“Captain Catalan. I need an immediate and critical favor,” the Assini said swiftly. “We are about to make a run for the defending fleet. Hopefully, we will draw the Escorts with us.”
“That should make a difference,” Octavio agreed. “How can we help you?”
He was trying to think how to politely ask the Assini to send over their entire databanks before they made what was probably going to be a suicide run.
“We are transferring our databanks to a storage system we should be able to eject into space,” Reletan-dai told him. “The storage system in question is not a cold data storage bank, however, and requires continuous power. You will need to catch it and supply power within twenty-three minutes.”
Octavio exhaled sharply and gestured Daniel over to him.
“We can do that, I think,” he told the Assini. “Is that the favor?”
It seemed…unlikely.
“No,” Reletan-dai confirmed. “Consider that payment of an existing debt and partial repayment for the favor. The favor will take far longer and require far more of your resources. It may prove impossible, but I must ask your promise regardless.”
“We’ll do everything we can, Reletan-dai. What do you need?”
“D?”
“Escorts are now in extreme range of the weapons platforms,” the AI told Octavio in response to the unspoken question. “Shezarim now moving in their direction at full acceleration.”
Which was…a lot. Octavio hadn’t realized that Reletan-dai was stepping down his ship’s acceleration to match Interceptor’s when they’d arrived in the system.
“You have the call, D,” Octavio said levelly. “When you have a shot, fire them all.”
That had been the agreement from the beginning: if they put D in charge of weapons, the AI wouldn’t fire them without permission from a human.
Seconds passed, the big Assini ship screaming outward from the planet while Interceptor lunged into her wake, shuttles scattering around her to snap up the various precious cargos the big ship had left behind.
Octavio trusted his people to manage that, however. Lieutenant Daniel had managed to intercept a ship traveling at 99.99% of lightspeed. She could rendezvous with not-quite-debris in an inactive orbit.
His attention was on the Escorts. The eight of them between Interceptor and the rest of the fleet were now changing their course, refining their angles to be sure they intercepted Shezarim.
And for a few critical seconds, they were flying in a perfectly straight line while they did so. Whatever damage their core intelligences had taken since leaving the Assini home system, it had cost them a degree of multitasking.
In those critical seconds, D acted. Not every platform around Vista had the angle or the range, but a hundred and sixty grasers and six hundred X-ray lasers fired as one. Nuclear explosions marked the X-ray lasers’ firing, and smaller, less blatant explosions marked the overload of the graser platforms.
None of the weapons were designed to fire twice. The hope was that they wouldn’t need to—and catching the Escort Matrices by surprise, they demonstrated why that hope was entirely reasonable.
One moment, eight Escort Matrices blocked Shezarim’s path, certain to tear her to shreds as she blasted through them.
The next moment, four of those Matrices were outright gone. Two more spun away, their engines failing and leaving only the momentum imparted by the beams to move them.
The last two seemed to pause in space, considering their actions for a few seconds as Shezarim bore down on them—and then dove away at their maximum velocity, running toward their allies in the rest of the system.
To Octavio, looking at the wreckage of the minefield, it was obvious that attack was a one-off with no second shot.
The Escort Matrices clearly weren’t going to take that bet.
“You’re clear all the way out to the fleet, Reletan-dai,” Octavio told the Assini. “They’ve got enough of a velocity edge that they will catch you if you run much past that, though.”
“That was never the plan,” the alien replied. “Let them think I’m running, though. Let them follow.”
Octavio shivered at the tone the translator gave Reletan-dai’s words. He glanced at the screen.
Shezarim would pass through the fleet at a low relative velocity just as the Escort Matrices reached their range of her. There was no way they’d catch the Assini ship without fighting Lestroud’s fleet.
And as the vectors for the other two Escort groups shifted on the screen, Octavio was grimly certain that Reletan-dai’s decision to act as bait had just saved everyone in Vistan orbit—including Octavio himself.
It wasn’t much of a down payment on the karmic debt the Assini had accrued, but he’d take it.
65
“Spread out the formation,” Isaac ordered. “If they’re going to focus on Shezarim, let’s hit them from as many other angles as we can.”
He was going to miss the Vistan guardships when the shooting started, but there was no way the slower vessels could get into line with the rest of the fleet before Shezarim reached him.
Fourteen Escort Matrices had joined up into a single force now following in Shezarim’s wake. The big ship had flipped and was decelerating toward the fleet now, letting the Matrices grow closer by the second.
“Put the Matrices in the center,” he continued after a moment’s thought. “Have them fall in around Shezarim as she cuts through our formation. They can change their velocity the fastest.”
It was one of the odder ironies of the disparate chunks of his fleet. The Matrices could go from nothing to point one cee—or flip the direction of their point one cee—faster than the ESF ships, but the ESF ships were more maneuverable on a second-to-second basis and could get up to higher velocities overall.
It was the ESF ships that spread out in response to his orders. Vigil herself went high with the destroyer Frozen Heart, with Juliet and Romeo swinging left and right with another Icicle apiece, while Galahad and the battered Othello went low.
The overall formation ended up looking like a ring, with the Vistan bombers and the light Matrix ships filling in the gaps between the Exilium ships and the six combat platforms at the center.
“Everyone except the Vistans is to fire as soon as they think they can score a hit,” he ordered. “Bombers are to hold their fire until six hundred thousand kilometers. All other ships are to cycle their fire to have a full salvo at that range.”
At two light-seconds, the bombers had a fifty percent hit chance. Their launch would be the heaviest hit his fleet would land, so he wanted to stack it with everything else.
“Range is eight light-seconds and dropping,” Connor told him. “Estimate enemy will open fire in twenty seconds.”
“All right.” Isaac leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. His final orders were given. At five light-seconds, their hit chances sucked, and only Vigil’s main gun really had a chance of hurting the Escorts.
It was, however, the range at which the last set of Matrices had opened fire.
“Shezarim is increasing evasive maneuvers,” Connor continued. “All units have commenced combat maneuvers on our side.”
Isaac nodded, watching the display.
Five light-seconds.
The entire holodisplay flashed as Vigil opened fire. Her spinal particle cannon spoke first, but the grasers mounted parallel to it opened fire a second later. The Matrix ships joined in moments later, followed by the grasers aboard the strike cruisers.
None of those beams were going to do much against the Escort’s armor at this range. The inverse wasn’t true, sadly, and Isaac watched as Shezarim demonstrated the big ship wasn’t going to be lucky today.
Only one zetta-laser beam hit the colony ship, but it gouged along the vessel’s starboard flank in a spray of debris and atmosphere that made him wince in sympathy.
“We got one,” Connor reported. “Glancing hit from Vigil’s particle cannon, but she’s lost some maneuvering…and pa
id for that,” he finished with grim satisfaction.
Vigil had hit the ship again—and the combat platforms had seen the injured enemy Matrix and targeted it with thirty-six grasers. Isaac wasn’t sure how many had hit, but it had been enough. The Escort vanished from his screens with a deceptively sanitized finality.
That still left thirteen Escorts continuing to close, and more zetta-laser fire gouged Shezarim’s hull. The ship had been built by the same technology base that had built the weapons, and she could stand that fire better than anything in Isaac’s line of battle.
His own fire was getting more effective by the second as the Matrices closed. None of the remaining Escorts had gone unscathed now, but they hadn’t hit any of them hard enough to harm them yet.
“Shezarim is starting to lose engine power,” Connor noted. “Her acceleration has dropped twenty percent already. I’m guessing she’s lost an engine. Maybe two.”
Isaac nodded silently. The Assini ship used very different engines from the Exilium Space Fleet. Instead of the thousands of microthrusters that propelled his ships, Shezarim had twelve massive antimatter rockets.
At least one of those was gone now, shattered under the hail of fire swarming over the massive Assini starship. Energy signatures around the ship on the display marked the explosion of another engine as Isaac was watching, flinging the ship wildly off course as the containment around the antimatter lines failed.
“Is she still with us?” he demanded.
“We still have tachyon-com telemetry,” Connor confirmed a second later. “Shit! The Matrices!”
Isaac’s orders had been for the Matrices to hold position with the rest of the fleet and fall in around Shezarim as she passed through the formation. Now the Assini ship had lost several of her engines, and the remainder were horrendously unbalanced.
She was still accelerating at thousands of gravities, but there was no control to it. The big colony ship was twisting in space, and Isaac winced in sympathy. Even with gravity control, it was going to be utter hell aboard that ship.
The Matrices in his formation, however, weren’t willing to watch their Creators die. All twenty-nine Matrix ships had shifted course and lunged forward at ten percent of lightspeed.
“Fuck.”
Isaac swallowed his breath after the curse escaped, staring at the screen as he reached for a solution.
That was enough for the Escorts to finally pay attention to something other than Shezarim, especially as the focused fire from the Construction Matrix warships tore another Escort to pieces. Half of their next salvo of zetta-lasers hammered into Isaac’s robotic allies.
Four recon nodes vanished under energy fire they could never have withstood, but the remaining ships continued their charge.
“Order the bombers to engage now,” Isaac barked. “Hit the bastards with everything we’ve got!”
More of the Matrices from both sides were dying as he gave the order, and a chill ran down his spine. His allies were dying faster than his enemies, and Shezarim was still getting pounded.
“Bombers are firing…now.”
Six hundred nuclear explosions and eighteen hundred X-ray lasers spoke in the dark of the void. He hadn’t given specific targeting orders, but someone along the way had realized randomly spreading the bombers’ fire was a waste of munitions.
The Vistan spacecraft targeted only six Escort Matrices and hit with over forty percent of their beams. Those six Matrices stalled out under the fire, one disintegrating in its tracks and the others slowed by damage.
The survivors were the focus of the entire fleet’s fire—and suddenly there were only four Escorts left. Outnumbered and outgunned by the force in front of them as they were, Isaac half-expected them to run.
They didn’t.
All four lunged toward Shezarim at their maximum speed, their weapons returning to full focus on the Assini ship. Unimaginably powerful energy beams tore apart her armor, exposing cargo bays and systems to the depths of space.
Then the Matrices flung themselves between their Creators and their rogue relatives. A combat platform died, absorbing half a dozen beams intended for Shezarim. Two recon and security nodes joined her.
Three Escorts died in the overwhelming fire of Isaac’s fleet—and a combat platform flung itself into the course of the final ship.
The cataclysmic explosion that followed marked the end of Shezarim’s protectors-turned-pursuers.
And from the way Shezarim was wildly spinning in space, flinging antimatter and atmosphere in every direction, Isaac wasn’t sure it wasn’t the end of the Assini colony ship as well.
66
The energy spikes of the battle were fading from the holodisplay on Vigil’s flag bridge, but Shezarim’s energy signature was still all over the place. The big ship was entirely out of control, whatever engines she had left activating and deactivating at random and lurching her away from the Construction Matrices that were trying to close with her to assist.
“Com incoming from Shezarim!”
“Connect them,” Isaac ordered.
Reletan-dai appeared on Isaac’s screen, the bridge of the Assini colony ship behind him. The moment Isaac saw the state of the bridge behind the alien official, he knew the news couldn’t be good.
For an energy surge to penetrate so deeply into a ship as to cause damage on the bridge, it had almost certainly done critical damage elsewhere, and Shezarim’s bridge was a wreck. Isaac was sure he saw at least one body in the debris behind Reletan-dai.
“Get those Matrices clear,” the Assini told Isaac. “We’re trying to stabilize her, but the engines aren’t our first priority. The conversion cores had dropped below minimum power draw and are going unstable.”
And their conversion cores were significantly larger than anything in Isaac’s fleet, even including the Matrices.
“Connor, pass the order,” Isaac snapped.
“Is there anything we can do?” he asked Reletan-dai as he returned his attention to the alien.
“We’ll know short—”
The signal dissolved into static for several seconds and Isaac looked up at the main display. The ship was still there…
“Connor?”
“One of their antimatter engines just blew up,” the ops officer replied. “She’s now tumbling with one engine.”
Reletan-dai’s image resolved again as the Assini hauled himself back into view of the pickup.
“That was the last engine we had any control over,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm. Either the translator wasn’t picking up certain tones—possible, if the software hadn’t encountered them—or Reletan-dai was one of the calmest people Isaac had ever met.
“We can’t shut down the remaining engines, and our attention is focused on the conversion cores,” he continued.
An untranslated stream of Assini was shouted behind Reletan-dai, too distant and distorted for the translator to pick up.
“We have core three shut down,” he told Isaac, closing his eyes in relief. “But we have to eject core two. This may not work…”
Another stream of untranslated Assini echoed across the bridge, and Isaac watched Reletan-dai react like he’d been struck.
“The ejection systems were wrecked at some point,” he said quietly. “We can’t prevent the failure and we can’t eject it. Listen to me, Isaac Lestroud.”
“I am,” Isaac promised.
“We left our databanks and the cryo-bay in Vista orbit,” Reletan-dai told him. “Your Captain Catalan should have caught and restored power to both. There are forty-eight hundred Assini left in that cryo-bay.
“They are all that remains of my people. The databanks, whatever tech you can salvage from Shezarim, all of that is yours. Just take care of my people.”
“I will,” Isaac told the other man. “I swear it.”
“There is blood on my race’s hands, but those survivors are innocent,” Reletan-dai said. “Take our knowledge and help them.
“May your people be
wiser than mi—”
There was no static this time. The channel just cut off, and Isaac knew what he would see in the holodisplay before he even looked.
Matter-conversion cores were intentionally designed so that critical equipment would be destroyed first in a failure, killing the reaction before it could cause too much damage.
The failure of Shezarim’s core two was still a multi-gigaton explosion that shattered the three-kilometer starship like a dropped glass.
67
“We have both the cryo-bay and the databanks tethered to Interceptor’s hull,” Octavio Catalan reported. “The cryo-bay was honestly easier: it was designed for this as an emergency protection measure. We’re running power to it, but it has its own atmosphere and systems.
“We’ll want to connect it to one of the Vistan space stations sooner rather than later, though.”
“What about the databanks?” Isaac asked. “They weren’t as easy?”
The surviving Assini had been the priority, but those databanks could make the difference between victory over the Rogue Matrices or the deaths of the now three species that he was responsible for.
His oath was to the Republic of Exilium. His love and his life were Amelie Lestroud’s. He was Exilium’s soldier, but he’d pledged his word and the honor of the ESF to the protection of the Vistans and the Assini now.
“They weren’t designed to be ejected into space,” Catalan replied. “We had to catch them and then rig up a power-conversion interface in less than an hour. Fortunately, we’d already been working on an interface with Shezarim’s systems for other reasons.”
“You retrieved them?” Isaac asked.
“We did. We also copied the entirety of the database to Interceptor’s files. D is organizing and comparing against the Matrix files now, along with some of my key personnel.” Catalan shrugged. “It’s not like we could help in the battle. For a while there, I thought I was going to have to run and bear witness…and left to our onboard resources, I’m not sure Interceptor’s warp would have been repairable.”
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