“Shit,” Rob screamed.
Morton’s sensors caught two soldier motiles pouncing. They’d been lurking in a shallow depression, their suits powered down to avoid detection. Limbs lashed out at Rob’s suit as the three of them crashed to the ground in a tangled bucking heap. Force fields flickered between lavender and cerise as weapons fired at point-blank range.
“Keep going,” The Cat insisted.
It was hard. Morton wanted to halt and pound the wrestling figures with shots from his hyper-rifle. Imagery shot into his brain at accelerated speed, and he saw just how many soldier motiles were charging after them. Front rank almost on top of Rob. “Rob!”
“Do it,” Rob grunted. “I’m gonna show them a little Doc Roberts trick any second. These motherfuckers don’t ever learn.”
Morton’s virtual hand flashed into his grid and hauled out Rob’s telemetry. He could see the safety overrides clicking off one by one. Powdery gravel crunched underfoot. The armored car was ten meters ahead. Morton leaped, powerdiving over the curving wedge-shaped vehicle. He’d almost landed on the other side when Rob shorted out every power cell he was carrying. The explosion turned the empty sapphire sky solar white.
“Way to go, Robby boy,” the Cat cried.
Morton’s outstretched hands touched the ruined road. He curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to kill momentum. The fearsome glare drained away. Behind him the armored car was skidding sideways. Stig fought for traction, slewing it back on course. Morton hopped on the front, clinging to one of the X-ray laser mounts.
The Cat appeared beside him as if she’d teleported in. A lone sensor image showed him the smoldering blast crater where Rob had been. Alic thudded onto the roof, gauntlets gripping narrow ridges tight enough to gouge the metal. Morton’s hyper-rifle deployed out of his forearm; targeting graphics slid out of his grid. The three of them began to shoot any soldier motile in a broad swathe ahead of the armored car. “Use everything,” Alic shouted. “Punch them out of the way.”
Morton’s grenade canisters thrummed as they fired. His plasma carbine switched to continuous pulse, hosing out energy. The hyper-rifle swung around as he picked out target after target. Power cell charge wound down at an alarming rate. More ion rifle shots came from behind them where Jim and Matthew were clinging to the armored car Ayub was driving. Micromissiles burst all around, hyperfilament lashing against the suits, streamers of ion fire clawed at the grizzly bodywork of the armored cars. They were driving through a demonic inferno that blotted out every sensor return in a digitized blizzard. His suit surface screeched as the demented energy slashed against it.
Then they were past the bedlam, racing down the gray-white concrete strip of Highway One, shedding static tendrils like chaff. Stig had cranked their speed up over a hundred sixty kilometers an hour; smoke was shooting out from somewhere underneath. Morton hunted around, finding the bulk of the soldier motiles streaming together behind them. Their weapons fire contracted, centering on the last armored car. Jim and Matthew were doing their best to return fire, but they were swamped by the colossal barrage. Hyperfilament shrapnel mauled the road right in front. The armored car exploded.
“No!” Alic cried. “Godfuck all of you. Oh, sweet Jesus, why can we never catch this monster?”
Morton wanted to answer, but all he saw was Rob’s demise, and Doc Roberts, Randtown’s glass crater.
“How much power have you got left?” the Cat asked.
“Twenty percent. Maybe.” Morton checked his schematics. “Bit under.” He started scanning along the side of the armored car. Somewhere inside metal was grinding against metal with a terrible clattering violence. The smoke rushing out from underneath had thickened.
“It’s the one percent that’ll kill it,” the Cat said.
“Stig?” Morton asked. “Are we going to make it?” The sound coming from the armored car sounded terminal.
“We’ll make it. This thing has redundancy everywhere. Sixteen kilometers, that’s all.”
Their speed still hadn’t slackened. Up ahead, the road was angling into the foothills. The Institute valley was visible as a wide saddle that led back to the first mountains of the Dessault range. They weren’t high enough to have snowcaps, but the ones in the misty distance behind them did. He scanned the jagged skyline, looking for any hint of an approaching storm. Far Away’s vaulting sapphire atmosphere was as placid as he’d ever seen it. Damnit, I thought we could rely on the Admiral at least.
The armored car juddered sharply and recovered. He swept his radar along the road, getting a clear empty image until it curved into the valley ten kilometers ahead. The MANN truck was already inside.
“Bradley,” Morton said regretfully. “We’re not going to catch it. Do you have any notion how we can disable the starship?”
“Not disable, no. We just have to delay launch until the storm arrives.”
“How?”
“There is one possible option, if you’re willing to help me.”
That didn’t sound good in any way. Morton wanted to look at the Cat’s face, to see what she felt. Despite her thick shell, he knew her well enough now to read her thoughts.
She could obviously read him a lot better. “We’ve come this far,” she said.
***
The amethyst plasma inside the Dark Fortress churned in violent torment as it was bombarded by radiation from salvos of fifty-megaton fusion bombs. Thousand-kilometer peaks soared up through the gaps in the outer lattice sphere like solar prominences, their extremities evanescing away into tattered streamers. The Charybdis dived down between them and struck the plasma at fourteen gees.
Ozzie had been bracing himself for a spine-snapping impact, even though he knew the plasma had a density that barely disqualified it from being a vacuum. There was a slight tremor, which he had to strain to notice amid the brutal acceleration. He disengaged the drive, and was plunged into freefall so abruptly his maltreated body interpreted it as being flung forward.
“What the fuck?” Mark mumbled.
Ozzie shut down their active sensors. “Flying dark, see?” The passive sensors showed fusion drives drilling through the plasma all around as the Prime missiles hurtled past. “They’re overshooting.”
“Can we navigate like this?”
“Sure. Look at the returns. The plasma is illuminating the lattice spheres in twenty different spectra. We can fly through this, but slowly.” Their velocity was already taking them toward the second lattice sphere at twenty kilometers per second. Behind them, three hundred twenty Prime ships slid through the outer lattice sphere and plunged into the plasma. They launched another massive missile salvo.
“Uh…”
“It’s fine, I can steer us through the second lattice no problem. It’s the negative mass one, there’s like no way we can hit it, we just get shoved away if we get too close, like magnets.”
“Ozzie…Christ! They can see our wake.”
“Huh?”
Behind the Charybdis, a five-hundred-kilometer-long contrail of plasma spiraled like a gargantuan tornado. The armada of missiles was all converging toward the apex at seventeen gees. They started to detonate. The frigate’s hull field blazed rose-gold as it warded off their directed radiation pulses, flinging vast webbed lightning zephyrs off into the plasma. “Shit.” Ozzie pushed power back into the secondary drive, accelerating the Charybdis away from the vector it had been coasting along. G-force shunted him down into the cushioning again. “Are we losing them?”
“No!”
“Mark, you control the weapons, do something!”
“What? I can fire a quantumbuster, a nova bomb, or a neutron laser.”
Behind them, another wave of missiles detonated. Radiation turned the plasma to an opalescent violet.
“Use a quantumbuster.”
“We need to be a million kilometers away at least when one of those goes off—anything closer than that and this frigate is dead.”
“Son of a bitch, we’re not goi
ng to make it.”
“You have an incoming call,” the SIsubroutine said. “An encrypted maser link originating outside the first lattice sphere.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ozzie groaned.
“Do you want to establish a connection? The identity certificate is confirmed: Nigel Sheldon.”
Ozzie was crying as he laughed. “Tell him we’ll accept the charges.”
“Yo, Ozzie, how’s it hanging?” Nigel said. “You guys need any help down there?”
***
Both armored cars charged around the final curve in the road, and the Institute valley was directly ahead. The town had the look of a small elite university campus, with villas and apartment blocks colonizing the shallower southern slope in prim rows where their silvered windows looked out over the long white laboratories and engineering sheds that sprawled across the floor of the valley. All of it was dwarfed by the huge cylindrical starship sheltering inside a force field. The scaffolding that had surrounded its eight-hundred-meter length for over two decades had gone, revealing a light gray fuselage that the morning sun gave a satin sheen. Eight dark fusion rocket nozzles dominated its aft superstructure, their external casings inset with concentric thermal duct strips that were glowing a mild maroon as they kept the superconductor coils chilled. Several long blunt fins protruded from the fuselage, fluorescing a deep fuchsia purple as they maintained thermal stability within the internal tanks and generators. Up at the prow, the original tumorous cluster of force field generators had been supplemented by an elongated scarlet cone, fifty meters across at the base. Frost clung to long segments of the fuselage, revealing the outer walls of the deuterium tanks.
A single gantry pillar had been left standing just behind the prow. The MANN truck was parked at its base.
“The son of a bitch made it,” Alic said bitterly.
“We’d have been royally screwed anyway,” the Cat said. “I somehow don’t think these boys would let us pass.”
Soldier motiles had formed a broad line across Highway One and the surrounding ground half a kilometer from the rear of the Marie Celeste.
“Oh, shit,” Morton muttered; there must have been a thousand aliens waiting.
“Ready,” Stig said.
“Hit it.” Morton launched his three electronic warfare drones; the Cat launched her remaining pair. Stig and Olwen had changed the focus on the X-ray lasers; now they fired them in broad fans at the waiting aliens.
For a couple of seconds the soldier motiles were bombarded by false signals and insidiously corrosive software; X rays seared into their electromagnetic sensors. They adapted and filtered and flushed the digital viruses, but there was still a moment while they were purblind.
It didn’t matter. When their sensors regained full functionality and scanned the land in front of them nothing had changed; the armored cars were still racing along Highway One, three armor suits riding on the outside of one that was puffing out hot black smoke. The two vehicles suddenly braked hard, tires squealing as the gearboxes were slammed into reverse. Then they were turning, skidding around as if the concrete had iced over. They started to flee back down the road.
As one, the soldier motiles started running after them. The armored car that was leaking smoke suddenly juddered. It began to slow, sparks flying out from underneath along with thickening belches of smoke. Something inside it was clanging like a broken bell. The soldier motiles opened fire.
“FUUUUUUCK,” Morton yelled, and powerdived off the armored car. The sky around him erupted in a relentless blaze of malignant ion bolts. He hit the edge of the concrete and rolled perfectly, timing it so he recovered his footing in a half turn. Suit electromuscles propelled him into an immediate sprint, his body leaning forward at forty-five degrees. The force field reshaped itself, mushrooming out around his head and shoulders to act as a spoiler, providing downpressure from the air that rushed over him. He swung his hands in a near-Neanderthal gait, knuckles not quite touching the ground, but close.
Sensors caught Stig bursting out through the armored car’s front emergency hatch as its force field’s glow escalated to a scarlet climax. The Guardian sped away, moving with fluid ease in the low gravity. Behind him the soldier motiles concentrated their fire. The crippled armored car exploded.
Up ahead, Olwen’s armored car braked.
“Keep going,” Morton yelled frantically. “Get the fuck out of here.” Micromissiles streaked overhead, pummeling the slow-moving vehicle. “We can outrun them.”
“But—”
“Go!”
The armored car accelerated hard again, building distance.
“Outrun them.” the Cat laughed raucously. “You going to run away from the launch, too, Morty darling?”
He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.
He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?
The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.
“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.
“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”
“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”
“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”
“You. Not me.”
“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”
“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”
“Fuck you.”
It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”
“Good idea,” Alic said.
Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.
“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”
“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”
“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”
“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”
The sun went out.
Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.
***
The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.
An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diap
hanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.
Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.
“Nigel?”
“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.
“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”
“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.
“Do you think they’re—”
Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.
Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.
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