The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  "You're insane!"

  "And you're a dead man if you question me another time!" There were two ships right ahead of him, the corvette and a light cruiser pulling up on its starboard side. "The cruiser! Now!"

  The gunship bucked as the torpdeo raced away. It arced left, took the cruiser just behind the primary fusion lance and detonated in a ball of white flame.

  The cruiser's forcewall became visible, just for a moment, a rippling sheet of unbroken green light under the torpedo's wasted blast. It was fading again as Godolkin's Banshee hammered between the two ships.

  Walls of armour were blurring past him, the cruiser to his left, the corvette right. Maybe angered by the torpedo, maybe confused by the explosion's force, the vessels opened fire on him simultaneously. The narrow space between the two ships became a storm of antimat bolts.

  If the comms web had been working, the two captains would never have made such a stupid mistake.

  Godolkin pulled up. Streams of fire from the cruiser were already ripping through the corvette's forcewall, tracking a line of explosions along its flank. Similar detonations were thumping through the cruiser, too.

  "Sacred rubies." Hophni slammed his fists down on the weapons board. "We have them."

  "We have nothing." Godolkin was powering Janet Four away from the picket fleet, back towards the cylinder. "Superficial damage, at best. This day is lost. Blasphemy?"

  "I'm kind of busy right now." Her voice was strained, guttural. She must have been throwing the Banshee all over the sky.

  "Do you require assistance?"

  "What the sneck do you think?"

  Godolkin checked his holos. While he had been inducing two of the Iconoclast ships to batter each other, more had already rounded the shipyard's flank. The dreadnoughts were holding back, but two cruisers and four corvettes were swinging about to bring their primary weapons to bear on the Umbrae Nova frigates. Hunger-gun fire was decimating the Banshees. Every wave had lost gunships.

  The drives were still at full throttle. Godolkin shut them down, knowing he had enough pure velocity for now: he'd only bring them back up if he needed to slow the gunship or make a hard turn. The cog-like decks of the shipyard raced towards him, energy bolts overtaking him effortlessly to slam into it.

  Lights flickered between the decks. There were Banshees there, trying to shelter from the storm. Godolkin took Janet Four in fast and saw another gunship barreling past him in the opposite direction, missing him by metres. Another two were, madly, lining up on a docked killship.

  The dreadnought was partially constructed, surrounded by a cluster of fabrication units and great nests of scaffolding. "Banshees in my forward arc - that killship is no threat. Save your weapons!"

  It was too late. One had already launched a torpedo: Godolkin saw the device dart away on a track of gleaming dust.

  "Banshees," he roared. "Pull away." He shoved the throttle onto emergency power.

  A moment later the torpedo struck. It never got as far as the killship: as soon as the warhead clipped the first piece of scaffolding it detonated, white light flaring out into a massive explosion of hull-plating and fractured gantry. A great cloud of whirling metal boiled out from the blast point between the decks.

  Godolkin yanked the controls hard, hearing a snarl from Hophni as the gunship bucked and slewed away from the debris cloud. Shouts erupted through the comms net, and sudden screams. He looked right and saw a Banshee veering towards the docked killship, venting fuel. A chunk of scaffolding had struck it just ahead of the drives. It spilled over, its thrusters jammed, and then a piece of hull-plating the size of a landing bay sheared it in two.

  The space between the decks was a raging hailstorm of fire and razored metal. Janet Four vibrated under multiple impacts. If any of the thruster arrays were hit...

  Light spilled in through the viewports, from Kerioth's distant sun and from the raging battle around the shipyard. Two of the frigates were already gone, and one was torn apart by explosions as Godolkin watched. "Blasphemy?"

  "I'm okay." His holos chimed a recognition signal, and one of the Banshees there flickered.

  "We are betrayed. This shipyard was never a threat."

  "But Dathan said-"

  "How blind have you become, Durham Red? Look around you."

  Around them all, the situation could only be described as a nightmare. The last frigate was burning from within, tumbling out of control towards the shipyard. The killships from the picket fleet were in sight now, sending lances of fusion fire down into the battle, while the Iconoclast corvettes and cruisers got in close, picking off Banshees with antimat barrages. The vacuum around the shipyard was filled with spinning metal and corpses, the comms net a chorus of screams. It was bedlam.

  The last remaining killships from the shipyard were pulling away, trying to escape. One of them hadn't bothered to disengage from its scaffolding, and was dragging streamers of metal away from the deck as it slid away.

  The flight board chattered. Godolkin looked down and saw indicators flaring. "We have three jump-points opening, one thousand kilometres distant. Reinforcements."

  "Yeah," Red replied. "Question is, whose?"

  There was a click as she switched to the general net. "All Umbrae Nova craft still in one piece, the time to bug out is now! Charge your light-drives and go!"

  Hophni cursed. "You heard her, human. Let's escape this mess!"

  "Wait." Godolkin was watching the jump points.

  The holes in space dilated, billowing into wide rips, spilling fire. Huge walls of shadow-grey metal arced out of them, wide deltas, bristling with weapons pods. Umbrae Nova battleships.

  "Sneck," gasped Red. "About time..."

  Points of light flared around the shipyard as the Banshees began triggering their light-drives. They must have been certain that the battleships would finish the job for them, but something about their formation bothered Godolkin. He paused, fingers frozen over the controls.

  "Human, what are you waiting for?"

  Godolkin ignored him. He was trying to work out why the battleships weren't firing.

  Five killships had escaped the shipyard. They were powering away, their backs towards Kerioth. They were holding fairly good formation, considering their state of repair and the lack of communications between them. Godolkin knew that their captains would be opening sealed-order capsules at this moment, each discovering where their rendezvous point would be. There would always be a place of safety designated for strategic withdrawals.

  "Iconoclast, trigger that light-drive, you human filth."

  Godolkin reached down, took Hophni's head in his strong hands and wrenched it sideways, hearing the wet crunching sound as the man's vertebrae shattered. Hophni gave a convulsive, sighing cough and sagged limp, slumping forward over the weapons board as Godolkin let him go.

  "Silence is golden, brother." Godolkin went back to studying the holo. The escaping killships were opening up jump-points, ragged tunnels of orange light expanding before them. He saw the first of them leap away.

  The Umbrae Nova battleships were moving forwards. They had still not fired a shot.

  "Godolkin? What the sneck's happening out there?"

  "I cannot tell, Blasphemy, but those battleships are offering us no support. They appear to be focussed only on the escaping killships."

  "I don't understand. I mean, er-"

  "It is safe to speak, mistress. My gunner is no longer taking an active interest."

  "Right..."

  The killships were away, the last of the jump-points snapping closed. The battleships were accelerating. "They mean to follow the dreadnoughts."

  "Why not blast them here?"

  Godolkin thought quickly. "It might be possible to find out. This gunship has a considerable range."

  There was a pause, murmuring. She must have been discussing the situation with Harrow. Godolkin's board chimed again as the batteships moved away. They were opening points of their own.

  "Okay, Godolkin,
go for it. Get back to the Emissary as soon as you can. I'll meet you there."

  "Thy will be done." Godolkin opened the flight cocoon and hopped down onto the deck, squeezing through the narrow space alongside. He reached into the lower cocoon and moved Hophni's corpse aside.

  Janet Four still had one torpedo.

  Godolkin pressed a series of keys, activated the firing mechanism and sent the torpedo darting away. It raced off as the last battleship tore a hole in the universe and dived through.

  Long seconds passed. Then, with a faint chime, an icon lit up on Hophni's board. The torpedo had entered the battleship's jump-point and struck it aft.

  It had, of course, completely failed to detonate.

  Its guidance tracker was still intact, and sending out a plaintive signal through the quantum web. Godolkin nodded to himself in satisfaction, and then began hauling Hophni's stinking corpse out of the cockpit.

  The battleship exited jumpspace in orbit around Melita. Once the torpedo was back in realspace its signal changed frequency, and stopped entirely shortly thereafter. The Umbrae Nova crew must have found it. Godolkin hoped it was puzzling them mightily.

  Melita was an uninhabited world a few light-years distant. Godolkin knew that there was a supply dump there, largely automated. A good enough place for stricken killships to regroup. He was already in transit, the space around Kerioth having been no place to spend time. The area was littered with wrecks and debris, and wholly under the control of the Iconoclast picket fleet. In total, the Umbrae Nova had lost all four frigates and thirty-eight Banshees.

  No, not lost. Godolkin was beginning to think they had been deliberately discarded.

  Once again, Enostine's spy network appeared to have gone from supernaturally effective to utterly wrong in an instant. But Godolkin was certain that the mutant commander knew exactly what she was doing. What that might be, and who she was doing it for, would be a question he would very much like to put to her should they ever actually meet.

  So far, the woman had been careful to avoid Godolkin. Anyone might think she had something against Iconoclasts.

  He left jumpspace what he hoped would be a safe distance from the supply dump, and made a careful alteration to his drive balance as he did so. It was easier to concentrate on such things now that Hophni had stopped his chatter. The mutant's body was now drifting among the Kerioth debris, one corpse among many.

  Godolkin didn't think he would be overly missed.

  The Banshee rattled hard as it left jumpspace, a groaning shudder that shook it from end to end. Stars whirled around the viewports. Godolkin's fingers played lightly over the thruster keys for a time, slowly damping the rotation. The drive imbalance he had set up had made the ship spin like a top.

  It had also given him a sizeable forward momentum without having to engage the main drives. Once he had killed the spin he shut down all non-essential systems, even the cockpit heaters, and took the weapons off-line, making sure the gunship sent out as few emissions as possible. He was far less likely to show up on anyone's sense-engines that way.

  As long as no one had spotted the brief, tiny jump-point he had created, he could stay undetected here indefinitely.

  He thought about contacting Durham Red, to make sure she had made it back to the pulsar safely, but he quickly decided that such an action would do more harm than good. If her suspicions about Xandos Dathan were growing as much as his, she might not want to announce her presence yet either. Instead he waited, watching the grey sphere of Melita grow to fill his viewports.

  After a couple of hours, the one holodisplay he had left active began to chime and outline targets. By this time his breath was steaming, but he refused to admit any discomfort. Lavannos had been more chill, and he had frequently stepped out into the thin air of that cursed little world wearing much less than the flight-armour protecting him now.

  The holo had picked up eight primary targets. He tapped at the icons, increasing the sense-engine resolution, sorting through the data. The results were odd, troubling.

  The five killships were out of formation, but still close to one another. The battleships were lined up close by. None of the ships, relative to each other, were moving. And there was an odd haze around the killships, a slowly-expanding cloud of particles. Godolkin wondered if it might be debris, shrapnel from hits, but the returns weren't hard enough.

  The Banshee drifted closer. The killships grew large in his viewports, large enough to see detail. There was damage, he could see, long scoring from fusion lances and antimat fire, but nothing disabling. Small sparks flickered around the holes, as if the damage was already being repaired. More sparks glittered around the twisted mass of scaffolding hanging from the prow of the one of the dreadnoughts: the ship had made its superlight jump with several hundred tonnes of shipyard still attached.

  Small vessels, shuttles, were moving between the battleships and the dreadnoughts.

  Godolkin risked a thruster burst, slowing the Banshee. He was very close now, close enough to be detected by sight alone, if anyone happened to be looking his way. The edges of that strange debris cloud were almost on top of him.

  Right on top. There was a soft thump as something hit the hull.

  Godolkin looked up through the viewports. Shapes were drifting past, surrounded by sparkling trails of ice crystals. For a moment he couldn't work out what they were; their outlines were too random, too strange. But then one spun close enough for him to see it clearly.

  He stared out through the viewports, horrified. Outside in the freezing blackness, an Iconoclast shocktrooper stared back.

  The cloud was made of people.

  There were shocktroopers there, technicians, helot-workers. Some bore wounds, ragged holes blasted through their bodies by frag-shells and plasma fire, but many more were intact. Their frozen features screamed pain and terror, eyes white with ice, mouths full of frost.

  There were hundreds of them.

  Godolkin sagged back in the cocoon, hearing bodies brush and shatter against the hull. The Umbrae Nova had boarded the killships, taken them over by force and spaced the crews and workers that were on board. There would have been only a couple of hundred Iconoclasts on each vessel. The mutants would have overwhelmed them easily.

  And now shuttles full of Umbrae Nova troops were spilling from the battleships.

  It was insane. Godolkin's mind reeled with the horror of it. To die in battle, torn by gunfire in the midst of the enemy, that was a good and natural way to die. But to gasp out your last breath into the unbearable cold of space, feeling your lungs crackle, your eyes crust over with rime, your blood rage with expanding gasses as the cold and the pressure and the total, utter airlessness took you down... Suddenly, armour or no armour, Godolkin felt very cold indeed.

  This was no plan for peace. The Umbrae Nova were monsters, no better than the Tenebrae back on Gadara. Whatever Xandos Dathan had in mind, it was not a balanced and free Accord.

  The Blasphemy would need to hear of this. Godolkin brought up the power, throttled the main drives into life. Instantly, his holos lit up with multiple target locks. The Umbrae Nova had been watching out for spies, and now they had one.

  Far too late. Before the first gun was fired, Matteus Godolkin was into jumpspace and away.

  14. TISIPHONE

  "God, Jude. What kind of an idiot am I?"

  Red was slumped disconsolately in the flight cocoon, elbows on the control board and her head in her hands. The Banshee was in jumpspace, its course already set. For a while, it could get on well enough without her.

  "I've done it again, haven't I? Jumped right in, feet first, without stopping to think what I might be getting us all into... Oh sneck, what a mess."

  "Holy one, please don't despair." Harrow had disengaged himself from the cocoon. He'd not be shooting at anything for a while. Instead, he was kneeling on the seat, facing back so he was pretty much face to face with her. "We still don't know the meaning of all this. Once Godolkin has reported back,
the picture should become clearer."

  "Bloody hell, I hope so." Red leaned back. "Because right now I've not got a clue what's going on."

  "I think that lies among Xandos Dathan's greatest talents."

  Red couldn't help but chuckle. Harrow certainly had that right - Dathan might have been a brilliant leader and tactical planner, but as a lying bastard he was starting to look unsurpassed. There was no way that the shipyard assault could have gone so hugely wrong by chance. Godolkin had hit the nail right on the head: it was a trap.

  But for who?

  No wonder Enostine had wanted Godolkin on the op, if she wanted rid of him. Kerioth had almost been the end of them all. "You know what? I'm starting to wonder who the real leader of the Umbrae Nova is. Dathan or that skinny bitch of his."

  "You think the woman might be the power behind the man?" Harrow turned around and slid back down into the cocoon. "What an odd idea," he said flatly. "I'd really never thought of that."

  "Ha! Come on, Jude, you're not that whipped." There was a soft chiming, and bits of the flight board started to light up. "By the way, nice shot with that torpedo. That's the second time you've done good things with a missile this trip."

  "It's a gift. Are we going back to Emissary?"

  "Not yet. There's something I want to do first."

  The Umbrae Nova fleet was bunched up quite a distance from Tisiphone, as though the mighty troop ship was being given a lot of personal space. As the Banshee neared it, Red started to get an idea why. One of the readouts on her board was edging upwards, through green towards amber and red. "It's getting pretty hot out there, Jude. Rad-level's climbing fast."

  "The pulsar. If Dathan has got his troops there, I hope it's well shielded."