The cart exploded into a ball of flames and sparks.
Ringo rolled to his feet and sought out the remaining two carts. He blasted them into smoldering hulks before they could ram his lieutenant. The young knight then joined his officer in firing at the airborne threats. The ring of robo-racks tightened around them all the while.
Before the vice-clawed robots reached striking distance, the knights managed to eliminate the sources of laser fire.
“Gaelic!” Lieutenant Zapatas shouted. “Get the sisters to the mainframe.”
“You heard the goon,” I said, passing through the secret doorway.
The nuns followed me.
The deck of engineering was littered with the smoking wrecks of transport carts and dozens of welder-bots which had rained laser fire down on the knights.
“Which way to Kressi’s mainframe?” I asked.
Sister Elizabeth pointed across the deck to a gallery, one of the four raised at each corner of the room.
“Let’s pull that plug,” I said and began leading them, by circuitous route behind the robo-racks.
Even as we got moving, more machines poured through the two main entrances to the engineering deck. Two more transport carts, another half dozen robo-racks, a pair of rolling scaffolds, vacuum cleaners, deck buffers, a small swarm of six-wheeled, bread box-sized, metal cans whose purpose eluded me and other assorted automated gadgets charged at us.
I stopped and waved the nuns on forward to the gallery. “Hurry! And look out for the kitchen sink.”
Sparing the knights a glance, I saw that the first wave of robo-racks had them surrounded in a tightening circle. Zapatas and Ringo had their swords drawn. Crackling, sparkling arcs of electricity trailed their every swing as the micron-thin edges of their crysteel blades ionized the air they cleaved through. Back-to-back, the knights hacked at the mechanized monsters closing in on them. Vice claws flew through the air in showers of sparks. Jointed segments of metal arms fell to the deck in loud clangs. Long lengths of treads spilled from under chassis like so many intestines from a gutted belly.
I turned to face my own robot attack. I fired at an approaching cart to no effect. One of the bread boxes slammed against my right ankle. It hurt just enough to piss me off. I punted the thing across the deck before diving out of the cart’s way. I landed on my side. Another bread box rammed my face. It struck squarely on my nose. The sharp, stinging pain blinded me for a moment, long enough for the wheeled robot to back up and slam into my forehead. Others rammed into my lower back and knees. My vision cleared in time to see the bread box charging again at my head. Beyond it, I noticed the transport cart had navigated around the debris littering the deck and was beginning its second charge at me. A robo-tiller approached slowly but steadily, its wheel of curved tines spinning menacingly.
With a wide sweep of my arm I struck the charging bread box hard with the butt of my pistol, knocking it aside.
I heard Estrella scream as I scrambled to my feet.
Unfortunately the transport cart was barrelling down on me. I leapt to clear it as it charged but one of the wheeled ankle biters tripped me up. My jump fell short and I landed hard on the cart’s back seat. Looking out from the rear of the cart I saw that a robo-rack had reared up like a giant spider crab between the nuns and the stairs to the gallery. One of the machine’s left arms had Estrella by the hem of her habit and was dragging her back and forth across the deck. Sister Elizabeth was deftly ducking and dodging the sweep of the robot’s other three arms and occasionally managing to take up a chunk of debris to hurl at the machine turned monster.
The cart lurched hard beneath me, first to the left and then to the right. I clawed into the leather of the seats with my free hand to keep myself from being thrown from the vehicle. Keeping my center of gravity as low as I could, I then quickly scrabbled forward over three pairs of seats to the cart’s wheel. Grabbing it, I hoisted myself onto the driver’s seat. Using hand over hand, I spun the wheel, leading the cart into a tight turn until I was aimed at the robo-rack that held Estrella.
“Get out of the way, Elizabeth!” I yelled, flooring the accelerator.
The young nun shot a glance over her shoulder and promptly withdrew from her fierce but futile battle with the robot.
It took all my strength to keep Kressi from turning the wheel beneath my hands. I kept it aimed at the robo-rack’s right treaded leg. Failing to wrest control of steering away from me, the AI shut down the cart’s engine… too late. I had enough forward momentum to ram the robot. The cart swept its leg from beneath it. The robo-rack toppled towards me. I leapt from the cart before it was crushed under the mechanized monster’s weight.
Estrella screamed when the robo-rack’s fall violently hoisted her into the air. The robot’s claw continued to grip her habit’s hem firmly. Esty hung five feet in the air, flopping like a freshly caught fish on the line. Sister Elizabeth ran to her and reached for Esty’s flailing arms.
“Never mind me,” Estrella shouted. “Shut down that mainframe!”
“Right!” the young nun said and darted for the stairs to the gallery.
I rushed over to Estrella. A vacuum cleaner attacked me enroute. I stopped short, before tripping over it. Barking out a curse on all machine-kind, I kicked the vacuum over. When I looked up again, I spotted another robo-rack charging at me. It was shorter than the one which had just collapsed, with four arms rather than six, identical to the one which had helped load torpedoes on to the Strumpet. I knew however, that it could still prove deadly. It was being driven by a homicidal AI and I was defenceless before it, my pistol buried somewhere in the wreck of cart and fallen robo-rack. I was hemmed in with neither room or time to dodge the mechanical menace.
I pulled my knife from its sheath and braced for the worst.
And then the robo-rack exploded into a dozen pieces!
It was hit by twin streams of pulse fire. Zapatas and Ringo had fought their way to a gallery across the deck. I raised my blade in salute and thanks.
“Cut the Reverend Mother down,” Zapatas shouted. “We’ve got your stern covered.”
As if to prove his lieutenant’s point, Ringo blasted the closing robo-tiller into a half-dozen pieces.
I flashed them a thumbs-up and turned to Estrella.
“Grab my waist, Esty,” I instructed after climbing onto the side of the fallen robo-rack.
Estrella grabbed on to my gun belt with both hands.
“It looks like you really have changed, sis,” I said, reaching for the hem of her habit. “You’ve traded your lace thongs for linen bloomers. If that doesn’t say conversion, I don’t know what does.”
“Oh, shut up and cut me down, Gael!”
“Right away, O’ Reverend Mother,” I said and had me a good laugh.
I grabbed her ceremonial rope cincture and cut a swath of her habit with a slash of my blade, releasing her from the robot’s grip.
A moment after I lowered her to the deck, the lights went out and a pall of silence fell over the expanse of engineering as every machine was suddenly stilled.
“It’s done!” Sister Elizabeth exclaimed from the gallery above us.
Ahead of us, the knights fired up their helmet lights and began making their way to us across the wreckage-strewn deck.
“It’s almost done,” Esty said. “We’re going to have to fire up life-support before we use up what little oxygen is left on the station.”
“Lieutenant Zapatas, do you copy?” Commander Appraxin queried through the knight’s wrist comm.
“Aye sir, we copy, loud and clear.”
“I take it that you have successfully taken the AI offline?”
“Yes sir,” Zapatas answered. “Sister Elizabeth has managed it. Gunny Weber laid down his life to grant us that opportunity, commander.”
After a pause, Appraxin said, “I’m sorry to hear that lieutenant. Weber was a good man.”
“Yes sir, he was.”
“And he will be properly honored in d
ue course,” the Imperial commander continued. “Right now we need to reboot the station’s operating systems and do it without waking Kressi. Are you by the mainframe?”
“I will be in a moment, sir,” Zapatas responded and hurried his away across the last stretch of engineering deck between him and the gallery above us. “I’m in position,” he said when reached the top of the steps.
“Very good,” Appraxin said. “I’m handing you over to Chief Admin Chung.”
Krestor Station’s Chief Administrator talked Lieutenant Zapatas and Sister Elizabeth through the rebooting process. Kressi’s ‘plug’ consisted of twenty-one switches, three in each of the seven, six-foot, glass-enclosed panels that lined one wall of the gallery. These were the switches that the young nun had thrown, one at a time, to shut Kressi down. Beneath each switch was an extendable drawer, each with a score of multi-phase quantum routers plugged into its shelf. Guiding the knight and nun one drawer at time, Chung had them pull out all but two or three routers per drawer. When they were done, they threw the twenty-one switches back into their ON position. The mainframe whirred with new life. Chung then guided Sister Elizabeth through a few intricate command protocols she had to manually key in at the console against the gallery’s opposite wall.
“Done!” she said, initiating the systems reboot.
The lights came on almost immediately.
Estrella squeezed my hand. “Thanks be to God!”
“The systems should start coming back on line beginning with…” Chung said.
“Life support!” Sister Elizabeth cried out with a laugh and triumphant leap in the air.
Cheers erupted from the Command Center crew. We could hear through the deck speakers from which Kressi was now banished.
“Well done people,” Commander Appraxin said. “Scanners are coming on line now. Let’s see what kind of fix we’re in.”
Lieutenant Zapatas hurried down from the gallery and made his way to the nearest console. All of us but Ringo gathered around him. The young knight was kneeling in prayer beside his fallen comrade. Zapatas tapped brusquely at some tiles on the console and it produced a lightly gridded, five foot square, holographic projection of the sector. Our gazes darted across it feverishly, taking in every detail we could and assembling them into a coherent picture of the outside world as quickly as we could.
It was not a pleasant picture.
The Federation fleet was nearly in striking range of the station and already engaged in battle with the Imperial Halberds who must have charged forward in its defense. The Goswhit’s transponder was transmitting from the middle of the debris field to which it had been reduced. The Ron, Llamria and Hengroen were fighting losing battles against swarms of Starwings and three corvettes apiece. The Prydwen’s icon winked off the screen as we watched, losing the fight to the battle group dispatched to confront her over Haven. We noted with little comfort that the debris of a corvette and a dozen Starwings also littered the battle space.
Near the opposite edge of the sector map, some six AU from Krestor Station, a heavy plume of displaced, deep space plenum, streaked like a comet towards the battle.
“Who’s the incoming?” I asked.
“That would be the Excalibur, the Galatine, and their Halberds,” Lieutenant Zapatas responded with an impish grin.
“Commander Appraxin said they were eight days out,” Estrella said.
“We had every reason to believe that Federation operatives were listening in,” Zapatas said.
“So he lied?” Sister Elizabeth asked.
The lieutenant shrugged. “He exaggerated.”
Sister Elizabeth’s wimpled face scrunched with disapproval. Estrella gave her hand a squeeze and said, “We’ll have to school you in the finer points of casuistry, my young one.”
“They’re ten, twelve minutes out,” I said pointing at the sector map. “Your remaining halberds won’t last that long.”
“Lieutenant Zapatas,” Commander Appraxin’s voice boomed through the speakers again. “There’s still an opportunity to get off the station. We’re going to plow a road for you. God go with you, lieutenant.”
“Aye, Commander. God be with you, sir,” Zapatas responded.
“What’s he talking about; plow a road?” I asked.
“Let’s just say the Psion aren’t the only ones who can weaponize a facility,” the Imperial Knight said, winked and gestured towards the sector map.
Even as I turned back to the holographic projection, the Calabash Foundry let loose a massive jet of energy.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, stunned at the off the charts power reading on the screen.
Zapatas chuckled in answer.
The jet of energy streaked across the sector, forking like lightning when it reached the line of Federation ships assailing the Halberds Llamrai and Hengroen. In the instant of contact, the icons of a dozen Starwings and three corvettes went dark. The survivors broke off their attacks and careened into retreat.
“You’re channeling Cosmic Birkeland Currents through the foundry,” I said, realizing at last what I had witnessed. Foundries like Calabash tapped into the electromagnetic maelstroms of nebulas to forge neutronium crystals. It was a dangerous process to draw even the small percentage of power they did from the EM fields the currents generated, but to tap the raw current itself was unheard of. It should have destroyed the facility. “How?” I had to ask.
“The short answer,” Zapatas said. “An array of five hundred plus crystals in a negative Cassini field.”
“A negative Cassini field?”
“I don’t understand it either,” Zapatas said with a shrug. “All I know is that our engineers assured us that they could turn the foundry into the most powerful of plasma cannons. The only drawback is that it would only be good for three or four shots before the facility melted into so much slag.”
The foundry fired another jet. The bolt speared the heart of the incoming fleet. The trunk of the current struck the dreadnaught Constitution and sent off shoots to strike several nearby vessels. The icons of a frigate and a pair of corvettes went dark. The Constitution survived but lost nearly half of its shield power deflecting the star-forging fires of the Cosmic Birkeland Current. The fleet’s attack arc broke up immediately as the vessels flew off in every direction, seeking to place as much space as possible between each other as quickly as they could.
It was a surprising turn of events, but one which, I felt certain, would do little more than delay the inevitable. More so, there was a large wedge of space on the Krestor’s coreward side that the foundry could not fire on without also hitting the station. The Liberty was headed for the exposed flank with half a dozen corvettes and four squadrons of Starwings in tow.
“We must go now,” Zapatas said.
“We finally agree on something,” I said.
I reached for Estrella’s hand.
“I’m sorry Gael, but I can’t,” Estrella said. “My place is here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My position as Mother Superior comes with a role in the station’s senior staff. I took an oath. My duty…”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Esty! Your convent, your church, this whole station will soon be Federation property. If it’s not blown apart in the fighting, that is. You have no more obligations, no…”
“But I do Gael, I do,” Estrella insisted and swallowed hard.
“You’ve done your part taking Kressi offline,” I said.
“This crisis is not yet passed,” Esty said.
“This crisis ain’t passing, Esty,” I said. “Not any time soon. And not in any way that will be good for either of us.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I must see it through, whatever happens. There are still twelve hundred people on the station... my people… whom I am bound stay with… But you don’t have to stay, Gael. You can go. You should leave.”
“Oh, I’m out of here alright,” I said. “And I’m taking you with me. Now!”
I moved to sweep her off her feet but Lieutenant Zapatas clamped his gauntleted right hand, vice-like on the back of my neck and pulled me away. I tried to spin out of his grip, leading with a rising elbow to his face. The move was broken in mid twist by a sharp, prickling jab to my lower back. The Imperial Knight released me and stepped back. “I’m sorry,” he said and flung the pneumatic injector aside.
I was going to tell him what to do with his apology but my spine suddenly went soft. It took every ounce of concentration not to fold in half where I stood. A beat later the bones in my legs seemed to turn to rubber. Zapatas stepped forward again, catching me before I collapsed into a numb-limbed heap.
“I’m really sorry,” the lieutenant reiterated as he picked me up and heaved me onto his shoulder like a gunny sack. He turned so that I faced Estrella.
I could not raise my head for more than a second at a time. Estrella took my head in her hands and raised it to her face. Her lips quivered and a tear streaked down her cheek. “I’m so sorry, Gael. I cannot go with you. My place is here. I cannot walk away from my responsibility. Not again…”
I tried to protest. My tongue, feeling swollen and heavy, my pleas came out, “Ethe! Plith Ethe, thom weth meh! Ethe, pliith!”
Estrella choked on a sob and the tears poured forth unhindered. “I love you, Gaelic. I’ve loved you all my life, but I’m sorry; I can’t go with you. I can’t run away again.”
“Ethe! Ethe no!”
“I won’t run away again.”
“Ethe!”
“Go with God my brother,” She kissed my forehead. And then Estrella kissed my lips. “God be with you, my love!”
My tongue dropped lifeless over my lower lip. I pled my case with my eyes. She lowered my head, even as another sob burst from her. “Godspeed lieutenant,” Estrella said between stifled sobs.
The Imperial Knight turned to face her briefly, “God be with you, Reverend Mother.” He then called out to Ringo. “Let’s move.”
As we ran to the elevators on the opposite end of the engineering deck, I caught glimpses of Sister Elizabeth’s parting from her Mother Superior. The young nun bent low over the elder’s hand and kissed it before being urged to run off after the knights and me. My sister Estrella, the only woman I had ever loved, disappeared behind the closing door of an elevator.
One Last Flight: Book One Of The Holy Terran Empire Page 19
