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On the ground, as the crew trod slowly forward, something began to crackle in their receivers. Those were passive and always on. Spencer noticed the increasing background noise first. It went from an indistinct hiss of crackling static to a garbled transmission in a matter of seconds.
Then it got loud.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, looking to the sky.
***
On the Seraphim, Iona’s eyes opened wide and Crash came fully out of her nap in half a second. She’d been kipping in the command seat whenever possible. It was easier now that they were concealed within the denser parts of the nebula.
The speakers blasted the incoming transmission, which in addition to encrypted text that Crash hastily scanned through, also had an audio component. “What is that?”
“I think it’s Orff,” Iona said. “Oh Fortuna.”
***
“This feels unwise,” the ship said as Krieger pushed the conventional drive to its limit.
Krieger only laughed. “How many do we have following us?” The answer popped up on his display a moment later. Nearly fifty. Not a bad catch.
“Our weapons may not be sufficient,” the ship said in a dry voice.
Krieger grunted agreement. “They will not need to be. Not if we do this correctly.”
The idea itself was straightforward and would only work because of the singular mindset of the pursuit vessels. The nebula certainly didn’t hurt, either.
“Can we get anything else out of the conventional drive?” Krieger asked, checking the closing distance between the ships behind and working out the time until they reached the hiding place where Seraphim lurked.
“No,” the ship said. “We are already pushing its safe limit. At our current rate, our margin will be very thin.”
Krieger snorted a laugh. “No, really?”
There was nothing pretty or complicated about it: this was a stern chase through and through. The ships behind were slowly gaining ground—whatever sort of drives they were using clearly had the advantage.
Fortunately, the encrypted text he sent out to the system at large would allow Crash and Iona to knock them down as he had lined them up.
“Two minutes,” the ship said, populating Krieger’s feed with a countdown.
He watched the display and saw the red of the enemy’s weapons envelope inch toward his position. This would be tricky. Very tricky. And dangerous.
At the thirty second mark he cut the engine and used the thrusters to reorient the Ab in space, flipping her over and pointing her nose down relative to his previous orientation. This took just over three seconds, and the drive kicked back on at full power.
Sensors showed a shower of small contacts as weapons fire raked through the space he had just vacated. Changing direction just before weapons range was only a minor delaying tactic; the pursuers altered course themselves, if on a much more smooth parabolic than his own jagged turns.
And Krieger was changing it up. He used the thrusters to jerk the ship in random directions, ending in a drunken weave that would make PDC fire unreliable at best. The angle between him and the enemy was changed just enough that their shots would impact on the heavily armored spine of the ship rather than hit his engine cone directly. It cost him a little distance and let them get closer, but for those last few handfuls of seconds until the intercept, staying in one piece was all that mattered.
The sharp crack of rounds striking the hull began to sound like rain. They were wide shots meant to throw Krieger off and make him react. Which was why he ignored them. The heavy ordinance would come next, and fast. Torpedoes had extreme range, but from a distance they were relatively easy to pick off. With this many ships on his ass, Krieger knew they would coordinate their torpedo fire at a closer range to ensure a kill.
Sometimes the only thing a pilot could do was let his gut take over. Krieger did that five seconds before when the computer models told him the enemy would launch their torpedoes.
“Now!” he said. The ship obeyed at once.
A drone launched from the belly of the ship, then two more in precisely offset patterns. None of the three engaged any kind of drive system. Instead they oriented with small thruster packages and fired the PDC cannon mounted on each.
The ship’s own PDC network lit up at the same time, filling the space between it and the swarm of torpedoes with tungsten slugs. In the soup of the nebula, all Krieger had to go on were heat signatures, but he watched the hot streaks of incoming weapons flash and then vanish.
Good enough.
The countdown reached zero just as the pursuers got out of range of the drones. In seconds another flight of missiles or torpedoes would home in on his drive emissions and annihilate the Ab. Nothing he could do about it.
Crash and Iona, however, could.
From around the shrouded planetoid vomiting out reflective gas came a new heat source, this one far larger than Krieger or the Children vessels behind him. They approached at a right angle, and the enemy drones were unprepared for it.
Missiles and PDC rounds joined what Krieger desperately hoped were precisely aimed shots from the rail gun in a broadside that took advantage of the enemy’s inability to change course at such high speeds. It wasn’t nearly enough to destroy them all, but eighteen enemy vessels winked out off his scanners in a handful of seconds.
He cut the engine a second time and flipped the ship, still traveling away from the swarm of attackers but facing them as he did it. The light of burning fuel from damaged and destroyed ships lit up the gas of the nebula and let him see through the haze, ghostly images of the now-breaking formation showing through.
“Fire,” he told the computer. It would handle this part; maneuvering while flying ass-end first took up all of Krieger’s concentration.
Just as the computer began targeted bursts from their entire weapons array, the Seraphim cut through the middle of the line and actually struck one of the damaged vessels attempting to limp away. The smaller ship disintegrated against the dense, heavily armored nose of Krieger’s home. Seraphim was still firing as it passed through their line.
“Okay,” Krieger said, tapping thruster controls in a constant dance, “we need to make this work. Thirty targets left and now we have help.”
It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be fast. He just hoped the Ab and the Seraphim would be enough, because no more help was coming.