No Other Gods (19 page)

             
None of us could celebrate — not at eight Gs. We could only survive. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, I brought the power back down to full. The gorillas jumped off our chests and at three gravities, we felt like we could fly.

             
Kin located the first target and targeted a long burst. More accurately, the targeting computers Kin was babysitting shot, killing one bogey. Accelerating at eight Gs for almost five minutes had given us a velocity of almost 25 kilometers per second. At speeds like this, human aiming simply did not make sense — even our skill was next to useless. Adding to the difficulty, this close to the sun we were not in a pure vacuum. At the speeds we were moving, there was appreciable atmosphere, causing turbulence and making targeting even more challenging. I uttered a silent prayer that our shields would hold.

             
Tonia immediately adjusted our heading slightly. Every thirty to ninety seconds we took out another EMP. Our magic number crawled down from 230 to 210. One hour left. EMP killing became methodical, and during one long approach Sama and I took over from Tonia and Kin. They slumped, exhausted, in the rear chairs.

             
“Projections, Livia? At current rates of destruction, are we going to make it?”

             
“Too close to call, G. The techs just don’t know.”

             
I burned a missile, increased to four Gs, and vectored onto our next target. Down to 180.

             
“G, we have a problem!” Livia’s voice sounded almost panicky. We heard background sounds, screams perhaps, or yells. Then dead air, nothing.

             
“Livia, come in. Livia,” I said, still continuing our hunt. “Livia?”

             
“Here, we’re here,” her voice came back on. “We’re in trouble. Big trouble. Five EMPs just struck unimpeded about forty thousand kilometers south. Other side of the sun from you. The techs are extending magnetic fields, attempting to compensate for affected nodes. They’re sinking fast!”

             
I stayed silent. There was nothing we could do — the Sunflower would either hold or fail, regardless of our efforts. Livia kept comms open and we heard the shouting and anxiety in dozens of voices.

             
“They’ve extended the fields successfully to catch one of the nodes. Now two! Trying to restart those nodes — they can’t be held forever. One’s slipping. It’s sinking, slowly, now faster.”

             
It was like play-by-play at some sporting event. Only, this even would determine whether or not billions of people would have the energy they needed. Or whether the biggest engineering project in the history of the human race was going to go the way of the Titanic. Or whether hundreds of millions would die in agony.

             
“If they can’t reconnect, there won’t be enough fabric for the Sunflower in this quadrant. Lose too much mesh and it’s going to fall, to fail. The Sunflower is already at only 73% system integrity. If we lose this node, it’s over.”

             
We kept hunting our fish, not knowing whether it would make a difference or not. Fried another, then another that was close, and continued to our next group of targets.

             
“They caught another one!” Livia shouted. “And now one of them is restarting and reconnecting to the grid. That’s it!”

             
“Are we in the clear now?” I asked.

             
“Yes, for this quadrant. They’re not catching a few of the other nodes that were sinking, not supported by neighboring nodes. But they’ve restarted enough, extending fields from other cells. We’re clear here. But down to 69 percent. The techs are attempting to compensate by bringing new nodes online, and extending node spacing throughout unaffected parts of the Sunflower.”

             
I slumped with relief. But Tonia piped up in a tired voice.

             
“On the other hand, our particular emergency right here is still occurring,” then smiled, vaporizing another EMP.

             
After what seemed hours but was likely only minutes, we had vectored on to our next target. This one was almost in the act of detonating — we had only seconds.

             
“Sama, fry it now!”

             
Sama took an extreme long-range shot, then a few bursts. From four hundred kilometers it was almost an impossible shot. Wisps of solar atmosphere made it even more challenging.

             
“Missed! Retargeting.”

             
The EMP was perhaps 5 klicks from the node and closing fast. We had seconds at most. The targeting systems adjusted, compensating for our still-huge velocity and the not-nearly-as-fast, but still considerable speed of the missile. Shot automatically, and kept firing for perhaps 10 seconds.

             
“That was about 30 bursts,” said Sama. “I’m putting a tight grouping on our best-guess course extrapolation.”

             
We watched the bogey on the screen as it closed with the node, still hundreds of kilometers away. Seconds before calculated impact, the missile disappeared off the screen in an unceremonious blip of static. Our magic number, 165, ticked down a notch.

             
“Got it,” said Sama, unnecessarily. We all breathed again. And turned to the next target.

             
The next hour was identical: racing at four or five Gs, sometimes up to eight, to a target. Burning it from long distance just seconds before potential detonation. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

             
Our current targeting solution had us leapfrogging nodes: sacrificing some so that we could save at least some. The techs at Sunstation were working fulltime on babying the converted meteor defense systems that were still on to catch EMPs and bury them in sun before detonation. And on calculating which nodes would fail, extending fields, and hooking up nearby nodes in a modified mesh that should save some. We were haggard from the now-continuous heavy boost, and the voices we heard at Sunstation were raw and often approaching panic.

             
I didn’t know how much more of this we could take. Kin and Tonia, who had borne the lion’s share of the early piloting and targeting, were semi-conscious on the rear acceleration couches. Sama was pulsing in and out, still helpful but definitely nearing the end of his endurance. And I was more exhausted than I had ever known I could be. I could not remember ever feeling so tired, so sore, so empty, so … finished.

             
Still, we raised a ragged cheer when the magic number went below 100 for the first time. Our efforts, and a few probes that were still operational, plus the spontaneous failures, was having an effect. Livia was on comms almost continuously now, encouraging, suggesting, cheering. She could sense that we had almost no energy left, and she kept us awake and on-task.

             
“Just a few more, G. Just a few more and we’ll be safe. We’re pretty sure Sunflower can handle about fifty near-simultaneous attempted hits — they’re running the meteor defense system in parallel on multiple systems now. But we need at least forty more.”

             
“How long do we have?” I asked, too tired to do the basic math anymore.

             
“You’ve got fifteen minutes, G,” Livia replied. “The probes will get at least twenty-five. You need fifteen: one each minute.”

             
We were in a heavy attack zone, and our current course was a whipping S-curve that took us through the heaviest concentrations of missiles. I boosted again to six continuous Gs and we started frying.

             
“Sama, Kin, Tonia! We’ve got 15 more minutes of hell. We need all of us targeting and working.” I kept talking to them, pushing, prodding. We approached some semblance of a smooth-functioning team, for a few minutes. The number ticked down to 80, then 65.

             
“You’re doing it!” whooped Livia. “Light at the end of the tunnel. That’s almost enough already!”

             
“Whoa, what’s …” Sama started.

             
A tremendous boom cut him off. The ship shuddered violently, and our world exploded. The engines cut out, and sparks and smoke filled the air. We floated in our restraints as artificial gravity failed. Thrust was nonexistent. My readouts said all three engines were offline, and we immediately starting sinking toward the surface of the sun, just a few hundred kilometers distant. We heard odd noises from mechanical, then one engine came back online. Another came back, at least partially, and gravity came back with a jolt, slamming us back into our acceleration seats. Applying as much power as I could, I stopped our descent and jinked left and right automatically, evasively. That had felt like an attack.

             
“What was that? Sama, see anything?”

             
Sama scanned his instruments frantically, then found it.

             
“It’s the rebel’s ship — the one that launched all the missiles! They hit us with some kinetic weapon. I see them — extreme range.”

             
“All sensors up and scanning. Do they have another one?”

             
“No …” Sama replied. “Looks like they had only the one. They must have saved a missile or two, stealthed it, and then, while we were here on the surface, sent it high and arcing down from way up. We didn’t pick it up until the last second.”

             
“A civilian ship wouldn’t be able to stock particle beams,” I mused. “They used what they had, and got a lucky shot.”

             
“Sama, are they in the vicinity of any EMPs we need to take out?” I wanted to take them out. Call it revenge, call it self-preservation, I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to jeopardize our mission: saving the Sunflower.

             
“Yes, two or three.”

             
“Then we’ll take them out.” Brave words, but we were down one engine. Building in threes was intended to provide margin for safety, but we’d been using full power from all three drives all day. I had some doubts about the wisdom of attacking without one of them, but shoved them away.

             
Full acceleration was now only about 25 Gs … and the inertial dampers kept that down to a perceived two, maybe two and a half.

             
“They’re turning away. They must see us coming, and are trying to escape.”

             
We nailed two more EMPs that were in our path, then came up within a thousand kilometers. The rebels were sluggishly accelerating away.

             
“Sama, start firing bursts. I want this over.”

             
Hitting a huge cargo ship that had held thousands of the tiny missiles we had been hunting was orders of magnitude easier than hitting the missiles themselves. Sama started making hits immediately.

             
The ship loosed two more missiles in our vicinity, but now that we were aware and alert, Sama was able to burn them before they were 20 kilometers out from launch point, and then turned his attention back to the ship. I threw in some evasive maneuvers just in case.

             
“Nailed it,” Sama said. “Another hit.”

             
Any ship that could survive in the solar atmosphere was tough, but no ship could take repeated blasts from our particle cannon and survive. We watched in silence as the cargo ship’s FESS shield failed, and the bow of the enemy ship disintegrated. Ravening plasma at millions of degrees centigrade instantly invaded the ship, and engines overloaded. Detonation was just one small blip of light in a vast sea of flame.

             
No-one cheered.

             
We burned three more EMPs in the vicinity, and the numbers on our screen went lower and lower as the SunFlower protected itself, ticking slowly, agonizingly down to zero.

             
The battle was over, and just in time.

             
We limped back to SunStation, burning a few more EMPs along the way. Livia confirmed the good news — the Sunflower was no longer in danger. Back up to 78% integrity and climbing, and the techs were kicking the construction and repair factories into high gear, producing new nodes to replace any that had been lost.

             
At Sunstation we effected repairs, picked up Livia, and left without celebration and without delay. I didn’t want to be there when any officials came, and started asking unanswerable questions. And though we had completed our mission, we had nothing to be happy about.

             
We did take some time to collect Drago’s body. By unspoken agreement, after a small ceremony that consisted mostly of us standing in a circle and staring wordlessly at each other, we consigned him to the star we had come to save.