The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [122]
“You will not retreat!” Lanyan roared.
Another explosion struck his Juggernaut, a bad one, ripping out two of his engines. His navigation officer struggled against a shower of sparks on her console to keep the gigantic ship from spiraling down to the planet.
Hundreds of Klikiss component vessels continued pecking away at the Thunder Child. On the screen, Lanyan saw Brindle’s cruiser and two others pulling away. Only one other Manta survived, and he was relieved to see that it remained at his side. But the cruiser looked hopelessly crippled, with smoke pouring from prominent breaches in its hull.
Sensing easy prey, the Klikiss closed in.
He had expected Chairman Wenceslas to applaud his foresight for not only striking the bugs, but also wiping out the human traitors. Now, instead of a double victory, he had botched the whole mission. He could already imagine the scorn the Chairman would heap upon him as soon as they got back to Earth. Not one of the high points in my illustrious career. If there was any chance of salvaging the situation, he needed to arrive back at Earth before Brindle made his report. He needed to tell his side of the story first.
“Get us out of here,” he snapped. “Maximum speed.”
The navigator turned to him with an astonished, sickened look on her long face. “General, I can barely keep us in a stable orbit! Two engines damaged, all control linkages fried — we’re not going anywhere.”
“Then activate our stardrives. I don’t care where we are. Get us away from this planet.”
She frowned at him as if he were a mentally deficient child. “Too late for that, sir.”
His Juggernaut was rapidly falling apart, and space was thick with Klikiss component ships still slashing and slicing. He hesitated only a second before opening up the comm channel again. He had to act before the retreating EDF ships could get out of range.
“Admiral Brindle, we are declaring an emergency. I order you to return and assist us.” He swallowed hard. “We’re abandoning ship.”
The Thunder Child’s bridge crew didn’t need to be told twice. They scrambled to escape pods. Loud Klaxons echoed up and down the metal-walled corridors. Entire decks were on fire, and hundreds of his crew were already dead from the numerous hull breaches.
Lanyan continued to shout into the comm system, “Admiral Brindle, it is your obligation to retrieve our escape pods.” At any other time, the man would have obeyed without a second thought. He would have done his duty. But on the static-filled screen, Brindle and the surviving Mantas continued their retreat.
The Klikiss kept pummeling the Thunder Child. When the deck started to split beneath him, Lanyan had no choice but to dash to the small escape pod built into his ready room. Everyone else had shot themselves away in the larger lifeboats, though with so many Klikiss ships in the vicinity, he doubted anyone would get away for long.
On a viewscreen behind his desk he saw Admiral Brindle turning his Manta around to retrieve whatever pods he could, even though he put himself and his ships at great risk to do so. At least the man had a tiny bit of honor left.
Lanyan jumped feetfirst into the round hatch and pulled the lid shut. He hammered the activation buttons that locked down the airtight seal, blasted free the retention bolts, and disengaged the pod. As the small chamber spun, Lanyan grew dizzy watching through the single observation port.
In orbit above, the Thunder Child was little more than a skeletal structure held together by a few hull plates and connective girders. He saw other escape pods flying into space like the spores of a swollen mushroom, heading out to safety, but he was falling in the other direction, toward the planet’s surface, nowhere close to Brindle’s retrieval operations.
As the pod decelerated through Pym’s atmosphere, the white expanse of desert and brackish lakes looked uninviting. The automated systems