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  They were now almost on top of the cruiser. It loomed before the cockpit windows. It was so massive that Angel could fly through the gap between the cruiser’s engine ring and hull if she wanted to. Hrain spotted dozens of gun ports, all of them dark.

  “Program the scanner drone to enter at that hull breach. Have it find the ship’s computer. I want a full download of everything they’ve got, and if we can’t interface with their technology, just cut it out.”

  “Gladly.”

  “Launch drones when ready.”

  Hrain sat back and waited for Angel to finish her computations.

  “Uh-oh,” said Angel. “Aborting launch.”

  “What?” said Hrain.

  “Aren’t you watching the sensors? They just raised their shields.”

  He looked up. Outside, navigational lights illuminated the enemy’s hull as power came back deck by deck. Gun ports began to glow with emerald energy.

  “Nazpah,” he spat.

  “Watch your mouth,” giggled Angel. “There’s a lady present.”

  “Enough.”

  A shrill alarm sounded. “Missile launch detected,” said Angel. “Adjusting shields and readying countermeasures.”

  Hrain thought Angel sounded much too happy. He grabbed the flight stick and slammed the throttle forward. Angel’s wild acceleration threw him back in the seat. A moment later, they were clear of the cruiser. He switched the tactical viewscreen to a rear view.

  The warheads were invisible except for their engine exhaust. They only had a few seconds before they caught them. He tightened his grip on the flight stick.

  There was a dull clang as Angel deployed two pulse beacons. The beacons drifted for a moment and then went active, spewing electromagnetic noise and chaff into the path of the missiles. The Ta’Krell weapons were not fooled.

  Angel tried the anti-warhead lasers next. The missiles’ nose cones began to glow, but still they came on.

  “Brace for impact,” she said. The playful note in her voice was gone.

  Hrain waited until the last possible second, then jerked the flight stick back while cutting engine power to one-quarter. He fired thrusters to accelerate into a loop.

  The torpedoes curved upwards, but were unable to match the curvature of his climb. They shot past as he completed his loop.

  The missiles were arcing back around. He flipped the mode toggle on the PPC emitters and fired a conical burst. There were two flashes of white light, and the missiles were gone.

  “Nice work,” said Angel.

  A second alarm sounded. Hrain pushed the throttle, but it was too late. He was slammed forward against the restraints as wave after wave of transplasma rained down on the Angel’s Fury. The Ta’Krell were firing at extreme range, but the onslaught was still enough to destroy most ships.

  Angel wasn’t most ships. A guttural roar emitted from the cockpit speakers. They’ve got her angry now, thought Hrain. Good.

  Angel swore in Talurian as another blast struck home. “I’m going to kill them!”

  “Disable,” said Hrain. “Disable them!” He pulled up hard, flying vertically for a few seconds to gain elevation above the enemy before adjusting pitch to face them as he rose. He stared down at the behemoth, and at a rising sea of green transplasma bolts.

  He fired lateral thrusters, moving away from their turrets’ linear firing lines. Many bolts still found their mark, splashing across Angel’s forward shields and obscuring his vision. The gravimetric distortions, triggered as the hyperspace-jacketed plasma collapsed back into the subspace layer, wreaked havoc with Angel’s sensors. Every time a bolt struck, Hrain lost his lock on the enemy ship. He switched the targeting mode to manual and reverted the PPCs back to full beam compression mode. If he could just hold her steady for one second!

  “Here, let me do it,” said Angel.

  Before he could protest, Angel overrode the controls. The nose tipped down half a degree and three blue PPC lances shot out at the enemy.

  “Oh,” said Angel. “That’s not good.”

  Hrain had never seen Angel’s weapons be so ineffective. The Ta’Krell’s shields absorbed the blast without as much as a ripple.

  He pulled up and accelerated, passing over the Ta’Krell and taking a good hit in the process. Angel fired off a few bolts from the aft transplasma cannon. Hrain spun around on thrusters and fired PPCs and all forward plasma cannons. He held Angel’s nose in line with the enemy until the PPC beams had dwindled to nothing, and still the Ta’Krell ship remained.

  “Hrain!” cried Angel, her voiced laced with panic for the first time he could remember. “My shields are at fifty percent.”

  Hrain turned away from the enemy and executed a full burn. By Ramas’ claws, it’s a monster!

  The thought of running crossed his mind, but he pushed it away. That wasn’t an option. The Ta’Krell must have scanned Angel by now, and they might be able to track her hyperspace wake back to Taluria despite the wandering course he’d plotted. If that happened, Ezek would expel Hrain from the system, assuming the Talurians survived the encounter. He scraped his claws together, remembering what Ezek had said.

  Either someone destroyed all hyperspace com buoys between here and Mauria, or the planet itself has been silenced.

  Hrain had checked on a bunch of the com buoys. They were all transmitting just fine, carrying the usual chatter between the Screll, the Talurians, the Wetu, and the Mekmek. There were no incoming calls from any Maurian-controlled system, and the outgoing transmissions went unanswered. Of Sledgim he knew nothing, but no one sent transmissions to or from there on the standard com buoys.

  Angel was rocked by another plasma bolt. Hrain glanced at the display screen. A stream of blue exhaust trailed behind the nightmare ship as it bore down at them, sending bolts streaking outwards from its bow-mounted cannons.

  “They can’t be that fast,” he said.

  “They are,” said Angel. She yelped as the Ta’Krell scored another direct hit. “Shields are almost gone.”

  Hrain fought against his own rising panic. Come on, think of something.

  “The charges,” said Angel. “Use the charges.”

  That was it! He had forgotten about the two interspatial charges in the cargo hold. I suppose this occasion is as good as any.

  The production of interspatial charges had been outlawed after the third Maurian-Talurian war. Still, the Navy had seen fit to equip their prototype vessel with a pair of them, probably left-over stock from the war.

  Hrain keyed in the command to arm one of the charges.

  “No, use both,” said Angel. “Please!”

  He hesitated for a moment. Interspatial charges are hard to come by. I’ll probably never find another one. Then, Angel screamed as a plasma bolt tore through her shields and sizzled into her aft armor.

  “Ok, we’ll drop both,” he said. “But we need to get closer. Set up a power fluctuation in the sublight repulsion coils. Let’s bait them.”

  “This better work,” said Angel, as she turned off the engine regulators.

  Hrain eased back the throttle with a trembling hand. The nose of the ugly ship filled the rear camera display, flashing with green fire as it rained blast after blast down upon Angel.

  “Primary shields are down,” said Angel. “I’m raising the emergency screens.”

  “No,” said Hrain. “Leave them down.” He could sense something now, with the Ta’Krell this close. They were hungry for information and they wanted him alive.

  The plasma barrage stopped. The Ta’Krell ship was within ten thousand kilomarks, and it was slowing.

  He took a deep breath and tried to force the panic out of his mind. “Yes, come and get us.”

  He opened the payload doors and routed the payload bay camera to a side display. The two bloated bombs crept out on mechanical arms, stopping just past the lip of the doors. Their black bodies reflected dully in the light of Angel’s belly.

  “They’re energizing a tractor beam,” said Ange
l. “If they catch us with that, we’re done.”

  Hrain flipped the release lever. The magnetic clamps reversed, and the bombs were repelled away. They seemed to hang for a moment, traveling parallel with Angel. Then, Hrain reset the engines and went to full throttle.

  The sensor board lit up as the Ta’Krell tractor beam lanced out. “They missed!” said Angel.

  “Raise those emergency shields,” said Hrain. “All power to aft emitters.”

  The Ta’Krell ship slammed into the spatial charges. A white flash tore through space, and Angel shook so violently Hrain’s shoulder popped as he was thrown against the restraints.

  On the tactical screen, the huge ship was awash in a field of swirling white light and black pools of spatial distortions. It was intact…mostly. The forward third of the ship had been blown off, exposing flickering internal decks. Debris that normally would have expanded outward in all directions was being sucked in a thick stream towards a point just below the Ta’Krell vessel.

  The enemy resumed firing.

  “How can they still be there?” he said. He checked his displays, and saw that the enemy ship was generating a massive hyperspace field of its own counteracting the singularity created by the spatial charges.

  Plasma bolts ripped into Angel’s ablative coating. Warning klaxons screamed as the Ta’Krell launched four more missiles, two of which made it past the singularity.

  “Angel, jump to hyperspace,” he said, as another blast shook them. “Any heading.”

  There was no response.

  “Angel? Angel!”

  Something stabbed into his mind. His vision blurred, and strange colors played across his eyes. He felt like he was drowning. Sparks flew from somewhere in the cockpit, but he barely felt them as they singed his fur.

  A voice, not his own, boomed in his mind.

  Son of Ramas. Where did you come from?

  They were telepathic! He hadn’t spoken to someone directly like that since his days back at the orphanage, when he and the other children had discovered their abilities.

  No, he said. I won’t tell you.

  You will. Where!

  He imagined Pogue’s wall—the mental recreation of the stone wall that had surrounded the orphanage. It had always seemed so solid and impenetrable. You can’t get me in here.

  Outside, thunder boomed. The wall shook. Mortar cracked, and bits of rock crumbled from the top, but it held.

  His body was forced against the back of his seat. Angel was talking to him, but he was slipping away and didn’t understand her.

  Oh Sledgim, I so wanted to see you again.

  The darkness enveloped him, and he felt nothing more.

  Chapter 11

  Flames flew from the Scorpion’s exhaust. Morgan tightened his grip on the steering wheel, his arms tense. Tendons bulged in his neck. He pushed the gas pedal harder, but it was already buried in the floor.

  He risked a glance over his shoulder. The blue POD was inches from his door, floating on a pillow of light. Man, she’s fast. He grit his teeth. She’d never be able to stay with him through this corner.

  The turbo hissed as he upshifted. The Scorpion’s computer beeped out a warning as they shot past a holographic speed limit marker. The POD dropped back a few inches.

  The road ahead veered off to the left. One more second…brakes!

  The blood drained from Morgan’s face as brake pedal descended without any resistance and clunked into the floorboard. He downshifted and pulled the emergency brake, jerking the wheel in a last-ditch effort. It was no use; he was going way too fast to make the turn.

  He watched in slow motion as he skidded off the road. The restraining field flared into full power.

  “Ahh!” he screamed, as he tore through the guardrail.

  He opened his eyes, gasping. Warm beams of golden sunlight streamed into the room. He kicked off the sheets and lurched to his feet.

  “Just a dream,” he said, heart thudding. When was the last time he’d had a nightmare?

  After regaining his breath, he threw on blue jeans and a faded T-shirt. He dug out his leather boots from under a pile of dirty clothes.

  As he sat at the desk lacing his boots, he noticed the two tickets to the space show on Starlight Station. He picked them up. Each said:

  ‘Admit One: ISF Lunar Show’.

  ‘Starlight Station Observation Ring’

  ‘Saturday July 13th, 2250’.

  He turned a ticket over. Printed on the back, along with the ticket’s identification chip, was the message:

  ‘Firefly Demo: Ride Group B. For more information, visit DN:ISF.lunarshow50.civnet1’

  He had dropped Liz off last night without so much as mentioning Captain Batson’s visit, let alone the tickets. He had been too tired to look up anything and had gone straight to bed after dinner with his parents.

  He pressed the ticket against the screen of his desk computer. It loaded the datanet address, and a view of Starlight Station filled the screen. The curve of the earth was partially visible against the backdrop of space.

  He flipped through the historical information. He knew most of it already. The station had started out as a joint venture between China and Russia, and had been absorbed by the ISF after the end of the third cold war. On the screen, dozens of ISF and civilian ships circled the station’s three massive rings, along with vessels from independent Earth navies. There was a Commonwealth cruiser docked at one of the pylons extending from the core between the top two rings. According to the website, it was a real-time feed.

  Morgan scanned the links, paying little attention to ‘History of the ISF’ and ‘Space Force School of Engineering’. His hand hovered for a moment over ‘StarFighter School’, but then he saw what he had come for. Halfway down the page was a button labeled ‘Firefly Program’. He pushed it.

  ‘Error: This page requires the use of a holographic emitter.’

  “Stupid thing,” he muttered, wishing he had retinal projectors built into his eyeballs like everyone else. He switched off the terminal and got up, heading for the door. Captain Batson’s words echoed in his head. We’re showcasing the new Firefly fighters, and we’ll be giving a few rides. He wondered if Liz would be interested in something like that. Would she even want to go with me?

  He stepped out of his bedroom and into the hallway. He could hear faint snoring through his parents’ closed door. Good, they’re sleeping in. He began tiptoeing towards the main part of the house, grateful for the plush carpeting.

  The living room was empty. The ceiling illuminated as he entered, displaying the unobstructed view of the early morning sky. He waved the brightness level down to its lowest setting, then sat down at the computer terminal and scanned the ticket. The ceiling darkened, becoming a star field. Starlight Station materialized in the middle of the room. Holographic ships flew around in graceful loops, passing through the sofa and the arm-chair.

  It took a moment for Morgan to find the button linking to the Firefly information page, because all of the links were now arranged in a three-dimensional pattern. He poked it.

  “Sweet,” he said, as the ship coalesced from suspended photons in front of him. He had seen many fighters before, ISF and otherwise, but nothing compared to this. The ISF’s mainstay fighter fleet, the ZX-07, was an aggressive ship with sharp lines and a gray hull. A clunker, compared to this. He reached out and spun the model of the little ship.

  The Firefly’s matte black hull was smooth and graceful. The bow was a pointed ellipse that thickened to hold the cockpit. It flowed into the main body of the ship, which resembled an upside-down garden spade. The hull morphed into two swept wings at the rear of the canopy, each with a cylindrical engine nacelle. Lines marked recessed flaps and fins for atmospheric maneuvering. The aft edge of the wings melded seamlessly into a large central engine at the rear. If not for the gun emplacements, he would have thought it a race craft.

  He skimmed through the specs. Hybrid fusion drive, rocket boosters, ablative ar
mor, gyroscope stabilization, dual-mode repulsors skin. What would it be like to fly this thing?

  “Morgan?”

  He turned. His mom was staring at him, sleepy-eyed, from the living room entrance. Her hair was a matted mess and she was in her pajamas. She looked from the floating station to the Firefly, and back to Morgan.

  “It’s that Captain Buffoon isn’t it? He’s got you thinking of joining the space force.”

  Morgan stood. “I’m not joining anything. And his name’s Batson, not Buffoon.”

  “I don’t care what his name is. Why are you looking at this stuff?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It is,” she snapped. “Whatever notion he put in your head, you can drop it right now.”

  Morgan clenched his fist. Why does she have to be so controlling? He shot her a dark look, took a breath, and tried to calm down. She’s got me cornered. I might as well tell the truth.

  “Actually, it’s got nothing to do with joining the space force.” He pointed at the Firefly, which his mother was regarding with distaste. “The Captain told me about this new fighter they’ll be showcasing at Starlight Station on Saturday. It’s called the Firefly.” He paused. “There’s a space show. Batson gave me some tickets. I wasn’t going to go, until I realized that Liz might, maybe, be interested in going.”

  Her scowl softened. “The girl from yesterday?”

  “Yeah. She likes cars, so I thought she might like ships too.”

  “I see.” His mom came into the room and put a hand on his shoulder, her brow knitted together as she tossed the thought around. “I knew there was something going on between you two.”

  Morgan shrugged. “Yeah, she’s really cool. And, well…” he trailed off.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, she’s pretty cute too.” He felt himself blushing and looked away.

  “So you noticed that, huh?” said his mother. “Well, I’m glad you have an appreciation for the other half of the human race! I was beginning to think you didn’t care about finding someone.”