The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  The Amuser sank through the weak magnetosphere, all stealth systems active, trying to draw as little attention to itself as possible, using the debris field as cover. There was something wrong with the Basilisk II’s configuration. It should have been folded down tight, spare and aerodynamic. Instead it had been made larger. He wondered what they could be carrying that they felt was that important.

  He watched as the Templar fired multiple laser batteries downwards, trying to create a grid of destructive energy to ensnare the fast, elegant yacht. It fired AG smart munitions and emptied racks of kinetic harpoons. Mr Hat certainly wasn’t going to struggle to track the light cruiser.

  The Basilisk II’s energy dissipation grid flared briefly as it flew through the lasers. Its own laser batteries, blister-like bumps in its smart matter hull, fired defensively, aiming at the friction-heated kinetic harpoons that were too close for comfort and the AG smart munitions, though the latter had initiated random chaos-fact-driven evasive manoeuvres. The yacht launched its own AG smart munitions but not as many as the reptilian bounty hunter had expected.

  The Templar was heading straight down, hard burn. It looked like an arrow pointed at the planet’s core as it tried to bring its big guns to bear on the smaller ship. It was lost against the massive bulk of the gas giant, little more than a pinprick of light. The Basilisk II, however, was using the Cage as cover. Even the fusion lance didn’t touch the S-tech material that the Cage had been constructed from. As the two sets of AG smart munitions closed, they detonated into multiple submunitions, destroying each other in a spectacular, expensive, but largely pointless, display of light and force.

  Benedict/Scab knew that the Basilisk II could outfly the Templar but only for so long. The ex-Church light cruiser could follow the Basilisk II in and out of Red Space, and if they tried to run then that left them vulnerable to the big guns. Still, he had to admit that whoever was piloting the Basilisk II was good. He assumed it was his father/older self.

  The Templar dived between the walkways of the Cage, and then levelled out, picking up some ionisation from a megastorm weather front in the clouds below them. Lightning wreathed the ship and the energy dissipation grid glowed slightly. The Templar’s weapon operators were trying to bring the particle beam cannon to bear, using the lasers and the fusion lance to shepherd the smaller craft into firing zones, but to little avail. The Templar launched another hail of kinetic harpoons, a number of them hitting the Cage and disintegrating. Several of the harpoons hit the Basilisk II, however, and the visual feed showed the yacht’s hull flowing as the carbon reservoirs replaced damaged armour. The forward lasers were lighting up the Basilisk II’s energy dissipation grid. They themselves were taking laser and harpoon hits but the bigger craft was just shrugging them off, powering through.

  The Basilisk II rolled over one of the ziggurats and dived. Its engines glowed brightly, hard burn. Benedict/Scab smiled. They had them. He just wished there could have been an opportunity to board.

  AG field or not, they were getting kicked around. The dive had made the Monk’s stomach lurch until altered biochemistry had controlled the sensation.

  The feed from the Basilisk II’s sensors showed the massive bands of colour below them. They looked solid from her current perspective. It felt as if the yacht was getting beaten with giant hammers as kinetic harpoons impacted into the rear of the ship. The external feed showed the rear of the Basilisk II glowing neon, venting light and heat as lasers played across its hull. The thick white light of the fusion lance shot past them and into the cloud. It had probably missed by some distance but it had felt close.

  With every impact the growling intensified. The Cystians were becoming more restless. The Monk tried not to look around, tried not to show any weakness. The last thing they needed was a fight on the Basilisk II. She felt as if she was standing in the middle of a herd waiting for a stampede, except the herd were all predators.

  Talia was jinking the craft around a bit, trying to not be where the Templar was sending ordnance, but it was mostly a straight dive now. They were rapidly outpacing the light cruiser. The Templar, in comparison, looked as if it was slowly falling towards the gas cloud.

  And then they were in among the clouds of hydrogen, helium and methane. The clouds made little difference to the Templar – the feed from the ship told her the light cruiser was bathing the yacht with active scans.

  A laser hit a pocket of methane the size of a capital ship, and just for moment the inside of the clouds was illuminated by flame and then snuffed out.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Scab ’faced. The yacht was being buffeted. The Cystians were making more noise. Little of it sounded like language to her ears, but it did sound like fear.

  ‘Want to speak to your troops?’ the Monk ’faced to Scab. He ignored her. Her vision was filling with warnings from the ship but so far they were warnings about exceeding the hull’s stress tolerances rather than actual hull integrity warnings. That changed when she saw the smart metal hull flex inwards. Suddenly she wished that they hadn’t made the Basilisk II bigger, that they weren’t carrying all that extra, feral, biomass. The feral biomass who were becoming more and more frightened, and trying to back away from the hull despite being packed in tight.

  ‘Well, this will be a shitty way to die,’ Vic said. He sounded more resigned than frightened. The Monk suspected that he had run out of fear after the fall of the Cathedral and his close encounter with the two Elite. He had seemed particularly terrified of the Monarchist’s L-tech machine Elite, Ludwig.

  ‘The Templar’s levelling off,’ the AI said. She checked the feed. The Templar was two miles above them. Talia took the yacht deeper. The smart matter was definitely bulging inwards, reaching the limits of its elasticity. The automated warning messages were becoming positively alarming. The Basilisk II levelled off. The Monk felt the ship slow significantly as Talia attempted to bleed off heat and lower the ship’s EM signature as she engaged the stealth systems. Her sister dropped AG smart munitions behind the yacht, leaving them hovering in the gas clouds.

  The yacht was now relying on passive sensors; fortunately the Templar was giving them a lot to go on as it rained harpoons and lasers down into the clouds, and saturated the area with active scans. The Monk still didn’t like the way the hull was bending in. From the external feed she could see the eddies in the clouds from the downward passage of the harpoons. If just one of them hit the badly stressed hull the yacht would pop like a water balloon stabbed with a knife. AG smart munitions from the Templar were moving through the clouds like sharks seeking them, but the Monk knew that they had to stay at this depth until the AI had analysed the Templar’s actions enough to make a decent fist of predicting where the ship would be when they came out of Red Space.

  Light and force lit up the clouds above them as rival smart munitions found each other and blossomed into explosively colliding submunitions. Waves of pressure buffeted the Basilisk II, further distending the hull. She knew they were dead. The Monk closed her eyes, which was foolish. She was still receiving the sensor feed, she just couldn’t see the hull pressing in towards her.

  Benedict/Scab could not work out the play. They could hide but then what? If they skipped to Red Space, the Templar could do the same. They could probably evade and run, but then what had they gained?

  ‘Benedict?’ Harold hissed. His first mate wanted to run silent, lace the clouds with AG munitions as intelligent mines, try and find them with passive sensors, but he knew there was a small chance they would miss a bridge opening if they did that.

  ‘Continue the active scans. I want a laser spread tight enough to catch them. Can we seed the clouds?’ He ’faced the question to the ’sect sensor operator; he wanted to drop a nano-screen over a wide area but he suspected he knew the answer.

  ‘No, too much weather … bridge!’ the ’sect sensor operator ’faced just a moment behind the ship informing him of the energy signature. With a thought he ordered the ship to follow them into Red Sp
ace.

  Blue light, a bloody red gash in the striated cloud. They were practically sucked through, helium and hydrogen venting and then dissipating into the crimson clouds. The hull flexed back to normal and then the ship lurched and went dead.

  ‘Basil?’ the Monk asked.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ the AI said. She could hear the worry in its voice. ‘It’s not the ship, it’s Talia. Her biometrics would suggest that she is upset.’

  The Monk couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Actually, she could. She was finding herself having some very uncharitable thoughts about her sister. She could hear ’faced questions from Vic and Scab. If this was to work she knew they would have to move quickly. Navigating away from the beacons, even for Church-built systems, was not an exact science, and even then they only had the best guess from the AI as to where the Templar would be. The ship moved. Subjectively it felt like they were going up. Now it was just a case of who would find whom first.

  AG smart munitions had still been coming up out of the clouds at the Templar as they had opened the bridge. A number of the autonomous weapons had followed them through into Red Space. The light cruiser’s lasers targeted the hail of submunitions as they passed through the glowing blue portal.

  They saturated the surrounding area with active broad-spectrum scans. The personality-spayed AI was trying to predict where the other ship was when they felt the impacts. Little more than a slight tremor in the decks but the external feed showed a different story. Fusion warheads detonating as AG smart munitions breached their defences at short range. Kinetic harpoons impacted against their armoured hull and lasers lit up their energy dissipation grid.

  The Basilisk II had come out of the red clouds subjectively below them. The yacht’s weapon systems were concentrating fire on the Templar’s weapons, sensor arrays, and then the forward part of the ship. Benedict/Scab knew it was suicide. Surprise or not, they couldn’t hope to go toe-to-toe with a ship like the Templar.

  The airlock had grown out of the floor of the cargo bay, the smart matter arching around the three of them and pushing the feral Cystians aside. The cargo bay ramp had lowered with them on it. The Monk found herself looking out at the disquieting crimson clouds of Red Space. Not for the first time she wondered if the Destruction was some leech-like mechanism of this artificial universe sucking the life out of Known Space.

  Light, force, kinetic and fusion energy were being exchanged between the two ships, further illuminating the red clouds. It was, for the moment, a one-sided exchange – somehow the Basilisk II had got the upper hand and targeted the Templar’s weapons. They were looking up at what was effectively the bottom of the light cruiser, but the larger craft’s manoeuvring engines were burning as it started to turn to bring its larger weapons to bear.

  The grapples were basically fat, cross-shaped pads with molecular hooks, similar to those on the feet of their combat armour. The same kind of pads that were currently adhering them to the cargo ramp as they were buffeted by the distant explosions. A guided AG motor towed the lines to the other ship. As soon as they made contact, Vic, Scab and the Monk leapt from the ramp. The winches clipped to their cloaked armour started dragging them towards the Templar. The AG motors on their P-sats, now in their more heavily armed and armoured combat chassis and clipped to the back of their armour, steadied their flight. Vic and Scab had had to assemble new P-sats after theirs had been destroyed in the Cathedral. The yacht’s assembler had done its best, but they were not up to the specs the two bounty killers were used to.

  The Monk couldn’t help herself. This was exhilarating. Almost as soon as they had left the Basilisk II, the yacht opened a bridge back into the gas giant’s atmosphere in Real Space.

  Mr Hat had sunk the Amuser into the upper cloud layers. He had liberally laced the calmer upper clouds with nanites. He was also receiving tight-beam updates from the network of mini-satellites he had left in the lower layers of the orbital debris field that used to be the blockading Consortium fleet. He felt a little like the trap-door canine predators that had once lived on his home planet before it had been commercially exploited, though he was very much aware of the vast distance over which he’d had to spread his net.

  The Basilisk II hit the web first, soaring upwards, dragging clouds of helium vapour behind it. The Templar followed, firing as many of its weapons as it could bring to bear, though the light cruiser’s belly looked as though it was rippling as its carbon reservoirs tried to repair what looked like extensive damage. There was a near-constant wall of exploding fusion between the two craft, the result of colliding submunitions. Mr Hat knew this fight would go to whoever had the most AG smart munitions, which had to be the Templar.

  This was bad; it wouldn’t get Patron what he wanted, but this wasn’t a firefight into which Mr Hat wished to interpose. After all, the Basilisk II was probably the Amuser’s match on its own.

  Riding the putty-like substance through the liquid carbon the matter-hack had made of the Templar’s armour had been the worst. The Monk had felt the carbon harden into solid, explosive-fused reactive armour plate behind her. It was total sensory deprivation, combined with the knowledge that she would be trapped if it went wrong. She had required drugs to keep her calm, though they had only managed to downgrade sheer panic to deep unease at being consumed by the armoured skin of a warship.

  Hitting the solid part of the hull and then seeing the glow of the powerful thermal seeds the putty was now tamping and, mostly, protecting them from almost came as a relief.

  They spilled out of the hull in a shower of molten metal into a four-bunk sleeping quarters and a burst of ACR fire. The two possessed pirates in the bunkroom had seen the glow. They’d triggered the alarm, the security screen had triggered the alarm, and the sensors had triggered the alarm. It was just bad luck.

  With a thought the Monk triggered her coherent energy field and took the brunt of the fire as she fell to the ground. Scab pounced on one of the pirates and did something horrible to him. The Monk extruded a blade from the field and cut the other pirate’s legs off, before a power-assisted, taloned, insectile foot crushed his skull.

  With another thought the Monk switched off the field. She wasn’t going to be able to use it again until they had control of the ship because she couldn’t ’face with the Templar’s systems from inside the field. She partitioned her mind and started the hack, dumping viruses and scatter-gunning attack programs to distract the ship’s defences while she went looking for backdoors in any remaining Church programming that she had been cleared for. Scab was doing something similar, but cruder and more invasive.

  The other part of her mind was all about combat. Had they not been discovered so quickly, had they been able to hide and try and subvert the ship’s systems, use them to deal with the pirates, then they could have been less pro-active, less violent, but it hadn’t played out that way. Now they went looking for Brother Benedict’s body, and Scab’s poisoned twin psyche. The Monk unclipped her dual weapon, a hybrid side-by-side automatic EM shotgun/laser carbine combination, with an underslung grenade launcher. Tiny AG motors compensated for the weapon’s lack of balance. The shock-absorbing stock extended until it touched her shoulder, targeting graphics and weapon telemetry appearing in her vision.

  Scab lifted his right arm up and the energy javelin shot out of it, cutting through the door like it was made of butter. A scream was choked off. Vic kicked the internal door off its hinges and stepped out into the corridor. His thorax rotated one way, his upper limbs firing the ACR and its grenade launcher. His abdomen rotated the other, his lower limbs firing the six-barrelled Gatling strobe gun. He was taking a lot of fire the moment he stepped out. The Monk was getting feed from Vic’s P-sat. The corridor was wall-to-wall pychos. Vic’s P-sat separated from his armour and rose over his head, its lasers shooting incoming grenades out of the air, EM-driven flechettes searching out unarmoured faces.

  Scab reeled the E-javelin back, his automatic EM shotgun in one hand whil
e with the other he grabbed the top of the doorway and swung up, his armoured feet adhering him to the ceiling. He was firing and being fired on the moment he left the sleeping quarters, his P-sat also separating from his armour.

  The Monk was out behind Vic, covering their backs as they advanced down the corridor heading for the C&C. Vic threw the strobe gun up, its ambulatory spipod unfolding and sticking the weapon to the ceiling, the weapon still firing, covering their backs. Vic drew his lizard-made power disc and threw it with his lower left hand. His lower right was drawing his triple-barrelled shotgun pistol and firing three solid shot concussion rounds. They detonated in the corridor in front of Vic and Scab, giving them a moment’s respite.

  The Monk was firing underneath the strobe gun. Their enmeshed tactical software meant that she and the semi-autonomous rotating heavy laser were choosing complementary but not identical targets. Her S-sat separated from her armour, shooting grenades out of the air as it did so. She tried not to stagger as EM-driven 10mm armour piercing rounds, fired by the pirates from hacked Church ACRs, impacted her armour and exploded. She fired the four grenades from the launcher very rapidly, programming the solid-state tubular magazine for fragmentation and high explosive. The grenades battered those in armour with airbursts of concussive force and killed those without armour. She was triggering rapid bursts with the laser carbine and the EM shotgun simultaneously. The beams were hitting and superheating Church-issue armour, and then the EM-driven, fin-stabilised, penetrator flechettes pierced the weakened armour and exploded when they detected surrounding flesh. The strobe gun was like a scythe, a red mist forming at the end of the corridor from superheated blood.