Heart Of The Tiger Page 4

  Blair changed his vector to follow the two ships as they veered toward the shelter of the asteroid he had noted earlier. On their present heading, they would not pass close enough to pose any particular danger to either pursued or pursuer. If they could put the irregular lump of rock and ore between their ships and Blair's Thunderbolt, they might be able to confuse his sensors long enough to make their escape.

  On their present course they were opening the range separating them from the first Dralthi, which was running in the opposite direction with Hobbes close on the enemy fighters tail. That was one less thing to worry about. Apparently the Kilrathi had no great interest in rescuing their comrade.

  Blair kept one eye on his fuel gauge and the other on the enemy ships. High-thrust operations burned fuel at a terrible rate, and the last thing he needed now was to use so much of his reserve that he wouldn't be able to make it home. Judging from the heat outputs of the two Dralthi, they were not using their full thrusters. They were probably already low on fuel, nearing the end of an extended patrol. That meant he could still close the gap and engage them…

  Then the enemy exhaust plumes started burning hotter. The two craft suddenly began to swing around, their symbols changing quickly on his sensor readouts. They were turning, but not to run. This time they planned to attack.

  In the same moment, three more targets appeared on Blairs screens, closing from starboard.

  These, too, were Dralthi. Blair cursed. The new arrivals had been lurking in the lee of that asteroid, dangerously close to the huge rock. Evidently the Kilrathi picked up the first patrol flight and realized there would be a follow-up mission, so they organized an ambush. With Hobbes distracted by his one-on-one fight with the original attacker, the enemy squadron could concentrate on knocking Blair out of action while he was still unsupported.

  "Hobbes," he said urgently. "Talk to me, buddy. I've got five bandits surrounding me with damn little running room. Break off whatever you're doing and give me an assist."

  Blair was already reversing course as one of the Dralthi broke and plunged toward him. His fingers danced over the autopilot keyboard as he programmed the computer to begin random bursts of thrust at odd vectors to keep his opponent from getting a firm lock on the Thunderbolt Then there was nothing more he could do except wait, jaw clenched, as he watched the Dralthi slowly close in. Soon the enemy pilot would be able to match his vector, and when that happened…

  He fired his maneuvering jets to execute a tumbling turn just as the Dralthi settled on the Terran fighter's tail. Suddenly, the Kilrathi ship filled his forward viewport, and Blair opened fire with his blasters in a quick succession of shots that burned power too quickly for the weapons generators to respond. His last shot was with a Dart unguided missile, the type pilots referred to as "dumb-fires." But even without a homing system, the missile wasn't likely to miss at this range.

  The missile barely left his ship before Blair's fighter was twisting again. He didn't see the missile punch through the weakened shields and detonate over the weakest armor, around the Dralthi's cockpit. But his sensors registered the blast, and Blair felt a momentary thrill as he realized he had scored a kill.

  But that still left four-to-one odds.

  He did not waste time. The other Kilrathi fighters were still out of range even though they were closing in fast. Blair reignited his afterburners and tried to put some distance between his fighter and the pursuers, but this time it was Blair who was concerned about his fuel supply. The four Dralthi were running flat out, apparently unconcerned about their reserves.

  "Talk to me, Hobbes," he said again. "Where the hell are you… ?"

  His answer was a blood-curdling, triumphant snarl that the computer translator utterly failed to interpret, and for an instant, Blair thought it was Ralgha's opponent proclaiming a triumph. Then he realized it was Hobbes, giving way to his instincts and emotions in the heat of battle and forgetting, for the moment, the thin veneer of Confederation culture that lay over his Kilrathi heritage.

  Then his rigid control seemed to clamp down again. "I have dispatched my opponent," he said stiffly, as if the earlier Kilrathi war-call had come from someone else entirely. "I am coming to your support now, my friend."

  "Make it soon, tall, dark, and furry," Blair said. "These guys want to put me in a trophy room."

  Another Dralthi was approaching, and once again Blair knew he must steer a fine line if he was going to fight. Every time he let himself be drawn into a dogfight, the other Kilrathi ships tightened the range a little bit more. At that rate, he would never be able to win. And sooner or later the odds would tell against him.

  This time he didn't wait for the other ship to get so close. Instead, he threw the Thunderbolt into a tight, high-G turn and opened fire as soon as his weapons came to bear. The Dralthi returned fire with a full spread of blaster bolts and missiles, and for all of Blair's attempts at dodging, they racked up three solid hits, scoring away more than half the armor on his port wing.

  Blair rolled away from the oncoming fighter, trying to keep his starboard side facing the Dralthi, but the Kilrathi pilot was a veteran who knew how to efficiently maneuver his craft. More blaster shots struck his weakened side in rapid succession, sapping his shields.

  But the attack carried the Dralthi past Blair's Thunderbolt, and for a few seconds the advantage went to the Terran. He slapped his weapon selector switch and called up a Javelin heat-seeker. Blair's fingers tightened around his steering yoke as he tried to line up the targeting reticule over the Kilrathi fighter on his HUD display. It was close… very close.

  The target indicator glowed red, and Blair fired blasters before releasing the missile. The Javelin locked onto the heat emissions from the Dralthi's engines and leapt outward. Seeing his danger, the Kilrathi pilot made a fast turn, attempting to get under the missiles sensor cone to confuse its on-board tracking system. Blair cursed as his board showed the missile losing its lock.

  His energy readout showed his guns hadn't finished recycling yet, but Blair took a calculated risk and switched power from the shields to the weaponry systems. Then, determined to keep his fighter in line with the rear of the Dralthi despite its twisting, turning maneuvers, the Terran opened fire again. The blasters tore through the weakened shields, the armor, and the entire rear section of the Dralthi, which erupted in gouts of flame and spinning metal. "Scratch two!" Blair called.

  Then Hobbes was beside Blair, firing a warning shot at long range to let the other three Kilrathi craft know the odds had changed. Almost immediately they veered away, charting new vectors, as if deciding against pressing the battle.

  "They are withdrawing," Hobbes said. "Do we pursue?"

  "I'm showing some pretty bad damage on the starboard side, and I'm down to one missile," Blair replied grimly. "What about you?"

  "The first foe put up a valiant struggle," the Kilrathi replied. "I fear my own missiles are exhausted, and I have forward and port-side armor damage."

  "Those guys are fresh," Blair said. "I don't know why they're giving up so easily, but I figure we'd better just count our blessings and head for home before they spring any more little surprises on us."

  "The Captain will not be pleased, I fear. It seems we have not carried out our mission."

  Blair didn't answer his wingman's comment directly. "Let's get these crates moving, buddy. Set course for home base, standard thrust."

  Chapter IV

  Thunderbolt 3OO

  Orsini System

  Of all the evolutions carried out by a fighter on deep space service, a carrier landing was the most difficult and dangerous maneuver. Bringing a fighter in with battle damage was that much worse, especially when shipboard diagnostics could not pinpoint the full extent of the harm done by the enemy hits. Blair studied his readouts as he drifted in his assigned holding pattern, waiting for Hobbes to land. Half a dozen amber lights were vying for his attention in port-side systems, including thrusters, weapons mountings, and landing gear. Any one of
them could fail if put under too much strain, and the results would be catastrophic not only for the fighter, but possibly for the carrier as well.

  Therefore, Hobbes was going in first. Once Rollins established the fact that Blair was uninjured and in no immediate danger, the communications officer waved him off. If Blair crashed and burned coming in, it wouldn't leave Hobbes stranded with a damaged flight deck and empty fuel tanks.

  So Blair waited—gloomy and brooding. His first trip off the carrier deck ended in defeat. He should have considered the possibility of more Kilrathi ships hiding near that asteroid, kept a tighter rein on Hobbes…

  Right now he was mostly surprised by their survival.

  The cats had surprised him twice today; once by springing the ambush, then by backing off when he and Hobbes were ripe for the picking. That seemed to be the only reason Blair and Hobbes were still alive, and that grim thought worried him. Was he finally losing his edge?

  He had witnessed this during years of war. A veteran pilot with an exemplary record would find his skills slipping away and his judgment calls evolving into errors. Such flyers would get sloppy and careless, and they did not live very long.

  Ever since the Battle of Earth, and especially after Concordia's loss, Blair found himself growing increasingly uncertain about the war and his role in it. Were his doubts starting to sap his cockpit performance? If that was true, maybe it was time to rethink his whole position. He could retreat into the purely administrative side of his job, as his predecessor had apparently done… or he could request a new assignment, even resign his commission and leave the war for a younger generation who still knew what they were fighting for and had the sharpened skills needed to carry on that fight.

  It was a tempting thought. But how could Blair drop out now? Wouldn't that be a betrayal of all his comrades who hadn't been so lucky? He wished he could talk to Angel. She always knew how to put everything into perspective.

  "Snoop Leader, you are clear for approach," Rollins said over his bitter reflections.

  "Roger," he acknowledged. Blair brought his full attention back to the problems of landing. Fighter and carrier had matched vectors and velocities precisely, and they were drifting less than a kilometer apart. Using minimum thruster power, Blair steered closer, lining up the flight deck with a practiced eye while watching the damage readouts for any sign of a sudden failure in a critical subsystem. A pilot like Maniac Marshall would have made a more dramatic approach, coming in under power and killing all his velocity in one last, well-timed braking thrust, but Blair wasn't taking any chances this time.

  The most critical moment of any carrier landing came at the end. Blair had to steer the Thunderbolt directly into the narrow tractor beam that would snag the fighter and guide it down to the flight deck and into the hangar area. A tiny error in judgment could cause him to miss the beam and plow into the ship's superstructure. Or he could hit the beam with the fighter in the wrong attitude and damage both Thunderbolt and flight deck.

  As the range in meters dropped steadily on the readout in the corner of his faceplate HUD, Blair held his breath and activated the landing gear control. A few seconds went by, and the amber damage light flickered, blinked… then went out. A green light nearby declared the wheels down and locked, but Blair raised a video view from the carrier deck and zoomed in for a close-up of the fighter's undercarriage, just to be sure. The blast burns and pockmarked hull plating made him wince, but the gear had deployed and the fighter looked as ready for a landing as it ever would be.

  He killed almost all of his momentum then, and the range countdown slowed. Then, abruptly, the fighter shuddered as the tractor beams took hold. Blair kept his hands poised over the throttles and the steering yoke, ready to apply thrust quickly in case the tractors failed and he had to abort. Slowly, carefully, painfully the fighter closed in, and the carrier's superstructure loomed large in the cockpit viewport.

  The wheels touched down evenly, and the fighter rolled freely along the deck, still pulled along by the tractor beams that held the Thunderbolt despite the absence of gravity. The force field at the end of the hangar deck cut off and the fighter glided smoothly into the depressurized compartment. A moment later Blair's craft rolled to a complete stop, and Blair gratefully relaxed and started the powering-down process.

  It took several minutes to repressurize the hangar deck. Blair was still running through his shutdown checklist when the overhead lights flashed red, signaling that the atmosphere was safe to breathe and that artificial gravity was about to be restored. Outside he saw technicians bracing themselves. Then the welcome sensation of weight gripped him again, gradually rising until the gravity was set at Earth-normal. Techs, some fully suited and others in shirtsleeves, swarmed on the deck around the fighter.

  The cockpit swung open. Blair unstrapped himself and stood slowly, stiff yet glad for the chance to move around again. After a moment, he clambered down the ladder built into the side of the Thunderbolt. "It's all yours, boys and girls," he told the technicians.

  Rachel Coriolis was there, her face creased in a frown. "Looks like you were nearly cat food, skipper," she commented. "You'd take a lot better care of 'em if you were the one that had to fix 'em up!"

  He shrugged, not really feeling up to a snappy comeback. "And maybe mechanics wouldn't grumble so much if they had to be on the firing line."

  "What, and give up all this glamour?" Her grin faded. "Captain wants you and Hobbes in his ready room for debriefing. And I don't think he's handing out any medals today. Know what I mean?"

  Captain's Ready Room, TCS Victory

  Orsini System

  "If this mission was any indication of your abilities, Colonel, then I must say that I wonder how you earned such a good reputation."

  Blair and Ralgha stood at rigid attention in front of the captain's desk, listening to Eisen's angry appraisal of their patrol mission. Victory's captain was plainly agitated, unable to sit still. He prowled the confines of the ready room like a caged beast, pausing from time to time to drive a point home to the two pilots. Neither of them had ventured a response to Eisen, and Blair for one agreed with most of what he had to say. The mission had been mishandled from start to finish, and as senior officer Blair bore the full blame for everything that had gone wrong.

  Eisen leaned heavily on his desk. "I expected better of both of you," he said, more quietly this time. "Especially you, Colonel. But maybe I'm just expecting too damned much. Maybe the Confed has just pulled off too many miracles in the past, and the miracles are starting to run out now." He looked up. "Well? Do either of you have anything to say?"

  "I screwed up, sir," Blair said softly. "Underestimated the Kilrathi and let the situation get out of hand instead of keeping a grip on… things." He looked at Hobbes. "I allowed myself to get separated from my wingman, and soaked up unacceptable damage in the process. That made it impossible to press the fight when we were able to hook up again, even though the enemy seemed unwilling to stand and fight."

  "And you, Ralgha?" Eisen asked. "Anything to add?"

  The Kilrathi renegade shook his head. "No, Captain, save that the Colonel fought with skill and honor."

  "Honor doesn't matter to me nearly as much as winning," Eisen commented, straightening up slowly, "but at least you both got back in one piece." He mustered a faint smile. "The Confederation needs every pilot it can muster, even a couple of senile old screw-ups like you."

  "Next time out, sir, I guarantee things will be different," Blair told him. "You can count on it."

  "I'll hold you to it," the captain said. "All right, let's move on. I want a heavier patrol dispatched as soon as possible. Draw up a flight plan for my approval. I suggest a minimum of four fighters this time, and maybe a backstop of four more in case the first team runs into trouble. We'll smoke the bastards out one way or another."

  "I'll get on it, sir," Blair said. "Hobbes and I will lead 'em…"

  Eisen shook his head. "You know the regs. Except on magnum op
s, you stick to the flight rotation schedule. You're the wing commander, Colonel, and you can't start trying to jump on board every op. That will burn you out, and that's the last thing we need right now."

  Reluctantly, Blair nodded in acceptance. "As you wish, Captain," he said slowly.

  "All right, then. You're both dismissed."

  Outside the ready room, Ralgha reached out and halted Blair with one massive paw. "I am very sorry, my friend," he said gravely. "I let you down out there today. And yet you were willing to accept the blame from Captain Eisen that should have been directed at me."

  Blair shook his head. "Sure as hell wasn't all your fault," he told the Kilrathi. "I should have been ready for the bastards."

  "Nevertheless, I failed you. That insolent peasant and his challenge… I should never have allowed myself to be drawn into fighting him, leaving you to face the others alone." Ralgha paused. "Did it seem to you, my friend, that the enemy behavior was out of character?"

  "How so?" Blair asked. He, too, had wondered about the way the trap unfolded, but he was especially interested in whatever observations Hobbes might share. After all, Ralgha nar Hhallas was the closest thing to a genuine expert on Kilrathi psychology aboard the Victory.

  "In the beginning, it seemed to me they were intending to fly a traditional attack plan. There was no good reason to launch that first attack if their aim was to draw us into an ambush. It was only after I was engaged that the others broke off and attempted to draw you into their trap. Could it be that the Empire has a particular interest in you?"

  "In me? How—"

  "You can be assured that the Empire has sources of information within the Confederation, agents who could have identified your new assignment to this ship. Spies are remarkably easy to plant, particularly when the Empire has many human slaves to recruit."