Free The Gathering Flame by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald Page B

“What am I supposed to be scanning for, anyway?”
    “Anything that looks suspicious. The raiders have hit Tanpaleyn.”
    There was a sound as if Verris had bitten off a startled oath. Gala tried to remember if the lieutenant had friends or family on the colony world, but she couldn’t recall. The sensor room fell silent except for the click-clack of Verris’s fingers on the comp-station keyboard.
    She watched the lieutenant at work for a little while, then turned away and brought up the massive holochart that filled most of one wall with a schematic representation of Entibor’s colonial space. In silence, the base commander put in the contact report from Tanpaleyn, so that the colony system showed up in the chart as a point of bright red light. Trestig Brehant and his squadron, presumably in hyperspace transit, she marked with a thin line of pale blue dots. Then she waited.
    Twenty minutes later, another courier showed up. This one reported a Mage raid at Ghan Jobai. By now the sensor room was full of men and women in uniform, watching the monitors and keeping the communication links open. Gala entered the contact from Ghan Jobai on the chart; behind her, as she punched in the data, she could hear the comm panel spitting out yet another incoming message.
    She never did have time to go for a cup of cha’a. Eventually a runner from the galley brought in a carafe of fresh-brewed. She poured some into one of the unwashed mugs left in the sensor room from the night before, and drank it down without tasting it while she stood with Lieutenant Verris and contemplated the holochart.
    The lieutenant said, “I don’t like the looks of this, Captain. They’re attacking in too many places all at once. Raiders don’t—”
    “If these were raiders, we’d have a report of at least one of them breaking off. No—” Gala pointed at the spangle of systems in Entibor’s colonial protectorate. More than half of them were flashing red. “This time they’re moving in to stay. It’s the big push.”
    The lieutenant nodded. Whatever the news of the first attack had meant to him, by now he had himself well under control. “That’s what I thought. What do we do now?”
    “They want us to split up,” Gala said. “Which means it’s the single worst thing we can do. We’re going to take the entire fleet and hit one of their groups, then do it again for the next one. And the next.”
    A siren began hooting in the hall outside the sensor room, and a voice came over the audio link.
    “Mage raid,” it said. “Mage raid.”
    “Where?” she demanded—though she knew, already, what the answer was going to be.
    “Right here!”
    An exclamation from one of the technicians at the sensor screens drew Gala’s attention, and she strode over to see what had caused the reaction. It was as bad as she’d imagined. The entirety of nearspace was full of Magebuilt warships, and more of them were dropping out of hyper every minute.
    Gala grabbed up the link handset for the base comms and flipped the setting to All.
    “Launch, launch, launch,” she said. “Duty courier, make for Entibor. Inform Central of our situation and status. All hands report to your vessels. All ships on the ground, make orbit as soon as your crews are aboard.”
    She turned to Lieutenant Verris. “You have control on the ground. Keep comms up; coordinate task elements and evaluate data as available. I’m taking command on-scene.”
    That taken care of, Gala left the sensor room at a dead run, heading for the launching field and a shuttle to take her up to her flagship, the Entiboran Fleet Cruiser Opal Wind . She had reached the main doors of the headquarters building when a series of powerful blasts from the field outside jammed the doors open and filled the passageway with curling dust. Where the nearest shuttle had stood on landing legs a minute before, only a crater remained.
    “Bastards!” she yelled at the unseen raiders, somewhere up above the stratosphere