The drone fell back, dropping away from the still accelerating weapon. Then its grappling line, still hooked to the hull inside the barrel, caught and snapped taught. The line swung the drone toward the inside of the barrel of the weapon.
A huge white glowed filled the sky.
The weapon was firing.
The drone exploded into plasma. And then the silence of space filled with a roar of white fire.
_____
It took several thousand shots before Bria managed to destroy the first incoming missile. She growled in frustration: the time required to destroy one missile left her little time to target the next missiles. She considered trying to move into its path, but it seemed unlikely she could manage it. She unleashed another automatic firing of all the cruiser’s energy weapons. As the weapons cycled, she attempted targeting corrections based on data from independent systems.
The missile shot past. She cut her acceleration but continued firing, the cruiser’s lasers tracking it as it accelerated away. Bria had almost given up when a wave of gamma radiation washed over the ship. The missile had been hit.
Seconds later, the cruiser jerked to the side violently. Decompression alarms sounded as atmosphere leaked from a hull breach. Bria’s pilot seat lifted her helmet up from its storage in the back of the seat, and placed it over her head. It locked down with a hiss.
Very unlucky, Bria thought, for shrapnel hit the cruiser.
The ship stabilized back onto its trajectory. A quick review of ship systems showed that most were still fully operational. Some fragment of the missile had blown right through the cruiser, punching two small holes, neither of which had penetrated an essential system.
Bria reviewed the tactical situation from inside her helmet. The third missile shot past. She trained the ship’s lasers on it, but it was far away. The dispersal of the missiles had been tactically perfect: no trajectory that she could take would put her in a position to fire at all of them effectively.
She turned on her hyper-radio, using the protocol that she had established with Zoroastrian. “One missile escaped. Prepare.”
She cut the transmission.
The attack run against the last missile had to be perfect now. The lasers were cutting out intermittently. She set them to autotarget, with a slight variation in the algorithm to add some chance to overcome the auto-targeting’s plodding predictability. Then she told them to fire in alteration, stopping when necessary to cool.
The only other option was interception. If she could come closer to the last missile’s vector, she would have a better chance of getting in its way. But it came fast. Only a few minutes till it would pass her. She flipped the ship, and fired the engines at high thrust. After the minute of dizzying microgravity, the force of acceleration made her nearly pass out. But then her vision cleared. She set a trajectory that aimed to slide over into the missile’s path. It would allow her more opportunity to correct for any evasions the missile might take, and to fire on the missile throughout her approach. She was unlikely to actually ram the missile, but if she could get so close the lasers could not miss, then the explosion of the missile would be about as destructive to her cruiser as would a ramming impact.
She glanced at the tactical data being transmitted on hyper-radio from the Zoroastrian’s AI. Gravity fluctuations shuddered around Neelee-ornor like a curtain of rippling space. Neutrinos blasted out in dense waves. Something strange and dangerous happened there. Neelee-ornor, the capital of the Alliance, might be destroyed if they did not burn the rings quickly and completely. She needed to stop the last missile, and hope Zoroastrian could find a way to destroy the other missile that had escaped her.
Bria nudged the ship in the last missile’s way. The missile shifted, correcting course to avoid her. Bria growled and compensated. She would have to strike into it fast and hard, using all the available thrust. She plotted a course to do that, letting the missile think that it could pass close by but escape her. She would thrust into its path at the last second.
“Briathursiasalientiormethesess,” a voice said.
Bria growled. It was a Sussurat voice. A male Sussurate voice. In her helmet, it seemed close and intimate, as if the male stood right behind her, his breath on her neck.
Bria clacked her teeth, the closest she came to a laugh. She replied to the hyper-radio message.
“Interrogator,” she said.
“Is special envoy Siasaliurassianas,” he said, confirming her conjecture. “Do not ram missile.”
Bria clacked her teeth again, but did not change her trajectory. The missile had to be stopped.
“Am targeting now,” the Sussurat said.
Bria did not know what it meant to target: her or the missile. Her tactical display beeped. The ship appeared at the edge of her view, rising from a lower orbit.
“Do not intercept missile,” the Sussurat repeated.
Bria hesitated. Should she trust the Sussurat?
“Nothing to interrogate,” the Sussurat male said, by way of explanation.
Bria showed her teeth. This explanation she could believe. Blasted to atoms, she would not offer much for the interrogator to probe. Bria shifted the cruiser slightly out of the missile’s path, so that she moved out of the targeting line of the big Sussurat ship. But she did not move so far that she could not attempt a close pursuit if the Sussurat ship’s shot failed.
A chorus of warning beeps indicated the cruiser detected a battery of energy weapons being fired, seemingly aimed at her. The Sussurat ship had a lot of weapons. It had fired them all at once. The cruiser protested with proximity alarms as the heavy particle beams shot past, causing virtual particle wash.
Another wave of gamma radiation followed: the missile had been hit. The cruiser’s shields were failing. Bria’s implants warned her of the excessive radiation that pelted through her body. But the missile had been destroyed.
Only one missile left then. And it had a large lead.
“Surrender,” the Sussurat male transmitted.
“Chase,” Bria replied, her tone taunting. She did not wait for the Sussurat to reply. She knew it would chase her. No male could ignore such a flirtatious challenge to its authority.
She pushed her engines to maximum thrust, racing after the last missile. It was far ahead, and she had little chance of stopping it, but she had to try.
Behind her, the Sussurat ship began the slow ramp up to match her acceleration. Then it disappeared from all screens. The ship had shifted into stealth mode. They were taking the chase seriously. Bria clacked her teeth again, then increased acceleration as much as her body would allow.
_____
Tarkos’s suit had almost shut down. All energy had been diverted back to the Farraday field. His armor trembled on the shaking weapon, his boots still barely holding to the metal. He stood there without a view: his exterior cameras had been cooked away by radiation and blast shields had covered his visor. A rem counter began to complain loudly inside his helmet. A virtual particle counter reported ongoing damage to his suit.
“Pietro?” he radioed. But the task was hopeless. Even if Danielle were still alive, the wash of radiation from the weapon overwhelmed any transmission.
“Emergency,” his suit said. “You will receive a fatal dose of radiation in four hundred seconds.”
He tried to take a step, to turn and begin to climb away from the muzzle of the weapon. But his suit would not obey him. The radiation had overwhelmed all suit systems.
“Bria?” he transmitted. No answer there either. Just the hiss of static.
“Suit,” he said. “Prepare to make a recording with maximum redundancy. This will be my final statement. I, Amir Tarkos—”
He fell up. Starting in surprise, he jerked in his suit, straining against its confines that were now stiff and unresponsive. He thought for a moment that he had fallen, that he would tumble into the beam of the weapon—but no. He was moving up.
He told his suit to lift the blast shield from his helmet. Re
al light fell through the glass. All around him, the black limbs of robots held to him. They had climbed down the weapon and surrounded him. As Tarkos watched, one robot passed him to another, both of them Neelee designs that looked like six-limbed reindeer, their heads sprouting tools instead of horns. He looked at the robot that had just let go of him. Sparks vomited from its joints. It plummeted away, its internal systems destroyed by the radiation.
“We have to get out of here fast,” Tarkos radioed. He felt immediately foolish to have stated the obvious.
One robot turned him as it passed him on, so that Tarkos faced down. Below, a blinding tower of white fury streaked from the weapon. In the distance, the rings of Neelee-ornor disintegrated, burned into plasma by the broadly dispersed beam. The glow of the weapon flickered over the surface of Neelee-ornor, making the day twice as bright. But further ahead in his view the rings still rippled and warped space.
Down there on the planet surface, Tarkos thought, it must seem that the sky itself is on fire. It must seem that the world is about to end.
And, in a sense, so it was.
_____
A visual data report sputtered alive in Tarkos’s suit. The robots had carried him most of the way up the exterior of the weapon. The radiation grew less intense as they climbed away from the muzzle of the canon. His suit systems rebooted now. In a second he had a protocol link with Zoroastrian.
“Captain Sharazi, this is Harmonizer Tarkos. Did Bria intercept the missiles?”
“Amir Tarkos,” the captain’s voice came back. “You’re alive.”
“Barely,” Tarkos said. “For a while. I got cooked. I’m a well done steak. I’m already feeling the effects of radiation and virtual particle poisoning.”
“Don’t die, Harmonizer. I expect you to live so I can see you in prison.”
“Here’s hoping,” Tarkos said. He coughed. A strange taste filled his mouth, something like bile. “Did Bria intercept the missiles?”
“Most of them. One is still incoming.”
Tarkos frowned. The weapon had turned as they rose in their orbit. He could not see the Zoroastrian, nor the rings of Neelee-ornor. Suddenly, all the readouts in his suit faded from red to green. He felt himself rising—no, he was falling. Into zero-gee.
He realized that they’d stopped accelerating. And they’d turned off the weapon. He opened his mouth to speak, but in an instant, dark clouds of what appeared to be smoke surrounded him, swallowing his view.
“I… what’s happening?”
“We’re coasting,” the captain said. “We’re passing through the rings—what’s left of this patch of the rings, I mean. We’re flipping the gun.”
Tarkos almost felt accelerated again, as the robots began to run up the surface of the weapon, pulling him in his frozen suit. In the microgravity, they did not have to maintain careful and slow steps on the vertical surface—it was no longer vertical. They could hurry with impunity. Tarkos tried to relax, to stop straining against his frozen limbs. He had no choice but to be carried him along in a blur of thin black limbs, a human cargo passed along by rushing ants.
“I’m surrounded by… particles. Almost like an atmosphere.”
“What? Ah… right,” the captain said. “That would be the plasma and ash from having burned a path through the rings. We’re passing through them right now.”
“How much of the rings are destroyed?”
“Forty-eight percent. But the symbiont weapon is still at least partially operating. We can’t figure out what it is. Maybe some kind of gravity weapon? But it’s not getting worse, and fortunately the angle of our aim means we’ve not had to pass through the effect. Still, if the missile hits us, that’s all over. And if the Ulltrian ship gets here before we are done, it’s all over.”
“Ulltrian ship?”
“Ah. Sorry. You missed the transmission. There is a single incoming ship, dropping from the outer system, on a trajectory for us.”
Tarkos grunted. They needed to burn all the rings. And that meant they had to first and foremost defend the gun.
“Which will arrive first?”
“The missile.”
“What about Bria?”
“The commander destroyed three of the missiles, and is pursuing the fourth, but her speed is no match for it. She will not be able to destroy it.”
“I see only one solution. We use the big gun on the incoming missile. We’ll be turning the gun anyway. So maybe it would not cause too much of a delay to aim it at the missile.” Tarkos told his suit to add the common band. “Tiklik?”
“I hear your call human Harmonizer Amir Tarkos.”
“We need to change the targeting. We have to fire at the incoming missile. Can we do it?”
“It will add twelve minutes to our firing schedule.”
“We’ll have to chance it, and hope the weapon holds out for the extra minutes. Prepare the revised plan.”
“Two problems,” the captain said. “Your commander is in the line of fire.”
“And the other problem?” Tarkos asked.
“We still have the incoming Ulltrian ship. It has jumped twice, and somehow survived the hyperspace leaps in system. It’s behind us. It would be very hard to turn the gun around and fire in that direction next.”
“Do you have a mass estimate on the size of the Ulltrian ship?”
After a pause the captain said, “Maybe 20 kilomasses.”
“It’s likely a Space Gnasher then. Dangerous. Fast. Built to attempt jumps in system. But it’s not heavily shielded.”
“That’s wonderful,” the captain said, her sarcasm as dry as her usual discourse. “If we had guns, we would take advantage of your information.”
“Tightbeam me to Bria. Bria?”
After a long pause, the familiar growl sounded in Tarkos’s ears. “Tarkos.”
“We have an Ulltrian ship coming in, and we have you in the line of fire if we’re going to target the missile.
Bria understood immediately his implicit suggestion. “Will pursue Ulltrian.”
“It’s likely a Space Gnasher. I know the cruiser is in poor shape, but if you could even just slow it….”
“Will destroy Space Gnasher,” Bria said.
Tarkos started to laugh out of admiration of Bria’s attitude, but it turned into bitter coughing. A wave of nausea overcame him. When it passed, his voice came as little more than a whisper.
“Well, Commander,” Tarkos said, “If you approve of my suggestion, we’ll take out the missile. You get out of the line of fire, and you stop the incoming Space Gnasher. Then, if the gun lasts a little while longer, we should be able to burn what’s left of the rings.”
“Yessss,” Bria growled.
The robots carrying Tarkos had climbed to the top of the weapon, back where the original crew quarters had been. They passed him through an oval door.
“Commander,” Tarkos transmitted, eager to speak before he might lose the radio connection. “You want to tell me why you cut up that ambassador ship, before I die of radiation poisoning and you are destroyed by the Space Gnasher?”
Tarkos fancied that he could actually hear Bria closing her top eyes, before she cut the line.
The door closed behind him. Tarkos flexed an arm. He felt like the rusty Tin Man. He could move, barely. But without the robots carrying him, it would take him an hour to walk to the command room.
“Tiklik,” he said. “It’s up to you now.”
Then he vomited in his helmet.
CHAPTER 11
Bria growled in frustration. The ship’s small repair robots, moving sluggishly in the heavy acceleration, had located the two breaches in the cruiser’s hull and sealed them. But now the interior of the cruiser filled with smoke as it repressurized. Bria could draw up a tactical view inside her helmet, but it seemed cramped and unclear. She preferred the tactical holograms that would normally fill the cockpit.
She had cut directly up and out of the plane of Neelee-ornor’s orbit, accelerating away f
rom the path that the huge weapon’s beam would cut. Behind her, the missile blazed on, streaking for the Zoroastrian and the weapon. Bria sneered at its path, but had faith that Tiklik could handle it. The missile was small. The gun that Tiklik aimed was very, very big.
Before her, the Ulltrian attack ship showed in the tactical view as an angry red point, heading straight for the big gun. Bria would intersect the Ulltrian ship’s path before the big Neelee gun was in targeting range for its energy weapons. The sole Ulltrian pilot of the small ship would know this. The cruiser’s stealth capability had not been repaired; the cruiser would show as a hot point in cold space.
What would the Ulltrian do? It would jump, of course. It would aim straight for the cruiser, feinting that it was going to engage in battle, and then it would jump, as Space Gnasher class ships usually did when seeking a short cut to their target. The sole Ulltrian pilot of the small attack ship could not know that the cruiser had suffered extensive damage that rendered most of its weapon systems inoperable. And so the pilot would calculate that the two ships—Harmonizer cruiser and Ulltrian Space Gnasher—were an even match. Its mission was obviously to destroy the huge Neelee weapon, and save whatever remained of the rings, and of Ice Sky Storm. So it would jump past Bria.
Probability jumps in a gravity well were dangerous. No Alliance ship used the technique. This close to Neelee-ornor, the odds of coming apart in the re-entry approached 1 in 6. But those odds beat the even match the Ulltrian would assume it faced if it fought with the cruiser.
The smoke had thinned in the cockpit. Bria pushed the tactical display back into the cockpit, and considered her options. She would fire at the Space Gnasher as it approached. The Space Gnasher would no doubt fire at her. But assuming it jumped, and reappeared a megameasure closer to the Neelee weapon—what option did Bria have then? She could target the likely volume of space where it would reappear, but the precise location where the Gnasher dropped into actual space would be random within a few dozen kilomeasures. The odds of hitting it with a guess shot were negligible.
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