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  “I’m doing my job—I take good care of them. After all, a human you can make for free, but a fighter craft costs a lot of money.”

  “That supposed to be funny, jackass?”

  Poplin flung his pilot’s helmet to the ground; it caromed off the floor and went high up into the air. Poplin’s green eyes burned with anger.

  In contrast, Toda’s gaze narrowed and sharpened. “You wanna go a round, dragonfly?”

  “Bring it on. I’ve lost count how many imperials I’ve killed, but every one of ’em was a better man than you. I’ll even give you a handicap—one hand’s plenty for the likes of you!”

  “Listen to you! Trying to shift blame for your own mistakes!”

  There were shouts at them to control themselves, but by that time the punches were already flying. Blows were exchanged two or three times, but finally Toda, driven into a purely defensive fight, began to stagger. Just as Poplin’s arm was drawing back again, however, someone grabbed hold of it.

  “Enough of that, you fool!” said a disgusted Commodore von Schönkopf.

  Things settled down right away. There was no one who failed to acknowledge the hero of the capture of Iserlohn. Though naturally, for von Schönkopf himself, it was terribly disappointing to have no other role in the fighting but this.

  The commanding officer of the imperial force attacking Urannf’s Tenth Fleet was Vice Admiral Wittenfeld. He had orange-colored, longish hair and light-brown eyes, and his narrow face seemed somehow out of balance with his body’s firm build. His combative demeanor could be seen in his furrowed brows and the fierce gleam of his eyes.

  Furthermore, all vessels under his command were painted black and known collectively as the Schwarz Lanzenreiter, or Black Lancers. This force was the very embodiment of swift and violent strength. Uranff had fought a tough, shrewd battle, delivering a steady stream of damage to this force. However, he had taken just as much in return—not percentagewise, but in terms of raw numbers.

  Wittenfeld had a larger force than Uranff did, and furthermore, his troops hadn’t been going hungry. Both the commanding officer and his subordinates were fresh and full of energy, and although they were taking considerable casualties, they succeeded at last in fully enveloping the alliance fleet.

  The Tenth Fleet, unable to advance or retreat, had no way to avoid the concentrated fire of Wittenfeld’s fleet.

  “Fire at will! If you shoot, you’re bound to hit something!”

  The imperial force’s gunnery officers rained a monsoon of energy beams and missiles down on the densely clustered vessels of the alliance fleet.

  Energy-neutralization fields ruptured, and hulls were pounded by unendurable shocks. The concussions finally breached the interiors, filling the ships with explosions, and soldiers and officers were vaporized by hot, murderous gales.

  Pulled by the planetary gravity, shattered vessels that had lost propulsion were now falling. Among the planet’s inhabitants, children forgot their hunger for a brief while, enthralled by the ominous beauty of the countless shooting stars screaming across the night sky.

  VI

  The Tenth Fleet’s armed potential was just about exhausted. Conditions were terrible: 40 percent of all vessels had been lost, and half of the ships that remained were unable to continue fighting.

  Rear Admiral Cheng, the fleet’s chief of staff, turned toward the commander with a face gone white as a sheet.

  “Excellency, it’s no longer possible to continue combat operations. All we can do now is decide whether to surrender or run.”

  “So it’s one dishonor or the other, is it?” Vice Admiral Uranff said, showing a hint of self-deprecation. “Surrender is not in my nature. Let’s try to run. Relay the order to all ships.”

  But even to run, they would need to blaze a bloody trail through enemy lines. Uranff reorganized his remaining force into a spindle formation and slammed all of it at once against one point of the encirclement. Uranff knew how to concentrate his force and use it.

  Using this bold and clever maneuver, he succeeded in extricating half his subordinates from the jaws of death. He was killed in action himself, however.

  His flagship had stayed in the encirclement to the last, and at the very moment it had attempted to break through, had taken a direct hit from an enemy beam up one of its missile tubes and blown apart.

  All across the lines of battle, alliance forces were lapping the bitter soup of defeat.

  Vice Admiral Borodin, commander of the Twelfth Fleet, under assault by Vice Admiral Lutz, had fought until a scant eight gunships remained to him, and when both battle and escape became impossible, had shot himself through the head with his own blaster. Fleet command had passed to Rear Admiral Connally, who stood down and surrendered.

  The other fleets were also under attack—the Fifth Fleet by von Reuentahl, the Ninth by Mittermeier, the Seventh by Kircheis (who had already destroyed the transport fleet), the Third by Wahlen, and the Eighth by Mecklinger—and pullback had piled upon pullback.

  The sole exception was Yang’s Thirteenth Fleet. He had employed a clever half-moon formation against Kempf’s fleet, dodging the enemy’s attacks and bleeding them with alternating strikes on their port and starboard flanks.

  Surprised at the unexpected amount of damage he was taking, Kempf had decided that it was better to grit his teeth and choose drastic surgery than to stay the course and die miserably from blood loss. He elected to retreat and regroup his forces.

  Seeing the enemy pulling back, Yang made no attempt at using the opening to go on the offense. What matters in this battle is surviving it, not winning it, Yang was thinking. Even if we were to beat Kempf here, the enemy would still have the overall advantage. In the end we’d just end up getting pounded from all sides when the other regiments ganged up on us. The thing to do is run as far from here as we can while the enemy’s pulling back.

  In a grave and solemn voice, Yang addressed his forces:

  “Attention! All ships: run away!”

  The Thirteenth Fleet ran away. But in an orderly fashion.

  Kempf couldn’t help being surprised when the enemy—which had the advantage—not only did not give chase, but began a rapid pullback. Though he had been bracing himself for considerable losses when they pursued and attacked, he had been duped instead.

  “Why don’t they use their advantage and attack?”

  Kempf was both soliciting opinions from his staff officers and wondering aloud.

  His subordinates’ responses were split into two camps—the hypothesis that “the alliance force must be rushing to the aid of another force that’s in trouble” and the hypothesis that “their aim is to deliver a killing blow by showing us an opening and inviting us to thoughtlessly go on the offense.”

  Ensign Theodor von Rücke, a young officer fresh out of officers’ school, opened his mouth fearfully. “Sir—I mean, Commander—I think it’s possible that they don’t want to fight and are just trying to get away.”

  This suggestion went completely ignored, and Ensign von Rücke backed down, alone and red-faced with embarrassment. No one—himself included—understood that he was closer than any of them to the truth.

  Kempf, who had a lot of common sense as a strategist, arrived after much thought at the conclusion that the enemy pullback was a trap, and giving up the idea of a second counterattack, set to the regrouping of his fleet.

  Meanwhile, Yang Wen-li and his forces continued their escape, arriving in a region of space the imperial forces called War Zone C. There, imperial forces engaged them again, and a new battle began to unfold.

  Meanwhile, the Ninth Fleet, commanded by Admiral Al Salem, was under withering assault from Mittermeier’s imperial fleet and had been set to flight repeatedly. Admiral Al Salem was struggling desperately to prevent the chain of command from collapsing.

  The swiftness of Mittermeier’s pursui
t and assault was such that the vanguard of the pursuing imperial fleet and the rear guard of the fleeing alliance fleet actually got jumbled together, with ships of both forces flying side by side in parallel. One soldier after another was flabbergasted to see the markings of enemy vessels up close through the portholes.

  Also, the high matter-density readings detected in that narrow region of space sent the collision-avoidance systems of every ship into overdrive. Whatever direction they tried to turn, however, they found the way was blocked by both enemy and friendly ships, and some vessels had even started spinning as a result.

  They did not exchange fire. It was plain to see that if vast energies were released with the ships packed so closely together, an unstoppable chain reaction would result, and all of them would perish together.

  Still, bumps and collisions did occur. This was because collision-avoidance systems, unable to find a safe direction in which to advance, had been driven to a horrid state of autonomy, causing some ships to switch over to manual piloting to keep them from going mad.

  The astrogators were sweating hard, and this had nothing to do with the temperature-control function of their combat suits. Clinging to their control panels, they could see the enemy right in front of them, struggling with the shared goal of avoiding collisions.

  The chaos finally ended when Mittermeier ordered his subordinates to drop speed and increase the distance between the two fleets. Of course, all this meant for the alliance forces was that the enemy fleet was regrouping and would presently return to its strategy of pursue and attack. As the imperial force put a safe distance between itself and the enemy fleet, the alliance’s ships and soldiers were steadily lost amid the deluge of enemy fire.

  The hull of the flagship Palamedes was damaged in seven places as well, and the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Al Salem, was injured, with broken ribs. His vice commander, Rear Admiral Morton, took over in his stead and just barely kept the remaining force together, treading a long road toward defeat.

  The hardships of the path to defeat were of course not theirs alone.

  Each of the alliance fleets was enduring that same sorrow now. Even Yang Wen-li’s Thirteenth Fleet was no longer an exception.

  By that time, Yang’s Thirteenth, having retreated to a distance of six light-hours from the site of the initial battle, had been forced into a fight with enemies four times more numerous. Moreover, Kircheis, commander of the Warzone C imperial forces, had already set the Seventh Fleet running for their lives and was committing forces and supplies to his front line constantly in order to wear down Yang’s fleet through uninterrupted combat.

  This tactic was an orthodox one—not the product of some clever strategy—but it was extremely reliable when put into operation, causing Yang to sigh, “No opening to attack, no opening to run. It seems that Count von Lohengramm has some excellent people working for him. Nothing strange or flamboyant—just good tactics.”

  He couldn’t help being impressed. For although he was using orthodox tactics, it was clear that his numerically inferior alliance force was being driven to defeat.

  After thinking about it, Yang decided on the tack he should take: abandon the space they had secured and yield it to the enemy’s hands. However, Yang’s orderly retreat would draw the enemy into the midst of a U formation, and then, when their ranks and supply lines were stretched to the breaking point, he would counterattack from three sides with all his forces.

  “There’s no other option. And naturally, it depends on the enemy going for it …”

  If he’d had the time to accumulate force strength and perfect independence of command, Yang’s strategy might have both secured some measure of success and put a stop to the imperial force’s advance.

  However, he was ultimately unable to do either. While enduring the fierce onslaught of imperial forces approaching in overwhelming volume, Yang was struggling to regroup his fleet into the U formation when new orders arrived for him from Iserlohn.

  The 14th day of the present month,

  Concentrate forces at Point A of the Amritsar star system. Cease combat immediately and change course.

  When Yang heard those instructions, Frederica saw a shadow of bitter disappointment flash across his face. It was gone in an instant, but in its place he let out a sigh.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  That was all that he said, but Frederica understood how hard it would be to retreat under these circumstances, right in front of the enemy. They were not up against an incompetent, either. Kempf was in the same position: if he could have pulled back, he would have done so from the start. He was fighting on because he couldn’t do otherwise.

  Yang followed his orders. But during that difficult fighting retreat, the casualties among his fleet were doubled.

  On the bridge of Brünhild, supreme flagship of the imperial fleet, Reinhard was listening to von Oberstein’s report.

  “Though the enemy continues to flee, they’re retaining such order as they are able and would seem to be making for Amritsar.”

  “That’s near the entrance to the Iserlohn Corridor. But I don’t think this is merely an attempt to flee inside. What do you think?”

  “That they likely intend to gather their strength and take the offensive again. Though it’s a little too late, it looks like they’ve realized the foolishness of spreading their forces so thinly across our space.”

  “It is indeed too late.”

  Scratching with well-formed fingers at the golden hair that spilled down from his forehead to his eyebrows, Reinhard smiled a cold little smile.

  “How shall we respond, Excellency?”

  “Naturally, we’ll gather our forces at Amritsar as well. Why deny the enemy their wish, if it’s to make Amritsar their graveyard?”

  I

  The voice of the star Amritsar was ever raised in a soundless roar. In its fearsome inferno of nuclear fusion, countless atoms collided, split apart, and reformed, and the tireless repetition of that cycle spilled unimaginable energies out into the void. Varied elements produced multicolored flames that erupted in dynamic bursts of motion measured in the tens of thousands of kilometers, painting the worlds of its respective onlookers in reds, yellows, or purples.

  “I don’t like this.”

  Vice Admiral Bucock’s whitish eyebrows were drawn together as he peered at the comm panel.

  Yang nodded in agreement. “It’s an ominous color,” he said. “No doubt about it.”

  “Well, the color is, too, but it’s the name of this star I don’t like.”

  “Amritsar, you mean?”

  “The initial is A, same as Astarte. I can’t help thinking it’s an unlucky letter for our side.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it enough to notice.”

  Yang was in no mood to make light of the old admiral’s concern. After half a century spent in the empty depths, there were special sensitivities and heuristics that men such as he developed. Yang was more inclined to put stock in the superstitious words of the old admiral than in the decisions of Supreme Command Headquarters, which had designated Amritsar as the site of the decisive battle.

  Yang was hardly feeling high-spirited at this point. Although he had fought hard and well, this retreat had cost him one-tenth of the ships under his command, while also putting an end to his attempt at a counterattack. All that he felt now was exhaustion. While his fleet was being resupplied by Iserlohn, while the wounded were being sent back to the rear, and while the formation was being regrouped, Yang had gone to a tank bed to rest, but mentally it hadn’t refreshed him in the slightest.

  This isn’t going to work, he thought. The Tenth Fleet, having lost its commander and more than half of its force strength, had also been placed under Yang’s command. It seemed even Supreme Command HQ had in some way acknowledged his ability—in managing the remnants of defeated forces, if nothing else—but he wasn�
�t feeling grateful for the added responsibility. There were limits to both his abilities and his sense of responsibility, and no matter how much might be expected of him—or how strongly his arm might be twisted—the impossible was still impossible. I’m not Griping Yusuf, but confound it, why do you have to give me such a hard time?

  “At any rate,” Bucock had said just before ending the transmission, “I wish that bunch at Supreme Command HQ would come out to the front themselves and have a look around. They might understand just a little bit of what the men are going through.”

  He had called to discuss adjustments to the positioning of their ships, but the conversation’s latter half had turned into an excoriation of Supreme Command Headquarters. Yang hadn’t felt like telling him he’d gotten off the subject. He, too, felt the same sense of exasperation.

  “Please have something to eat, Excellency.”

  Yang turned around from the now blank comm panel and saw Sublieutenant Frederica Greenhill standing there holding a tray. On it was a roll of roast gluten stuffed with sausage and vegetables, winged bean soup, a slice of calcium-fortified rye bread, fruit salad smothered in yogurt, and an alkaline drink flavored with royal jelly.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got no appetite. I sure would like a glass of brandy, though …”

  The look in his aide’s eyes denied the request. Yang looked back at her, broadcasting objection.

  “Why not?” he finally said.

  “Hasn’t Julian told you you drink too much?”

  “What, you two have ganged up on me?”

  “We’re concerned about your health.”

  “There’s no need to be that concerned. Even if I drink more than I used to, it’s still just barely what the average person does. I’m a good thousand light-years from hurting myself.”

  Just as Frederica was about to answer, though, the harsh, grating voice of an alarm rang out: “Enemy ships closing! Enemy ships closing! Enemy ships clos—”