Not that there was any point.
The Anaconda’s own lasers were finding her. Stripping away the last of her shields, starting to bite into her ablative armour again.
The
Dragon Queen
aimed itself for the hole out into space. Out towards the bright white light of Jackson’s pulsar. No shields left. The beam, when it crossed the Cave again, would scramble everything; but she was screaming towards the
Omerta
and wasn’t going to get that far. The last of the Fer-de-Lance’s shields failed. The
Omerta
’s lasers flayed her hull. Ziva could see the metal turning to vapour, the outer wrap of ceramic foam armour ablating away.
For an instant the crippling acceleration stopped and the
Dragon Queen
flipped around. Ziva had a half-second. It was enough to thumb the safety cap off her own energy bomb and then she was staring back down into the fissure. The Anaconda was almost directly astern, the
Dragon Queen
’s fusion plume stretched out between them. At least the plume blocked those fucking lasers. The spark of the
Omerta
’s E-bomb was dead ahead of her now.
The bomb flashed. Blinding white. Ziva felt the engines kick in again, slamming into her back, trying to slow her down as her ship hurtled backwards towards the Anaconda and the hole in the cavern roof. The
Dragon Queen
’s canopy turned black but she could still see the light of the E-bomb as it went off. She tried to speak. How close was the
Omerta
now? Close. Must be.
She let her finger fall and dropped her own bomb.
It was a gamble. Ravindra was vaguely aware of Orla firing the lasers at the corvette. They couldn’t trust a proximity detonation from the E-bomb, so that left impact or timed. Ravindra was aware of – rather than saw – the corvette’s E-bomb flashing by. She knew she was going to be caught in the blast radius, but the crew of the corvette wouldn’t expect her to fly into the explosion. The question was, how much distance could she put between it and the
Song
?
She saw the corvette turn and run as Orla hit it with shot after shot from the laser. She was aware that the planetoid was shaking. Light, energy and heat was leaking through from somewhere else. She didn’t understand that – the corvette's E-bomb hadn’t even detonated yet …
The cave filled with lightning. Energy connected matter. Everything turned to light and force. The
Song of Stone
was engulfed.
The
Dragon Queen
shot past the
Omerta
and out of the hole in the surface. It burst into the empty space between the Cave and Jackson’s pulsar, a long fusion tail streaming ahead of it. Alarms went off everywhere. They were out in the raw strength of the magnetar’s field now, unshielded by the metal-rich planetoid. Containment failure warnings flew up. The magnetics of the power plant and the drives, holding back all that fusion-heated plasma, were being warped to breaking point from a million miles away.
The pulsar’s beam swept across the
Dragon Queen
and everything went dead for an instant. The acceleration didn’t stop and she was still alive. That was all she knew.
The planetoid surface below erupted. Two E-bombs. Two anti-matter charges as big as a man’s fist. Through the
Dragon Queen
’s blacked-out canopy, through her closed eyes, the light still overloaded her Fresnels. For a moment she was blind. The radiation blast would kill her more slowly, not that it was any worse than the pulsar’s beam. Without her ship’s shields it
would
kill her. Was just going to take a little time that was all.
Abruptly the acceleration stopped. She was adrift in open space, still floating away from the Cave.
‘The plasma containment is about to fail.’ The
Dragon Queen
sounded almost apologetic. ‘The core is shutting down.’
‘No. Inject the anti-hydrogen.’
‘Captain, the safety requirements for the use of …’
‘Override the fucking protocols.’ She was a mess. She’d probably pass out from sheer pain as soon as the
Dragon Queen
stopped flooding her system with endorphins and repair nanites. ‘Inject the bloody anti-hydrogen. Keep the engines running until we get back into the Cave. Or until we explode.’ There was a monstrous hole in the Cave now where the fissure had been. No sign of the
Omerta
. But the ship couldn’t have survived that, not in a confined space. Nothing could have survived that. Nothing.
She felt acceleration kick in, much more gentle this time. Erratic. The eking out of a last few minutes of the power plant’s life.
‘Hey, En,’ she whispered to nothing. ‘I’m sorry.’
The pulsar’s beam swept over her yet again, crashing all her displays. She turned her head to look at it, at the pale white light of it.
White light. Heaven?
Battered upwards, move fingers slightly, manoeuvring engines force the ship downwards. Buffeted downwards, do the opposite. Repeat. There was more room to manoeuvre now there was significantly less rock. Of course, that didn’t really do justice to the fact that the force of the buffeting was threatening to tear apart a spacecraft whose hull was now mostly liquid with lightning playing over it. Nor that lightning was playing all across the controls in the bridge blowing one system after another. Another explosion shook the
Song
as the military laser died. Somehow the damage seemed reasonable to Ravindra. They had flown into an E-bomb. They had gotten off lightly.
They came out of the explosion pulling clouds of energised gases with them. They were in a glowing, flowing, molten cave, racing the explosion. Even if the navcomp had been working, their map wouldn’t have helped them. The terrain was significantly changed now.
There was one way out. The corvette was taking it. Ravindra followed as the stone behind her was turned to gas.
No sensors. Life support was down. Optics were down. Ravindra was flying by sight alone. Damage control was down. The bridge was filling with smoke. Orla was screaming. The panel in front of Orla was on fire but her acceleration couch was holding her in place so she had to sit there and burn. What Ravindra had was engines – and
some
manoeuvrability.
She caught sight of the corvette and fired. Nothing happened. Then she remembered the military laser was gone. The corvette disappeared around a bend in the stone tunnel. Ravindra moved her fingers, she found the manoeuvring engine she wanted wasn’t working and attempted to compensate. She scraped the ship off the wall.
Jenny somehow managed to get the bridge damage control to work. The extinguishers put out the fire currently cooking Orla’s legs.
Ravindra saw the corvette again. Its still-working military laser started punching hole after hole in the
Song
’s armour. Ravindra triggered the beam laser. Nothing happened.
Orla slumped in her seat. Her couch was working enough to inject her with massive amounts of painkiller and sedative.
Hit after hit into the front of the
Song
. It was just a matter time now. The military laser would take them apart. Ravindra tried firing the pulse laser. A red light reached out to hit the back of the corvette just before it disappeared around another bend in the tunnel.
Ravindra smiled. She was in a ship with no sensors, limited handling and only a pulse laser. It reminded her of her old Cobra Mk. II.
‘We’ve had it?’ Jenny asked.
‘Yes.’ Ravindra manoeuvred around the bend. She saw the corvette’s forward manoeuvring engines burn as the other ship tried to bleed off inertia, slowing down so it didn’t lose the
Song
. They traded laser fire, their stocks of missiles and countermeasures exhausted.
There’s no shame in this
, Ravindra thought. They’d fought a good fight, won more than they should have. They were moments away from being spinning wreckage in the narrow, bending tunnel.
Except there was Dane’s most important law.
Never give up
.
Ravindra started rolling the
Song
in the narrow confines of the twisting tunnel. Some of the laser fire from the corvette missed, and the rest of the hits were distributed across the ship. She hit the corvette time and time again with the underpowered pulse laser. Ahead, she knew that the tunnel split. One tunnel led to a cavern, smaller than Jackson’s Hole, but it led out of the Cave. The other took you deeper into the tunnel complex. She would take that, hide, and see what they could do with the ship before they were found.
The corvette took the branch that led to the cavern and out of the Cave. Ahead of them there was light. Ravindra couldn’t understand this. And then thousands of tonnes of molten rock and metal flowed into the tunnel that the corvette had taken, engulfing that ship. It flowed into the main tunnel. Ravindra pulled up hard. The
Song
shuddered as her belly just brushed the molten rock and then she took the other tunnel deeper into the Cave.
Ziva was staring at the pulsar, dazed by its eerie beauty, the arcs and coronas of light flickering in shapes and patterns defined by the crushing power of its gravity and magnetism and the brilliance of its beam, spinning with impossible speed, raking the distant stars and then coming back to murder her little by little. And then she was staring into darkness, the dim glow of molten orange stone. She must have passed out again. The
Dragon Queen
had given her that respite. Too little chance of survival. Yet here they were. In shelter again.
‘System test,’ she whispered. She wasn’t going to like the answer.
‘All primary systems functional,’ answered the
Dragon Queen
. ‘Life support is green. Hull integrity is amber. There is loss of pressure. The cockpit is sealed. Power is red. Emergency power is operational. Drives all green. Shields are red …’ The list went on but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if everything across the whole ship still worked if she had no power. They were running on batteries. Enough to keep the life support systems running for a month, that was mandatory, but not enough to run the magnetics she’d need to get the main drive back on line, not enough to jump. Barely enough to fire the X-ray lasers.
‘K-cast?’ she asked. ‘Long-range comms?’
‘Non-operational.’
Dead in the water. And fuck-all chance of anyone picking up her distress beacon, nestled up this close to a pulsar. ‘How long have I got to live?’ She asked.
‘Unknown. There has been extensive radiation damage. Between two and three days. Reversible provided we reach a competent medical facility within forty hours.’
‘And our chances of doing that?’
‘Manual repair of the plasma containment chamber is required.’
Ziva tried not to laugh. ‘Manual repair. On a Fer-de-Lance? You want me to get out there in a space suit and fix it?’
The
Dragon Queen
didn’t answer.
The
Omerta
was gone. With it the Veil who’d shot Aisha and so casually torn her life to pieces. Maybe Khanguire was still out there, maybe not. Maybe the corvette had got her. The
Dragon Queen
had killed a Veil, though. So that was something. The biggest bounty there was.
Ziva shunted what power she had to the laser and slaved it to her Fresnels. She could always shunt it back out again if she needed it for something else. ‘Did En leave a message when she called?’ She wished she’d taken it now. One last goodbye.
‘Yes.’
‘Play it.’
The video was broken up beyond hope. The sound popped and crackled. ‘I suppose you’re busy like you always are.’ En sounded horribly distant. ‘Ay’s going to be fine. I thought you’d want to know. They’ve got her in regeneration for a few days.’ A pause. ‘I love you, Ziv. But I think it’s best if you stay away a while. Take care of yourself.’
The
Dragon Queen
was down to its last salvo of drones. She had them rotated into place and ran system tests. To her amazement they still worked.
She continued to drift.
‘What state are we in?’ Ravindra asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jenny said sarcastically. ‘Because this,’ she knocked on her control panel, ‘is pretty much an inert piece of moulded composites, ceramics, hardened plastic and metal. That said, if I was forced to guess, I’d say the ship’s fucked.’
Orla was still sedated.
‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought. We’ve got power and drive and that’s only because the Imperials keep things so heavily shielded.’
‘Can we jump?’ Jenny asked. ‘Everything’s all right if we can jump.’
‘Yes, we can jump. What we can’t do is navigate.’
Ravindra turned in her couch to look at Jenny.
‘Those burns look bad.’
‘They’re not fun, but let’s sort out Orla first.’
‘Whatever happens, I’m glad we got you back.’
Jenny nodded, smiling.
‘Why’d we fight?’
‘I needed to distract them from going after Ji, and give him time to get away. I discussed it with Orla and she agreed. I’m sorry. I damned you.’
Jenny gave this some thought.
‘None of us had any illusions.’
The
Song
risked a shade-side external hop across the surface of the Cave. The glowing cavern acted as a beacon. As they sank into the cavern they saw rock and iron flowing like liquid. The already-hot rock of the inductively-unstable planetoid prevented the cold vacuum from hardening the molten rock quickly. It was like sinking into the basin of huge waterfall of lava. In places harder rock had cooled enough to solidify.
It was only then that Ravindra worked out what had happened. Someone had dropped two E-bombs. The first had melted everything. The second had created a blast wave that flushed the molten rock through the tunnel systems and caught the corvette. The
Song
, and its crew, had been very lucky.
Orla was still out cold.
The Fer-de-Lance was a point of darkness against the backdrop of glowing lava. She was drifting. Ravindra couldn’t tell whether it was dead or not but it looked mostly intact. Ravindra triggered the manoeuvring engines and slowly moved towards the bounty hunter’s ship. It looked like it had been through hell. Most of its armour had been stripped, and laser scars and other more extensive energy burning had blackened most of the ship’s hull.