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“Steady as she goes,” Dath said from his command chair—softly, as though they were sneaking up on someone. And for all rights and purposes, they were. “Systems, any sign that we’ve been detected?”
Ylura tapped fingertips across the holo-wafer of her console and read from readouts she’d already checked a thousand times. “Negative, sir. No indication we’ve been pinged by active sensors. Void Drives at Speed One. Minimum tachyon signature.” She turned to him. “At this distance, even a focused scan would have a hard time picking us up.”
Dath nodded, staring into the main screen hologram. It showed a tactical display, zoomed out to show the entire region around Farside Station, at its center as a white dot. A loose ring of gray icons surrounded it from a distance. A single red one circled the station nervously, encircled by what was the Morvenan Fleet equivalent of a task force. Tenacity hung off in the lower right corner of the display, faintly blue.
“Operations,” he said, “do we have the Aetann on scopes?”
“Aye sir,” replied the slender young woman of burnt-honey features and bright doe eyes to Ylura’s left. “Right here.” She tapped her console and one of the Morvenan icons strobed. At the same time a dotted line drew itself from Tenacity, straight in to Farside, and passed right past the highlighted vessel. “I also have Commander Varley’s channel queued up; he’ll have plenty of warning of us, sir.”
“Very good, Ensign Regal.” Dath touched his armrest control. “Control, give me Main Engineering.”
A crackle issued from the overhead speaker, hid words that might have been a grumble. “Rougan, here.”
“Tom,” Dath said with an ironic smile, “it’s not that I’m worrying; but how are the Hypernaughts? Those Drives behaving themselves?”
“Running like a dream, this morning, Captain,” Rougan replied. “They’ll put you on top of that station in two minutes. But, like I said before, it’s not the sprint that’s going to strain them; it’s the sudden stop. You’re talking about reversing the Void Fields, inverting the event horizons in the shafts. The Drives haven’t faced that kind of strain, yet.”
“No time like the present,” Dath replied, his smile hardening.
“Aye sir.”
“Thanks, Tom. Bridge out.” With the ping of the cut connection, he leaned forward and called to the helm station. “Zovga, how long to get us up to Void Speed Nine-point-five?”
The Korthan helmsman turned his craggy, orange-scaled face to Dath. The structure of his reptilian face meant his fangs were almost always bare, even when relaxed. But Ylura knew the ensign well enough to know he was smiling now.
“With the Drives wide open, sir, it’ll be thirty seconds. By then, we’ll be practically on top of the station, probably another minute at full speed.”
“And the deceleration?”
“Dropping from Void Speed—especially by field inversion, as Commander Rougan intends—accomplishes deceleration from FTL.” Zovga pivoted his seat to his station and touched a control. On the main screen, the icon of Tenacity shot forth along the dotted line from before, streaked through the Morvenan encirclement, and slowed violently as it neared Farside. “But once we’re out of Void, it’s all sub-light drives. That’ll actually be the tricky part.” He glanced over his shoulder at Dath. “I can’t say for certain until we’re in it, sir, but we will be maneuvering in the open for between fifteen and twenty seconds.”
And that would be the truly perilous part, Ylura and everyone on the bridge knew. Once Tenacity was in close, at point blank, the majority of Farside’s defense systems would be obstructed by its own mass. But for the few endless seconds before that, as Tenacity braked for her final approach, every weapon at the terrorists’ disposal could focus upon them.
Regal touched Ylura’s forearm and grinned impishly. “Bet you’re thrilled to be back for this.”
Ylura chortled and smiled back with feeling. An explosion on the bridge during that last fight near Typhon had left a shard of metal sticking out of Regal’s shoulder. But the ensign showed no signs of that wound, now; three months of leave and regenn therapy having done the job in remarkable time. Ylura had been shocked to see her aboard, actually. But bathing in the warmth of the younger woman’s smile and golden-shining aura, she couldn’t be more grateful.
Reaching out to take Regal’s hand, Ylura replied, “No place I’d rather be.”
“Captain,” Clemens spoke up from her station and turned with a hand cupping the earbud to the side of her head, “I’m getting a signal from the cruiser, Rokhann. They’re broadcasting on the open. It’s beginning.”
Ylura hid a flinch. That was her uncle’s ambassadorial ship. Of course, he’d put himself into the middle of this. That was Tahna out there. Also, probably the other ministers had insisted upon it, with all the assumption of responsibility for the disaster that implied. She closed her eyes and concentrated, let herself fall into the First Circle. Discipline and serenity, she thought out to Arrakka, though with her meagre abilities it was unlikely her will could cross the distance. Ancestors go with you, uncle.
On the main screen, the single gray light-mote of Arrakka’s cruiser coasted inward from the perimeter around Farside, pulsing with its transmission. The crimson dot of the repurposed T5 frigate lurched from its patient circuit around the station into a sprint to meet the ship. Both slowed to close range, close enough for a full energy-weapons volley to wreck one or both. The rebel frigate pulsed now with its own communications.
“They’ve made contact,” Clemens announced, listening to her earpiece. “Rokhann is relaying the transmission back to us.”
At Clemens’ command, a quadrant divided off from the main display to show a bony, privation-marked Morvenan male’s face. Glow from the eyes fluttered with fatigue and blue-black hair hung loose about them. The bridge of the frigate behind him was poorly-lit, shadows moving back and forth, occasionally obstructing the glow of a single station seen over his shoulder.
He sounded crazed as he spoke. “We will atomize you if you move a centimeter closer!”
“The quadrant divided within itself, halved to show a second transmission, a second face: Arrakka’s. “Hold, please!” Ylura’s uncle replied with a hand upraised into sight. “No one wants more bloodshed.”
The captain of the frigate narrowed his eyes to simmering slits. “Count Arrakka, is it? We know much of you. It is not surprising it would be you here now. More than any others, you would have a stake in this.”
Arrakka’s features tightened till the bones beneath showed sharply. He looked as though facing the terrorist through the hologram required immense effort.
She is not there, his voice suddenly filled Ylura’s mind. She suppressed a gasp, drew a glance from Regal, nonetheless, as she drew a hand to her temple. He was there! Arrakka was there, somehow projecting himself across the void, and she realized what fatigued him so in the hologram. Tahna is not on the ship; she will be on the station.
I understand, Ylura thought back, pinching to her core with internal effort and knowing it would be in vain.
“All of the Unity has a stake in this,” her uncle was replying aloud in the hologram, haughty now and stern. “You have made certain of that.”
“Indeed, we have,” the rebel captain replied. “You have forced us to this! The inaction of the Colors, despite every piece of evidence we have provided them, has forced us to this!”
“And we are willing to discuss that,” Arrakka replied calmingly, but unyieldingly. “But not on the open holo-channels and not for the consumption of the entire galaxy.”
“Of course not,” the captain sneered. “All in the family, yes? That is how you would prefer it. None of the ugliness out in the open.”
“And we are not going to air those grievances here,” Arrakka cut him off. “I am empowered to come onto the station to negotiate in person. But I must have certain assurances. First of all...”
Dath was making a cutting gesture with his hand to Clemens, who quickly muted the conversation. “Alright, everyone,” he told the bridge crew, “that’s the signal. Alvarez? How are we doing this?”
The Tactical officer looked up from his station. “Morvenan Archival records show Farside was constructed with Type-IV shielding and only upgraded once in the last two decades. They’re solid, but not particularly well-reinforced, meant to dissuade pirate attack.”
“For which they’ve done a superb job,” Dath quipped.
“A full volley of overloaded plasma torpedoes should do the trick to bring them down,” Alvarez told him with a grim smile.
“Full overloads?” Ylura looked over at Alvarez, then at Dath, brows furrowing. “That doesn’t leave a whole lot of margin for error.”
“Bringing the shields down is the main thing,” Alvarez replied, the smile tightening a little with what she read as dissatisfaction at having his expertise questioned. Of the bridge crew, Alvarez had always been friendliest to her, but certainly that had limits. “Collateral damage is a risk, yes, but we can be more precise with the energy weapons once the shields are down.” He turned again to Raker. “If the goal is minimum risk to the hostages, this is the way. Sir.”
“Agreed,” Dath replied and fixed his gaze upon the main screen, effectively ending any further discussion with the grave set of his face. “Alright, Zovga, if the Drives are warm, take us in!”
Ylura stared at the icon of Farside Station in the hologram’s center as she felt the reality-lurching shift of Tenacity’s mass towards FTL. But she saw a memory of a waifish Morvenan girl-child, suddenly warping into a feral-faced terror clenching a blaster rifle.
***
“I’M TELLING YOU,” HARLANDER ranted on the bridge of the Devourer, “if the Morvenan terrorists manage to pry the truth out of that traitor, this whole operation is finished!”
“And I’m not arguing that with you, Magus,” Heath replied, seated in his command chair and waving a hand disarmingly. “But the question remains: what exactly do you propose we do about it from here?”
On the bridge main screen, the tactical display showed the siege of Farside Station in glowing detail, viewed by Devourer’s sensors at a safe half a light minute with the ship, herself, coasting mostly powered-down and dark in the void. There seemed to be another stirring of activity between the terrorists and their opponents, but it was likely just more mind-witch chatter and Heath’s attention was on Harlander.
“I don’t know,” the Magus was admitting in frustration. “Blast our way in?”
Heath laughed in his face. “You’re out of your mind!”
“Devourer is more than a match for any Morvenan cruiser.”
“She certainly is,” Heath replied, “but not a dozen of them at once.” He leaned forward, glowering. “And that would obviously compromise Golgotha’s role in recent events, would it not? We’re here to sow division, not unite the Morvenans against a common foe!”
“We have other purposes, here,” Harlander growled.
Again, Heath waved him off. “I’m not having this debate; involving Devourer directly in these affairs drops the whole ruse.”
“Then we go back to the drop-off site for more of the derelicts, arm one of those, and come back, posing as another faction,” Harlander insisted.
“Magus,” Heath groaned, “this is desperation, not planning. Why pursue this with such vehemence?”
Harland put a hand on the armrest of Heath’s chair—a breach of decorum great enough to draw looks of shock from Mueller and the rest of the bridge crew. “We cannot allow the supply to be interrupted, Brother-Captain.”
Heath glowered back. “And I’m telling you; there may be no way to prevent that.”
Agony like knife-points—like fangs—punched through Heath’s mind. He felt himself fold over, grasping one hand to the side of his face while the other gripped the armrest for support. The intensity of the Mistress’ presence in his mind was as acute as though her great, terrible mass settled crushing upon him, feeding upon him.
That must not be the answer.
The pressure eased very slightly, allowed Heath to straighten up slightly. Through a fog of pain, he saw Harlander’s rat-like features creasing in satisfaction. He felt Her, too. “Yes,” he purred. “Can you feel it, Heath?”
Scraping a layer of instantly-blossomed sweat from his brow, Heath rasped, “My goal is the preservation of the ship” he wasn’t replying to the Magus, but to the source of his suffering “your preservation.”
Risks may have to be taken. The words swirled like dark vortices in his skull, worming into thoughts, memories, his guts, his loins. Never had his connection with one of Them been so intense. We must have more.
“Yes, you do feel it,” Harlander whispered near Heath’s ear, an intolerable violation of his space, his rank. But he couldn’t resist. “The witchling in the Cradle, Heath; through her, the Mistress’ reach is far greater. But, like all fuel, the child will eventually be expended.” Heath felt Harlander’s breath at his ear, just as he felt the Mistress’ bristles scraping across his brain. “We must have more.”
“Brother-Captain!” Mueller barked.
The exclamation was jarring enough to break the trance and Heath jolted back in his seat from Harlander. Lips peeled away from his teeth in fury with the other man. But the source of his First Officer’s alarm drew his attention away.
“Inbound vessel!” Mueller yelped and pointed at a streak of light representing a tachyon wake, tearing across the hologram, straight for Farside. “High speed, coming on at” the Commander paused, seemed not to believe what was reading over Systems Officer’s shoulder on the man’s console “Voice Speed Nine-point-five!”
Heath stood up so violently Harlander had to leap back to avoid being struck. “The Unity doesn’t have any ships that fast. Who?”
“Unclear,” Mueller replied with a shake of his head. “Mixed signature, but definitely Sanctuarian manufacture.”
“The Republic is here?” Harlander hissed.
“We knew the Unity had invited a delegation,” Heath snapped at him before spearing Mueller with his glower. “Brother-Commander, can you identify?”
“A-aye, sir.” The younger officer gulped as he read with obviously disbelief from the Systems station hologram. “Signature is consistent with a heavily-modified Fenris-class battlecruiser.”
“By God and the Mistresses who convey to us His Voice,” Heath growled, “it’s Raker!”
***
“STEADY AS SHE GOES,” Dath said, as much to quell his nerves as a command.
“Aye sir,” Zovga replied in his vaguely sibilant voice. “Fifteen seconds to drop out of Void Speed. Sub-lights primed and ready.”
“Torpedo tubes overloaded,” Alvarez noted. “Missile racks at the ready; energy weapons primed.”
“Shields at maximum,” Ylura added from Systems, gripping at the edges of her console for support—which was needless; if the inertial compensators failed, they’d all be smeared across the inside of the crumpling bridge, anyway.
But Dath understood, clenching at his armrests, himself. The moments felt like the shuddered climb up the slope of a roller-coaster, up towards the drop. “Have they seen us, yet?”
As if in answer the forward display flashed and a peal of thunder slammed through the ship. Dath held on as impact translated through the shields—which otherwise shunted its destructive power into an alternate dimension of subspace—into the hull and his bones. A second strike flung him backwards, shoulder blades tingling instantly from the smack of the chair against them.
“Hit?”
“Heavy particle cannon!” Ylura replied over the subsided rumble. “Two hits! Loss of twelve percent to the forward deflectors!”
“Gah!” Dath had been hoping their speed would have gotten them in close without a scratch. “Lucky bastards!”
But it looked like the terrorists’ luck was already running out. Farside Station erupted in a porcupine spray of energy bolts that lanced the vacuum vainly in pursuit of Tenacity’s speeding silhouette. Most seared emptiness, targeting sensors baffled by the superluminal approach—and, also likely the terrorists’ inexperience with the heavy weapons systems of the station.
Alarms blatted from the tactical and clouds billowed out from hardpoints along the rim of the hub, elongated suddenly into hair-fine sprays of missile tracks. “They’re on to us!” Alvarez barked.
“Point-defenses!” Dath snapped, then raised his voice to a roar. “Zovga, drop us from Void Speed, now!”
“But we aren’t close enough to—”
“Now!!!”
The Korthan helmsman didn’t hesitate, three-fingered hands working across his console with a clatter of nails on holo-wafer. The Drives squalled through the hull as the singularities within them inverted polarity and just as quickly dropped them out of FTL. Dath wobbled forward, nausea jetting up from his guts as a sensation like being scissored between incompatible universes and physics tore at him. Something else might have screamed from the ship’s innards—or someone.
“Fire!” Dath rasped and gulped back bile. “All weapons fire!”
The spread of Void-capable missiles launched from the station squirmed in mid-flight, seemed momentarily lost as their target it came to a relative standstill, instead of the arrowing course they’d tracked. The delay cost them more than any jamming Tenacity could have put out. In the instant it took them to re-acquire the ship, the close-range blaster arrays opened up in a firestorm of firefly-streak bolts that enveloped the salvo. A dozen missiles exploded within a second of another, snowing the space around Tenacity in white-fire.
Another particle cannon impact spalled across the forward shields, dousing them in annihilation. Dath had his mouth open to scream a command at Alvarez when the bridge quivered around him and the torpedo tubes belched solid cyan shafts of hell. Fired at nearly point-blank, the raging packets of destruction couldn’t miss, hit the station’s shields with the force of six consecutive gut-punches, enough to turn a planet-side town into a crater.
Farside’s shields stood a little more chance than that, but not much. A heat lightning flicker passed along the ridged edge of the station’s ring, the domed protrusions of shield projector coils blowing out, one after another as the shields, themselves, writhed like a bonfire hammered by a gale. The inferno unraveled, came apart like sheets of solid flame tearing as the power to keep the deflector fields up failed.
And left Farside naked before Tenacity as she coasted in on sub-light engines to knife-fighting range.
“Heavy weapons,” Dath barked, “knock ‘em out!”
Tenacity’s main particle guns were already at work, hammering out at turreted emplacements along the station. Fireballs fed by escaping oxygen billowed briefly, silently against the eternal dark. Puffballs of crystallizing atmosphere vented in icy sprays, carried squirming figures out into the vacuum that were quite visible with the main screen’s high level of detail. But maelstroms of shredding metal swept these mercifully from sight as follow-up blasts ripped the guts from Farside’s defenses.
An alarm blatted from the tactical display and an untouched bulge along the station’s back loop, blocked from their fire by its mass, flickered once and sprayed fresh missile tracks. Tenacity’s point-defenses spewed fresh firestorms into their paths as they looped in close, but the range was so short, some wheeled through. Bang-bang-bang reverberated through the hull as the battlecruiser’s last-resort, anti-drone racks belched shotgun blasts of hyper-velocity pellets into their paths. Two out of three vanished in shredding embers.
But the third—wham!!!
Dath folded halfway over his left armrest, felt its edge bite into his ribs as Tenacity bucked to port. White glare doused the starboard shields as the ship’s bow jolted away from the explosion, left it side-slipping the last several thousand kilometers towards Farside. Proximity alarms began to warble; suddenly out of control, Tenacity would hit the station with more destructive power than any of her weapons.
“Port-side maneuvering fields, Zovga!” Dath rasped through the splinters of pain from his side. “Bring us bow-on and bring us to a halt.” With a grimace and a hand cupped to his ribs, he called to Alvarez, “Missiles! Tracking on any targeting beams! Minimum yields! Fire! Fire!”
The words were still leaving his mouth as Tenacity’s starboard-dorsal missile rack ripple-fired into Farside’s face, sent a roiling cloud of trails blistering forth. A heavy blastcannon turret still thumping out woefully-inaccurate bolts blew away before the salvo. Blisters of antimatter glare rose and burst across Farside’s hide as the warheads wormed out to claim any still functioning weapon.
“Damage?” Dath called to Ylura.
“Forward shields at fifty percent,” she replied. “Starboard at sixty. Minor buckling to the—”
Another stuttering crash to the forward shields as Zovga got Tenacity straightened out for the final glide into position drowned out whatever Ylura was saying. Dath clenched his teeth as he spied a surviving heavy weapon emplacement jolting out javelins of ravaging light. “Missed one! Get that sonofabitch!”
No less than three of Tenacity’s particle beams found the turret simultaneously, converting much of its mass into fluorescing gas and whirling shrapnel. But secondary explosions daisy-chained away from the conflagration, rippling back along the wheel towards the forty-five-degree hangar bay and dangerously close to spoke inward to the control module.
“Where’s Aetann?” he demanded. “One of us is going to get too carried away, at this rate!”
“Coming on now, sir!” Regal replied from her station. “Ten seconds!”
And sure enough, the slender, nacelle-winged tube shape was careening out of Void Speed now, shuddering violently as it braked for sub-light approach. There was little subtlety, shafting straight in for the dock like the battering ram in somewhat resembled. Bluey sparks underlit its ventral surface as maneuvering fields flared to slow their final approach. The mass of her slid under the mighty silhouette of Tenacity, the bigger ship’s mass and shields providing all the cover she’d need against Farside’s remaining defenses.
Aetann struck with enough force to buckle the curve of the station and send a ripple of loosened plates and puffing atmosphere out along the wheel from the point of impact. All seemed to go very still for an instant, as though both sides had been stunned by the violence of the ship’s arrival.
Dath knew that stillness would be shredding apart in seconds within the warped metal of the hangar bay.
***
SECURITY TOUGHS CURSED and picked themselves up after the impact with the station. Someone laughed as they settled back behind the rank of armored Morvena kneeled and holding up energized riot shields before the still-sealed unloading ramp of the Aetann. Lights flickered inside the hold. One of them went out completely.
“Five seconds to breach!” Varley’s voice crackled in Jaxan’s helmet speakers.
“Roger that!” she called back mechanically, then blinked to switch to the general address channel. “Bartosz, Hennesey, I want drones out front. Full spread! Here we go, people!”
And the seconds dragged interminably.
The pause was long enough for Jaxan to wonder what the hell she was doing here, about to fling herself into the storm. She’d gone beyond fear, to a point of numb detachment. It was almost an instant exhaustion, a weight threatening to drag her to her knees. She really didn’t want to do this. But she thought of dad, shoving his blaster into his coat rig and readying for another day on the mean streets of South Solace, and clenched her jaw.
A jarring crackle punished the air inside the hold, sparks flying from the seams of the Aetann’s bow ramp. A final snap sent it flying down, opening the ship and its tensed occupants to a wildly fluttering panorama of chaos and movement and smoke. The boom of the ramp to the deck of the hangar bay shook Jaxan like she was a ball bearing in a can.
The eruption of blaster fire that met them nearly knocked her down. Cyan bolts and ruby laser beams chopped across the bay, carved into the faces of the Morvenan riot shields. These held, hissing as their force fields absorbed the punishment. A laser ricocheted off one and sliced into the hold overhead, sent drips of slag spattering across the waiting toughs and birthing a yowl of pain and panic.
“Drones!” Jaxan barked.
Shapes whizzed over her head, unfolding into barbed, winged silhouettes as anti-gravity motors whirred to high-pitched whines. A lucky blaster bolt caught one of these a dozen meters from the ramp, knocked it sideways in a rooster-tail of sparks. The rest skimmed forth into the hangar bay, energy bolts stabbing out. Jaxan heard screams as some of these found their marks.
“Alright, everyone, let’s—”
A scream of a different sort carried from behind a shuttle parked on the far side of the bay. Jaxan had time to see a conical shape propelled on a ghostly thread of propellant before she ducked reflexively behind the Morvenan shield. An anticlimactic whumpf struck her, felt more like being jostled in a crowd than a rocket blast as it knocked her back onto Cho. One of the Morvenan Guards careened into her toughs as fire and smoke spouted from his hotly-glowing shield. But its portable field had taken the worst of the blow.
“We’re sitting ducks, here! Go!” Jaxan screamed, staggering back to her feet, staggering to the front. “Go-go-go!”
Shoving the Morvenan in front of her on, Jaxan stomped forth. The Guards scuttled ahead and formed a kneeling, shield-wall semicircle at the bottom of the ramp. Through the gaps between them, Jaxan and her toughs spilled into anarchy.
Jaxan had already picked her spot, having seen it first through the Aetann’s external sensors, fed to her through her helmet by Varley; then seen and confirmed by her naked eyes as the ramp fell. The hangar crash cart sat beside a half-stripped transport forty meter from Aetann’s entry point. Ragged, armed figures were scattering away from it as drones chased them with stabs of cyan.
Long, hammering strides carried her to the cart ahead of any of her toughs. The heavier-gravity training had added a bouncing muscularity to her movements, and the hangar artificial gravity felt lighter than standard. The slam of the cart’s knobby rear wheel felt plenty heavy, though, as she flung herself in behind it. Blaster bolts squalled over her head, struck the roll-bar of the cart and sprinkled her in glowing bits.
One of these lashed by to strike a Security tough squarely in the chest plate as he sprinted to join her. Cyan flashed out through his momentarily-gaping mouth—idiot hadn’t dropped his facemask—before he crumpled in smoke with a finality that spoke of instant death. Jaxan thought that might have been Vance, one of the new guys. But she lost sight of him as Cho jumped the corpse and stumbled the last few steps to crash in at her side in cover.
“They’re running!” Strain made his voice an octave higher. “They’re falling back to the far side!”
“Can’t let them seal the bay!” she snapped back. She looked past him to see Bartosz lumbering up to join them, the tiny woman looking almost ridiculous with the bulk of her drone pack. “Barty, I need more!” Jaxan pointed over and past the cart. “Cover the exits!”
Bartosz nodded and knelt, tapping a command into the bandolier controls across her chest. The bulbous module seated on her back hissed as what looked like scales twitched and shed from it. But each of these, half a dozen, unfolded into hovering wing shapes that extended blaster spines and sensor bulbs. Bartosz keyed another command and they whirred up and away from them.
A section of Jaxan’s helmet visor view divided off to show the view from one of these. It zipped over the top of the cart, past a pallet of stacked crates behind which Security toughs crouched and fired their blasters, and out across the bay. Plasma and laser clawed for it through the smoke. One of its winged kin intersected one of these, shattered like a glass figurine flung against a wall. The rest whipped by frantically-firing terrorists, reached the main exit, where a pair of Morvena struggled at a control panel to close the blast door.
The storm of blasts from the drone flight cut them down.
“We’re not going to hold that exit with drones,” Jaxan called over her shoulder to Cho. “We need to get boots over there!”
“I hear ya!” Cho grated back, ducking low as a wild blast shrieked overhead. “I’ll take a team to the left, around that transport.”
“And I’ve got the right.”
“Watch yourself, Lieutenant,” Cho said as he hand-signaled to the toughs gathered behind him in cover. “I saw something moving under the ship’s belly!”
“Noted.” She jabbed a finger at Bartosz. “Stay here and keep the drone cover coming, Barty!” She turned the finger on the foursome of toughs behind her, who Cho hadn’t already signaled. They were all mixed up, fire teams from different detachments—but that was always the way of it. The seniormost, by chest plate markings, was the huge Korthan, Ghath, visor down over his eyes, but refusing to mask-up over his grinning, now-dripping fangs. “You’re mine! Keep up!”
The Korthan’s teeth might have spread even further.
Jaxan sucked in a breath and turned, exploded into motion around the corner of the crash cart. Strides felt jellied and clumsy, now, the pause in cover having sapped some of the adrenal power from them. But muscles responded with increasing snap as a laser crimsoned the air past her head and she stretched out into a full sprint for the crate pallet and the toughs pinned down there. She crashed in amongst the trio, crashed again as Ghath and the others crowded up behind her. With a smack to the top of the helm of the nearest, she called, “Pauley, what’s the hold-up?”
“Couple of ‘em behind a forklift over there,” the man drawled back with a New Dalton twang that reminded Jaxan of Tom Rougan. Pauley chuckled hollowly. “Not sure who’s got who pinned down.”
“We’re doing the pinning here,” she retorted. “Now just—” movement out of the corner of her eye to the left filled her guts with ice and her sinews with violent reaction “shit!” She spun at the hips with her blaster raised.
“Civvies!” Pauley’s hand shot up to knock the muzzle down. “Hold, Lieutenant!”
Jaxan blinked through a haze of fear and sweat, saw what she’d almost stitched in blaster fire; a clump of Xokans, bunched together under the transport, behind a landing gear. It was almost impossible to tell where the tangle of one’s tentacles ended and another’s started, but the terror in their fluttering eye-rows was unmistakable, flashed to mindlessness as a stray bolt clanged off the gear and caused them to pinch even tighter together.
“Christ...” Jaxan muttered and turned back to the work at hand. A rise in the volume of fire from the opposite side of the transport told her Cho was on the move and meeting resistance. They had to keep moving. “Grenades,” she told the gathered toughs. “Concussion only, no HE; don’t want to blow a hole in the deck and start sucking vacuum.” She pointed. “Pauley, that’s your guys, and covering fire after that.” She nodded to Ghath. “We clean up and then on to the exit. Got it?”
Nods and hands fumbling at the egg-shapes of grenades answered her.
“Do it.”
Pauley and another of his companions half-stood and chucked the primed explosives hook-armed over the top of the crates. Jaxan didn’t dare a glance out of cover to watch their flight, but clearly heard the ping of one striking the deck. That lurched beneath her before she even heard the blast of the grenade. A second, tearing jolt sent her slipping onto her buttocks as a crash that would have wrecked her hearing, had it not been for her helmet, rent the air.
Cursing, she shuffled back to her feet and lunged to her right, pivoting and bringing her weapon up. Ghath was already past her firing wildly and roaring—roaring as if they were charging across some pre-industrial battlefield. Jaxan’s path carried her after him, through settled fumes and pattering debris.
Spindly shapes staggered into sight from the haze. One fumbled uncertainly with a blaster. The Korthan’s far more certain three-round burst ended its efforts in a puffball of flames and flailing limbs. Blaster fire from the others chopped the rest down. Jaxan hadn’t fired a shot, yet, but kept going, bellowing what she hoped were coherent commands, lurching for the hangar bay exit.
Leaping over the smoking corpse of a terrorist, Jaxan reached the exit control panel and knelt beneath it, scanning the anarchy around her as Ghath and the others settled in around her, covering angles. Blasts keened from the hall outside in the wheel of the station, but it sounded like probing fire from Bartosz’s drone.
“I got the corridor!” Cho called as he and his team scuttled from the other side of the transport to join them. He wasted no time leading the way on, and Jaxan was too busy sucking wind to protest.
And, suddenly, she had something right in front of her.
Shit. Raising her blaster reflexively, she stared up the sights at a feral apparition, staggering out of the smoke. Seeing her, the male Morvenan flinched to a halt and gawked at her. Aerosolized carbon blackened one side of his face, smudged his threadbare coveralls. Short-cut hair hung in an inky smear about his face and his mouth dangled wide.
He wasn’t armed.
“What the...” Ghath spun at her side, bringing his weapon to bear.
The glow of the Morvenan’s eyes went white-hot and lips stripped away from blood-grimed teeth. A hand twitched and a pallet strewn on the deck behind him twitched, suddenly stood up on its edge, then leapt into the air. Streaking past the ghostly Morvenan, it spun straight for Jaxan’s chest.
Only a lucky side-step carried her out of the way, but it crunched squarely into Ghath’s chest, sent the Korthan ricocheting backwards, off the edge of the exit. More debris was skittering across the floor, gathering towards the Morvenan like metal shavings to a magnet. He was the magnet. His mind.
One of them!
Jaxan pulled the trigger. The blaster bolt punched through the terrorist’s sternum, sent him flopping away like a kicked ragdoll. He struck the floor in a pile of limbs and smoldering rags and twitched once. The wreckage stirred to movement by his mind stilled around him.
“Damn...”
Renewed blaster fire from out in the hall stirred her from her fugue. She turned back to the exit, found Cho leaning out into the corridor fire a testing blast, then flinching back from a streak of red brilliance and slag. “These guys are starting to get their act together!” He barked. “Drones aren’t going to the hold the intersection on their own!”
“Then get out there,” she snapped back.
“We’re not going to be able to hold it, on our own!”
“Just a couple minutes, you are.” She waved him on. “Go! I’m bringing the cavalry!”
Muttering something, Cho leaned out into the hall, fired a testing burst, and lunged out through the exit. Three fire teams followed him out in rhythmic surges. The din of a firefight swelled in the corridor.
Kneeling beside Ghath, Jaxan set a hand upon the back collar of the Korthan’s chest plate a pulled him upright. Purple-red blood stained his teeth and scaly chin, but he shook her grasp off, gave himself a groggy shake. A mess of hissing words tumbled out, something in Korthan, at first, then blurring into Republic standard. “Fine...I’m fine...”
Giving him a single pat to the chest, Jaxan keyed up the tactical channel she shared with the bridge of the Aetann, with Varley, and said, “The bay is in our hands! Facing counter-attack from within the station! Send reinforcements!” She flinched as an explosion out in the corridor jarred her to the bones. “Send the rest!”
***
FULLY A THIRD OF THE Tenacity’s main display squirmed with holofeeds from the fight in the Farside hangar bay. Most were tossing, flashing anarchy; snatches of violence or wreckage. Ylura could make little sense of any of it and, with a knot of revulsion forming in her gut, gave thanks for it.
“Commander Varley is reporting they’ve seized the docks,” Regal announced after listening at an earbud. “Chrome Guards are pressing into the interior.”
And Ylura could feel it, the whole horrid mental cacophony of fear and shock and rage and pain. Perspiration slickened her flesh as it bombarded her, the chorus of the rebels’ outrage and resistance. They flung their very minds out as weapons, weaponized Shala. Glancing around the bridge, she wondered if anyone else felt it.
“Thank you, Ensign,” Dath was replying, otherwise nonplussed. The tactical buzzed a warning, did trigger a reaction, though. “What now?”
From the far curve of the station, a fresh spread of missile boiled out. Their trails writhed out into space in wormy anarchy before lurching as one into a long arch out and away, but curving back towards Tenacity.
“Alvarez.”
“On it, Captain!”
Blasters opened up before the first of the warheads had fully come around the station, ripping the inbounds from the stars. The point-defense fire was violent, overwhelming, but brief. The dozen missiles smeared away in silent flutters of cyan inferno. A jolt of azure streaked out from the station to port as the last burned out, too far out of position to angle in on the ship, but lashing out, anyway. The battle in space had sputtered out into such desultory flails, as though the boarding action had been the gutting blow that took most of the fight out of Farside’s occupiers.
Except the war still raged in Ylura’s soul. She began to sway, had to put a hand upon her console to steady herself. She caught Regal glancing concernedly at her, but couldn’t pull herself out of the din in her skull. She’d experienced the connection of other Morvena, of course, and some link to humans, reading auras, tasting thoughts when permitted. And she’d faced assault, oh yes, as the hateful Arathra had battered her mind.
But this...this was the peaceful art she’d learned and taken solace in, turned into something awful. Turned on her.
Ylura.
She stiffened as the familiar voice, the familiar presence, pierced the dissonance of all the others. Guts curdled. Joints tensed involuntarily. And she was drawn from the present, against her will, saw now a late afternoon in the summer on her uncle’s estate, that fountain, again, that laughing girl splashing in it. She paused and looked up, golden eyes glowing, flaming like twin novae, drilling straight through Ylura’s spirit and pinning it in place.
Ylura, you have come. I knew you would. Only you will listen.
“Tahna...” she rasped, and now definitely drew a look of alarm from Regal.
If I live, don’t let them take me...
A fresh blat from her console jolted Ylura out of the trance. On her sensor hologram an icon was blinking, was lunged across space towards Tenacity. Fingers reacting without full guidance from her mind, Ylura prompted the computer for analyses and gave herself a shake, composed herself as she turned to face Dath.
“The rebel frigate has broken away from the blockade,” she told him and cast her view onto the main screen, overlapping part of the fight around the station.
“Confirmed,” Alvarez added.
Dath’s face pinched as he eyed the display. “The Unity ships aren’t doing anything about it?”
Frowning, Ylura checked the encirclement, the stoically immobile ring of dots. “Rohkann is in motion, but lacks the speed to overtake it.” She checked a calculation. “The T5 will be at extreme range in ninety seconds, Captain!”
“And us at a goddamned standstill,” Dath growled. His voice rose to a holler. “Zovga, full reverse from Farside and bring us about to port once we’re clear! Spin us up to Void Speed One as soon as you can!”
“Aye sir!”
“Captain,” Alvarez called, “the T5 is angling to starboard; looks like they intend to approach from behind Farside.” He turned from his station to scowl. “They’re trying to draw us into the firing arch of the weapons on the station that are still functional, pull us into a crossfire.”
“Is enough left on Farside that can hurt us?” Dath asked.
Alvarez snorted. “There’s probably more packed on that little T5 than is still in one piece on the ring, sir.”
“Then you know where we’re going.” Dath grinned fiercely. “Systems, how are shields?”
Ylura read from her display. “Recovering. Almost at ninety percent.”
“Zovga, intercept course with the T5, once we’re up to speed.”
“Almost clear, sir.”
Ylura watched Farside fall away from them on the display as the sub-light drives strained to bring Tenacity’s great mass into the open. Small flecks of spark danced about the stub of Aetann, wedged like a broken-off arrow shaft in the hide of the station. Another particle beam flicked out from the opposite curve of Farside’s wheel as its rebel crew tried vainly to bring it to bear upon them.
And a voice wailed in the space between her temples, the cry of a woman-child torn from the warmth of a family’s embrace and cast into an icy solitude.
Ylura! Please. Don’t go and leave me alone with them!
***
“THEY’RE COMING RIGHT at us!” Alvarez announced. “Got to admire their moxy!”
“Radicals, Count Arrakka told us,” Dath replied with a humorless snort as he watched the frigate careen towards them on the tactical display.
Insane was more like it, though. The T5 was outgunned nearly five-to-one. Designed as a fast patrol ship, meant for the far fringes of the Republic, she could engage pirates or conduct First Contact with new intelligent species, but only participate in a fleet engagement as a support vessel—and that had been in her prime, nearly two decades before. Her main advantage lay in her speed, which had been augmented with the non-specification new Drives. And she demonstrated that now, tearing for them at already almost Void Eight.
And Dath suddenly felt like Tenacity was a whale, lolling in front of a harpoon. “Alvarez, it would be nice if they didn’t get any closer.”
“Aye sir.”
Tenacity shivered as her main guns opened up, the heavy particle cannon gouging blue-white shafts through the vacuum. The frigate seemed to have anticipated this, was already side-slipping to starboard. But one bolt managed to connect, slathered the T5’s shields in white blaze. It altered course sharply, veered further to starboard, and quivered for a moment before releasing a cloud of missiles.
“Zovga, get us up to speed, now!” Dath demanded as the smaller vessel darted out of range once more. “They’re dancing around us!”
“Working on it, Captain.”
Hostile targeting alarms blatted as the six-missile spread from the rebel frigate streaked towards them. Dath smiled in grim satisfaction as his ship quivered with counter-fire, blasts from the main guns smearing the inbounds from existence with almost contemptuous ease. But the delay had put the frigate now well off to starboard and coasting into Farside’s shadow where some of its weapon banks remained intact. As if to underscore the point, a jolt of azure destruction leapt out from the station, scouring several thousand kilometers off to Tenacity’s flank and marking their furthest reach.
“Not subtle people, these terrorists,” Dath quipped.
“No sir,” Alvarez agreed. “But effective. If we follow, we take fire from Farside.”
“Regal,” Dath asked, “any word from Varley as to status? Are they making progress towards suppressing the station?”
The young woman listened at her earbud and scanned something on her holograms. “They’re still fighting their way out from the bay. Control module still in rebel hands.”
“Systems” Dath looked over at Ylura “any help coming from the Unity?”
She took a surprisingly long moment to answer, long enough that Dath began to wonder if she’d heard. But she shook her head, replied in a voice that had the thickness of someone roused from a deep sleep. “Rokhann still coming on, but cautiously. The rest of the cruisers are maintaining their perimeter.”
“Allies, gah,” Dath muttered. He ignored the hurt glance from Ylura as he told Zovga, “Fifteen degrees to starboard and continue to accelerate.” He turned his gaze to Alvarez, whose eyebrows arched up. “I’m not going to have that thing zipping around while this matter remains unsettled.”
“Aye sir.”
“We get into range, focus on bringing down her shields and crippling her Drives. You understand?”
Alvarez nodded and turned back to his instruments.
“If possible,” Dath rumbled, “I want a look at her when this is over.”
Tenacity strained into a long curve towards the frigate, the circumference of a circle with the wheel of Farside at its center. Almost immediately, an intact particle cannon turret on the station cut a chord across that circle and the ship jolted with a white-fire impact.
“Hit!” Ylura squawked. “Starboard shields holding at ninety percent!”
“We’re in their firing arc now, but they’re in ours, too,” Dath called to Alvarez. “Can you do something with that, Lieutenant?”
In answer, Alvarez stroked an icon on his holo-wafer panel and shafts of hellfire belched from Tenacity’s own guns. The particle beams sliced into Farside with surgical precision, carving the bulge of the weapons turret from its hide in an ugly boil of brief flames and whirling shrapnel. A moment later, in spewing response, a spread of missiles erupted from another surviving emplacement—then a second one, and two dozen warheads sprinted across the void after Tenacity.
“They have to be nearing the end of their munitions,” Ylura called out over the warble of hostile targeting alarms. “Farside was never built to stand off a Fleet attack!”
“Still,” Dath chortled back nervously, “they’re doing a hell of a job of it!”
Tenacity’s starboard weapons seethed with azure and cyan as particle beams mixed with plasma blasts to savage the incoming volley. Missiles started dying instantly, the vacuum sprinkling with the white-fire pearls of their immolations. But more wove through the net of destruction, came on a purblind speed.
Another alarm squalled from the tactical display. Dath scowled as the icon of the frigate wrenched back towards them, no longer playing the rabbit, but streaking for them. A stuttered flash lit its bow as its handful of heavy weapons fired. Tenacity’s forward shields strobed with hits. A moment later, the flanks of the frigate boiled with the spurts of chemical charges as missiles ejected and then lit their independent drives, wheeled towards Tenacity in double-six patterns.
“Missile spread!” Dath barked to Alvarez. “Counter-volley targeting on the frigate.” He waited for the telltale quake of the fusillade leaving its racks. “All energy weapons on Farside’s missiles!”
He almost needn’t have bothered. Alvarez was already working, shifting the guns to smother the closing missile swarm from the station while Tenacity’s own salvos lurched into the path of the frigate’s. Explosions snowed the tactical display, blazed a half-circle around the ship to fore and starboard. Some of these walked closer and closer. Dath clearly saw a single conical shape dodge the destruction of one of its kin from a collision with a Tenacity warhead and dive for them.
“Hang on!”
The white fist of an anti-matter detonation smote Tenacity head-on. Dath tensed every muscle, gripped both armrests as impact translated through the shields into the hull. Cries of alarm jarred the bridge. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Clemens half thrown from her seat, even as he struggled to keep his. Displays crimsoned and damage alarms warbled.
“How bad?” Dath demanded. “Systems, how—”
Wha-wham!!!
A double-tap of particle beam brilliance crashed across the bow, an uppercut blow that actually shifted Tenacity’s course a degree to starboard as the rebel frigate streaked off to port, her guns blazing. Tenacity’s replied reflexively, the broadside quickly drowning out the smaller ship’s hopelessly outclassed volume of fire and driving it into a sharp veer away.
“Gah!” Dath spat. “Bastards! Zovga, do we have full speed, yet?”
“Passing Void Nine, now, sir.”
“Then get on them!” he snapped. “Run them to the ground!”
Tenacity groaned into the turn to port, pivoting sharply enough that her stern briefly swung out from behind her without control. But Zovga had been handling Tenacity’s bulk for five months now and had guided her battle before. He had her winding after the frigate’s crazed evasion course in a moment, barreling in pursuit like a Santuarian hound on the tail of one of the homeworld’s squirrel-monkeys.
A streak of azure snapped out from the T5’s tail, a backhanded swat crackling across Tenacity’s forward shields. Before Dath could ask, Ylura was already announcing, “Shields steady at sixty percent!”
“Do we have plasma torpedoes ready in the tubes, Alvarez?” Dath asked, wiping away a streak of sweat that had stung its way into his good eye.
“Aye sir,” the Tactical officer replied hungrily.
“Controlled release,” Dath told him. “Take their shields down. Now.”
Three of Tenacity’s six tubes unleashed their solid shafts of cyan. The frigate was wrenching into a reverse turn to port as the first of these connected in an appalling splash of eye-searing annihilation. Shields reached sun-like glare, then flashed beyond it as the second and third torpedoes ate into them. The main screen subroutines dimmed the brilliance to protect human and computer senses, momentarily blanked out a view of the fleeing ship. When Dath could see it again, the frigate was juddering with explosions walking forward along its spine; shield generators overloading, one after another.
“Shields stripped!” Alvarez cried as an ember spew of glowing debris and briefly-ignited atmosphere smeared out behind his prey.
“Target her Drives,” Dath snapped. “Cripple only! We want her intact, if possible!”
Tenacity’s particle beam batteries flared with a spasm of blue-white shards that seemed almost too much, almost out-of-control. But the precision of their strikes spoke otherwise, a tight clustering of cherry-red bursts along the frigate’s exposed flank, walking up the stubby nacelles of her Drive nacelles. Secondary explosions followed, sent her slewing into a sideslip. A jolt of sparks sent one of the obviously-oversized nacelles spinning off.
“Nice shooting, Lieutenant!” Dath crowed. “Zovga, watch that debris! Stay on her!”
“Captain!”
Dath wrenched his neck, turning to Ylura at her sudden cry. He noted an inexplicable bluey pulse from the severed Void nacelle and a crimson halo painted around it by the ship’s computer, warning text scrolling out next to it.
“That was a controlled-ejection!” Ylura cried. “That nacelle’s still live! They dropped her in our path on purpose!” She whirled in her seat to face him. “Her signature is expanding! She’s going to—”
The Cherenkov halo of the dropped nacelle flashed to near-white intensity before shattering in an indescribable flash that was both blazing fire and streaks of absolute darkness. The computer seemed for a moment not to know how to translate the imagery through the holographic medium of the main display, portrayed what almost appeared a bubble of quicksilver, boiling outwards towards the onrushing Tenacity.
Then, just as suddenly, that bubble burst and its shreds were collapsing inward into something that almost seemed an endless, impenetrable blackness.
Tenacity squalled and lurched for this—dragged, it became instantly obvious as her Void Drives shrieked with the conflicting gravity surges.
“Singularity!” Ylura screamed over the rushing roar through the hull—reverberating through deck plates, through bone and nerve. “They triggered a Void Field collapse, let the black hole eat right through!”
“Black hole bomb!” Dath snarled into the din. “They’re out of their goddamned minds!”
Detonating the singularities captured in a Void Drive wasn’t a particular new or novel tactic. In theory, if a commander didn’t care to have the use of an engine again, they could vent one as a very short-lived weapon, as this one had apparently done. And for however long it took the microscopic singularity to decay in real-space, the damned thing would devour anything in range. The problem was there was little telling how long that could take.
The other problem was that using such a desperate weapon usually posed as much a risk to the wielder as the target, which Dath could see the rebel frigate was finding out right now. Already crippled by Tenacity’s fire, and now completely denuded by the ejection of their surviving Drive, the T5 fell backwards into the event horizon, strips of hull plate peeling away from superstructure, then the entirety of its mass sloughing apart as it tumbled into the endless gravity hole it had opened.
Dath’s biggest problem was that Tenacity would follow in short order.
“Full reverse!” he bellowed. “All Drives!”
A squeal vibrated from the nacelles, through their struts, and into the rest of the ship. Dath couldn’t escape the sensation of slipping forward, begin drawn down a deep well. He gripped the armrests of his chair and dug his heels into the deck, uncertain if any of it did any good, or was even real. Senses jumbled, could sense the warring of forces of nature that were at the very edge of understanding.
“Zovga,” Dath called in a throttled voice, “how are we doing?”
“Drives at maximum!” the Korthan replied. “I’ve only been able to slow our fall; we’re still being drawn in.”
Dath stared into that terrible orb of nothingness, what the main display computer was struggling to represent as either a blot of infinite black or a rim of light fluorescing into a corona at its edges. A surge of real panic lanced its way up through his gut as alarms began warbling and a ship schematic popped up, flashed red everywhere.
“Strain on structural integrity approaching dangerous,” Ylura cried from her station. “Minor buckling. But worsening.”
Part of him couldn’t believe this. Of all the damned ways to go! He’d had them pursue too closely, walked right into this. They’d pillory him forever in Fleet annals; the captain who lost the last Fenris to a single over-gunned frigate. But more, his people deserved better than such a ridiculous, meaningless end.
“Damn it! Suggestions!” Instinctively, he looked over at Ylura. “Anyone?”
“We have to outlast it,” she replied. “Black holes evaporate over time and the synthetic ones conjured by Void Drives have relatively tiny lifespans.”
“How long?”
Her fingertips were hammering at her console. “Working on it!”
“Captain!” Zovga called. “I estimate a hundred and eighty seconds till we reach the event horizon!”
Dath slammed the communicator control hard enough that his palm stung. “Rougan! Tom, is there anything else we can squeeze out of the ship?”
***
“DRIVES ARE ALREADY straining,” Rougan replied to Raker’s crackling voice. He scanned the red-blotched engineering displays, watched as those blotches grew bigger, merged. Before him, the glow of the Reflex Furnace had intensified to a glare. “At the rate we’re going, the Void Field on the Number Three, at least, is going to collapse. And then you’re going to have...”
He trailed off as a desperate thought lodged in his skull.
“What was that?” Raker’s voice demanded.
Rougan gripped the console before him with one hand to keep balance as shudders built through the deck beneath him and with the other keyed in a fresh command. A globular hologram sprang up, showing a mirror of the bridge’s main display, notably its scan of the artificial black hole. Another quickly-tapped command changed the perspective to show an energy emission diagram.
“Sir?” asked Vekkla, perched at Rougan’s side courtesy of its many splayed-out appendages. “Radiation levels?”
“Hawking radiation,” Rougan replied, thinking furiously. “I’m trying to estimate how long till that thing burns itself out.” He typed again, waited. The computer returned a figure and he grinned wide enough that sweat rolling down his face went salty on his lips. “Like I thought; thing’s unstable. It’s going to dissipate in about three minutes.”
“We do not have three minutes, Commander,” Vekkla noted grimly.
Rougan looked over his shoulder at the cephalopod, still smiling. “We’re going to vent the Number Three.”
Vekkla’s row of eyes blinked in unison. “You are going to release the singularity. Into the other one?”
“No!” Rougan squawked. “That’ll only make it bigger! You can’t destroy a black hole. But you can affect it with external forces. It’s a creature of gravity. Stronger gravity will move it—like from another singularity, a newer one, not quite so used-up.”
“You plan to move it further away from us?”
“By firing another one past it, yes!”
“Will we not just be pulled along with the one, as the other drags it?”
“Yes! But it will lengthen the amount of time we can remain beyond the accretion disk, and destruction.” He turned and grabbed one of the Xokan’s tentacles, gave it a shake. “It’s all about buying time!”
“You will be sacrificing a Drive, sir.”
Rougan nodded, shook droplets of sweat loose. “We’ll run the Hypernaughts past their design specs, past their failsafes. I’ve read the white-papers; each of them can theoretically take another twenty-five percent strain.”
“Theoretically...”
Rougan cackled, on the edge of mania, and certainly past the point of desperation. “Theoretically, we’re about to be eaten, Lieutenant!” He released its appendaged and clapped it where approximately a shoulder would be on a human. “Don’t you want to see what these things can really do?”
The Xokan’s eyes turned towards the display and the devouring nothingness of the black hole at its center. “It does not appear I have a choice.”
Rougan clapped him again, couldn’t think of anything else to do for encouragement. “Stand by at the substation for the Number Three Ventral. When I give the word, deactivate all the restrictions on the Void Fields to forward!”
“Aye sir!”
“Rougan, dammit—”
“Here, Captain!” he replied, slapping the comm to queue up the bridge channel. “And I’ve got a plan! We’re going to release one of our own singularities to draw off the other one!”
“Will that even...?”
“It’ll work!” Rougan insisted. “Check with Aval, if you need confirmation. But, Captain” he glanced again at the black hole, and Tenacity’s steady slide towards it “we don’t have a lot of time!”
Raker paused. Then, “Do it.”
“Have Zovga angle us at” Rougan checked the display and quickly-scrolling calculations “thirty percent to port, relative to the singularity.” He waited as the shivering vessel seemed to wobble around them and that damned hole got closer. On his screen the icon of Tenacity blinked and a faint line drew itself out from the ship, past the disturbance. “All right...” he gulped. “We’re going to do this!”
“Hope you’re right, Tom.”
“You and me both.” He looked over his left shoulder to the Power Distribution station. “Styx, you been listening in on all this?”
“I have,” the veteran officer called back, “and it’s nuts!”
Rougan laughed. “Yep. Stand-by to kill all power to the Number Three after the venting. Don’t want a blow-back into the hull!”
“Already ahead of you!”
Rougan hesitated, stared into that darkness, saw more than death. He thought of Kevin, the crazy deluded kid—actually wanting to put himself out in this sort of insanity. He thought of the flask jiggling in his cargo pocket.
To hell with it. He yanked it out and corked it, put the spout to his mouth and drank hard. Hellfire washed down his esophagus, for a moment the best thing he’d ever felt in his life. Eyeballs popped and belly flamed. “Whew!” He shoved it back towards the pocket, but shaking hand misjudged and the container clanked to the floor, bounced, and shivered across the deck from the ongoing vibrations. One set of Vekkla’s eyes followed its path.
No help for it.
“Alright,” Rougan called, “release Number Three Void Fields ahead! Vent!”
Vekkla’s tentacles twitched a pattern across the sub-station before it. A great thunk went through the ship, as though they were in a large, wheeled vehicle and had just run something over. Rougan grabbed at his console instinctively, inner ears seething with the sense of balance gone, of wobbling, of forces he couldn’t viscerally comprehend, pulling at his sanity.
On Rougan’s display, a shaft of dark energy—represented at once as a brilliant white and a shaft of nothingness by the computer—shot out from Tenacity and slashed by the rupture of the first black hole. As it tore across space, the shaft distended into a disc of its own, drawing gravity and energy to. Then, drawing its hellish kindred, too. An uneven tug-of-war ensued, the first singularity at a disadvantage instantly as a chord of radiation tied their disks together, chained it to the second.
“Captain,” Rougan hollered into the communicator, “overload the Hypernaughts! Go!!!”
A terrible scream through the hull told Rougan that Zovga was already responding, flinging everything his controls would allow into the remaining pair of Drives. Rougan was about to give him more. On his engineering schematic, the nacelles glowed solidly crimson and warning text splayed out from each. With a wave Rougan dismissed these and released all the ship’s restrictions. The lurid glow of the Drives reached a nearly yellow-white intensity, began to blink as the screech of their efforts rent the ears.
It occurred to Rougan in a crazed, terrified moment that they were all just going to vanish in black holes as the Hypernaughts blew and released their own.
“It’s working!” Vekkla whistled in its airy voice, barely heard over the din.
And it was, the recently-released singularity ripping out from Tenacity and its twin following, with the ship dragged on behind them, but not as quickly. Slowly, slowly the first black hole diminished, shrank, and finally dissolved in an anticlimactic fizzle of radioactive remnants.
What had been the propulsive force behind Tenacity’s third Drive kept going, tearing itself apart across the vacuum, but leaving the ship behind. By degrees, the pull on her lessened and the force of her own retrograde motion overbalanced it. Rougan sensed the first easing on the Hypernaughts as a lessening of the molar-loosening vibration in the air, but it was equally obvious on his displays.
“Gah!” Raker’s voice sounded from the communicator. “Tom, that was...that was something.”
Settling with both hands now upon the console, Rougan noticed the chilly oiliness of sweat all over his body. Shivering from it, he glanced over a shoulder, towards where the flask still spun on the deck plates. Slowly, it came to a halt. Vekkla eyed it again. So did everyone else in Main Engineering.
“Yeah,” he groaned, “it sure was.”
***
A BLASTER BOLT SQUALLED over Jaxan’s head and she ducked down behind the hover cart in Farside’s main corridor where she’d taken up position. “They’re trying us again! Barty! Need a drone!”
The little specialist knelt at Jaxan’s side. “I’m down to my last couple units, here, Lieutenant.”
Another bolt spalled slag from the cart and Jaxan hunched even lower, scowled across the corridor to Cho, in cover in a side hall with a pair of toughs crowded behind him. “Can you see them?”
The petty officer shook his helmeted head. “Movement sensors show a half dozen, somewhere around the curve, but I can’t actually draw a bead!”
“Bartosz” Jaxan turned back to the woman “we need to break them up, whoever they are. Give me one drone, standard loadout.”
The specialist worked her bandolier controls and another flap detached itself from her bulky pack with a hiss of activating gravity fields. The little machine unfolded itself and hummed at eye-level expectantly. A ping went through Jaxan’s temples as her augmentations linked to the unit and a corner of her vision divided off to show a weird view of her own face, as seen by the drone’s holocamera, her eyes flashing with the helm visor up. She jerked her head by way of command, saw the other-her in the image mirror the motion. Suddenly, the view was lurching out over the hovercart.
“Let’s see what we can see,” she muttered, raising herself enough to watch the machine whisk away.
The main corridor following Farside’s wheel for its entire circumference was an open thoroughfare in this section, wide enough for moving cargo to and from the hangars and accommodating heavy machinery. The drone’s camera gave a view of all of this as it zoomed out into the open. It also detailed smoke, wreckage, and bodies—mostly Morvena in the smoldering rags of T’Sona terrorists. They’d made several rushes at the hangar bay entrance, the first couple desperate and costly, the last few feeble.
Not that the fight was done. With her own senses, Jaxan could hear the clamor of fighting between the Chrome Guards and T’Sona holdouts in other parts of the station. The Morvena were pushing around the opposite loop of the wheel, seizing key stations, as well as hitting the Command Module, further down the spoke towards the hub. By the rising din of the latter, it didn’t sound like it was going easy.
A cyan streak whipped by the drone’s viewpoint in the corner of Jaxan’s vision and she flinched reflexively. The view did the same as the drone automatically evaded the incoming fire, then flashed again as the little machine replied with bolts from its own blaster barbs. Between strobes, Jaxan could see a clump of feral figures edging up behind a truck-sized container.
“Cho!” she called out. “Grenades!”
He nodded and waved one of his companions forward. The man carried a stubby-muzzled, drum-fed weapon he proceeded to aim around the corner.
The air screeched and sizzled with blaster fire as the drone fell back from the terrorists’ frantic shots, itself pulsing out bolts to cover its retreat. At the same time, it was feeding coordinates back to Jaxan and the others. A second sector divided off in her vision, showed a rough diagram of the corridor and pulsing icons for their attackers. Cho and his people would be seeing the same.
“Smart charges!” Jaxan ordered—shocked at the hoarseness of her voice. “Break ‘em up!”
The grenade launcher crump-crump-crumped. Egg-sized rounds described lazy arcs into the air, looked like they’d simply fly down the center of the corridor, away from the T’Sona position. But electric flutters lit each up as tiny maneuvering fields keyed off telemetry from the drone and they lurched back towards the corner behind the container. Jaxan heard a howl of fear as the explosives pinged to the floor. Then—
Wh-wh-whaaam!!!
Jaxan ducked, then came up from behind the cart with her blaster aimed. Smoke and debris were still flying away from the shattering trio of explosions, as was what looked like most of a body. Another staggered out of the seething fumes from behind the container and dropped, facedown and motionless. Three more sprang from behind, racing back down the corridor, one dragged their leg. The drone, resuming its advance, savaged with its blaster barbs. Fire from the rest of Jaxan’s team merged with it.
An apparition of purple-black smeared rags and wild, glowing eyes staggered from behind the container, knelt at the side of the first fallen T’Sona. The waifish form came up from behind him with the blaster he’d dropped. Jaxan’s targeting halo, mated with her own weapon and painted across her vision by her augmentations, settled upon the terrorist. She pulled the trigger. A frenzy of fire from Cho and the others saved her from seeing what her own shot did.
She was still seeing that empty-eyed youth who’d flung metal at her with his mind, anyway.
“Hold!” she wheezed from a ravaged throat. Spitting once and clearing it, she repeated, “Hold, damn it! Are they all down?”
The grim smoldering view from the drone and flickers of sensors readings across crumpled forms answered her as clearly as calls back from her teams.
“Bartosz,” Jaxan said, turning to the woman, “send out all remaining drones to form an outer perimeter. I don’t want these clowns getting that close again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jaxan blinked a command to her augmentations, keyed them to a separate channel. “This is Republic breaching team, outer main corridor is secure. Still some minor activity.” She paused, listened again to the racket of fighting elsewhere in the station. “Commander Varley, do we have an update on the progress of the other groups?”
Crackling in her mastoid implant told her someone was listening on the other end. She heard voices, Varley’s maybe, and some swearing.
“Commander, this Jaxan. Do we have further instructions, over?”
“Jaxan!” Varley replied with a squeal of static that triggered a wince from her eyes to her toes. “Sorry...ah...yes. Ah, they’re telling me Trytassis has secured the remaining hostages and has teams in control of Farside’s critical systems, now. But...” Another pause for what sounded like an argument in the background. “But, the remaining T’Sona are forcing a breakout towards the hangar bay!”
“A breakout?” she squawked in reply. “How the hell are they forcing their way past a full company of the Chrome Guard? There can’t be that many left!”
“They’re heading your way, Jaxan!” Varley sounded at once incredulous and frightened. “Raynim says the Guard can’t stop them! You have to!”
“What the hell—” She cut herself off, shook her head. “Roger, Commander.”
“Careful, Jaxan.”
She scowled, didn’t need that in her head. She stood and pointed to Cho. “Hold here with a team. I’m moving on into the spoke with the rest.”
“They’re coming this way...?” the man asked doubtfully.
“No one’s going nowhere,” she snapped back at him and waved to the teams not directly-assigned to Cho, nine toughs, not counting herself. “Ghath, you’re with me!” The Korthan might have grunted an answer, but she was already moving.
They trotted back to the intersection of the hangar bay entrance and the main corridor. Opposite the former, another tunnel opened inward, following the spoke towards the central hub. A T’Sona slumped outside this, taken down in the earlier fight. More littered the relatively dark passageway inward, left in various states of smoldering and very dead. Some looked to have been blasted excessively, the Chrome Guards apparently taking no chances. Increased racket echoed down the hall towards Jaxan’s rushing team.
A trio of Morvena stumbled towards them, a pair carrying a third, badly-wounded comrade with them. Glowing eyes looked up from under raised face plates as Jaxan’s group clamored towards them. One of them Guards had his mouth open, apparently to call out something. But it stretcher open further, distended his entire face as a scream tore forth.
“What the...?”
The second Morven flinched and released his wounded companion to clap both hands to the sides of his face, which pinched as he joined his shrieks to the first’s. The inured third’s squall of pain as they let him drop to the floor was lost in their wails. And soon, they were on the floor with him, convulsing, clawing at their heads.
Screaming.
More of it was carrying up the passageway towards Jaxan’s team, who stood dumbfounded as fresh Morvena staggered towards them, keening with their inner agonies. Most crumpled after a few steps. A few almost reached the humans before collapse. One tumbled at Jaxan’s foot and reached for her shin. She knelt, took the poor devil’s hand.
“What is it? What’s happening to you?”
A screech of an entirely artificial and deadly sort tore the air. Jaxan lunged away from the supine Morvenan and slammed into cover behind a bulkhead. Ruby red ripped the air, ripped through stricken Morvena and brought them down like dropped, smoldering toys.
“Watch that!” She brought up her blaster rifle and lowered her helmet visor, let its targeting sensors take over, rather than her augmentations.
The aiming halo waved over smudges in swirling smoke, which the visor enhanced as figures charging up the passageway, firing as they came. The rags and mismatched gear of a T’Sona terrorist solidified and Jaxan needed no more encouragement, stoked the trigger. The apparition went down in azure flash and swirling fumes. “Watch your fire!” she hollered as Ghath and the others opened up. “They’re all mixed in up there!”
The Korthan and his team heeded only by adding to her fire tenfold.
Blaster bolts tore a web through the narrow space of the corridor, kicking off embers from the wall, drowning out the screams of the tormented Morvena, who carpeted the floor, squirming about the ankles of both sides, entangling everything. Jaxan gave up on pressing the attack when she started to step out and a handle clasped about her calf; one of the Morvena they’d first seen flailing for a grip on something more real than whatever was going on in his head.
“What now, Lieutenant?” Ghath growled to her between jolting bursts.
Grinding her teeth as an answering blast chopped close enough past her head to send a momentary pixelation through her helmet view, Jaxan considered the stalemate. It was a bottleneck for both sides. Bartosz and her drones would have been a big damned help here, but no help for that. She glanced over her shoulder and spied Cooper, the specialist with the grenade launcher.
“Gas charges!” she called to him. “Switch to Irritum-5! Short range!”
“Will that even work on them?” Ghath asked.
Jaxan flinched back from another rebel blast. “You saw how ragged-ass their kit is! Most of them have no countermeasures!”
“And them?” Ghath nodded at the Chrome Guards curled up on the floor.
Jaxan scowled. “They do.” She shook her head. “Cooper, you ready?”
The specialist raised his weapon. “Just call it, Lieutenant!”
“Don’t wait on me!”
One-two-three charges crumped down the hallway, the third already trailing its noxious fumes. The gas wasn’t fatal to any species that breathed an atmosphere comparable to Sanctuary’s, but it would inflame the lining of respiratory tracts and throats. That it was effective against Morvena became clear an instant later as wheezing and coughs tore the air ahead. Terrorist forms writhed and staggered unwittingly into the open in their dismay as haze purled about them.
Ghath put a blaster bolt clean through one as its struggles exposed it. “Let’s do this!”
Jaxan consented by stepping up from behind cover, firing as she led the way. Another stricken Chrome Guard snagged for her heel and she kicked the hand savagely aside, nearly stumbled as she stepped on a second one. A laser seared past her hip, triggered a yelp of pain echoed both in the air and in her helmet speaker as one of her toughs went down. Ghath roared something and fired twice, sent one of the T’Sona spinning away in a twirl of fiery limbs.
But resistance collapsed quickly. The upper left quadrant of Jaxan’s visor view divided off to show a rough schematic, painted by its sensors, and displaying a clot of icons scuttling off to the left, down a side passage. “Take and hold that intersection!” she snarled to her team.
Pressing on through thickest of the gas, touching her mask to make certain it was in place, Jaxan reached the t-section first. Ghath and the others arrived a second after her, the Korthan only then remembering to lower his helm mask. The fumes were already beginning to thin. Chrome Guards were crawling under them to clear the space; a few were beginning to look like they had control of their faculties again. One sat up against a bulkhead and gestured down the side passage wordlessly.
Jaxan nodded and checked the sensor quadrant inside her visor again. Referencing records from the briefing, her augmentation memory added details to the map, indicated a short passage to what looked like a small break longue protruding from the inside of the spoke. “They’ve got nowhere to go,” she told Ghath. “Stay close. Go easy. Records show there are viewports ahead. Don’t want to blow ‘em out.”
“What if they do?” Ghath muttered back.
Jaxan didn’t answer, edged on ahead. She heard scuffling and raised her blaster to her shoulder and cheek, proceeding one measured step at a time and tight with the wall. The targeting halo glowed balefully before her. Breath felt constricted and tacky against the inside of her mask. She held back the urge to tear it off.
The passage opened up into a lozenge-shaped bulb, domed with support lattice-work and windows offering a view of stars and drifting battle-debris. Jaxan froze at the entry, catching sight of motion behind the wide, thick-based table at the lounge’s center. Finger tightened on the trigger as motion sensors painted a pair of ghostly outlines crouched behind the obstruction. Signaling Ghath to hold up, she keyed her helmet speaker.
“Surrender!” she called out. “You’ve got nowhere to go! Drop your weapons and surrender!” Recalling the savaged bodies along the way—Morvena savaged by Morvena—a jolt of insight compelled Jaxan to add, “We’re Sanctuarian Fleet!”
A figure stood slowly from behind the table. Confusion locked Jaxan’s mind for a moment. She saw not a Morvenan, but an older human man, mahogany-faced and craggy from age and stress. Confusion became recognition, and then a rush of iciness through blood and nerves that locked Jaxan’s joints from the pinky toe to the base of her skull.
It...can’t be...
“Hey, baby girl.”
Darius Jaxan, her father, looked exactly as he had the day before he died. Salt-and-pepper hair, cut to tight curls against his narrow scalp, added a grandfatherly aspect to his appearance she knew he’d hated. But the green eyes blazed with intense wisdom and clear thought that only mortality had dimmed.
“It can’t...” Jaxan muttered through a parched throat. “You can’t...”
“Lieutenant?” Ghath still lingered at the corner of her vision, fidgeting with his blaster in confusion.
But she could only focus on the ghost before her. “You’re not here,” she told it.
“You’re right,” he answered. “I’m just a messenger, baby, one they knew you’d listen to.” He shook his head, the way he did when the facts of a case suddenly became clear to him. “Things here aren’t what they seem. You gotta listen to these folks, hon.”
Jaxan scowled. “These...terrorists?”
The specter shook his head again. “It’s not as simple as all that, girl. There are facts to this case you don’t know yet. But I can tell you. If you’ll listen.”
“Lieutenant,” Ghath was urging from her flank. Behind them, Morvenan voices were raising, arguing with Sanctuarian ones.
The phantom of Darius Jaxan faded from the air before her. In its place, a Morvenan female was standing from behind the table with hands held high. A second one, smoking from blaster wounds, remained on the floor, unmoving. Jaxan panned the targeting halo across the living one, a young woman she recognized instantly, from the briefing packet.
Tahna Yssida.
“You can’t turn me over to them,” the T’Sona leader told her in a trembling voice. Glowing eyes fluttered like a candle stirred by a breeze. “Please, someone needs to hear. Anyone.”
Suddenly, Darius Jaxan was back, in place of Tahna. He was as real as the last day Jaxan had seen him, while on leave, listening to him mutter in his tiny kitchenette about a case he couldn’t crack.
“Please, baby,” he was saying, like it was that day exactly—even though Jaxan knew this wasn’t him; was Morvenan mind-tricks, “please, there’s a lot more to this. Don’t let them have her. You need to talk to someone who knows.”
“You need Ylura Aval.”