Then the gravity hammer came down. He had a moment to appreciate that he’d screwed up and they were well and truly dead. Then he realized that he shouldn’t have been allowed that moment. And now, two such moments later, he was still alive . . . The Joan’s damage console was lit up like it was some kind Partheni festival – but they were still there and the ship was responding to his commands.
Segmentation. It was Partheni tech developed at the end of the war. It had been brand new at Berlenhof, expensive as hell, and you had to build your entire ship around it. He remembered the Pythoness as it had come in towards the Architect, a mere mote in the face of that jagged crystal landscape. All around them, other ships had been flayed away. The unseen hands of the enemy’s gravitic fields had found them and sculpted them into tatters and flowers and murderous origami. One of his Int classmates, in a ship up ahead, had been snuffed out into nothing, just gone into loose molecules and tormented strings of organic material. Then the Pythoness had fallen under the Architect’s gravity field too, but the new tech had saved them, shunting the clenching force of the strike right down its segmented hull, focusing and concentrating that force until . . .
Until now, the Dark Joan slipped from the interceptor’s grasp like a lizard leaving only its tail behind. The last five metres of the ship were just gone, sheared off and crushed into a knot of metal and plastic by the deflected force of the hammer’s blow. But they were clear – and very close. He ran his calculations swiftly, taking into account Kris’s revelation. He could unleash both the Joan’s laser and accelerators, then dart from blind spot to blind spot. He’d head for the point where all three ships lined up like a conjunction.
The interceptor pilot was pulling its ship round now, to catch them in its field of fire. He felt the judder as their gravitic shielding clashed against his own a second time. This time it was expected, all figured into his calculations. Lessons from Berlenhof again. Idris had been at ground zero, watching the Heaven’s Sword crew play tag with the Architect. Their vast battleship was no more than an insect in the face of this enemy, as they calculated its hundreds of conflicting attempts to maul space around them.
And the Heaven’s Sword had gone down, of course. But this time would be different.
Idris hit a blind spot and the interceptor rolled away just as he’d foreseen. He already had the Joan’s accelerators running hot, his barrage of fire whirled harmlessly away by the gravitic torsion of the other ship’s shield. Another blind spot – and now Idris wasn’t shielding but reaching out, predicting the defensive configurations of the enemy’s shielding and matching them. He aligned the ships, reorienting the Joan to find a new down. The ship rolled uncomfortably around him and Kris, as he brought them swinging far too close to the enemy’s hull. He’d seen Partheni Zero fighters do exactly the same as a swarm, to bring their weapons to bear on larger targets. He was no Zero pilot, but then this wasn’t the war . . . Make do and mend.
The Dark Joan darted past the interceptor, heading into deep space; next instant the grabby drive had yanked it back, still yoked to the shifting gravitic fields of its target. Then came the moment he’d been waiting for . . . that heartbeat of stillness when the enemy weapons stopped, to avoid raking hellfire across the Oumaru’s warped hull. Even though the wreck was nothing more than a glinting dot a world away.
Idris unloaded everything they had, chewing up the Joan’s own mass for ammo, emptying the laser’s power reserves. He used the shuddering flex of the interceptor’s own gravitic field so that, when the enemy tried to twist the Joan’s attacks away, it took them into its heart instead, embraced them to its bosom like a lover.
He saw their reaction drives blow first, then their remaining fuel reserves, a constantly extinguishing fire venting out into the hunger of space. Abruptly the interceptor was spinning, turned from an arrow to a twirling baton by the force of the explosion. The Joan’s twin accelerators raked the length of the ship three times, automatically tracking along its length for as long as he maintained fire. His panel reported 307 discrete hits, like a proud child with a test score. But Idris was pulling away from the damaged ship, feeling abruptly sick at the surge of triumph he’d felt, the savage joy. For him, adrenaline went sour quickly.
He located the Oumaru and checked the Vulture was still attached. Then he scudded the Joan across the intervening kilometres at the ship’s best speed, because the others would need him.
Solace