Free Magnet (Lacuna Short Stories) by David Adams Page A

was in that confrontation that we learned – against conventional thought at the time – that the Toralii used little fighters as companions to their larger ships in space battles.
    Military intelligence thought that strike craft would be too slow and too weak to hurt the larger ships but, shock horror, military intelligence got it wrong. The unexpected and effective presence of those little birds, pecking away at the Beijing’s hull, convinced the task force that we should have them too.
    A space craft was hurriedly designed and built, while tryouts were held amongst the world’s best air forces... with the Israelis eventually claiming the prize. The Iranians protested, of course, and insisted on providing their own pilots. The Australians went with the Israelis, but wanted to have at least one of their own pilots on the Sydney just to maintain an Australian presence.
    They picked me. Lord knows why.
    I was ecstatic at the time, but as I watched drops of my blood float up and get sucked out the giant hole in my canopy, and as my strike craft slowly tumbled end over end and drifted away from the battle, I began to see the events that had taken me to this point in a slightly less than positive light.
    We’d been given the task of assaulting a mining colony. It was thought that there might be humans held prisoner there – the Tehran had gone missing and there was a good chance the Toralii were using its crew as slave labour – and it was thought that the colony would be unprepared and lightly defended.
    The Sydney ’ s Broadsword gunships had been picking up a handful of prisoners, while the rest of us took defensive fire from the colony. It was random and light until the Toralii launched strike craft from the surface and, I had to tell you, then I was pretty excited. The Sydney had seen combat before I’d been transferred to her, but this was the first time I was going head to head with the Toralii myself.
    I still kinda hoped it wouldn’t be my last.
    I reached up and fumbled for the distress signaller, flicking it on. The red light in the corner of the cockpit which indicated duress lit up just like it was supposed to. Too brightly, actually, much lighter than the rest of my instruments. I frowned. What the hell was the designer thinking, putting in a bulb so bright... as if the pilot wasn’t already aware he was royally fucked.
    The moment the Sydney had appeared in the Lagrange point near the Toralii mining colony and we’d shot out from her launch tubes like little darts, banking and turning down towards the colony, holding off until our our short range radars lit up and we saw the hostile ships coming to meet us.
    Fortunately, we had the element of surprise. I got an early lock, letting off two missiles the moment I had good tone. We always fired two at once... they called it ‘ripple fire’. The reason why we did this was, well, they called them miss- iles, not hit- iles, and for the cost of an extra missile we’d want to make sure we hit our target.
    Both missiles went straight in, striking the centre of the Toralii bird in quick succession, causing the ship to burst into a bright pinprick of light against the backdrop of space. A pretty good showing for my first day out. Then, well, the anti-fighter fire started up again, stronger this time, and... well, that’s about where we came in.
    Eject, Eject, Eject flashed the HUD, the wail of alarms drowning out the hiss of escaping air, but I knew better than that. With this much blood my suit had to have been holed, too... so I’d be a gonner minutes after I bailed out. The ship had a much greater supply of oxygen than my piddly little suit and I was losing so much every kilo mattered; the only thing to do was to sit with it, try to get back to the Sydney if I could and go down fighting if I couldn’t.
    “ Come on you bastard,” I growled, struggling for a moment with the control column. Moving in three dimension was different than flying in an