“Kinetic missiles,” Joshua said. “What the hell are they doing?”
Bright orange explosions rippled across the rust-red polyp surface.
“Injuring it,” Sarha said with terse determination. “That kind of assault won’t destroy it, but they’ll inflict a lot of harm.
Almost as if they’re deliberately mutilating it.”
“Injuring it?” Dahybi asked. The normally composed node specialist was openly incredulous. “What for? People injure. Animals
injure. Not habitats. You can’t hurt them like you can a mammal.”
“That’s what they’re doing,” Sarha insisted.
“It does look that way,” Joshua said.
The
Maranta
’s drive came on again, followed a few seconds later by the second ship.
“They’ve seen us,” Joshua said. It had taken eight minutes, which was appallingly sloppy detection work.
Lady Mac
was over halfway towards the lifeboats. Less than twenty thousand kilometres away now. The other ships were barely five hundred
kilometres distant from the squealing beacons. “This is where it gets interesting.” He launched eight combat wasps and upped
the
Lady Mac
’s acceleration to seven gees. The drones shot ahead at twenty-five gees. An answering salvo of twelve emerged from the two
starships.
“Shit,” Joshua exclaimed. “They’re running for Aethra.”
“Clever,” Melvyn said. “We can’t use the nukes when they’re close to it.”
“No, but I can still use the gamma pulsers for offence.” He fired off a string of coded instructions to the combat wasps.
“And it may give us the time we need to pick up the lifeboats. None of their combat wasps are targeting them.” He thought
for a moment. “Sarha, broadcast a tight-beam warning to the lifeboats. Tell them to deactivate their beacons now. Anyone warped
enough to maim a habitat won’t think twice about snuffing refugees.”
The first combat-wasp conflict took place five thousand kilometres from Aethra, a ragged rosette of plasma sprawling across
six hundred kilometres. Joshua watched several attackers come through unscathed and launched another salvo of five drones,
programming three to form a defence-shield formation. The bridge’s gravity plane shifted sharply as he initiated an evasion
manoeuvre.
The children were crying with their voices and minds. Gaura broadcast a soothing harmonic in the general affinity band, adding
to the compulsion of the other adults. What I need, he thought, is someone to calm me.
The lifeboat was a sturdy cylinder ten metres long and four wide. It had no propulsion system apart from the solid-fuel booster
to fire it clear of any conceivable emergency, and reaction thrusters to hold it stable while the refugees waited for rescue.
Like all the systems on the station it was spacious and well equipped. There were eight seats, lockers with enough food for
a fortnight, and a month-long oxygen supply. For Edenists, even disasters would be inconvenient rather than dangerous.
Such arrogance, he cursed inside the confines of his own skull, such stupid blind faith in our technological prowess.
Right now there were fourteen adults and five children crammed inside. There hadn’t been time for them to reach another lifeboat.
With a hubris which hindsight revealed to be quite monstrous, the disasters which the designers anticipated had all been natural.
Even a meteorite strike would leave most of the wheel intact, and evacuation would be a calm rational process.
What had never been even a theoretical contingency was insane Adamist starships slicing the station apart with lasers.
It had all happened so fast. Now little Gatje and Haykal hugged Tiya, their mother, faces distraught as she kept them anchored.
The air was too hot, it stank of vomit. Aethra couldn’t hide its torment over the kinetic missile attack that bit deep into
its shell from the young impressionable minds. Candre’s death convulsions as she went through explosive decompression was
still causing wintry shivers along Gaura’s spine. The combined psychological stresses of the last fifteen minutes was going
to leave a trauma scar that would take a long time to heal even for the well-balanced psyche of an Edenist.
And it was all his fault. As station chief he should have taken precautions. He had known about the civil strife on Lalonde.
Yet he had done nothing.
It is not your fault,
Aethra said softly into his mind.
Who could have anticipated this?
I should have.
From the information you had, this was not predictable.
I had enough data from
Ilex
. It was chaos on the planet when they left.
These starships did not come from Lalonde. They are mercenaries, recruited elsewhere.
I could still have done something. Put people into apartments closer to the lifeboats. Something! How are Candre and the others?
I have them. But now is not a good time to begin raising my consciousness to multiplicity status.
No. And you? How are you?
I was angry, frightened. Now I feel sorrow. It is a sad universe where such wanton acts can take place.
I’m sorry we brought you into existence. You have done nothing to deserve this.
I am glad I live. And I may yet continue to live. None of the craters is more than twenty metres deep. I have lost a lot of
nutrient fluid though, and my mineral-digestion organs have been damaged from the shockwaves.
Gaura’s hand squeezed the grab hoop he was holding. Fury and helplessness were alien to him, but he felt them now with a daunting
strength.
The physical damage can be repaired. It will be repaired, never doubt that. Not as long as one Edenist remains alive.
Thank you, Gaura. You are a fine supervisor. I am privileged to have you and your staff attend the dawn of my intellect. And
one day Gatje and Haykal shall run around in my park. I will enjoy their laughter.
A solid beam of intolerable white light stabbed into the lifeboat through its one small, heavily shielded port. Space was
being devastated by another hail of fusion explosions. The children started crying again.
Through Aethra’s much-degraded perception he saw the long white fusion exhaust of the third Adamist starship decelerating
towards them. With its tremendous velocity it had to be a warship, but there had been no contact apart from the curt woman
telling them to switch off the beacon. Who were they? Who were the other two? Why had they attacked Aethra?
Not knowing was difficult for an Edenist.
You will soon be safe,
Aethra said. It widened its broadcast to include the Edenists on both lifeboats.
All of you will be safe.
Gaura met his wife’s frightened stubborn eyes.
I love you,
he said for her alone.
The blast light was fading. He looked out of the port, his mind welcoming inquisitive contacts, showing the children their
solidly real rescuer approaching.
Whoever the pilot was, he was coming very close. And moving far too fast.
Space directly outside the lifeboat was filled with the brilliant fusion exhaust. Gaura flinched, jerking back from the port.
It’s going to hit!
There were screams behind him. Then the exhaust vanished, and a huge spherical starship was a hundred metres away, small sensor
clusters sticking out of its dark silicon hull like metallized insect antenna. Its equatorial ion thrusters exhaled fountains
of sparkling blue ions, halting its minute drift.
Bloody hell!
It was a collective sentiment from the adults.
The starship rolled towards the lifeboat as though there was a solid surface below it. And its extended airlock tube was suddenly
coming round to clang against the hatch.
Gaura took a moment to recover his poise. A voidhawk would be very hard put to match that display of precision manoeuvring.
The lifeboat’s bitek processors reported the short-range inter-ship channel was picking up a transmission.
“You people in the lifeboat, as soon as the hatch opens we want you through the tube and into the lounge,” commanded the female
voice they’d heard earlier. “Make it fast! We’re running out of combat wasps and we’ve got to pick your friends up as well.”
The hatch seal popped and it swung back. Little Gatje squealed in alarm as one of the biggest cosmoniks Gaura had ever seen
floated in the airlock tube.
It’s all right,
he told his dismayed daughter.
He’s a… friend. Really.
Gatje clutched at the fabric of her mother’s suit.
Promise, Daddy?
“Shift your bastard arses through here now!” Warlow bellowed.
The children gulped into fearful silence.
Gaura couldn’t help it, after all the horror they’d been through to be greeted by such utter normality, he started to laugh.
I promise.
“Oh, Jesus, they’ve cracked it,” Joshua told the three crewmembers left on the bridge when
Lady Mac
rendezvoused with the second lifeboat. Another combat wasp was curving round over Aethra’s bulk, accelerating sharply. “I
knew they’d work out the numbers game eventually.” He fired a salvo of three drones in defence. It was a terrible ratio. One
which the
Lady Mac
could only ever lose. Three defenders was an absolute minimum to guarantee an attacker didn’t get through. If he could just
have flown evasive manoeuvres, or attacked, or been able to run, the numbers would have shifted back towards something near
favourable.
“Jesus!” The fourth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. He had to launch another three from
Lady Mac
’s diminishing reserves.
“Fifteen left,” Sarha said with morbid cheerfulness.
The starship’s maser cannons fired at a kinetic missile that was sixty kilometres away. Five nuclear-tipped submunitions exploded
perilously close to Aethra, reducing the latest attacking combat wasp to its subatomic constituents.
“Did you have to tell us that?” Melvyn said laboriously.
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“Yes. But I could always hope I was wrong.”
Joshua accessed a camera on the airlock deck. Warlow had anchored himself to a stikpad beside the airlock tube. He was grabbing
people as they came out and slinging them into the chamber. Ashly and one of the Edenist men were on a stikpad below the ceiling
hatch, catching then shoving the human projectiles up into the lounge above.
“How many more to come, Warlow?” Joshua datavised.
“Six. That makes forty-one in total.”
“Wonderful. Stand by for combat acceleration the second the airlock seals.” He sounded the audio warning so the Edenists would
know. The flight computer showed his plot of an open-ended vector heading away from Murora. At eight gees they could outrun
the other starships easily, and jump outsystem. That kind of prolonged acceleration would be tough on the Edenists (no sinecure
for the crew, either), but it was one hell of a lot better than staying here.
“Joshua, Gaura has asked me to say some of the children are very young, they can’t possibly survive high gees,” Warlow datavised.
“Their bones aren’t strong enough.”
“Jesus shit! Kids? How old? How many gees?”
“One girl was about three. There were a couple of five-year-olds as well.”
“Fuck it!”
“What is it?” Sarha asked, real concern darkening her sea-green eyes for the first time since they’d entered the Lalonde system.
“We’re not going to make it.”
The fifth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. Seven of the
Lady Mac
’s submunition drones detonated their nuclear explosives in immediate response. Joshua launched two more.
“Even if we jump without an alignment trajectory, from here, it’ll take us fifteen seconds to retract the sensors and prime
the nodes,” he said. “We’ll be blind for ten seconds. It’s not long enough.”
“So run,” Sarha said. “Fire every last combat wasp at them and go.
Lady Mac
can make eight gees even with tube one down.
Maranta
can’t make more than four gees. We can get clear.”
“That vector’s already loaded. But we’ve got kids on board. Shit! Shit! Shit!” He saw the last Edenist being yanked out of
the airlock tube by Warlow. The flight computer was shutting the hatch before his feet were fully clear.
Do something, and do it now, Joshua Calvert, he told himself. Because you’re going to be dead in twenty seconds if you don’t.
His mind ordered the flight computer to start the fusion tube ignition sequence.
Another whole two seconds to think in.
There was nothing in the tactics programs, even Dad had never dug himself a hole this deep in the shit.
Can’t run, can’t fight, can’t jump out, can’t hide…
“Oh yes I can!” he whooped.
The fusion drives came on, and the
Lady Mac
accelerated down the vector plot that sprang from Joshua’s mind even as the idea unrolled. Three gees, heading straight in
towards the gas giant.
“Joshua!” Dahybi complained. “We can’t jump if you take us inward.”
“Shut up.”
Dahybi settled back and started into a recital of a scripture he remembered from his youth. “Yes, Captain.”
“Warlow, activate the three zero-tau pods we’ve got in capsule C, and cram the children in. You’ve got four minutes maximum
before we start accelerating properly.”
“Right, Joshua.”
The sensors reported that four combat wasps were pursuing them. Joshua fired an answering salvo of five. He could hear Dahybi
muttering something that sounded like a prayer, it had the right dirge-like resonance.
“They’re coming after us,” Melvyn said a minute later.
Maranta
and its cohort were accelerating away from Aethra.
“That’s the
Gramine
,” Sarha said after studying the image. “Look at the angle its drive is deflected through. There isn’t another starship that
can do that. Wissler was always boasting about their combat agility.”