Judas Unchained

“Can the Moscow-class fly in that close?” Wilson asked. He’d automatically assumed the Dublin would be in trouble if they were in real space a mere half-million kilometers from a G-class star.

“Yes,” Tunde said. “But I wouldn’t recommend an extended combat time in such an environment. The stress level on the force field would undoubtedly lead to overload.”

“Same for the Prime ships, then,” Rafael said.

“Undoubtedly.”

“What are they up to?” Wilson whispered. His virtual hands rearranged the imagery icons, and the office’s tactical display shrank slightly to accommodate the hysradar return from the Dublin. Four hundred eighty thousand kilometers above Hanko’s star, the Prime wormhole was holding steady. Over fifty ships were through now. The pair of Douvoir missiles Oscar had launched were closing fast. Ten seconds from impact, the wormhole closed.

“It’s opening again,” Tunde said, scanning the projection. “Twenty million kilometers away.”

“Douvoir missiles locking on,” Anna said. “Nothing’s coming through yet.”

The Dublin’s hysradar return was showing sixty-three Prime ships accelerating hard from the point where they’d emerged. Each of them was firing a flock of high-acceleration missiles. The expanding globe of hardware was already five thousand kilometers across. Nuclear explosions began to blink around the periphery. The hysradar image immediately broke up into an uneven hash.

“What’s happening?” Wilson asked.

“Interference,” Oscar reported. “The nukes are somehow pumping out exotic energy pulses. It’s screwing with our hysradar.”

“That’s certainly one diverted-energy-function we haven’t got,” Tunde said. “A direct inversion to an exotic state. Natasha?”

“Well, it’s obviously possible,” Natasha said; she sounded more intrigued than alarmed. “I don’t understand how the mechanism holds together under those conditions.”

“You’re missing the point,” Dimitri said.

“Which is?” Natasha asked with cool politeness.

“They’re going to a great deal of effort to hide something from us above those stars.” He indicated the image from the Dublin, which showed the star’s vast curvature. The uniformity of the image was broken by a shimmering patch of silver and yellow particles that obscured over half of the surface. “This is the only sensor blind spot in the star system. Something is going on behind that interference, something they clearly consider extremely important to their attack.”

“The Primes are generating identical interference patterns in the other systems,” Anna said. “It’s a constant pattern.”

“Oscar,” Wilson said, “we have to know what they’re covering up.” He hoped the tension wasn’t showing in his voice. But if the Primes did have something equal or even superior to quantumbusters this war was already over. A lot of his family would leave on the lifeboats that were in the last stages of assembly above Los Vada. If they have time to reach them. He assumed he’d be relatively safe on the High Angel, though God alone knew where it would fly away to.

“Roger that,” Oscar said. “Standard sensors are useless this close to a star. We’re going in closer.”

“Good luck,” Wilson told him.

The first tremor caught Oscar by surprise. His heart jumped in response. “What the hell was that?”

The others were all lifting their heads from the flight couches, checking around the cabin. For what, Oscar couldn’t imagine. A crack in the hull that was letting in solar wind? Crap. He’d always known and accepted that any attack powerful enough to have a physical impact on the starship would simply destroy it. Now another judder ran through the vessel, stronger this time—and they were still intact and alive. “Somebody talk to me.”

“I think the exotic energy blasts from their diverted-energy-function nukes just hit our wormhole,” Dervla said. “I’m certainly seeing a lot of unusual fluctuations around our compression dynamic wavefront.”

“Oh, great,” Oscar said. “A new threat. How badly can that hurt us?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We never covered anything like this in training. It don’t think it can break our boundary.”

A shudder made Oscar tense his whole body as the couch straps vibrated against him. It was like riding a white-water raft. The hologram display wobbled as his eyes tried to focus. He switched to virtual vision for primary information. Just in time, as the next judder shook his body. Curses were mumbled through the narrow operations segment.

“Ten seconds to the missile formation,” Hywel said.

Oscar consulted the navigational grid. They were flying toward a star at nearly four times the speed of light. He wanted to say something to Dervla about making sure their course was correct, but harassing people at inappropriate moments wasn’t the sign of good captaincy. So he trusted her with his life.

She was taking the Dublin in a long curve to solar south of the Prime incursion, heading past them to an altitude of four hundred thousand kilometers above the star. The shaking began to reduce as they left the explosive umbrella behind.