Seven tactical warheads knifed through space at tremendous speed behind The Cereno, an inescapable approach without a saltus-carrousel. The first three hadn’t managed to make it through the falling debris. Multiple explosions burst in Amora’s atmosphere, static cracks of super-lightning jumping between charged points in the upper mesosphere. The forth warhead was sent hurtling off-course, its propulsion drives extinguished, spinning it aimlessly into the stars. Rynal launched the stern chasers. Hundreds of thermal flares scattered out to distract the warheads behind the fleeing Cereno, while broadside beam cannons lashed into space, garish stabs of light zipping along the flight paths of the missiles, unable to lock their erratic twists and sidewinding turns. Rynal was forced to make a dangerous manoeuvre. The Cereno dove, rolling into a lower altitude. Intense friction of air particles blasted over the nose of The Cereno in white hot streams of fire as her velocity pushed way over safe re-entry protocols. He exerted the engines, parting the thickening atmosphere like a red hot knife in a fog, competing against the heated attrition with the approaching missile.
Temperature critical, warned The Cereno’s AI. Stabilise velocity now. Acceleration over-ride engaged. Manual re-entry incorrect, drop speed and adjust articulation immediately.
Rynal kept the nose down. The AACS alarms began signalling objections, klaxons bleating into the bridge. It was now a game of chance. If the two warheads hit they would certainly be dead anyway. Something had to give. The Cereno’s hull shielding peeled away at the nose, tearing back slowly like banana skin under the ablation of the thickening atmosphere.
Suddenly there was a breakthrough. The warhead overheated in re-entry and reached critical mass, exploding with enough violence to throw the sixth missile off-course. The moment it happened, Rynal gasped out a cry of long held aspiration and cut the acceleration, angling the starnavis star-ward again and levelling an appropriate escape velocity. The red hot Cereno returned to a safe altitude then cruised away from Amora once more like a firefly to the inky night. Scanners searched assiduously for the seventh warhead but there was nothing in range.
‘We did it,’ Osmond’s voice spluttered through the bridge, wheezing from the stress of the gee-forces. ‘By the gods we did it.’
The tactical computer alerted him to take immediate attention to the radiators, and quickly he discharged the lethal heat into a conduction cylinder and purged the white hot element into orbit. He hadn’t much more of those. The Cereno was in deep trouble without thermal purge units, the whole core could overheat at this rate.
Guided projectile identified, The Cereno’s AI once more alerted.
LOCK. LOCK. LOCK. LOCK
No!
A single fuel pellet was released in that moment falling into the focus-fusion caste. It pulsed into full flux, the pellet’s reaction triggering a resplendent stream from the aft engines. Yet even with the starnavis’ reactor jacked fully into the engines The Cereno’s inertial weight was still too great for a quick getaway, and the warhead slammed into the fuselage. The impact cleaved through the external MLI resin shielding and a flash of plasma momentarily shone inside.
Malla and Raven jolted forth, the cabin pressure tearing through the hole. Her ears rang. The breath snatched from her screaming lips on a gust of air racing into the blackness outside. She felt pinned into her seat as The Cereno spiralled through space, inertial forces pushing over forty rpm. And although the moveable seats adjusted to reduce the inertial strain, Malla, Raven and her child were thrown unconscious.
Emergency sprinklers activated, jettisons of foam racing into the hole punctured in the ship. The foam started collecting, sticking, gathering and growing around the wound. It quickly piled there, travelling on the evacuating air, expanding, sealing everything up in an instant. But the air was faint. Once the foam petrified the oxygen tanks stirred, releasing a fresh mix of air into the cabin again.
The lethal blow cut the engines and The Cereno powered down, catapulted through space on its own directionless momentum. The auto-pilot immediately recognised the crew was unconscious and emergency thrusters worked to counter the ship’s spin. Radiation and dangerous overheating was the remaining problem. The whole thing desperately needed to cool, and Rynal had been too cautious with the conduction elements while he was awake. The auto-pilot injected a new element into the core, conducting tons of super-hot exposure into the charge, and dispelled the hot cartridge into space, a thermal flare that gave away their position to The Deathwind. The Cereno drifted now through the silence. The damaged starnavis was easy pickings.
‘Target is neutralised!’ Ripley reported impassively.
The daring of the pilot intrigued him. His gutsy dive into Amora’s atmosphere told him he was a risk taker and a born survivor. There was more going on here than desperation, he thought. The weaving through the debris field told him he was skilled, that he understood how Newtonian motion carried his bulky starnavis. Even now as they were dead in Amora’s apoapsis, he hoped there was still some fight in them before the maser surgery unpieced their vessel. The Deathwind stayed on course, levelling its long canopy steady with The Cereno’s orientation, matching her angle before firing its main engines up. Gee-forces pressed Ripley back into the cushioned seating. His engineered bones flexed and his veins fattened up as his geobacter supercharged the nanoctors, working hard to keep the oxygen where it was most needed, a job his lungs were unable to perform at such speeds. The approach time was a little under five minutes. They’d already covered a great distance, which meant The Cereno was a racer class starnavis. He thought her unusually large to have racer class engines.
The infantile screaming and wailing in his mind had now abated. He could no longer hear the child screaming. It was a relief they all shared, but the network had fallen eerily silent; his boys were clearly spooked by the phenomenon. This was no radio frequency trick or clever network hacking. The child had been coughing, light hacking coughs, punctuated between the fierce wailings. They all knew that this sound was in their heads, that they all shared its invasive presence and felt its utter distress.
‘Ripley, destroy that starnavis,’ said the commander. ‘The crew members are gene-freaks and they’re breaking morale.’
‘Copy, ma’am.’ Said Ripley, emphasising her title with some mild indignation for the derogatory term. ‘All gene-freaks to be processed.’ And with that, he returned focus on allies in his close proximity. ‘Fall in all strike-ships, target The Cereno, finish the job.’
-3-
When Rynal finally came to, he saw the entire starnavis had been sequestered in darkness. The atmosphere lingered, hot and metallic, making his eyes rheumy. Each shallow breath inhaled the corrosive air as though it was spiced with the vapours of fried chilli-pepper. Only the radium pads were left to light the emergency escape routes. His antennae began to glow softly as he searched out the starnavis for his wife and child. They were safe, but the forces of the blast had knocked them unconscious. Raven too had been knocked out cold by the explosion. But he hadn’t the time to worry about injuries just now. Their survival was paramount.
‘Rynal!’ Osmond whimpered from somewhere below.
Rynal reached out, floating towards the inertial bed where the old man lay.
‘You’re hurt,’ he noticed.
‘My ankle,’ he groaned with wince of pain, ‘Just my ankle. Listen son...you have to get the starnavis moving again. Not for me, you understand. You know how important she is. The child. We all share her dreams.’
Rynal understood the gravity of this. He had once doubted the existence of clairvoyants and mystics. But since she’d been born everything changed. Even the Elixir had changed.
‘She’s a Chronomancer. She must survive.’
‘She will,’ Rynal vowed determinedly. ‘She will, if you can pilot The Cereno.’
‘Not as good as you.’
‘Go straight. I’ve locked onto one of the saltus-carousel zones in the velox quadrant. I got us pretty damn close to the nearest stati
on. Couple the starnavis with one of the saltus-carousels and make the exit velox. I’ll hold them off.’
‘How?’
For a moment he glared stolidly at the old man, his narrow face sullen and determined. ‘The catalyst.’
‘Rynal,’ the old man gasped. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘There’s no other way,’ Rynal breathed heavily. ‘Our culture is out there, dying!’ Rynal turned to the dead circuits and began to unlatch wall panels, drawing out crystal boards from their place. ‘We got this thing too late. We need to use it.’
‘My god…what if that’s why they’re here?’ Osmond asked. ‘Did we take the bait? Did we give them an excuse to wage this war?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Rynal. ‘I doubt they’d hand us something that can make a quanti-magnus. They’re here for something else.’
‘You can’t use it.’ Osmond said. ‘There’s no power source…’
‘I’ll engage the macro-gravity on the Obsiduranium catalyst and over-mass the material to critical singularity. The catalyst isn’t fitted with micro fusion cells and vacuum energy won’t work near a Lagrange point; I’ll have to power it manually. I have just enough geobacter in my blood to maintain over-mass. The Catalyst will do the rest.’
‘What about us? What about the Elixir?’
Rynal sprang towards the core terminal and unlocked more of the crystal circuit boards, the glowing nanology in his blood scintillating like tinsel over his skin, communicating with the circuitry.
‘I doubt they came here for the Elixir.’ He said softly, his face cast in moiré tones of blue white fluorescence. ‘You told me about this Titan who came to buy the system. Well I think it’s like you said, they’re here to mine the Suntau.’ he explained.
‘Oh god,’ Osmond gasped, shifting his ankle painfully. ‘I can’t move Rynal. It’s bad.’
‘Stay there,’ said Rynal. ‘So long as my daughter lives, we might have a chance of at least saving the Elixir.’
Emergency lights illuminated the bridge command again and Rynal operated a diagnosis check.
‘The Casimir plates are misaligned,’ Rynal reported, ‘molecular diodes are out. That missile also tore up our photoelectric fusion core. This is bad. Right now I’ll run the ship from whatever is left of the fusion cells. It’ll take a while for the nanomes to get the molecular diodes online, but the second they’re operating again, you get to the nearest saltus-carousel before those bastards find them. There’s a storage station nearby. I’ve programmed the coordinates.’ Rynal checked the basic radars and sighed. ‘We’ve got Arrowhead strike-ships in-bound.’ He reported ‘E.T.A, six minutes.’
Rynal eyes illuminated with facets of light and information as he toyed with delicate plates of crystal. A moment later a hatch opened in the middle of the bridge command. He floated over and grabbed hold of a large lever, pulling it down once.
Alert, dormant research catalyst exposed. Obsiduranium material purged. Potential fatality detected, vacate the area immediately.
‘That should deter them for a moment,’ said Rynal with a glimmer of joy. ‘They’re probably wondering what the hell that thing is we just ejected. They’ll be in for a shock when their scanners are done.’ He looked at the old man affably and offered a febrile smile, drawn tired eyes glistening with sweat. ‘You’re her only hope now, Osmond.’ He said. ‘Get them out of here.’
‘Good luck Rynal Protos.’ He heard his voice through a semi-transqualia, just enough to feed the thought without sharing the full sensorium that included his painful ankle.
Rynal poised over the personnel chute, arms volant, wide in balance. He looked down the long dark pit to where the cargo bay access was. He could find a quick exit from the airlock port from there. Rynal offered Osmond a readied nod, then descended into the cargo bay.
*
John Ripley wasted no time. He launched another warhead crashing into The Cereno minutes ahead of his arrival, detonating on impact and shattering what was left of The Cereno’s external shielding. When suddenly, his strike-ship’s AI sounded, drawing attention to an apparent danger in the area.
Ripley, said the AI, we’ve got a problem.
‘What is it D.W?’
There’s a great concentration of dormant condensed Obsiduranium just been detached from The Cereno. If that substance can be catalysed, then we could have a quanti-magnus on our hands.
‘Hold back!’ Ripley said on the audio network. ‘That’s exposed Obsiduranium.’
‘Jesus Christ Ripley,’ one of the pilots flared, ‘nobody mentioned anything about Obsiduranium being on this mission.’
‘That’s because there isn’t supposed to be any,’ the mission commander declared. ‘This culture hasn’t the means or resources to manufacture such material, it has been stolen. Analyse the Obsiduranium Ripley, we’re on the way.’
‘Roger,’ said Ripley, giving his AI a few seconds to report. ‘Analysis complete.’
‘What state is it in?’ she asked.
‘It’s dormant ma’am.’
‘So make the attack and keep it that way. I don’t want them activating that catalyst with a power source. We could have a micro singularity if we’re not careful.’
‘Orders ma’am...?’
‘Engage the target, Ripley.’ The commander said obstinately, ‘you have back up. Confirm. Our Jackal has her in range. Don’t let them wire up a power source to that catalyst.’
‘Copy,’ he grunted incongruously. ‘Resume the assault. We’re going in.’
Ace Ripley. said the AI, pensively. If that thing has a timer…it’ll only take a minute for ZPE conversion rates to…
‘I know,’ he growled, ‘but, we are near an Amorian Lagrange point, confirmed?’
Correct.
‘Stay on course. We’ll be fine.’ Ace decided. ‘They won’t be able to harvest vacuum energy in this locality, not unless they hook up a power source.’
As you wish, the AI responded.
*
The nanomes had managed to shift The Cereno’s power flow, charging up the actuators once more. No sooner had the systems come online did The Cereno take another battering explosive missile to the shields. Rynal gasped in his suit as the whole ship vibrated. He opened the airlock and faced the glistening vastness of the engulfing nebula. Below him floated the Obsiduranium core, a large black elongated diamond roughly thirty meters in diameter. As the neon flames emerged from the thrusters, he made his leap away from the starnavis, down towards the ejected catalyst.
Sixteen metres, his suit informed.
Rynal saw washes and snaps of garish lightning reach from the far vacuum of space. Although he couldn’t see them he knew the masers from the approaching Arrowheads had trained their targets on him. But considering the distances, he was still a small and difficult target for now.
Ten metres.
His own shallow breaths rasped through the helmet as he kept his arms outreached for the catalyst. Rynal spun into a slow forward roll, catching a glimpse of The Cereno as he did. It was covering a good distance now, leaving a long exhaust stream of radium dust particles in its wake.
Three metres.
Rynal planted his feet onto the catalyst’s work-path platform, solenoid boots pulled in towards the device’s walkways. His motions were gradual, each step a desperate effort as he moved as quickly as possible to the device’s power nodes on the other side; a man in slow motion, fighting the static pressures of space.
New target, power nodes are six metres, his suit updated, the visor now projecting a logical path for him to follow. He saw his own shadow stretch across the surface of the catalyst as a salvo of missiles raced after The Cereno, passing silently overhead until their expanding vapour streams carried dull vibrations raining over Rynal’s suit. He ran across the black spherical device, chasing the walkways, gasping breaths isolated within the dense helmet, the only audibility in the silence of the glistening nebula.
‘Rynal...I can’t take too many more of these. W
e’re spent on stern chasers.’
‘Don’t worry Osmond. It’s almost over.’
‘Our enemy is expeditious. There’s a Jackal making a very quick advance. They’re arming long range Rail-Velociter.’
‘Calibrate your magnetosphere; break up the concentrated photons of maser-fire. Once the Catalyst is active those Rail-Velociter won’t be able to hit you.’
Rynal reached the power node, opening the device’s delicate circuits. Finally he found what he was looking for and stared wistfully at the voltage warning.
Untwisting the glove on his left arm first, he removed it and two jets of air sprayed into the blackness of space from his sleeves as his suit deflated. The pressure leak detection activated an emergency seal, constricting the intelligent fibres around Rynal’s forearms and locking in the air pressure. Rynal removed the other glove, leaving it to spin aimlessly into space, and the suit tightened around his arms to seal off the leak.
Exposed in the vacuum the veins on his pale hands fattened. They were fitted into specialised conversion gloves he’d picked up from the cargo hold, covering his finger tips and parts of his palms. The gauntlets were specific for most nanome to energy conversions, a crucial tool for nanome engineers and, especially now, for him.
Chaos Cipher Page 3