"Yes. We can go through with the ship suit providing invisibility, or we can pretend to be one of their ships."
"It won’t work," said Jaiden. I turned to look at him. "It’s Aetheric Sight will see a cloaking field or any energy signature. You won’t lose it by turning invisible."
I nodded, and turned back to the main screen. The way we cloaked using a belt suit variant developed for small ships, didn’t disguise much beyond sight. But there were ways of making it more effective, albeit also making things more dangerous.
"Just run for it," suggested BA.
Nineteen
We ran.
The Dragon behind us fell slowly further behind. I really didn't want to have to fight it, and I was hoping it would give up. No such luck.
The red dot on the HUD vanished, and reappeared just in front of us.
In the seconds it took me to take control, fire and plasma washed across us, and something hit the shields very solidly. The guns were all linked up, and I pulled the trigger, while also pressing the torpedo launch button. Six of them fired in the time it took the pulses to hit.
And then we collided.
This close up to a live dragon which was nearly as big as our ship, was nothing short of terrifying. The freakiest thing of all was seeing the small, humanoid figure in gleaming black armour riding the dragon. He was sitting on its back, at the base of the neck, and throwing bolts of lightning at us.
Split second observation isn’t usually reliable, but I guessed the dragon was about two thirds of our length, but much bulkier, since Gunbus was quite sleek in design.
Normally, two ships of around the same size colliding tended to be fatal. But our superior shielding had saved us a number of times. And so it did now.
Shields met whatever magic was protecting the dragon, and the two ground along each other as the entire topside length of Gunbus scraped against the belly of the dragon. We boosted away, our shielding down to less than fifty percent, and speed almost gone. The hull hadn’t touched scales, but I noticed the dragon, as it turned to follow us again, seemed to be missing a claw or two from a back foot, so it must have been able to slash at us as we went past.
"Bloody Hell!" exclaimed BA.
I turned to look at her for a moment.
"Do it again!" laughed Amanda and Aleesha together, and I shot the former a glance to see if she was serious or not.
"Let's not," added Alison quickly.
I agreed with her, and brought my attention back to the dragon. I had no way of knowing if we'd done any damage or not. And it was still coming after us. The rear shields took a hit, going down around five percent, showing our adversary was still very much in business. Gunbus began accelerating again, and the shields started to regenerate.
"Jane, concentrate the turrets where the neck meets the body."
"Confirmed."
Gunbus was primarily designed for anti-fighter. She carried a lot of point defence turrets, and two larger ones, one on each side, for smaller capital ships. While I didn’t think they'd get through scales, they were what we had, and they all pointed backwards when needed to. I left it to Jane to control them, as I had other things to worry about.
I selected a fire and forget magazine for the rear missile launcher, and emptied all fifty of them as fast as they could launch. At the same time, I used my PC to select an image recognition magazine for the front missile launcher, selected the same point the guns were trying to hit as their target, and pumped them out as fast as I could as well. When each of the magazines emptied, I started the reload process.
I was going for maximum distraction. The dragon’s rider was either going to have to deal with constant hits on the magic shield, or try to take out as many as possible, or hopefully both. A hundred missiles, when you don’t know how badly they will hit, had to make any Magus pause. Or maybe not, but I had to try.
I waited for the explosions to begin. Fire and forget missiles find their own way to the target, so there was nothing at all predictable about where and when they would hit. The IR's had to loop around Gunbus before going straight in. I was hoping for chaos, and a Magus unused to it, but wasn’t counting on doing any real damage.
"He's got that look," yelled Aleesha, and those in my sightline braced themselves, guessing what was coming.
I pulled the speed slider all the way back, bringing the ship to a complete stop, and flipped us end for end, ramming the speed slider back to the stops. Gunbus powered back towards the dragon again, now spitting torpedoes every second.
I had no intention of playing chicken, but the idea was to make it appear as if I was, while spitting as much destruction as I could in the process.
More magic fire, and whatever the magus was hitting us with, reduced the front shields once again, but we were still well within safe margins, and I kept us on a ramming course. Safe with me is always a relative thing though.
"I said DON'T do it again," muttered Alison, and both twins laughed.
I didn’t need to look at Aline to know she was gritting her teeth, or BA to know there was exhilaration on her face. The twins and Jane were in my sightline, and all three looked like they were enjoying the rollercoaster ride.
"Reloaded," said Jane quietly.
"Fire the front ones off."
"Confirmed."
I was still firing torpedoes, and now another magazine of IR's began to launch.
The dragon was just a glowing mass of explosions now, some well away from the magic shield, but most hitting it. It was still coming on.
At the last second, I added front guns to the mix, and dragged us to the right.
Our shields ground against each other again, but this time I was aiming for one of the wings. So it was side shields which went down rapidly this time, and then we were past, and powering away.
When the explosions ended, the dragon was revealed to have stopped. Part of one wing was missing, and it appeared to be bleeding from several other places.
Was it regenerating? Holy crap!
I put us back on course for the jump gate. I noticed the courier was peering out at the injured dragon.
"You probably just made it angry you know."
Twenty
"I know," I said.
"They'll be waiting for us at the gate now."
"He has a point," said Amanda.
"What are we going to do about it?" asked Aleesha.
Everything shimmered for a moment.
"What was that?" asked Jane, who was now sitting at the XO's console, and no longer at the main front console.
I looked around in surprise, and saw everyone was doing the same. But my eyes came back to Jane. When Jane didn't know what was happening, shit just got real.
But where we were was familiar.
"Is this BigMother?" asked Abigail.
"Apparently," said Jane.
I’d never seen such a confused look on her face before, but she ignored me, and schematics popped up on a screen.
"Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt!"
I thought I said it, but it was Jane who actually said it, even though I thought it.
It was BigMother, but it also wasn’t. She'd started out life as a Midway class escort carrier, and eventually been sold for scrap. How pirates got hold of her, no-one knew, but I’d taken her from them, and had her restored into a Command Carrier.
She'd been pressed into service again by the Australian sector militia, her repairs fast tracked and not really what I wanted, so she could be used to repel the Midgard invasion. Which she had done.
Once the jump point into Australian space had been retaken, I’d used her as a flagship. For a long while, she'd had a Battleship and four Pocket Battleships docked underneath her.
A desperate gamble to stop the Darkness entering our space had seen her crash land upside down on an asteroid, and although we escaped what had seemed like a suicide mission, BigMother's days as a fighting ship were over, and she'd been modified to collect and carry refugees.
For the
rest of the Darkness War, I'd flown a Dreadnaught, at least until the new Titans had been completed.
But now? I felt my jaw hang loose.
"Is that a titan turret underneath?" I asked Jane.
"Yes. But not one of the ones I designed. This one is much flatter, and has six battleship turrets spaced around it."
She sounded awed. Jane awed. Wow!
But it was impressive. Her top armaments had all been replaced as they were before, using mainly cruiser turrets and missile launchers, and General Custer, our assault frigate, was once again docked in the special docking facility above and behind the bridge.
"You mean she's now a Pocket Titan Carrier?" asked BA, grinning wildly.
"Apparently," agreed Jane. "And judging by the power levels, Gunbus' power crystal is now powering BigMother. And yes, Gunbus is docked internally."
"Who moved us?" asked Aline.
Well that was the question. Probably whoever was moving us through books, was my guess.
"Doesn’t change our current problem," said Alison.
"True," said Jane, "but the Dragon is now retreating."
"Doesn’t this make things worse?" asked Alana. "This ship is probably too big for the gate."
We looked towards Jaiden, who looked like he'd been sandbagged. But he didn’t get a chance to say anything.
"I think we can help with that," said a voice from the rear.
All heads turned to find Tanith and Syrinx standing there. They made an odd pair. He was black, and I mean deep dark void black, and carrying a staff. She on the other hand was ceiling paint white. Both were magicians, but from different planets. They'd saved us from the inside of a sun going red giant, only a few days ago now, and then helped me seal away the Darkness forever. I still didn't know much about them, but was very glad to see them now.
They both walked further onto the bridge, coming to stand behind the twin's seats.
"How did you get here?" asked Amanda.
"Absolutely no idea," said Tanith. "I was asleep in my bed on your station, and woke up in the first stateroom on the next level down."
"Same," added Syrinx, "but in the second stateroom. We both felt magic being used, so came straight up here."
"What's going on?" asked Tanith.
A hollo screen popped up, showing a close up of the dragon.
"Is that a dragon?" asked Syrinx, and most of the girls laughed.
"Did you win against magic without any?" asked Tanith.
"Not exactly," I said. "More or less a draw I think."
"I don’t think the dragon would agree," Jaiden commented.
I shrugged.
"The dragon got hurt, but all the same, our shields were almost down by the time it stopped following us. For this fight, we really needed a bigger ship. I don’t know why whoever moved us did it after the damned fight, but I suspect someone is enjoying dangling us on a hook."
"I would have felt happier in BigMother," said Agatha quietly, and I had to agree with her.
BigMother facing off against a Dragon, even as she'd been before without the docked ships, using capital ship missiles as well as the ones I’d used, and it would have been a short fight, magic or no. Converting BigMother back to an exploration ship was on my list of things to do, once we deployed our shipyard. After we figured out where we were, and how hostile it was.
"I missed this ship," said Abigail, and I had too, but didn’t say it.
"How did we get here?" asked Tanith.
"Absolutely no idea," laughed Amanda.
"But probably Thirteen," added Aleesha.
"Oh," said Syrinx. "And here is?"
"Complicated," I said. "Jane will explain it later."
Or not, depending on if we had a later here.
"What do you need?"
Tanith had only met Thirteen a couple of days ago as well, but seemed to grasp he was here because he was needed.
Another hollo screen popped up, showing a tactical display of two systems. Our position was marked on one of them, and the Void Star, the ship we needed to get to, was marked on the other.
"We need to go from here to there," said Jane, "and then have a shuttle moved to dock with the Void Star and moved back."
"So you want me," said Syrinx, "to open a rift to the other system, big enough for this ship to traverse?"
"Yes," I said. "But we want to be well away from the ship, so it can't see or detect us."
She nodded.
"I presume," said Tanith, "you then want me to move a shuttle to the ship, allow it to dock, and then bring it back?"
"Confirmed," said Jane.
It was a plan, but not the whole plan. I sub-vocalized with Jane while we waited for Syrinx to do whatever she did to form a rift.
"Ready when you are," said Syrinx, about a minute later.
I nodded to her. I’d have liked us to be cloaked, but the ship suit wasn’t big enough now. BigMother was battleship length, and considerably more mass than any of them. I’d have to hope we'd be out of detection range.
In front of us, a rectangular area of grey appeared, and Jane took us straight in the middle of it. An instant later we were somewhere else, and all the stars had shifted. I brought us to a stop.
The navmap showed a single blue dot out on the edge of scanner range. Jane rose, we bid goodbye to Jaiden, ignoring his curiosity as to who we were, and the two of them left the bridge. On another popup, we watched the hangar doors open, and the shuttle drop free. It did vanish, although we could see the white dot next to us on the HUD. I nodded to Tanith.
He concentrated, slammed the base of his staff into the deck, and the white dot vanished, reappearing next to the blue dot on the navmap. We watched a cam view from the shuttle as it docked, the suit opening a hole for the airlock. Jaiden crossed from one ship to the other, and I could imagine alarms going off over there, as an external airlock cycled for no apparent reason. The airlocks closed, the shuttle undocked, and Tanith brought it back.
Jane was back within minutes, and confirmed the alarms had been triggered.
"Job done?" I asked her.
She grinned.
Just Because
Twenty One
I looked around, and found I was alone.
Good.
I'd been thinking about this for a while now as we moved through books, and obviously whoever was moving us had been monitoring my thoughts, and thought this was a good idea too.
The buildings looked a bit primitive, but it was dark, so not much more than shapes could be seen. But I knew exactly where I was, and what was about to happen, having viewed it and read it dozens of times.
Everything wrong began here.
And there was now the opportunity to right one of the worst wrongs of seven hundred years of entertainment history. In my humble opinion of course.
Now was the time to fix things. And only I could do it.
A man appeared out of the shadows. I knew almost everything about him. He was the good guy, and was about to do something both necessary and stupid, and bugger it up really badly. He wore robes, and at his side hung a sort of pipe. I knew it wasn’t a pipe, but it really did look like a pipe. With knobs on. Using it would devastate him, but not using it would be even worse. What he was about to do, couldn’t be left to stand.
I drew my long gun, checked it was on stun, and shot him.
He should have detected me, but his focus was too narrow, fixed on the doorway he was about to enter, and this was a place he considered safe. The decision he'd made was eating him up already, and so he missed my presence. There wasn’t much of a thump.
I silently called for my sword, and drew it.
Taking care not to make any sound, I entered the door I'd stopped the man from entering.
Inside, another much younger man was sleeping, younger even than I was. I could feel the energy of him as he slept, and knew he was dangerous even like this.
He was just as quick as I expected him to be, coming from sleep to full awake in an i
nstant, and his pipe came out and ignited into a laser sword, in enough time to block the down stroke of my sword.
Except it didn’t.
His sword sputtered out as mine went through it as if it wasn’t there, and cut through his neck and well into the bed below.
Magic takes many forms, and his was not up to mine in this case. Which of course was why I'd come.
I sheathed my sword, it vanished off my back, and suddenly I was somewhere else.
It was a desert in the pre-dawn, many years earlier, on a different planet. My suit shifted, giving me desert pants and a robe like jacket, with a hood. I stood there looking into the distance, and waited.
"Who are you?" asked a voice behind me.
I turned to find a middle aged woman looking at me.
"My name is not important. I'm here to give you a warning."
"What warning?"
"Return home now. And never leave it again alone."
"Why?"
I pointed the way she was headed.
"Your death lies down that path, and will trigger events which will kill millions. You must take precautions to ensure you only die of natural causes."
She looked at me strangely.
"Are you…?"
"Yes," I lied, cutting her off. "Your death is preventable, and I've come to see it done, although others would have it differently. Come, let me escort you home."
Neither of us said any more, as we backtracked her footprints. Near the entrance to her abode, I stopped. She kept walking, but turned at the entrance, and I waved to her. She waved back, and vanished inside.
My suit shifted back to my normal uniform. Once again I called for my sword and drew it, taking a two handed grip, raised high to the right side, ready to strike.
"Now," I muttered.
I appeared on a ramp with a man right in front of me, walking down. My sword cut him in half before he had time to even notice I was there. The supercilious smirk on his face stayed there.
And I was back in my bedroom on BigMother, sword still in my hand. It vanished, and I sat. The last had been yet another planet, and once again, an earlier time.
I pondered for a moment if two executions made me an assassin. Technically, I guess so. But these were books, from square and flat screens, over six hundred years old. It wasn’t real.
Crossover: It's a Jon Hunter thing. Page 7