Breaking Point

by David Alastair Hayden

  Kaleeb’s lasers opened up on them as he continued to dodge the Outworld Ranger’s plasma shots. Silky pumped as much power as possible into the shuttle’s engines, even at the risk of burning them out.

  “Hard right!”

  Mitsuki jerked the control stick, and the shuttle swerved. Vega’s shot sailed wide. If not for his need to evade plasma bolts, which were increasing in frequency and intensity, there was no way he would’ve missed.

  “What the hell are they doing?" Siv asked. “Those plasma shots are insane!”

  “Being clever, sir. They're siphoning power from the overloaded fusion core and pumping it into the quad plasma cannon. They’re delaying the inevitable and buying a few more minutes to give Oona a chance to fix the mess she’s made.”

  “How long can the cannon continue firing like that?” Tamzin asked.

  “It will burn out soon.” To Siv alone, he said, "In the meantime, we can enjoy the light show and the jig it's making Vega dance."

  The Outworld Ranger’s plasma cannon scored several solid hits on the infiltrator as it followed them toward the sixth moon.

  Unfortunately, this starkat and pony show had attracted a lot of attention. Most worrying was that of the Thousand Worlders who had adjusted the course of their small fleet so that they'd arrive at the sixth moon roughly twenty-two minutes after the shuttle crashed.

  They were so screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.

  "Dammit!" Mitsuki shouted, pounding both fists into the piloting console. "Controls are out. I'm done here. We're lined up for the moon but…" She pounded a fist into a palm to illustrate the result she expected.

  “Can we can bail under antigrav once we enter the atmosphere?” Siv asked.

  "Possibly and dangerously, sir. I'll let you know if it's an option. Hey, Batwings, if you'd be so kind as to not pound the piloting console to dust, you'll find a bright orange emergency landing button on its lower left side. Pressing it will enable the ship to land us using telemetry I provided to a dedicated thruster control module. We'll strike the surface hard, but with a solid chance of survival."

  While Mitsuki reached toward the button, trillions of calculations and predictions ran through his processors as he crunched possible outcomes, particularly noting the pounding the infiltrator's force field was taking and the evasion patterns Kaleeb was using. He examined the results and made an educated guess in favor of the second most likely outcome.

  “Mits, wait! Not yet.”

  “Wouldn’t sooner be better?”

  “For the chance of a happy landing, yes? But this is the last maneuver we can suddenly make. Keep your finger on the button but only press it on my signal."

  “What the hell?" Tamzin said.

  “Explain it to her, sir, I’m busy.”

  “Too busy to talk?” Siv chuckled. “Sure, that’s why.”

  While Siv explained the obvious, Silky ran calculations at a furious pace, trying every variable he could imagine. The results kept coming out the same with no new options for making things better.

  Silky reduced his simulations capacity by one percent and opened up a channel to the Solace. Master Oktara had been trying to contact him for several minutes.

  Oktara is proud and not easily swayed, he told himself. Tamp down the sarcasm, be diplomatic. Long ago, he had subroutines to help with such things. Maybe he should restore those from his factory settings for occasions such as this…

  The voltage pulse that he thought of as a smile ricocheted through him.

  "Master Oktara, I'm sorry for the delay. We've had more going on than even I can manage. What can I—”

  “I would like to know what the hell is going on! This situation does not look anything like what we discussed. I am not taking on a fleet from the Empire of a Thousand Worlds.”

  “Nothing in our agreement has changed. You don’t need to fight the Thousand Worlders."

  "You are on course to crash-land on the planet's sixth moon. If I take the time to stop and send down a rescue party, the Thousand Worlders will catch up, and I will have no choice but to fight them. My ship can withstand a lot of firepower now that it's fully functional again, but not that much."

  What irritated Silky most was that the man wasn’t wrong. It was hard to argue with someone who was logical and correct.

  “We agreed to an exchange, Master Oktara.”

  "Your own light cruiser jumped halfway into the system. How I have no idea, but if they can do that, then surely they can rescue you."

  “You would think so.”

  “Please, Master Silky, release me from your request, give me the rest of the information you have for us, and let us safely go on our way.”

  Master Silky…that had a nice ring to it.

  “I’m sure you’ve noticed how badly damaged the Outworld Ranger is after that jump, that its fusion drive is overloading, and that it’s speeding out of control. It’s quite possible they won’t be around five minutes from now.”

  “What are you proposing that I do? You know I cannot hold out against this enemy.”

  Immediately, he thought of a few harebrained schemes that would give the Solace a decent enough chance of taking on the Thousand Worlders and surviving just long enough to get the job done. But there was no way Oktara was going to agree to even the tamest of the schemes he had in mind. There was only one thing he could ask to which Oktara might agree.

  “Here’s what I humbly propose. Let’s assume the Outworld Ranger survives and rescues us and can slip off that moon despite the Thousand Worlds fleet…”

  “That is quite the assumption.”

  “Yes…well…if that happens, we will still need help escaping the system.”

  “I will not—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Silky snapped. “Bear with me here.”

  “Go on,” Oktara replied, irritation tainting his tone.

  “All I ask is that you maintain your cloak, swing around the planet, and return to our agreed upon rendezvous point, or very near it anyway.”

  “To what end?”

  “The Outworld Ranger is heavily damaged, its shields are shot, the plasma cannon will soon be gone. Even if we can get off that moon, we don’t stand a chance of escaping the system without your help. And before you say it, I’m not asking you to fight the Thousand Worlders.”

  “That fleet will still be there.”

  “Here’s what I want. Let us match our speed to yours and clamp onto the belly of the Solace. Your shields and cloaking will give us a chance to escape. You will catch fire along the way, but nothing you cannot handle.”

  “I do not—”

  “Look, Master Oktara, I am going to give you the information I found in good faith. Swing around the planet and give us a chance. If we can’t get into a position where we can clamp onto your hull, then you can keep going on. No hard feelings.”

  Oktara took several labored breaths. “I am promising nothing, Master Silky.” He sighed heavily. “But we will try.”

  “I can ask for nothing more. Thank you, Master Oktara.”

  “Regardless, know that I appreciate all that you have done for my people. I can never thank you enough.”

  Yet you still want to turn your back on us. Silky restrained himself from pointing that out, in excruciating detail and in long sentences punctuated with expletives.

  “You will be forever in our prayers and an integral part of our history.”

  Great, pompous asses will celebrate me. If he’d had eyes, Silky would have rolled them.

  “I beamed the information I found to you.”

  “I appreciate you not holding that over us.”

  Silky had considered holding it out, and he wanted to. Maybe he should. He understood why the Benevolence hadn't told them, but he appreciated the situation Master Oktara was in. Silky, perhaps too human now, couldn’t hide it from them. They had a right to know the truth.

  The question now was how would Oktara react when he learned the truth? And would he be willing to
take a huge risk to save the only chippy who could help him figure out the rest of their history? Silky ran his human behavior probability equations. The result was basically a coin toss. Based on the odds they’d survived on for the last two weeks, that practically sounded like a guarantee.

  The ScanField-3 lit up as the strange interference patterns around the Outworld Ranger surged in strength.

  The Outworld Ranger released an awe-inspiring barrage of mega-bolts right as Kaleeb lined up another shot. Silky carefully analyzed Kaleeb’s flight pattern and the buildup of energy in his infiltrator’s dual-laser cannon.

  "Now, Wings!” Silky shouted.

  She pressed the button, and the ship turned sharply. Their dodge spared them from a direct hit, but Kaleeb's point-blank laser blast scorched across the shuttle’s starboard hull, opening a meter-long, half-meter-wide wound.

  49

  Silky

  The transport shuttle’s sad excuse for a plasma window containment system failed to seal the breach in its starboard side. With a fierce howl, the remaining atmosphere vented out into space.

  Clothing snapped. Equipment rattled. The straps holding them into their seats creaked. The tubes leading from the ceiling to the oxygens masks threatened to tear loose.

  One of the seat cushions broke free and slammed into the gap in the ship's side. As it folded in on itself, the howl of vanishing atmosphere turned into a high-pitched shriek. Then, suddenly, the last of the air was gone, and silence engulfed his human companions. It didn’t matter to him, except to the extent that it mattered to Siv and Mitsuki. For him, sound was just another environmental cue to be measured and analyzed.

  Kaleeb weaved desperately through the wild scatter of plasma mega-bolts storming from the Outworld Ranger. Despite his piloting skills and the maneuverability of his infiltrator, he couldn’t avoid them all. A fiery burst knocked out his shields and slammed into his ship’s aft section. That glancing blow engulfed the infiltrator in flames and sent it spinning out of control.

  “Hell yeah!” Mitsuki shouted to everyone except poor, chippy-less Galen. “They nailed his ass!”

  A brief smile flicked across Siv’s face, and he sighed with relief. Tamzin clapped, her hands striking silently in the void. Galen’s death grip on the armrests eased for a moment. Silky saw no reason to celebrate this diamond found amidst the sewage. The next moment proved him right.

  The Outworld Ranger’s plasma cannon erupted, and Silky’s every electron winced as fire and debris spurted from the top of the light cruiser.

  “‘Nevolence!” Siv and Mitsuki both cursed, seeing the readout in their HUD’s, followed by a distant, blurry video provided by the ScanField-3.

  Siv sat upright. “Are they—”

  Kaleeb’s infiltrator exploded in a blinding white burst as its fusion core detonated. The resulting shockwave rammed into the shuttle, sending it tumbling off-course. The thrusters, guided by the automated crash-landing routine, struggled as they realigned the shuttle.

  Even Silky’s quantum processors strained to keep up with all the data pouring in at once—receiving, processing, and analyzing as fast as possible then providing a scroll of readouts to Siv and Mitsuki’s HUDs. It was, unfortunately, more than they could parse giving the situation, and so they hit him with a barrage of questions. Tamzin, too.

  “Everyone aboard the Outworld Ranger is safe and whole,” he told them. “No one sustained anything worse than minor cuts and burns, except Seneca who’s badly damaged.”

  “Will he be okay?” Siv asked.

  “All I can say, sir, is that his transponder is still online.”

  “What about the ship?”

  “Stable and operational, but the damage is extensive. The quad plasma cannon is gone. The top of the ship has suffered significant structural damage. Atmosphere’s leaking from the weapons bay and from cargo bay 1. The shields, the flak cannon, and the railgun are damaged and offline. And I’m only talking about damage from the cannon explosion. Oona’s stunt did far more, though less obvious, harm to my…our ship.”

  Gav detected the worry from the others, but Siv gave him a thumbs-up along with a pat on the shoulder, and mouthed, “The girls are okay.”

  “There is good news. The fusion drive has powered down to normal. The excess heat dissipated in a wave of strange blue flames. The twin ion engines cooled and returned to normal maximum burn. Full control of the ship was restored to the AI and bridge command. Plus, the interference that prevented me from contacting them vanished.”

  Siv breathed a massive sigh of relief and mouthed to Galen, "Oona did it. The Outworld Ranger's no longer in danger of blowing up."

  It took three attempts for Galen to understand, but once he did, tears streamed from his eyes as he clasped his hands together and shook them vigorously. As if they were somehow safe now. The overloading fusion drive wasn’t going to destroy his ship anymore. But the Thousand Worlders could still finish the job any minute.

  “I've already conveyed your well wishes and gratitude to the others,” Silky told them, heading off the statement Siv began to prepare. “Forgive me for taking the liberty.”

  “And Kaleeb?” Mitsuki asked. “Is he dead? For real this time?”

  “As far as I know, yes. But I can’t detect any trace of him or the sky-blade on a level-five scan, not with all the interference from these explosions, so…I have no idea. The important thing is that he no longer poses a—”

  A strange blip of static registered on the scan…once…twice…a third time. Each time it grew weaker. He couldn't identify the source, but there was definitely something about it that bugged him. It seemed familiar, but he could not place it. He imagined this was what it was like for a biological to have an itch they could not scratch. The signal disappeared. Not having the time or focus to properly analyze it, he followed procedure and marked it as "WOW" then filed it away.

  "Any chance we can bail on the crash routine and land this bucket in the Outworld Ranger’s loading bay instead?” Mitsuki asked.

  “Not a chance, and the shuttle’s too big for that anyway.”

  Siv nodded toward the tear in the shuttle’s hull. “Didn’t you say the moon had an atmosphere?”

  "I did, sir. And entry's going to be a human roast, sir. I'm working on the proper solution as we speak."

  “Could we fly into the Solace?” Siv asked.

  “If we had the maneuverability and engines enough, yes. But I'm afraid, at this point, crashing is the only option we have."

  Silky had just given the same explanation to crew aboard the Outworld Ranger.

  He scanned and reanalyzed everything, metaphorically frowned at the WOW signal, then consulted with Artemisia and Rosie to perfect his calculations.

  The shuttle was only five minutes away from plunging into the sixth moon’s atmosphere. The air might be thin, but there was enough of it to cook anyone on the bridge upon entry.

  "Okay, team, to survive entry we need to retreat to the crew compartment. It's currently sealed, so we're going to have to hang tight through a bit of explosive decompression. Opening the door in 3…2…1."

  The door slid back, and a rush of air stormed through the bridge. The cushion in the gap collapsed in on itself and ripped free, taking with it more of the ship, the hole expanding by half a meter in every direction. It was good thing Siv had rolled that unconscious pilot down the boarding ramp when they first got on board.

  “Okay, everyone, release your seatbelt, stand, and detach the oxygen canister from the ceiling. A quick twist to the left then pull downward. Quickly! We don't have much time!”

  Siv helped Galen and Tamzin into the crew compartment then followed them in.

  Mitsuki hesitated in the piloting chair. “Do I need to do anything?”

  “It’s all automated, Wings. And we’re back on course now. All we can do is wait it out.”

  And hope.

  Once she was inside, Silky closed the door. “In the lockers to either side of the entry here, you w
ill find environmental suits. Get them on. Fast. Then take the seats near the rear exit and strap in. Hurry!”

  Siv grabbed a suit from the locker then hefted the oxygen canister in his other hand. “This might be tricky.”

  Silky loved humans but sometimes their limited knowledge was tiring. “There are magnets on the top of the canisters. Fix them to the ceiling while you dress. Then take the mask off, hold your breath, and deploy the environmental suit’s helmet.”

  “Are you sure we’ll survive the heat back here?” Tamzin asked.

  “With the environmental suits on, I believe you will be okay.”

  “And the impact?” Mitsuki asked.

  “This section is heavily armored, based on the premise that once the shuttle lands an enemy will concentrate their firepower on this section. Unless something goes wrong, you should survive. I can’t promise there won’t be injuries, though.”

  Siv finished donning the black and gray environmental suit. The armor padding was minimal, but any help they could get on impact would be worthwhile. Heat shielding was the key now. The helmets would also be useful to prevent smoke inhalation if the vessel caught fire.

  “You’re cutting a handsome look in this, sir.”

  “Bite me, Silkster.”

  “If I could I would, sir.”

  Siv helped Mitsuki who had to accommodate her wings using the one suit on the shuttle designed with wakyrans in mind.

  Meanwhile, Silky contacted the Outworld Ranger. He’d told Artemisia and Rosie everything already, but he wanted to personally reiterate everything to the humans onboard. At least there he could use the com system to speak out loud.

  "Kyralla, I provided Rosie with our expected crash-landing coordinates. Also, be on the lookout for anything…unusual. I picked up a strange frequency earlier. I've lost it now, and it could be nothing, but a lot is going on, so be careful."

  “I’ll watch for anything weird,” Tekeru said. “A little human intuition couldn’t hurt, right?”