The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  “What? Hey, fuck -” She stopped herself, and took a deep breath. This wasn’t Cherry being stubborn - they could die if they ran out of power. Fine. “Okay, scrap the sigil. We’ve won them more time, and if we blow them up out here the wreckage should be easy to avoid.”

  Agreed. Conventional combat generally yields positive energy balance, assuming no meld and no dramatic shield loss.

  Good. She needed to do something . Ada spun around in space, spying her allies in the distance.

  The Union fleet was going to enter firing range with the bigger Haint warships any minute now. The advancing string of Hornet formations was slowly curling back, a tentacle of firepower fixing to wrap around the Union fleet and crush it. Ada hoped Union armour could stand up to those fusion packets.

  “What do we know about the larger Haints?”

  Little beyond records. Union codenames are Vultures for the medium-sized gunboats, and Hammerheads for the large frigates. The Haints also have cruiser-analogs codenamed Leviathans, but I do not currently detect any in the system.

  They warped over to the Union fleet, and Ada swerved to fly between the Empress and the King , which were flying just a handful of klicks apart.

  “Izha, Felisha? You’re about to get into weapons range - where do you need me?”

  It took a moment for the response to come back. “We don’t know. Ada, we can’t tell you what to do. We’re coordinating based on our understanding of Haint hardware and tactics. Every half hour you and your ship whip out some new magic power and we just don’t have the time to try to factor you in. You seem perfectly capable of figuring things out.”

  She frowned and ground her teeth. That was no good. She reached out across space, looking for Baoji’s own ship signals, and found him far away on the surface of the moon. “Baoji?”

  “Ada.” He sounded defeated. “We saw the Watersmoke .”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No time for sorry.” He sighed; perhaps he was already exhausted. “You’ve been chewing through Haints like a rhask in a duck pen, and that’s more than enough in my book. We’ll find another orbital to evacuate to. Fly safe - we’ll be watching.”

  “Don’t I know it. Shout if you get into trouble.”

  Ada, Union ships have entered weapon range.

  She looked up to see both carriers aiming dozens of laser turrets, and all of a sudden every ship around her was firing. Cherry highlighted laser traces for her eyes as they snapped at Haint ships in the distance. Or rather, one of the ships. She couldn’t see what it was at first, but it looked like the entire Haint fleet was targeting a single Vulture, a wide, flat, wing-like thing with a bulbous core. They were only targeting one?

  The results were thoroughly unspectacular. After a few moments of laser fire, the Vulture burst into wreckage, and they shifted their lasers onto another target. Seriously? There were dozens of ships here, and this was all they were doing?

  The carriers suddenly began launching support craft, picket ships and interceptors. They bobbed out of the hangars and separated from the main fleet, moving towards the Haints from slightly different angles. It was all ponderously slow, and in the meantime the fleet managed to pick off two more Vultures, two out of dozens.

  “What the fuck are they doing?”

  The veil absorbs laser fire and reforms quickly after being destroyed. Multiple staggered laser beams are required to both pierce the veil and damage the ship underneath.

  “This is garbage. What happens when -”

  The Haints started shooting. Starfire glittered burned glittering across the black towards the Union fleet. It would be almost a minute before the packets reached any Union ships. This was agonizing. Union ships ponderously shifted course, trying to get out of the way, but the Haints were firing in a partially-random hailstorm - just as they had for her, but to much greater effect. Ada could see the firing lines they were tracing skewer Union ships at almost all angles. Hundreds of projectiles were incoming. This was going to be a mess.

  She warped into the middle of the field. Starfire crisscrossed around her. In time dilation, carefully planning her shots, Ada struck out at the packets with the weakest little hexes she could get from Cherry’s fins. Each fusion packet that fell prey to her shards of light burst into a puff of gas and vanished entirely.

  The problem, of course, was that there were hundreds - at this point, thousands - of them flying towards the Union fleet. Ada could pick off dozens at a time, but how much impact would that really have?

  Then the Union fleet began gushing urgent transmissions.

  She spun around and warped into the thicket of the carnage. Starfire was tearing into Union ships. First impacts scarred the armor, leaving long black gashes that didn’t seem fatal, but where starfire struck twice the results were catastrophic. With that first layer of armor stripped away, the fusion packets eviscerated hulls and spewed fuel or atmosphere or gods knew what into space.

  Ada swung around, looking for starfire that might hit the Empress , picking off projectiles as quickly as she could. A frigate exploded barely a klick away from the carrier, atmosphere and fuel and crew bleeding helplessly into nothing. Transmissions.

  “The Yangtze is lost. No pods detected. All crew -”

  “Pull out! Evasive maneuvers!”

  “They’re filling the field with flak, we can’t possibly -”

  The lasers continued firing. Suddenly the carriers, cruisers, frigates - everything in the Union fleet was firing rockets. Hundreds of the things traced gentle curves towards the enemy. Cherry could immediately track them, and they were aiming for the row of the bulky, front-heavy Hammerheads at the back of this Haint formation, about two dozen rockets per target. That seemed like overkill.

  A stray piece of starfire struck one of the rockets, and it exploded in a brilliant bloom that knocked out two other rockets too close to the blast. Those detonated in turn. In seconds, nine had been swept from the field.

  Two dozen rockets per target was nowhere near enough.

  Another frigate was shredded by starfire. Something inside one of the cruisers exploded and the ship began spinning sideways, crippled, though at least it was still firing.

  She saw another few Vultures blown up as she vainly warped around, throwing hard light shrapnel ahead, trying to keep starfire from hitting the carriers.

  The Union fleet was being torn apart.

  What could she do?

  She wasn’t achieving enough playing point defense. She watched more rockets blasted before they could get anywhere near their targets. The wounded cruiser was struck and blown to pieces. Another Vulture puffed out of existence, veil blown apart in the explosion. The fleets were still a few hundred of klicks apart, but they were moving ridiculously quickly towards one another.

  Gods. They were going to collide, weren’t they?

  What in the thousand worlds were they thinking?

  Ada had to get in there. She had to do something.

  “Cherry, ready to go in there?”

  We may need to pull out quickly if we draw too much fire.

  “I know.”

  A brief smudge of space across the cockpit window, and suddenly she was up close and personal with the huge, glowing segments of a Hammerhead, its veil oozing several klicks behind it like a great white scar in the black. This ship was two clusters of large cannons at the front of a short, stubby pack of thrusters; functional and without much room for anything inside.

  Their starfire ignored her completely. She swept across the top of the ship, firing into the veil with explosives. A few guns responded with wildly inaccurate defensive fire, but she just wasn’t getting their attention.

  “What the - why aren’t they shooting at me?”

  Based on observational analysis, I believe they are treating you as a high-risk low-reward target. Firing on you wastes energy relative to targeting large Union vessels that cannot evade or resist their weapons.

  “Low reward?” She kicked the ship into speed
towards the Hammerhead’s rear thrusters. “I’m not a - I - gods, any reason I can’t just ram these things?”

  Our shields may not be able to withstand extended exposure to the veil as well as kinetic impacts.

  She gritted her teeth. “Fucking veiled pieces of shit.”

  She turned on the Hammerhead’s thrusters - the otherwise contiguous murk of the veil seemed to thin just behind them - and poured in all the weaponfire she could. Even from hundreds of meters away she saw the spray of shrapnel and fire from the thrusters. She kept firing into this crack in the Haint’s smokey armour, and the hard light kept going deeper and deeper, and -

  Suddenly her mind was awash in danger. Another Hammerhead was firing at her, starfire pelting her shields.

  Good.

  She ducked and swerved as close to the damaged Hammerhead as she could. The starfire mostly missed the Haint frigate, but a few of their shots were just close enough to tear into the veil, briefly exposing dark, heavily damaged metal structure beneath. Then the other frigates stopped firing at her. It seemed they weren’t going to fall for that.

  “They won’t shoot at me, will they?” She was grinding her teeth. How could she bait these things into shooting each other? She curved through space around the damaged frigate, peppering it with her own weapons. It began to respond earnestly, a few pieces of starfire hitting her shields and almost shattering them. These were much bigger guns.

  “Fuck, this is dangerous. How can we -”

  Suddenly the veil around the frigate started glowing brighter, and in a brief moment there was a flash. Cherry’s shields lit up brilliant blue as she felt the entire ship suddenly thrown back, and she shut her eyes briefly, trying to ward off the light. She watched her shield integrity plummet to 12%.

  Well.

  She warped through space, without pausing to turn, emerging hundreds of klicks away. She turned around to see a slowly-expanding, slowly-dimming field of white light where she had been.

  “What the hell just happened? Where are our shields?”

  The frigate appears to have self-destructed in an attempt to destroy you. That explosion could have wiped out our shields if they had been more compromised. The veil around the other Haint ships absorbed any potential damage.

  She spun around and warped back into the middle of the Union fleet, and started picking off starfire again. It was all she could do, it seemed, without putting herself at enormous risk. One of the Hammerheads, against all odds, was struck by enough rockets simultaneously to knock it out of the fight, but there were several others converging on them, as well as a steady supply of Vultures the Union had yet to shoot down.

  The Union, meanwhile, was in tatters. Cruiser and frigate wreckage continued hurtling towards the Haints alongside the remaining ships, lost comrades closing in for one last strike in death. The carriers were reasonably resilient, but they had lost half a dozen frigates and a few cruisers already. Thousands of lives.

  The interceptors started making themselves accounted for at closer range, firing lasers and close-range missiles at the Vultures, picking off several in the first volley. Ada focused on throwing hard light in the way of any incoming starfire, trying to keep the carriers safe. If one of the carriers was destroyed - well - the battle might be lost. They were the twin hearts of the fleet, and though a third carrier had jumped in some time ago with its own battlegroup, it was still well away from being able to engage with the Haints.

  Meanwhile, the wormship continued accelerating towards Chang’e in the distance, slowly devouring the hours.

  Ada had an idea.

  “Cherry, if I got too close to the wormship, would it self-destruct to try and kill me?”

  If it did, it would be much more successful than the Hammerhead frigate.

  “But we can warp out of the way, can’t we?”

  I did not detect any external signs of the detonation in the Hammerhead before it occurred.

  So if Ada tried to get the ship to blow itself up, she would get herself killed. Would it be worth it? Of course not. She wanted to live - self-sacrifice was a poor way to achieve that goal. Besides, the Haint wormship was valuable - it might not even try to blow itself up in the first place.

  “Gods damn it, I wish we had more of you, Cherry.”

  If there were other fleet elements around Earth, I would summon for them. Alas.

  “I figured.” She heaved a sigh. “Okay. Another crazy plan. Can we get a wraith inside a Haint, and get it to detonate the ship’s core from the inside?”

  Our shields are still recovering. Another self-destructing Hammerhead could destroy us.

  She slammed the sides of her chair in frustration. She had a ridiculously powerful ship, so why couldn’t this work? Why was the answer always no? What was wrong? Nothing was working. She tore through space, twisting and shooting, trying to keep the starfire from getting through, but nothing.

  If only that third carrier were faster.

  She turned around, looking at that carrier. It was several thousand klicks behind, but the Union fleet here was decelerating, and it hadn’t started doing that yet. It was still coming in hot.

  “Okay, better plan. Can we boost that carrier’s speed?”

  Cherry was briefly quiet at that suggestion. We may be able to push them using the same technique we used to smash the Hornets, but as their attitudinal thrusters are not designed for such maneuvers, we would only be able to move them effectively in a straight line.

  “Better than nothing. How are our energy reserves?”

  Slowly recovering, but a larger array of code will provide some extra energy for the maneuver, and we can incorporate structures to capture and convert the carrier’s exhaust.

  It wasn’t optimism, but at least it was possibility. Ada spun around, warping through space to the third Union carrier. She hailed it. “Hey, this is Ada Liu, of the… er, of the Earth Dominion. I’m going to give you a little boost.”

  The responding male mirran voice was hesitant. “Ada Liu, this is Chieftain . What exactly do you mean by boost? ”

  “I mean what I said. Point your ship where you need to go.”

  Cherry’s voice chipped in. “We can provide a unidirectional prograde acceleration factor of 118%. Adjust your trajectory accordingly and signal when ready.”

  “I -” The response was muted for a moment before returning. “Very well. Stand by.”

  She swung around the back of the ship, and when they signaled they were ready, she used Cherry to weave a vast levitation sigil behind the carrier, pushing it faster into weapon range. This ship class had enough railguns turrets to… well, at least pick off some Vultures, maybe a Hammerhead or two. Once the sigil was active, floating behind the carrier in space like a great web, she started entwining more and more power core sigils into it, weak little things on their own but enough to generate more and more energy when built together in a web.

  “Ada Liu, this is - what exactly are you doing?”

  She looked around; the carrier was starting to outpace the frigates and cruisers around it. “Giving you a boost! Think of it as magic.”

  She felt out behind them, looking for more military vessels, but there were only a few more cruisers and frigates behind them.

  “Where are the other carriers? I thought there were five.”

  “They’re holding defensive positions around Freyja and Athena. We can’t commit the entire fleet here, we need to be able to -”

  Ada suddenly felt a burst of transmissions from up ahead. Instinctively, she swung out to warp straight past the Chieftain into the rest of the Union fleet. Haint ships were sliding through the cloud of Union vessels all over.

  Hammerheads and Vultures slammed into the wreckage of destroyed cruisers and frigates, but they also struck the functional ones. Blinding white explosions rocked the fleet, veiled armor and chunks of metal slammed into nearby ships. Most remaining Haints in the vicinity either crashed or detonated. Space churned like an angry ocean and Ada was frantically
diving in and out of time dilation, desperately adjusting her course, trying to avoid the storm of shrapnel and starfire.

  It took her a moment to realise what was really wrong, though. The Empress was bleeding its insides out into space.

  Sanako was on that ship. Zhilik was on that ship. She zipped towards it.

  The transmissions were coming fast. “ Empress life support out. All crew to escape pods. All ships, eyes out for -”

  Something exploded near the front of the carrier, and as Ada flew out past it she found the front of the carrier mangled beyond recognition, scarred and pocked and charred like a vicious burn wound. A Vulture slammed into it, ripping a massive scar into its starboard side.

  “Cherry - Cherry, you remember Zhilik?” Her heart raced. “Can you find him?”

  Yes. Biometric signatures indicate he has been evacuated to an lifepod. I will display -

  As soon as the image appeared in her vision she zipped towards the tiny metal tube, shoving four of her fighter’s fins forward to pinch it in place and push the lifepod back the way the ships had come, away from the battle. She couldn’t see him inside, but she had nothing else to go on.

  “All ships, divert course. Skirt the evacuation corridor. Defend civilian ships. The King will decelerate and return to the jumpgate for emergency repairs. The Chieftain will take over as flagship -”

  Behind them, laser fire suddenly started peppering the remaining Haint ships as the Chieftain got into range, but it was too little, too late. Even without seeing it, Ada felt the fleets pass through each other, most of both wiped out in the process, the Haints gleefully throwing themselves into any Union ship that veered close enough to them. Both other carriers survived alongside four cruisers and a handful of frigates, but the Union fleet in the system had basically been cut down by half. What Haints remained out of range started slowly curving towards the civilian ships desperately trying to run between the gate and Chang’e.

  There was a civilian ship making for the Chang’e jumpgate, so she started pushing Zhilik’s life pod through space towards it. She felt exhaustion shudder through her limbs.

  Then a second Haint fleet started jumping through the wormship, veils billowing behind them as they scattered across the black like powder and smoke.