Winterhome

by Blaze Ward

  Softer, if any station hardened fer space flight could be considered soft. Soft ’nuffs, as no less than Seeker had ’splained it all in poetical terms when he talked ’bouts his last time home to stand afore the Gods itself and been rewardeds fer livin’ the good life and bein’ sent to little Trusski for final mission.

  This were final mission.

  Well, hopefully not final final mission. Maybe the last time she’d have to put on anything approximatin’ a uniform and make a living killin’ people.

  Go homes and be a proper Imperial Lady for a bit, least ’tils Casey gots settled. And then let Digger make an honest woman of her.

  Honest enough, anyway. Did she wanna be an Imperial Lady? Or Republic Dame? Goes to Petron with Jessica? Or just goes home to Saxilby?

  Choices, choices, choices.

  They just hadta kill a god first.

  Moirrey let go a sigh and put the goofball to one side. Time to be serious. To become the killer she really didn’t like to talk about at nice parties.

  Summer squeezed her hand one last time as if she understood the feeling, then dropped it. Moirrey put both her hands on the keyboard and focused her intent on the mighty machine above and behind her.

  St. George’s Lance itself. Going to slay a dragon.

  Just because, she adjusted the coolant flow a little, listening to the gremlins in her soul talking to the wee beasties just waiting to scamper loose and play tricks on her.

  Same for battery array number eight. It had always given her issues, so she shifted the recharging cycle around to put that one last to be discharged, just knowing that it would throw all sorts of false positive errors she’d have to fix by telling the system to ignore them anyways.

  Hopefully, this time wouldn’t actually be the wolf that ate them. Her ghost would be rightly embarrassed at her to die this way.

  “Bedrov, deploy the butterfly,” Gunter ordered in a heavy voice he must have borrowed from Vo.

  Moirrey was looking the wrong way, so she could only listen to th’pongs and twangs as long antennae unfolded from the hull and telescoped out to their full exposure, drawing a solar sail out between them.

  Fragile gossamer, it wouldn’t survive more than a few days in the harsh climate of solar wind, but it didn’t have to. They only had to hold those lovely wings in place for a little while, and then either die or flee.

  “Butterfly deployed and operational,” Yan said stiffly.

  “Emergence,” Gunter echoed as the ship dropped into real space.

  Moirrey had a short-range sensor readout displayed semi-transparent in one corner of her engineering screen. Not that she could do anything about it, if someone were coming, but she’d like to see.

  Nerdy, don’t you know?

  Her hands passed above the surface of her console without touching anything. System were live, and she had ultimate lockdown ability if something went wrong.

  Forlorn hope.

  “I have a targeting lock,” Gunter called in a too-loud voice, up a half octave of nervous excitement. “Preparing to fire.”

  They had dry-run this buncha times fer training and role-play. She and Yan and Pops and even Summer was supposeds to yell if something weren’t right. Otherwise, Gunter Tifft would make history.

  They was ’pparently luckier than fate deserved to grant them.

  Passive sensors only, and they’d dropped long and flat in a place with nobody close by. No beeps. No pings. Not even rocks floating by.

  Buran liked to fly down from the north pole of any system and dock or de-orbit. Fribourg and Aquitaine usually came in on something approximating the system ecliptic plane, assuming all yer planets were well behaved. They’d hoped this spot were clean, but the only way to find out would have been to pop out in RealSpace and say hi.

  Really dumb idea.

  Clock was running anyway. Big, bad wolf were no more than one light-second away, sitting pretty in the firmament of night, as it were, since they landed by design with Winterhome’s star behind them.

  Best way to eke out every erg of power was to add a solar sail and fast-dump solar energy into the batteries. Wasn’t going to be as fast as they went dry, but if’n every generator went overload right now, and the sail were clean, they might get an extra six and a half seconds of boom through the lens afore it hiccupped as the capacitors drank from an empty well.

  “Engaging,” the man cried in triumph.

  Moirrey felt the beam power itself up like it were slow motion. It were really more like six Type-4 beams, once you gots inside the second piece of hardware. Fire all six beams at once and then lase them into a tertiary coherence that were more theory than practicum. That was why you needed the sensor arrays off a scout. Nothing smaller could hold that much power and broadcast it as a single thing without the scattering and backlash that would cook the housing and the ship around it pretty damned fast.

  Click, click, click, click, click, click. Thunk.

  Couldn’t have taken more than one-hundredth of a second, but she was that keyed up to hear and feel it. And maybe only Summer would have done the same, but she weren’t human, so it wasn’t a fair comparison.

  Someone had the front of the ship showing a visual signal. The whole room brightened like dawn.

  For a moment, Moirrey wondered if either Ainsley or Gunter had opened the blast shields, but a quick glance showed metal walls. That was just coming out of a console video.

  Wowsers.

  “Firing,” Gunter continued unnecessarily.

  T’weren’t nobody on this ship that’d missed that. Even mice in the cupboard would have stood up on hind legs to go wow.

  First battery array went black quick, but that were normal. Took everything it had just to prime the firing matrix and bring it all into alignment. All the generators were doin’ was firehosing. Second battery array began to discharge, slow enoughs she could see the line collapse in real time, rather than the blink number one had been.

  Coolant system were already running hotter’n’snot. Worse than t’were supposed ta.

  Local gas density were thicker than their firing range, and they hadn’t accounted for that. Side frequencies were already sucking enough photons of energy off the big beam that they were probably glowing like a neon tube right now.

  Like everyone within sighting distance weren’t already looking at a hose of solid light connecting Buran’s home with someone on a hill with a cannon.

  Matter of time until someone came looking.

  Moirrey studied her readout in a glance. Everything were already imprinted so deep she already saw it in her dreams. She cut out the life support systems and routed that power to the feeble shielding the little ship projected. Not much, but enough to hold it a little better and deflect away some of the mad power that might flood back.

  They weren’t running out of oxygen anytime soon, and there was nobody in this room so ugly she’d be offended if they had to strip near-naked to cool off. The engineers aft? That were a different story, and she’d be fine with them keeping their clothes on. Or hatches closed up tight.

  “No change on area aspects,” Ainsley called out with relief.

  One of the bright sides of dealing with god-like ships. Ya turned them down into dogs when you weren’t expecting things, so it took humans to realize that a problem might need the ship, and then you had to get permission to turn him back on to try to fix anything.

  Buran hisself might be the only one around here being smart. Patrol ships were the risk. Someone close enough to get up in their face, fast enough to keep them from doing the sorts of mass damage they had planned.

  Every second of stupid was that much more carving knife time.

  Sure nuff, coolant system were startin’ ta bitch. Even using the butterfly wings as heat synchs, stuff were getting hotter than deep space could cool it, lessen’s ya wanted stuffff to melt ’longs the way.

  “Active sensor ping received,” Ainsley’s voice called out.

  With Gunter in charge, sh
e were acting Science Officery fer him, since he had guns and nav and all that.

  She didn’t bother explaining who it might be. Anybody smart nuff to ping them had guns enough to get mad. And were gonna come here soon as he could program a jump that short. ’Cause if he spend twenty minutes comin’ over with engines, Gunter’d have time to cook his goose, too.

  “Jump signal,” Ainsley yelled.

  Silence, all of a sudden.

  Dark, too. Like stuff were wrong.

  Was they deaded and hadn’t caught up? Moirrey’d killed lots of folks over her career. Some with pistols, most with up-scaled Jack-in-the-boxes.

  Dinna feels right.

  “Wha’happen?” she asked the room.

  Gun weren’t firing. Butterfly weren’t charging. Generators still goin’ like run-way locomotives, so Moirrey automaticallies brought life support back into the mix. Air and cool would be nice soon.

  “Bastards reacted too fast,” Gunter growled. “Patrol Hammerhead found us and got here before the theoretical cut-point for success.”

  “Bulgarian, please?” Moirrey chided him.

  “There is a significant difference between slowly bleeding to death, and decapitation, Lady Moirrey,” Gunter’s teeth ground.

  “So recharge everything and drop out on a new vector to fire again,” Bedrov chimed in.

  “In two minutes, every Buran ship will be at full combat capacity,” Gunter said. “Some will already be separating into component parts to make it easier to engage us. I expect anything that the monster can reach will be sitting out there at the range we took our first shot, just waiting for us to appear.”

  “You want to live forever, Sailor?” Ainsley asked merrily.

  Forlorn hope.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, crazy woman,” Gunter sneered back, grinning at her. “What’s the use in being the most famous man alive, if I’m dead and can’t enjoy it?”

  “That’s because you are thinking like a proper naval officer,” Pops, of all people, said. “Bad for the digestion.”

  “Suggestions, old man oracle?” Gunter turned.

  Woulda been rude, but they’d been through rough afores, and this were just siblings fussin’.

  “Think like a pirate, young man,” Pops suggested.

  Yan turned to look at him in what looked like utter disbelief. But he only shook his head, remaining silent.

  “A pirate?” Gunter finally asked, when the room fell silent. “What’s that even mean?”

  “It means you’re holding St. George’s Lance, Gunter Tifft,” Lady Moirrey of Kermode said with finality. “Charge.”

  Chapter LXXVIII

  Imperial Founding: 181/07/03. IFV Butterfly, Winterhome

  Gunter managed to not swallow his tongue as he looked at Lady Moirrey and the implications of her words came clear. These people were all obviously insane, but he’d signed on for this mission with a clear conscience.

  Nobody else in the galaxy would ever be given the opportunity to do something like this to a god.

  And hey, it had always been fifty/fifty that he made it out of here alive.

  Pirate, huh?

  Lady Moirrey even had a phrase for this sort of thing. He fixed her with a hard stare.

  “Cry havoc,” he said evenly. “And let slip the dogs of war.”

  “Orders?” Ainsley asked from beside him.

  “Blow the sail and the arms holding it clear of the hull,” Gunter said as he engaged forward vectors on the JumpDrive. “Let it drop into RealSpace like we just suffered an emergency in Jump.”

  He paused to look at his boards, and then at the faces staring back at him.

  It dawned on Gunter that he really was the only line officer here. Bedrov had served as First Officer on Keller’s flagship, but done so under Shiori Ness and only as a pirate. Pops had owned his own ships, but retired to planet-side long ago. Ainsley had flown Starfighters. Moirrey was an engineer. And he could only guess if Summer Ulfsson had ever appeared in a space pirate video.

  “Charge the battery arrays full, but bring them out of the loop after that,” he ordered. “We won’t be charging them again after this run. Arm the scuttling charges and engage the deadman switch to blow them if we suffer enough damage to compromise the hull.”

  He found the interior comm and realized that the whole conversation had been limited to the bridge. The men aft, in charge of the various components, had no idea what had happened. Just that they had stopped firing the gun and escaped into JumpSpace.

  “Engineering, this is Tifft,” he announced. “First run was not successful. We are jettisoning the solar sail and housing, and then coming around to make a second pass. Bring everything to full and hold it there until I order overloads.”

  He didn’t bother waiting for the acknowledgements. They would give him everything they had, because those were the sorts of men he had picked, when he had access to their deepest personnel and psychological files. He was probably the weakest link on this vessel, and he knew what kind of man he was.

  “Moirrey, Yan, Pops,” he called back over his shoulder. “Bring the gun to a zero alignment and lock it in place. You’re right. We’ll have to do this in motion.”

  “What are you about to do, Commander?” Ainsley asked.

  “Use it like a lance,” Gunter replied. “Gallop full speed at that bastard and try to knock him off his horse before he knocks us off ours.”

  “Give ya credit fer nuts, Gunter,” Lady Moirrey’s voice smiled at him.

  They had been dead stop relative to the station when they dropped out the first time. Easiest way to line it up and calibrate the beam itself for range and accuracy.

  The Butterfly shuddered with what felt like death-throes as Ainsley triggered the separation charges aft. Those had been for a worst-case scenario he never expected to face.

  And failing’s better?

  Buran had invented this thing. Drop out of Jump as close as possible to another target, passing right down his spine with the Mauler ripping chunks and lives loose. Kill and rend like a shark emerging from the dark waters to feed.

  His Mauler was bigger. That was all.

  Gunter considered his possible vectors. All of them were bad. The best chance for damage involved staying on the plane of the station’s gravity, like the first shot had been. Going high or low risked enough bulkheads in the way to hold the shot at bay for the short time he would have before Buran killed him.

  Someone would most assuredly be sitting right on top of where that sail housing suddenly appeared. Had probably already blasted it with every beam they had on a twitch. Kill now and sort out the results later, when the threat had been neutralized.

  Gunter pulled up the scan log and grinned. Beside him, he could feel Ainsley do the same. Neither spoke, but words weren’t really necessary.

  That Hammerhead had appeared bow-out, like a proper defensive warship should, where all his guns could range on a threat.

  IFV Butterfly had vanished in that instant between the Hammerhead appearing, and being able to shoot.

  That’s what you get for building too high in the gravity well, Gunter thought. I can play your games, too.

  “All hands,” he said, trying to sound magisterial, as he spoke. “We will emerge on a reciprocal course, firing the weapon before I have a target lock. Repeat, before lock. We will fire blind, and then use gyros to zero the deflection down. Plan for sudden evasive maneuvering as I try this thing.”

  He cut the signal, again before anybody spoke. He was in charge of all their fates now. The others had delivered the Imperials here, now he had to deliver the kill.

  Gunter programmed his flight vectors into the system and said a small prayer to St. Nicolas, Patron of Sailors.

  “Anyone?” Gunter said conversationally. “What happens if I start firing before we emerge?”

  “Haven’t the slightest clue,” one of the men said quietly. Gunter couldn’t tell which.

  “You will destabilize the Jump universe alo
ng the axis you fired, Commander,” Summer Ulfsson said definitively. Clinically. “All that energy gets converted to a bizarre space-time equivalent that I don’t have time to explain, but it would affect this ship like putting oily soap in water to stop bugs. They land, expecting to float, and sink to their deaths instead because the surface tension is broken. JumpSpace across an areae of more than four light seconds would reject your subsequent attempts to escape for nearly eighteen minutes, landing you back in RealSpace instead.”

  The tone didn’t sound like a middle-aged, bimbo, ex-actress. So much so that Gunter felt his head turn all the way around to meet her eyes.

  The look she gave him was one that he knew would chill his nightmares for years. It was as if a million-year-old Goddess of Destruction had come down and been made flesh on his deck. An avatar of Kali-ma herself, to hear Bedrov occasionally grumble about the old days with Keller. Or tales of Alber’ d’Maine and his various tactical officers.

  And there was utterly no doubt in those eyes now. He didn’t bother asking how she knew. There was no answer that he would like any more than any others, and this was one he was willing to let get away from him.

  He nodded at her. She nodded back. Lightning bolts might have passed between them.

  “Stand by to emerge first, and then open fire as soon as we confirm,” Gunter announced, turning what was left of his soul back to the console before him.

  He blew out a breath as the clock counted to zero.

  Emergence was hard and clunky. For a moment, he thought that perhaps he had managed to fly into the Hammerhead by cutting his line too fine, but then it resolved into a plasma cloud he suspected had been his solar array two minutes ago. That energy had also messed up JumpSpace, probably by the sail getting hit before it fully materialized. He had no idea how any of the physics worked, and really didn’t care.

  Gunter pressed the engines to the top. They wouldn’t do much to accelerate him now, but any bit might make a shark miss with the shot that should have killed him.

  “Science Officer, hard scan,” he called, ignoring everything except the golden eyeball staring back at him from far too close. They were hauling ass, relative to the Hammerhead, and hopefully everyone else who might be waiting.