Chapter 12

[You know, ] Carcass’ sardonic voice filled Roxi’s mind as she desperately pulled a nearly relativistic jackknifing turn – so intense that it pushed the life support of her few remaining organic bits to their upmost to keep her from stroking out – that ended with the sixteen planet-cracker antimatter bomblettes on stabdrive capable strike fighter frames overshooting her location and plunging into the upper atmosphere of a bloated jovian. [I think the Voidbringers might have figured out what our plan is.]

The gas giant’s atmosphere flared and trembled upwards – a bulge nearly the size of a thousand Terras, reaching up and away from the planet towards Roxi’s feet as she skidded through the void at a hyperbolic tangent compared to the rest of the solar system. With the bomblettes no longer behind her, she snapped her head up and glared at the Bountiful Dawn. The last of the wallowing super-freighters, with the final Iron Bomb nestled securely within her exposed hull, was currently burning as hard as she possibly could – harder, actually. The crew had sacrificed their long term survival and short term agency by programming the fusion torch drive to ignore all programmed restrictions and put it into the harshest burn possible, before throwing themselves out of the airlock to drift through space.

On the one hand, it was a bad idea to drift through space in vac suits without pickup.

On the other hand, Roxi had to admire them. They’d looked at the fact that drifting through space in a solar system thronging with Voidbringer strike craft, stray kinetic weapons, and detonations like the one she had just evaded ... was still better than sticking in a ship pulling a hundred Gs.

So they had just chucked themselves into space.

[Ya think?] Hugh muttered.

The first few Iron Bombs had been textbook deployments. The freighters had dropped from E-space into their chosen systems, flown in close to the supergiant stars that had been chosen for demolition. Then they had dropped the Bombs, turned, and burned hard enough to hit a safe jump point, then slipped back into E-space. Easy.

This one, though?

[We have a target lock! Munitions away!] K’iren said, and Roxi’s shoulders opened as a pair of micro-muntions shot out, jinking and corkscrewing wildly. One was beamed out of the sky by the dorsal X-beam turret of the Voidbringer destroyer that was trying to keep up interdiction and fighter support. The other struck the destroyer and cracked it in half with a flare of blue-white light and a hissing spray of hard radiation. [And that’s the last of our radioactives, we’re down to pure kinetics and the Grazers.]

[I wouldn’t use your left Grazer, ] Heinlein said, quickly. [Remember?]

Yeah, I’m not about to forget the hole in my fucking palm, Clarksworld! Roxi thought, seeing another flight of Voidbringer fighters banking down towards the unmanned Bountiful Dawn. She shot forward, accelerating away from the truly fascinating pyrotechnics that were happening on the gas giant behind her. Her tangent corrected itself, transforming from a wild ellipses, then a circle, then back into another hyperbolic line. But this time, it was lancing through where the Voidbringer fighters would be again in ten seconds.

The oblong black darts that were the Vidbringer’s strike fighters didn’t even try and swing around to engage her. They opened up with their nose mounted kinetics and their wing mounted X-beams. What passed for the Dawn’s ablative armor bubbled and hissed across meters of the bulbous, beetle shaped hull sections, while sparks hissed and flashed along the dorsal spine of the ship. But the fighters had needed to pull their noses up at the last second – to try and evade as Roxi shot between them, her right palm leading her corkscrewing motion.

The end result?

Six dead voidbringer fighters – if I was counting, I’m sure the number would be quite impressive... - and only light damage on the super-freighter. Of course, light damage added up. By now, several of the secondary fusion torches were down and the ship had gone from pulling hundreds of Gs to merely pulling dozens: Taking out a single engine on one side forced the ship’s automation to shut down an engine on the other, to prevent listing.

How much longer?! Roxi thought, desperately, as she saw the flicker-flash of four more E-space entries. Two carriers and ... two goddamn battleships. Their spinal kinetics were already in-line with the Dawn, but they had entered into the system far enough to be out of hammerlock range. That meant that if they fired, the Dawn could have enough time to spot the incoming projectile and effect evasion – all it would take would be adjusting their trajectory minutely for a few seconds and every bit of energy would be lost.

The battleships started fixing that by flaring their own torches on and the carriers started to help by launching wave after wave of fighters.

ETA! Roxi thought, when her crew hadn’t responded in a few moments. Her brain was running fast, and her simulated bridge was running even faster, but at the speeds that space combat took place at, especially with the energy and tech both she and the Voidbringers were throwing at one another, there was still only so much time to sit around gobsmacked.

[[Thirty seconds for the Dawn,]] Hugh said, quietly.

[Fifteen for hammerlock, ] K’iren said.

Okay, then ... Roxi thought. She shot forward, ignoring the fighters.

[We have target lock and ... incoming AM2s!]

I know, Hugh! She thought. Kay, do something about it.

[Oh, will harsh language work?] Despite her snark, K’iren already had a solution programmed. As Roxi darted ahead of the Dawn, her ankles opened and several kinetic darts with small thrusters attached launched from her. They shot away from the super-freighter, intersected the incoming antimatter tipped missiles, and then detonated themselves into shotgun sprays of fine particulates, which the antimatter missiles flew through when they were still significantly denser than vacuum. The armor ablated and the containment units were shattered into fragments – turning each antimatter missile into a miniature star.

Roxi ignored it. She instead was looking at the super-freighter and Carcass, having intuited what she was thinking, threw up the structural diagrams. The big reason why she wasn’t delivering the Iron Bombs herself was that starships ... for all that they were incredibly useful and effective, had a scaling problem. Roxi had been given a great way to understand it, explained to her by Carcass during their training days back on Found – before she had been Roxi.

How do thumbtacks work? They make the pressure of your weird mammal thumbs focus into a single point, pushing through the wall. Bizarre invention. Why not made something that doesn’t damage the wall? Anyway, starships have the same problem. It’s ameliorated by some clever design from the Pantheon – a-grav and kinetic barriers working together to turn your immense strength applied in a small area into a wider area. But there are limits to that widening – meaning in many tasks, a starship is simply too small.

If Roxi gripped the Iron Bomb and just threw it into the sun, what she’d do would ... put her hands through the incredibly fragile housing and break the fucking thing. It’d hit the sun as a pile of scrap. But with the crew vacated and the ship shot to shit, the Dawn now could serve as one gigantic pile of scrap that she could do with as she wanted – while containing and protecting the Iron Bomb in the webwork of a-grav corsets and kinetic barriers that had kept it secure against the maneuvering and evasion so far.

We’ll reimburse them, right? She thought as her palms punched into the front of the ramscoop’s covering. She clenched her hands on what felt like thin tissue paper, wadded up and balled into her hands – but in actually were several layers of thick hull plating, compacting together under her yellow and black fingers – and then she shifted her arms, making an ungainly throwing motion as hard as she could. Her shoulders groaned and she felt the power requirements of the motion – drawing not merely on the advanced metamaterials of her arm muscles, but in the various agrav field projectors and kinetic manipulators that were threaded through her upper torso, spine, and legs, all put to the same goal of propulsion by the most ancient means.

[Who the fuck cares?] K’iren asked as the super-freighter picked up just enough extra momentum to clear the final stretch of space between it and the surface of the supergiant.

[Actually, the surrounding frame will work better on the Iron Bomb – extra protection from the blazing heat of the sun. Once it melts and the bomb triggers, it’ll be closer to the core, means the supernova goes off bigger, harder and oh shit, run!] Hugh said, his voice becoming a panicked scream in the last bit.

Roxi was, currently, doing her damnedest. The battleships, hammerlock range being significantly further for her than for the wallowing behemoth of the Dawn, were still firing their petajoule kinetics on shotgun mode. It was more than a little annoying – and that was the word that Roxi stuck to because ‘terrifyingly random’ and ‘oh shit I might die’ wasn’t exactly what she wanted to think of right now. She kept jinking wildly, trying to avoid the focusing arrays of X-beams and grazers and impactors and everything else that the Voidbringers were chucking her way, while also getting her orbit closer and closer to the pining beacons of the Dawn’s crew.

“Go on! Get out of here!” the captain – a Frellin girl who couldn’t be more than sixty eight, which (for Frellin) basically made her on par with a Terran teenager. “You have to get back to Found and join the fleet!”

“No offense, Captain Quirenren, fucking shut up!” Roxi snapped. Internally: Okay, Car, you have approximately fifteen real world seconds to figure out how to save twelve Frellins in HESS-12s and two hours of air left.

[Ten, actually, ] Carcass said, his voice soft.

Roxi realized that two of the beacons had flat-lined – it looked like they’d either been too close to a radburst or unlucky with a kinetic projectile. She hissed quietly. Damn it!

The beacons rushed closer. Carcass cut in.

[All right, calculations complete, tell them to polarize their helmets and hope they don’t have any leaks. If even an inch of their suits are damaged, they’ll be dead the instant we hit E-space.]

Polarize your visors now, maximum setting, Roxi shouted.

Another beacon went out, as if the Voidbringers were doing their best to fucking piss her off as she raced towards the beads of glittering light that were the Frellins. They had each jumped out of the airlock within seconds of one another, but at the rate the Dawn had been going, that still meant each of them had a pretty huge difference in their orbits. But by now, Hugh was damn good at navigation – and Roxi swept herself into an arc, following the line that he had painted.

[They’re shooting at where we’re gonna be!] K’iren shouted. [Deploying countermeasures!]

Roxi ignored the way her shoulders popped open and barely noticed the dozens of clever countermeasures that K’iren launched. She only had eyes for the first of the suits that was dangling ahead of her. She caught him – and slammed him into an agrav field so that he didn’t immediately turn to jelly inside of his suit. She snatched another, then another, then another, racking them in her arms, as if she was soaring through a warzone carrying a massive bag of laundry.

[Roxi, this is going to-]

Pain.

[-suck!] Heinlein said, his voice tight as agony exploded through her belly. Roxi ignored it, ignored the screaming from half a dozen alerts, ignored the red lights that gleamed in her HUD – an array of yellow and red markers appearing on a silhouette of her body that appeared in the upper left-hand corner of her eyes, damage indicators. She ignored it all as she snatched up the last suit and dropped into E-space seconds before several kinetic darts shot through where she had been.

A fraction of a second later, the Iron Bomb in the heart of the star went off.

At the same time, across light years, Iron Bombs within other stars, went off at the same time.

One hundred thousand years later, on the far side of the galaxy, the people there would arrange parties to watch this moment. From there, it would be a thing of staggering beauty as gleaming gems appeared in their night skies, flaring to life and dimming in near unison, the light of these titanic detonations arriving at the steady crawl of light speed, far outpaced, by ansible and courier rockets with E-drives.

Up close, it was significantly less prosaic.

“Hey, doc, got a question, why does this hurt?”

“Well, Approximating Apotheosis,” the shipdoc said, his voice a barely audible trill over the clamor of the shipop bay that was currently half full of wounded starships: “It’s because you took a goddamn petajoul kinetic through your spine. You’re damn lucky your crew knows what they’re doing and shut your barriers down or else you’d be so much scrap.”

[Yes, I am away of how overpenetration works, true, ] Heinlein said.

None of this particulaly helped Roxi’s mood, because she was laying on her back, forced into mobility, and felt as if her whole body was caught in the nasty liminal space between fire and hammers. She closed her eyes and tried to block out the sensation of the shipdoc working on her injury. It took longer than she wanted it to – and every bit of it hurt. The reason was simple and entirely tied into just how sophisticated and fancy she was. Every inch of her body was just crammed with components, subsystems, and other interrelated pieces of technology. Even a tiny hole through her needed a lot of delicate rebuilding, layering, reconnecting.

And she didn’t exactly have a tiny hole through her.

“So, Doc,” she said through clenched teeth. “How does overpenetration work, again?”

[I’ll handle this doctor, ] Heinlein said, sounding concerned. [A kinetic barrier hit by that scale of projectile would have failed and the projectile would have squashed against you, meaning more of the kinetic energy would be distributed through your body. End result? Bad news. Bad news for everyone.]

“Uhh huh!”

[But since I shut your kinetic barriers down, the shot was a through and through – you don’t have internal organs and can’t die from a through and through.]

“It just fucking hurts because of ... sadism? Right, forgot, our gods are merciless and ... fucking cruel.” She clenched her teeth, her eyes closing.

[It hurts because there’s no better system in your brain to communicate this information – sorry, it’s hardwired in there.]

“But my brain is wetwaaare!” she whined, her eyes closing tightly.

Then, suddenly, merciful coolness exploded through her belly. She slumped back in the chair, her breath coming slow, steady, needless as ever. But it was a reflex as old as her bones, and she wasn’t about to give it up, even now. She opened her eyes and the shipdoc nodded, looking her over. “All right, you’re good to go again.” He smacked her butt as she floated off the table. “Next!”

“Hey!” Roxi rubbed her rump with one hand, scowling slightly as she drifted away – her eyes pausing to look over the whole place. She spotted the CNS Sting In The Tail among the wounded. The more experienced starship was missing a right arm and looked really bored as she held her stump out towards a pair of shipdocs who were operating a kind of heavy duty nanolathe that was glowing so bright that it had several midnight black heat-shields deployed around it. Roxi flew up, skimmed along the ceiling, then dropped down with her head facing the floor, so that Sting seemed to on the ceiling as Roxi stood on a bare, light studded floor.

“Sting!” Roxi said. “What happened – why are there so many beat up ships?”

“We’re from the evacuation attempts of Listal Alphen,” Sting said, her voice tight. “There were so many Voidbringers – we counted at least fifty thousand battleships, and sixteen of a new class.”

“What class?” Roxi asked. “How big?”

“Well, we’re calling them planetkillers. So fucking guess,” Sting said, her voice getting snappish. A second later. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

Roxi winced. “How many people got off?”

“We managed to evacuate half the population of Listal IV and V,” she said, nodding. “They were putting every rocket they could to the pads. People were retrofitting hovercars for sub-orbital and getting snatched from the sky by jurry-rigged skyhooks. More than half of those smashed the instant they got hooked, but they still managed to evacuate a few million that way. By the end there, we were just spraying over hab-blocks with sealant and carrying them into space and hoping they had enough air to last the trip through E-space.” She shuddered. “And the whole time, the Voidbringers were hitting the planet’s defenses with everything they could with angular fire.”

“Angular fire?” Roxi asked.

Sting nodded. “Yeah.” Then, as if she had only just now realized it too, her brows knitted and furrowed, her synthetic lips turning down. “Okay, yeah, that’s weird.”

[Why?] Hugh asked. [Everyone uses angular fire when they’re fighting around a habitable planet.]

[Why would Voidbringers do that, though? They don’t give a shit about biospheres, they’re from another galaxy, right?] K’iren said. [Them giving a shit about our planets at all as anything but raw matter is actually weirder than them going in gungho and firing direct.]

“Yeah,” Roxi said – hastily packaging and sending that little exchange to Sting. Sting’s science officer cut in, appearing as a shimmering, blue, augmented reality ghost beside her shoulder.

“I did take some readings as we were pulling out,” he said. “The Voidbringers were landing their drones on the planet – but not at any population centers. They had already begun extraction efforts – but I couldn’t tell what they were exacting exactly.”

“Spooky,” Roxi whispered.

“All operational starships, report to briefing room 001,” the PA crackled, while text-signals popped up inside of Roxi’s HUD. Sting and her exchanged a glance. Sting smiled, slightly, then withdrew a brand new, gleaming arm from the nanolathe. She wriggled her fingers.

“What good timing I have, huh?” she asked.

A few minutes later, Roxi, Sting and a ship she recognized as the CNS Tigerclaw were sitting next to one another, with even more ships to the left and right of her, ahead and behind her. This briefing room was normally used to give mission outlines to rocket crews, which were usually deployed in fleet actions. Roxi didn’t even need to be a major history nerd to know that there had never been this many starships organized in a fleet action ... ever. Not even in the prior worst crises that the Concord had faced.

Admiral Yen Yen Ro looked as if he had aged about ten galactic standard years without a shred of medtech. His multiple eyes each had their own massive bag, and his skin looked an unhealthy gray. As opposed to how he had looked just twenty four hours ago, with a healthy shade of gray. He nodded to the assembled starships, then brought up a map of the Perseus Arm and the E-space that existed above and below it. The two maps overlaid, to create a map of the strategic situation – and just seeing it made Roxi feel a faint swell of pride.

E-space looked like someone had grabbed it, shook it, and then smashed it together, creating a jagged, snarling maze of frothing, quasi-real reefs of pseudo-matter – the byproduct of a dozen suns detonating at nearly the same moment, dumping their energy into realspace and, thus, into E-space as well.