Judas Unchained

He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.

He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?

The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.

“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.

“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”

“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”

“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”

“You. Not me.”

“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”

“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”

“Fuck you.”

It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”

“Good idea,” Alic said.

Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.

“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”

“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”

“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”

“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”

The sun went out.

Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.

***

The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.

An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.

Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored lines that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.

“Nigel?”

“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.

“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”

“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.

“Do you think they’re—”

Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.