Hegemony (8 page)

The hours had stretched.
Ulia's Flower
was not yet safe, but she had a good chance. The ship was drifting now, letting the singularity re-stabilize for an FTL transit.
Ulia's Flower
was going to aim for the near-by Yuro system; there was likely to be help there, and it was a low-stress transit from this system; there was no way they were going to wait for full singularity stabilization, and an easy transit target was going to be imperative with a not-fully-stabilized drive.

Escape for the
Ulia's Flower
was not yet certain, but the two ships chosen as victims had no chance at all. The two victim ships were still accelerating, but that was only to increase the time it would take for the raiders to match vectors with them, giving the two other ships more time to escape.

The bridge of the
Ulia's Flower
was silent, each crewmember seeking the impersonal solace of direct interface. Relief at being spared had slowly been replaced with dread at the fates of the two doomed ships. A quick conference with the captain of the
Diamond Dust,
the other escaping ship, had yielded no new answers, and to his shame, Rilk did not have the heart to contact the captains of the
Gold Mine
or the
River of Prosperity
. Neither did they contact him; there was nothing to be said.

The sensor operator's exclamation of shock had jarred everyone on the bridge. "Those self-raping bastards!"

"Report, Kiril," Rilk said, with a good measure of reproach in his voice. Sensor reports had to be clear and proper, even on a freight-liner.

"Captain, those two raiders have both reached turn-over to match vectors with the freight-liners... but they're not decelerating. They're just... they just kept accelerating."

"What?"

"They aren't decelerating for the intercept. They aren't going for a course merge."

"They're letting 'em go?" asked the communications officer, disbelief exaggerated in her voice.

"No," said Rilk, his voice flat as he realized what the vector plot showed.

The crew of
Ulia's Flower
had watched in horror as the lance-ships accelerated past the point where they would need to begin
decelerating
to match vectors with their victims, necessary to capture and loot a victim. Instead they were piling on the velocity, burning to generate slashing fast-pass intercept courses, useful only for destruction.

The death of the two freight-liners had at least been quick.
Gold Mine
had tried to surrender, sending her intent on all frequencies and even trying to change her vector to give the raider an easier window for a course merge. The raider had simply bored in, making a fast pass to within twenty thousand kilometers. The
Ulia's Flower
had trained her sensors on the distant motes of the two ship and watched, and at Rilk's command recorded with the best fidelity that the sensors crew could manage, as the raider closed in to the range at which its lasers would be able to focus perfectly, making their effects explosive. The sensors picked up the silent sparkling flashes as the raider opened fire with capital ship laser arrays, converting the freight-liner's hull metal to a plasma shockwave more destructive than any conventional explosive. It had taken less than a minute to destroy the
Gold Mine
, along with her helpless crew; the ship's reactor must have taken a hit, collapsing the singularity in a violent explosion that turned the freight-liner into expanding vapor. Then the scene had been repeated again with the
River of Prosperity
.

River of Prosperity
had not tried to surrender, but the raider pursuing it had more than enough margin of acceleration to force the intercept, and the other freight-liner had likewise died under a flail of capital-ship laser fire.

It was after the death of the two freight-liners that the nightmare for
Ulia's Flower
and her crew reached its worst. The fast passes made by the two raider had taken much less time than a course-merge would have, and now both raiders burned to change their vectors to intercept the surviving, fleeing liners.

The sheer disparity of acceleration seemed to doom the two remaining freight-liners. With their cargo holds empty, the huge cargo ships could manage about a half gee of acceleration. The raiders were averaging over four gees, and might be able to push higher than that. That was enough margin to make the 'liners' attempts at evasion meaningless.

Not that either 'liner dared to try to accelerate to escape. Feeding mass into the singularity, where it would be crushed into fusion to heat reaction mass into plasma in the ship's drive, would mean that the singularity was no longer re-stabilizing. For as long as the plasma drives ran, the ships would get no closer to being able to initiate an FTL transit.

The raiders' deadly attacks had been much faster than capture and looting would have been; it had taken the raiders less than twenty-eight hours to kill the two ships. Their vectors were highly divergent from the surviving freight-liners, but their acceleration would let them come back around quickly enough. Rilk calculated that they had less than sixty hours before the raiders reached them; that was all it would take for the raiders to kill their outbound vectors and bore in at full acceleration for a killing slash at the remaining 'liners.

"We've only got one fucking chance, Captain!" Kiril's voice was raw, half rage, half pleading. "We have to go for an FTL transit."

"The singularity is not stable enough," said Rilk, with no emotion left in his voice.

"It might work, it might. You can't know it won't."

"It won't work." N'tasa's voice was calm. She put a hand on her husband's arm and Kiril twitched at the contact, as if she had shocked him.

"It has to. It's the only chance we have. It has to work."

"The singularity is not stable enough," repeated Rilk. He was looking at Kuper, the engineer.

"It's not," said Kuper in a empty voice. His eyes were closed. He would not look at anyone in the compartment. "It's only had ninety-eight hours to stabilize. That would be enough, maybe, coming off of a normal transit, but it... the singularity is still way too unstable; the frequency variation is all over the place. It can't generate a wormhole." His voice, still quiet, grew savage. "That fucked up emergence is going to kill us!" He did not look at N'tasa, but the accusation in his voice was clear; she was the FTL navigator. She had run the parameters of the transit that had gone so wrong.

"How many hours?" asked Gala. Her eyes were red, standing out like costume makeup in a ashen face.

"A bit over two hours till the raider makes his pass. He's keeping up five gees."

"We can't evade," said Kiril. "We have to try FTL. We have to."

"
Diamond Dust
is going to try for FTL," said Rilk, almost two hours later. He had just picked up the signal, was still in the interface, though he had willed himself to speak out loud.

The raider was eight minutes from
Diamond Dust
, less than two million kilometers away and closing at four thousand KPS.

"God help them," said N'tasa.

It was easy to see it all, through the interface. The vector lines of the two ships, the raider, red, and Diamond Dust, blue, were clear and bright, heading inexorably towards a point of contact, after which there would only be one vector line, red.

"They're going for it," said Kiril. His sensors were doing double duty, a secondary sensor array was locked on the other raider, four million kilometers away; sixteen minutes away, give the closure rate. The main sensors array was watching what Rilk knew to be the last minutes of the
Diamond Dust
. Rilk tried not to think about it. He was trying not to think about anything, except the plan.

In his own mind, there was the plan. Only there; if he spoke of it, it might evaporate, like a drop of water in vacuum. A captain always has to have a plan. Was that from his training? No, his first captain had told him that, when he was a junior crewmember on his first ship.

"They've initiated FTL," said Kiril. Rilk watched the vector lines, and the telescopes that showed a grainy, tiny image of the
Diamond Dust
. It was still there.

"The wormhole failed," said N'tasa. "They can't go FTL."

"They've lost power," said Kiril, saying what his sensors had just showed to everyone plugged into the data stream.

"Their singularity collapsed," said Kuper. "They pushed it, and it shut down."

"It doesn't matter," said N'tasa, with tears in her voice.

Diamond Dust's
crew tried to escape; a dozen escape pods erupted from the ship in the seconds before the raider made its blazing closest approach. Rilk and the rest of the crew of
Ulia's Flower
watched the raider's lasers track and vaporize the escape pods, before ripping open the
Diamond Dust
, shattering her huge hull in a ripple of silent flashes of laser light and vaporized alloy. The raider swept past the expanding cloud of debris, venting laser coolant, still firing at the wreckage, tearing the largest pieces into smaller and smaller debris.

The second raider was less than eight minutes away.

"We have to try the FTL!"

"It won't work. Damn it, Kiril, it
will not
work," N'tasa's voice was less than calm now. Rilk wondered if she was upset about her impending death or about her husband's loss of composure.

"We're going to..." Rilk tried to find his voice. He had given so many orders, routine orders, here. Now was a hell of a time to stumble his words. "We are not going to try the FTL. We are going to try something, though. We've got a shot at this."

Kiril was still saying that the FTL had to work, had to. Rilk ignored him.

"I want the lasers ready. Don't open fire yet; we can't do much to that bastard with them, but they can blind some of his sensors."

"That won't be enough," said N'tasa. Rilk wished Kiril was... wasn't losing it. He'd have the best insight on what sort of effect the lasers would have against military sensors.

"You're right," said Rilk. "It won't be enough, and it won't be all. The raider is five minutes outbound, and he's coming in at more than four thousand kilometers per second. That is very fast. Too fast. He will have a very limited time to shoot at us. They've used large laser arrays so far; no missiles, no interceptors."

"Who'd waste warheads on us?" said Kuper, with an edge in his voice.

"Just as well that they don't. Wait for it. Damn it all, wait for it."

"Wait for what?"

"Not now!" said Rilk, trying to ignore everything except the interface, the data stream. He had to start... right now.

"What are you doing?" said Kuper.

"He's running the cargo-mover," said Gala.

"It's too late to dump cargo. We can't vector away."

"It's a shield," said Rilk. "The ore will disperse, but for a while it's going to make a shield for us. He's going to have to fire through the ore. Now, as soon as he starts firing, lase him back. Blind him. He'll have to compensate at the last moment. He might not have time to adjust for the blinding laser. And stand by for acceleration. I'm going to try to keep the ore cloud between us and him as he passes."

"It won't work," said Kiril.
"Shut the fuck
up
!" said Gala, yelling the last word.

Two minutes. A single minute. No time at all.

The inbound ship was clearly visible, a dark spindle of metal and composites with a halo of plasma thrust streaming behind it. The telescopes could see the shape of it, narrow and lean, studded with weapons and radiator spines and sensors. More than four thousand kilometers closer every second.

A dorsal weapons mount suddenly flared to life, and tons of ore dust became incandescent as an anti-ship laser burned into it. The hull of the
Ulia's Flower
creaked and groaned with the energy that leaked though the expanding cloud of ore. Warning lights flashed.

Her own small lasers fired back, trying to blanket the raider's sensors with searing light, trying to blind the raider. The 'liner suddenly rang and boomed as thermal shock ruptured a hull frame. The surface of the hull was vaporizing, melting under the raider's beam, but the ore cloud prevented the full force of the laser from striking, keeping the beam from focusing precisely on the
Ulia's Flower
with a shattering thermal shock.

The 'liner's drives lit and thundered, pushing at emergency-maximum power, more than half a gee, as Rilk flew the giant ship to keep the cloud of ore between himself and the raider.

The raider seemed to be firing forever, venting a trail of laser coolant into space to dump the enormous waste heat of its laser, but keeping the beam on the 'liner. More sections of hull failed. A pressurized crew area blew out with a puff of air, venting some of his crew into vacuum, to be instantly turned into vaporized carbon and water vapor by the laser energy that was lashing the freight-liner. Laser energy was
cooking
the 'liner, destroying sensors and the 'liner's own laser arrays, surrounding the ship in a cloud of vaporized metal.