Chapter 20

Chapter 20: Ten thousand millions flee to the westward light

The Koraxians sent a lot of troop ships. Dozens. Backed up by a handful of their crystalline monstrosities. My brain kicked into overdrive to come up with a plan of attack. My eyes scanned the consoles in front of me. I mined Arcturus for information.

"How do the troop ships work?"

"The bottoms are covered with a large number of cable-bound claws. There are a few large ones, too, that they use to tear the roofs off of buildings."

"So, the smaller ones grab people?"

"Yes. They're coated with sedatives to minimize resistance. One ship can snap up and hold about four hundred people in under an hour."

"And they sent a lot of ships, I see."

Arc nodded.

My eye caught one of the controls laid out before me. "What's 'Grapnel Control' for?"

"We have a few grapnel launchers aboard. We use them to gather asteroids for mineral processing."

"How many is 'a few'?"

"Five, we have five."

"Better than nothing." I veered Absolution toward a cluster of the troop ships. They were of a much different design than the crystalline ships--boxlike, not nearly as big, metallic. Big engines filled up the rear. A blue glow filled the window in front of me, and I launched one of the grapnels straight into the engine. It lodged neatly into one of the exhaust ports, which immediately lost its glow. I knew this wouldn't do enough to bring down one ship--not even with five grapnels available. So, I swung toward another ship, putting as much slack as possible on the cable I'd already launched. Threw another hook into a second ship. Arcturus gave me a very nervous look, hoping I knew what I was doing. Technically, I did, but whether or not it would work remained to be seen.

Three, four, five. Five ships with large grapnels jammed up their tailpipes. I turned Absolution away from them, began reeling them in, and slowly cranked up the throttle. "They're dragging us!" Lana warned.

Yes, I was fully aware of that. Arcturus put together what I was doing and activated the intercom. "Byron, we need all the engine capacity you can give us."

"We're already at 90 percent!" she called back.

Arc looked at his son, who shrugged. "We should be able to take 200% for twenty minutes or so without blowing anything out."

"Did you get that?" he called into the intercom.

"Yeah. I'll see what I can coax out down here."

Little by little, we began slow the dragging process. More importantly, the troop ships were being drawn closer together as the grapnels reeled in. As Byron got more power out of the engines, we began to pull the ships together more quickly. I adjusted the retraction rates of each cable and gave a glance to everyone else on the bridge. "You might want to hold on, this is going to be bumpy."

They didn't seem to think I was kidding. Each one grabbed a nearby handle--common features in ships like this one. I jerked the ship hard to port, which yanked one of the troop ships into another one. Absolution creaked under the effort, its engines pushed to the limit, the grapnel hardpoints threatening to tear from the bottom of the ship. I threw the ship upward. Another collision. Ship shook harder this time.

Down. I faintly heard the sound of metal tearing. Starboard. Three of the cables finally gave, throwing us all forward. I smacked my head on the console, leaving a nice impression of the controls on my forehead. "Ow."

Everyone else looked okay, although Arc's expression was one of "If you broke my ship I'm going to kill you, you son of a bitch."

I ignored him, turned back to the troop ships. Five of them, smacked together in a nice clump, their hulls wedged against one another. Given a few minutes, they might break free and get on with their mission.

I armed the most powerful weapons the ship appeared to have: some low-yield thermonuclear warheads. I figured those would be enough. I lobbed them toward the center of the mass and backed us away. Moments later, we saw the flash, and then a cloud of debris. The gnarled remains of two grapnels slowly pulled back into their chutes, along with what was left of the other three cables.

Arcturus looked simultaneously impressed and pissed off. "I must say, I didn't think you'd manage to take down five of them. But did you have to wreck my fucking ship in the process?"

"Easy, tiger. There are still plenty more we need to take out, and your grapnels have had it," I said. My eyes scanned the tactical readout. "Oh, and we've gotten the attention of their escorts. I don't suppose you have any hull disruptor missiles aboard?"

He folded his arms. "I don't even know what those are."

"That's a 'no,' then. What about the Darrex? I thought you said they had a fleet."

"They do," Jeremiah confirmed. "They're working on launching right now. You just bought them some time."

"Not a whole lot, so I hope they hurry." I maneuvered us away from the fleet and out of the path of the crystalline ships. One advantage of being in a vessel much smaller than the Protector was that the Koraxians would have a hell of a time hitting us with their big-ass shards. But that didn't address the main problem: "What do we have that can take out the rest of the troop ships?"

"Well, you seem to have found our nukes. We only have a few of those, I am sorry to say. Atomic weapons are hard to come by in the NAR. We have some mines aboard that we picked up recently. They were laid by police near one of the vectors out of here. We were just going to recycle them, though. Disabling them usually renders them useless. We've never had to make one work again after we took it offline."

"Jeremiah? You seem to be the tech guru around here," I said. "Can you get them working again? We could take down another few troop ships."

"I can try. Would you mind helping me?"

I got up and gave Lana the controls. "Just keep us out of harm's way in the meantime. We may not be able to trash all of the bastards, but we'll get as many as we can." I glanced at Arcturus. "Don't waste nukes on the escorts. It won't do you much good. I'd recommend picking off the troop ships instead. All we need to do is buy enough time for the Darrex to get their ships in orbit, right?"

Arc sighed. "Their fleet is hardly state-of-the-art. They stand no chance against the crystalline ships. I would expect them to take heavy losses even going against the pissant defenses of the troop ships."

"Wonderful. It may be time to start thinking about evacuation or at least sheltering. The troop ships can't nab what they can't see, right? I'll be belowdecks with Jeremiah, working on those mines." I followed him off the bridge.

We went down a couple ladders and through some poorly-illuminated corridors, finally making it into a small bay. We were greeted by about thirty metallic spheres, their surfaces marked with numerous impressions. Typical design. Each impression contained sensory equipment designed to trigger in the presence of any significant electromagnetic signatures. Boom!

Jeremiah knelt next to one of them. "Walk me through how you disabled these," I said.

"They're activated by remote. We reset them by using a strong X-ray burst. It's a design flaw in the sensors they use. It shuts the mine down for about ten seconds. That gives me enough time to link up and disable it completely."

"So, where's the problem in turning them back on?"

"The X-ray burst sometimes damages the sensors. The mine isn't much good if the sensors don't work. I also trashed the internal programming to keep them from coming back up by accident. So, they aren't really even mines anymore... more like unprimed grenades."

"Then how do we pull the pin?"

He bit his lip, staring down at the dark sphere, thinking. "I wonder if I could put something in there real quick to just be a timer. When the timer expires, the mine explodes. I could come up with that in a few minutes. Anything more complicated would take longer."

"A timer's better than nothing. How long would we need? Where do you launch these from?"

"Well, we have a mine launch tube, we just never use it. It's the next deck down."

"Then you work on your little program, and I'll start rolling these suckers downstairs."

We both did our parts. I have to say, I had considerable trouble rolling the damn things in a straight line when Lana kept throwing the ship all over the place. Sure, she was dodging enemy fire, but she could have been a bit more graceful about it. The worst part, of course, was going down the ladder and pulling the mine over my head without being crushed by the stupid thing. Suckers were heavy. Thank God for mechanically-reinforced arms.

I got a few of the mines down into the rather cramped mine launch bay before I realized I could have just asked Theo to help, with his big, bulgy arms and gruff demeanor. I smacked the intercom button and called him down.

I went back up for the third time to check Jeremiah's progress. "How close are we?"

"I've about got it." He flashed a small device past my eyes. "I've got it on here. I can transmit it into each mine. The clock will start ticking as soon as I do that. We'll have three minutes a mine."

Theo showed up shortly thereafter and set to work moving the mines around. I continued to help him, and before long, we had fifteen mines filling up the mine launch bay. No way was it going to hold any more. "How many does the launch tube hold?" I asked.

"Hell if I know," Jeremiah shrugged. "Just start dropping them in the hole."

I nodded. He came over, waved his little transmitter over the first mine, and I rolled it into the round hole by the wall. We repeated until we could see that no more mines would fit in the tube. Six. Six mines.

I hit the intercom again. "We've got three minutes to dump six mines. Let's go!"

"Acknowledged," Arcturus said.

Then, there was nothing to do but wait. I patted Jeremiah on the back for a job well done. He smiled. I thanked Theo for his muscular contributions, and we all went back up to the bridge. Lana was busily positioning the ship to drop a mine in front of one of the troop carriers. She paused for a moment, launched a mine, then veered off for another one. "Their ships turn like pigs," she said. "Even with minutes to spare, they won't be able to get out of the way."

That was good, but we only had a couple minutes left anyway. "If you need to dump more than one at a time, go ahead. We have more. The clock is ticking. Jeremiah?"

"Yeah, we have about two minutes and ten seconds until the last one goes off."

"We'll be fine," Arc said. He pointed to a group of the troop ships in formation off the starboard side. "Drop them in front of that bunch."

She agreed and spend about forty seconds getting us over there. She dropped the mines. Two, three, four. A red light came on when she tried to launch the fifth. "Oh, what now?" she muttered. "Goddammit. We have a jam!"

Jeremiah and I shared a panicked look, then rushed back down to the mine launch bay.

"We've got all of about thirty seconds to disarm two mines," I said. "I hope that transmitter of yours can do the job."

"Working on it," he said tersely, kneeling over the grate that covered the launch tube. He furiously worked the tiny keys, sweat dripping from his forehead. "Come on... got one!"

"Fifteen seconds, hurry!"

He worked on the second one. A drop of blood came from his lip as he bit down too hard. Sweaty fingers slipped over the keys. He was cracking. "Fuck!" he snapped, then sighed, then kept me in agony for the last few seconds. And then we didn't blow up.

I glared at him. "Well?"

"I got it. Barely. Sorry. That was just really close."

"You did good. It's a lot of pressure to be under. Believe me, I know."

We both stood and started walking away. As we rounded the corner, I tried to encourage him with a little ribbing. "For a second there, I thought we were going to--"

My voice was subsumed under a river of fire. The ship shuddered. I slammed into the wall and then the floor. The rush of air leading away from me told me all I needed to know. Explosion. Hull breach. My hand felt around for Jeremiah. Gone.

I struggled to get up, had a hard time maintaining my footing. The mine launch bay was gone. It opened up in vacuum. I peered with enhanced sight through the gaping hole. A few hundred meters out, there it was: his young form, drifting.

I had to think quickly. Unless the blast got him, and my eyes told me it didn't, he'd survive a few minutes. But that was it. I could survive much longer--my cybernetics kept me alive when my parents airlocked me, after all. Reserve oxygen. Enhanced blood filtering. I had a chance on my own. He didn't.

The wind swept viciously past me, and I finally decided. I got a running start and dove through the hole. Out of the fire and into the void.

Again.