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A hatch flipped open on the roof, and up rose a forklift with a familiar device balanced precariously on its tines. It was the concoction he’d referred to as the magic mirror, and from the looks of it, he hadn’t been gentle with it during its removal. The ship above had been slowly maneuvering, turning on end and orienting the gaping mouth of its cannon at the surface of the planet. Karter, at the controls of the forklift, eyed it and angled the hulking device as accurately as he could. He then threw an old-fashioned manual jack under the edge before lowering the rig to the ground.
Drones roared overhead as he crouched and put his mechanical arm to work, jacking up the end of the device until it was roughly pointing at the wrecker. He then pulled out a bundle of cables and ran to the base of a handful of broken roof lasers, hooking up to their power supplies and jacking into the crudely aimed device.
“Okay, step one: deactivate safety devices,” he said, pulling out a hammer and smashing a small control box on the side. “Done. Now, let’s see how dangerous I can make this thing.”
Power started to flow into the device as he flipped switches and turned knobs. The current was enough to make the cables shudder and smolder. Slowly, the menacing black dot began to form. Bolts of energy were peppering the roof, but the combined efforts of Lex and Ma managed to draw most of the fire. That was fortunate, since Karter was paying absolutely no mind to the chaos going on around him. His eyes were fixed resolutely on the growing black dot, an unsettling grin on his face. It wasn’t until the ship above started to produce a pulsating thump that he tore his eyes away.
“Let’s see how that shield handles a singularity!” He announced, hammering a button on the controls.
With a crackle of energy, the refrigerator-sized hunk of machinery fired the barely visible speck of black. The force of the recoil drove the rest of the machine halfway into the roof like a tent peg and launched the forklift off the edge of the roof. Almost immediately, the tiny dot was invisible, but Karter closed his natural eye and focused his electronic one, tracking the trajectory.
“Come on, come on!” Karter growled. “How’s containment, Ma?”
“Containment holding. Guidance fieldglass holding.”
The super-dense projectile shuddered through the air under the influence of the machine’s fields, growing slightly as it went. When it struck the shield, it passed through without slowing, the marble-sized collision managing to light up and collapse half of the deflector array. The armor plating wasn’t much of a match for it either, a perfectly circular bite being taken out of it as the singularity passed through like a stone tossed into a pond. Presumably, it continued to pass through the various systems and mechanisms of the Asteroid Wrecker unimpeded until it struck the tube of the main weapon.
“Disabling containment!” Karter announced, reaching down and yanking a cord.
There was a brief flash, then a clap as the black hole collapsed, unleashing a wave of energy that tore easily through the weapon, rupturing it and sending a string of explosions running through the hull.
“Yes! Yes!” Karter said, slapping the machine, “Oh, I am so making a black hole mortar now.”
“Did you do it!?” Lex asked, his voice transmitting out of a communicator in Lex’s arm.
“Hell yeah, I did!”
“Then why are all of these drones still trying to kill us!?”
Karter looked up, seeming to notice for the first time that twenty or so robotic fighters were continuing to swarm and bombard the area.
“Good question. Ma, how’s the wrecker look?”
“Forty-one percent hull integral. Running on secondary powerhouse. I am detecting missile modular activation.”
Karter growled.
“Fine. They want to play it that way? I’m fresh out of black holes, but they’re fresh out of shields,” he said, kicking the ring from the front of the hopelessly lodged magic mirror, revealing the four particle beams, “so these suckers ought to make a dent.”
He leaned down and threw a switch on the mercifully still accessible--and still functional--control panel. All four massive weapons fired, producing a continuous beam that struck the wrecker viciously. After a few seconds, the beams burst out the other side of the ship, armor plating running like melted wax. There was no way to aim, but he didn’t have to. The automated ship was attempting to get out of the way of the beam, and in doing so only managed to drag its trail of destruction across the surface.
“Caution, particular beam heathen levels approaching danger threshold.”
“Just a little bit longer,” Karter said, mesmerized by the beam’s effect.
After a few seconds, the path of the beam crossed the main power for one of the engines, causing it to sputter and fail. The whole ship pitched to the side and rotated, allowing the beam to trace a neat spiral across its surface before two more engines gave out. The monster finally dropped out of the sky, missing the half-collapsed armory by barely a hundred meters and shaking the entire complex with earthquake force.
“That’s what you get! That’s what you get!” Karter crowed, stabbing his finger viciously at the downed vehicle.
“Heathen levels criticism!”
“Oh, right!” he said, kicking the switch open and shutting down the beams.
Without the main computer to guide them, the drones suddenly lacked the organization they’d shown before. They worked well when guided, and were capable of organizing themselves autonomously, but the transition from one to the other evidently involved an awful lot of aimless milling about, which made for easy targets. By the time they’d gotten back into an effective formation, there weren’t nearly enough to put up much of a struggle.
Bypass Gemini Page 24