by Bodicea
A light fell from the sky and bore down on his position. Its speed was great, and it was bright enough to make a spot of daylight immediately below.
Pieta screamed.
Basil dropped from the sky to the ground, making the most of the narrow space between the house and the cliff’s edge. The hatch was opening even before the ship had settled. A tall, lean spartan figure stood in the light of the hatch, extending a hand.
Tobias ran, Pieta coming with him. He shoved her toward the ship first. Tamarind lifted her the rest of the way in.
“Go!” Tamarind shouted when the hatch was sealed behind them.
Flight Captain Jones did not have to be told twice. With a flash, Basil was climbing into the morning sky.
“What is happening?” Tobias demanded.
Tamarind handed steaming mugs of hot chocolate to both of them. “Your wife approved the treaty with the Aurelians. That was the signal for the Aurelians to commence the attack on your planet. Pegasus is defending your world, but she is preparing to withdraw.”
“Withdraw? Why?”
“That explanation is complicated, and we have little time, and many hazards.” Tamarind led Tobias to a seat next to Pieta and helped him strap in. There were nine people from Pegasus already in their seats, four men and five women. They had been the last to leave the Isle of Mab. Pieta had never been in a room with so many men at the same time, and it felt uncomfortable. She looked around for Lieutenant David Alkema, but didn’t see him. She realized she might be going to see him, and this calmed her a little.
Tamarind opened the viewport next to their seats, and they watched the curve of the planet fall away below. They saw streaks of light hurtling downward.
“The Aurelians are firing some kind of weapons of mass destruction against your planet.”
“Why?”
“To wipe your civilization clean, so they can replace it. In a way, we are responsible. We could have attacked them pre-emptively and prevented this, but, we underestimated them. We are sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Tobias cast his eyes over his world, for the last time, he thought.
Suddenly, the ship pitched downward too hard for the on-board systems to compensate.
Tamarind looked upward, as though he knew what had happened.
The War Room on-board Pegasus saw everything.
Basil had just cleared the atmosphere when an Aurelian spikehead, that had appeared to be passing underneath the ship en route to one of the Bodicéan cities, suddenly skipped off some thermal inversion and shot upward. It caught Basil from underneath, seeming to wrap its tail around Basil, just for a moment, its too solid spikehead smashing against the lower hull before returning to its course.
Its brief dance was enough though, to overload and short out Basil’s entire power system.
They watched the Aves flip on its back and begin falling toward the surface.
American shouted. “They’ve lost power. They’re going down.”
The tactical display showed Basil twisting and writhing as it fell. The tag showed it was receiving no data from the ship. There was no way to tell if the crew was alive or dead.
Then, its image disappeared entirely as Pegasus’s sensors lost their lock.
Miller looked at the screen. “Prepare a rescue mission. Commander Keeler, Basil is down.
We have to delay departure from the system. We have to…”
“Phil,” American said gently. “Those images are six minutes old. Basil is already down.
They’re gone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Prudence cleared the atmosphere and climbed back into space. Lights were bursting across the surface of Bodicéa, like flashbulbs. Beneath each flash, a city of 200,000 people ceased to exist. Concordia, Serenopolis, and Apollonia had already been blasted to dust, and many more would join them before the sun arose. Prudence had no time to mourn their destruction. They had gotten the word. Pegasus was running, ramping up to transition speed, and it would take everything they had to catch her.
” Pegasus is currently 4 light minutes from us, commencing a lateral attack run… over the entire Aurelian fleet.” Alkema displayed the course data from Pegasus. The Aurelian fleet was by now spread out in a deep parabolic arc, closing in on Bodicéa. Pegasus was going to run along this curve and above at forty light seconds vertical separation.
Matthew did some quick calculations. Pegasus was already moving faster than Prudence.
He would have to red-line the gravity engines to close the distance. He ran some mathematical calculations through Prudence and displayed the results as the relative courses of his Aves and Pegasus over time and space. The two lines representing this data did not quite converge, Alkema looked over the data and understated the obvious. “We can’t catch up.”
“You got this up to .90 c when you were running from the Aurelians before,” Lear insisted.
” Pegasus needs five full days to achieve .55c. You should be able to catch her.”
” Pegasus had a head start,” Alkema reminded her. “And it took almost three days for Prudence to get up to that speed when he was running from the Aurelians before. In three days, Pegasus will be out of the system. We’ll be behind her, but we can’t catch them before they transition.”
“We can catch Pegasus, but it won’t be easy,” Matthew explained. “At ramp speed, Pegasus puts out a strong short range gravitational wake. The closer we get to the ship, the more we’ll be fighting the current. It gets stronger as we approach the ship, but that isn’t our biggest problem.”
“What is our biggest problem?”
Driver projected the tactical display on the canopy. “Those are the problem.”
The sky between Prudence and Pegasus was filled with the Aurelian spikeheads, dodging and weaving, spewing violent energy in every direction. Prudence would be like a bird flying through a hailstorm, except that any piece of hail that struck the bird would explode and blow it to pieces.
” Prudence will need every joule to catch up and dock,” Alkema swung around in his seat and activated a command console. “I’m going to shut down all unnecessary systems. I’ll also shut down life support to the main cabin. We’ll bring up Armatrading and the Executive Commander’s son to the main cabin.”
Lear gave the order. “Do it!” She spoke into the ship’s comm.system. “Bridget, bring Trajan up to the command module.”
Matthew ran a few alternate course projections, trying to find an optimum combination of time-to-intercept Pegasus while avoiding the worst of the spikeheads. He soon confirmed his suspicions that there were no ideal alternatives, and his best bet was a straight run.
When Armatrading and Trajan Lear were secure in the command module, Alkema sealed off the main cabin. “Cutting life support… now!”
The power reserves climbed and there was a sense the engine was pushing a little harder.
The indicators showed a five percent gain in speed. The two lines on the navigation display nudged a little closer together.
“That’s helping, but I don’t think it will help enough. We have to get our speed up,”
Matthew said. “I’m going to try something.”
Alkema whispered to Trajan. “When you hear a pilot say that, strap in and pray.”
Matthew brought up the displays for the two Shrieks Prudence wore at the edge of her wings. He touched them and over-rode the automatic separation controls. “Secure your stations, strap into your landing couches.”
“You’re not…” Alkema began, intending to finish with “going to activate the ion drives on the Skrieks while they’re still connected to the wings. Granted, it will give us an extra power boost, but we’ll lose steering control and possibly tear the wings off. Are you sure you want to do that.” Before he could finish, Matthew hit the ion-drives. The sudden acceleration kicked Alkema into the seat so hard his breath was knocked from him, which kept him from articulating his second choice of expression, which would have been, “Arrrgh!”
Pillars of bright blue shot out from the rear of the ship, pushing it forward, gaining another twenty percent of speed, but stressing the wings in the process far beyond their standard design load.
In the command module, bright red displays alerted the pilot to this condition. “She can take it,” Matthew reassured everyone. He was more interested in the other display, where two graphing lines that had stubbornly refused to converge before now came together. They could intercept Pegasus in forty-one minutes at this speed.
But first, they would have to survive the storm of spikeheads they would reach seven minutes first .
” Pegasus hailing Aves Basil, Basil, if you are able, please respond on any channel,” Specialist Shayne American repeated for the forty-fifth time.
Basil had been at 95,000 meters when the spikehead had struck it. Telemetry and communication had ceased instantaneously and not been restored.
The War Chamber had become almost as silent. Screens and holo-displays showed Shrieks and Hammerheads methodically pounding away at the Aurelian Fleet (and being pounded in return) and Aves lined up behind the ship, jockeying for approach positions and dodging the occasional spikehead. Aurelian assault ships were still closing in on Pegasus, not yet realizing that she had quit the battle. Many more ships were moving toward the planet. On every front, the Aurelian spikeheads were moving in, with deadly purpose, and were already wreaking havoc on the surface of the planet.
The real change in battle, the real change in tempo, tone, and attitude had come when Basil was destroyed. No other fact of the battle could command their attention against the fact that the enemy, for the first time, had spilled their blood in combat.
Only a few hours ago, Tamarind had stood in this very room. Only a few days ago, American had shared the command module with Flight Captain Jones, and together, they had walked on the streets of a city that no longer existed, nor did any of the citizens they had spoken to.
Lt. Commander Miller looked as though he had been kicked hard in the gut by the All-Oz Armpit Avenger Place-kicker. He was leaning against the command podium from which he had been orchestrating Pegasus’s defense of itself and of Bodicéa. When Basil had gone down, he had followed every attempt to raise her.
The ship had gone silent eleven and a half minutes ago. It should have hit the ground by now. If they had been capable of sending out a distress call they would have. 95,000 meters to fall, without any power. When the ship hit to ground there would be nothing but a crater and perhaps a handful of pulverized debris. Even if they had survived the initial detonation, the impact would have killed them all. No lifepods had been detected.
With grave reluctance, Miller called off the search. “Cease and desist, Specialist.”
“Acknowledged, sir,” calmly and efficiently, Shayne American switched from scanning for Basil to monitoring the rest of the battle.
“Status of the other … Aves.”
“Four on final approach. Prudence just broke atmosphere.”
“Can they catch up with us?”
“At their present speed…” She was about to say they couldn’t, then, Prudence accelerated.
She had to double-check because their acceleration curb far exceeded the Aves profile.
“Specialist,” Miller prompted, testily.
“They’ll catch us on the opposite side of the fleet,” she finished. She showed him the schematic. Pegasus was positioning herself for an attack run. She would leave the Aurelians their prize, but would rain nucleonic death from above as she parted.
Miller studied Prudence’s course with concern. “To catch us, they’ll have to cut right through the middle of the assault fleet.”
“Are you suggesting we wait for them?”
As if in answer, an Aurelian spikehead broke through the screen of Shrieks and Hammerheads and bore straight on for the command tower. The phalanx guns took over at short range and pulverized the beast, but Pegasus was already going too fast to avoid the debris field. Waves of force and wreckage slammed against the command tower, hard enough to knock all the standing officers off their feet in the upper decks PC-1.
The War Room was heavily shielded, but still felt the effects of the blast. The deck shook, the command consoles rocked.
“Primary shields 1, 4, 7, and 5 down to 13 per cent,” American called out over the alarms that had activated. “Damage to nineteen decks…”
As she was speaking, another Aurelian spikehead avoided the line entirely with a lateral attack and bore down on the weakened area of the starboard blade. The Aves James broke from its approach and blasted the spikehead to bits.
For a moment, the telemetry tag on James flickered, than was restored. Flying through the debris of the spikehead had temporarily blocked it.
To Miller, it was an omen. “We can’t slow down, there’s too many ships and spikeheads closing in on us. Full speed ahead. Arm Hammerheads and Hammerjacks, fire in braces as we pass over the fleet.”
American put her own mourning aside, and gave the necessary orders.
“Thirteen seconds to the Aurelian fleet.”
“Twelve seconds to the edge of the Aurelian fleet,” Alkema said out loud, speaking of the other edge. The survivors braced for the onslaught, except for the pilot, who wasn’t listening.
Alkema had been right. Steering Prudence at this speed, with the Shriek engines rocketing her forward, was almost impossible. The Shrieks were not designed to be used in this way and the additional power was almost uncontrollable. Matthew had turned directional control function over to Prudence itself, laying in the optimal course and letting artificial intelligence handle the challenges of staying on it, constant adjustments to power and trim, thousands of times each second.
With his ship minding its own course, Matthew Driver concerned himself with making sure none of those violently dancing balls of light and death hit his ship. He would bob and weave, and trust the ship to take him back on course when the danger was passed.
At nearly .49c, the challenge was immense, and required almost total interface with Prudence. Her sensors became his eyes, and he had to direct her by flexing his thoughts. His brain locked into her braincore, his mind linked with her mind. They became as one.
He looked ahead, into that stormcloud of Aurelian death machines, saw where each one moving, saw almost a pattern-ness to the random deflections of their courses. He could almost see a brightly lit golden line through the center of them, a safe passage through the valley of the shadow of death.
“Four seconds,” Alkema read off. “Three… two … one … entry.”
For a moment, it was as though nothing had changed. The ship continued its smooth silent course.
Then, a blazing spikehead shot over the Aves, only a few thousand meters away. Its blinding white light washed all color out of the command module, made the people inside pale as ghosts for a second.
Then two more flashed by, not so close, but close enough to be seen. Then, two more after that were followed by four more, then eight more.
“Jesus and Vesta,” Armatrading cried out.
Alkema looked at the path. At this rate, it would take them another thirty-nine seconds to clear the danger zone.
Prudence whispered in Matthew’s mind. They’ve spotted us, Honey. We’re too fast for them to lock onto, but they can get in our way.
“Time to clear the path,” Matthew said out loud, the only acknowledgement he had made to the others in the Command Module.
He flexed his mind, and Prudence‘s forward pulse cannons blazed. The weaponry was similar to Pegasus phalanx guns, not quite as powerful, but enough to disintegrate any spikeheads they caught at short range, or knock them off their course at longer ranges.
He fired off the Hammerheads in braces, every five seconds, until the ship’s small supply was exhausted. The Hammerheads drove on toward any spikehead that tried to block the path, connecting with them, deflecting them, destroying them.
The pulse cannons kept firing, demolishing s
pikeheads just in time for Prudence to dodge a little bit, catch the trailing edge of the shockwave and debris field and pummel on forward.
The command module bucked and shook as crash gear hugged its occupants tightly.
To Trajan Lear, it felt like he was riding a roller-coaster that was being blown up at the same time. He should have been terrified, but what he actually felt fell a little short of that emotion, and a little closer to that one called “exhilaration.”
Armatrading knew if she survived this ride, she was going to throw up copiously.
Light seconds ahead of Prudence, Pegasus was giving the Aurelians better than she had got. Pegasus accelerated, flashed over the Aurelian fleet one last time, and released from its missile hatcheries a last assault. Wave after wave broke from her bow and fell away from the Mother-Ship, then kick-started their ion-drives and bore down on the Aurelian fleet.
The spikeheads threw themselves up as a screen against the Hammerheads. It was a pretty even match. Whenever they impacted one another, the resulting explosion annihilated both warheads and anything within 10,000 meters.
A little more than half the Hammerheads were making it through the screen, descending on the Aurelian Assault ships with deadly consequences. Sometimes, they hit the propulsion systems aft, destroying them and making the ships dead in the water. Sometimes, they smashed against the forward weapon arrays, destroying the entire front quarter of the ship and devastating the rest with the power feedback. A few times, they hit amidships, opening great gashes in the sides, spilling out the cargo of weapons and mercenaries to a cold death in space. Two of the Aurelian ships split in half, quite spectacularly. Then, the two halves crumpled into one another, releasing more light, energy, and death.
A few seconds into her run, Pegasus passed over the World-Ship, where she dropped a very special load of missiles.
They were called Hammerjacks. They were cousins to the Hammerhead missiles that made up the bulk of Pegasus‘s offensive weaponry. However, where the Hammerheads were a blunt but effective tool for destroying things with massive explosions, the Hammerjacks were more subtle.