JN> I don’t like it. Where there’s one, there could be more.

  BK> Something for Admiral Cody to worry about.

  JN> He’s got a war to fight.

  BK> Not much we can do about that. You’re not telling me something.

  JN> Don’t laugh, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m being followed.

  BK> I’m not laughing. Keep me updated.

  JN> Will do.

  Minutes went by and the Estral continued launching incendiaries, whilst the three escort ships returned to their earlier positions close to the hangar bay. Any faint hopes Keller had that the aliens believed the SC Gundar had flown elsewhere were completely dashed by the ongoing attempts to flush her out.

  She kept in contact with Nation and used their neural link to watch the feed from his sensor augmentation. There were a lot of stairs within Isob-2 and Nation kept himself away from the lifts. He didn’t mention the possibility of being followed again. Nevertheless, Keller knew him well enough to be certain he was worried and a deep unease settled into her, unrelated to the efforts of the Estral fleet to knock the Gundar out of stealth.

  After twenty minutes, another group of shuttles exited the hangar bay, leaving only four plus the cruiser behind. These ones weren’t treated to an escort and they all flew towards the main transport vessel Keller had observed earlier. The Estral lacked humanity’s intense loyalty towards their soldiers, but they didn’t exactly treat them as expendable. Consequently, Keller was reasonably sure they wouldn’t detonate the planet buster until the evacuation was complete. Or until they considered it unavoidable.

  A few updates trickled into the Gundar’s database and she read through them. The Estral attack on Sindar’s Istoliar plant was a well-planned precision assault, designed to reduce humanity’s ability to expand its warfleet. The attack also revealed new information about the enemy capabilities.

  The aliens had arrived in five previously-unknown spaceships, each equipped with a lightspeed catapult, which allowed them to cross from Estral territory to human territory in close to zero time. They had bombarded the facility’s defensive energy shield with sub-light missiles and high-intensity particle beams until the shield fell. Afterwards, they’d simply destroyed the Istoliar plant and used their lightspeed catapults to escape.

  There were numerous overcharged particle beam turrets on the surface of Sindar, which had been sufficient to destroy one of the attacking spaceships and damage another badly. It was nothing which could be classed as a victory, since the Sindar plant produced a significant proportion of the Confederation’s Istoliar. It also highlighted the fact that these new Estral spaceships were significantly tougher than any known model.

  If a positive could be taken from decades of conflict, it was a mutual acknowledgement that wholesale destruction of entire planets, and the people living on them, was no longer an acceptable tactic of war. As a result, the people living on Sindar were still alive, rather than being reduced to cinder by Estral incendiaries.

  With Lieutenant Nation still on level Sub-15, the Isob-2 facility hangar bay doors opened once more. Keller cursed when she saw what was coming out.

  BK> I’ve got four more shuttles waiting to depart the facility. If my count is correct, that leaves no more transports in the bay and only the cruiser yet to leave.

  JN> There’s no way they can have completed an evacuation in that time.

  BK> It must be so serious they aren’t waiting for stragglers.

  JN> Shit. That means they’re going to set off the planet buster as soon as the cruiser leaves.

  BK> Maybe I can delay them.

  JN> How?

  BK> By killing the one with the detonation codes.

  JN> Sounds like a plan. Mind if I listen in?

  BK> Nope. How’s your stalker?

  JN> I’ve seen nothing, heard nothing.

  BK> And you still think something’s wrong.

  JN> I’m convinced.

  BK> In that case, don’t slow down.

  Keller ended the link and checked the sensor feeds and the tactical screen. The Vastiol was a little over a million kilometres away from the Gundar and still approximately three hundred thousand above Isob-2. Its stealth modules were active, whilst the four escort ships left theirs turned off. It was a standard, outdated tactic to try and draw fire from the most important ship in a fleet.

  Closer to Isob-2, the last four shuttles raced directly away from the planet’s surface. As soon as they were clear, the Estral cruiser followed, rising vertically through the shaft at high speed. It reached maximum velocity and kept on going.

  The tactical computer bleeped twice, alerting Keller to a deviation in the Vastiol’s course. Sure enough, the spaceship was on its way, with the four escorts clustered around it.

  “The time has come to act. Teal, do you mind if I take over?”

  Keller always felt slightly embarrassed to ask, but in a way the spaceship was so close to sentient it would have felt like a betrayal to simply go ahead.

  “No, ma’am. There is a greater chance of success with you in command.”

  “Thank you.”

  With a half-smile of anticipation, Keller closed her eyes and made a connection with the SC Gundar. Her consciousness expanded into every one of its thousands of control systems. Information poured in through the Faor augmentation’s interface and she felt herself become a part of the spaceship. Whilst her biological brain remained aloof, the Faor’s near-limitless processing capabilities received updates from the warship’s onboard systems far faster than the Gundar’s own Istoliar clusters.

  The end result was a human pilot, with a level of intuition beyond almost anyone else in the Confederation, tied in with the infallibility and speed of the most advanced technology the Space Corps could produce. Lieutenant Becky Keller picked her target and prepared to fight.

  Chapter Fifteen

  BK> Priority 1 target: Estral ship Vastiol.

  Keller gave the command for the Gundar’s Istoliar drive to fire. It took a moment to warm up and then it threw the spaceship into high lightspeed. Keller monitored the flight and cut the engine a tiny fraction of a second later. The Gundar re-entered local space, this time ninety-five thousand kilometres from the Vastiol’s positron trail.

  BK> Exit into local space complete. Locking on to Vastiol. Max range of overcharge repeater = 99800 klicks.

  The Gundar’s main armament had varying capabilities, depending on the range. At anything less than one hundred thousand kilometres, it was absolutely devastating.

  The particle beam turret fired three times in rapid succession, each expulsion sending an invisible beam of energy into what appeared to be an empty area of space. The repeater was stopped by an energy shield and the Vastiol remained undamaged, still with its stealth modules active.

  BK> Damnit, they have a phase-shifting shield.

  The Vastiol’s battle computer caught up with the sudden attack and sent the ship into lightspeed.

  BK> Target ship has entered lightspeed. Running fission model to determine its destination.

  Almost every spaceship left an identifiable cloud of energy behind as a result of the transit into lightspeed. Any would-be pursuers with the technological knowhow could generate a predictive model from the cloud and from this model, extract the details of where the fleeing ship would emerge. Keller’s augmentation had more than enough processing brute force for the task.

  BK> Model 80% complete. Inbound phase-shifting missiles from Class 2 Estral vessel. The Gundar’s shields have absorbed three overcharge particle beams from the enemy warships. They’ve picked up on my location quickly. Shield capacity: 95%. Model complete, entering lightspeed.

  Keller activated the Istoliar drive in pursuit of the Vastiol and before the phase-shifters could crash into the Gundar’s energy shield. The Estral warship hadn’t gone far – only a billion or so kilometres off into an area of Isob-2’s solar system that wasn’t close to anything in particular. The Gundar’s drive shut off and it entered local space.

  BK> The Vastiol is keeping within the antenna arc. Searching…

  JN> Get the bastards. I can think of better places to die than this miserable piece of rock.

  The fission prediction model wasn’t always one hundred percent accurate, but on this occasion, it brought the Gundar to within twenty thousand kilometres of the Vastiol.

  BK> Target locked, firing.

  The overcharge repeater fired again and again. After the fourth shot, the power drain on the Vastiol’s shield was sufficient to shut down its stealth modules and the enemy spaceship abruptly came into view. It was seemingly undamaged, but Keller was sure it didn’t have much in reserve.

  The Vastiol’s four escort ships appeared from lightspeed and started firing at once.

  BK> Targeting Class 2 vessel with stasis emitters. Success.

  The Gundar’s stasis emitters made no sound, but they did produce a noticeable spike on the Istoliar drive’s power gauge. The most potent of the Estral escort vessels was shut down completely. Every single one of its onboard systems went offline and its Obsidiar-Teronium drive stopped generating power. Immediately, it began drifting.

  Before Keller was able to capitalise, the Vastiol went to lightspeed. She ran the fission prediction model and sent the Gundar after it. Once again, the enemy hadn’t gone far, this time jumping to the blind side of Isob-2. If Keller had been using sensors to track them, the tactic might have worked. Unfortunately for the Estral, lightspeed travel didn’t care what physical objects were in the way. A spaceship simply appeared at its destination regardless.

  BK> Targeting Vastiol. Firing. Damnit, out of antenna arc. You’re probably not receiving this.

  The enemy shields resisted two hits and partially absorbed a third. The energy from this third, successful repeater strike, was substantially absorbed, but it retained enough destructive energy to set much of the Vastiol’s right-hand flank alight. Sparks trailed from the damaged ship in a wondrous shower of orange, before they dwindled and died in the endless darkness.

  BK> The next hit is a definite kill.

  The Vastiol was granted a stay of execution. An inbound comms request from the Estral vessel made Keller pause and she opened a channel. Redar-Finor sounded pissed, as well he might in the circumstances.

  “If you destroy my ship, you will allow the Antaron to escape.”

  “What is the Antaron?”

  “We believe it seeks Istoliar. There is a planet buster bomb in the Isob-2 facility. Only I have the codes.”

  “How will the Antaron get away? How did it get here?”

  “I don’t know, human. Let me destroy the planet.”

  In the few seconds they’d been talking, six Estral warships appeared from their own lightspeed jumps and at varying distances from the Gundar. They didn’t attempt diplomacy and filled the area with incendiaries in the hope of bringing the Gundar out of stealth. The Estral got lucky and one of the incendiary cannisters burst apart, scattering an enormous quantity of self-fuelling plasma onto the Gundar’s energy shield. The spaceship’s Istoliar drive automatically fed more power into the shield and the reserve gauge trickled below 90%.

  With the Gundar highlighted in an ovoid of crackling blue-white, the alien ships were able to target and fire. Keller watched a dozen missiles appear on the tactical screen briefly before they exploded. The Estral phase-shifter missiles carried a tremendous payload and, though they couldn’t bypass the Gundar’s advanced energy shield, their detonations engulfed the spaceship in white-hot plasma fires.

  It was Keller’s preference to speak to Redar-Finor at greater length and find out what the hell an Antaron was. However, she couldn’t allow the Estral to blow up Isob-2 while Nation was still inside the facility, and she had no intention of talking while the other alien ships shot the Gundar into pieces.

  “Sorry, Admiral. No can do.”

  With a grimace at the lost opportunity to gather some solid intel, Keller activated the particle beam repeater again, before Redar-Finor could respond. The weapon fired once, heating the Vastiol so rapidly the entire spaceship was ripped into molten pieces. She fired the overcharge again, this time at the largest remaining section of the Vastiol’s wreckage. The destruction was complete and lumps of semiliquid alloy sprayed out in every direction.

  With the main target destroyed, Keller set about doing as much damage as possible to the other Estral warships. The Gundar’s overcharge repeater connected with an Estral cruiser. This spaceship wasn’t equipped with a phase-shifting shield and the beam cut straight through it. A single hit was sufficient to destroy the vessel completely, producing half a billion tonnes of molten wreckage. Keller re-targeted and hit another with the same outcome.

  One of the remaining Estral warships entered lightspeed. Keller gathered the fission data but didn’t waste any processing cycles producing a model from it. Another enemy ship launched a phase-shifter and dumped its remaining stocks of incendiaries.

  The Estral ship jumped to lightspeed, a fraction of a second after Keller gave the same instruction to the Gundar’s Istoliar drive. When the Gundar exited lightspeed, it was back within the Isob-2 antenna arc and within three thousand kilometres of the planet’s surface. The incendiaries were tenacious and they clung to the energy shield even after the lightspeed transit.

  Keller ignored the steady drain on the shield and worked the sensors, searching for enemy warships. Of those she’d just engaged, one was within five thousand kilometres. Keller hit it with two rounds from the repeater, destroying it and sending it in pieces towards Isob-2’s desolate surface.

  BK> Unlucky for some.

  JN> ?

  BK> I had to kill Redar-Finor. Got to go.

  Neural talk was very quick, but it did take a small amount of time, and Keller didn’t have a lot of it spare at the moment. There were two other Estral vessels on this side of Isob-2 and two more jumped in from the scene of the recent engagement with the Vastiol.

  Keller surveyed her opponents – the four enemy ships likely had an average time in service in excess of thirty years. They were the type of old, semi-obsolete craft which padded out the Estral’s admittedly extensive fleet of spaceships. In sufficient numbers they could cause problems for some of the Space Corps’ less capable craft, or, in mass combat situations, soak up a few hits meant for more significant targets.

  Against the SC Gundar, they were completely outmatched. Keller caught two of them with the stasis emitters, knocking them out of the fight. The third one fired its particle beam, while the fourth entered lightspeed. Keller recorded the fission cloud, without attempting to run a model.

  BK> You were correct to think that was a new species in the Isob-2 centrifuge.

  She fired the particle beam repeater at the final operational enemy spaceship. It proved surprisingly resilient, no doubt having been fitted with a heat-dissipating hull, and it took a second shot to finish it off.

  JN> What is this species?

  BK> An Antaron. Fighting. Be right back.

  Keller didn’t enjoy shooting at disabled ships, but war was war. She destroyed the two affected by the stasis emitter, at the same time as she finished a sensor scan for the one she’d hit with the weapon earlier. There was no sign of this third spaceship. The stasis emitters could generally keep a smaller, older ship offline for a considerable time. They weren’t quite so effective against the newer Istoliar-cored stuff, but there were no such opponents in the vicinity.

  She accessed the fission cloud data from the two fleeing ships. The longer the intended lightspeed journey, the greater the effort was required to predict the destination. Keller ran both models simultaneously and cancelled the calculations after a few hundredths of a second. The fact there was no output after such an extensive modelling run meant the Estral weren’t waiting anywhere close by.

  BK> Finished.

  JN> Already? What happened to 15% chance of success?

  BK> They were poorly trained, poorly led, or both. In addition, half of them cut and run.

  JN> No Redar-Finor, means no bomb, right?

  BK> Not necessarily – I’m running some checks and I’ll tell you about it in a moment. Where are you?

  JN> Crossing through the middle of Sub-11. It’s a little more crowded than I was expecting. This place is falling apart.

  Keller accessed Nation’s sensor feed. He had his stealth modules active and was making his way through what looked like an office complex. She saw lots of doors, as well as an open plan area to one side. The power was off and there were plenty of Estral soldiers to avoid. Some of the aliens walked aimlessly in seemingly random directions and others were standing still, with their weapons lowered.

  JN> They’re aware they’ve been abandoned and they don’t have any idea what to do about it.

  BK> So they’re waiting to die. Still being followed?

  JN> I have no evidence one way or another, and knowing wouldn’t change what I have to do. I’m just going to keep running until I get to the hangar bay.

  BK> I don’t like it. Something’s bugging me.

  JN> I don’t like it either. Anyway, what about this bomb?

  BK> I am certain there is no officer in the vicinity of Isob-2 with the authority to detonate a planet buster. However, I am in the process of checking known Estral command and control locations to find out where there might be someone with the seniority to make the decision and send the codes.

  JN> And?

  BK> Here we are – there is a suspected mobile space station thought to fly a route between Ganar-12A and Ganar-193F. If we assume one of the Estral at Isob-2 fired off a comms alert, the station commander may be able to transmit the activation codes for the planet buster.

  JN> I’m not going to like the answer, but tell me how long this process might take if we assume the Estral space station is at its closest point to Isob-2.

  BK> Outbound comms from here to there, eighty seconds. Another eighty seconds to return the transmission codes. If the station is midway on its route, you can add another twenty seconds to the combined total.