off the lawn. “Defender reports a big transition flare at the edge of the system.”
They’d evacuated everyone of importance to their respective flagships, and though he’d tried repeatedly, Charlie couldn’t get an update on Cesare’s condition. After that Charlie had remained on planet with the marines to sweep the palace and its grounds. Still no Lucius, and no Theode either. It would be ironic if Charlie were killed trying to save the two people for whom he had no liking.
As commanding officer of the ground operations, through long habit he’d hustled everyone else off before jumping on the last boat out. But in the confusion there’d been a mistake: the last boat had already gone out with no room to spare. He and twenty marines had wasted precious minutes finding something to get them off planet. All they’d found was a mere shuttle, not a gunboat: no firepower, no powered shielding, no serious internal gravity compensation, able to drive at no more than about six gravities. It was a bad mistake, perhaps a fatal mistake.
“They’re leapfrogging,” the pilot announced as he lifted the shuttle’s nose.
Like everyone, the Syndonese were blind in transition. It would be suicide to enter Turnlee nearspace on transition drive. The gravitational distortions within the system would warp their heading into the nearest planet or asteroid, and blind, they’d have no way of knowing how to compensate, or even if they needed to compensate. Standard operating procedure was to down-transit at the edge of the system, then spend hours, even days, driving inward on sublight drive. But the Syndonese were leapfrogging: down-transit one ship at the edge of the system. That ship, no longer transition-blind, immediately launched its navigational drones to extend its baseline, then uplinked accurate navigational data to the remaining ships in the strike force, who themselves continued with confidence into the heart of the system at transition velocities. At hundreds, even thousands of lights, such ships could cross the breadth of the system in minutes.
“It’s a big strike force. I’ve got thirty, maybe forty transition wakes entering the system. Darmczek’s engaging them.”
Charlie had a situation summary on the screen in front of him. Defender was already long gone with Cesare and the other VIPs aboard. Darmczek had left a small destroyer in orbit around Turnlee to pick them up, then had taken the rest of the flotilla outbound to take potshots at the incoming Syndonese: still in transition and temporarily blind, they were defenseless.
“Big transition flare in near orbit, Commander. A Syndonese, close in, and he came out of transition shooting.”
“We’re not going to make it out of here,” Charlie shouted. “Take us to ground now. Advise Darmczek and tell him to disengage and take care of himself.”
The shuttle suddenly lurched badly and listed to port. Charlie didn’t need the pilot’s “They’re firing on us, sir,” to know what was happening.
Charlie gripped the arms of his seat. The shuttle lurched again into a wild spin. The pilot managed to pull them out of it, but they were canted at an odd angle, and Charlie didn’t need readouts in front of him to know they were losing altitude in a sharply slanted dive with only a few hundred meters to a very hard landing. He braced for a crash, tried to think of something nice, like Del’s kiss maybe. It had been a nice kiss. And he did rather enjoy applying the palm patch to her thigh, and . . .
He had no sense of time. He’d been in the dark so long that time no longer mattered. At least someone had shaved off his beard and cut off the matted, lice-infested, shoulder-length hair, though he still had about a two-day growth of beard. Oh, but his face hurt. And his leg hurt, and his arm hurt, and his ribs hurt.
First the arm, his left arm. He explored it carefully with his right hand. It was crudely splinted, so it must be broken. The realization struck him that he wore no manacles, and he was no longer on the chain with his comrades.
He was lying on his side so he struggled to a sitting position. His right leg throbbed painfully. He found that the leg of his trousers had been torn away, and in the dark he could feel a line of crude stitches running up the calf about six inches long. Next he carefully explored his face. The right side was oddly misshapen, and he guessed that his cheek and the orbit of his