Judas Unchained

Wilson knew it was going to flip. He could feel the motion building. Nothing I can do. It’s all gravity. The tailplane lifted up as the main body rolled to starboard, jabbing the wingtip into a small crevice. In low gravity the somersault was almost graceful. The hyperglider turned lazily and thudded down on its upper fuselage. An inverted horizon skidded toward Wilson as cracks multiplied across the cockpit canopy. The tough glass finally shattered in a burst of gas. Raw pocked lava rushed past, centimeters from his helmet. Through the swirling white haze of the cockpit’s evacuating atmosphere Wilson saw a big spur of rock straight ahead. The hyperglider crashed into it, flooding Wilson’s universe with a searing red pain.

***

“Man! This is one seriously cruddy radar,” Ozzie complained as the Charybdis approached the edge of the Dyson Alpha star system. He’d pulled the TD detector visualization out of his grid to find a translucent gray cube filling his virtual vision. It was grainy inside, with minuscule photonic flaws flowing past him like some kind of smog. Clusters of them veered into warped blemishes, knots in the structural fabric that represented the stars back in the real universe. Now they were only twenty minutes out from Dyson Alpha he changed the scan resolution to focus on the star system ahead. There was a silent inrush of the streaming particles as they foregathered as the star. Smaller congregations swept around it in concentric orbits, three solid planets and two gas giants. Ozzie searched for the location of the Dark Fortress but there was nothing available on this scale. Strange, that mother’s the size of a planet. He pulled astronomical data out of the grid, and overlaid it. A tangerine reticulation sprang up to mimic the planetary system layout and size-adjusted until it synchronized with the sensor imagery. A simple purple decussation highlighted the coordinates of the Dark Fortress. Ozzie shifted the focus to center it, then expanded to the sensor’s absolute limit. The little gray motes underwent some kind of jitter as they slipped through the volume of space where the Dark Fortress should be.

“Well, something’s still there,” Mark said without much conviction.

“Let’s go take a look,” Ozzie said. He altered their course vector to take them in a mild curve around to the Dark Fortress coordinates. “Can this thing pick out ships?”

“I’ve no idea,” Mark said. “It doesn’t have very good resolution. I suppose if you get close enough it can pick up smaller objects.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t got a clue about the physics behind any of this, that’s if you can even call it physics anymore. I just do the assembly, remember?”

“Okay. Let’s get ready to drop out of hyperspace five thousand kilometers above the outer lattice sphere. Get our force fields activated. I’ll scan around with ordinary sensors. And, Mark, if there are any ships out there, they’re going to be hostile. They’re going to think we’re here to turn their star nova.”

“I know! I was on Elan when they invaded.”

“So,” Ozzie prompted.

Mark gave him an irritated frown. “So?”

“You’ve encrypted the weapons. You’re going to have to shoot them.”

“Oh. Right. I’ll enable the tactical systems.”

“Good idea, man.”

Ozzie gradually reduced their speed as they drew closer until they were stationary relative to the Dark Fortress. There were sixteen ships or satellites orbiting around the structure. The TD detector couldn’t provide reliable size estimations.

“Got to be big to show up on this piece of junk,” Ozzie decided.

“The smallest mass to create a gravitonic fold in space-time which can be detected from hyperspace is approximately one thousand tons,” the SIsubroutine said.

“They’re ships, then.”

“That is a high probability.”

Ozzie touched the icon that activated his couch’s plyplastic webbing. He turned his head to look at Mark. “You ready for this?”

Mark gave him a calculating look. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

Ozzie dropped the Charybdis back into real space. Tiny segments of the stealth hull peeled back like eyelids, allowing sensors to peer out. Five thousand kilometers in front of the sleek ultra-black ellipse of the frigate the Dark Fortress writhed in electromagnetic agony. Beneath the outer lattice sphere a dense typhoon of radiant amethyst plasma was beset with eruptions and upsurges of copper and azure gyres. The unstable surface spun out tumescent fountains. As they lashed against the outer lattice sphere they triggered snapping discharges deep within the struts causing them to glow with ethereal radiance.

“Wow,” Mark hissed. “Looks like it’s on fire down there.”

“Uh huh.” Ozzie was watching the data from the nonvisual sensors. The energy environment around the gigantic orb was diabolical, with electrical, magnetic, and gravitonic emissions pulsing up from the rutilant interior to create a maelstrom of particles and radiation above the outer lattice sphere. “I guess something this big doesn’t have a quick death no matter what you hit it with,” he mused.