“Way to go, Robby boy,” the Cat cried.
Morton’s outstretched hands touched the ruined road. He curled himself into a ball and rolled forward to kill momentum. The fearsome glare drained away. Behind him the armored car was skidding sideways. Stig fought for traction, slewing it back on course. Morton hopped on the front, clinging to one of the X-ray laser mounts.
The Cat appeared beside him as if she’d teleported in. A lone sensor image showed him the smoldering blast crater where Rob had been. Alic thudded onto the roof, gauntlets gripping narrow ridges tight enough to gouge the metal. Morton’s hyper-rifle deployed out of his forearm; targeting graphics slid out of his grid. The three of them began to shoot any soldier motile in a broad swathe ahead of the armored car. “Use everything,” Alic shouted. “Punch them out of the way.”
Morton’s grenade canisters thrummed as they fired. His plasma carbine switched to continuous pulse, hosing out energy. The hyper-rifle swung around as he picked out target after target. Power cell charge wound down at an alarming rate. More ion rifle shots came from behind them where Jim and Matthew were clinging to the armored car Ayub was driving. Micromissiles burst all around, hyperfilament lashing against the suits, streamers of ion fire clawed at the grizzly bodywork of the armored cars. They were driving through a demonic inferno that blotted out every sensor return in a digitized blizzard. His suit surface screeched as the demented energy slashed against it.
Then they were past the bedlam, racing down the gray-white concrete strip of Highway One, shedding static tendrils like chaff. Stig had cranked their speed up over a hundred sixty kilometers an hour; smoke was shooting out from somewhere underneath. Morton hunted around, finding the bulk of the soldier motiles streaming together behind them. Their weapons fire contracted, centering on the last armored car. Jim and Matthew were doing their best to return fire, but they were swamped by the colossal barrage. Hyperfilament shrapnel mauled the road right in front. The armored car exploded.
“No!” Alic cried. “Godfuck all of you. Oh, sweet Jesus, why can we never catch this monster?”
Morton wanted to answer, but all he saw was Rob’s demise, and Doc Roberts, Randtown’s glass crater.
“How much power have you got left?” the Cat asked.
“Twenty percent. Maybe.” Morton checked his schematics. “Bit under.” He started scanning along the side of the armored car. Somewhere inside metal was grinding against metal with a terrible clattering violence. The smoke rushing out from underneath had thickened.
“It’s the one percent that’ll kill it,” the Cat said.
“Stig?” Morton asked. “Are we going to make it?” The sound coming from the armored car sounded terminal.
“We’ll make it. This thing has redundancy everywhere. Sixteen kilometers, that’s all.”
Their speed still hadn’t slackened. Up ahead, the road was angling into the foothills. The Institute valley was visible as a wide saddle that led back to the first mountains of the Dessault range. They weren’t high enough to have snowcaps, but the ones in the misty distance behind them did. He scanned the jagged skyline, looking for any hint of an approaching storm. Far Away’s vaulting sapphire atmosphere was as placid as he’d ever seen it. Damnit, I thought we could rely on the Admiral at least.
The armored car juddered sharply and recovered. He swept his radar along the road, getting a clear empty image until it curved into the valley ten kilometers ahead. The MANN truck was already inside.
“Bradley,” Morton said regretfully. “We’re not going to catch it. Do you have any notion how we can disable the starship?”
“Not disable, no. We just have to delay launch until the storm arrives.”
“How?”
“There is one possible option, if you’re willing to help me.”
That didn’t sound good in any way. Morton wanted to look at the Cat’s face, to see what she felt. Despite her thick shell, he knew her well enough now to read her thoughts.
She could obviously read him a lot better. “We’ve come this far,” she said.
***
The amethyst plasma inside the Dark Fortress churned in violent torment as it was bombarded by radiation from salvos of fifty-megaton fusion bombs. Thousand-kilometer peaks soared up through the gaps in the outer lattice sphere like solar prominences, their extremities evanescing away into tattered streamers. The Charybdis dived down between them and struck the plasma at fourteen gees.
Ozzie had been bracing himself for a spine-snapping impact, even though he knew the plasma had a density that barely disqualified it from being a vacuum. There was a slight tremor, which he had to strain to notice amid the brutal acceleration. He disengaged the drive, and was plunged into freefall so abruptly his maltreated body interpreted it as being flung forward.
“What the fuck?” Mark mumbled.
Ozzie shut down their active sensors. “Flying dark, see?” The passive sensors showed fusion drives drilling through the plasma all around as the Prime missiles hurtled past. “They’re overshooting.”
“Can we navigate like this?”
“Sure. Look at the returns. The plasma is illuminating the lattice spheres in twenty different spectra. We can fly through this, but slowly.” Their velocity was already taking them toward the second lattice sphere at twenty kilometers per second. Behind them, three hundred twenty Prime ships slid through the outer lattice sphere and plunged into the plasma. They launched another massive missile salvo.
“Uh…”
“It’s fine, I can steer us through the second lattice no problem. It’s the negative mass one, there’s like no way we can hit it, we just get shoved away if we get too close, like magnets.”
“Ozzie…Christ! They can see our wake.”
“Huh?”
Behind the Charybdis, a five-hundred-kilometer-long contrail of plasma spiraled like a gargantuan tornado. The armada of missiles was all converging toward the apex at seventeen gees. They started to detonate. The frigate’s hull field blazed rose-gold as it warded off their directed radiation pulses, flinging vast webbed lightning zephyrs off into the plasma. “Shit.” Ozzie pushed power back into the secondary drive, accelerating the Charybdis away from the vector it had been coasting along. G-force shunted him down into the cushioning again. “Are we losing them?”
“No!”
“Mark, you control the weapons, do something!”
“What? I can fire a quantumbuster, a nova bomb, or a neutron laser.”
Behind them, another wave of missiles detonated. Radiation turned the plasma to an opalescent violet.
“Use a quantumbuster.”
“We need to be a million kilometers away at least when one of those goes off—anything closer than that and this frigate is dead.”
“Son of a bitch, we’re not going to make it.”
“You have an incoming call,” the SIsubroutine said. “An encrypted maser link originating outside the first lattice sphere.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ozzie groaned.
“Do you want to establish a connection? The identity certificate is confirmed: Nigel Sheldon.”
Ozzie was crying as he laughed. “Tell him we’ll accept the charges.”
“Yo, Ozzie, how’s it hanging?” Nigel said. “You guys need any help down there?”
***
Both armored cars charged around the final curve in the road, and the Institute valley was directly ahead. The town had the look of a small elite university campus, with villas and apartment blocks colonizing the shallower southern slope in prim rows where their silvered windows looked out over the long white laboratories and engineering sheds that sprawled across the floor of the valley. All of it was dwarfed by the huge cylindrical starship sheltering inside a force field. The scaffolding that had surrounded its eight-hundred-meter length for over two decades had gone, revealing a light gray fuselage that the morning sun gave a satin sheen. Eight dark fusion rocket nozzles dominated its aft superstructure, their external casings inset with concentric thermal duct strips that were glowing a mild maroon as they kept the superconductor coils chilled. Several long blunt fins protruded from the fuselage, fluorescing a deep fuchsia purple as they maintained thermal stability within the internal tanks and generators. Up at the prow, the original tumorous cluster of force field generators had been supplemented by an elongated scarlet cone, fifty meters across at the base. Frost clung to long segments of the fuselage, revealing the outer walls of the deuterium tanks.