Courageous
Sparrow had been singing for eleven minutes, and nobody had found a way to stop her.
“You can’t hold the mike that long,” Tinsel said. “That’s not a solo. That’s a hostage situation.”
Sparrow held it longer.
The flight net was a private channel, four Shrikes and nobody else, and in the second month of the deployment it had picked up a name. Vic One Karaoke. Crane had named it and refused to explain the name, which was the only thing about it he’d ever refused to explain. The rules were simple. Lead picked the song. Everybody sang. Nobody was allowed to be good.
Sparrow sang the way she flew, all in and a little ahead of the music. She was twenty-three. She hummed on the hangar deck during preflight and patted the nose of her Shrike twice before she climbed in, every time, and she thought nobody had noticed. Crane had noticed. He noticed most things about Sparrow. He’d decided a while back that noticing was as far as it went.
Today lead had picked “Satellite Heart,” a power ballad three hundred years old with a key change that Sparrow treated as a personal challenge. She went up for it now, a half step past where her voice lived, and missed by a mile, and kept going like she’d hit it.
Crane laughed into his mask. He could feel her grinning. That was the Mesh, or part of it: four pilots linked through one hub, and the hub was him. Sparrow’s grin sat at the edge of his own face like a word on the tip of his tongue. Tinsel’s boredom sat somewhere behind his eyes. Tinsel kept score of everything on a grease-pencil kneeboard: kills, bets, how many times Sparrow went flat. She had a laugh like a dropped toolbox, and more than once he’d caught himself saying something stupid on purpose just to hear it. Rook was a quiet weight off his right shoulder, the way she always was, forty kilometers out and closer than the seat harness.
“Rook,” he said. “You’re not singing.”
“I’m on watch.”
“We’re all on watch. Watch and sing. That’s the job.”
“Your job is stupid.”
“That’s a dare, then. Wrench dares Rook. Second verse. Go.”
Tinsel made a noise like a stepped-on cat. “Oh, now we’re in trouble.”
Rook waited exactly long enough to make the point that she didn’t have to. Then she came in on the second verse, low and clean, and she was good. She was really good. She was the only one of them who could actually sing, and she broke the third rule every time, and every time Crane let it go. In fourteen months he’d never once had to look to know where she was. He’d thought about telling her that, one night in the wardroom. He’d told her a joke instead.
Sparrow stopped singing to listen. So did Tinsel. For half a verse nobody on the net said anything at all.
Crane checked his scopes, because that was the job too. Four Shrikes in a loose box, eighty thousand kilometers ahead of CNS Courageous, sitting across the mouth of the transit lane. Behind them the carrier and her escorts were making a slow turn for the next jump. In front of them was a lot of nothing, which was what you wanted in front of you. The Kharrai had been probing this stretch for three weeks. Probing meant a dozen fighters, a look, a run home. Intelligence had been very clear about that.
Rook finished the verse and stopped.
“Okay,” Tinsel said. “Okay, that’s not fair. Somebody write her up.”
“Noted,” Crane said. “Rook, you’re on report for being good at things.”
“Wrench.”
It was Rook, and it was not her singing voice. In the Mesh, the quiet weight off his right shoulder went tight.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve got contacts on the lane. Bearing three-four-zero, high. A lot of them.”
Crane looked. The scope at the edge of his own sight was clean, and then Rook’s sensors bled into it, the way they did when she was locked on, and it wasn’t clean anymore.
It wasn’t a dozen. The contacts kept coming out of the transit in a smear, a whole wing, then another behind it, and behind those the heavy returns of something that was not a fighter at all.
“Strike, Wrench,” he said, on the real net. “Contacts on the lane. Count is...” He watched the number climb. “Count is stupid. Two hundred plus, with heavies.”
The carrier’s controller came back clipped and fast. Courageous had them. Courageous was turning. The escorts needed eleven minutes to come about and cover the turn. Wrench flight was to hold the lane.
Eleven minutes. Four Shrikes. Crane did the arithmetic once and didn’t do it again.
“Vic One,” he said, back on the private channel. “Strike says hold the lane. So we hold the lane. Sparrow, you’re on Tinsel. Rook’s on me. Nobody gets cute.”
“You get cute,” Tinsel said.
“I’m lead. I’m allowed.”
Sparrow was the last one to say anything. “Wrench? We didn’t finish the song.”
“After,” he said. “Key change and everything.”
# # #
The lane was two hundred kilometers wide, and the escorts needed every kilometer of it behind them. Wrench flight sat across it in a loose box, Tinsel and Sparrow high, Crane and Rook low, so anything coming down the lane had to come through both pairs to get to the carrier.
The first wave hit them at the edge of the box, and for three minutes it went the way the training said it would.
The Kharrai fighters came in fast and spread, long-hulled and dark, with their drives running hot enough to read at any range. They didn’t talk. They never talked. They came at you like weather.
Crane put two Vipers into the lead pair and watched one of them come apart. That was his second. He didn’t have time to log it. Through the Mesh he felt Tinsel turn before she called it and Sparrow follow her a quarter second behind, both of them pulling hard, and he could feel their g in his own gut like an echo.
“Tinsel, two on your low side.”
“I see them.”
“Sparrow, stay on her.”
“I’m on her, I’m so on her, she’s going to file a complaint...”
Rook was off his right shoulder where she always was. He never had to look. He never looked.
The second wave was bigger. It came through the first like the first wasn’t there, and the lane they were holding was suddenly full of fighters, and then a pair of them got on Crane’s tail and stayed there.
He felt Rook start to come around for him.
“Stay put,” he told her. “I’ve got it.”
He went very still.
Then he killed his drives.
The Shrike went cold and silent, all thrust gone, falling down the lane on pure momentum with every system dark that didn’t need to be lit. To the two fighters behind him he dropped off their scopes the way a stone drops out of a hand. They overshot. They went past him so close he could see the blue scorch around their drive bells.
He lit the drives again with both of them dead ahead of his nose and ran the cannon down the second one’s spine.
“Burning stars, Wrench,” Tinsel said. “Never do that again.”
“Did it work?”
“Never do that again.”
Nine minutes left. He checked his scope and kept it to himself.
“Tinsel, you’ve got two inbound high, coming down on...”
“I see them. I’ve got two on my...”
The channel ended.
It didn’t break up. There was no static and no shout. Tinsel’s voice was there in the middle of a word and then the word wasn’t. At the edge of his sight, where her sensor feed had been riding along with his for fourteen months, there was a small square of black.
And in the Mesh, the place behind his eyes where her boredom had been all afternoon, where her laugh lived, where she was always half a second from giving him grief, just wasn’t there. It was gone the way a tooth is gone. He kept reaching for it with his tongue.
“Tinsel.”
Nothing.
“Wrench,” Sparrow said. Her voice had gone very small. “Wrench, I can’t see her. I lost her. Where is she? I was on her.”
“Sparrow, come to me. Come to me now.”
“I was right on her.”
“I know. Come to me.”
She was coming. He could feel her turning toward him, scared and fast and trying. She was thirty kilometers out.
There was a flash. It was white and very small, the size of a fingernail against the black, and there was no sound with it, because there’s never any sound.
Crane kept looking at the place where it had been.
Sparrow wasn’t in his head anymore. He hadn’t felt her go. He’d felt her there, and then he’d felt the space, and the space was bigger than she had been.
“Rook,” he said.
The weight off his right shoulder was still there. It was the only thing he could feel. “I’m here.”
“Stay on me.”
“Wrench, there’s too many.”
“I know. Stay on me.”
“I’m on you.”
Seven minutes. Rook killed one. He killed one, and lost count after that, and the Kharrai kept coming out of the lane the way water comes out of a broken main. Strike came up once to say the escorts were halfway around. Strike didn’t come up again.
Somewhere in there, between calls, he heard Rook humming on the private net. The second verse. She probably didn’t know she was doing it. He didn’t tell her.
He felt Rook’s fuel getting low, felt her shoulders aching in her harness, felt her decide something.
“Rook, don’t.”
“There’s a pair going for the carrier. I can catch them.”
“Rook.”
She went anyway. He felt her go, the weight off his shoulder sliding out and away from him. He turned to follow and something hit him in the drive section hard enough to snap his head into the canopy.
When he could see again his drives were gone. Not cut. Gone. Every gauge on that side of the board was dark, and there was smoke in the cockpit, and fire, small and greedy, licking up out of a panel by his left shoulder.
He beat at it with his glove. It climbed his collar. He felt it reach his neck and he went on beating at it, and found the extinguisher handle, and pulled it, and the cockpit filled with white.
When it cleared, he reached for Rook.
There was nothing to reach. He didn’t see a flash. He didn’t hear a call. There was no last word cut off in the middle. He’d felt her there, sliding away from him, angry and brave and scared, and now there was nothing at all where she had been. He didn’t know when it had happened. He’d been busy with a fire.
“Rook,” he said. “Rook, Wrench. Talk to me.”
The net was empty.
He said it again anyway.
Far behind him, eighty thousand kilometers back down the lane, Courageous was still turning. He could see her on his one working scope, a long bright return with her escorts strung around her. Then the heavy returns from the transit reached her, and the bright return got brighter, and then it was two returns, and then it was a scatter of small ones drifting apart.
There was no sound. There was never any sound.
# # #
He drifted.
The Shrike tumbled slowly, end over end, nose through the stars and back again. He didn’t try to stop it. He didn’t have anything to stop it with. He checked his oxygen once and then didn’t check it again, because the number didn’t help.
His neck hurt in a hot, wet, far-off way.
After a while, and he didn’t know how long a while, he keyed the flight net.
“Vic One Karaoke,” he said. “Wrench has the mic.”
The net hissed back at him. Just carrier wave. Just nothing.
“I’m not singing. You’d all hate it. I’m going to tell the joke instead. The one with the chaplain. Tinsel, you never let me finish it. You always said you knew how it ended.”
He told the whole thing. It took a while, because it was a long joke, and his throat was dry, and he kept losing his place. He got to the punchline and said it out loud into the empty channel.
Nobody laughed. It was a bad joke. Tinsel had been right about that.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Save me a seat.”
The Shrike turned over again. The stars went past, and the dark came after them.
# # #
Light.
White light, hard, straight into his eyes through the canopy, and the canopy wasn’t tumbling anymore. Something had hold of it. Something was clanking against the hull.
A voice came in on the guard frequency. It was a man’s voice. It wasn’t any of theirs.
“...got a reading. Got a reading, he’s alive. Holy shit. Courageous fighter, can you hear me? Can you hear me in there?”
Crane tried to answer and found he’d forgotten how. He tried again.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Sixty-one hours,” the voice said, to somebody else. “Sixty-one hours in that thing.” Then, back to him: “Who the hell were you talking to? We could hear you on the net the whole way in.”
Crane looked at the light until his eyes watered.
“My flight,” he said.
