by J. N. Chaney
“Had the Verity fleet been fully prepared for our arrival, rather than provoked into launching a series of hasty, uncoordinated attacks, this battle would likely already be lost,” Sentinel said.
“Ragsdale’s vigilance appears to have prevented Temo from sending a warning of your approach to their trap,” Custodian said.
Dash nodded. He’d be buying Ragsdale plumato wine for a good, long time for that. If it hadn’t been for the security chief’s suspicious nature, the Cygnus fleet might already be drifting scrap.
There were many other implications of Temo’s treachery, but that would have to wait. Dash relayed what had happened to the rest of his fleet, then said, “So these Verity assholes have managed to hit us again, in our home, and kill some of our people. Let’s return the favor.”
“Do you wish to deploy the new weapon?” Sentinel asked.
Dash frowned, thinking. Custodian had installed a blast cannon on the Archetype, similar to the one mounted on the Mako, but even more powerful. Trouble was, they hadn’t test fired it live, because simulations showed that, about a quarter of the time, it would temporarily disable the mech. Taking the Archetype out of the battle, even for a brief period, could be disastrous.
“Not yet. If we’re going to risk knocking the Archetype offline, I want it to be when it counts the most.”
The drones now arranged in an arrowhead pointed right at the heart of the Verity fleet, the ships of the Cygnus Realm began their attack run.
Dash winced, then cursed, when he saw the Fearsome explode.
The Silent Fleet ship had been badly damaged by a pair of missile impacts; a trio of light cruisers then concentrated their fire on her, pounding her to wreckage. He did see escape pods race away but didn’t have time to count them. Instead, he turned his attention back to the heavy cruiser he’d started methodically tearing apart.
“Bridge should be right about there,” he muttered, pulling his fist back, then slamming it into the cruiser’s hull. The plates buckled; jets of atmospheric gases erupted from the gaps. A fusillade of point-defense blasts rippled across the Archetype, but he ignored them, just driving his fist into the gap again. The hull plates and underlying structural members abruptly gave way; Dash jammed the power sword into the gaping hole and swept it side to side, up and down, the shimmering blade ripping through the ship like a laser cutter through mild steel. He finished by stowing the sword, grabbing the mangled wreckage, then wrenching most of the cruiser’s uppermost deck free and hurling it at a nearby light cruiser closing to help its stricken heavy consort. The Verity ship accelerated hard, but the chunk of deck dealt it a glancing blow, ripping open its drive section.
They’d found the Verity’s most glaring weakness: they were cowards.
Verity tactics focused on standing off, well away from their foes, and relying on ranged weapon technology to do their fighting for them. They had no wish to get into knife fights, demonstrated by how their ships were optimized for standoff battles. Ironically, it bad been the Aquarian ship, the Comet—new to fighting the Verity—that had inadvertently shown them the way.
The Aquarians had designed her to escort their comet-mining ships, meaning she had to operate in fields of debris—abrasive dust, chunks of ice and rock, all manner of navigation hazards. She’d been given an electrostatic nav shield, a repulsor system so powerful it rivaled the Archetype’s shield—from the front, anyway. Likewise, she had the thickest ablative armor across her prow and forward hull Dash had ever seen; it was more formidable protection than he’d seen on most warships. She’d shrugged off the fire from the Verity ships as they closed, eventually finding herself at the forefront of the flotilla, keeping station on the Herald. Dash had made to tell her fall back. She might be tough, but she was under armed for this fight—or so he’d thought.
As they raced through the storm of incoming fire, the Comet had loosed a pair of big missiles. Verity shots took out one, but the other closed to within a few hundred klicks of a big battlecruiser, then detonated.
Dash had heard of gamma ray lasers, but he’d never seen one in action. All he’d heard was that they were too unwieldy, temperamental, and expensive to make effective weapons. Essentially a big fusion warhead, when it detonated, it pumped energy through rods of an exotic thorium alloy, which were instantly turned into a brief, but incredibly intense burst of coherent gamma rays, destroying itself in the process.
The Aquarians used them for cutting apart especially large and valuable comets, making them easier to handle. It turned out their gamma ray laser was just as good at cutting through spacecraft, the hyperenergetic EM pulse entering the battlecruiser through its bow and exiting through its stern, vaporizing everything in between. The battlecruiser immediately went dead, then exploded as its reactor containment failed.
The colossal blast threw the Verity battle line into confusion, giving the Cygnus the chance it needed to close. And by the time the Verity had recovered and resumed firing, the range had dropped below the minimum for them to generate effective firing solutions. Much of their shooting was ineffective, just wild bursts of fire tracking madly after the Archetype and her cohorts.
“That’s it,” Dash said. “Sentinel, that’s it. The Verity aren’t good up close. We need to grab them by the balls and just hang on.”
“I will take you at your word that that is an apt analogy.”
“Oh, believe me, it is!” He switched the general comm. “All ships, the Verity suck at close-in battle. Get in as tight as you can. Hug the bastards!”
They’d still lost the Fearsome, and the Snow Leopard had been reduced to a battered hulk that they may or may not be able to recover, but the battle turned. They lost every single drone, but half of them had been able to close to point-blank range—a few had even managed to collide with Verity ships—and then Sentinel had simply shut down their fusion containment, turning them into powerful bombs. Between those blasts, and the battering-ram rush of the Cygnus mechs and ships, they’d smashed through the Verity line, opening a gap through which the Herald and the Slipwing raced, closing on the fixed defensive platforms orbiting the two dwarf planets. Dash saw both take hits, but then they were once more at point-blank range, both ships swinging back and forth in strafing runs.
“Dash, I think we’ve…well, won,” Leira said. “Tybalt and I are out of active targets.” After a pause, she went on, a note of wonder in her voice, “How the hell did that happen?”
“The bastards are afraid to get their hands dirty, that’s how. Once we got right in their faces, they fell completely apart.” Dash scanned the heads-up. “But we aren’t quite done yet. There are installations still on those two dwarf planets. I want them dead.”
“So do I,” Leira said, her voice suddenly alloy-hard. “Let’s finish this, shall we?”
“Yeah, let’s.”
Accelerating hard, Dash aimed the Archetype at the larger of the two planets, while Leira powered the Swift at the smaller one.
Dash landed the Archetype on the dwarf planet with a heavy thud. Sentinel immediately applied a steady down thrust, the little planet’s gravity being too low to otherwise stop the mech from just bouncing back into space.
A cluster of domes rose from the rocky surface a few klicks away. In between them and the Archetype was something novel: ground forces. The Verity, desperate, had deployed armored grav tanks and missile launchers to try and halt the Archetype’s rampage. Pulse-cannon shots slammed into the mech’s shield, while missiles raced across the barren terrain, Dash square in their sights.
But the power output of a grav tank was a miniscule fraction of that generated by a spaceship. The incoming pulse-gun shots might be lethal against other ground forces, but against the Archetype, they might as well have been tossing rocks. The missiles were more of a threat, but Dash just swatted those aside with quick dark-lance bursts. At the same time, he charged the Verity ground forces.
They were, indeed, a last-ditch defense, and not a very good one. For once, Dash foun
d himself not outgunned, but overpowered for the battlefield.
Outsmashing might be more accurate, he thought, tearing into the Verity forces as he rampaged through them with power sword, fists, and feet. He kicked a grav tank aside, stepped on another, crushing it, then picked up a third and heaved it into a fourth, the colossal impact sending sprays of gas and sparks inward before complete implosion reduced the tank to scrap. The remaining tanks desperately kept up their fire, but Dash gave a grim laugh and threw the Archetype into their midst, bashing and twisting them into smelter bait.
“Leira,” he called. “How are you doing?”
“I hate to say it, but this is fun,” she replied. “You really don’t want to get too up close and personal with one of these mechs, do you?”
Dash picked up a missile tank and flung it aside, then turned and cut another in half with the power sword. “Well, I don’t mind it myself, but I suspect the Verity are really regretting it.”
“Good. Screw ’em.”
“Indeed.” Dash grunted, swinging the power sword in an arc that cleaved a tank from barrel to base.
The last of the Verity tanks were scrap. Now, Dash turned his attention on the domes.
They were, it turned out, habs—the places where the Verity lived, and no doubt carried out their vile experiments. Dash approached with some caution, fearing there might be actual humans within them, but Sentinel assured him that none of the fitful bio signals she detected were more than just a fraction human.
That was all Dash needed to hear.
He’d smashed three of the domes and wheeled on the last when something suddenly shot up from the surface, rocketing spaceward. It was a small ship, but wholly unlike any Dash had seen yet. This one, shaped like a teardrop, shimmered with a darkly mirrored surface. He fired the dark-lance but saw its purplish beam just skitter off the ship’s hull. Benzel, monitoring from the Herald, engaged with pulse-cannons and dark-lances; they had no further effect.
“That ship is covered with armor based on Dark Metal,” Sentinel reported. “Similar to that used in the construction of the Harbingers. However, this is even more robust. It is unlikely our conventional weapons will be able to affect it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want who or what’s inside that thing getting away, which means this is the time I was talking about, when using that new blast-cannon is worth it. Sentinel, go ahead, charge it up.”
“Charging cycle initiated. Firing solution computed. The weapon will be live in fifteen seconds.”
From the Archetype’s back, a quartet of wings unfurled, cracking with incandescent energy as they balanced the enormous charge of power pouring into the blast-cannon. Dash raised the Archetype’s left arm, putting the targeting reticle on the receding ship and locking it there, gritting his teeth against a growing bass hum that thrummed through the mech. He watched the charge build.
The blast-cannon abruptly switched from charging mode to ready to fire.
The escaping Verity ship began to translate.
Dash fired.
No weapon—not a dark-lance, a pulse cannon, even a maser—could affect a target transitioning to a superluminal state; it would be gone from real space by the time the shot arrived. As potent as these weapons were, they were still constrained by the cosmic speed limit of light.
The blast-cannon, though, wasn’t. The singularity that powered the Archetype generated more than enough power for Custodian to have incorporated a translation effect into the weapon’s shots. Even then, the wings, acting as massive capacitors, had to accumulate enough raw energy to drive the thing, which meant that for a brief instant, the Archetype hummed with almost as much power as the entire Forge.
The effect, though, was surprisingly anti-climactic, as it mostly occurred in unSpace. The weapon discharged, flinging all of its prodigious energy in a single, titanic blast that knocked the Verity ship back into real space and sent it tumbling off in a random direction.
Dash let out his breath and smiled. “Still here and in one piece.”
“Yes, however the blast-cannon is now offline. It will require rebuilding upon our return to the Forge,” Sentinel replied.
Dash shook his head, his eyes on the tumbling, disabled Verity ship. “That’s okay. It was enough to stop whatever’s aboard that ship from escaping.” He launched the Archetype toward it, leaving the smashed ruin of the Verity settlement behind him.
“Now let’s go find out just what they were so anxious to save.”
It wasn’t cryogenically frozen samples this time, or pieces of tech that the Verity were trying to save. It was something far more valuable.
As Dash approached the derelict Verity craft, he studied its Dark Armor. It had been given a nearly mirror-bright polish, so deep and lustrous that it reflected the starfield almost perfectly. Moreover, whatever incoming energy it didn’t reflect, it refracted around it. It would be the ultimate stealth ship; if Dash hadn’t actually seen it launch, and the Archetype hadn’t been able to then track its flight path away from the ruined settlement, they probably never would have detected it.
“I would suggest that only a weapon as powerful as the blast-cannon would have been sufficient to disable it,” Sentinel said as they edged toward it.
Dash nodded. “Yeah. Even then, it doesn’t look like it took much damage.”
“It didn’t. Any conventional craft would have been completely destroyed. The blast-cannon simply overwhelmed the ability of this Dark Metal armor to completely dissipate its effect.”
“Can you tell what’s on board?” Dash asked.
“I am getting intermittent, weak bio-signals as the craft tumbles, periodically exposing its damaged quarter to us.”
Dash saw what Sentinel meant. A portion of the Dark Metal armor had been blasted off, exposing hull plating beneath. Information about what was inside leaked through the gap. Dash’s eyes widened when he saw that included hints of a weapon of some sort, apparently in the process of being armed.
“Sentinel, it looks like—”
“Yes, a weapon or explosive device. We must stabilize the Verity craft and maintain our orientation relative to its damaged quarter. If you don’t wish to destroy this craft outright, then I may be able to hack its systems and—”
Dash didn’t listen for the explanation, he just lunged forward, grabbed the Verity ship, and yanked it to a halt with thrust from the Archetype. Sentinel disarmed what seemed to be a scuttling charge that was struggling to come back online.
That was when they learned the truth. There were Verity on board—living Verity.
And now Dash had prisoners.
The Verity ship—essentially a glorified escape pod—squatted on the deck of one of the smaller, more remote docking bays in the Forge. Dash had alerted Custodian to their prize and made the necessary security arrangements; Ragsdale, still bandaged across his chest and one arm, had waited for its arrival with a squad of dour, heavily armed crew from the second Aquarian ship, which was still undergoing upgrades in the fabrication level. Also present were Kai and his monks of the Order of the Unseen.
Dash told Ragsdale, who winced with every movement and looked haggard and exhausted, that they had this; he could go back to bed. The man gave his head a grim shake.
“No way I would miss this,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to look one of these bastards in the face since we fought our way through that crashed ship back on Gulch.”
Kai didn’t have to say anything. He had more right to be here than any of them.
Custodian hacked and opened the Verity ship’s hatches. Pulse-guns levelled, the monks tensed into martial-arts readiness, waiting.
No one emerged.
Then, the others arrived—Leira, Viktor, Amy, Benzel, and Wei-Ping—even Freya had put in an appearance, watching curiously from the back of the bay.
Accompanied by Leira and Benzel, Dash led the Aquarians forward, stopping a few meters from the gaping hatch.
“We know you’re in there,” Dash
said. “And I’m getting irritated. So you can sit inside your little ship and pout, or you can come out and talk to us like men—oh, wait, you can’t do that, can you? You know, not being human and all. The opposite, in fact, inhuman assholes.”
There was movement in the opening. A single Verity stepped into view. All around Dash, pulse-guns were aimed, but Dash put up a hand.
“Welcome to the Forge,” he said.
The Verity gave him a cold, imperious look. “I am not prepared to banter with the likes of you. There would seem to be little point to any discussion since you intend only to kill us.”
Dash cradled his pulse gun. “That’s just a bit presumptuous of you. I mean, that’s your style, taking prisoners and then killing them—eventually—but it’s not ours. Believe it or not, we don’t harm those we take captive. It’s not our style.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Well, first of all, anything we can do that sets us apart from you bastards is pretty much automatically the right thing. Second, having a reputation for taking captives alive makes other enemies more likely to surrender, instead of fighting to the death. And third, if we’d wanted you dead, we could have just bored a hole through your damaged hull and vented your atmosphere.”
“Or even just blown you up,” Leira added.
Dash glanced at her and nodded. “Correct. We fire, boom, it’s over. But here you are. Here we are.” He shrugged. “So you can huddle inside your little escape pod there until you starve—or run out of batteries, or whatever the hell you do—or you can all come out here and surrender yourselves to us. Up to you.”
The Verity’s expression as Dash spoke could have been the regard of an ancient statue. The unblinking stare went on long enough that Dash began to wonder if the Verity had malfunctioned in some way, or even somehow just killed itself, by switching itself off. But, without a word, it suddenly turned and re-entered the ship.
