Judging by its perceived size, Blake guessed Cheops-A was many millions of kilometres away. He could see they were close to a planet. Once you’d flown through space for long enough you developed a knack for gauging where you were in relation to other celestial objects and he assumed this planet was the closest one to Cheops-A. From his memory, he dredged up the planet’s name: Tarnor. It was a hot rock with a diameter of thirty thousand kilometres and two moons. The Vraxar fleet was parked near to Tarnor at an altitude of approximately eighty thousand kilometres. There was nothing special about this particular place as far as Blake could tell. Doubtless a computer had chosen it and the aliens had come.
TIMER: 95 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
Without a better idea, he levelled the Blackbird out and aimed towards Tarnor. His brain worked out the numbers – approximately eighty thousand kilometres away at the Blackbird’s top speed: twenty-five seconds.
“Lieutenant Pointer, we’re running out of time. We need lightspeed and we need it soon. It’ll take nearly twenty seconds for the cores to do the maths.”
Pointer had only bad news. “There’s a problem. We can see it’s Cheops, but the navigational systems still aren’t able to place us within Confederation Space.”
“What?”
“She’s right, sir,” said Lieutenant Quinn. “The options to enter lightspeed coordinates are greyed out on my panel. We’re not going anywhere until the navigational system catches up.”
“This is the most up-to-date tech in the Space Corps, backed by sixteen Obsidiar processors. Why are we waiting for it to catch up with what our eyes can see?”
“I don’t know, sir. Quantity of data perhaps,” said Pointer. She crinkled her nose, the expression able to distract Blake even in these most trying of circumstances. “We’re sending pings everywhere and none of them are coming back,” she said.
“The Vraxar can jam our guidance systems and block our comms. Could their ships be interfering with our positional systems?”
The same answer came back. “I don’t know, sir.”
The Blackbird hurtled through space towards Tarnor. The planet came steadily closer and Blake realised he’d underestimated the distance. In the initial few moments after the Blackbird’s emergence from the mothership, the Vraxar struggled to lock onto the spy craft. Now they were adapting and their rate of fire increased. A hundred particle beams stabbed through nearby space, along with thousands of high-velocity projectiles.
TIMER: 70 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
Tarnor was close. Its surface was incredibly hot, though not enough for the rock to become molten. On the sensor feed he could see the pockmarks from a billion years of meteorite strikes. There were mountain ranges, harsh and rugged, with rivers of flowing lava. A vast canyon cut from left to right, like the scar across the face of a god. The two moons were to the left and to Blake’s eye they were so close to each other it was almost as if they were touching.
Having realised their crude trap was in the process of failing, the Vraxar fleet started moving out on their gravity engines. This wasn’t what Blake wanted. In his discussions with Pointer, they’d agreed the sensors would only take seconds to calibrate and then they would be out of here – a maximum exposure to the Vraxar forces of thirty seconds, before they vanished into lightspeed, leaving the aliens to make the acquaintance of the Obsidiar bomb. In fact, the Blackbird wasn’t going into lightspeed and the Vraxar were following them.
“They’ve stopped,” said Pointer suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re returning to their original positions.”
“That’s got to be a good thing,” said Quinn. “They’ve given up.”
“Except they’re still firing at us.”
TIMER: 50 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
The Blackbird came to within ten thousand kilometres of Tarnor and Blake took the spaceship along a course which would take it around to the far side.
“I’m reading a power build-up on the mothership,” said Quinn. “Their output has climbed by over a million percent and it’s still rising.”
Blake had no idea what they were planning, but he was sure he didn’t want to find out. “I don’t think they’ve given up,” he said.
The Blackbird flew on. Far behind, the Vraxar mothership’s power output reached a peak and then steadied, as if they were waiting for something to happen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BLAKE KEPT the Blackbird low to the planet’s surface in order to shorten the distance it would take to hide from the Vraxar. Just when he thought they would escape to the far side of Tarnor, a particle beam connected with their energy shield. The Blackbird was carrying a big lump of Obsidiar, but the hit knocked thirty percent off the power reserves. Another beam came within a whisker and a barrage of Gallenium projectiles raked across the planet’s surface, kicking up high plumes of hot dirt and adding their own craters to those already etched into the rock.
TIMER: 40 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
“We’re going to make it,” said Hawkins.
“Got it!” shouted Pointer. “Our coordinates are updating!”
Blake watched as the details flooded into the guidance system. He punched the air. “Yes! Good work Lieutenant! Get us out of here. Anywhere, I don’t care where.”
Lieutenant Quinn was distracted by something else. “The mothership is going to…”
With the ES Blackbird right on the cusp of sight, the Vraxar mothership fired. A beam of pure darkness came into being from a dome positioned in the middle of its uppermost armour plates. The beam was thick and formed a perfect line between the Vraxar and the planet Tarnor. For several seconds, nothing happened.
“Oh crap,” said Quinn, fumbling to choose a destination. “You need to get us out of here, sir. Fission drive warmup is a little slow since the navigation system is still catching up. We’ll be out of here in twenty-eight seconds. I don’t know what the hell the Vraxar have done.”
TIMER: 30 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
“Perfect timing,” said Blake.
He checked how much distance they’d put between themselves and the enemy. They were more than one hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away from the Vraxar and twenty thousand from Tarnor. They’d come far enough around the planet that he was able to keep it between the Blackbird and the enemy fleet. With Tarnor as a shield, he kept the spaceship pointed in the opposite direction to the Vraxar in order to get as far away as possible.
It was not to be so straightforward.
With its core ruptured by the Vraxar energy beam, Tarnor exploded. It began lazily enough – a few large pieces of lava-drenched rock tore away from the surface and out into space. After the tiniest of pauses, the rest of it followed. Blake watched in horror as a hundred million objects appeared on his tactical screen. The utilisation on all sixteen of the spaceship’s cores hit the maximum the tactical system was permitted to access – fifty percent on each processor.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the unimaginable destruction on the rear sensor feed. The entire planet fractured and great plates of surface rock – some of them two thousand kilometres across – were sent into space. As they spun and tumbled out into the void, the pieces crumbled and seemed to gather pace. Within seconds, the fastest sections were level with the Blackbird and then they were far ahead.
TIMER: 20 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
“We’re going to make it!” Blake shouted, as if his willpower alone would make it happen.
Before he knew it, the Blackbird was amongst a storm of rock so dense and thick, all of the sensor feeds showed a variation of the same thing – lumps of fiery rock of infinite different sizes and shapes. They streaked by, some of them travelling at fifty thousand kilometres per second and leaving glowing orange traces across the background of space.
A cloud of red-hot dust particles enveloped the spy craft. Where these particles hit the energy shield they left behind motes of red, until the spaceship looked as if it was held in the ce
ntre of a sphere of glowing, sparkling flames.
Several parameters governing the warship’s battle computer were breached and it switched itself to automatic. The Blackbird’s heavy repeaters sprayed projectiles at the nearest of the rocks, jumping from target to target. The craft wasn’t anything like sufficiently armed to destroy so many objects and the defensive system was overwhelmed. It continued firing, the cannons producing a low thrum audible to the crew on the bridge.
Blake wrestled with the controls. His brain was overloaded by the quantity of information and he pulled the Blackbird left and right. The energy shield sustained a series of heavy blows, taking huge chunks out of its power bar. Hand off to the autopilot, you idiot, he thought.
The autopilot didn’t want to know. The palm of Blake’s hand smashed down twice on the activation pad. The autopilot system had calculated their chance of escape to be exactly zero percent and in those circumstances, it was programmed to remain unavailable.
TIMER: 10 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
Swearing loudly, Blake hauled the spaceship hard to one side, narrowly avoiding a boulder which was eight hundred kilometres across. He thought for a second they’d made it, only for two smaller pieces of rock to collide behind them. The collision threw out a single, massive chunk which hurtled straight at the Blackbird. Blake’s brain realised the inevitable and he prepared for impact.
The huge dull-glowing section of Tarnor’s crust crashed into the ES Blackbird. This boulder was nine thousand metres in diameter and vaguely spherical – Blake didn’t want to guess how many trillions of tonnes it weighed. The spaceship was exceptionally dense and heavy for its size, but it was hurled to one side without affecting the boulder’s trajectory.
“Oh shit,” said Lieutenant Quinn. “Our shield’s offline.”
Blake’s console lit up with a hundred warnings. His hands moved towards the panel, before he realised there was no point. An arrow-shaped section of Tarnor hit them side on, scraping away a hundred thousand tonnes of armour plating and sending the spaceship off on a new, unwanted course. Again and again they were hit. It felt to Blake as though time had slowed down, whilst his brain operated at its normal speed and tried desperately to figure a way out.
“Everything’s shutting down,” said Quinn, his words as slow as treacle.
“Activate the fission engines.”
“Critical failure, sir.”
TIMER: 0 SECONDS TO DETONATION.
OBSIDIAR BOMB DETONATION SEQUENCE ACTIVATED.
There was a moment when the bridge was utterly silent – the briefest of instants between the sounds of the alarms and words of the crew. The air felt heavy and with the smell of chlorinated water. Blake’s mind continued working. We’re one hundred and eighty thousand klicks from the centre of the blast. He was able to find humour of a kind in the situation. It won’t be the explosion which kills us, he thought with a bitter laugh.
Deep within the cargo hold of the Vraxar mothership, the Obsidiar bomb exploded. The huge spaceship wasn’t merely torn into pieces – it simply ceased to be, every atom disconnected from those surrounding. The blast grew with hideous speed – a ball of energy darker than any Vraxar weapon. It engulfed the alien war fleet and continued outwards. The closest Vraxar warships, including Neutralisers and battleships – which were in the process of moving away from the destruction of Tarnor - suffered the same fate as the mothership. Their energy shields held for infinitesimal moments before they collapsed and the spaceships beneath them were unmade.
There were other Vraxar warships, further from the centre of the blast sphere. These ones were simply destroyed, their armoured hulls peeled away by the force of the explosion. A few of the larger ones were hurled outwards with the force, spinning uncontrollably as they disintegrated.
The effects of the detonation did not stop there. The sphere grew still further, beginning to weaken at its extremes. This weakening was relative and the dark energy washed amongst the remains of Tarnor. Where rock and dark flames met, the molten pieces crumbled, their fires quenched. In places, tiny fragments of Obsidiar were formed.
On the bridge of the Blackbird, the crew could only stare in dumbfounded shock. The fires of the Obsidiar bomb came to them through the debris of the shattered world, breaking up rocks which would have destroyed the spaceship. It touched the ruined armour of the Blackbird, reacting with the metal and corroding it so that it scattered away like the foam from a windswept ocean.
The flames receded. As quickly as they’d come, they dissipated. In the aftermath, the ES Blackbird was left damaged and amongst the thinning rubble of Tarnor. Blake had not for a single moment abandoned his efforts to pilot his ship to safety and he continued unabated. The control rods were heavy and unresponsive, and the gravity engines were jumping rapidly between offline and online.
“Give me a status report,” he said. His voice sounded distant, as if it came from elsewhere.
“Life support critical and in a borderline failure state,” said Quinn. “We’ve lost plating and engine mass from our rear and port sides.”
“Weapons systems critical and offline,” said Hawkins. “I might be able to get the repeaters back.”
“Three of our main sensor arrays have failed,” said Pointer. “We’re not blind, but it’s not good.”
The tactical display was a confused mess of objects, which jumped around on the screen as the remaining sensors did their best to carry the load for the offline arrays. Much of the debris was far ahead of the Blackbird now and the slower pieces had either been destroyed by the Obsidiar bomb or weren’t moving quickly enough to overtake them. The treacherous thought formed in Blake’s head. We made it.
“Sir, the furthest parts of the debris have reached the closest of Tarnor’s two moons. I’m reading numerous large impacts,” said Pointer.
Blake growled with anger. He had enough on his plate with the exploding planet and bomb – the thought something might happen to Tarnor’s moons hadn’t occurred to him.
“Show me,” he said.
The front sensor array wasn’t in perfect focus and the image flickered erratically. It was sufficiently operational to show the turmoil on the closest moon. There was a crater several thousand kilometres wide, with a blurriness to the image which he guessed was a fountain of dust thrown up into space.
“There have been two catastrophic impacts and dozens of minor ones,” said Pointer. “The most distant rocks are just about to strike the second moon.”
The sensor feed changed, now showing the pristine surface of the second moon. Something collided with the moon dead-on. The object was too small to be seen, but the results of its impact were not. A crater formed, appearing as an area of darkness on the red-liquid surface. Moments later, a second, much larger crater appeared.
“They no longer have anything to orbit,” said Hawkins.
“What’s our distance from the closest moon?” asked Blake.
“A third of a million klicks.”
“Calculate the trajectory of both moons. The Blackbird isn’t responding well – it’s like flying a brick and I don’t want to go through that same crap again.”
“That one’s breaking up,” said Quinn in wonder.
He was right – a series of huge fissures ran around the circumference of the moon, emanating from the largest crater. The moon fractured into three pieces. It was nothing like as violent as Tarnor’s destruction and the separate sections drifted apart, spraying the contents of their molten cores into space.
“Get your eyes off the sensors and try and bring those fission engines online!” snapped Blake.
“They aren’t coming back any time soon, sir. Some things you can fix quickly, others…” Quinn shrugged.
“Lieutenant Pointer, can you suggest a course for me to follow that will get us out of this?”
“Yes, sir. I’m feeding the details over to you now.”
Blake needn’t have worried. The courses of the two moons would take them far from the ES Blackbird. A
few of Tarnor’s smaller rocks continued striking the rear of the spacecraft and he altered course to avoid a cluster of larger pieces. It wasn’t exactly plain sailing, but he permitted himself to think his earlier thought again. We made it.
“There’s an eighty percent chance the intact moon will collide with Cheops-A at some point in the next thirty days,” said Pointer. “The pieces of that other moon will drift forever.”
The next ten minutes took all of Blake’s concentration. Gradually, he managed to steer them onto a course where he was confident they wouldn’t be struck by any debris of significant size. There were still pieces of rock which were moving faster than the ES Blackbird, but these were easy to avoid. In fact, the autopilot permitted itself to take over, allowing Blake to remove his hands from the control rods. This respite allowed his body to catch up and he felt the tension in every muscle of his body.
“Get on the comms, Lieutenant Pointer. Let Fleet Admiral Duggan know the news of our success.”
“We’re on the backups, sir. The signal will take a while to reach its destination. I don’t recommend you attempt a live conversation.”
“No matter. Make him aware.”
With the autopilot in control, Blake was able to evaluate the multitude of damage reports on his panel. The stealth modules had failed totally, but the life support systems remained operational, though at reduced efficiency. The weapons systems remained offline and the failed sensor arrays would need complete replacement. There was some good news – the Obsidiar core was undamaged and it recharged at its usual rate.
“Even if we’re stranded, we’ll still have our shields,” said Pointer.
“How long to reach the closest Space Corps outpost on our gravity engines?” asked Blake.
“It’s not too bad. A few months.” Pointer laughed. “If we’re lucky, they might send someone to help us out.”
Inferno Sphere (Obsidiar Fleet Book 2) Page 24