by J. N. Chaney
Dash engaged the fusion drive, pushing the Halfwing back toward the star. Now Nathis had two targets, but only one ship to chase after them. Sure enough, the big capital suddenly began to decelerate, intending to come after the Halfwing.
Barring anything unforeseen, the Slipwing was in the clear. Now, if he could only shake Nathis, then use an unSpace trajectory back toward civilization, and then rendezvous back with the Slipwing, things would be okay.
There was a whole lot of if involved, and myriad things that could wrong.
Dash pushed all negative thoughts away and focused on the Halfwing’s scanners and controls.
At least it kept life interesting.
12
Dash wove the Halfwing among tumbling chunks of ice and rock, one eye glued to the scanners ahead, the other watching the rearview screen. The big capital ship had taken a long time to come about and make chase, but there she was, burning fuel like she was made of the stuff. The edge of the Shadow Nebula was rapidly approaching, and Dash’s apprehension was growing. He needed to shake Nathis entirely, then take advantage of the Halfwing’s miniscule size and extreme maneuverability—as long as she had fuel, of course—to get away.
He wondered if Nathis might try something extreme like an unSpace translation to close the distance. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, because it would be more likely to put his ship somewhere far removed from the Halfwing. It just wasn’t easy to maneuver after small, specific targets through unSpace, but if he got desperate enough, it might come to that.
A chime sounded. Not long to the boundary of the nebula, now. Dash sat up, shook his head to clear it, and focused. Okay. He had the advantage on the enemy, being so far ahead and reaching normal space long before them. Interference from the nebula and the Halfwing’s tiny size would be enough to let him break away and find somewhere to hide. Then, once he’d thoroughly lost Nathis, he’d set a course toward the prearranged rendezvous with the Slipwing and, hopefully, they’d be entirely in the clear.
Another sound came from the scanner. Not a chime, though. An alarm. As the Halfwing brushed through the last, tenuous clouds of dust and gas that marked the outer boundary of the nebula, she detected something that was a threat, and not all that far away.
Dash studied the scanner output. “What the…”
The scanner pondered the fuzzy datapoint, then clarified it.
It was an Echo—two of them, actually—and they were far closer than Dash had expected any Clan Shirna ships to be.
Dash rotated the Halfwing, hard. A particle beam blast blew through space close enough to cause a minor electrical surge in some of her less shielded systems. There was no damage, and even if there had been, the systems weren’t critical—although listening to music or watching vids might soon be out of the question.
The two Echoes chasing him wove back and forth, trying to lay down a pattern of fire that would hem the Halfwing in, and eventually converge in an unavoidable barrage. Only Dash’s frantic flying, and the fact that the Echoes were probably still under strict orders to just disable and not destroy him, had prevented disaster so far.
Dash scowled at the Echoes racing after him. The plan had been sound, even a good one, but it had not accounted for the Echoes that chased them into the nebula getting damaged, then withdrawing back into clear space to wait for help. Unfortunately, damaged wasn’t disabled, so the Echo pilots had decided to brave the risk of piloting their wounded craft after him. Not that it had likely been a choice; Dash was pretty sure Nathis would happily send a couple of his pilots to their deaths, if it meant a shot at getting the Lens. And, given the insane devotion of Clan Shirna to their cause, he also didn’t doubt the pilots would do just that.
Another salvo of particle beam fire tried to converge on the Halfwing. Again, Dash was able to weave his way out of it through desperate, wrenching maneuvers. If there’d been a third Echo, they would have been able to make dodging their fire impossible and he’d have been disabled and captured long ago. The trouble was the Halfwing’s fuel was already down to worrying levels, so he only had a limited amount of time left.
He needed to get somewhere safe. The only place he could envision that even remotely qualified was back inside the Pasture.
The nearest of the engineered comets was now visible, a point of light illuminated, ironically, by the same blue star from the Globe of Suns he’d told Nathis he’d used to destroy the Lens. He could only hope the Clan Shirna edict against entering the Pasture would make the Echo pilots break off their chase rather than follow him in, because, frankly, after that, Dash was pretty much out of ideas.
The Echoes put on a burst of power to close. At least one of them did. The other lagged behind, either being strategic in some elusive way Dash just didn’t get, or because of damage. Probably the latter. Dash considered the Halfwing’s fuel supply. She had enough for her fusion drive to keep accelerating into the Pasture, but it would be touch-and-go how much decelerating she’d be able to do once inside. And if he couldn’t decelerate, then he wouldn’t be able to do anything but keep sailing along through the Pasture, eventually emerging on the other side, months from now. Not that that mattered, because he’d be a freeze-dried corpse long before then. The Halfwing could only sustain him for a few weeks.
He tried to imagine sitting buckled into this acceleration couch that long, but he soon gave up.
I wonder if it was something like this that happened to the crashed Sooner ship we found. Did they run out of fuel, or lose control, or—
Another alarm made him jump. He looked at the scanner.
Missile launch. No, two of them. Both from the further back of the two Echoes. He wasn’t sure why the nearer didn’t fire missiles as well. Maybe she couldn’t. Small miracles. Or so he thought.
“Oh, well now, aren’t you guys smart,” Dash murmured.
The obvious intent of the two Echoes was clear. Again, since there were only two, they couldn’t box him irrevocably in with their particle cannons. The geometry of things was such that he would always have an escape route from their firing solution. But the two missiles would effectively act as a third Echo, meaning Dash would have to pretty much accept being hit by at least one of them, or being hit by the Echoes’ particle cannons.
It actually was clever. Very clever. Too clever.
Because, being unarmed, the Halfwing had no hard countermeasures against missiles. She did have some electromagnetic jamming capability, but that was more an afterthought. She really wasn’t made for bailing out in the middle of space battles—not unless you had friends nearby who could protect you and pick you up. Alone, against two dedicated attack ships, all the escape pod was really good for was getting you to the scene of your death.
Dash furiously pondered the options. A single particle beam hit would cripple the Halfwing, if not outright destroy her. There was little doubt Nathis had specifically ordered that not to happen, but if it did, the instant of satisfaction that some Echo pilot was going to be on the receiving end of Nathis’s wrath wasn’t going to give much consolation. The detonation of a missile warhead, on the other hand, might offer some hope, because the danger zone of the blast effect was actually quite small—inverse square law and all that. So, if he could maneuver and time things just right, he might have a chance.
“This is going to be cutting things close,” Dash muttered to himself, focusing on the scanners and the Halfwing’s controls. “As in, I wouldn’t shave myself that close.”
He began nudging the controls, puffing small reactions from the thrusters. He had to think far, far ahead of the respective trajectories of the Halfwing, the Echoes, and their missiles. Think about not where they were, but where they were going to be, and when they were going to be there. He could do it all with math, or, correction, Conover could probably do it all with math. Dash had to rely on judgement, and experience, and luck.
Yeah. Luck. Lots of that.
The missiles closed. Dash saw the Echoes lining themselves up, arrang
ing their trap. He watched them carefully, looking for any hint that they were playing a fast one and would try a double-bluff. It would be a hell of a letdown to fly right into one of their particle beams, after all.
“Here we go,” Dash said to the Halfwing. “Let’s do this, sweetheart, and then we can take a rest.”
Dash paused and then broke hard, right into the path of the oncoming missiles. At the same time, he ramped the Halfwing’s fusion thrust to override power, filling the space in her wake with hot, electrically-charged gas.
But the missiles weren’t dumb. One immediately swerved out of his exhaust plume, sacrificing its chance to hit him to feed telemetry to its companion—a trick not unlike the one the Slipwing’s missiles had used against the Clan Shirna frigate during their escape from the Pasture. Dash swung the little pod sideways, making her thrust perpendicular to her course. She rapidly slewed away from the missile still chasing her; it burned, making it hard to follow, and then it detonated.
There was a dazzling flash, then a hard crash of static over the comms. For a moment, Dash thought that maybe he’d pulled it off, that the missile had reached the limit of its range and detonated as close as it could, which wasn’t close enough. But then a tsunami of incandescent plasma, stellar-hot, washed over the Halfwing and vaporized chunks of her hull.
A thunderous roar and the cabin filled with fog, which was instantly swept into space by the explosive decompression. Dash had the presence of mind to jam his helmet on; by the time it sealed, the Halfwing’s atmosphere was gone. He scanned the controls, but most of them were dark. Ahead loomed the alternating midnight black and dazzling silver white of a comet. The Halfwing would shoot past it, but, acting on raw instinct, Dash used what control he still had to point the burning fusion drive right at it. As the crippled Halfwing decelerated relative to the comet, he braced himself, counted to five—because five seemed about right—then switched all power left in the little ship into the inertial dampers. A sudden surge of artificial gravity shoved him down in his seat, then more systems failed, and something groaned behind him, like tearing metal.
13
There was darkness, a long tunnel of it, enormously far away, and at its end, a faint point of light.
He started clawing his way toward it, climbing the tunnel as though scaling a vertical shaft. That light, he had to reach that light. Otherwise, he’d fall backward, deeper into the tunnel. He’d lose sight of the light, and that would be it. There would be no more light.
The faint glow suddenly swelled, enveloping him.
Dash opened his eyes.
There was silence. Darkness.
His breath rumbled in his ears. Something enclosed him, tightly. What?
Wait. He’d been aboard the Slipwing, with Leira and Viktor and Conover—
No.
There’d been more. The Halfwing. A chase. By Echoes. Then there was a missile.
After a thunderous roar, the cabin filled with fog, which was instantly swept into space by the explosive decompression, the alternating midnight black and dazzling silver white of a comet.
He’d hit the comet. Crashed into it.
How was he still even alive?
Dash considered his body, his limbs. Everything still seemed to be there. And although there was pain, it was bearable. Mostly some specific, bright spots of hurt, and an ache that seemed to involve his whole body, like he was one continuous bruise.
But why was everything so dark?
It took Dash a moment to realize that it was literally dark, as in, no light. He switched on his vac suit lamp and the world erupted into control panels, components, and structural members, but everything was lifeless and tilted askew. He lifted a hand and poked experimentally at some controls. But there was nothing. Not even a spark. He glanced at the master power panel, but it was as dead as anything else.
The Halfwing was dead. And, judging from the distortion of her hull, no longer even a spacecraft. She was just wreckage now.
That realization kickstarted a whole new line of thinking. He had to evacuate. To where, well, that was something to worry about later. He reached under the seat and yanked out the crash bag, a kit containing things of immediate usefulness—suit patches, extra power cells, a distress beacon—before he levered himself out of his harness, wincing, groaning, and clambering to his feet. Then he floated up and banged his helmet on an overhead. Right. There was no gravity to speak of. He’d have to be careful.
A sudden rush of alarm slammed through him, washing away the last of the fuzz clouding his brain. If the fusion core was breached, there could be radiation, and a lot of it.
But the rad counter in his suit just showed a little above normal background. And the anti-deuterium storage had obviously stayed intact, too, or he wouldn’t even be here to wonder about it…he’d just be an expanding cloud of ionized gas mixed in with the rest of the Halfwing, and probably most of the comet, too.
It took Dash a while to exit the remains of the Halfwing. When he finally had, and was standing on what had been her prow, he looked around, his suit lamp revealing his new surroundings.
The Halfwing had impacted on a portion of the comet that was just unconsolidated ice, shot through with flecks of gravel. That, plus the fact that she’d come in backward, her fusion drive burning, decelerating with respect to the comet, had prevented total disaster. She’d ploughed a tunnel deep into the ice, her fusion exhaust vaporizing material as she crashed, until the drive finally failed. The catastrophic crushing of her rearmost two-thirds absorbed the rest of the impact. The tunnel she’d driven in her death-dive was still open, the walls obviously melted by the energy of it all and then refrozen. And the only reason he’d survived was because the inertial damper had cushioned him during the crash, at least until it finally failed.
He was alone, with maybe a day or two of oxygen, almost no other resources, and far, far away from anyone except Clan Shirna, who probably wouldn’t enter the Pasture to come after him anyway. And that assumed the fusion core didn’t breach or the anti-deuterium containment didn’t fail.
“Yup, things are definitely looking bad for our hero,” he said, his own voice echoing loudly in his head.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
Eventually, though, Dash began to wonder if just having his lights put out in the crash might not have been better. His suit was leaking air, and doing it in a place he couldn’t reach with a patch. It was supposed to be self-sealing, but that was obviously a bit of overhyped marketing by the manufacturer. So, instead of a couple of days, he probably had only hours. Days would have given him a least a chance to contact the Slipwing and try to set up some sort of rescue. Hours? Not so much.
Keenly aware of the oxygen pressure indicator in his heads-up display, and its slow-but-steady crawl toward zero, he pushed his way around the Halfwing’s crumpled hull. Maybe he could salvage something from her engineering module. The rads climbed as he approached, but that didn’t seem all that important right now. And an anti-deuterium release would end things before he could even register it. So, all things considered, it was worth nothing. It was a complete waste of time. The Halfwing’s engineering bay, or what was left of it, was buried in solid, glassy-smooth ice. The residual heat had probably done that, melting the ice, which froze again and encased everything in a frozen tomb. It would take Dash days to hack his way through it with what he had on hand, which meant it might as well take forever.
He let out a sigh.
So this was it. This was how it would all end. All things considered, it was actually surprising he’d made it this long. His only real regret was that he wasn’t going out in an actual blaze of glory, something he’d always hoped would happen. The battle against the Echoes, and the subsequent crash—well, that had probably been spectacular, but there’d been no one to see it. Blazes of glory weren’t of much use if they went unnoticed.
But he wasn’t even getting that. He’d survived the awesome crash only to face a much more unpleasant death from anox
ia. His best bet was probably just to get it over with—open up his faceplate and just let it happen, rather than dragging it out.
He sighed again. “Well, goodnight, universe,” he said, reaching for the latches. “It’s been fun, but now it’s time…time to…”
He frowned. What was that?
Dash pushed himself deeper into the narrowing gap between ice walls and wrecked Halfwing. There was a crack in the ice. No, a gap. An opening.
And he could see light glowing through it.
Aboard the Slipwing, they’d already established that these comets had alien stuff, for lack of a better term—technology, items, artifacts, whatever—buried in them. He hadn’t really forgotten that, it just hadn’t seemed really that relevant. But, looking back along the tunnel the Halfwing had drilled into the comet, he realized she’d gone pretty deep. That put her—and him—closer to whatever the Unseen had buried in this comet.
He had to hack away some ice to make an opening big enough to push through, but once he had, Dash found himself in another tunnel. This one, though, was perfectly cylindrical, its ice walls as smooth and crystalline as polished glass. Now he drifted along it, pushing himself off the wall periodically, letting it take him…wherever it was taking him. Probably face-to-face with some bizarre, incomprehensible machinery, which would make a really interesting backdrop to his corpse.
An alarm sounded. It was the low oxygen alert.
Right, okay. Not so much hours left, as minutes.
Dash shrugged inside his suit, his light flung far ahead of him, turning the tunnel walls to glowing crystal. Behind him, there was nothing but midnight darkness. But he’d seen light.
On a whim, he switched his suit lamp off. Sure enough, the ice glowed with a faint, bluish radiance. He decided to leave the lamp off and just try to navigate by the soft glow. He might miss something subtle otherwise, and right now, subtle things could be the difference between life and death.
