But if she didn’t, and Amos really was waiting. Or Jim.
“Naomi?” Alex asked again. “What do we do?”
“Take out the platforms,” she said. And then, “First. We take out
the platforms first.”
“If we’re going to land, we have to slow down,” Alex said.
She needed time. She didn’t have it. The Roci shifted hard, then fell away, slamming her against her straps as their rail gun fired.
“Get me options,” she said.
“Coming up,” Alex said, and the thrust alert came on. They were flying into the enemy barrage, and she was slowing them down. “Ian! Tell the others to match my course. We’re putting on the brakes.”
She pulled up the tactical, and the drive came on, pushing her back into her couch and the coolness of the gel. She couldn’t tell if it was the evasive dodging or the changes in acceleration or her own sense of doom that left her feeling nauseated, but it didn’t matter. She pulled up the tactical display, ran it through the Roci’s system, and prayed to nothing in particular that a solution existed.
Their information on the defense grid was pieced together from Transport Union ships that had moved through the system. Five weapon platforms, flat black and resistant to radar. They were in higher orbits than the alien construction platforms, and spaced around the planet in a web that put any approaching ship in the sights of at least two and usually three. They were already firing at Naomi’s little strike force, and whatever technology they were using to compensate for the rounds they fired, it didn’t make a heat or light plume that she could use for targeting.
The construction platforms were closer to the planet, long and articulated, with filaments coming off of them like something in a microscope slide of contaminated water. They shimmered with light. There were five of those too, all of them in near-equatorial orbit.
The plan had been to approach with the ships close together so that they would all be covered by the same defenses and dilute the incoming fire between them. Then, when they were close, the Cassius and the Prince of the Face would split off, wrapping around the spinward side of the planet while the Roci and the Quinn cleaned up anti-spinward. Then they would all burn hard for the ring gate and the hundreds of systems beyond to hide in.
That had been the plan. Now it was the same, but slower. More time in the enemy crosshairs. Less chance of escaping unharmed.
Ian shouted over the din of PDC fire, drive resonance, and thruster burn. “Cassius is requesting permission to break off. They’re ready to make their run.”
“Confirmed,” Naomi shouted. “Let’s do this.”
“With them gone, the bad guys are going to have more guns for us,” Alex said. “We’re about to get real bumpy.”
“What the hell has it been up to now?” Ian asked.
“Walk in the park, kid,” Alex said.
On her tactical display, the Cassius turned, its drive plume leaning in toward the other three as it slid toward the far side of the onrushing planet. A few seconds later, the Prince of the Face did likewise. As they slid away, a new bloom of fast movers jumped up from the Laconian defenses.
“How many of these missiles can we take?” Naomi shouted, and a voice she didn’t know yelled back, PDCs at sixty percent as if that answered her question.
“We can start doing damage of our own in eighty seconds,” Alex said. “Seventy-nine.”
“Lock on the construction platforms,” Naomi said. Her legs felt like they were on the verge of cramping. Her monitor was throwing three low-priority medical alerts. She ignored them. The ship moved hard to port, fighting to get out of a rail gun’s firing arc. They were getting close enough that dodging after the rail gun fired was getting hard.
“Permission to hit their weapons, Captain?”
“No,” Naomi said. “The construction platform goes down first.” She might die. They all might die. Even if they did, they didn’t have to lose.
She fought the temptation to grab weapons control herself. The fear and the tension left her muscles trembling, and the evasive shifting was coming faster and harder. She wanted a sense of control. Of being able to bend the next minutes to her will. Trusting a crew she’d barely met with everything was like flying blind.
“Prince of the Face reporting that the Cassius took a rail-gun hit,” Ian shouted.
“How bad?” Naomi asked, already pulling up the sensor array data to see for herself. By the time Ian spoke, she knew.
“The Cassius is gone.”
The odds shifted in her mind again. If the Prince of the Face was lost too, it would mean looping around Laconia to catch the surviving platforms. She’d only just taken on the risk by slowing down, and she was already paying the price.
She took comms control and opened a connection to the Prince of the Face. As soon as it went through, she started talking.