The tunnel widened into a maze of columns bridging a narrow space between the roof and ceiling, while to either side the walls fell away. Ziva wove between them, darting this way and that, flipping sideways to use the main engines for each sudden change of direction, pulling the
Omerta
’s missiles into detonating on the columns behind her. This deep inside the Cave she was starting to get her sensors back, even if they hazed with static every time the pulsar beam swept past. Pieces of debris tumbled across her path. She shot the columns as she wove between them, leaving an impossible maze for the Anaconda behind her, and turned her own fusion drive up to a full gravity, accelerating away. The
Omerta
lit its own engine too, blasting its way through her wake, vaporising pieces of half-molten stone as they tumbled across its path, ramming through the cavern columns with sheer brute force. She was taking a hammering though, more and more debris crashing into her shields.
Come on, come on!
The more Ziva drove the Anaconda to keep up, the more damage it would take. A Fer-de-Lance was as nimble as the Sidewinders chasing after her. An Anaconda handled more in the manner of a brick.
The
Omerta
slowly fell back as Ziva guided the
Dragon Queen
into one of the winding tunnels at the far end of the cavern. She had no idea where it went, but she was starting to get an idea of how deep they must be from how badly her displays speckled with each sweep of the pulsar outsi—
Without warning
Dragon Queen
flipped over, pointing her back the way she’d come, and what felt like fifty gravities slammed into her back. The wail of the collision warnings turned to a howl. The needles came again. Ziva felt them as she lost consciousness for a moment and then was jolted back by the hard rush of noradrenaline injected straight into her heart. Safety warnings flashed everywhere and the Fer-de-Lance’s engines were on maximum burn. She could see the three Sidewinders suddenly racing towards her. She wanted to shoot at them but she couldn’t even think, never mind move.
The Sidewinders had turned back and were on full burn too, trying to stop, spraying plasma all over the remnants of her shields. It would have been the easiest thing, if she could have moved, to have shot them.
She passed out for a second time. When she came back, the acceleration was down to a bearable five gravities and one of the Sidewinders was behind her again.
‘What the hell was—?’
An explosion a little further down the tunnel answered her question as the Sidewinder behind her, still decelerating furiously, hit the dead-end wall of the tunnel and disintegrated in a flare of plasma.
With the
Omerta
still coming, somewhere ahead of her now.
They’d passed other tunnels, hadn’t they?
Shit.
The first of the two surviving Sidewinders reminded her it was there by being stupid enough to shoot at her. She lit it up with the
Dragon Queen
’s main laser and it disintegrated. The second Sidewinder was already tearing back the way it had come. Ziva let it go. She wasn’t in any great hurry to come nose to nose with the
Omerta
.
‘Find me another way out,’ she said. ‘And give me a damage assessment on the Anaconda.’
The
Dragon Queen
offered a sequence of blurry images taken as the two ships had passed one another. The aft quarter of the
Omerta
looked like it had taken multiple hits hard enough to burn through its armour and hurt whatever was underneath, hopefully the engines. The mouth of the hangar bay was a ruin and the ship’s hull beneath had been split open. She must have hit one of the Sidewinders before it got out, or else a warhead had detonated inside, scoured the hangar and ripped the Anaconda right open. A deep wound – but they were tough bastards.
For a moment she almost passed out again. She’d no idea why. They weren’t even accelerating. Just a shimmer and a roaring in her head. Then she looked at what the
Dragon Queen
had pumped into her to keep her alive and conscious through that last deceleration.
‘You can’t keep doing that, you know,’ she whispered.
Twelve gravity turn in a tight cavern. Before Jenny had passed out, she’d told Ravindra that they were about to run out of countermeasures. Thirteen gravity turn in a tight, induction-formed rock tunnel. Before Orla had passed out, she had slaved all the weapons systems to Ravindra. The beam and pulse lasers were just point defence weapons now. The missiles fired on her voice command. Between the rear of her ship and the front of the corvette was an ongoing storm of explosions as each ship fired and their point defences subsequently destroyed the missiles from the other ship, but only one needed to get through to cause real damage. Each explosion triggered sprays of molten rock and iron ore. The military lasers punched through the explosive storm, time and time again, though Ravindra could see that their laser was close to overheating. The corvette was getting the worst of it. They were moving at speeds that had it flying through the ongoing explosions and molten sprays, but it was more heavily armoured than the
Song
and it just kept emerging out of the violence, spinning to spread out the damage. Meanwhile, its military laser was cutting up the rear of the
Song
. The tunnels were so tight that the only real evasive manoeuvre Ravindra had was to spin her ship also. Ravindra was pretty sure that the remaining Sidewinder was behind the corvette, which at least meant that it couldn’t fire on her. The main advantage she had was that she’d had time to map the area.
The walls of the tunnel fell away and they were in a wide but low cavern interspersed with floor-to-ceiling columns of rock. The Sidewinder spun out from behind the cutter and launched missiles and started firing its beam laser. Without any more countermeasures, even the beam laser would start to do significant damage. More missiles meant more work for the already close-to-overheating pulse and beam laser batteries. They were nearly overwhelmed.
A right-hand gentle bank took them out across the flat cavern floor. Light shone through holes in the cavern like moonlight through gaps in thick tree canopy, playing across the stone as the planetoid slowly tumbled. The
Song
was so close to the cavern floor that Ravindra felt like she was piloting a ground-effects vehicle.
Here the size of the Sidewinder worked in the fighter’s favour. A burn from its fusion torch lit up the cavern. It could almost fit sideways between the floor and the ceiling as it banked hard one way and then the other, weaving in and out between the columns. The corvette was acting as point defence support for the smaller craft as the Sidewinder closed, taking out the missiles that the
Song
fired from its rapidly diminishing supply.
Waves of force from multiple warhead explosions buffeted the
Song
. Ravindra’s heart lurched when she felt her control of the ship drop out for a moment. Then an impact. It took her a moment to realise that she had scraped the roof. She instructed the
Song
to inject the battered bodies of Orla and Jenny with yet another stim. She hoped they didn’t have a heart attack before they had time to die in a dogfight.
‘Wha—?’ Jenny asked. ‘Did you crash the ship?’
Ravindra fed data from their earlier mapping expedition to the autopilot and the navcomp. She told the
Song
her plan. The
Song
objected in the most strenuous way a complex expert system had, short of shutting down. Unguided warheads exploded ahead of them. They flew through a shower of molten metal and rock. Ravindra ignored the new warning icons that appeared in her vision. That was all Jenny’s problem now.
‘What the fuck?!’ Orla had a moment to scream. Perhaps it had been cruel to wake them just then.
The fusion torch, at full burn, was close to two miles long. Too late, the Sidewinder pilot realised what was happening and started to veer out of the way. The fusion torch just clipped the edge of the fighter. It was enough to turn it into a spinning pile of debris flying through the cavern, ricocheting off floor, ceiling and columns. The corvette banked as hard as it could in the tight cavern, as stone was turned to liquid in the torch’s wake. The pilot must have thought that the
Song
had just committed suicide.
It wasn’t as simple as just turning all the manoeuvring engines forward and burning hard to stop their inertia. The surroundings were too tight and they were moving too fast even for Simpson Town genes to pilot through the columns. Ravindra had slaved a glitching autopilot to a glitching navcomp and provided it with the unreliable topographical model of the cavern they’d made during their earlier reconnaissance. The autopilot did its best to steer them one way and the other whilst at the same time trying to slow forwards momentum. It almost managed.
One of the nacelles just bumped one of the columns. The column and much of the nacelle ceased to exist. The
Song of Stone
bounced away from the stone in a flat spin.
Ziva drove the
Dragon Queen
hard back up the tunnel and then waited by the first exit while she sent a reconnaissance drone ahead. The drone died on her after a few seconds when the pulsar beam swept over the Cave but the glimpse she saw looked promising. More of a fissure than a tunnel, narrow but very deep; and a little light coming in a few miles away suggested an exit to the surface. More columns and pillars of stone bridged the fissure, glassy smooth where they’d once melted in the heat.
Close to the surface suited her better than it suited the
Omerta
. It was more seat-of-the-pants flying and the Fer-de-Lance was made to fly like a fighter.
The Anaconda, when it came, was moving slowly and at a slight angle. It drifted steadily, changing its attitude now and then, still blasting aside any obstacles in the tunnel. Ziva opened up with the
Dragon Queen
’s main laser as soon as she saw the
Omerta
nosing around the corner. She gave it a second of sustained fire, enough to scorch off its armoured nose, and then darted for the fissure before the
Omerta
could fire back. Sniping like this, maybe she could take the behemoth after all. On the off-chance it would make a difference, she left a scattering of contact mines drifting around the fissure entrance and powered away.
The Anaconda came slow and careful. It disappeared from view behind twists and turns until the fissure opened up and the Anaconda nosed out after her. The mines hadn’t killed it.
Too obvious, Eschel. Anyone could have seen that coming.
The last Sidewinder flitted about her, keeping on the edges of visual contact while the
Omerta
moved steadily to a position between Ziva and the surface. The sensor disruption was bad again here. Even sheltered inside the cave, the pulses every twelve and a half seconds kept resetting half her systems. The Anaconda didn’t seem to be in any hurry now. Both ships took pot-shots at each other. Ziva didn’t dare get close: when it came to lasers, the
Omerta
out-gunned her three to one. The Anaconda seemed content to stay up near the surface even though that meant its shields and sensors got more of a hammering with every sweep of the magnetar’s X-ray beam. Ziva, carefully out of sight, couldn’t work out the shift in tactics. They were putting themselves at a disadvantage up there.
Something detaching from the
Omerta
and the small plume of a rocket flared towards her. It seemed odd.
Easily dodged
, she thought.
The Sidewinder turned away and his engine flared up to full thrust, the sort of acceleration that would practically kill its pilot.
And that was when Ziva understood what the
Omerta
had launched.
E-bomb.
G-force held her in place. The
Song of Stone
, her poor, battered, wounded ship, fed data direct to her lenses. Ravindra moved her fingers a tiny little bit. She triggered the remaining manoeuvring engines, one after the other, each burn slowing their spin a tiny bit. She expected to feel the
Song
impact into rock at any moment, but it never happened. She controlled the spin, but the
Song
was almost at a complete stop, all inertia gone, half her manoeuvring engine on the ship’s port side destroyed. Ravindra had never much liked the seafaring terms adopted for space combat, but dead in the water was a good way of describing their position. The corvette was on the other side of the cavern. The corvette’s pilot had them dead. Launching their E-bomb to finish off the
Song
was just a formality now.
‘Jenny, it would really nice to be able to manoeuvre soon,’ Ravindra said.
‘Don’t fly the ship into rock then!’ a terrified Jenny screamed at her.
‘Please don’t ever do that again,’ Orla told Ravindra.
There’s not going to be an again
, Ravindra thought.
‘And we’re out of missiles.’
Then the corvette fired its E-bomb.
Ravindra did it again. The heat of the fusion torch turned most of the metal and rock in the cavern wall directly behind them into liquid. This time Ravindra didn’t bother with the glitching autopilot, though admittedly it was a much less complicated route, almost a straight burn, just a few nudges with the manoeuvring engines. Pretty much the same trajectory as the E-bomb, only in reverse.
The acceleration crushed her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Not that she
needed
to breathe. The
Dragon Queen
was keeping her alive. The acceleration had everything redlining. They shot towards the
Omerta
. She could see what the Anaconda was doing – it was flushing her out. And the
Dragon Queen
couldn’t get out of the blast area – too late for that – but maybe she could ride the blast wave, and that meant getting up speed.
There was a hole in the planetoid’s crust past the
Omerta
.
Fire the lasers
, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t speak. Under so much acceleration the weight of her own jaw kept it firmly shut.