in this case, the other members of the squadron back in the Salad Bowl, the loaders, manglers, technicians, and all of the other support and logistics personnel that made a squadron work. Not to mention some six hundred scientists, technicians, and support personnel stationed at the Bowl.
“Yeah, and how are we supposed to do that, True?” Gallagher replied. Another antimatter warhead detonated in the distance, flooding the area with a harsh and deadly light. Surrender was not a matter of simply contacting the enemy . . . not when their electronic defenses were up to prevent attempts to hack into fighter control systems or AIs. “If the Bowl tells us to stand down, we stand down. Until then, we fight, damn it!”
There was no response . . . and Gallagher realized with a sudden cold impact that Truini’s fighter had vanished from the display with that last detonation. It was down to Gallagher and Joyce.
“Blue Two calling Fox One!” Joyce announced. “Missiles away!”
Gallagher programmed the shot and triggered it. “Fox One!”
“Their fighters are trying to cut us off!
“I see them.” He considered their options . . . which were few and not good. He considered ducking in Saturn’s rings and immediately discarded the idea. The thicker portions of the rings were too distant—the outer reaches of the massive and brilliant B Ring orbited over 120,000 kilometers farther in from Enceladus, more than a third the distance between Earth and Luna.
But damn it, they needed cover.
Nuclear fireballs flared and blossomed in the distance. The enemy transport was still there . . . but it was no longer decelerating. Maybe they’d done some damage. Maybe . . .
Something about the data coming up on the alien transport didn’t add up. The ship was longer than a French Orcelle-class transport—nearly 700 meters—and its power curve was closer to that of a battle cruiser than a troop ship. Gallagher called up a magnified image . . . and he stifled a sharp, bitter exclamation.
He didn’t know what that . . . that thing was, but it wasn’t a troop ship.
No time for analyses now. He would store the data and hope he lived to transmit it.
“Okay! Make a run for Enceladus, Karyl. Close pass . . . crater hop if you have to. We’ll see if we can lose ’em in the ice!”
“Right behind you, Frank.”
The problem with being so badly outnumbered was the openness out here, with enemy fighters and capital ships now moving in from all sides. If they could get down on the deck of Enceladus, half the encircling sky would be blocked, and the radar and laser signatures of the fighters themselves might be masked by the ice skimming beneath their keels.
“Enceladus Base, this is Blue Leader!” he called over the tactical channel. “We’re down to two fighters! I think we managed to ding their troop ship, but they’re trying to swarm us! What are your instructions?”
“Blue Flight, Enceladus Base. You’ve done what you can, Frank. Get the hell clear of battlespace. RTB when you can.”
“Copy.” RTB—Return to base—when they could, if they could. More Black Mambas were streaking toward them, now. If things had been bad before, they were worse now. The enemy fighters were furious at the attack on the Confederation capital ship. Gallagher launched several more sandcaster rounds, then put on a burst of raw, hard acceleration that sent him hurtling toward the fast-swelling white disk of the moon. He was aware of the crater-pocked surface growing swiftly larger, of the dazzle from a distance-weakened sun glinting from the ice plains below . . . and then he was twisting around his drive singularity, fighting to shift his vector to one a little closer to parallel to the moon’s surface. Enceladus was so near now that its bulk blocked out the far vaster loom of giant Saturn.
Three enemy fighters were following him down. Where were the rest?
Where was Karyl?
He didn’t know. The three bandits on his six were closing fast, though. It looked like they were lining up for a gun attack rather than another volley of antimatter warheads. Maybe their missile rails had gone empty. Maybe . . . maybe . . .
A nuclear fireball blossomed to port, the detonation rapidly lost astern. They were popping nukes at him then . . . and one had just impacted the surface. He swerved to starboard, angling toward the tiny moon’s south polar region, still accelerating.
His fighter shuddered, and he heard the rapid-fire banging of small high-velocity pellets against his hull. He cut back on his speed . . . then cut back again as the shuddering increased in strength and decibel level.
A shimmering, hazy wall rose against the black of space from the horizon ahead.
Shit! In the excitement, Gallagher had forgotten about the moon’s south pole . . . and the tiger stripes.
Cassini, an early robotic probe exploring the Saturn system, had discovered the mysterious jets streaming out from the moon’s south polar region in 2005. The constant tug-of war between Saturn and Enceladus created tidal heating and heavy tectonic activity, generating titanic cryovolcanoes erupting from four parallel fractures—deep cracks in the icy crust popularly known as “tiger stripes” for their dark color. Geysers of water emerged at high pressures from the vents and froze almost instantly, creating plumes extending as far as 500 kilometers up and out into space.
Much of this ice drifted back to the surface of Enceladus as snow, carpeting the moon’s southern regions to create a brighter, whiter surface much younger than existed in the north. The rest drifted clear of the satellite and formed the broad, highly diffuse E ring of Saturn, a 2,000-kilometer-thick belt circling the planet all the way from the orbit of Mimas, an inner moon of the planet, out to Rhea.
Those cryovolcanic plumes had been the first evidence that Enceladus might harbor a liquid-water ocean beneath the ice . . . and possibly life as well. Enceladus base had been established a century and a half earlier to search for that life—a far more difficult task than on Jupiter’s Europa. While the subsurface ocean had a temperature close to 0˚ centigrade, the surface of the ice was a numbing 240 degrees colder, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. And unlike Europa, the internal ocean seemed to exist in pockets, limiting the areas where the xenobiology people could drill.
The effort had been worth it, however. Life had been discovered beneath the Enceladean ice . . . very, very strange life, life based on hydrogen-germanium chemistry—on organometallic semiconductors rather than on carbon chains.
Exactly how an ice ball like Enceladus had acquired enough germanium—a relatively rare element on Earth—to evolve life based on the stuff was a mystery; how it worked was a bigger mystery still. Simply identifying the flecks of organometallics exchanging photons with one another in the Enceladean oceans as being alive had taken the better part of a century . . . and a near-total rewrite of the definition of the word life.
Enceladus Station, located in the permanent blizzard 100 kilometers from the terminus of one of the tiger stripes, was a xenobiological outpost maintained as a joint venture by Phoenix University of Arizona and the Universidade de Brasília. With Brazil siding with the Confederation against the North American rebels, there’d been some understandable political stresses at Enceladus. VF-910 had been dispatched to the moon to keep the peace . . . and the scientific neutrality of the base.
Obviously, it hadn’t worked out as planned. The Confederation had dispatched a naval squadron to seize Enceladus and to isolate North America from the rest of Earth’s scientific community.
None of this was of particular interest to Gallagher at the moment, as he skimmed above the polar ice toward a misty wall, which, at his current velocity, would have nearly the same effect on his ship as a cliff of solid ice. He gave orders to his AI, nudging the fighter into a slightly different path. Those tiger stripes each were about 35 kilometers apart. It would be like threading a needle, but he might slip between the plumes if he could maintain a low-enough altitude.
The