The Evolutionary Void (78 page)

“Troblum,” Tomansio said. “Let’s get going.”

“The device is almost at active status. Another five minutes.”

Aaron smiled encouragement.

Troblum’s tentative humor faded away. His big round face paled. “Oh, no,”
he gasped.

Oscar’s u-shadow was pulling sensor imagery from the starship’s
smartcore. Troblum had permitted everyone a general-level access.

A sleek-looking ultradrive ship not too dissimilar to the
Elvin’s Payback
had emerged ten kilometers away. It opened
a communication link. Oscar’s shoulders slumped. He
knew
.

“Hello, my dears,” said the Cat.

A pulse of pure misery swept through the cabin.

“What kind of defenses have we got?” Aaron asked.

Troblum shook his head. He was close to tears.

“Weapons?”

Troblum started trembling. His legs gave way, and he sank to his knees.
“I can’t let her capture me. I can’t.”

“What do you want?” Oscar asked the Cat. If it was dead, they would’ve been
that already.

“That’s a whole load of talent you’ve got on board there with you, Oscar,
my dear. It’s not often I’m impressed, but just this once I’m going to admit
it. You did good.”

“What have you done to Cheriton?” Corrie-Lyn demanded.

“Don’t interrupt the grown-ups,” the Cat said. “You’ll get a smack where
it hurts most for that.”

Oscar made a frantic cutting hand signal at Corrie-Lyn. She gave him a
disgusted glare.

“You told Ilanthe about us,” Oscar said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did that spoil things? I thought you dealt with that
little shit Ethan quite beautifully, Araminta.”

“What do you want?”

“You know that, Oscar. Same thing I always do: some fun.”

“We’ll invite you to the victory party.”

“Don’t push your luck. The Void is where this is all going to finish. I
need to be a part of that, and you’re going to take me there.”

“What is Ilanthe doing?” Oscar asked.

“She’s set her little metal heart on something called Fusion.”

“No,” Araminta-two said. “It’s not that. She has become something
other
.”

“Then you’ll be able to ask her yourself soon enough, won’t you?”

“Can the Cat affect us once we’re inside the Void?” Aaron asked Inigo.

“You mean apart from blowing us all to shit?”

“Surely your mind is stronger.”

Inigo gave Araminta-two a worried look; he looked equally alarmed.

“I just don’t know.”

“Oscar, my dear, it’s rude to keep a lady waiting.”

Oscar didn’t know what the hell to do apart from using the obvious
smart-ass answer, which in this case might just prove terminal. And nobody was
offering any suggestions. Suddenly he was flinching, cowering halfway to the
decking. Space outside was ablaze with hard radiation as a range of enormously
powerful weapons were fired. His u-shadow reran events, analyzing it in
millisecond increments. He saw another ultradrive starship materialize directly
between the Cat’s ship and
Mellanie’s Redemption
. It
opened fire instantaneously at the same time its force field expanded,
deflecting the Cat’s return salvo away from
Mellanie’s
Redemption
.

A communication channel opened.

“Oscar, get the hell out of there,” Paula said. “Leave the Cat to me.”

“Go,” Oscar screamed at Troblum.

For the second time in an hour, the
Mellanie’s
Redemption
fled into hyperspace.

“You’re going to deal with me?” the Cat asked. There was a mocking tone
in the voice.

Paula was frantically reviewing the
Alexis Denken
’s
defense status. The force fields were struggling under the energy impact of
their first weapons exchange. Whatever the Cat’s ship was equipped with, it was
stronger than she had expected. The beam weapons were somehow transferring some
of their energy through hyperspace, circumventing the force fields. Local
gravity was doing strange things, its twists exerting unnatural stresses
throughout the
Alexis Denken
that the onboard
compensators weren’t designed to cope with.

“Always do,” Paula sent back. On her instruction, the smartcore fired a
couple of quantumbusters. They shot away, accelerating at two hundred gees.
“And this is the last time.” The quantumbusters went active. Eighty kilometers
away, the small chunk of astroidal rubble they targeted was less than thirty
meters in diameter. The entire mass was converted directly into energy in the
form of ultrahard radiation. For a microsecond its output rivaled that of the
nearby star.

Exovision warnings leaped up as the force fields strained to deflect the
appalling radiation torrent. Paula sent the starship back into hyperspace and
flashed toward the gas giant. The Cat came after her. Neither was making any
attempt at stealth.

Fifty thousand kilometers above the seething pink and gray cloudscape,
Paula stopped, and the
Alexis Denken
hung in
transdimensional suspension while the force field generators began to
stabilize.

One of the gas giant’s large outer moons exploded. A quantumbuster had
converted a couple of its more substantial craters directly into energy, a
detonation big enough to fracture the moon down to its core. The entire globe
ruptured, with vast segments moving ponderously apart while a billion rock
fragments came tumbling out of the expanding fissures into the outburst of raw
energy. The physical damage was an irrelevancy. The quantumbuster had a
diverted energy function, shunting a high percentage of the explosion’s power
into hyperspace.

Paula went flying painfully across the cabin as the colossal exotic
energy wave smashed into the starship.
Alexis Denken
fell back into spacetime as its overstressed ultradrive failed. Outside, the
remnants of the moon were creating a giant translucent shock sphere twenty
thousand kilometers across that glowed an ominous spectral blue as it inflated
at half lightspeed. The Cat’s ship came streaking out of the garish aurora,
force fields glimmering a malevolent crimson as it headed straight for the
Alexis Denken
. Dark missiles punched forward at a hundred
gees.

The smartcore identified them as Hawking M-sinks. Force fields wouldn’t
protect Paula from them.

Another moon exploded. Sequential ripples of exotic energy swept outward,
blocking any return to hyperspace. Paula powered the
Alexis
Denken
straight down toward the gas giant, accelerating at fifty gees.
Internal gravity compensators could shield her from only about thirty of them.
Biononics had to support her body physically as the punishing force tried to
crush her into a puddle of flesh across the decking. Even with that enrichment
it was tremendously difficult to breathe. She’d gotten her left leg at a slight
angle; it made a bad sound as it flattened out.

One of the small inner moons was below her, a cratered rock two hundred
kilometers in diameter, three thousand kilometers farther along its orbital
track from her vertical vector and moving sedately away. She fired a
quantumbuster at it, modifying the effect field format. When the weapon
activated, it converted a quarter of a cubic kilometer of rock right at the
moon’s core. The moon shattered instantly. Millions of rocky shrapnel fangs
detonated outward from the micronova in a lethal supervelocity cloud. The
particles vaporized as they went, blowing off expanding flares of indigo and
topaz ions like primeval comets. Space was filled with a dense clutter of energized
mass. The Hawking M-sinks flew into it and began to absorb the deluge of lively
atoms. Vapor or rock shards, it made no difference; the event horizons sucked
everything down. In doing so, their courses wobbled slightly. As the drives
attempted to compensate, their efficiency fell off due to the nearly
exponential increase in mass they were now propelling.

The
Alexis Denken
raced away from the
underside of the hellish fireball, hurtling straight for the agitated
stormscape below.

Mellanie’s Redemption
flicked back into space
one and a quarter million kilometers above the yellow star. She hung there for
a couple of seconds while the forward cargo bay opened and the fuselage force
field started to fizz with violet stress patterns. The planetary FTL device
shot out, and Troblum took the starship straight back into transdimensional
suspension.

“How long?” Aaron demanded.

“Ten minutes to initiation,” Troblum said. Catriona was back at his side,
her beautiful face tragic with concern. “Establishment will take longer. And
no, I don’t have a fucking clue how long. Nothing more I can do. We just sit
and wait now.”

Oscar was keeping track of the hysradar return. He winced when one of the
gas giant moons broke apart within a bloom of exotic energy. That was one hell
of a fight, as bad as Justine and the warrior Raiel.
Oh,
crap!
“Hey!”

Everyone looked at him. In the packed cabin that was quite intimidating.

“You didn’t think this ship could survive anything the Cat threw at it,”
he said to Troblum. “Why?”

“Because it couldn’t,” Troblum replied. Catriona was directing an
aggressive stare Oscar’s way, which he ignored.

“But you have the Sol barrier technology. That can withstand any
Commonwealth weapon.”

“
Mellanie’s Redemption
doesn’t have that kind
of protection,” Troblum said.

“But … your armor does.”
So I assumed the ship would
as well. Shit!

“Yes. I just built my armor. But before now I couldn’t ever use the
design the Accelerators developed from the Dark Fortress; that would have
revealed what we’d got.”

Oscar wanted to grab the front of Troblum’s toga suit and give the huge
man a shake. “But if we haven’t got that kind of force field, how the hell do
you think we’ll get past the warrior Raiel?”

“They’ll let us past. Won’t they?” Troblum said in a puzzled tone that verged
on hurt. “When we explain that we’re on a mission to shut down the Void.”

“Shit,” Tomansio grunted.

For once even Aaron was startled.

“Troblum,” Oscar said very firmly. “Give me full access to your TD
linkage. Now.”

“What are you doing?” Inigo asked.

“Calling the one person who might be able to help.” He grimaced as
another one of the gas giant’s moons was blasted into a tsunami of exotic
energy. “If she’s still alive.”

The
Alexis Denken
hit the upper atmosphere at
fifty kilometers a second. Paula ordered an immediate deceleration as they
plunged toward the first truculent cloud layer. It didn’t seem to make much
difference. Disintegrating gases gouged a five-hundred-kilometer tail of
incandescence in their wake, a giant pointer for the Cat’s sensors. The
juddering was phenomenal; as an indicator of how much punishment the starship
was encountering, it was badly worrying. Acceleration forces were still
crushing her down onto the decking.

Far above, the first flaming debris from the small rock moon was following
her down, dazzling points of light churning through the atmosphere, jetting out
vast plumes of black smoke. The terrible buffeting broke them apart into
hundreds of smaller chunks, which then shattered again and again. A vast plain
of electrical fire sank down toward the clouds. The basic energy the impact was
spinning off created enormous lightning discharges that flared for thousands of
kilometers through the higher atmospheric bands.

It made sensor coverage difficult. But just before she sank into the
second cloud layer, hysradar located the Cat’s ship chasing her down.

Paula hurriedly changed her direction, angling the regrav units’
propulsive effect sharply to try to flatten out her trajectory but still
heading down.

“I see you,” the Cat called through an interference-saturated link.

“If you stop now and rendezvous with your force fields down, I will
simply place you in suspension with your original self,” Paula replied. “Any
other course of action will result in your termination.”

“Darling Paula, this is what I love about you. That psychoneural
profiling is actually the installation of blind stupidity. Come to me. I can
remove it for you.”

The
Alexis Denken
’s sensors detected another
M-sink being fired. Now the entire gas giant was doomed, though its final
destruction would be weeks away. Paula suspected the Cat had done that to make
sure there would never be any hiding place beneath the gas giant’s furious
storms. Paula fired a quantumbuster, then angled the
Alexis
Denken
down through the fourth and final cloud layer. Below that was a
zone of perfectly clear hydrogen extending for several hundred kilometers. Huge
vertical pillars of lightning snapped on and off within the gap. At their base,
a smog of hydrocarbons eddied uneasily atop the pressure boundary where the
atmospheric compounds were finally compressed into a liquid. The sight vanished
in a blaze of white light as the quantumbuster activated.