| |
“Um, Iona? Please tell me I’m hallucinating right now,” Crash said, sitting up in her chair as alerts sounded across the bridge. The threat assessment display populated instantly with half a dozen ships, then doubled. Then doubled again. The numbers kept on climbing.
“You aren’t,” Iona said. “Gonna be kinda busy.”
Crash knew she was only on the ship in case something happened to Iona. She was the only other fully qualified astrogator and pilot they had left. Everyone had learned at least the basics of each person’s job, but there was a wide gulf between being able to keep the damn thing straight and experience that came only with hundreds of hours behind the stick.
The threat board lit up with yet more new foes, leaving their deep geosynchronous orbit over the Vault surrounded. They were Children technology—had the alien defenses on the planet sent anything up here after them, they wouldn’t have been in stealth mode and certainly wouldn’t be stationed at relative stops. It was a threat, not an attack. Yet.
“Options,” Crash said. “Where did they come from and why aren’t they attacking?”
Iona considered for less than a second. “They must have been in deep stealth, sneaking up after that damn mind worked out where we were. I’d really like to know what they have for armor. They turned it off to become completely visible to our sensors. As for options...they’re not attacking. They’ll read our power curve if we cycle up for anything big like a warp jump.”
They were relatively safe this far from the planet. The ground-based defenses targeting anything manipulating gravity were less effective at longer ranges. The orbital platforms in this area had been cleaned out by the Originators, giving a small but useful bubble of clean space to work in.
Crash mulled that over. “What could we do with a brief Slip drive burst? I mean, the capacitors for it are already charged, so if we run the drive on a trickle and then dump a bunch of power into it, that should give us a burst, right? No ramp-up of the power curve?”
Iona came fully alert, though Crash knew she was still integrated with the ship. There was surprise on her face. “That’s brilliant. Normally we cycle the fusion plant up to keep each bank of capacitors topped off as it runs. I never thought of that.”
Crash grinned, waving a hand at the enemies surrounding them. “What can I say? Threats to my life make me pretty creative. What’s the count, by the way?”
“Sixty-eight,” Iona replied at once. “They seem to have stopped coming. Why are they waiting?”
Crash suppressed the urge to laugh. The sim was amazingly capable, but her relative lack of experience sometimes showed through in startling ways. “Either they’re waiting to attack all at once, or someone is about to give us an ultimatum. Only reason I can think of for not shooting us out of the sky as soon as they could is because we’re leverage.”
Iona’s brow wrinkled. “How could you possibly know that?”
Crash shrugged. “I’ve been here before.”
“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Iona asked.
Crash sighed. “Guessing it won’t be very long. These things are usually over quick. Start thinking of which direction to go and what our next move will be until then. Waiting it out and seeing where we stand is preferable to shooting from the hip and fucking up from lack of information.”
While they waited and Iona worked, Crash brought up the tactical array and worked her way through several of the automated firing solutions Grant had programmed in. There were hundreds of patterns based on his most useful tactics, and several dozen of them dealt with overwhelming groups of enemies. She keyed in several with the right contingencies for location and circumstance. Iona glanced over and gave her an approving nod—it would be one less thing for her to manage should they need to make a run for it.
As it turned out, half an hour was how long they had to wait. Iona didn’t bother asking when the transmission came. She just accepted the link and opened the channel.
“Ship in orbit,” the voice of—Crash assumed—the Vault’s mind said. “You are now my captives. I will allow your crew to return to your vessel and leave if they agree to abandon their attempt to access the repository. You have three minutes to decide, or I destroy your vessel and leave you stranded here.”
Crash gave the sign to kill the channel. “Iona, give me an encrypted burst.”
The light went green. “Captain, we’re gonna rabbit. We’ll figure something out. You do what you have to. Don’t let this fucker win.” She paused, and when the recording light blinked off, said, “Send it.”
“Burst sent. Do we wait for orders?” Iona asked.
Crash grinned. “Hell, no. Grant left this thing in our hands. He trusts us not to get her shot up too badly. You have a course laid in?”
Iona looked slightly uncomfortable. “I do, but you’re not going to like it.”
The screen changed to show the overall layout of the nebula. The rough locations of the mines and known weapons platforms were highlighted in yellow. The large empty space where Blue’s avatars had set off the Breakspace engine represented only a tiny fraction of its volume. A path through away from the planet and into the minefield was lit in green.
“You’re kidding,” Crash said.
Iona shook her head. “Best chance we have is to skirt as close to the danger zones as possible. The nebula will shield us and the weapons out there might take out some of those ships. I think I’ve found one of the stations producing the nebula itself. Or augmenting it. Hard to tell if it was already here, or—”
Crash waved an impatient hand. “Okay, shit. Just do it. How much juice will we get from the capacitor?”
“I shunted some power over to the whole bank,” Iona said. “We’ll get a burst of speed from each one, and I think it’ll be enough to get us far enough away to use the full power of the ship. If we want to risk going to warp or using the Slip drive in more than small bursts, I mean.”
Crash surveyed the map, chewing her lip as she weighed the dangers. “I leave that up to you. If it looks like we’re gonna die anyway, then go crazy. Just try not to get us killed. Are we shooting as we accelerate away?”
“I think we’ll have to,” Iona said. “You want to do the honors?”
In response, Crash pulled up the console version of the tactical array and readied herself to fire weapons. “Let’s do it.”
Iona’s countdown was only five seconds—the time limit set by the mind was nearly up.
There was no lurch of acceleration thanks to the artificial gravity compensating for the inertia, but the Seraphim groaned a little under the sudden strain. Slip drives were designed to be used to slowly ramp up velocity, not surge to full or even a significant fraction of their capacity at once. The gravitational stress on the hull had to be severe to cause Crash’s girl to complain about it that way.
She fired a second after the jump began. She knew the enemy ships were being piloted by human slaves by the fact that there was any lag in their move toward Seraphim at all—a machine would have reacted in a fraction of the time. Over the course of the war, she’d taken the measure of the slave drones more than once. They were fast puppets, but puppets nonetheless and with the limitations of flesh.
A dozen silvery missiles burst from pods laid against the hull and streaked off at bone-crushing speeds, followed by a staccato burst from the ventral rail gun and a storm of slugs from the PDC cannons.
To her immense surprise, nine of the missiles managed to kill their targets. She hadn’t planned on any of them actually getting the job done. That wasn’t the point. She only intended to ward the mind’s ships away long enough for Iona to get them out of range of the enemy’s weapons envelopes.
The external view changed quickly—far too fast for Crash to follow. The lurching acceleration of the Slip drive engaging a second time threw them farther from the pursuing ships than Crash had imagined possible. She turned to Iona. “Damn, girl. How fast are we going?”
Iona frowned in concentration, eyes narrowed. “Faster than I planned for. We’re off course. I’m correcting—reactor is cycling up now.”
Apparently seeing that Slip travel was safe in the general area, the enemy ships copied their tactic. Seraphim was well within the nebula proper, the strange thin spot in its coverage near the planet far behind them. The ships would have a hard time tracking them down in this soup.
But it wasn’t impossible.
“Okay,” Crash said, hands ready to twitch onto the tactical controls at the first sign of trouble. “Let’s do a dance between all the shit out here that will try to kill us and make these things regret playing hide and seek.”