"That wasn't so bad, and it only took," Lex began, glancing at the clock. "Two minutes!? Oh man. Gotta pick up the pace."
The world faded back in again, the star a much larger ball of blue light. He completely ignored the creaking complaints of his ship now, trusting his loyal ship to hold together, and muscled himself over to the missile. A hastily aimed attack went wide, but he managed to drag the coil back across the tip of the missile on its return, grinding away a tile.
"Good enough," he said, tapping for the next missile.
The third missile came and went with the same speed, as did the fourth. With each jump forward to catch up to the next the star became brighter, the engine rattled a bit more, and the ship's complaints grew more urgent. He was gaining time, though. With forty-five seconds left, he had two missiles to go. It was beginning to look as though he just might manage this crazy mission. Naturally, the universe heard his hopeful thoughts, and saw fit to throw a wrench at him.
Perhaps it wasn't quite built to code, perhaps the fuel mix hadn't been quite right. Whatever the reason, when he fell back out of FTL for his fifth missile attack, the CMEA wasn't quite where the flight plan predicted. His speed was still ticking down when it came streaking into site. He pulled the ship hard and tried to cut speed even more, but it was too little too late. With a long, grinding slide, he struck the missile. There must have been something to that infinite mass nonsense, because when the weapon and the ship collided, it didn't feel like the jarring but ultimately inconsequential sort of clash you would expect from a ship hitting something the size of the missile. The blow rocked the SOB as though he'd slammed into a mountain.
For a few seconds, the SOB was completely out of control, as was the missile. Fortunately, regardless of how out of control something gets, when it is moving at such high speeds without any real countermeasures, it inevitably ends up moving roughly in the same direction. That's inertia for you. In this case, the result was his ship doing an about-face and sliding along at 0.995c backwards, which treated him to a lovely red-shifted version of the cosmos to complement the blue-shift ahead. He finessed the controls into facing the right way again without flying apart in the process, and was greeted by a flurry of weapon discharges from the hostile little rocket.
Trying to get the SOB to avoid the blasts at this speed was like trying to get an elephant to dodge raindrops, but he managed to keep the damage to a minimum. He glanced at the clock again and tried to do the math to see how much time he had remaining, but it quickly became clear that he didn't have enough spare braincells to be doing something complicated like subtraction, so he settled on the answer "not enough." With a desperate heave of the coil, he managed to nail the nose of the missile, which was impressive, because he was fairly sure it was out of range of the tractor beam. A moment later he realized why he'd managed to reach it, when the tractor beam emitter itself drifted along beside him, apparently having been torn free in the process.
He had no weapon, one missile, and maybe ten seconds left. It would have been nice to say he didn't know what he was going to do, but the fact of the matter was that he knew exactly what he was going to have to do. One last tap of the navigation computer brought him to the final missile. It was beginning to slow up for its swan dive into the star, but Karter's flight plan had taken that into account. The star itself was steadily creeping back toward its proper yellow color, and filling far too much of his view screen with blinding light, but in the brilliant field of light was a single black form, and Lex powered his ship toward it. The side panels were disengaging now, drifting alongside the weapon as it continued its path. The center split off and spun away, but he dodged it and followed the warhead. He was directly above it now. Once he knew he had enough of a lead, he drove the ship downward, bashing the activating weapon with his unshielded ship.
The collision was no less severe than the last one had been, and the malfunctioning inertial inhibitor only seemed to make it worse. His teeth rattled in his head, the ship pitched and rolled, and the constant blaring warnings all suddenly vanished into silence as the power in the cockpit dropped away. His ship went into a roll, twisting his cockpit toward the weapon he'd just intentionally struck. It was in pieces, shattered by the hit. That was it. All six missiles destroyed. Now all he had was the comparatively minor problem of being strapped in the cockpit of a ship that had no power to its controls and was moving at nearly light speed into a giant ball of nuclear fire.
The lights and sounds of the cockpit were slowly reactivating in a garbled and scrambled state, but there wasn't a flicker of life in his control harness. No amount of fighting with the yoke would prompt even a nudge of motion from the spiraling ship. He glanced out of the cockpit to see that the star was... well, all there was to see. It was blinding, even with the cockpit safeguards. Out of reflex, he reached up to increase the tint, and raised his eyebrows when it actually worked.
"Okay, fine. Good. The tint works. So it isn't the entire control system that's down, just these controls," he said quickly. After a quick attempt to access the autopilot, he amended his statement. "And the navigational computer. So I either blew a fuse or a wire came loose. Here's hoping its a wire, because I don't have time to replace a fuse."
The sun had already raised the interior temperature of the ship to broiling, and sweat was pouring down his face as he looked madly over the various hatches and panels that had been jarred loose by the flight. Finally he spotted a thick bundle of wires with a snapped connector that was dangling free. He pressed it into the matching socket and the controls came to life again.
"Yes!" he proclaimed, putting his hands on the yoke. The moment he did, though, the wires fell loose again. "No!"
He reinserted the wires and attempted to steer the ship with one hand, but it soon became clear that it would probably take three hands to do the psychotic level of aerospace acrobatics necessary to keep from going out in a blaze of glory.
"Gotta find a way to keep it in! But I don't... GUM!" he blurted as his brain rushed out a solution.
He spat the wad of gum from his mouth, shoved the wires into the socket, and stuck the gum over the damaged clip. They held firm as he grabbed the controls and wrestled with the damaged ship, tweaking and nudging until he stabilized its tumbling roll and orienting it away from the sun. With the proper heading set, he maxed out the engine's power and gritted his teeth as he watched his velocity tick down.
"Come on. Come on!" he begged the SOB as it fought the pull of the star.
The stresses on the ship – now thanks to good old momentum, heat, and gravity rather than some bogus relativistic equations – rattled and popped beams and struts, and his engine was doing the star ship equivalent of a wheezing final breath when the balance finally tipped and he started to move away from the star. A few seconds later his engine shutdown completely due to overheat, but by then he had enough speed to coast away from the star, at least for a while. For now he simply took a deep breath and tried to get his blood pressure down below 300/250. With a crackle, his radio clicked on.
"Lex, my boy," squawked Garotte's voice across a radio connection that was nearly as warped and distorted by the sun as Lex's ship. "Since the time limit has come and gone and there are no significant fireworks, am I correct in assuming you succeeded in damaging the missiles?"
"Yeah, just barely. And the SOB has seen better days," he replied.
"Need a lift?"
"Yeah, but aren't you trapped in an equipment locker?"
"That was an hour ago, my boy. The computer managed to get us out a few minutes after you left. We got the Declaration on its feet, then I headed out to meet you while Silo cleared out and locked up the riffraff. We also managed to patch up Karter, who seemed only vaguely aware that he was minutes from bleeding to death."
"But wait, it was... Oh, right. The time thing. Well, I'm flattered that you were confident enough in my abilities that you would be willing to hang out this close to the star."
"Don't be too flattere
d. I only came down here once Ma assured me that in the event of mishap I'd be able to outrun the ejection. Even so, waiting to see if you'd succeeded was the longest hour of my life."
"It was the longest couple minutes of my life, too. Literally, I guess. Well, wherever you are, come and give me a tow. I think I've done enough flying for today."
Epilogue
Once Ma and the others had gotten the more fatal damage to the space station sorted out, it had taken just over ten days to get it back to Big Sigma. Their original intention had been to find a way to transfer Ma out of the system and load themselves into the SOB and the Declaration, but Karter had been rather insistent that he be allowed to keep the station as payment for his 'inconvenience.' A thorough search had turned up three intact escape pods, and the surviving Neo-Luddites had been loaded into them until they and their departed brethren could be dropped off on a planet where the local law enforcement could find them. They had also snagged the still drifting, and still homicidal Zerk and deactivated it. It was wisely decided to find some way to return Zerk to military storage as soon as possible, since all were in agreement that something like that really ought to be kept out of the wrong hands, and hands didn't get much more wrong than Karter's.
When they had reached Karter's base, the EMP devices were deactivated by the codes in the station computers and there was a brief conversation between Ma and herself, who had greeted each other as "Primary Instance" and "Subset 1.2" respectively. Once the AI pulled herself together, she sent a shuttle up through the cloud of debris and ferried them each to the surface. In the facility, each member of the group saw to their own pressing needs. Silo took the opportunity to use "an honest to goodness shower for the first time in three years." Karter locked himself in one of his workshops with a case of beer and a box of a semi-legal snack food called Vice Stix. Garotte disappeared into one of the computer labs, and Lex convinced Ma to autopilot the SOB down from the orbiting space station to get some proper repairs. Once all had seen to their various priorities, Ma summoned them to one of the cafeterias in the facility. Lex was the first to arrive.
"Yeah? Well that's great!" Lex said into the slidepad held to his ear. "Have you ever done an interview that high up the chain of command before? … I didn't think so. … Yes, I'm fine, I told you. … Mitch, I'm sure. … No I didn't forget. I'm going to discuss it with him again right now, but don't expect a different answer. … And it'll be voice only, if anything, because of the moat thing. … I told you, it's a bunch of junk in orbit. Screws with connections, otherwise I'd be staring at your pretty face on my slidepad right now. … Yeah. … I will. See you in four days. … Love you too, babe. … Bye."
"How have these events affected Miss Modane's career?" asked Ma's voice.
"Disaster, crime, intrigue, they're all good for business when you're an investigative reporter," he said, poking at the device. "Between the work she'd already done, the stuff she learned from us, and the chaos we managed to cause in the Neo-Luddite organization, she blew the lid off of them. There's already award talk for her. She's got interviews lined up with Admirals and Field Marshals, and the remnants of the Neo-Luddites are scattering like roaches with the lights turned on. Evidently Jon the intern is up for a distinguished journalism award, too, just for holding the camera. She convinced her editor to put him on the official payroll at a 'very competitive salary.' She wants me to do a big followup story with her next week, and she thinks we might be able to squeeze a press tour out of the last wavering moments of my fifteen minutes of heroism, so we ought to be able to hang out without someone detonating antimatter in the atmosphere. That should be nice for a change."
"I am pleased to hear it," Ma replied.
"I've got a big pile of messages I've been ignoring. … It looks like my courier boss has been calling every four days to see if I'm back. Like usual. My chauffeur dispatcher seems to have forgotten I went on sabbatical, so I've had eleven missed pickups, nine angry messages, two notices of termination, and then another three missed pickups. That man seriously needs an assistant to at least remind him of who he fired and who he didn't. I seem to have a message from Preethy Misra, the personal assistant of my mobster landlord. I'm sure that's good news..."
"Your performance in the tasks of the last few weeks suggests that there are few challenges beyond your capability. I am confident any difficulties awaiting you will be easily dispatched."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ma," Lex said.
He took a seat at one of the plain, institutional-style tables of the cafeteria. The room would have been familiar to anyone who had spent any time in a dorm, factory, or other facility that required a bureaucracy to provide meals. For the uninitiated, that meant neutral colors, cheap and sturdy furniture, plastic serving trays and utensils, metal steam trays, and various other examples of a bare bones, maximum efficiency dining experience.
"I see that this place is still as sterile as ever," Garotte proclaimed as he entered the cafeteria as well. "Hardly much different than the prison."
"Speak for yourself, buster. Maybe this is what that country club you call a prison was like, but this is worlds better than what I've been dealing with for the last few years," Silo countered, entering behind him. "Par-tic-ularly those showers. I could live in there."
While Garotte was dressed in the crisp white shirt and black pants that he evidently treated as a uniform, Silo had taken advantage of the calmer circumstances to change into something a bit more casual, a pair of snug jeans and a tank top. Though it may not have been the intention of the outfit, it certainly did an excellent job of showing off her curves.
"What have you two been up to?" Lex asked.
"After fighting with the network connection enough to patch into the appropriate servers, I managed to tweak our entries in the facial recognition databases for most of the big security repositories. Silo and I won't have to worry about getting recognized anymore. Not digitally, anyway," Garotte explained, taking a seat at the table.
"I've just been walking the halls. It's been more than three years since I've been able to walk more than a few meters without having to worry about leg restraints, police officers, corrections officials, or armed guards giving me trouble," Silo added, sitting beside Garotte. "It is a shame it is so cold outside, or I'd go for a jog."
"Where are you guys going from here?" Lex asked. "Now that the mission is over?"
"Honestly, Lex, I don't know what I'm going to do after the mission," she said with weary frustration. "For better or for worse, though, this mission isn't quite over."
"Oh no?" Lex remarked.
"Ma didn't tell you?" Garotte asked.
"The information you are referring to is not relevant to Mr. Alexander's interests," Ma stated quickly.
"I dare say that should be his decision, not yours," Garotte countered.
"Look, we were supposed to go get Karter and bring him back, and we did. And we stopped the CMEA from being used."
"We delayed it. Evidently the designs were sent to a third party shortly before our arrival. There's not enough info to tell us who, exactly, but someone out there could try again."
"So even after all of that, there's no way of knowing that this won't happen after all..."
"The chances are pretty slim. That alloy is tricky stuff to make. The supply on the space station, represents by a large margin the greatest single source in the galaxy. Your girlfriend's coverage and the Weston University disaster have made it a controlled substance overnight. They keep track of it by the gram now," Silo explained.
"That said, it was blind spots and security gaps in the military that allowed the Neo-Luddites to grow and thrive to begin with," Garotte chimed in. "Silo and I both would feel a bit better with ourselves on the job."
"Why didn't you tell me Ma?" Lex asked, looking around for something to glare at. Even with ten days of doing so, Lex was having a hard time getting used to Ma no longer having a face, albeit a furry one.
"I prefer not to elabora
te at this time," she replied.
"What are you people still doing here?" demanded a gruff voice from the door.
Karter, dressed in a fresh jumpsuit and bearing his realistic and fully functional prostheses for the first time since Purcell had seen fit to slice his hand off, came pounding into the room and headed for the food counter.
"Karter, please remember to treat your guests with hospitality," Ma reminded. "An ounce of gratitude would not be out of place."
"Since when do you call me Karter?" asked the scientist.
"Since I spearheaded a rescue mission that succeeded despite extremely unfavorable statistical predictions," she stated simply. "That's when."
He seemed to pause to consider this, then shrugged it off and pulled the lid off of one of the trays. With a deep breath, a look of pure bliss came to his face.
"It has been too long," he proclaimed, pulling the entire steam tray from the counter and dropping it down on one of the tables. The tray was full of red beans and rice, and Karter began shoveling it into his mouth with the serving spoon. "You wouldn't believe the crap they were feeding me."
"Actually, I meant to say this earlier, but it looks like you dropped a ton of weight in the last few weeks," Lex said.
"That's what happens when you eat nothing but military rations. Plus, I used my implants a whole lot. Those things burn some serious calories."
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