The Night's Dawn Trilogy (2 page)

“Get back on the cushioning,” Peter yelled as the gee force leapt upwards. Alkad attempted to swing her legs back up on the
ledge. They were made of uranium, impossibly heavy. Muscles and tendons grated horribly as she strained against the weight.

Come on. It’s easy. It’s only your legs. Dear Mother, how many times have you lifted your legs? Come on!

Neural-nanonic nerve-impulse overrides bullied her thigh muscles. She got one leg back on the cushioning. By that time the
acceleration had reached seven gees. She was stuck with her left leg on the floor, foot slipping along the decking as the
enormous weight of her thigh pushed down, forcing her knee joint open.

The two opposing swarms of combat wasps engaged; attacking and defending drones splitting open, each releasing a barrage of
submunitions. Space seethed with directed energy beams. Electronic warfare pulses popped and burned up and down the electromagnetic
spectrum, trying to deflect, goad, confuse, harass. A second later it was the turn of the missiles. Solid kinetic bullets
bloomed like antique shotgun blasts. All it took was the slightest graze, at those closing velocities both projectile and
target alike detonated into billowing plumes of plasma. Fusion explosions followed, intense flares of blue-white starfire
flinging off violet coronae. Antimatter added its vehemence to the fray, producing even larger explosions amid the ionic maelstrom.

The nebula which blazed between the
Beezling
and her attackers was roughly lenticular, and over three hundred kilometres broad, choked with dense cyclonic concentrations,
spewing tremendous cataracts of fire from its edges. No sensor in existence could penetrate such chaos.

Beezling
lurched round violently, drive deflector coils working at maximum pitch, taking advantage of the momentary blind spot to
change course. A second volley of combat wasps shot out of their bays around the attack cruiser’s lower hull, just in time
to meet a new salvo fired from the blackhawks.

Peter had barely managed to roll off the acceleration couch where he was sitting, landing hard on the floor of Alkad’s cabin,
when the terrible acceleration began. He watched helplessly as Alkad’s left leg slowly gave way under the crushing gee force;
her whimpering filling him with futile guilt. The composite deck was trying to ram its way up through his back. His neck was
agony. Half of the stars he could see were pain spots, the rest were a datavised nonsense. The flight computer had reduced
the external combat arena to neat ordered graphics which buffeted against priority metabolic warnings. He couldn’t even focus
his thoughts on them. There were more important things to worry about, like how the hell was he going to force his chest up
so he could breathe again?

Suddenly the gravity field shifted. He left the decking behind, and slammed into the cabin wall. His teeth were punched clean
through his lip; he heard his nose break with an ugly
crunch
. Hot blood squirted into his mouth, frightening him. No wound could possibly heal in this environment. He would very probably
bleed to death if this went on much longer.

Then gravity righted again, squeezing him back against the decking. He screamed in shock and pain. The datavised visualization
from the flight computer had collapsed into an eerily calm moire pattern of red, green, and blue lines. Darkness was encroaching
around the edges.

The second clash of combat wasps took place over a wider front. Sensors and processors on both sides were overloaded and confused
by the vivid nebula and its wild energy efflux. New explosions were splattered against the background of destruction. Some
of the attacking combat wasps pierced the defensive cordon. A third volley of defenders left the
Beezling
.

Six thousand kilometres away, another nuclear-fuelled nebula burst into existence as the
Chengho
fought off its solitary hunter’s swarm of combat wasps. The
Gombari
wasn’t so fortunate. Its antimatter-confinement chambers were shattered by the incoming weapons.
Beezling
’s sensor filters engaged instantly as an ephemeral star ignited. Kyle Prager lost his datavised visualization across half
of the universe. He never saw the blackhawk which attacked the frigate wrenching open a wormhole interstice and vanish within,
fleeing the lethal sleet of radiation its attack had liberated.

The combat wasp closing on
Beezling
at forty-six gees analysed the formation of the robot defenders approaching it. Missiles and ECM pods raced away, fighting
a fluid battle of evasion and deception for over a tenth of a second. Then the attacker was through, a single defender left
between it and the starship, moving to intercept, but slowly, the defender had only just left its launch cradle, accelerating
at barely twenty gees.

Situation displays flipped into Kyle Prager’s mind. The blackhawks’ positions, their trajectories. Combat wasp performance.
Likely reserves. He reviewed them, mind augmented by the tactics program, and made his decision, committing half of his remaining
combat wasps to offensive duties.

Beezling
rang like a bell as they launched.

At a hundred and fifty kilometres from its prey, the incoming combat wasp’s guidance processors computed it wouldn’t quite
reach the starship before it was intercepted. It ran through the available options, making its choice.

At a hundred and twenty kilometres away it loaded a de-activation sequence into the hardware of the seven antimatter-confine
chambers it was carrying.

At ninety-five kilometres away the magnetic field of the first confinement chamber snapped off. Forty-six gravities took over.
The frozen pellet of antimatter was smashed into the rear wall. Long before contact was actually made the magnetic field of
the second confinement chamber was switched off. All seven shut down over a period of a hundred picoseconds, producing a specifically
shaped blast wave.

At eighty-eight kilometres away, the antimatter pellets had annihilated an equal mass of matter, resulting in a titanic energy
release. The spear of plasma which formed was a thousand times hotter than the core of a star, hurtling towards the
Beezling
at relativistic velocities.

Sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels vaporized immediately as the stream of disassociated ions slammed into the
Beezling
. Molecular-binding force generators laboured to maintain the silicon hull’s integrity, a struggle they were always destined
to lose against such ferocity. Break through occurred in a dozen different places at once. Plasma surged in, playing over
the complex, delicate systems like a blowtorch over snow crystals.

The luckless
Beezling
suffered a further blow from fate. One of the plasma streams hit a deuterium tank, searing its way through the foam insulation
and titanium shell. The cryogenic liquid reverted to its natural gaseous state under immense pressure, ripping the tank open,
and blasting fragments in every direction. An eight-metre section of the hull buckled upwards, and a volcanic geyser of deuterium
haemorrhaged out towards the stars past shredded fingers of silicon.

Combat wasp explosions were still flooding surrounding space with torrents of light and elementary particles. But the
Beezling
was an inert hulk at the centre of a dissipating halo, her hull fissured, reaction drive off, spinning like a broken bird.

The three attacking blackhawk captains observed the last volley of
Beezling
’s combat wasps lock on to their own ships and race vengefully across the gulf. Thousands of kilometres away, their colleague
scored a debilitating strike on the
Chengho
. And the
Beezling
’s combat wasps had halved the separation distance.

Energy patterning cells applied a terrible stress against the fabric of space, and the blackhawks slipped into the gaping
wormholes which opened, contracting the interstices behind them. The
Beezling
’s combat wasps lost track of their targets; on-board processors began to scan round and round in an increasingly futile attempt
to re-acquire the missing signatures as the drones rushed further and further away from the disabled warship.

The return of consciousness wasn’t quite as welcome as it should have been, even though it meant that Dr Alkad Mzu was still
alive. Her left leg was a source of nauseous pain. She could remember hearing the bones snapping as her knee hinged fully
open. Then came the twists of a shifting gravity field, far more effective than any torturer. Her neural nanonics had damped
down the worst of the pain, but the
Beezling
’s final convulsion had brought a blessed oblivion.

How in Mother Mary’s name did we survive that?

She thought she had been prepared for the inherent risk of the mission failing, for death to claim her. Her work at the university
back on Garissa made her all too aware of the energy levels required to push a starship through a ZTT jump, and what would
happen should an instability occur in the patterning nodes. It never seemed to bother the navy crew, or rather they were better
at hiding it. She knew also that there was a small chance they would be intercepted by Omutan naval craft once the
Beezling
emerged above their target star. But even that wouldn’t be so bad, the end should a combat wasp break through
Beezling
’s defensive shield would probably be instantaneous. She even acknowledged that the Alchemist might malfunction. But this…
Hunted down out here, unprepared physically or mentally, and then to survive, however tenuously. How could the good Mother
Mary be so callous? Unless perhaps even She feared the Alchemist?

Residual graphics seemed to swirl obstinately among the ailing thoughts of her consciousness. Vector lines intersected their
original jump coordinate thirty-seven thousand kilometres ahead. Omuta was a small, unremarkable star directly in front of
the coordinate. Two more jumps, and they would have been in the system’s Oort cloud, the sparse halo of ice-dust clouds and
slumbering comets which marked the boundary of interstellar space. They were approaching from galactic north, well outside
the plane of the ecliptic, trying to avoid detection.

She had helped plan the mission profile, offering her comments to a room full of senior navy staff who were visibly nervous
in her presence. It was a syndrome which had affected more and more people in the secret military station as her work progressed.

Alkad had given the Confederation something new to fear, something which surpassed even the destructive power of antimatter.
A star slayer. And that prospect was as humbling as it was terrifying. She had resigned herself that after the war billions
of planet dwellers would look up at the naked stars, waiting for the twinkling light which had been Omuta to vanish from the
night sky. Then they would remember her name, and curse her to hell.

All because I was too stupid to learn from past mistakes. Just like all the other dreaming fools throughout history, wrapped
up with seductive, clean equations, their simplistic, isolated elegance, giving no thought to the messy, bloody,
physical
application that was their ultimate reality. As if we didn’t have enough weapons already. But that’s human nature, we’ve
always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch. And for what?

Three hundred and eighty-seven Dorados: large asteroids with a nearly pure metal content. They were orbiting a red-dwarf sun
twenty light-years away from Garissa, twenty-nine light-years from Omuta. Scoutships from both inhabited systems had stumbled
across them virtually simultaneously. Who had actually been first would never now be known. Both governments had claimed them:
the wealth contained in the lonely metal chunks would be a heady boost for the planet whose companies could mine and refine
such plentiful ore.

At first it had been a squabble, a collection of
incidents
. Prospecting and survey ships dispatched to the Dorados had been attacked by “pirates.” And, as always, the conflict had
escalated. It ceased to be the ships, and started to become their home asteroid ports. Then nearby industrial stations had
proved tempting targets. The Confederation Assembly’s attempt to mediate had come to nothing.

Both sides had called in their registered naval reserves, and started to hire the independent traders, with their fast, well-equipped
ships capable of deploying combat wasps. Finally, last month, Omuta had used an antimatter bomb against an industrial asteroid
settlement in the Garissa system. Fifty-six thousand people had been killed when the biosphere chamber ruptured, spewing them
out into space. Those who survived, another eighteen thousand with their mashed fluid-clogged lungs, decompressed capillaries,
and dissevered skin, had strained the planet’s medical facilities close to breaking point. Over seven hundred had been sent
to the university’s medical school, which had beds for three hundred. Alkad had witnessed the chaos and pain first hand, heard
the gurgling screams that never ended.

So now it was retaliation time. Because, as everybody knew, the next stage would be planetary bombardment. And Alkad Mzu had
been surprised to find her nationalistic jingoism supplanting the academic aloofness which had ruled her life to date. Her
world
was being threatened.

The only credible defence was to hit Omuta first, and hit it hard. Her precious hypothetical equations had been grasped at
by the navy, which rushed to turn them into functional hardware.

“I wish I could stop you from feeling so much guilt,” Peter had said. That was the day they had left the planet, the two of
them waiting in the officers’ mess of a navy spaceport while their shuttle was prepared.

“Wouldn’t you feel guilty?” she asked irritably. She didn’t want to talk, but she didn’t want to be silent either.

“Yes. But not as much as you. You’re taking the blame for the entire conflict. You shouldn’t do that. Both of us, all of us,
everyone on the planet, we’re all being propelled by fate.”