“I’ll get the lightspeed catapult ready and take us back to Eriol.”

  “Still not happy?”

  “You’re right – we can’t wait here any longer.”

  Nation opened his mouth to respond, when he caught sight of Keller’s changing expression.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Something just came away from Isob-2.”

  “A sensor ghost?”

  “No, not a ghost. It appeared on the edges of the array’s detection range. Oh shit!”

  Keller tried to activate a lightspeed transit. The speed of her Faor augmentation was such that her reaction time was as close to zero as could be measured by the Space Corps’ existing technology. She was too late. The Antaron appeared with an immense speed that defied the ability of the sensor arrays to track it perfectly. It bypassed the Gundar’s energy shield and engulfed the ship, wrapping the rear two-thirds of the hull in darkness. Keller sent the spaceship into lightspeed and the SC Gundar tore away from the slowly disintegrating planet Isob-2.

  On the bridge, an automated siren wailed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Alert, alert,” said Teal in soothing tones which suggested everything was fine.

  “I know there’s an alert. Stop saying it.”

  “Can you turn off this bridge siren?” asked Nation. His hands roved, as if he were on the brink of pressing something at random.

  Keller turned off the bridge siren, without interrupting her diagnostic checks over the warship’s onboard systems.

  “We’ve lost the Antaron, right?” asked Nation. “Nothing can hold onto our hull at lightspeed.”

  Before today, Keller would have agreed with Nation’s tentative assertion. Not now. She tapped a finger on one of the monitoring screens. Nation looked.

  “Istoliar core, 85%.”

  “And falling.”

  Nation sometimes pretended he didn’t know how a spaceship worked. In reality, he knew a lot more than most, even if the bridge siren had him stumped. “A standard lightspeed jump only knocks off a couple of percent.”

  “We have an unwanted guest,” said Keller grimly.

  “I told you the Antaron was significant.”

  Keller ignored the comment. “It got through our shields – our phase shifting shields – like they weren’t there. It covered a million klicks faster than anything this side of a lightspeed catapult and now it’s latched onto us.”

  “It wants Istoliar.”

  “Just like the Estral told us.”

  “How long until it sucks the core dry?”

  “Ten minutes at this rate.” Keller’s diagnostic check finished. “Crap. It’s not simply draining the core. It’s killing it entirely.”

  “You mean the Istoliar drive won’t recharge?”

  “Not the part the Antaron has already damaged. The rest will. Should. Might.”

  Nation cast his eyes around the bridge. The Gundar’s sensors didn’t function properly at lightspeed, so there was no way to get a visual on whatever was happening externally. There were errors across every one of the Gundar’s main and sub-systems.

  “It drained my cells, but they recharged.”

  “Maybe you weren’t close enough. Maybe your cells are small fry and it wasn’t hungry enough for them.”

  Nation cast his eyes up to the ceiling. “Metal coffin,” he muttered. “I feel like I’m back on Isob-2.”

  “We’re not dead yet. I’m trying to figure out what to do.” She tapped the side of her head with a fingertip. “This is one thing a Faor implant can’t deal with.”

  “Humanity still has a use, huh?”

  “Yes it does, so please give me your ideas.”

  “The Antaron is cold. The Estral were keeping it in place with heat. Maybe we should hit it with the stasis emitters, followed by a couple of shots from the overcharge and see what it thinks of that. Or fly in close to a star.”

  “They are both excellent suggestions.”

  “Except…?”

  “The overcharge isn’t designed to be fired at point-blank range, nor are the stasis emitters. If I activate the emitters at such close range, we’ll be shut down ourselves. I don’t know what’ll happen with the particle beam. I can’t imagine it’ll be anything good.”

  “So we’ll fly near to a sun.”

  “Our energy shield will prevent the heat getting through. I could switch off the shield, but then we might burn up. A plasma rocket explosion is a hell of a lot hotter than the melting point of our hull, and those are what the Estral were firing at the Antaron.”

  “The lightspeed catapult takes fifty percent off a fully-charged Istoliar core. We’re at 81%. Why not drop out of lightspeed and see if our friend can hold on during a catapult run?”

  “The catapult takes a long time to warm up. We’re already past the point of being able to try it.”

  Nation threw up his hands. “This feels like one of those question-and-answer sessions I keep getting invited to, where there’s always a senior officer with a counter-argument to every suggestion. It pisses me off!”

  The words hit home and Keller’s face fell. “You’re right.” She tapped her head again. “Too much reliance on this.” She pressed her palm over her heart. “Not enough reliance on this. Let’s do something to fix this crap.”

  Without any more talk, Keller cut the Gundar’s Istoliar drive to bring the spaceship into local space. A small node of her Faor core examined the sensor data and registered the lack of any input whatsoever. Not only had the Antaron held on during the transition to lightspeed, it had also spread itself completely around the hull, blocking the Gundar’s extensive array of external monitoring instrumentation.

  Deep inside the Gundar’s battle computer, Keller’s mind spent a few processing cycles studying the activation commands for the stasis emitters. Her earlier words to Nation held true – they would knock the Gundar’s Istoliar drive offline for a short time and render the spaceship vulnerable.

  BK> Maybe that’s it! If the Istoliar core is prevented from generating power, the Antaron might leave us.

  JN> We stasis-emit ourselves?

  BK> I don’t think that’s the correct terminology, but in a nutshell, yes.

  JN> Go for it.

  Keller gave the command and the two wing-mounted stasis emitters fired. The effect was instantaneous. The Gundar’s Istoliar drive went offline, Teal lost power and Lieutenant Joe Nation slumped into his seat, his eyes open, but seeing nothing. The lights remained on and the bridge screens didn’t even flicker, since they were designed to switch to a secondary backup system. Everything else ran off the main drive.

  Keller flashed a look of sympathy in Nation’s direction.

  “Sorry, Joe. Maybe I should have mentioned that part.”

  Nation was fitted with a few plain old Obsidiar-Teronium backup cells which were there purely to kick-start his Istoliar main system. Keller had no idea how long it would take them to work. It was probable no one had thought to test this specific scenario and come up with an answer.

  “He’ll definitely be okay,” she said to herself, with a sudden, crashing wave of guilt. “Definitely.”

  A few seconds went by and Keller drummed her fingers against the arm of her seat. Deep within the SC Gundar, its own series of Obsidiar-Teronium power cells and processing cores were doing their best to fire up the warship’s main drive again. She monitored the process, unable to tell how long it would take. If it wasn’t for the fact that she wasn’t in a hurry – yet – Keller would have used her own Faor implant to speed things along.

  The Space Corps had extensive documentation on the effects of a stasis emitter on a fleet warship, including a simulated scenario in which its craft were forced into combat with rebel-held or stolen spaceships. The estimated time for a Class 1 Retaliator to remain locked down by a stasis emitter attack from another Class 1 Retaliator was between nine and three hundred seconds. It was one of those occasions where the minimum and maximum where so far spread that the prediction was meaningless.

  Twenty seconds so far.

  The seconds ticked away and Keller did her best to accept her helplessness. She could monitor the SC Gundar’s internal systems and maybe give them a push in the right direction if it became necessary, but she couldn’t do much other than watch, wait and hope.

  There were two scenarios.

  Either the Gundar’s drive comes back online and the Antaron is gone. In which case, yippee. Otherwise, the drive comes back and the Antaron is still here. In which case, boo.

  At exactly twenty-seven seconds, the SC Gundar’s Istoliar drive kicked into life, producing a noticeable shudder through the walls and floor. Having been offline, it would require a few seconds before it reached its full potential again. The Istoliar processing cluster which housed Teal came to life and she felt the AI checking the time stamps on the main data array as it investigated what was going on.

  Keller accessed the sensor feeds and breathed a loud sigh of relief. Every one of the arrays was clear and receiving external data. She reached across and gave Nation a pat on the arm.

  “I knew it would work.”

  Nation remained unresponsive and Keller wondered if she should connect and take a look at what was going on with his backup systems. He would never know.

  “I made a promise,” she said to herself.

  The Antaron was no longer attached to the spaceship’s hull, but it didn’t seem wise to stick around any longer than necessary. She checked the Istoliar drive to see how much of its potential had been drained in the attack. It was at eighty percent and showed no sign of recharging beyond that. It would cost a lot to refit the Gundar, but until the Space Corps decided it was time for it to return to the yard, the Gundar was still an exceptionally capable weapon of war.

  It was standard procedure to perform a random lightspeed jump away from the combat arena in situations like this one and Keller did exactly that. She chose a location and activated the Istoliar drive for ten seconds, before switching it off. The Gundar emerged once again into a place occupied by nothing more notable than dust. It was good to put the extra distance between the spaceship and the encounter with the Antaron and Keller felt as though she had a bit more room in which to think.

  “The comms response from Fortress-3 is overdue, so if they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them.”

  Keller sent the command to warm up the lightspeed catapult. Its Obsidiar detonators rumbled and before the sound could die away, it was joined by a muted howl which cut through the dense structure of the spaceship.

  The lightspeed catapult technology was proven reliable and failure rates were exceptionally low. However, the fact that not one of the Space Corps’ scientists could honestly claim to know exactly how the devices worked, ensured the catapults had the power to engender a degree of fear in even the most battle-hardened officers. In Keller’s mind, it was akin to riding a wild animal and hoping that when the beast ran out of steam, you’d be able to hop off right where you wanted.

  The upsides were obvious. The catapult could open a wormhole from one place to pretty much anywhere in known space. If you targeted too far out, say into the complete unknown, the device simply wouldn’t open the wormhole. Many questions remained unanswered and each question had a dozen associated theories – many of them officially classified as crackpot – about the reasons for this failure.

  “Teal, we’re going to Eriol.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My sensors indicate Lieutenant Nation is in a state of hibernation.”

  Keller rubbed her chin. She’d made a promise that she wouldn’t invade Nation’s privacy again. Teal had made no such promise.

  “Wake him, please.”

  “Certainly. Commencing interface.”

  It was done quickly. Nation blinked once and looked around him. He lifted a hand and studied it for a moment, as if it were a stranger to him.

  “We made it?”

  “The Antaron is gone. The lightspeed catapult is warming up and we’re going to Eriol.”

  Nation raised his voice to be heard over the howl of the catapult. “Great. How much damage did we take?”

  “Just what happened to the Istoliar drive. Everything else is fully operational,” Keller replied, equally loudly.

  The muted howl of the lightspeed catapult reached a crescendo, indicating it would shortly fire. With a single second left before the lightspeed catapult threw the Gundar into the partially-unknown, Keller performed one final sensor sweep of the area, simply to occupy a few trillion cycles of her Faor augmentation.

  She saw movement way out in the distance, several million kilometres away. It was a fleeting hint of a hint on one of the super-far lenses, exactly the same kind of disturbance that she’d seen coming from Isob-2. The Antaron was back and it was coming towards the Gundar at tremendous speed. There was something about it which made the sensor feed difficult to interpret, like the alien was hidden behind a frosted window. The only impression she got of its shape was that it was tapered like an arrowhead.

  One thing was certain. The Antaron was huge – far, far larger than she previously imagined. It was thousands of metres in length and it must have weighed twenty billion tonnes or more. In comparison, the SC Gundar was tiny. Keller had no time to feel shock and no time to even forge a neural connection with Nation.

  Now she knew what it was, Keller didn’t hesitate. She targeted the Antaron with the particle beam, cursing the slowness of the Istoliar-cored battle computer, which seemed to take forever to accept the instruction.

  In those few processing cycles, the Antaron crossed two million kilometres.

  The particle beam turret could hit a target from as far out as five million kilometres – at such a range, the weapon might destroy a single vehicle on the surface of a planet. At thirty thousand kilometres - the range at which the Antaron was struck - the effects were usually far more devastating. In this instance, there were no fireworks – the Antaron simply veered off and passed a few thousand kilometres to the Gundar’s starboard.

  JN> What’s wrong?

  Keller didn’t respond immediately. She desperately tried to locate the Antaron, to find out where the hell it was and if it was damaged or simply distracted. There was no sign of it on any of the sensor arrays, but she wasn’t at all convinced it was gone. Keller monitored each array simultaneously, watching out for anything which might indicate the Antaron was coming for another attack.

  She did see movement. At the precise moment the lightspeed catapult fired, the Antaron showed up on one of the rear super-fars. Then, a wormhole appeared around the Gundar and the spaceship was carried across several galaxies towards its destination world, Eriol.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The lightspeed catapult was a fairly accurate tool, something which had not been true of the earliest generation versions of the devices. The SC Gundar completed its journey through the wormhole and entered local space, eighty million kilometres from Eriol. In terms of the distance travelled, it was an acceptable result.

  “You might have missed that, but the Antaron came back just before the catapult fired,” said Keller, in case Nation hadn’t realised.

  “I wasn’t tied in to any of the Gundar’s critical systems,” he confirmed. “I did have time to wonder what you were doing.”

  “The overcharge particle beam scored a direct hit.”

  “Did you kill it?”

  “No. We got away from it and I hope I never see another one. Not without a fleet of spaceships to shoot it to pieces.”

  In truth, Keller had a lot to think about. The Antaron had followed the Gundar though lightspeed and, while such a capability wasn’t unusual, it did mean the alien was technologically advanced. Not that she had any doubt, simply based on its speed of travel.

  Keller put the matter aside. It was entirely unheard of for pursuit to take place through a lightspeed catapult wormhole and it was easiest to believe the Antaron was several years’ lightspeed travel behind them and with no way of following. She noticed Nation studying her. He nodded and she knew he understood exactly what she was thinking.

  “It’s in Estral territory. Let the Estral deal with it,” he said. “We’re back home, for the moment at least.”

  “Yeah.” Keller paused, wondering whether to say what was on her mind. “There’s something else. You said you heard it in your head, didn’t you?”

  “I did. It wasn’t a good feeling.”

  “I sensed something similar, only I got more than hatred from it. I think it noticed the presence of Faor on the Gundar and it was…interested.”

  “Like a dog sniffing a crap?”

  “I wouldn’t have used those precise words.”

  “We’ve got to forget about it for now. We can provide all the details over the course of what I assume will be a thorough debriefing. I’m interested to discover how the early exchanges in the war have proceeded.”

  Keller wasn’t to be distracted. “The Antaron has me worried.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  With the Gundar at maximum sublight speed and heading towards Eriol, Keller checked in with Fortress-3. The base mainframe acknowledged the arrival of the spaceship and arranged a landing slot for them to set down. Keller handed control over to Teal and made herself comfortable with a cup of adequate coffee from the replicator. The Gundar’s sensors focused directly on Eriol and the pair of them watched the planet, with its drab greens, blues and large polar ice caps.

  “Not the most hospitable world in the Confederation,” said Nation.

  “I like it. It’s good to be back.” Keller took a sip of her coffee and suppressed a grimace. “Even if it’s just for the length of a debriefing.”

  “Now we’re in Confederation Space, the databanks should be fully updated with details of the war.”

  “I haven’t checked,” admitted Keller.

  “Nor me. Sometimes it’s better to hear a potted summary straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  The words were prophetic.