Olli’s Scorpion rushed past her on the ceiling, taking up almost all the space, saw-edged tail whipping left and right. One ratcheting limb rapped Solace’s helm on the way through, slamming her back against the floor. She heard another two shots from the hijackers before the remote specialist reached them. Abruptly the air was full of blood, a thousand little pellets of it, each accelerating away from the man Olli had just torn into. Solace charged up her faceplate, repelling the droplets so they spun away in every direction. The other human hijacker had a leg pinned by one of the Scorpion’s heavy work limbs—it looked more broken than trapped, but he also had his gun against the clear plastic of Olli’s capsule. Solace snapped off a single shot from Mr. Punch, puncturing his temple and the wall behind him. Hope there wasn’t anything essential there. The Harvest’s Hanni was retreating, sending out a wild spray of bullets from the gun clutched in its mandibles. The recoil sent the creature spinning backwards in freefall, but at the far end of the corridor, it caught itself against the wall with four or five legs and started aiming properly.
Olli was right after it, apparently believing her Scorpion frame was entirely bulletproof. When she was just halfway, a lance of fire lashed across her, severing one of the frame’s legs entirely.
The Castigar was there, the big wormlike one with the weapons-mount hood—the one that had killed Medvig. Solace put a couple of pellets through it, but Castigar tissue was dense and unspecialized. Unlike humans, they lacked discrete vital organs; accelerators weren’t a good weapon against them. She settled for drilling her next three shots through the Hanni, sending its body spinning disjointedly into the top corner of the room.
The Castigar’s weapons hood swung towards her and she braced herself for significant suit damage. Olli was on it in the next second, the loss of one leg barely an inconvenience. There was a great blackened furrow across the Scorpion’s back, but she must have routed around the damage. She grappled fiercely with the alien, trying to bring her cutting arms and tail to bear, even as it wrapped its twisting length around the Scorpion and fought to aim its down weapons.
“Go get the others, I’ve got this fucker!” Olli shouted, even as Rollo let out a roar of fury. Solace looked up to see a suited figure sticking its head out to see what the hell was going on. The suit was one of the Vulture’s but the face inside the helmet was none other than Mesmon the Tothiat’s. Then he shut the door between them, abandoning his fellows.
Rollo was already after him, yelling at Kit to get the door open. “No—!” Solace shouted; they needed to give Olli backup. Between him and Olli, though, the captain needed her most. Solace cursed all civilians in war zones and ran after him.
Once through the door, the sudden space of the drone bay caught her by surprise. She wasn’t as familiar with the Vulture’s layout as its crew. Rollo had dived behind a tangle of pipes and was shooting at a handful of suited figures entering through the ship’s remotes hatch. It was connected to the Oumaru, Solace realized; this was their salvage party hurrying back on board the Vulture. She sent a scatter of shot in that direction, pure intimidation rather than a determined attempt to kill anyone. In response three heavy impacts struck her like fists, lifting her from her feet and sending her cartwheeling across the bay into the wall. Rollo returned fire, though one of the pipes he’d been sheltering behind was now a jagged-edged stump.
“Kit, can you give me gravitic access?” Her own voice was commendably calm in her ears, even as she scrabbled for purchase against the wall. She would have been a sitting target for those shooters at the hatch. Instead, Mesmon slammed physically into her. She saw two holes in his stolen suit, evidence of Rollo’s marksmanship. They hadn’t slowed him down at all. His mottled face, through the cracked visor, was all eerie calm.
She clamped one boot to the wall for purchase and flipped him, slinging him across the drone bay. He somehow kept his orientation, levelling a hand-cannon at her and hitting her with another two shots. Each bullet exploded on impact. Unarmoured, she’d have been a bloody mist by now. As it was, she felt the impacts like sledgehammer blows, bruise-makers every one. Her heads-up was giving her all sorts of warnings about ablative tolerance and stress fractures. Partheni battle armour was good but there were limits.
So: return the favour. She levelled Mr. Punch and did her best to cut the Tothiat in half the hard way. One pellet did actually catch him in the leg as he bounced back from the wall, spoiling his return leap for her and spinning him away. She tried to track him, but he swung himself off in an unexpected direction, one hand hooking around the drone bay’s empty control pod. Then he was speeding back at her from the other side almost faster than she could register. Right little zero-G ballerina, aren’t you?
This time she didn’t throw him off, but grabbed him when he came in, with the full intention of breaking his neck. Contrary to popular opinion, Partheni weren’t superhumanly strong. Raw muscle wasn’t usually needed, except, it seemed, for brawling with renegade Hegemonics. However she had the assistance of her armour’s servos and decades of muscle memory.
She got a hand on his helmet and wrenched at it, yanking his head to one side. He stuck a boot to the wall behind her and used that purchase to hammer down a blow where her neck met her shoulder. Stupid infantile move, except she felt it, and her armour’s stress warnings redoubled. She felt the first worm of worry creep in through the cracks. She could see he’d hit her so hard he’d broken his own wrist, the hand bent at a crippled angle. Even as she registered his injury, the joint snapped back into place, the damage repairing itself before her eyes. Through the rents in his mangled glove she saw skin seal and bones realign even as he came in to hit her again.
Need to update our database on Tothiat. She gave the servos all the reserve power the armour had, went for his neck, and felt something give with a satisfactory snap. When his next monstrous blow came in, she realized she’d actually heard the seal of his helmet give way. It came away in her hand, leaving his face pressed right up close to her own visor. His next blow was too much for his boots’ magnetic seals, and he fell away from her, levelling his gun. She threw his own helmet at him, bouncing it off his forehead. “Gravity any time now, Kit!”
“Working working working,” in her ear from the Hanni.
Mesmon’s next shot blew a hole in the wall past her helmet, the propulsion sending him rocketing away from her across the room. Grimly, she lined up Mr. Punch and put a dozen pellets in him before he could change his course. The force spun him around three times, leaving a spiral of holes all over his body before it bounced him off three walls.
And now to end the others, she thought. Because surely they’d done for Rollo already, and would be coming for her next.
Yet Rollo was still over by the pipes, exchanging inaccurate fire with two hijackers while a third brought something up out of the Oumaru. The gangster was handling his find as gingerly as though it were a bomb rigged to blow. The other thugs moved to cover him. Despite all the fighting around them, apparently this was their priority.
Then Mesmon was back, notwithstanding all the holes in his hide. And she realized she had a bigger problem herself.
Idris
“Kris,” Idris said. “There’s a fold-out seat behind mine. Get it out, strap in.”
She was already on it as she asked, “What now?”
“I’m going to push the tolerance of the ship’s dampeners. I don’t want you thrown around.” He had the grabby drive reaching out for the universe again, dragging them at a tangent to the Harvest interceptor, which was lurching towards them in turn.
Let’s see what you’ve got. He fired their accelerators towards the Harvest craft, burning through a hundred fist-sized pellets from the magazine, each one spun up to a speed beyond the dreams of ballistics. Their opponent was already using its drive to bend space about the vessel, so that every shot, still going subjectively straight, just swerved away. So far, so much as expected. Then the return fire was incoming, trying to track the fleet litt
le Partheni package runner as Idris threw it through a series of abrupt changes of heading. You couldn’t dodge something as fast as an accelerated round, any more than you could see a laser before it hit. But you could well and truly mess with your opponent’s targeting. Plus the void was very big, and the Dark Joan was a very small target.
Idris had his own gravitic drive twisting space too, so the handful of shots that came near slingshotted around the Joan and were lost to the abyss. By that time he’d closed with the interceptor on a jagged course. And the interceptor’s salvos continued to land everywhere the Joan wasn’t, Idris’s deft hands feeding calculations to the ship. There were gaps in their enemy’s firing, too. He wasn’t sure why, but his mind picked up the discontinuity. Why not shoot back just then? Why that half a second when their guns cut out? Malfunction or strategy?
He brought them closer yet, reaching out with the brachator to snag the universe and yank the Dark Joan in. Close was relative, but a hundred kilometres meant near neighbours in space. His laser flicked out and he unloaded another burst from the ship’s accelerators, the high whining vibration of the weapons coming to him through the hull. The Harvest ship tried to match him, manoeuvre for manoeuvre, but its drive-to-mass ratio was far more mass than drive and he buzzed it like a fly. The Partheni console helpfully picked out all its arcs of fire and he chased the blind spots as it rolled and lurched then dropped suddenly away, trying to get him in range again. A moment later he was too close and the gravitic fields that had been fending off his attacks were clashing with his own. The whole fabric of the Dark Joan shuddered, and for a moment he lost control over where they were relative to the other ship.
He’d almost calculated a solution when the interceptor’s pilot reconfigured their gravitic field and sent the Joan hurtling away, like a cork from a bottle. The interceptor itself was punted in the opposite direction by Newton’s inescapable boot. Partheni ships had what Idris thought of as a panic pedal to generate emergency shielding. It flipped all the gravitic drive’s resources towards defence, and he stomped on it then, almost closing his eyes as he waited for the Joan to take a hit. Then a kilometre of space around them was coursing with the angry metal bees of accelerator shot.
The missiles flowered away from them in a perfect rosette as the Joan’s drives took the gravitational gradient of spacetime and hauled on it like a sheet. The lethal barrage of fire fell away from them, raindrops down a window. Except the window was the universe and “down” was in every direction.
Something hit them like a slap, making the inside of the Joan boom hollowly. Kris yelped, and for a moment Idris thought she’d been hit. But this was no laser, no punching railgun round. She was just demanding to know What the fuck? because she’d never been on the wrong end of a gravity hammer before.
I guess they do have one then. He really hadn’t quite believed it, because serious gravitic weapons were for Partheni battleships and other big-ass militaria. But that was humanity. Apparently the Hegemony were just giving the damn things away, even to their apostate gangsters.
That had been a near miss, the interceptor’s hammer striking the space the Joan was just vacating. Idris was still using the drive to ripple their gravitic shielding, eeling through the storm of shot the interceptor was sending their way. Their shielding couldn’t take the concentrated gravitic force of a closer strike. Even another near miss might just flatten the spatial contours all around them, leaving them a sitting duck in a mathematically predictable volume of space.
The Harvest almost had them in the next second. Idris had the sense of being arrested in mid-leap, suddenly stationary, so the dampeners struggled and he and Kris were both rammed sideways in their seats. A moment later they were out of it and on the move. Again, the interceptor had missed its big chance to turn them into confetti. Same thing, why stop then? What’s the deal? He let the back of his mind chew at it as he had the grabby drive sling them about a bit. Once more, he tried to exploit their blind spots, or at least minimize their attacker’s lines of fire as they dodged.
“The Oumaru!” Kris shouted.
“What?” That part of his mind they’d monkeyed with, to make him an Int, was warning him that the gravity hammer was crushing space along their path like a raging imbecile chasing a fly.
“They don’t—” Kris whooped again as the whole ship shuddered and groaned around them, “want to hit the Oumaru.”
It seemed ridiculous, because something had already hit the Oumaru with extreme prejudice, but Kris was absolutely right. The gaps in enemy fire occurred when that great scatter of accelerator rounds might catch the ruined freighter. Worried about their friends on the Vulture? But would that really warrant sending a near-as-damn-it warship after them—via a dangerous in-system jump. What’s so bloody valuable to them?
Then the gravity hammer came down. He had a moment to appreciate that he’d screwed up and they were well and truly dead. Then he realized that he shouldn’t have been allowed that moment. And now, two such moments later, he was still alive… The Joan’s damage console was lit up like it was some kind Partheni festival—but they were still there and the ship was responding to his commands.
Segmentation. It was Partheni tech developed at the end of the war. It had been brand new at Berlenhof, expensive as hell, and you had to build your entire ship around it. He remembered the Pythoness as it had come in towards the Architect, a mere mote in the face of that jagged crystal landscape. All around them, other ships had been flayed away. The unseen hands of the enemy’s gravitic fields had found them and sculpted them into tatters and flowers and murderous origami. One of his Int classmates, in a ship up ahead, had been snuffed out into nothing, just gone into loose molecules and tormented strings of organic material. Then the Pythoness had fallen under the Architect’s gravity field too, but the new tech had saved them, shunting the clenching force of the strike right down its segmented hull, focusing and concentrating that force until…
Until now, the Dark Joan slipped from the interceptor’s grasp like a lizard leaving only its tail behind. The last five metres of the ship were just gone, sheared off and crushed into a knot of metal and plastic by the deflected force of the hammer’s blow. But they were clear—and very close. He ran his calculations swiftly, taking into account Kris’s revelation. He could unleash both the Joan’s laser and accelerators, then dart from blind spot to blind spot. He’d head for the point where all three ships lined up like a conjunction.
The interceptor pilot was pulling its ship round now, to catch them in its field of fire. He felt the judder as their gravitic shielding clashed against his own a second time. This time it was expected, all figured into his calculations. Lessons from Berlenhof again. Idris had been at ground zero, watching the Heaven’s Sword crew play tag with the Architect. Their vast battleship was no more than an insect in the face of this enemy, as they calculated its hundreds of conflicting attempts to maul space around them.
And the Heaven’s Sword had gone down, of course. But this time would be different.
Idris hit a blind spot and the interceptor rolled away just as he’d foreseen. He already had the Joan’s accelerators running hot, his barrage of fire whirled harmlessly away by the gravitic torsion of the other ship’s shield. Another blind spot—and now Idris wasn’t shielding but reaching out, predicting the defensive configurations of the enemy’s shielding and matching them. He aligned the ships, reorienting the Joan to find a new down. The ship rolled uncomfortably around him and Kris, as he brought them swinging far too close to the enemy’s hull. He’d seen Partheni Zero fighters do exactly the same as a swarm, to bring their weapons to bear on larger targets. He was no Zero pilot, but then this wasn’t the war… Make do and mend.
The Dark Joan darted past the interceptor, heading into deep space; next instant the grabby drive had yanked it back, still yoked to the shifting gravitic fields of its target. Then came the moment he’d been waiting for… that heartbeat of stillness when the enemy weapons stopped, to avoid
raking hellfire across the Oumaru’s warped hull. Even though the wreck was nothing more than a glinting dot a world away.
Idris unloaded everything they had, chewing up the Joan’s own mass for ammo, emptying the laser’s power reserves. He used the shuddering flex of the interceptor’s own gravitic field so that, when the enemy tried to twist the Joan’s attacks away, it took them into its heart instead, embraced them to its bosom like a lover.
He saw their reaction drives blow first, then their remaining fuel reserves, a constantly extinguishing fire venting out into the hunger of space. Abruptly the interceptor was spinning, turned from an arrow to a twirling baton by the force of the explosion. The Joan’s twin accelerators raked the length of the ship three times, automatically tracking along its length for as long as he maintained fire. His panel reported 307 discrete hits, like a proud child with a test score. But Idris was pulling away from the damaged ship, feeling abruptly sick at the surge of triumph he’d felt, the savage joy. For him, adrenaline went sour quickly.
He located the Oumaru and checked the Vulture was still attached. Then he scudded the Joan across the intervening kilometres at the ship’s best speed, because the others would need him.
Solace
Mesmon slammed a fist into Solace’s helmet, hard enough to spatter her visor with his own blood—a resource of which he seemed to have an infinite supply. She grabbed him under his arms and tried to throw him away from her, but he held on and they ended up kicking away from the wall, crashing straight into the knot of his confederates. They were all human, lightly suited for EVA duties and sheltering whatever they’d brought up from the Oumaru with their bodies. Her armoured knees rammed one in the back, hard enough to gash his suit. Another decided to get in on the action, grabbing her arm and giving the whole awkward tangle that was Solace/Mesmon a completely new spin. Solace gave the man a murderous glare and drove her fingers, ramrod straight, into his throat. She felt the thin suit material flex and then he was jerking away, kicking and strangling in mid-air, wrestling futilely with his helmet.
Shards of Earth Page 18
