Chapter 3

A slight blur began forming in front of the Enemy. Micah assumed it was preparing another portal.

“That’s about enough of that,” Micah murmured, scanning the space between the outer planet and the next planet in. “There you are my beauty,” he said with a smile, spotting a handy asteroid.

An asteroid orbited the sun just under a light second inside the outer planets’ orbit. It wasn’t in the perfect position, but it was close enough for his purposes.

Micah charged the cannon and adjusted the parameters to fire from the asteroid’s surface. He knew the asteroid wouldn’t survive the shot. In fact, he expected most of the asteroid’s mass to follow the black hole, and crash into the Enemy. He hoped the Enemy would assume he was cloaked, and firing from just a pounce away.

“You don’t need to waste the energy on a portal,” he advised the Enemy quietly. Remote firing took an extra ninety seconds to fire, so he hoped it would catch the Enemy’s attention before the portal finished forming.

He counted the seconds down in his mind as the blur in front of the Enemy took shape. A faint dark blue shimmer began outlining the developing portal when the canon fired.

The asteroid was longer than the skyscrapers Micah remembered from his home world were tall. It was at least half a mile thick. It shattered when the miniature blackhole formed near its surface and launched towards the Enemy. The shards of the asteroid followed in the black hole’s wake, some adding to the mass of the tiny black hole.

Micah gasped when the shot flew through the orbit of the outer planet. The black hole passed near one of the orbiting shaped charges and pulled the nuclear explosive in its wake.

The portal was on the verge of completion when the black hole passed through its structure, scattering the pure energy the portal was constructed from. Then it hit the Enemy, followed closely by the remnants of the asteroid. The shroud rippled, a hole appearing briefly before closing again. The shape charge was the last to hit the Enemy, passing through the shroud before the hole closed. It disappeared in the blackness, then exploded and momentarily illuminated a shape in the center of the black shroud.

Micah smiled, noting the position of the shape, slightly off center in the shroud. His fingers twitched as he adjusted his targeting for the final attack.

He waited anxiously, wondering if the Enemy would take the bait. The blur didn’t start again, yet. Micah took a deep breath to calm himself. No matter what the Enemy did, he knew he would attack. He prayed for the chance to make the attack effective enough to destroy the Enemy.

A portion of the Enemy’s shroud grew even darker. Micah didn’t understand how that was possible, and he didn’t understand what the Enemy was doing.

The Enemy blurred, flashing forward through the orbit of the outer planet, and stopping where the asteroid had been.

Micah initiated the final firing sequence. He relaxed as two heartbeats later, the outermost planet ignited along with tens of thousands of shape-charges in the planet’s orbit. A nuclear fire erupted, driving inwards from the entire planetary system’s periphery.

That deeper blackness began forming in the Enemy’s shroud again that Micah had noticed before, when the blast wave hit it. The shroud rippled, and great gaps appeared, briefly, before it shrank smaller, and the gaps diminished. The blast wave swept the shroud deeper into the system. The rippling along the edges of the shroud changed to flailing as it swept inward towards the sun. It shrank and the shroud was whole again, but it was much smaller. It had been reduced to about a light minute across. The edges had stabilized, still protecting whatever was at its core.

The Enemy seemed to regain control of its ship while riding the blast wave and slowly began edging ahead. Until they crossed the next orbit.

Another blast wave washed over the Enemy, and the shroud edges began flailing again. It stabilized faster this time, and had pulled further ahead of the blast wave, when it crossed the next planetary orbit.

Again, and again the Enemy was hammered going in system. The shroud continued taking damage and shrinking. Micah assumed the shroud was repairing itself and supplying power for stabilization.

Micah deftly maneuvered his ship, careful to stay in the inner planet’s shadow, but more closely aligning with the path of the Enemy.

The black shape, now less than a light second across, passed the third planet’s orbit. The ignition of the nuclear firestorm was the largest yet. It slammed into the shroud, shredding it and revealing the ship inside for the first time.

Simultaneously with the third planet’s ignition, the device at the center of the neutron star triggered. Micah felt the shudder of his ship as the star went super-nova, warping the very fabric of space.

The Enemy ship was big. It was miles long and nearly a mile thick. Its hull drank light more voracious than the shroud, and it was tumbling on the leading edge of the blast front heading towards the second planet’s orbit.