20

Dodge THIS

” Alert. Anomalous chemical thrust trace detected.”

What? Why did the Cat decide to announce this out loud? Must be something really unusual. I check the 3-D map for new visual tracks and I see it almost at once, a dot of light leaving one of the larger pursuing drive traces, just a couple of seconds ago, allowing for lightspeed lag. Spectral analysis says chemical rocket, and it's ramping up acceleration, too fast to be a limpet drone or mining bug, pulling enough gravities to pulp any human pilot…

I reach a conclusion the same moment the Cat does.

“Alert. Missile track detected,” it announces just as I yell “Missile!”

“What?” Miranda voice is still thick with exhaustion, but awake enough to be alarmed. “What does that mean?”

I'm not going to waste time asking her what the hell she thinks the word 'missile' means.

“Someone wants us dead,” I say. “Even if it's high explosive instead of a nuke, that's not a disabling weapon. They mean to breach or vaporize us. Leela, we need to get that drive responding again or we are dead.”

“Working on it,” says her little-girl voice in my ear at the same moment Miranda asks “How do you know they're targeting us?”

“Obvious from the track,” I say, punching virtual controls furiously, spinning up the railgun.

“But… that doesn't make any sense. They'll destroy the artifact!”

“Either they don't know it exists or don't care. If it's a Starlight ship, maybe they'd rather smash whatever they think we found than share. I don't know, but it's coming for us in about thirteen minutes.”

“Oh. Thirteen minutes?” She actually sounds relieved. Probably the delay is longer than she thought. Flatlanders have no idea just how big space is. “Is… is… there anything you can do?”

“Try to get lucky and shoot it down. But if we can't move in the meantime, I don't know. I don't like those odds. Leela??”

“I said, I'm working on it. Network's full of garbage packets. I'm configuring network switches to block anything that doesn't make sense, but that means I need to write a bunch of scripts to explain what I mean by 'makes sense.' Give me a few minutes.”

“Leela, I don't have minutes to hand out. This thing is picking up acceleration, and our thirteen minutes just became nine.”

The railgun pings me with a flashing message: “SPAM loaded - firing solution ready.” I punch for maximum fragments, high cloud density, medium dispersion, and press the trigger. The White Cat jolts and vibrates as a Shard-Projecting Ablative Munition round is flung into the sky, and Miranda gives out something between a scream and a yelp.

“Relax,” I tell her, “that was just me firing at it. You have about eight and half minutes before you have to panic.”

“If you don't mind,” she says, her voice a little shaky and even more high pitched than usual, “I'm going to be proactive and get a head start on my panicking right now.” It's a feeble joke, but she gives a somewhat forced giggle anyway. At least she's not totally freaking out, which is actually kinda brave for someone who's never been shot at before.

I punch up a slightly different trajectory and spread, and let loose another SPAM round.

“Marcus… you're going to hit it, right?” she asks.

“Honestly, Princess—uh, Miranda, I mean—I don't know. If I could run away while shooting… but, like this, I can't even dodge.”

I just leave it at that. Honestly, I'm grinding my teeth, and my ass is all but taking a bite out of the grav couch. Now may not be the time for perfect candor.

“Uh, feel free to jump in here anytime, Leela,” I add.

I don't even hear Leela's voice before the couch slaps me in the back, and the accelerometer suddenly reads “2.5 g.” I press the throttle forward, but there's no response… the engine stays at two and a half. I angle the stick, but there's no thrust vectoring, either… I'm stuck running in a straight line.

“Leela,” I ask, “what the hell did you do?”

“Managed to slip a command through the noise. Set a burn rate til further notice. But you still won't be able to get commands through. You're going to have to steer with the—”

“Orientation thrusters, yeah, I get it. Great. Big engine, brick on the gas pedal, no brakes, tiny little steering wheel. Fucked up way to dodge a missile.”

“I believe you meant to say 'Thank you for saving my small organic life, Leela,'” she chips in.

“That remains to be seen,” I grumble, firing two more SPAM rounds, on wildly guesstimated arcs, as I slew the Cat into a wide, awkward turn. It's like dancing with a body cast on, but at least it's better than coasting idle through space with ten kilos of plutonium roaring towards us.

“Thank you, Leela,” Miranda says, sounding sincere for once, but what comes back over the VR link abruptly loses all of that bantering tone.

“I didn't do it for you,” Leela says.

We don't ever get to find out how Miranda would have replied, because, at that moment, the White Cat cuts in another audible alert.

“Magnetic flare detected. Railgun firing signature detected. Multiple magnetic flares. Multiple railgun firing signatures detected.”

I shut my eyes and focus on the instrument readouts behind them. Holy shit. Half the pursuing fleet just lit up with pulses. The shooting war has started in earnest. I try to sort through the mess of data.

“Marcus, what's going on? Are they all shooting at us now?”

“No way to tell. I can't track the rounds, I can only see the guns go off. Like muzzle flash, but magnetic. But I don't think it's coincidence that everyone fired just after we did. Whatever that means.”

I'm wrestling with the Cat as I say this, just twisting about trying to be as wild and unpredictable as I can. There's no maneuvers in the textbooks for trying to steer with your damn orientation thrusters while your drive is blazing at fuck-my-life acceleration. We're staggering about like a drunken clown; It's better than sitting still, but not by much.

“Revised impact time is five—” I begin to announce, and everything flickers and goes dark. The engine thrust, jolts, and hiccups, bouncing me against the restraining straps.

For a moment I think it's me, that I've blacked out, until I hear Miranda yelp, and the cabin interior lights come back up.

The engine jolts again, and I'm slammed back into my crash couch. We are still under thrust.

“Marcus, my displays are—”

“Frozen, I know, mine too. Something happened with the power. Something might have hit us… hang on.”

I rotate the display, test controls. The computer's responding to input, everything seems fine, but the 3-D tracks of our swarm of pursuers aren't updating.

“Huh, that's weird.”

I punch up a diagnostic display. High gain antenna…. loss of signal. Lidar array… loss of signal. Back up antennae…. loss of signal. Wideband radio receiver/transmitter… loss of signal. Tightbeam com laser… Ready.

The display is blinking a solar flare warning, but that can't be right. The sun is so far away it looks more like a candle.

What the hell?

“What? Marcus, what's going on?”

“All our sensors are blind, and the Cat thinks it's a solar flare, which it isn't. Nothing seems damaged, I don't hear any breech alarms—oh. Wait. I get it.”

“What?”

“Electromagnetic pulse. Like from a nuke. Overloads circuits. Fries them if they're too close. I think that missile detonated.”

“You hit it? Nice shot!”

“No, wait… huh. That's funny.” I freeze the display, wind back through thirty seconds of history. “No, that can't be right at all.”

“What?”

“I missed. Missile went evasive, came around. Someone else hit it.”

“So those other ships firing were—? ”

“Yeah, they were trying to shoot it down, too.”

“So some of them want us alive. Or the artifact at least. And they're not all working together.”

“Yeah, but there's something else. Our hull's cold.”

There's a pause for a heartbeat or two. “Our what is what?” Miranda sounds puzzled.

“It's cold. We should have gotten hit by a wave of blast radiation. We're shielded enough to be fine at this range, but the hull temp should have spiked, and it didn't. If there was a nuclear explosion—”

“What if there wasn't?”

“But the pulse… oh. You're right. CHAMP. Counterelectronic High Amplitude Magnetic Pulse weapon. They were trying to disable us, not kill us.”

Understanding floods into her voice. “That's good news, right? Except…”

“Except what?”

“When the other ships realize that, I don't think they're going to provide us any more covering fire. They want us disabled, too.”

“Crap. You're right. Leela, how are we doing on that drive?”

“Working on it,” Leela says, this time troubling to project an avatar in a flight coverall. She's holding a cartoonishly giant double open-end wrench, about twice as tall as she is, and looking smug. “I'm locking down relays now. Two minutes.”

“Okay, good job, let's—”

“Hurry,” says Miranda, “They're probably going to fire a second missile,” and with cosmic irony, that's the moment when the Cat declares “Alert. Missile track detected.”

I don't say 'you had to open your mouth.' I'm not the superstitious type.

I just say “And there it is—”

“Alert. Missile track detected. Alert. Missile track detected.”

“—along with number three, and number four, all from the same contact. Apparently they have multiple launchers. I distinctly recall someone saying that no one has any warships sitting around anymore?”

Miranda manages to sound sheepish and irritated and scared at the same time. “Is this really time for an 'I told you so'?”

“It's either now or in the next ten minutes, unless Leela gets me some control over here.”

In some small, petty, miserly part of the twisted recesses of my brain, it feels—satisfying—to snap at her. Stupid to waste precious brain cells on something so small, but I'd rather lick sandpaper until my tongue bleeds than let this gorgeous, stuck-up little creature have any idea that I'm every bit as scared as she is. I've been shot at before, but nothing like this.

“Rebooting three network boxes now. Ten seconds,” says Leela.

I start shaking the stick immediately, commanding the engine to vector thrust, but there's nothing, just a steady, straight-line two and a half g, and those missile tracks are separating, looping out towards us in a coordinated arc that crosses our projection vector… well, sooner than I want to say out loud.

It doesn't much matter that I know now they're not nukes, that all they will do instead of vaporizing us is turn us from a partially functional flying vessel into a powerless tin can. Once that happens, someone will board us, and it all goes downhill from there. And by “downhill” I mean out an airlock without a suit, or something even nastier if somebody wants to make an example.

Then the White Cat shudders, and I realize I'm still working the stick, and the fusion drive is thrust vectoring, sending its near-lightspeed stream of ejected helium and neutrons this way and that, and I have control, blessed control, back again. It's sluggish and laggy, the network must still be giving Leela trouble, but it's there, and I can move again.

“Okay,” I call out, “brace yourselves.” As if we weren't all tied into acceleration couches with five centimeter nylon weave straps, but it just kind of slips out.

We're slammed sideways as I toss the Cat into a sharply vectored curve, then suddenly we're weightless as I cut the engine and come about on orientation thrusters before spurting off in a new direction. My eyes, or rather my attention, since my eyes aren't actually involved, is once again on the slowly swirling cloud of spacecraft tracks, and what I see is not heartening.

I've lost all the progress I fought for over the past hours, and am once again in the center of a tightening ball of pursuers, only this time they are closer still, with the first wave of six distinct contacts within a few hundred thousand kilometers. In every direction.

And those missiles are still on us, trying to come around and establish a new intercept. I can't outrun them, they accelerate too fast. But I can keep dodging and weaving until they run out of fuel, or I manage to lay a SPAM fragment on one of them.

I've taken my brief reprieve to try exactly that, jolting the Cat three times in quick succession as twenty-kilo slugs fly off at an appreciable percentage of lightspeed. They don't have a long wait before detonating into a cloud of sharp fragments—I've set the fuses short on purpose; those missiles are a few thousand kilometers away now.

Still a lot of space to be throwing shrapnel in. I'm going to have to get outrageously lucky to land even one of those tiny specks of hypervelocity grit on any of my targets. The odds get better as they close in, but I'm the only one firing now.

True to Miranda's prediction, the other craft have silenced their railguns, and those incoming blips aren't navigating a blizzard of counterfire from a fleet any more—just me, solitary, throwing snowballs. I'm tossing us around, changing course every few seconds. I'm not even jockeying for position in the swarm anymore—my world has shrunk to those three incoming tracks.

From behind me, I hear Miranda whimpering, and trying not to gag into her mask.

No time to care. Missiles coming in even faster now. Most of their mass is fuel, PMH and liquid oxygen, and the closer they are to running out, the lighter they are, the faster they accelerate, the tighter they turn. I have no idea how long they can last, but the I'm guessing it's longer than I can keep dodging them.

I cut the engines, gasp in freefall to reinflate my lungs as I come about again, slam the throttle back in. Five gravities. Six and a half.

Can't outrun them.

Eight gravities. Engine heat's in the yellow. I'm sipping and puffing air.

Can't keep dodging forever.

Nine gravities. I think Miranda might have blacked out again… my display tells me her mask pressure has gone way up. The system is forcing oxygen into her lungs. Color drains from my vision, and the world is gray.

Try to shoot all three down? That's more luck than I have, more favors than the universe owes me.

Ten gravities. I think. Something like that.

My vision is gone. I'm floating in the dark, nothing but displays projected on my visual cortex, lights hung in the void, and I can't read them, they've lost all meaning. I feel the wind crushed out of my diaphragm. Something like an alarm is screaming somewhere, but I don't know what that means, either.

I can't think like this, can't plan, can't even see. I cut the engine, and my chest hits the straps as my lungs reinflate. I pant into the mask, sucking oxygen rich pressurized air that tastes of rubber, and sweat. Color floods back into the world, the 3-D display makes sense to me again, and I can see the missile tracks passing behind me. I've made them undershoot once more, but already the first is coming around, with the others not far behind. Faster now.

Can't outrun them. Can't keep dodging. And hitting all three? Good luck.

Think. Gotta think. Gotta come up with something.

And for once, I actually do.

My world has shrunk down to four blips in a holographic view… the White Cat and three pursuing dots. Somewhere out there, some twenty-five nearby craft are closing in, but I'm only dimly aware of them. I'll deal with them later. If there is a later.

I can't keep dodging forever, and even if I succeed, someone out there has plenty more missiles to throw. They say the fox is running for his dinner, and the rabbit for his life. But the fox only has to be faster once.

If you're a rabbit, don't keep running in circles. Head for the briar patch.

The missile tracks have looped around tightly, and are separating again, smart enough to work together and come at me from different angles, aiming at an intercept point somewhere ahead of me.

That's what I'm counting on. I think of Miranda's guard drones, still and incurious as the crane electromagnet dropped on them. Tougher and faster than any person alive, but not smart enough, not creative enough, not human enough, to think like me, understand my motives, guess my next move.

Simple. Reactive. Predictable.

I hope.

Watch how they separate. Gotta line them up. No matter how they fan out, there's gotta be an angle that puts one behind another. Two points determine a line, three points determine a plane, but if I can line up all three…

I cut the fusion drive to idle, and drop us into the blessed relief of weightlessness, steel creaking as the hull relaxes. Miranda is panting behind me, loud ragged gasps. She doesn't try to say anything. There's nothing to be said. Nothing for her to do. Just endure. Hold fast.

We drift in dead silence, but that's an illusion. We still have all our momentum, we're screaming through the void at hundreds of kilometers per second—fast, still but slower that the missiles expected, and they must correct to avoid overshooting.

Slowly, the three tracks angle into my direction… and come together.

Yes!

Simple. Reactive. Predictable.

Now come about. Fast. I burn orientation thrusters in the Cat's nose and tail, hard. Far harder than they're designed for, tossing us sideways against our restraints, and they're screaming overheat warnings at me, flashing red indicators in my vision, but I've modified them extensively for this kind of work, programmed them not to cut out. I know their limitations. I won't melt anything. I think.

There.

Now back the other way… brake the turn, aaand… we're sailing backwards. It feels motionlessness, but only in our frame of reference. Those EMP weapons are coming in, coming in, converging, and I have to wait for it, wait for them to line up, predict their reaction…

One shot at this. I watch the tracks ticking ahead in the display, screaming through the void at relativistic speeds, but slow on the scale of my display, in the vastness of space…

Wait for it…

Watch the trails…

Now. Throttle.

It's a single twitch of my left thumb, but Sir Isaac Newton retaliates, slams me back into the seat with the biggest damn hammer in the universe. I'm holding on now, barely, sipping and puffing air against the weight of my own rib cage, fighting for consciousness, for the focus to watch three faint little white lines, waiting for the next right moment as I furiously code in fuse delays, dispersion patterns, firing solution inputs…

The railgun swings about.

And the traces merge into a single line, behind me, punctuated with three flashing dots.

They're coming at me in a straight line. Behind me.

The railgun is still moving on its track, coming around to point directly behind me, and those dots are coming up fast. I can picture the high-temperature inconel alloy of their drive cones glowing white-hot from the intensity of the fire, and they're devouring the gap between us, burning fuel recklessly in an attempt to seize this opportunity and strike…

But not fanning out. Not sacrificing their speed to disperse again.

Simple. Reactive. Predictable.

Artificial Stupidity.

I let go with the railgun, pumping out SPAM munitions as fast as it can cycle, short fuse, minimum dispersion. Two rounds. Three. Five.

And those predictable missiles are flying straight into the face of, not a long-distance interception shot, but a tightly packed cloud of tungsten carbide shards, each one tearing in with enough relative speed to make it a small bomb in its own right.

Dodge that, motherfuckers.

But there's no time for me to celebrate. There's one more thing I need to make this work, and I'm programming the engine now. Random vector, come about on orientation thrusters and main thrust vectoring, max burn. My display is nagging me about severe crew risk, and I've never punched “override” faster in my life.

All set up. Now I just need luck. I don't know how much. But that first missile detonated when it was hit, accidentally or by design, I don't know, but I need it again, or this whole plan falls apart. Three chances…

The closest pursuing dot winks out. No pulse, no shockwave, just gone. Either hit or ran out of fuel, no way to tell. Two more shots at this. That storm of fragments should be coming up on the next one right about…

The cabin lights flicker, the drive hiccups, my display stops updating.

High gain antenna…. loss of signal. Lidar array… loss of signal. Back up antennae…. loss of signal. Wideband radio receiver/transmitter… loss of signal. Tightbeam com laser… OK.

Electromagnetic pulse. We, and every ship in the area, are blind.

“Leela!” I scream into the coms, punching virtual buttons, queuing up my control sequence, “You have the con. Run this burn until the sensor blackout starts to fade, then cut the engines, go full dark, understand?”

Her voice comes right back, no hesitation at all, “Yes, I understand, but w—”

“No time! Do it!” I bark, and don't even wait for an answer, just start my sequence.

She better be on this. I hear Miranda sputtering and Leela's cool response “Yes, Captain, understood, sir!” I'm wondering why a fucking twelve year old is talking like that when my display flashes “MAX BURN,” and alarms are shrieking, and physics pounces on me and shakes me like a rag doll and the world is colorless, and then gray, and then…“What?” Miranda voice is still thick with exhaustion, but awake