbeam was dropping two missile launchers and their crews on Little B. If all went well, she'd pick them up after the fight, too.

  Alice didn't think there was much chance of that happening, but you never knew.

  "Wasp Nest One, ready to go," said Jimmy Cartwright in her helmet radio. He and two more colonists from Rivendell were at the other missile launcher, several kilometers away. The idea was to separate the launchers so one missile or barrage from a warship couldn't hit them both.

  A grunt came over the radio as Collins lifted a missile. Bridger helped him lower it gently into the launcher. Alice knelt by the launcher and fiddled with the console she'd made from a maintenance robot controller. It was able to communicate with the missile's brain, and it gave her a screen where she could enter simple commands. The console connected with the missile and flashed green.

  "Wasp Nest Two, ready to fire," she said, and got an acknowledgement back from the Kestrel. She squatted, trying to ignore the adrenaline singing in her veins. She'd done what she could for now. All she could do was wait. What will it be? Hours? Days?

  Minutes?

  It was, in fact, less than that. The sand lit up all around her, not the sharp white light of the freighter's landing lights but a soft glow, tinged with red. Someone swore over the radio, and her head tilted back.

  A portal opened directly above her. The range had to be hundreds of kilometers at least, but with nothing to give a sense of perspective it felt like the hand of God was slicing the heavens open just above her head.

  It's too close, she thought. Insanely close. The mines will all be too far away. Because who would put mines this close to a moon? It's a crazy place to open a portal. The ships could collide with Little B.

  Then a ship came through, and her head tilted to the side as she tried to understand what she was seeing. It had to be a fighter. It was too small to be anything else. But it didn't look like a fighter. It looked like a proper warship.

  Only when a second ship loomed in the portal did she understand. The portal was huge, and much farther away than she'd realized. The first ship through was a corvette, looking tiny because the portal was so big.

  Behind it came a ship so vast it nearly filled the portal, and Alice stared at it, dimly aware that her mouth hung open. This was no cruiser coming through the portal. This was a battleship.

  "Alice. Do we fire the missile? Alice? Alice!"

  She jerked her gaze away from the monster in the void above her and looked at Collins. There was silence from the Kestrel, and she stared blankly at Collins. The idea was to attack in tandem, overwhelming whatever ships came through with simultaneous attacks from the surface and from the Kestrel. Without a call from the ship she didn't know what to do.

  Sparks appeared in the faceplate of his helmet, flashes of light reflected from above. She looked up and watched dozens of mines erupt in flames against the hull of the battleship. Then a column of white fire appeared, a finger stretching for an instant from the surface of Little B to the underside of the ship where it exploded in a spectacular ball of flame.

  Wasp Nest One was firing.

  She jabbed her gloved finger against the console and the missile fired, blinding her completely with an eruption of white light. She lifted a hand to protect her face and felt heat through her glove and along her thighs. The missile was gone in an instant, and she looked up, much too late to see it explode. The battleship was invisible, hidden by the white circles that danced across her vision. She could just make out the glowing rectangle of the portal – until it shrank and vanished.

  "We're ready, Alice."

  She looked down, saw only a blur, and stretched out a hand. Her fingers touched the launcher, then the missile inside it. She found the console by touch, squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and leaned close to the screen.

  She couldn't read anything, but she could make out a hint of green.

  Good enough. She squeezed her eyes shut and pushed a fingertip against the screen.

  By the time the third missile went up her vision was largely recovered. The three of them worked with grim haste, the men loading one missile after another into the launcher. The console had no trouble linking to each missile in turn, and the battleship was a huge target, dominating the sky above. She let each missile target the big ship by default and launched them as fast as they were loaded.

  More light flashed in the corner of her eyes, the ground leaped beneath her, and Collins and Bridger stumbled, dropping a missile. She looked in the direction of that flash of light and saw a pillar of dust rising from the surface of the moon. That's in the direction of Wasp Nest One. She tried to gauge the distance. Maybe halfway between us?

  Something flitted through the void, a speck of light too fast for her to properly see, lashing down from above to touch the ground somewhere over the nearby horizon. And the ground shook again, less this time. There was no flash from the explosion, since it was hidden by the curve of the little moon's surface. Then another glowing speck came down, and the ground shook one more time.

  The battleship was firing missiles at the pests on the surface.

  "Alice!" A hand slapped her shoulder and she looked up. The next missile was in the launcher, Collins and Bridger already lifting another one. She glanced at the console, saw the battleship glowing green as the selected target.

  I should look for damage. Try to hit something vulnerable. But the battleship was hitting back, and she didn't know how much time she and her team had. So she jabbed the screen and the missile erupted in a burst of white flame and raced into the sky. Another missile dropped into the launcher – and a mighty hand slammed into her left side, bowling her over, sending her tumbling across the unforgiving surface of Little B.

  A strange static filled her mind, terror and shock overwhelming all thought. Some buried part of her brain knew what to do, though. She scrambled up, watching bits of rock and sand fall from her arms and shoulders, and started to run. Any direction was as good as any other. Safety lay in distancing herself from the missile launcher. She bounded across the regolith, fighting the urge to make panicky running motions with her legs while she soared above the surfac
e.

  A missile slammed down ahead of her, the flash blinding her, and she crossed her arms in front of her face, protecting her helmet. Debris peppered her. Then her feet touched down and momentum carried her forward, stumbling. She wanted to change direction, to run away from the site of the missile impact. Instead she ran toward it, stumbled on a chunk of stone blasted free by the explosion, and fell sprawling. The crater lay just beyond her outstretched hands, and she rose up on palms and toes, skittering forward until she could dive into the shallow divot left by the explosion.

  Missiles rained down around her, and she cowered in the meager cover of the bomb crater, arms curled around her head, and waited for the strike that would blast her into Kingdom Come.

  Tom had a death grip on both arms of his chair, his fingers digging so deep into the fabric that he thought he might damage the electronics underneath. It didn't look too good to the rest of the bridge crew, but he couldn't help it. Hell, he considered it a great achievement that he was gritting his teeth in silence instead of screaming, or giving voice to the ocean of curses bubbling up inside him.

  Three ships. It was supposed to be five small ships. We were supposed to have a fighting chance! We weren't supposed to face a bloody battleship and a massive fleet. I've made a fatal mistake. We're all going to die.

  It was an unproductive line of thought. In some distant corner of his mind he knew it, not that the knowledge helped. Not that long ago he'd sat board in a classroom while an instructor droned on about adrenaline and panic and how you needed to learn to keep on thinking when the sewage hit the air circulation machinery. At the time Tom had been afraid of only one thing: he might fall asleep in class, and start snoring.

  Now he scanned the bridge, trying to figure out what orders to give. O'Reilly was hunched over his console, hands moving across the screens as he made the Kestrel jerk and dance as it fled the barrage of lasers and missiles blasting at the ship from behind. O'Reilly needed no instruction, and Tom felt a moment of envy. Lucky son of a bitch knows what to do.

  Harris was busy as well, calling instructions to the gun crews and listening to reports from spotters and weapons crews. Onda had his eyes screwed shut, one finger plugging his left ear, his right hand cupped around the earpiece in his right ear.

  The rest of the bridge crew looked as terrified as Tom felt. For the moment there was nothing any of them could do, and Tom let that thought sink in. We're running, and we're shooting back. For the moment, we're doing everything we can.

  I'm doing fine. I'm not dropping the ball. I can take a moment and look at the big picture.

  He told himself sternly to release his grip on the arms of the chair. His fingers refused to unlock, so he shrugged inwardly and took a deep breath. He counted the seconds as he inhaled, held it, then exhaled. It was a stress management technique that had seemed silly when he learned it in Basic Officer Training. Now, though, it helped a tiny bit. Terror's stranglehold eased ever so slightly. Most of his mind was still awash in panic, but some part of his brain was his again.

  The tactical display looked like gibberish. A distant voice in his mind told him that was another stress reaction. He was overwhelmed, too frightened to understand what he was seeing.

  Unlocking the fingers of his left hand required more concentration than he ever would have believed possible. He managed it, though, his thumb dragging reluctantly across the fabric and almost triggering the intercom button as he tugged his hand free. His fingers refused to straighten completely, so he used a knuckle to zoom out the display.

  The familiar, automatic action seemed to flip a switch in his brain. Suddenly the display made perfect sense. He'd spent a couple of hundred hours using a display like this in one simulation after another. Telling himself to treat this as another sim, he took another slow, deep breath and made himself analyze the tactical situation with all the calmness he could muster.

  The battleship was barely visible dead aft, the bulk of it already half obscured by Little B. Her guns would still be able to fire on the Kestrel.

  "Take us toward the moon." The sound of his own voice startled him, and he was relieved to find that he sounded far more composed than he felt. O'Reilly didn't answer, but the ship turned and the battleship sank beneath the horizon.

  "Hug the surface," Tom said. "Keep our speed up." The curve of the horizon might provide a bit of cover, and the moon's gravity would interfere with targeting.

  O'Reilly grunted, and the Kestrel dropped. A proximity alarm warbled, warning them their altitude was dangerously low. Tom silenced the alarm.

  What had seemed to be a forest of red blips on the tactical display behind them began to resolve itself into something a bit less terrifying. For starters, there was no sign the battleship was pursuing them. It was gone from the display, hidden by the bulk of the moon. Several more ships were hanging back, perhaps to protect the battleship. Tom saw a light cruiser and a light carrier growing more distant as the Kestrel fled.

  They were still in plenty of trouble, of course. A corvette, a heavy cruiser and a light cruiser still pursued them, and a pair of fighters that must have launched from the carrier. The situation was merely desperate instead of utterly hopeless, and he felt himself grin. Progress!

  The corvette, more nimble than the larger ships, was the closest. In fact, it was tight on the Kestrel's tail, and Tom said, "Focus your fire on that corvette. See if you can take out her forward gun turrets, and then paste her with a couple of missiles."

  "Aye aye," Harris said, then spoke to his gun crews. "One turret's definitely destroyed," he said a moment later. "I know the other one's taken some damage."

  "Missiles," said Tom. He had to deal some damage while the enemy fleet was at least partially separated.

  "Missiles away," Harris said, and Tom bit back a curse as one missile vanished, destroyed by laser fire an instant after it left the frigate.

  The other missile hit, though, a white circle appearing on the nose of the icon representing the corvette on Tom's tactical display. He switched to an aft camera and saw a blackened crater in the nose of the other ship. One side of the crater glowed red, flames fed by oxygen escaping from the ship.

  The deck jerked beneath him, his chair twisted, and Tom grabbed the arms of the chair once again. An explosion boomed somewhere behind him, and the bones of the Kestrel gave a squeal of protest as they twisted.

  At first he thought the damaged corvette had managed one last attack, but when he switched back to the tactical view he saw it was the cruisers that were firing. A missile had struck the back of the forward section. O'Reilly was already reacting, sending the Kestrel skimming above the surface of Little B in a series of S-curves.

  The corvette fell behind, abandoning the pursuit. The cruisers were much higher, firing down on the frigate from above, and Tom saw a flare of light as a missile raced past the bridge windows. The ground erupted ahead of the ship, and rock chips rattled against the windows.

  Something thudded against the hull directly above them, and Harris let out a low whistle. "That was a missile," he said. "Lasers got it about half a second before it hit."

  Tom shuddered. A direct hit to the bridge would have been game over for all of them.

  A series of metallic impacts echoed through the bridge, starting in the distance and coming closer. Then three holes appeared in the ceiling above Tom's head. The communications console exploded, components spraying across the deck plates in a shower of sparks. Onda screamed.

  "Fields are holding," said Trenholm, his voice unnaturally calm. That meant the bridge was still airtight, despite three jagged fist-sized punctures giving a direct view of cold vacuum. Three matching holes decorated the deck plates, and God only knew what carnage those shots had done in the rest of the ship.

  A spacer named Farnham knelt by Onda, pressing a med patch to a terrible wound in the man's thigh. Tom jerked his eyes away, fighting panic. "O'Reilly! Get us out of here!"

  O'Reilly shot him a quick glance over one shoulder.
"Where can we go?"

  Nowhere. There's nowhere to run. But we can't just keep racing along like this. We're the star attraction in a shooting gallery. And if we keep going we're going to circle the moon and fly up to the battleship from behind. He spent a moment staring helplessly at the tac display, which showed only one other feature.

  "Take us to the planet."

  There was a moment when O'Reilly didn't react. He didn't argue, but Tom could imagine the thought in his mind. What good will that do?

  Then the stars plunged as the nose of the Kestrel swung up. It caught the cruisers by surprise, and Tom watched on the tactical display as three missiles exploded against the surface of the moon behind them. Three missiles and who knew how much other ammunition. What are the odds their magazines will run dry?

  It didn't take the gunners long to recover, and the change of course put the Kestrel at right angles to the hunters. It made her a beautiful target, and Tom heard more echoing impacts as projectiles raked the top of the hull. A missile raced toward the ship, missed the forward section by no more than a meter or so, and sped away into the void.

  The Kestrel fled toward the bulk of the distant planet, quickly changing the angle between herself and the cruisers. For a moment their roles were reversed, the cruisers exposing their tops to the frigate while the frigate showed only her tail. Three missiles left the Kestrel, either Harris or the missile crew not bothering to wait for orders, and Tom watched them burn toward the cruisers before winking out, one by one.

  The cruisers changed shape on his display, shrinking as they turned their noses toward the Kestrel. And the pursuit began. The sudden change of direction had opened up the distance between ships, which gave the Kestrel a bit of breathing room. She had plenty of space to shoot down incoming missiles, and a bit of basic evasion meant that not many smaller projectiles would find their mark. Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched, trying to force some of the tension out of his muscles. I need to pull myself together. I need to think!