by Blaze Ward
“Firing on us,” Kamsichor said. “All the Patrols are firing into the Turtle. The Axial Megacannon has fired twice and hit both times. Recharging now.”
“Can you reach anyone on the Turtle?” A’Alhakoth asked.
She knew she risked overloading Kamsichor, but she didn’t know how to do it herself.
If she lived through this, the first thing she was doing was qualifying to sit on the bridge and fly and fight SeekerStar.
If she lived through this.
“Negative,” Kamsichor said. Her voice got a melodic lilt when she was stressed.
“How are we doing?” she asked.
“The Ram Cannons have not lined us up yet,” Kamsichor turned a dread smile over her shoulder at her. “We won’t survive long when they do.”
“Die well, WinterStar,” Commander Omezi’s voice came over the line.
“SeekerStar is away,” Kamsichor said.
Something in one of the other consoles shorted, throwing sparks and smoke into the air. A’Alhakoth grabbed a fire suppressor immediately at hand and shot across the space, even as the hull rocked from a mightier blow.
“Ram Cannons,” Kamsichor said grimly.
A’Alhakoth understood now what she meant. Those would destroy the ship.
Comitatus.
She had taken an oath, and death was included in the possible outcomes, but no daughter of Kanus was a coward. Certainly not her.
“Change course to ram the Septagon,” A’Alhakoth ordered the woman. “Maximum speed.”
Fifty-One
Much as she wanted to, Erin couldn’t kill those stupid snakes. The rage and pain Daniel was broadcasting was almost enough to overwhelm her. The snakes were screaming in an entirely different manner. Loss and retribution, but they had also taken advantage of the chaos to flee.
None of the hatchways had been closed, looking at the hallway where the snakes had fled.
Most of the snakes. Two of them were charred hunks of carcass.
Daniel collapsed finally, his throat screamed dry and maybe bloody from the sounds that had come out of it.
Nothing Erin had ever heard in her life had prepared her for his shrieks. It was worse when they were inside her head, and she couldn’t do anything to block her ears.
Kam was flat on her face. Nkechi was down to one knee like Erin. Only Iruoma was still standing, however wobbly that woman was.
“Daniel,” Erin stagger-crawled to where he was laying.
She rolled him onto his side, just to confirm that the chef was still alive after all that. Breath rattled around his chest, and his pupils reacted when she peeled open an eye.
The screaming was most gone, but around her, the hull of the Star Turtle boomed like a thousand drummers bashing away with mallets.
Iruoma moved to the door.
“No farther,” Erin managed to gasp at the woman.
Iruoma scowled at her, but held her peace, that deadly pistol aimed outwards like a hunting dog sniffing for a trace.
Erin pinched Daniel’s ear. Nothing. She slapped at his face a couple of times, more love-taps than anything. He stirred enough to open unfocusing eyes in her direction.
“What’s happening?” she found herself yelling, as if he had gone deaf.
Or she had.
He mumbled something, so she put her ear next to his mouth.
“Septagon,” he repeated in a breathy whisper.
Ah. That was the genesis of all this. Must have shot the Star Turtle with their city-killing cannon. Twice. And they had all survived.
She wasn’t sure how much longer, though. Or how they would escape.
Could those snakes open the fin and escape in her SkyCamel? She was already set to kill them all. Piracy would just make it legal in any court with jurisdiction.
“Escape,” Daniel said.
She wasn’t sure if he was asking or ordering. Didn’t have time to ask either, as he screamed for a third time and passed out.
Around her, the lights dimmed, like the ship had suffered a power failure.
They had to leave right now, if they were going to. Even a Star Turtle could apparently be killed by the Sept.
She was just sad that she didn’t have time to cut apart one or the other of the corpses and bring that stupid gem along. But it would take more time than they had.
This was going to hurt. She rose and pulled Daniel more or less upright.
“Here,” Iruoma stepped in and lifted the small male warrior over her shoulder.
Nkechi had Kam more or less awake and upright. About as good as the worst pub crawl they had ever managed, and maybe a little more past that.
They made it as far as the hatch. Iruoma had Daniel’s weight, and still drew her pistol, intend on leading. Erin staggered in her wake, making sure that the other two didn’t fall behind, no matter how many walls the three of them had to bounce off of.
The thunder outside had turn to hail, except they weren’t on the surface of a planet where ice could fall on you. In space, such things were fragile puffs of solar wind and dreams, rather than punishing things.
More lights went out, but there were enough to navigate. They got back down the gullet of the beast and to the point where they would turn left and cross through the forests and the skull trophies, but Daniel roused himself and thumped Iruoma on the bottom enough to get her attention.
He turned them to the right instead, towards the older section of the Turtle, where some of the most bizarre designs had been stored. The oldest ones, too.
Things flown by creatures only vaguely human in size and shape.
A massive thump and all the lights failed. Gravity did, too.
Erin wondered if the Turtle itself had just died, or been knocked out.
It did make it easier to carry Daniel and the others along, when they could push him and pull the others.
He remained in a state somewhere just above dreaming. Lucid hallucinations that he shared with them, the kind that mostly aligned with the reality of the hallways around them, as he kept directing them out and down. This side was nearly a perfect copy of the other, but showed halls where a crew might have lived, had Urid-Varg ever desired one, or Kathra Omezi allowed it.
They got to the door of the number three flight bay. Iruoma managed to bring Daniel around enough that he could open the door and they entered into the most bizarre fairy wonderland ever. Most of these ships weren’t steel and electronics. A few might have been organic. One of them reminded Erin of ice carved from the face of a glacier.
“Which one?” Iruoma asked Daniel, apparently understanding that he had brought them here on purpose.
The ships were locked to the deck, so they hadn’t floated when the Turtle lost gravity. That was the only thing that would save them now, assuming he could open the fin and those Sept salauds either missed it, or tried to capture them.
Erin wasn’t going to be taken alive. Not by them.
Daniel brought his mind back into the present from whatever nightmare he had been trapped in. Erin watched the pain of a human being dismembered alive recede from his eyes just long enough for him to point.
In the distance, one of the ships lit up. Erin had always wondered if that one was made of glass. It had that look, and the skin had the texture, but it wasn’t transparent, and it apparently flew in space. She imagined a bunch of hexagonal rods stacked on top of each other, like an even larger hexagon band held them in place. Each of the rods was about a meter and a half, and the ship was nearly sixty long, but didn’t have any sort of thruster nozzles or anything that marked even one end from the other.
Still, it seemed to be what Daniel needed. They moved.
He had stopped screaming. The noise of the hail blasting the hull had fallen almost to nothing as well.
Erin assumed that a Septagon was about to pounce on them, and they had minutes before the end.
Hopefully, this huge hunk of glass sculpture had a gun on it.
Fifty-Two
“Sheer
off!” Pasdar ordered at the top of his lungs, uncaring who executed the order, as long as someone did. “All weapons concentrate on WinterStar and destroy it before it destroys us.”
Never in his career had someone decided to actually ram a Septagon. But these rats had been backed into a corner, and he understood that sometimes, that was the risk.
Vorgash had pounded the vessel mercilessly with the Ram Cannons. The outer ring had stopped spinning, and in a few places large chunks had been blown off of it. But the ship had been set on a course while it had power, and a Septagon was a huge beast to turn, even at the best of times.
This was not the best of times.
In less than four minutes, the sparking, semi-destroyed remains of Kathra Omezi’s flagship would slam into the side of Vorgash like a knife entering his kidneys. Just as he had done to the Star Turtle earlier.
“Is there any way to avoid it?” Rostami called to the twenty men frantically trying to prevent catastrophe.
One head turned and Pasdar watched a man’s lips purse, as though he was about to turn his own wife in for treason. Surely, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
“Speak,” Pasdar ordered the man, walking closer.
“We could jump, Naupati,” the officer said grimly. “The drives are charged and we could zero a safe enough course to move several light-years away. Our prey might escape by the time we could calculate a return, but we avoid a collision now.”
He hung his head, as though he expected to have it struck from his shoulders for such a cowardly suggestion. Pasdar made a note to have a long conversation with Rostami and his top forty or so aides about speaking and thinking more flexibly, at least while he was in command of this ship.
Another naupati might have the man killed in the most painful method anyone could devise. But the officer was also about to save all of their lives.
“Calculate a blind jump and execute it!” Pasdar yelled, confused at this moment as to which men he should even be looking at. “Better to survive to fight again than die stupidly. Do it.”
The day had already turned far and away from anything his entire career had prepared him for. The Turtle might be dead now. Certainly, it had ceased broadcasting any detectable signals after the third shot from the Axial Megacannon had slammed into it. It was slowly tumbling as well.
And the fools had been caught in a turn. The star itself would capture the vessel in another twelve hours at the most, melting it and destroying whatever alien allies Omezi had found.
He would defeat her yet. Perhaps the day after tomorrow, instead of today, but Vorgash had to survive intact, in order to bring Sept law to the uncivilized parts of the galaxy.
Off his bow, WinterStar charged like a blind buck, intent on goring her pursuer one last time before dying. His guns had fallen silent as the range got too close. Pasdar presumed her guns had died when generators or engines had cut out.
The wreckage or the pieces would still enter Vorgash like a knife.
Except the Septagon leapt suddenly into the darkness.
Naupati Amirin Pasdar let go a breath he had been unaware he had been holding.
Even a short jump would take time to overcome. The Septagon had inertia that needed to be killed. The ship had to come about and recalculate a safe distance to arrive from the hopeful corpse of the Star Turtle.
An hour would pass, but SeekerStar had previously leapt away with no indication that it was returning, just as his gunners had come to realize that Omezi was on the other ship and before they could adjust their aim at the newcomer.
Run. I will yet catch you.
“Well done,” Pasdar called loud enough to overcome the buzzing of the men in his Command Node. “You have killed our target and saved the Septagon from serious damage. Let no man cast aspersions on your honor or your courage, gentlemen. Now, the next challenge awaits, as we must return before they can all escape us.”
He sat and let the adrenaline burn itself out as below him his men went to work.
Fifty-Three
“Enough,” A’Alhakoth ordered Kamsichor. “Call Adanne and tell her to meet us on the cargo deck. We must abandon ship now.”
Kamsichor looked like she had aged a decade in the last fifteen minutes, but the woman had shown as much bravery as any person A’Alhakoth had ever met.
They abandoned the bridge together and thrust their flight down the long axis of the ship like fish swimming upstream. The outer ring of WinterStar had stopped spinning at some point. A’Alhakoth wasn’t even sure how much of it had been blasted clear by the Septagon’s guns. Certainly, most of the women out there would have been killed had there been any.
But she and the other two women had done their duty. Now, to see if they could survive it.
Firing had ceased. The hull still popped and rang, but those were fires and explosions rattling the ship itself as systems failed. Very little of the damage was on the central hull, other than the front sections that had been shattered by fire. The forward turret was a crater, as well as the generators servicing it and most of the forward crew quarters, but those were all as thankfully empty as the outer ring had been.
Down the central shaft they shot. A’Alhakoth caught sight of Adanne coming forward from where she had been shepherding her engines.
Thank the very gods that the Patrol craft had all been chasing after the Turtle. By the time anyone realized that WinterStar was a threat, they had all flown past at such a speed that they would be too late to turn around and kill their own mad speed, to say nothing of returning to shoot this ship from the rear.
A’Alhakoth went in first, diving into the one SkyCamel stored on the cargo deck, instead of along the outer ring, for those times you needed to move heavy cargo and didn’t want to do it in gravity.
She had not yet qualified on the Spectres, but a SkyCamel was a much easier beast to fly.
“Strap yourselves in,” she called as she powered systems up and skipped large chunks of the preflight checklist.
They needed to be gone as soon as they cleared the hull or they were dead. And needed to be clear as soon as she could bring things to readiness.
“Go!” Kamsichor yelled after a few seconds.
Rather than look, A’Alhakoth triggered the systems that would open the locks holding this SkyCamel in place.
Nothing happened.
Too much damage, perhaps? The systems should have been proof against a power failure, running on localized batteries as a redundancy, but they held her to the hull, where she was minutes from slamming into the giant warship and dying an explosive and messy death.
“What’s wrong?” Adanne called.
“Locks won’t release!” A’Alhakoth yelled back at her. “We’re stuck. Suggestions?”
“Overload your engines,” Adanne said in a clear and concise suggestion of utter insanity. “Use all your maneuvering thrusters as well.”
“Why?” A’Alhakoth had to ask, completely lost now.
“The arms are not that strong, Spectre Twenty-Three,” Adanne replied in a stern, commanding voice. “They are designed to capture and hold a SkyCamel floating nearby, not one resisting. Plus, Kathra will not dock your pay for breaking them off right now. At least not any worse than she will for killing her ship.”
Chuckles all around. What was the worst the Commander could do, sentence her to death? If she didn’t break clean shortly, Kathra Omezi would have to climb down into hell herself to handle the task.
A’Alhakoth double-checked her fuel feeds and temperatures, and then began to pour power into the systems. She had to keep everything balanced, so that she had some control if she did this, or she’d slam the SkyCamel into the side of the ship as she maneuvered. Or the Septagon.
Nothing.
More power.
She grabbed the flight yoke in a death grip and thumbed the engines wide open. The hull began to groan. Or maybe that was her nerves screaming at the stress.
Father had trained her to be as much a warrior as any of he
r brothers. Daniel and Erin had weighed her very soul and recommended her to the Commander.
Kathra Omezi had made her comitatus.
She would not fail.
Something broke aft.
It wasn’t the bending of metal turning under torque. One of the arms failed and broke, maybe somewhere around the wrist.
The SkyCamel lurched and A’Alhakoth fought the controls to keep her nose aligned with the blackness ahead, rather than swinging on a hinge and slamming into WinterStar with power.
A second docking arm began to bow under the pressure, like a leash extending as the SkyCamel tried to drag WinterStar itself over to an interesting bush to sniff.
A’Alhakoth took a breath and jerked the yoke hard right and then immediately left.
The SkyCamel jolted like a dog shaking off water and broke free.
Someone yelled. Howled with joy. Maybe all of them.
A’Alhakoth left the engines going full tilt, unknowing how big an explosion it would trigger when WinterStar hit the gigantic intruder and unwilling to be anywhere close when that happened.
She did turn on all the sensors this poor tub had, blind and feeble as they were. At least the collision alarms were good ones.
A’Alhakoth’s mouth fell open as she looked at the screen.
The Septagon was gone. Vanished. WinterStar was flying into nothingness.
Well, not nothing, they were too close to the star, and on a slowly-intercepting vector. The gravity would pull the ship down into the stellar forge soon enough, unless someone brought a huge towtruck to this system to save it, and she couldn’t envision anybody wanting to try that hard.
WinterStar was broken. Murdered, but she had died heroically, especially if the Septagon had fled rather than be rammed. All of the Patrol vessels had left as well.
The SkyCamel was alone, with WinterStar and Daniel’s Star Turtle. A’Alhakoth checked the flight vectors and confirmed the second problem. The snakes had set it on a course directly into the face of the sun. It would splash in twelve or maybe eighteen hours at the longest, destroying the vessel presumably, and all the treasures that she had only heard about from Kam and Ndidi.
