I took a moment to glance back at the Rhamphorhynchus and Quetzalcoatlus. The Altairian singleships were swarming around the Rhamphorhynchus (colored blue in the display). Peter Chin’s lasers were sweeping through the swarm, and every few seconds I saw a singleship explode. But he was still overwhelmed.
Heidi, aboard the Quetzalcoatlus, was trying to draw the swarm’s fire, but with little success. And if she fired into the cloud of ships, either her beams or debris from her kills might strike the Rhamphorhynchus.
I swung to look at the hologram of Peter’s head. “Do you need help?” I asked.
“No, I’m okay. We’ll just—”
The fireball must have roared through his bridge from stern to bow; the holocamera stayed online long enough to show me the wall of flame behind Pete, then the flesh burning off his skull, and then—
And then nothing; just an ovoid of static where Peter Chin’s head had been. After a few seconds, even that disappeared.
I turned to the holo of Heidi, and I recognized her expression: it was the same one I myself was now forcing onto my face. She knew, as I did, that the eyes of her bridge crew were on her. She couldn’t show revulsion. She especially couldn’t show fear— not while we were still in battle. Instead, she was displaying steeleyed determination. “Let’s get them,” she said quietly.
I nodded, and—
And then my ship reeled again. We’d all been too distracted by what had happened to the Rhamphorhynchus to notice the wake moving through the cloud of expelled gas around our ship. Another stealth torpedo had exploded against our hull.
“Casualty reports coming in—” began Champlain.
“Belay that,” I said. The young man looked startled, but there was nothing I could do about the dead and injured now. “What’s the status of our cargo?”
Champlain recovered his wits; he understood the priorities, too. “Green lights across the board,” he said.
I nodded, and the computer issued an affirming ding so that those crew members who were no longer looking at me would know I’d acknowledged the report. “Leave the Nidichars; let’s get rid of those singleships before they take out the Quetzalcoatlus.”
The starfield wheeled around us as the Pteranodon changed direction.
“Fire at will,” I said.
Our lasers lanced forward, taking out dozens of the singleships. The Quetzalcoatlus was eliminating its share of them, too. The two remaining Nidichars were now barreling towards us. Kalsi used the ACS thrusters to spin us like a top, lasers shooting off in all directions.
Suddenly, a black circle appeared in front of my eyes again: there had been an explosion on the Quetzalcoatlus. A stealth torpedo had connected directly with one of the Q’s three engine spheres, and, as I saw once the censor disengaged, the explosion had utterly destroyed the sphere and taken a big, ragged chunk out of the lens-shaped main hull.
We’d cut the singleship swarm in half by now, according to the status displays. Heidi powered up her tachyon-pulse cannon again; it was risky, with her down to just two engines, but we needed to level the playing field. The discharge from her TCP destroyed one of the two remaining Nidichars: there was now only one big Altairian ship to deal with, and forty-seven singleoccupant craft.
I left Heidi to finish mopping up the singleships; we were going to take out the final Nidichar. I really didn’t want to use our TCP—the energy drain was too great. But we couldn’t risk being hit by another stealth torpedo; we’d left our cloud of expelled atmosphere far behind when we’d gone after the swarm, and—
And the Pteranodon rocked again. A structural member dropped from the ceiling, appearing as if by magic as it passed through the holobubble; it crashed to the deck next to my chair.
“Evasive maneuvers!” I shouted.
“Not possible, Captain,” said Kalsi. “That came from the planet’s surface; its rotation must have finally given a ground-based disruptor bank a line-of-sight at us.”
“Cargo status?”
“Still green, according to the board,” said Champlain.
“Send someone down there,” I said. “I want an eyeball inspection.”
Heidi had already moved the Quetzalcoatlus so that the remaining singleships were between her and the planet; the ground-based cannon couldn’t get her without going through its own people.
The remaining Nidichar fired at us again, but—
Way to go, Nguyen!
A good, clean blast severed the habitat module from the two engines—a lucky guess about which was which had paid off. The habitat went pinwheeling away into the night, atmosphere puffing out of the connecting struts.
We swung around again, carving into the remaining singleships. Heidi was doing the same; there were only fifteen of them left.
“Incom—” shouted Kalsi, but he didn’t get the whole word out before the disruptor beam from the planet’s surface shook us again. An empty gray square appeared in the holobubble to my right; the cameras along the starboard side of the ship had been destroyed.
“We won’t survive another blast from the planet’s surface,” Champlain said.
“It must take them a while to recharge that cannon, or they’d have blown both of us out of the sky by now,” Heidi’s hologram said. “It’s probably a meteor deflector, never intended for battle.”
While we talked, Nguyen took out four more singleships, and the Quetzalcoatlus blasted another five into oblivion.
“If it weren’t for that ground-based cannon…” I said.
Heidi nodded once, decisively. “We all know what we came here to do—and that’s more important than any of us.” The holographic head swiveled; she was talking to her own bridge crew now. “Mr. Rabinovitch, take us down.”
If there was a protest, I never heard it. But I doubt there was. I didn’t know Rabinovitch—but he was a Star Guard, too.
Heidi turned back to me. “This is for Peter Chin,” she said. And then, perhaps more for her own ears than my own, “And for Craig.”
The Quetzalcoatlus dived toward Altair III, its sublight thrusters going full blast. Its force screens had no trouble getting it through the atmosphere, and apparendy the ground-based cannon wasn’t yet recharged: her ship crashed right into the facility housing it on the southern continent. We could see the shock-wave moving across the planet’s surface, a ridge of compressed air expanding outward from where the Quetzalcoatlus had hit.
Nguyen made short work of the remaining singleships, their explosions a series of pinpoint novas against the night.
And Altair III spun below us, defenseless.
Humanity had just barely survived five hundred years living with the nuclear bomb. It had been used eleven times on Earth and Mars, and over one hundred million had died—but the human race had gone on.
But our special cargo, the Annihilator, was more—much more. It was a planet killer, a destroyer of whole worlds. We’d said when Garo Alexanian invented the technology that we’d never, ever use it.
But, of course, we were going to. We were going to use it right now.