The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  She grimaced. That could still hide unpleasant surprises. “Let’s approach them just outside of our own weapon range, melded.”

  The warp field stabilizer snapped into place outside the cockpit, a glowing halo of solid blue light all around her. I will engage the meld as well as time dilation immediately after we warp.

  “Good. Go.”

  On the other side of a blue flicker, the Hornets suddenly burst into focus. They immediately started firing at her, each one belching out four staggered globs of something bright orange and roiling like fire; then time slowed to a crawl and she was invisible to them. Ballistic projections for each projectile, both visible and viscerally felt in Ada’s own body, crisscrossed space in a tightly-bundled tangle of places for her to avoid flying. Cherry, what are those?

  They appear to be magnetically-contained packets of nuclear fusion.

  What?

  Cherry’s attempt was briefly delayed. Small pieces of a star’s fire.

  Starfire? Holy shit, that did not sound good. Can they harm us?

  At this time I can only estimate. The packets seem to be boiling away, so their range is limited and their power decreases with distance. At half maximum range, one individual impact could result in approximately five percent shield degradation. Twenty in the span of a minute or two could crack the shields entirely, and they could severely damage my material structure. Note that melding is energy-intensive and will inhibit my ability to regenerate shields normally; twenty shots in ten minutes could be enough. Avoid close-range engagement and disengage the meld if you’re taking fire.

  She didn’t like the sounds of that. Luckily, the packets seemed to be moving in straight lines trained on the place Ada had been going as she snapped out of warp. Now that she was melded, the shots were wildly off.

  Back into realtime. The Hornets were about six klicks away, and their starfire stopped as though she had never been there. She swept towards them, closing the distance as fast as she could, when a transmission pinged in from the Watersmoke . “ Ada! ”

  “What?”

  “ Help! ”

  She spun the ship around in space and realized what she had done wrong. She had been right between the Watersmoke and the Hornets; the projectiles would keep going towards the freighter. “Oh, fuck. Cherry, will the starfire -?”

  Something shouted danger into her brain and in a moment of distraction she spin wildly as two starfire packets struck her shields.

  “What the hell - aren’t we melded?”

  I believe the Haints detected our outgoing transmission. Do not worry about the Watersmoke yet - the starfire will lose its effectiveness by the time it reaches the freighter, and your wraiths will be able to absorb or deflect it.

  She gritted her teeth and shut herself off from all transmissions, zipping closer to the Hornets as they stopped firing again. She put a wide angle between herself and the evacuation corridor this time, for her final approach.

  “Let’s shoot a wraith at each of them and see what happens.”

  Very well. Interface with it like any other weapon.

  For the briefest of moments Ada didn’t know what Cherry was talking about - then, suddenly, she had a whole new tool at her disposal, and she knew without really probing at it that it would literally fire out wraiths like a cannon.

  She smiled. She was less than a klick away, closing fast, and as long as she stayed quiet they couldn’t see her. She fired once, twice, a third time.

  As soon as she did, all three Hornets started swivelling towards her, still maintaining their trajectories. The first wraith splashed against the veil and disintegrated immediately in a grey puff, and the third was caught by an eager starfire burst and shredded. The second managed to unfurl, and Ada could see it attack, but reaching into the veil broke the dark code, so instead the wraith apparently decided to try and knock the ship off-course, wringing out a great levitation sigil that bumped the Hornet in another direction. Then starfire got that one too, and then the hailstorm was coming for her.

  “Damn it damn it damn it -”

  Two bursts struck her shields, and she could viscerally feel the struggle to power up the shields again while maintaining the meld. To hell with it. She broke stealth and corkscrewed away from the Hornets, slipping into time dilation to recover.

  Cherry, I think we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. The pearlescent lines of danger Cherry was tracing through space in her mind were not pinpointed on her this time - instead they wavered around her like kelp, all over and unpredictable.

  I am analyzing their firing patterns. The most predictive algorithm I’ve tested is a spherical, four-dimensional analog of Poisson disk sampling. Given the apparent parameters, I believe their mathematics operate on a hexadecimal base.

  She would have frowned if she had had time. I have no idea what that means.

  My analysis appears accurate. I will visually simulate expected firing patterns.

  Suddenly those threat lines changed. Now each Hornets was waving strange banners through the void, fading from red to blue, and watching the starfire slip along these ribbons Ada realized they represented where Cherry expected the firing arcs would move through time. They wove and crossed around her, trying to maximize the chance of her getting struck by anything as she moved. Apparently they had realized she was too quick to pin down directly.

  She had toyed with them enough to understand that she should stop toying with them. Sometimes a sharp hex of hard light really was the best solution.

  She reached for the weapon muscles linked into her mind, felt the thin streaks of travel where Cherry’s weapons would fire, and lined them up. Slowly wrenched the ship around in space. Aimed. Fire.

  In realtime, half a dozen shards of light shot from her fins towards the incoming Hornets. She inhaled, sticking to the bluish areas of the ribbons, which changed and followed her as she went. She exhaled and started firing back, just as her first shots hit the Hornet - four of them, at least.

  The first two didn’t seem to do much, swallowed into that foamy white veil the Hornet was trailing with it, but the third one hit something, and the fourth one pierced the Hornet all the way through. The Haint went as limp as a spaceship could, awkwardly spinning as it stopped maneuvering and firing entirely.

  She whooped in triumph. “Got one!” And as the words left her mouth she slipped back into time dilation. Still exhaling, she tracked the other two Hornets through space, firing into spaces they couldn’t help but be moments later. By the time she was inhaling, she was dodging the last of their starfire and watching in mild disappointment just how much she had to sink into each Haint to knock it out. Still, all three of them tumbled dead through the void, trailing white smears that evaporated dozens of metres behind them.

  “Okay. Next formation!”

  Calculating.

  They spun through space, warp stabilizer encircling the ship, and the world flickered. Bam. Six Hornets were firing at her, following the same semi-random patterns. Inhale; she wove around the ribbons of danger, in and out of time dilation. Exhale. Slicing into their trajectories with glassy blue hard light. A moment of inattention let one of the fusion packets slam her shields, but Cherry was better now at restoring shield strength. Half her shots at the lead Hornet went awry as incoming starfire suddenly forced her to change course, and she only damaged it. Still, this wasn’t going too badly -

  Transmission from the Watersmoke .

  “Ada! They’re going to hit the ship!”

  “What? I already shot the Hornets.”

  “We’re evacuating to the trawlers.”

  What? That made no sense. She flipped the ship around, looking back at the trailing husks of dead Haints. “Huh? Cherry, warp us back over there.”

  Moments later she snapped alongside the Haint wreckage, looking out the cockpit at the smokey metal carcasses. “I don’t get it. They’re dead. What -”

  The three Hornets appear to have course-corrected before you shot them.
Their trajectories intersect with the Watersmoke ’s limited cone of maneuverability at three disparate points. Their momentum will carry the debris through space such that the Watersmoke cannot help but collide with at least one of them.

  Ada blinked. What was Cherry saying? The -

  Oh, shit. The wreckage.

  The Hornets knew they were going to be killed, so they made sure their bodies were flying on a collision course with the Watersmoke .

  Can’t they stop? Or speed past the intersection point?

  Many of the thrusters and fuel cells were damaged by the viral infection I purged. It does not have the necessary maneuverability to adjust course fast enough.

  She spun Cherry around, getting underneath the nearest Hornet, and started ripping into it with weapons fire. After the first couple of shots were swallowed into the veil, the rest started tearing into the inert machinery, but the wreckage didn’t detonate. It, and most of the shrapnel Ada blasted out of it, kept sliding forward.

  Cherry’s weapons were too sharp - they could slice through the hull inflicting crippling damage, but they barely moved anything around.

  The Watersmoke was less than a klick away at this point. Time dilation. What could she do? The gas hauler was too crippled to get out of the way, and the Hornets were careening towards it in a vertical pattern centered on its trajectory. If she could blast apart the central Hornet, maybe she could save the situation.

  Don’t we have explosive firing options?

  Yes. I will show you.

  A muscle moved in Ada’s shared mind with Cherry, and she felt what she had to do. Simple enough. She zipped behind the central Hornet and mentally squeezed, blasting roiling lumps of molten light into the Haint’s thruster area. The detonations flashed white and the Hornet shattered into dozens of chunks and a cloud of smaller shards of shrapnel. No bodies, only metal - a small detail Ada barely registered.

  All of it was still moving at insane speeds towards the Watersmoke .

  Ada weaved sideways, trying to get a shot off, at least blowing up the largest of the chunks, so that maybe the ship could -

  Something struck one of the gas tanks on the sides of the Watersmoke . There was only a brief moment of wispy gas puffing out before something ignited and exploded, devouring the other gas tanks, ripping the ship in half. Smaller pieces of shrapnel and veiled armor smashed into viewports and thrusters. The fusion core was in there somewhere.

  The trawlers hadn’t gotten clear yet. Cherry’s sensors felt them burst in the hangar bay.

  Ada pulled Cherry back through space, rear shields suddenly taking four starfire strikes from the next formation before she managed to corkscrew out of the way. She watched, powerless, as the two other Hornets flew right past the wreckage. The fusion core ignited, ripping the rest of the hull apart and flinging chunks of hull and bulkheads in every direction. She saw tiny human and mirran shapes, briefly flailing into the void before falling still.

  Failed. She had failed them all.

  Chapter 17

  Eyes closed. Deep breaths.

  Failure was supposed to be an opportunity to learn. Not just a poison frothing in her blood. Learn.

  First lesson about space combat: in space, things keep moving until they hit something or forcibly changed course. Wreckage, or ballistic weapons, would keep moving forever. Worth considering.

  Bodies floating in the void.

  No, no, that wasn’t useful. Scores of Haint ships were charging at top acceleration towards the evacuation corridor even now. They had starfire cannons, but their own hulls were also weapons waiting to happen.

  Ada turned towards the Union military fleet, zipped across space, and reached out to the Empress . “ Hey , we’re in trouble. They’re aiming themselves at the evacuation corridor - even if we destroy them, the wreckage -”

  “Yes, we all saw what happened.” Felisha’s voice was remarkably calm and unsurprised.

  Ada cringed and turned red at the words, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know -”

  “It’s done. What matters is that you intercept the Hornets before they can fire on the evacuation corridor. You’ve done a good job at that, and we won’t make contact with the main fleet for a few hours. The civilians are counting on you, Ada. You’re the only one fast enough to intercept them.”

  She was all they had, and for once, she might not be enough. She flexed her fingers against the control groves and nodded. “Hurry the fuck up. I can only do so much.”

  She snipped off the transmission and cracked her way into the lead Hornet formation at warp speed. She hung in time dilation between frozen angles of motion, curves carved into space, ribbons of starfire dressing the void. She picked off Hornets one by one with pulses of quick explosive bursts, darting through their banners, swerving and corkscrewing and doing whatever needed to be done. If anything the Hornets’ aim was only getting worse, while hers was getting that much better.

  “How can they be getting worse at aiming?” Explosive shots sent more smokey shrapnel curling off into space.

  Judging by the shifting parameters of their firing algorithm, they are learning they cannot predict exactly where we will move next. They are firing in a random but distributed pattern all around us to account for our ability to defy their predictions.

  “What are they using to predict our flying?”

  As best I can tell - speed, direction, rotational properties.

  They warped to the next formation, a six-Hornet grouping a klick ahead of the next. She considered the Haints as she attacked them, dodging and spinning, barely taking a hit. They were basing their predictions on her speed, but she could go far, far faster than this.

  “What about warp speed?”

  What do you mean?

  “If they think they know our speed, let’s warp around. If they decide our top speed is warp speed, where will they shoot? They might try to hit us twenty klicks away from where we are now just to account for the possibility.”

  That is plausible.

  “Then let’s see whether it’s true.”

  They cracked like lightning to the other side of the Hornet formation. The Haints spun around to target her as they continued hurtling towards the evacuation corridor, but as soon as they fired she warped. And again. To the next formation, then back before they could fire. Out several klicks, then back in again. Over and over.

  Then she dove in for a real fight and they were spinning almost uncontrollably, firing everywhere, as though they were blind and desperately hoping to find her. She flashed her teeth.

  Tiny shapes, freezing solid in the void.

  The memory stung her brain, and she almost spasmed as she flinched from it, blasting at the Hornets without really aiming, almost all her shots going wide. Damn it. Focus. She aimed explosive fire directly at their fronts, where their guns peaked from between veil-generating plates, hoping to slow down the debris or even blast it in the other direction if possible. Most of the wreckage just kept going.

  “ Empress , what’s the plan with this shrapnel? Seriously, how the hell are we supposed to keep the evacuation corridor clear?”

  “We need to hope that at those distances, evacuation ships can calculate and maneuver around the debris.”

  Fantastic.

  With one Haint left in this formation, she had an idea, and dropped down in front of it to face it. She wove and dodged a little, but it was mostly firing off in random directions. “Cherry, can we use a levitation sigil to reverse its course?”

  Applying a powerful force to an object already moving in the opposite direction is more likely to crush it flat .

  She blinked. “That - I mean, that also works.”

  The power requirements for sustaining the gravitational distortion from a tactically safe distance, and in a wide enough beam to account for their maneuvers, may prove unsustainable over the course of the battle.

  “Just try.”

  A great, geometrically perfect sigil of black code unfurled from t
he ship’s nose cone like a dark flower, and a new muscle-like weapon trigger took root in her min d. Sh e set her jaw and fired at the Hornet.

  She felt a thrumming in her head and in the cockpit as the Haint splattered into a wall of nothing like dessicated, moldy squash, its debris miraculously staying in place as she continued hurtling along away from it. She woke the ship’s propulsion and fired back towards the wreckage. It sat there, inert aside from some gentle spinning, the veil scattered like blood.

  “Yes!” She threw her head back and pump her fist in the air. “Got it!”

  That gravitic pulse required 0.8% of our energy reserves to utterly stop the Hornet. Please use this ability conservatively.

  She bit her lip, but she had to do something . Until the Union fleet closed the distance with the Haint warships, she was all the civilian evacuation had.

  She warped through space to the next formation of Hornets, quickly positioning herself in front of each of them, smashing them in place and neutralizing their ballistic potential. It was glorious.

  This energy usage pattern is not sustainable in the long term.

  “We’ll stop when it gets too dangerous.”

  Next formation. Slam, smash, crush. Each Hornet rammed into a section of space that immediately sent them back the other way, and they burst like ripe huckleberries against a rock. They left no biological bodies - only wreckage. Only machines.

  Energy reservoirs at 62%. Consider lower expenditure levels to allow a positive energy flow.

  “Not yet. If we’ve got a reservoir we’re going to use the damned thing.”

  She couldn’t help but wonder where that energy was coming from; Cherry had mentioned vacuum energy in the past, but there was no time to ask what that meant. She swung through space to the next formation, and the one after, and found the Haints remarkably incapable of adapting to her smashing tactics.

  Energy levels at 28%. Another few formations and I will enter emergency protocols.

  “What does that mean?”

  I will warp us into deep space and cease responding to your commands until we have fully recharged.