Conquerors' Legacy

Another laser flashed toward him. Qui

He frowned. Preoccupied with the endangered Copperheads out there and the slow disintegration of his own Corvine beneath him, he hadn't been paying much attention to the Yycroman ships except when one of them happened to enter his immediate strike zone. But with little to do now but fly evasive maneuvers...

He pulled up a vector map first, switching the usual audio/visual cues into an overlay that could be distracting in the heat of combat but that at the moment wouldn't bother him. A high-speed replay of the past five minutes came next, drawing on both the Corvine's and the Trafalgar's recorders. Some of the Yycromae, he could see, were attacking the Zhirrzh ships directly, using shredder-bursts, ca

But the vast majority of them were being vaporized by the Zhirrzh. And for the first time since the battle had begun, Qui

They were ru

And even sacrificing their lives to run a moving screen between Zhirrzh firepower and a lone Corvine on a quixotic rescue mission.

Qui

The answer came immediately. "This is Savazzci mey Yyamsepk," the Yycroman words came, already translated, along the Mindlink. "What are your orders?"

"I want you to quit protecting me and do your job," Qui

In the distance off to starboard the Zhirrzh ship seemed suddenly to have become fully aware of Qui

"We are doing our job," the stiff-sounding retort came. "We aren't swift enough to catch them. We protect you in the hope that you can do so."

Qui

We can do it, Bokamba told him. A drop-J curve through the atmosphere will get us to an intercept point.

Qui

But in that situation he'd been flying an undamaged fighter through skies unpunctuated by heavy enemy fire. Here pulling such a stunt would be begging for gradient instabilities or turbulent control loss. There was probably no better than a fifty percent chance that they would make it to the rendezvous point ahead of the Zhirrzh.

What was certain was that committing themselves to the attempt would mean abandoning any chance of rescuing Dreamer and Con Lady.

Bokamba knew that, too, and for a moment his sense was tangled in an agony of indecision and guilt. But only for a moment. We have no choice, the tail said, his mental tone heavy but determined. Let's do it.

Right, Qui

And then, without warning, a double blaze of blue-white fire flashed into sight over the planet's horizon directly ahead.

Incoming spacecraft! Bokamba snapped out the warning. New vectors appeared on Qui

And felt his breath catch in his throat. To the unaided eye the approaching spacecraft were little more than dark blotches against the ragged-edged corona of their drive trails, but as the Corvine's optics edited out the glare, he could see the splashes of lights across their dark surfaces and the strangely curved edges glowing with an eerie luminescence. Images from the military history texts; images that supposedly no longer existed.

Yycroman Vindicator-class warships.

Qui

"They have come," the Yycroma's reply came through the Mindlink into Qui

The lights on one of the Vindicators dimmed, and the slender blue beams of particle-beam weapons lanced out toward the three Zhirrzh laser bombers diving ever deeper into the atmosphere. But too far ahead: the beams sliced through the air ahead of them for a clean miss—

And then, abruptly, the blue lines were sheathed with an explosive and expanding swirl of furious white turbulence. The beams, flash-ionizing the tenuous upper atmosphere, had created an instant hurricane.

The Zhirrzh laser bombers were caught flat-footed. Their mad race planetward floundered as the shock wave of superheated air slammed across their bows. Before they could recover, the second Vindicator fired, this shot sizzling past their starboard flank.

Charging toward the main battle like a pair of enraged bears, the warships were already out of range for a third shot. But it didn't matter. They'd slowed the laser bombers' descent just enough... and Qui

He had the Corvine in a vertical dive even before the second Yycroman shot had been fired; was scorching the fighter's hull with friction before the laser bombers finished their bouncing. By the time they'd settled down and were again throwing power to their drives, he'd started into his main curve.

Before they could do anything else, he was right on top of them.

" 'We have no idea,' " the Elder quoted, stumbling over the words in his haste to get them out. " 'But the description doesn't sound like that of any Human-Conqueror warship we've yet seen.' "

"I could have told you that," Supreme Commander Prm-jevev snarled under his breath as he gazed at the patches of blue-white flame charging toward him. Yycroman, without a doubt. And armed with weapons the like of which he also had never seen.