The first engagement of the battle of St. Judy’s Comet was at 01:45 GMT. Solomon Gursky watched it with his crewbrethren in the ice-wrapped warmth of the command womb. His virtualized sight perceived space in three dimensions. Those blue cylinders were the corporada ships. That white swarm closing from a hundred different directions, the missiles. One approached a blue cylinder and burst. Another, and another; then the inner display was a glare of novas as the first wave was annihilated. The back-up went in. The vanguard exploded in beautiful futile blossoms of light. Closer. They were getting closer before the meat shredded them. Sol watched a warhead loop up from due south, streak toward the point ship, and annihilate it in a red flash.
The St. Judy’s Cometeers cheered. One gone, reduced to bubbling slag by tectors sprayed from the warhead.
One was all they got. It was down to the fighter pilots now.
Sol and Elena made love in the count-up to launch. Bas-arms and sur-arms locked in the freegee of the forward observation blister. Stars described slow arcs across the transparent dome, like a sky. Love did not pass through death; Elena had realized this bitter truth about what she had imagined she had shared with Solomon Gursky in her house on the hillside. But love could grow, and become a thing shaped for eternity. When the fluids had dried on their skins, they sealed their soft, intimate places with vacuum-tight skin and went up to the launch bays.
Sol fitted her into the scooped-out shell. Tectoplastic fingers gripped Elena’s body and meshed with her skin circuitry. The angel-suit came alive. There was a trick they had learned in their em-telepathy; a massaging of the limbic system like an inner kiss. One mutual purr of pleasure, then she cast off, suit still dripping gobs of frozen tectopolymer. St. Judy’s defenders would fight dark and silent; that mental kiss would be the last radio contact until it was decided. Solomon Gursky watched the blue stutter of the thrusters merge with the stars. Reaction mass was limited; those who returned from the fight would jettison their angel-suits and glide home by solar sail. Then he went below to monitor the battle through the tickle of molecules in his frontal lobes.
St. Judy’s Angels formed two squadrons: one flying anti-missile defense, the other climbing high out of the ecliptic to swoop down on the corporada ships and destroy them before they could empty their weapon racks. Elena was in the close defense group. Her angelship icon was identified in Sol’s inner vision in red on gold tiger stripes of her skin. He watched her weave intricate orbits around St. Judy’s Comet as the blue cylinders of the meat approached the plane labeled “strike range.”
Suddenly, seven blue icons spawned a cloud of actinic sparks, raining down on St. Judy’s Comet like fireworks.
“Jesus Joseph Mary!” someone swore quietly.
“Fifty-five gees,” Capitan Savita said calmly. “Time to contact, one thousand and eighteen seconds.”
“They’ll never get them all,” said Kobe with the Mondrian skin pattern, who had taken Elena’s place in remote sensing.
“We have one hundred and fifteen contacts in the first wave,” Jorge announced.
“Sol, I need delta vee,” Savita said.
“More than a thousandth of a gravity and the mass driver coils will warp,” Sol said, calling overlays onto his visual cortex.
“Anything that throws a curve into their computations,” Savita said.
“I’ll see how close I can push it.”
He was glad to have to lose himself in the problems of squeezing a few millimeters per second squared out of the big electromagnetic gun, because then he would not be able to see the curve and swoop of attack vectors and intercept planes as the point defense group closed with the missiles. Especially he would not have to watch the twine and loop of the tiger-striped cross and fear that at any instant it would intersect with a sharp blue curve in a flash of annihilation. One by one, those blue stars were going out, he noticed, but slowly. Too slowly. Too few.
The computer gave him a solution. He fed it to the mass driver. The shift of acceleration was as gentle as a catch of breath.
Thirty years since he had covered his head in a synagogue, but Sol Gursky prayed to Yahweh that it would be enough.
One down already; Emilio’s spotted indigo gone, and half the missiles were still on trajectory. Time to impact ticked down impassively in the upper right corner of his virtual vision. Six hundred and fifteen seconds. Ten minutes to live.
But the attack angels were among the corporadas, dodging the brilliant flares of short range interceptor drones. The meat fleet tried to scatter, but the ships were low on reaction mass, ungainly, unmaneuverable. St. Judy’s Angels dived and sniped among them, clipping a missile rack here, a solar panel there, ripping open life support bubbles and fuel tanks in slow explosions of outgassing hydrogen. The thirteen-year-old pilots died, raging with chemical-induced fury, spilled out into vacuum in tears of flash-frozen acceleration gel. The attacking fleet dwindled from seven to five to three ships. But it was no abattoir of the meat; of the six dead angels that went in, only two pulled away into rendezvous orbit, laser capacitors dead, reaction mass spent. The crews ejected, unfurled their solar sails, shields of light.
Two meat ships survived. One used the last grams of his maneuvering mass to warp into a return orbit; the other routed his thruster fuel through his blip drive; headlong for St. Judy.
“He’s going for a ram,” Kobe said.
“Sol, get us away from him,” Capitan Savita ordered.
“He’s too close.” The numbers in Sol’s skull were remorseless. “Even if I cut the mass driver, he can still run life support gas through the STUs to compensate.”
The command womb quivered.
“Fuck,” someone swore reverently.
“Near miss,” Kobe reported. “Direct hit if Sol hadn’t given us gees.”
“Mass driver is still with us,” Sol said.
“Riley’s gone,” Capitan Savita said.
Fifty missiles were now twenty missiles but Emilio and Riley were dead, and the range was closing. Little room for maneuver; none for mistakes.
“Two hundred and fifteen seconds to ship impact,” Kobe announced. The main body of missiles was dropping behind St. Judy’s Comet. Ogawa and Skin, Mandelbrot set and Dalmatian spots, were fighting a rearguard as the missiles tried to reacquire their target. Olive green ripples and red tiger stripes swung round to face the meat ship. Quinsana and Elena.
Jesus Joseph Mary, but it was going to be close!
Sol wished he did not have the graphics in his head. He wished not to have to see. Better sudden annihilation, blindness and ignorance shattered by destroying light. To see, to know, to count the digits on the timer, was as cruel as execution. But the inner vision has no eyelids. So he watched, impotent, as Quinsana’s olive green cross was pierced and shattered by a white flare from the meat ship. And he watched as Elena raked the meat with her lasers and cut it into quivering chunks, and the blast of engines destroying themselves sent the shards of ship arcing away from St. Judy’s Comet. And he could only watch, and not look away, as Elena turned too slow, too little, too late, as the burst seed-pod of the environment unit tore off her thruster legs and light sail and sent her spinning end over end, crippled, destroyed.