Idris had his own gravitic drive twisting space too, so the handful of shots that came near slingshotted around the Joan and were lost to the abyss. By that time he’d closed with the interceptor on a jagged course. And the interceptor’s salvos continued to land everywhere the Joan wasn’t, Idris’s deft hands feeding calculations to the ship. There were gaps in their enemy’s firing, too. He wasn’t sure why, but his mind picked up the discontinuity. Why not shoot back just then? Why that half a second when their guns cut out? Malfunction or strategy?
He brought them closer yet, reaching out with the brachator to snag the universe and yank the Dark Joan in. Close was relative, but a hundred kilometres meant near neighbours in space. His laser flicked out and he unloaded another burst from the ship’s accelerators, the high whining vibration of the weapons coming to him through the hull. The Harvest ship tried to match him, manoeuvre for manoeuvre, but its drive-to-mass ratio was far more mass than drive and he buzzed it like a fly. The Partheni console helpfully picked out all its arcs of fire and he chased the blind spots as it rolled and lurched then dropped suddenly away, trying to get him in range again. A moment later he was too close and the gravitic fields that had been fending off his attacks were clashing with his own. The whole fabric of the Dark Joan shuddered, and for a moment he lost control over where they were relative to the other ship.
He’d almost calculated a solution when the interceptor’s pilot reconfigured their gravitic field and sent the Joan hurtling away, like a cork from a bottle. The interceptor itself was punted in the opposite direction by Newton’s inescapable boot. Partheni ships had what Idris thought of as a panic pedal to generate emergency shielding. It flipped all the gravitic drive’s resources towards defence, and he stomped on it then, almost closing his eyes as he waited for the Joan to take a hit. Then a kilometre of space around them was coursing with the angry metal bees of accelerator shot.
The missiles flowered away from them in a perfect rosette as the Joan’s drives took the gravitational gradient of spacetime and hauled on it like a sheet. The lethal barrage of fire fell away from them, raindrops down a window. Except the window was the universe and ‘down’ was in every direction.
Something hit them like a slap, making the inside of the Joan boom hollowly. Kris yelped, and for a moment Idris thought she’d been hit. But this was no laser, no punching railgun round. She was just demanding to know What the fuck? because she’d never been on the wrong end of a gravity hammer before.
I guess they do have one then. He really hadn’t quite believed it, because serious gravitic weapons were for Partheni battleships and other big-ass militaria. But that was humanity. Apparently the Hegemony were just giving the damn things away, even to their apostate gangsters.
That had been a near miss, the interceptor’s hammer striking the space the Joan was just vacating. Idris was still using the drive to ripple their gravitic shielding, eeling through the storm of shot the interceptor was sending their way. Their shielding couldn’t take the concentrated gravitic force of a closer strike. Even another near miss might just flatten the spatial contours all around them, leaving them a sitting duck in a mathematically predictable volume of space.
The Harvest almost had them in the next second. Idris had the sense of being arrested in mid-leap, suddenly stationary, so the dampeners struggled and he and Kris were both rammed sideways in their seats. A moment later they were out of it and on the move. Again, the interceptor had missed its big chance to turn them into confetti. Same thing, why stop then? What’s the deal? He let the back of his mind chew at it as he had the grabby drive sling them about a bit. Once more, he tried to exploit their blind spots, or at least minimize their attacker’s lines of fire as they dodged.
‘The Oumaru!’ Kris shouted.
‘What?’ That part of his mind they’d monkeyed with, to make him an Int, was warning him that the gravity hammer was crushing space along their path like a raging imbecile chasing a fly.
‘They don’t—’ Kris whooped again as the whole ship shuddered and groaned around them, ‘want to hit the Oumaru.’
It seemed ridiculous, because something had already hit the Oumaru with extreme prejudice, but Kris was absolutely right. The gaps in enemy fire occurred when that great scatter of accelerator rounds might catch the ruined freighter. Worried about their friends on the Vulture? But would that really warrant sending a near-as-damn-it warship after them – via a dangerous in-system jump. What’s so bloody valuable to them?