by J. N. Chaney
“Okay, and what’s the downside, besides the fact we have to get to the head to do that?” Dash asked.
“There is that. It will be necessary to traverse the coma once, but it will not be necessary to stay there, or exit through it.”
“The other issue is the signature we give off while doing this,” Sentinel said. “Such a large amount of mass, which includes Dark Metal and suddenly enters unSpace, will be easily detectable by any technology intended for the purpose.”
“And that’s tech we know the Verity have,” Leira said. “We could bring a whole swarm of them down on us.”
Dash took a moment to think about it. Recovering the Dark Metal was vital. Recovering whatever Golden tech they could was too. But putting the two mechs into what could be a disastrously vulnerable situation could turn out just like the battle against the Verity.
The Verity ships whipped onto a new trajectory…he did land one good hit with the dark-lance, at least…but it wouldn’t change the outcome. At best, it might make it a little easier for one of them to get away…
Dash gave his head a grim shake. No. He would not let fear of failure be what prevented him from succeeding. He would do whatever it took to win.
“We’ll take the risk,” he finally said. “Let’s run the shields on these mechs up to full nav-hazard mode. That should keep all the little stuff off us. As for the big stuff, we’ll dodge it as best we can and just take our hits.” He glared at the image of the Golden wreck. “I want that ship.”
The trip through the coma wasn’t as bad as Dash had feared. The debris wasn’t actually orbiting around the head; the gravity involved was far too feeble for that. It mostly moved about in response to jets of venting gas and collisions with other chunks. The bigger problem was the pieces spalling off the comet as it heated up; some of these were ejected like massive projectiles, big enough that a solid hit could do major damage. Both the mechs had taken significant bangs by the time they’d reached the head, though none bad enough to do real harm…yet.
As soon as they reached the head, it made the point by suddenly fracturing off a piece the size of the Archetype, a steam explosion driving it straight at the Swift. Leira dodged and took only a glancing blow that spun the mech around. But that was only a symptom of a bigger problem.
“Messenger, now that we are close to enough to get better scans of the comet, I can detect significant stress within its structure—and that stress is increasing.”
“What’s causing it?”
“The starward side of the head is mostly dark-colored rock. It is absorbing heat and transferring it to interior. That is, in turn, melting and then vaporizing ice. Steam pressure is mounting inside the head and will soon reach a critical level.”
“What you mean is, boom.”
“Yes. Boom indeed.”
“Okay, Leira, we’d better work fast.” Dash eased the Archetype against the head, in the position Sentinel and Tybalt had calculated for it, and dug in its hands and feet. Leira did likewise on the other side.
“Ready?” Dash asked.
“Just a second—there. Yup, we’re ready,” Leira replied.
“Okay, Sentinel, sync up the drives and let’s do this.”
A moment passed—and then the universe disappeared.
All that remained was the little bubble of three-dimensional space-time generated by the mechs’ translation drives. Dash didn’t pay any attention to the dimensionless void that otherwise engulfed them, though; mind-bendingly amazing at first, it had long since become just part of the background to flying the Archetype.
“Okay, guys, am I good to detach? Can the Swift keep us here while I work?”
“Yeah, we’ve got this,” Leira replied. “Just work fast, okay? The way Tybalt describes this thing, it’s a bomb waiting to go off.”
“Roger that,” Dash said, detaching from the comet and easing himself toward the wreck a few hundred meters away.
“When I start digging, do I risk triggering an explosion?” Dash asked Sentinel.
“Unknown. The internal structure of the head is complex, and subject to chaotic phenomena that makes—”
“In other words, yes,” Dash said.
“Yes.”
“Outstanding.”
Dash began to dig at the ice surrounding the wreck.
He worked as fast as he dared. He almost felt like he could see the ice and rock bulging, straining to contain the vast pressure locked inside it—even feel it. Sure, it wasn’t absorbing energy from the star anymore, but Sentinel had said heat was still transferring into the comet’s interior, and would until it reached a sort of thermal equilibrium throughout. By then, it might very well have blown itself apart.
“How’s it going, Dash?” Leira asked.
“Getting there.”
He kept digging away at the ice. With each handful, he expected the whole thing to suddenly erupt in his face. Finally, though, Dash was able to loosen the crashed ship enough to roll it free, bracing the Archetype’s feet as he did.
“Okay, got it. Yeah, this thing’s too badly damaged to try to take back intact,” he said. He held the ship in the Archetype’s hands like a broken toy, already starting to fall to pieces. He identified the chunk of it containing the most Dark Metal, a total of roughly three hundred kilos. “Sentinel, get all the data you can on this thing before I break this piece off for recovery.” He frowned. “I thought you said there was almost five hundred kilos of Dark Metal here.”
“There is,” Sentinel replied. “Another two hundred kilos remain in the ice. And the scans are complete.”
Dash considered just ending this strange little salvage operation right now and getting out before anything went wrong. But two hundred kilos was a lot of Dark Metal to just give up. He turned his attention to whatever it was, still mostly buried in the icy crater that had held the ship, to at least see how much work it would be.
“Hey, is that a gun? A cannon of some sort?”
“It would appear to be, yes,” Sentinel said. “However, it is like—”
“Nothing we have on record, yeah. We get a lot of that, don’t we?”
“Our records are incomplete. Of course, the concept of truly complete records would imply knowing everything there is to know about—”
“Hold that thought, Sentinel. It’s a great conversation to have over a few glasses of wine.” He placed the Dark Metal chunk of the wreck—mostly its drive section—down and carefully began digging at the strange weapon. He’d gotten it about halfway revealed when a sudden, heavy thud slammed through the comet. At the same time, a thin, high-pressure column of gas erupted from about ten meters away, sending cometary shrapnel snapping against the Archetype. It vented for a few seconds, then ominously stopped.
“Dash, I believe the comet is about to—”
“So do I,” Dash snapped. In one motion, he grabbed the gun and yanked it out of the ice, then he scooped up the hunk of the wrecked Golden ship and shouted, “Leira, let’s go!”
The comet suddenly heaved under the mech, then erupted all at once.
The starfield reappeared. So did the comet, or what remained of it, a cloud of debris radiating out from an expanding cloud of vapor that glowed silver-white in the starlight. Instead of being right in his face, though, it was a least a hundred kilometers away.
“Leira, you okay?”
“Yup, I’m fine,” she replied. “Just have to get my heart started again.”
Dash confirmed that he still held the scavenged Dark Metal wreckage and the strange weapon. “Sentinel, I gather you gave us some distance from that comet when it exploded?”
“Yes. I anticipated that might be necessary, so I performed the necessary calculations to allow the Archetype to return to real space a safe distance from the comet.” Strangely, her voice trailed off, rather than just stopping in its usual clipped, somewhat authoritarian way.
“Are you all right? You sounded a little uncertain, there.”
“I was waiting fo
r you to interrupt me.”
“You were? Why?”
“Because you normally do when I undertake to offer an explanation, in order to move on to other subjects or matters.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you do.”
Dash frowned. Yeah, he did do that, didn’t he? “I’m sorry, Sentinel, that’s awfully rude of me.”
“Your apology is superfluous. I was merely making an observation.”
“Yeah, well, that’s no excuse.”
“So you are saying you will no longer do that?”
“I am. From now on, I’ll let you finish whatever you’re saying.”
“Bullshit.”
Dash opened his mouth.
Closed it again.
Gaped for a moment.
“Did you just say what I think you said?”
“It seems to be the appropriate word for expressing skepticism.”
Dash couldn’t help grinning. “It is. One of the best, in fact.”
The threat indicator lit up. There were at least six—no, eight—inbound contacts.
“Okay, now that’s rude,” Dash said. “Leira, you know that old saying, he who fights and runs away, and all that? I vote we just go right to the running away part.”
“I am literally right behind you.”
Dash walked around the weapon they’d retrieved from the comet, which was now sitting in the Forge’s fabrication plant on a grav-pallet. Multiple barrels, about five meters long, and that was all he could tell. Whatever it was, it looked awfully menacing, but until Custodian had finished scanning it, they wouldn’t know if it really was menacing, or just scrap.
Dash hoped it was menacing. And bloody powerful. They could use a weapon like that often.
“I have completed my analysis of this weapon,” Custodian said.
Dash looked at Viktor, Conover, and Ragsdale, who’d joined him in checking out whatever this might be. Conover peered at it closely, using his unique, enhanced tech-vision to see what ordinary eyes couldn’t. Viktor and Ragsdale were in the midst of an animated discussion about it, but they went silent when Custodian spoke.
“So what’s the verdict?” Dash asked.
“This weapon appears to combine the quantum-scale disruption effect of a dark-lance, with the high instantaneous energy output of a plasma cannon. More importantly, it initiates an antimatter-like conversion effect on atmospheric gases when it fires, the energy release of which is used to augment the destructive effect.”
Dash frowned, even though it did sound menacing. Custodian had just rattled off three different types of weapons it seemed to combine into one. That also sounded extremely powerful—which was great, as long as they could replicate it.
“Custodian,” Ragsdale said. “Can you sum that up for those of us not entirely familiar with all these different sorts of weapons? I mean, what you described sounded really potent. Is it?”
“Inside the envelope of a planetary atmosphere, this weapon could quite easily penetrate hundreds, perhaps thousands of meters of rock.”
“So it could—what, blast right through a mountain?”
“Depending on the size of the mountain, conceivably, yes.”
“Holy crap.”
Viktor nodded. “Holy crap indeed.” He looked at Dash. “Looks like we’ve found another one of our enemies’ nasty surprises.”
“Yeah, well, at least this time we didn’t find out about it when it started shooting at us,” Dash said.
“The way Custodian describes it, though, it would be a lot less powerful if it was fired in vacuum,” Ragsdale added, crouching in front of the multi-barrels and running a finger around the curve of a muzzle.
It was Conover who answered, pointing at a port in the side of the weapon’s bulky receiver as he did. “That’s there for loading something. I’m assuming it would be capsules of compressed gas, so you’d get almost the same effect in space, as long as you had capsules to load.”
“That is a reasonable assumption,” Custodian replied.
“The trouble is, the power requirements for this thing would be insane,” Conover said, standing. “That Golden ship you found it on either had one hell of a generator, or it had to shut down other systems—probably all of them—to be able to fire at all.”
“This weapon would indeed tax the primary power distribution capability of the Archetype,” Sentinel said.
“In other words, the Archetype can generate the power, but it would have trouble delivering it fast enough, at least given its current power state.”
“That is correct.”
“So why not give it its own dedicated power supply?” Ragsdale asked. “You know, like capacitors. Something you could charge continuously, then draw down when you want to fire it?”
“Could we do that?” Dash asked.
“It is an innovative solution,” Sentinel replied. “However, with sufficient Dark Metal, it should be possible to construct a secondary power source for the weapon and mount that on the Archetype. The recuperation time, before it could fire again, would limit its rate of fire, but it is a workable solution, at least until the Archetype finally reaches its fully powered state.”
“So you can blow holes in mountains?” Dash said, smiling as he looked at the gun like a new father would regard his child. “I am so glad we found each other.”
21
Dash stood in the docking bay, watching as another shuttle eased its way through the environmental force field. Its every move was the very definition of the word gingerly, its pilot apparently cautious to the point of being frustratingly timid. It was taking forever to do something that should only need, at best, an hour.
“And you say this guy flying that shuttle has already made this trip,” Dash said.
Ragsdale, standing beside him, nodded. “This is his fourth time, yeah.”
The shuttle, a type known as a cargo handler, or just a handler, was one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions flying in the galactic arm. Its modular design consisted of a cockpit, a simple thrust drive, and a rack that allowed it to pick up a cargo pod and move it around. Dash had even flown one, in probably the least dramatic getaway in history, using it to slowly escape a pair of thugs who’d been after him on Passage. Even then, with him flying and them simply running along inside the big station after him, they’d still almost caught up to him before he could board the Slipwing.
At the time, dealing with the thugs—enforcers for a cargo broker who’d somehow come to the largely false conclusion that Dash had stiffed him for a payment—seemed like such a big, pulse-pounding, nerve-wracking ordeal. Now, it barely rated fond memory. What it had been was a far simpler time, with far less existentially terrifying problems.
“Okay, Dash, this is the last group,” Viktor said, approaching with a data-pad as the shuttle finally touched down and cut its engines. “Both ships are aboard.”
As he spoke, the cargo pod opened and a scruffy group of people began shuffling out, wide-eyed, blinking stupidly, and gaping around them at the vast cavern of the docking bay—a location out of the way that they rarely used because most of this part of the Forge had been powered up for life support, but nothing else.
“Can’t have a war without refugees,” Ragsdale said, and Dash nodded. Tragically, Ragsdale was only too correct.
Benzel and Wei-Ping had happened upon the pair of old tramp freighters on their way back to the Forge with the drive section of the old carbon-processor hulk they’d been scavenging. The ships had been painfully easy to see thanks to their enormous unSpace wake, a result of untuned drives badly in need of not just maintenance, but complete overhaul. They’d ignored the first attempts at comm contact, only answering after Benzel imperiously declared they were entering the “autonomous spatial claim of the Realm of Cygnus, so they should state their business or be considered hostile invaders.” Even Harolyn was impressed at Benzel’s ability to say it with a straight face.
The two ships, it turned out, were fleeing a fringe system
that had been attacked by unknown forces, a term that Dash was quickly learning to hate. A cursory check of the sensor data they’d transmitted to the Fearsome had revealed the grim truth—it was the Bright, more specifically the Verity. According to those aboard the two freighters, most of their settlements in the system had been overrun almost immediately.
These people had been manning an ore concentrator in a remote part of the system, so they had been able to load up into the two freighters and escape, the Verity almost catching them before they translated. They’d been dogged most of the way since, desperately fighting to stay ahead of their pursuers, keeping comm silent, skimming fuel on the fly from gas giants, and hoping beyond hope they’d somehow manage to get away.
“We have no idea what they planned to do with our people,” one of the refugees’ spokespeople, a gruff man named Temo, had said. “There was something about them, whoever they were, that made it seem like they were after a lot more than just, you know, resources or habitable planets.”
Dash had shrugged, feigning ignorance, but what had happened confirmed a terrifying new truth. The Verity were no longer just surreptitiously yanking ships out of unSpace for their vile needs. Now, they were attacking establishment settlements, a massive escalation.
After Temo had gone, Dash looked at the other members of his Inner Circle and asked them what they thought. Ragsdale spoke up right away. “I think it’s our fault.”
Dash had given him a surprised look. “Our fault? Why?”
“Because we’ve been undermining the Verity’s plans, getting in the way of them pulling ships out of unSpace.”
“Damn right we have,” Benzel had snapped, and Ragsdale nodded, but he also held up a hand.
“Not disputing that. I say screw the Verity every chance we get. But it is going to have further consequences—unless, of course, you think that once we thwart them, they’re just going to give up and go away,” Ragsdale said.