Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (15 page)

An Annihilator shot from another drone stabbed through space
where we had been an instant before. Robot ships had no need of stasis to keep
a pilot alive, making them more maneuverable than Jags. But their strategy was
limited to EI capability. Although a mature, well developed EI came close to
human reasoning power, it wasn’t close enough. Zabo and I had worked together
for over two decades, both of us upgraded every year, a synthesis that had
evolved far beyond what any EI or human could do alone.

My Jag hurtled past the third drone and caught it with an
Annihilator shot. As the drone exploded, Zabo showed me another MIRV Solo. It
was thousands of kilometers away, running stealth, using shrouds to hide as it
hurtled toward me. Even without Zabo’s detection, I would have known it was
there. I felt the pilot. He was a taskmaker, part Aristo, the same as Jaibriol’s
guards.

Switch to Impactor,
I thought. My Annihilator was
drained. Even with advanced inversion technology, a Jag still only had so much
space to carry antimatter and a good portion of that went to our positron fuel.

The Solo came at me like a knight in a stealth jousting
tournament. As we hurtled past each other, separated by over a thousand
kilometers, I fired the Impactor, a stream of smart clusters that fused on
impact like little H-bombs. The Solo was veering in its own evasion pattern and
releasing clouds of smart dust that confused my tracking systems. My shot
missed on its first go around, stabbing uselessly into space.

The Solo had fired his Annihilator. It winged my mag-shields
and particles spiraled madly off into space, but there was no damage. Stats told
me I had been in stasis several times in the past few seconds.

The clusters from my Impactor shot were going after the Solo
now. His decoy dust countered, some of it igniting the cluster bomblets and
some coming after us. As we hurtled away, Zabo released a cloud of decoy dust
that spread out behind us in a cone, leaving a wake of explosions.

Goldzabo hit, Zabo thought.

Gold, report, I thought.

Lost mag-shields and Annihilators, Helda answered.

One look at her stats was all I needed. The alarms display
for her Jag was lit up like a holiday decoration.
Helda, get out of here. Go
back to headquarters and report. Rex, cover her.

Got it,
Rex thought.

Greenzabo hit, Zabo thought. Stats showed the damage was far
less than what Helda had taken.

Taas?
I thought.

I’m fine,
he answered—and punctuated it with a direct
hit on a drone. In one flashing detonation it became a note in the history
files.

Solo to port, Zabo warned.

I snapped my attention to the new Solo. Impactor, firing
pattern K. Release decoy dust.

This new Solo evaded my shot. The pilot fired his Impactor,
but the clusters didn’t jab at my Jag. Instead he targeted an area off to my
port side—and nearly hit the ship as it jumped to almost that exact position.

I swore. This pilot was good. Too good.
Zabo, evasive
pattern Q.

Die, sweet Jagernaut.

The thought from the Solo hit me like a weapon. No telepath
sent that message, no one remotely resembling a telepath. But it formed with
such single-minded intensity that in my boosted state I had no choice but receive
it. The thought blanketed me with suffocating, choking scorn, and a lust so
intense I reeled from it:
Die, sweet Jagernaut. Die. Now. Slowly. In pain.
Die, sweet empath.

The masters had come. This pilot was an Aristo warrior.

Fire Impactor.
I was shaking now, struggling to free
myself from the Aristo’s concentration. But I couldn’t do it. The only way
would be to disengage my brain from Zabo, which was suicide.

The Solo veered in his evasive pattern and my shot barely
winged his ship. Several clusters exploded on impact, but the craft remained
secure in stasis.

Another Solo registered on my detectors, matching velocity
with my Jag as adeptly as the first. A second “voice” came to me:
Die,
Jagernaut.

And I was falling, falling, falling into a cavity, a dark
hole, caught, trapped—

Blocking, Zabo thought. The psicon flashed in my mind and my
sense of falling receded.

Zabo, Impac—

The Jag bucked, ramming my shoulder into the cushioned exoskeleton
around my body. Stats told me I had been in stasis for nearly a second. Alarms
blared in the cockpit and flashed on my mindscape.

Hit from port Solo, Zabo thought. Starboard Impactor destroyed.

Sweet Jagernaut.
The thought slid across my mind like
an oily caress.
You’re mine. A
second thought echoed it, hungering:
Mine.

Then yet another thought penetrated:
Die, little
Jagernaut
—and a third Solo materialized, firing out of a stealth approach
even Zabo hadn’t detected.

My Jag shuddered violently, alarms blaring. Hit to
starboard, Zabo thought. Annihilators no longer functional.

Fire taus, I thought. Get all three of them.

Three of my four cannons fired, taus surging out of their
maws. The missiles jumped in and out of stasis as they shot after the Aristo’s
ships. One Solo took off, accelerating away from Tams with the tau in pursuit.
The second Solo destroyed the missile bearing down on it before the tau hit.
The third missile found its target, one of the MIRV Solos, and detonated the
ship in a fierce blast.

The Solo that had destroyed its tau hurtled away, the pilot’s
anger blasting my mind.
Die, Jagernaut. In agony.

and the first
Solo re-appeared, jumping out of inversion a few thousand kilometers away,
blasting the area with high energy exhaust that would have demolished my Jag
had the Solo managed to come any closer.

and then that
same Solo exploded in a flash of radiation.

Got him!
Rex
thought.
I’ll
—

Red hit, Zabo thought.

REX!
His stats reeled through my mind: shields 8
percent, environmental support 4 percent, hull cohesion 14 percent. His antimatter
containment fields teetered on the brink of collapse.

Fire tau,
I thought. As my last cannon fired, the
Solo that had hit Rex let loose with its own tau. The two missiles matched velocity,
caught each other—and inverted. They reappeared to starboard and detonated
together, their explosion blanked from my mind as Zabo threw me into stasis.

Drones to port, Zabo thought—and I was fleeing two drones
that had jumped out of inversion, their Impactor fire crossing in space where
my Jag had been only seconds earlier. Their shots hit each other and they both
exploded.

I felt nauseous from being clapped in and out of stasis. My
spinal node was trying to compensate by spurring my traumatized brain to
release endorphins, but it wasn’t enough.

Warning. Zabo showed me a Solo accelerating away from Tams—and
this one had MIRV capability. It was headed toward the sun, surging up to
relativistic speeds.

Catch it,
I thought. We leapt after the Solo,
accelerating desperately. I had no taus left, no Annihilators, nothing, if I
had to I would ram the Jag down its—

Goldzabo appeared so fast that had it not been for Zabo
reeling off the data I would never have understood what happened. All I knew
was that the Solo exploded as if it had been slammed by an invisible cannon
shooting straight at its nose.

Zabo told me the rest; Helda had jumped out of inversion in
front of the Solo with a precision impossible for any ship except one in a
psilink. She read its position straight from my mind. Her Jag came out at 80
percent of lightspeed, blasting the Solo with the exhaust from its photon
thrusters. Before the Trader ship even finished exploding, Helda was gone.

It was damn near suicide. Had her calculations been off by
even a few
meters,
she would have come out on top of the Solo,
destroying herself as well as it. A miscalculation in the other direction and
she would have destroyed either my ship or what little remained of Rex’s ship.

But I had time neither to curse at her for disobeying orders
nor to voice my rush of gratitude. The Jag lurched sickeningly, throwing me
against the inside of the cushioned exoskeleton around my body.

Hit to starboard. Stats told it all: one more hit and we
would be no more than radiation and expanding gas.

Soz.
Rex’s thought came to my mind, dim but clear.

He was alive!
Alive.
I fought the urge to laugh, then
to cry.

Suddenly Zabo ignited the thrusters—and we leapt away from
an Annihilator beam the instant
before
a Solo fired at us.

Lucky Jagernaut.
The thought penetrated my mind,
taunting, thirsty, sliding like oil as the Solo hurtled away from us.

Sweat dripped down my temples. It wasn’t the first time Zabo
had anticipated a shot from an enemy craft. The Traders knew our weakness, that
during combat our boosted state made our minds vulnerable. They played it to
the hilt, taunting, baiting, trying to unbalance us. But any pilot who
concentrated too hard on a boosted Jagernaut, particularly one with my
experience and stratospheric rating, risked that Jagernaut picking up their
more guarded thoughts as well, including their intent to fire.

Gold, get back to headquarters, I thought. You hear me,
Helda? NOW. No more heroics. You may be the only one who can get in a report.

I’m gone, Helda thought.

Both the drone that had hit my ship and the Solo that had
missed were out of range now. Not that it mattered. I had nothing to shoot
with. As far as my scans could determine, they were the last Trader ships. The
drone was on intercept with Taas. The Solo, a non-MIRV craft, was leaving the
planet. I had no doubt it intended to try Helda’s gambit with inversion. A fast
analysis pinpointed its likely target: Redzabo Jag, drifting helplessly in
space like an invitation.

Intercept Solo, I thought. Catch him, Zabo.

We took off after the Trader craft. Zabo threw me into
stasis. Again. Again. I was sick with the lurching jumps of consciousness, my
mind dizzy, my throat dry. A prong clicked down from my helmet and water ran
into my mouth.

I licked my lips. Pump positron fuel into Annihilator.

Annihilators no longer functional, Zabo thought.

Then dump positrons into something that will hold a confinement
field and load it into a tau cannon.

Zabo gave me stats. Confinement won’t hold for long.

It won’t need to.

Solo will be at inversion speed in 3.1 seconds.

Follow it.

Then I dropped my mental blocks.

I opened my mind, drawing the Solo pilot in as if I were the
drain in the bottom of a barrel filled with acid. He poured into my mind like a
caustic whirlpool:
Pain, Jagernaut. Pain and fear and terror. Die
—

We inverted, Zabo locked to the Solo through my link with
its pilot. We screamed silently through imaginary space, chasing the Solo as it
came around and headed back to Tams.

Entering Tams system, Zabo thought.

Reinvert,
I thought.

We managed to jump out a split second earlier then the Solo,
but I hadn’t been able to maneuver into position to use my exhaust against it.
As the Solo reinverted, I thought,
Fire into its primed tau cannon. Then get
us out of here.

In the same instant that my makeshift missile plunged into
the Solo’s cannon maw, the Trader craft came out of stasis and fired its
cannon. The positron missile and the tau smashed into each other—and Solo
vanished in a furious blast of radiation.

I gasped, the sound coming out in a choked gust of air.

Ten planetary drones approaching from dayside of Tams, Zabo
thought.

TEN? Gods of all Skolia. How long until they’re within
firing range?

Four minutes, Zabo answered. Three minutes until air in Secondary
Blackstone’s emergency tanks exhausted.

Green, report.

My drone stopped droning, Taas thought.

Taas, you’ve got to get an EI to the rebels. You have four
minutes to get down as far as you can, make the drop and get out.

Got it,
Taas said.

Soz, don’t be a fool. Rex’s thought came dimly into my mind.
You go in. Have Green cover you.

I nudged closer to Rex’s ship, maneuvering as carefully as
my Jag could manage. I had to get close, so close we almost touched.
Release
accordion,
I thought.
Connect to Red.

Released, Zabo answered.

Soz. Rex’s thought came again. Tams is more important than
one aging Jagernaut. Go in with Taas. He can’t do it alone.’

You should have more faith in him.

The accordion bridge unfolded from my airlock. As it clanked
onto Rex’s Jag, Zabo thought, Air pressure in Red at zero atmosphere. I’m
sealing your space suit. One point two minutes of air remain in Blackstone’s
tanks.

Rex, get into the accordion, I thought.

I
can’t move,
Rex answered.

Zabo, open Red. Then release my controls.

Opened and released. As the exoskeleton snapped away from my
body, the psiphons popped out of my spine. I pulled out of the chair and
squeezed past the cockpit membrane. Then I propelled myself across the cabin.

Zabo opened both the inner and outer airlock doors. I shot
past them, into the accordion bridge that floated between Rex’s Jag and mine
like a diaphanous tunnel. The airlock to Rex’s Jag was also wide open. I
hurtled straight into Red—and into chaos.

Equipment floated everywhere, knocking past me as I moved
through the cabin. One section of the inner hull had buckled inward. When I
squeezed into the cockpit, I found Rex struggling to pull himself out of the
pilot’s seat. It was dead, its exoskeleton jammed around his body. He grabbed
my arms and with both of us working we managed to drag him out. But even when
he was free of the chair, his legs trailed uselessly behind him. I tried to
contact him with my suit radio, but I couldn’t get a response.