Assignment: Avalon

Chapter One: Bailout

Lights swirled and sparkled around her head: cold blue for Preceptorate ships, bright green for Rebels, yellow for outgoing missiles and ominous red for incoming ones. Curved lines, marking trajectories, traced graceful webbing through empty space in a constant slow dance; flickering numbers and the computer's whispering voice in her ear described distances and speeds. And every so often a light would flare and vanish, a trajectory tracer would fade away, and another ship and crew would be consigned to oblivion.

Melodan Castille picked her way through the deadly chaos with practiced skill, fingers curling and twisting in the control gloves. A scattering of drones and ever-changing electronic jamming kept the missiles away as she deftly dodged debris, and her own missiles and beams cleared a path before her, straight to the brilliant red sphere that marked the Primary Target: Charlemagne, flagship of Preceptor Johannes III himself.

Melodan boosted until the white line of her own trajectory marker neatly bisected the circle, ignoring the computer's sharp warning of imminent fuel exhaustion. She had enough for the attack—that was all that mattered.

She didn't see the trio of Preceptorate Swordcraft until she was within five hundred kilometres of the Charlemagne. They burst from behind the flagship and fanned toward her, filling her display with beams and missiles. She hesitated for only an instant—but her index finger was still curling to abort the attack when a red line touched the white blip of her ship. The screen flashed, then blanked.

Melodan swore and jerked off the virtual-space helmet. "Verbal input not understood," the computer's calm male voice murmured.

"You're not equipped for it anyway," she growled. "Display current status!" She stripped off the control gloves and reached for the glass of icefizz and the ham-and-cheese sandwich she had set on the communications console before starting the simulation.

Sipping the sweet liquid morosely, she leaned back in the form-fitting pilot's chair and scanned graphs and numbers on the flatscreens surrounding her on three sides. Nothing had changed since dimspace entry two and a half days before; every readout remained depressingly stable. After sixty hours of boredom, a small emergency would have been welcome—but she was too good a pilot.

"Then what am I doing here?" she asked herself. She tore a bite from the sandwich and a mustardy bit of ham fell between her legs onto the seat's worn black vinyl. Swearing, she retrieved it. Scoutships, designed for long voyages, had to have artificial gravity so the pilot could function normally on the planet once he or she landed. Spaceplanes—what she should be flying—didn't. She preferred it that way.

She tilted her head back to drop the errant piece of meat into her mouth.

The movement brought her face to face with her reflection in the cockpit canopy, a shadow-Melodan surrounded by glittering console lights, hanging in the absolute blackness of dimspace. Gray eyes met gray eyes. "So you're stuck out here, too," Melodan said to shadow-Melodan. "I hope you're enjoying it more than I am." She smiled crookedly. "Tell you what—you fly on to Avalon and I'll go back to the fleet. Deal?"

Shadow-Melodan did not look impressed.

Neither am I, Melodan thought, and jerked upright. A robot could perform this mission—on half power! "Replay simulation," she ordered the computer, then watched it unfold on the screen with bitter satisfaction. She'd come within seconds of single-handedly destroying—or at least damaging—the Preceptor's flagship. She'd never seen anyone do better in the "Preceptor's Last Stand" simulation. At the Academy on Alpha Centauri IV, she'd proven her skill over and over, graduating head of her class. If anyone had earned a combat assignment, she had. But when her orders came down? "Temporary scouting assignment." Scouting—when everyone knew the final attack on Earth was imminent.