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  “Range in thirty seconds,” Das reported calmly. “Designating Bogey One as our primary target. It looks like the locals got a piece of her; it’s possible they weakened her armor enough for a solid hit.”

  Effective range was based on a number of factors, including how long the ion packets would maintain any cohesion at all, but weaker enemy armor definitely extended it. Das came to the same conclusion on that as Octavio did, and a moment later, the ship shivered as the turrets fired.

  Seconds ticked by and the tactical officer shook her head.

  “We got her, but the packet was too diffuse. Normal effective range in fifteen seconds.”

  Octavio smiled thinly.

  “You already showed you can hit her, Lieutenant Commander,” he pointed out. “Now do it again!”

  The cruiser shivered again as Das did exactly that. The recon ship tried to evade but only managed to dodge one of the four projectiles.

  That might not have been enough if her armor was intact, but the X-ray laser hit she’d taken had left it with fractures, and the heat dissipation clearly hadn’t recovered from the last attack. The shots hadn’t done any damage, but they’d left the Matrix ships vulnerable.

  Massive chunks of the armor and hull flashed to vapor, and the ship shattered into pieces.

  Scorpion whipped around another set of graser beams, Daniel attempting to line the ship up on Bogey Two for Das. Bogey Two had focused its attention on Scorpion in turn, and her pulse guns were now opening fire.

  The ESF’s pulse guns were now near-matches for the Matrices’ weapons in rate of fire. The engineering trade-off to manage that meant they now fired weaker and shorter-ranged plasma pulses than the Matrix weapon did. Scorpion wasn’t in range of her secondary batteries—and Octavio didn’t intend to get in that range.

  Bogey Two’s focus meant their course was steady for several seconds…the wrong seconds, as a new salvo of the locals’ X-ray lasers bracketed the recon node. The recon unit vanished, and suddenly Scorpion faced only three ships.

  And Das was firing again as the ship’s twisting and the turret’s own motion lined up perfectly on Bogey Five. The guns took long enough to recharge that targets of opportunity were often ignored, but since the intended target was already gone…

  Four blasts of charged particles slammed into the front of the recon unit and kept going. The ship was still there afterward, but its engines had cut out and it was no longer firing. The outer hull might have survived, but the inside of the ship was gutted.

  They were spinning to hit Bogey Four when their luck finally ran out. Bogey Three’s graser strike hammered in low, missing the heart of the ship but smashing its way along at least a third of the lower hull…and hitting the lower turret.

  “Turret B is down,” Das snapped. “Engaging with A.”

  “We’re down almost half of our pulse guns, too,” Renaud murmured over her private channel to Octavio as the shots missed Bogey Four. “DamCon is on their way to Turret B, but it doesn’t look good.”

  “Keep me informed,” Octavio ordered, vivid memories of the battle he’d done DamCon in suddenly surging back. “Daniel, looks like we need pulse-gun range after all. Take us in!”

  Their course changed almost instantly, their evasive maneuvers slowing as Scorpion’s engines flung her toward the surviving enemy ships. More graser shots went wide, and Das’s next shots with the particle cannon didn’t.

  Bogey Four was still firing, but she wasn’t dodging.

  “Leave her,” Scorpion’s Captain barked. “Hopefully, the locals have a shot left, but we can kill an immobile target with the pulse guns. We need to disable that last ship.”

  Whoever was in charge of the local warships saw the same thing he did. Just as his screens reported the particle cannons fully charged, a new blast of X-ray lasers hammered into the immobile ship.

  Range meant they still didn’t have guaranteed hits…but the ship wasn’t dodging. She never stood a chance.

  The surviving Matrix adjusted her course ever so slightly. Octavio stared at the new vector for several seconds before he realized what he was looking at.

  “They’re trying to ram! Get us out of their path!”

  It turned out to be a terrible idea for the recon unit to try that. She flashed into range of the warp cruiser’s pulse guns, and Daniel stood the ship on her end. The position made it easiest for them to evade the incoming ship—and revealed their remaining pulse guns.

  Two particle-cannon shots and dozens of plasma packets hammered into the charging ship. She didn’t survive anywhere near long enough to actually hit.

  Then Scorpion was alone in the battlespace. The local ships were almost five million kilometers away. The Matrix combat platforms were farther away, but they were going to be the death of his ship.

  “What do we do, sir?” Renaud asked. “I make it thirty minutes until the combat platforms reach graser range of us. We can hold off their missile fire, but we can’t fight those bastards in close range.”

  Octavio nodded his agreement, but his gaze was on the local ships. They looked like they’d started life as midsized asteroids, their interiors gutted and smelted to provide their weapons and systems while still leaving massive amounts of rock and iron to armor them.

  The concept behind their weapons was crude, but he couldn’t deny the efficiency or effectiveness of the final system.

  “We can probably hurt them in close range,” he finally said. “But what we can definitely do is stop all of their missiles…”

  Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters watched the strange ship run toward them and considered the datasong of the system beyond them.

  Only one of the immense spikes threatening her world had been pushed off course. Part of her wished that the new Stranger had continued firing at the spikes, moving them away from their apocalyptic course.

  But her own ships were in a reasonable range of the impactors now, and she remained silent.

  “First-Among-Singers?” her Voice-Of-Gunnery asked. “Shall we fire on the impactors?”

  Sings studied the nightmare enveloping her star system and said nothing.

  “First-Among-Singers?”

  “What is our magazine status, Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies?” she asked the officer. She knew. She knew how many bomb-pumped lasers each of her ships carried and how many they’d fired.

  She knew the answer before she even asked.

  “We have forty cartridges remaining,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies responded, the male wilting at her tone of voice.

  “If the new Stranger believed they could defeat the oncoming ships, would they be rushing to hide under the range of our guns?” Sings asked. “We will maintain our current course and deploy all remaining lasers.

  “We will only have one chance of clearing the waves of those ships.”

  “And the impactors?” Swimmer asked, his trilling low-key.

  “If those ships remain, they will redirect the impactors,” she noted. “We will do what we can once the void above View-Over-Starry-Oceans is clear. But we will not serve our people if we die and change nothing.”

  They were cold words, but dark waters were cold. If the People-Of-Ocean-Sky were to survive, costs would have to be paid. That was the nature of any ocean.

  “Prepare all bomb cartridges,” she repeated. “And send our first-contact package to the stranger. If they are prepared to fight for us, it would be good to know the tones of their song.”

  4

  “We’re getting a transmission from the locals,” Octavio’s com officer reported. Torborg Africano was a dark-skinned blonde, originally from Earth before the Exile, and had spent most of the four years Scorpion had been surveying the region around Exilium being very, very bored.

  “Anything we can read?” he asked, watching the oncoming combat platforms.

  He’d seen the recordings of the first time a Matrix starship had come to Exilium. He hoped the bastards now understood how the ESF had felt when that recon node had oblitera
ted every missile they’d fired.

  Fifteen times the combat platforms had fired, and fifteen times Scorpion’s Guardian Protocols had shot down every missile. Now they were nearly into energy-weapon range, and they had given up.

  They hadn’t even tried to shoot past Scorpion, which was a good thing… Octavio’s ship would probably have been able to protect the locals, but it wouldn’t have been a certain thing. He put the odds at about sixty-forty at best, which meant he was far happier if they were shooting at him.

  “It looks like trinary machine code,” Africano told him. “Loaded into a stand-alone platform and initiating first-contact translation protocols. Should I send our package again?”

  They’d sent it when they first warped in, but it was possible it had been lost in the background of the battle.

  “Send it,” Octavio ordered. They were running out of time, but he was close enough to see the munitions the locals had deployed into space.

  His ship had been refitted with the understanding that she’d likely have to face Matrix ships, but they’d never intended her to face a single combat platform alone, let alone two. The Exilium Space Fleet hadn’t successfully faced a fully functional combat platform, and the advance of the two AI warships was nerve-wracking.

  “Do we have an estimate on the range of our friends’ bomb-lasers?” he asked.

  “Depends on target armor and their focusing optics,” Renaud told him. “They were hitting the recon units at three million kilometers, but that was with a one percent success rate.”

  They were well inside three million kilometers now.

  “I’m going to guess they don’t have the armor to take a graser hit, either.” Octavio shook his head. Just what had he got his ship into?

  “We will open fire at standard range. Maximum evasive maneuvers. We’re helping these people…but we can’t afford to take a hit for them.”

  “Understood.” Yonina Daniel’s focus was on her controls as she took the warp cruiser through a series of maneuvers that should throw off the Matrices’ targeting.

  Should.

  “Enemy firing,” Das reported. “No hits.”

  Graser beams flashed through space all around Scorpion, and Octavio looked at the range. It wasn’t optimal, but…what choice did he have?

  “Return fire. Target Bogey One, sustain particle-cannon fire until he’s dead or crippled,” he ordered. He didn’t expect to live to pulse-gun range. His particle cannons would either decide this fight…or not.

  His single functioning turret fired, a pair of blasts of charged ions flashing toward the enemy. The combat platform easily evaded his shots at this distance, and they returned fire.

  Daniel danced them around the graser beams, too. The range was long enough that none of them were certain of a hit.

  “Sir, I have Lieutenant Commander Tran on the intercom,” Renaud reported. “Quy thinks she’ll have the second turret back online in a minute.” The XO paused and swallowed. “She says ‘so long as we don’t get hit.’”

  Quy Tran had spent most of her career working for him. The woman was as good an engineer as he was—and had ice water in her veins that he didn’t. If she said she’d have the turret online, she’d have the turret online.

  “Tell Commander Tran we’ll do our best,” Octavio replied. “Daniel?”

  “Doing my best,” the helm officer replied as another salvo of graser beams flashed past.

  Octavio winced a moment later when he realized those beams hadn’t been aimed at Scorpion. Two of the local guardships each received the full firepower of a Rogue Matrix combat platform.

  They didn’t survive. Octavio wasn’t aware of anything in space that could survive that.

  “We’re running out of time,” he half-whispered. “Take the damn shot.”

  The upper turret fired again, and this time, they hit. It was a perfect shot, hammering both packets into the combat platform’s bow…and it did nothing.

  “Enemy armor intact,” Das reported. “Charging for next shot…hot damn, she did it!”

  “Das?” Octavio demanded. There was only one she Das could be that excited about, but—

  “I have the lower turret. All main guns online and charging.”

  “Then hit them again for me,” the Captain ordered.

  The guardships behind him were silent. Two of them were dead. The rest were trying to evade, but their accelerations were nonexistent by the standards of late-twenty-fourth-century humanity.

  Another guardship came apart as he watched. Scorpion shivered under his feet, an almost-perfect shot that landed three of the four blasts on the target.

  That had an effect, the combat platform lurching under the fire and missing its next salvo at the guardships, but Octavio still wasn’t seeing any sign of armor breach.

  “That armor can take everything I throw at her for a week,” Das said, her tone edging toward panic. “We can’t keep dodging forever!”

  “We have to,” Octavio Catalan said firmly. “Because there’s still six impactors out there that we need to stop, people.”

  And they were moving faster. If they didn’t wrap this up, Octavio wasn’t sure he’d be able to deflect six impactors in time.

  Then the sky behind his ship lit up with fire. Over two hundred fusion warheads went off simultaneously, and over seven hundred X-ray laser beams stabbed into the night.

  They bracketed Scorpion perfectly, missing the cruiser by less than ten kilometers, and then slammed into their targets.

  The X-ray lasers were individually weaker than the Matrix grasers, barely more powerful than Scorpion’s particle cannons. But Octavio had been hitting the armor with four particle blasts at most.

  Even with misses and maneuvering, the locals hit the combat platforms with over three hundred lasers apiece.

  One of the combat platforms just vanished, one of her matter-conversion cores clearly having lost containment. The other reeled backward, most of her armor peeled away and several of the “claws” holding her grasers blasted off her hull.

  “Daniel, take us in,” Octavio ordered. “Maximum thrust. Das…hit it with everything we’ve got!”

  He suspected the locals didn’t have anything else left. Killing the crippled combat platform was on Scorpion’s shoulders, but if they’d peeled the armor off…

  Ion blasts hammered into the interior of the ship, setting off secondary explosions. Octavio was an ESF engineer. He knew, roughly, where a combat platform kept its matter-conversion plants—and the secondary explosions weren’t close enough. Those power cores were the beating heart of the Matrix warship—and Scorpion needed to tear it out.

  “IDed the conversion plants!” Das snapped. “Firing!”

  Moments after the pulses left his ship, Octavio knew they’d done it. The locals had stripped the armor off the enemy ship and Das had landed the shot. The combat platform was dead—they’d won.

  And then the combat platform’s last desperate salvo of gamma ray lasers struck home.

  5

  The People-Of-Ocean-Sky could not easily conceal their grief. Strong emotion accelerated the unconscious chirps that allowed their sonar to show the world around them, and Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters could hear the grief of her officers.

  Five of the eight guardships she’d started the battle with were dead. The new Strangers’ ship was reeling. Sings didn’t know enough about the aliens’ technology to guess whether the ship was still functional, but the sudden drop in power signatures was worrying.

  She couldn’t act to save them, though. The datasong told her what she needed to do. There wasn’t even time to grieve. There was only time to act.

  “All ships are to set course to intercept the impactors,” she ordered, the trill of her voice duller than normal.

  “We have no weapons left,” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies exclaimed. Her Voice-Of-Gunnery sounded broken. She knew the tones of deep exhaustion, though she’d never thought to hear them in person in the command pool of her ship.
r />   “We have our engines,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters declared. “All ships will make contact with one of the impactors and push it out of the way. The most powerful engines the People-Of-Ocean-Sky have ever built are aboard these ships.

  “If anything can save our world now, it is those engines,” she concluded. “Set the courses.”

  “We shall make it happen.”

  Sings stood still in the center of the command pool as her ships changed course. A cover over her left receptor provided her with a private datasong that no one else could hear, and it was changing as she did the math, praying to the Holy-Masters-Of-The-Great-Depths that she could save her world.

  The numbers that came back were hope and damnation combined. If they made contact in the next few minutes and if none of them suffered failure for pushing their engines at maximum power, they could deflect the impactors from View-Over-Starry-Oceans.

  “Contact in three hundred six seconds for us,” her flagship’s Voice-Over-Voices reported. “We will bring engines to one hundred twenty percent once we’ve made contact.”

  Hope. There was hope…the ships could deflect the impactors.

  But barring a miracle, they could only deflect one of the incoming projectiles apiece before they were out of time. They would do all they could, but three of the immense devices would still land on her world.

  The final calculations completed, but she knew the answer: one impactor would be a disaster, but the People-Of-Ocean-Sky would recover. Two would be a nightmare, one that would risk the survival of her race but would give them time to act before their world froze under the impact winter to come.

  Three…three would end all life on her world in fire and steam.

  They would do everything, and she would still fail.

  “Maintain your courses,” Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters ordered. “Let’s get ourselves in position and push those impactors away. We will save our world.”