For Honor We Stand by Harvey G. Phillips, H. Paul Honsinger

hardly set the landing skids on the Carrier’s deck before it pulled a high G two axis course change that must have raised her Chief Engineer’s blood pressure thirty or forty points.  When the gigantic vessel straightened out on its new heading, the dissonant vibrations transmitted through the deck to the soles of his Max’s feet as he and Doctor Sahin walked through the ship told Max’s exquisitely sensitive sense of warship machinery that all three mains and both auxiliary coolant circulating pumps for the carrier’s four massive fusion reactors were being redlined. 
    The Rashidians assigned an earnest but selectively communicative Lieutenant Commander to escort (and keep an eye on) Max and the doctor.  The young man, about Max’s age, explained their course, rate of acceleration, and how the Clover would be ejected upon arrival at Rashid IV at a suitable distance.  He went on to detail how, by redlining its drive, there would be just enough time and space for the Clover to decelerate from the Carrier’s velocity to entry interface, how Rashidian flight controllers would clear a path for it from entry to the landing pad, and how fighter/interceptor aircraft would escort it to a safe landing.  The only thing he did not explain was why the entire Unified Rashidian Kingdom was putting forth such a profligate expenditure of men and resources dedicated to seeing that one Lieutenant Commander and one Doctor/Acting Ambassador were deposited safely on the surface of Rashid IV at the earliest possible moment.  What could be so urgent? 
    At least, now that they were on a gigantic Carrier surrounded by the aggressively defensive swarm of its Combat Area Patrol fighters, there was no chance of any further attempted ambush.  Which, of course, was the point.
    The ejection maneuver took place exactly as planned.  The Clover simply lifted off the hangar deck and nudged itself out the port side of the Carrier on maneuvering thrusters.  Even though the microfreighter had the same forward velocity as the Carrier, the larger ship was under full acceleration while the Clover was not.  As a result, the two vessels rapidly separated.  The Carrier’s enormous, blunt shape dwindled in only a few moments to nothing more than the brilliant pinprick of light created by its huge fusion drive, seeming to move ever so slowly against the background of fixed stars, the vastness of space reducing the carrier’s great speed and enormous bulk, as it reduces all the puny handiwork of man, to insignificance.   
    Immediately after separating from the Carrier, Max programmed the Clover’s ID transponder, in accordance with Escort One’s instructions, to broadcast Kilo Papa Lima Charlie.  Within a minute of leaving the carrier, the microfreighter was surrounded by a veritable cloud of thirty-six Qibli fighters arrayed in a flying wedge, defying any foe to challenge them.  Max never knew whether these fighters were launched from the carrier, in which case they would have a long flight back home, or whether they were based on or near Rashid IV. 
    After several minutes of hard deceleration, the Clover encountered the tenuous outer fringes of Rashid IV’s atmosphere.  The leading surfaces of the vessel began to heat as the ship entered the transitional regime in which space, where fusion and rocket engines propel ships silently along the elegant trajectories of Newton and Kepler, gives way to atmosphere, where air-breathing jets push aircraft with a deafening roar through buffeting gases subject to the laws of Bernoulli, Navier, and Stokes.  When the formation had descended to about 100 kilometers, the space fighters peeled away, one two-ship element at a time in quick succession, their brightly blue-white drives tracing graceful curves against the deep blue-black sky as they soared back to the infinite dark that was their natural abode.  Each element was instantly replaced by a pair of sleek AF-97 “Haboobs,” atmosphere fighters