Chapter Four
“Oh you want to know the truth, do you? Fine. Truth is we don’t know jack shit about the Nethra. It’s a metaphysical realm that defies our understanding of the natural world. It’s an impossible world of spirits, dead civilizations, and a plethora of eldritch horrors older than the universe itself. It’s the realm of gods and ghosts and nightmares. Anyone who claims to understand it is suspect. They think they know, but they see only one infinitesimally small piece of the whole. If I had to put a number to it, I’d guess we know less than point-zero-three percent of all there is to know about the Nethra and those who dwell within its murky depths. We know about the ones who currently talk to us, or who we have discovered painted in ancient temples, the ones who used to talk to us. But there are others. Other Nethrians, unknown and uncountable. Each more unpredictable than the last. When it comes to what drives them or what they want from us, we know absolutely nothing.”
–Snippet of an interview with an unnamed whistleblower from the upper echelons of the Tempolose Nethera.
“…told you there would be dangers!” Nolan shouted to be heard.
“Dangers, yes. Active defenses on a stealthed Maur corvette, no! Those are CD-750 defense drones, Monty! You can’t buy your way out of this!” Duncan roared right back.
Through the cockpit's windows, they all watched a cloud of cyclopean orbs rise from the derelict husk, guns bristling and engines flaring against the dark.
Sybil let out a low breath to prepare herself and push out all distractions, ignoring the shouting match that was only picking up behind her.
“Hope you’re all buckled in. This is where the fun begins.”
Even with the warning issued, she still only kicked the Shrike’s sunlight engines into Minus Six as she pointed the ship’s nose right at the densest cluster of the outer belt. The elongated disc-shaped craft shot forward with engines flaring bright and defiant. Shields flickered as she plowed through a fine layer of micro-asteroids on her way.
Nolan and Duncan hadn’t been strapped in due to their shouting match, which started the precise moment their three-day approach ended with a fleet of attack drones rising from the asteroid belt. Both Terrans were now tangled up at the back of the cockpit due to Sybil’s acceleration.
Blue had his eyes shut tight and was gripping his restraints like they were the only tether he had to this mortal plane. His mouth was moving rapidly as he subvocalized a series of prayers to the Maur’s holy trinity of war gods.
Sybil broke the silence. “Gunner, you ready for this?”
The big orc sitting in her co-pilot seat gripped the controls on his console and nodded grimly. “If I’m not, then this is going to be a real short trip,” he replied callously.
“Squint?”
“Yeah, yeah. Already on it, princess,” the hacker announced, using his middle finger to point to the cable socketed in the back of his head.
Sybil jerked her controls to the left, throwing the Shrike up onto its stubby portside fin to present a narrower profile as she threaded the needle between two oscillating asteroids.
The Hissak bodyguard Nolan had brought along must have unbuckled herself to go retrieve her master, because now she joined the other two in slamming into the portside wall of the cockpit.
“Oh shibb. My noth!” Nolan blubbered out through the blood pouring down his face. Less than a minute into the action and their client had already broken his nose. Off to an awesome start.
That Hissak’s forked tongue flicked out angrily and her slit-pupiled eyes landed on Sybil, promising death and retribution for harming the man she was sworn to protect.
“Or for fuck’s sake, don’t look at me like that. It’s his own damn fault. Get him strapped in!” Sybil roared, flipping her controls back to starboard and then pulling the ship up—relative to her previous trajectory—to balance it on her tailfin.
An angry staccato barrage of yellow blaster bolts ripped through the space the Shrike had been about to fly through. Enough to crack her shields and maybe even deal some real damage if they’d been caught out in the open.
These CD-750s were nasty buggers.
She feathered the throttle and jiggled the flight stick, keeping a particularly large asteroid interposed between the Shrike and her pursuers. It bought them another couple seconds.
“Squint!”
“Working on it! Be patient!”
Sybil glanced back at her charges.
The Hissak was securing Nolan in his crash chair and Duncan had found his way to a seat of his own. Good. Just a few more seconds and the nimble bodyguard could get secure. Then she could pull the gloves off and take the fight to those drones without having to play it slow.
I told you to get buckled, fools.
A periphery warning flashed on her HUD, drawing her gaze around to the big asteroid she’d been using for cover. Three CD-750 defense drones sped around the asteroid at top speed from different angles. Missile flares popped onto her sensors and began spiraling in towards the Shrike.
Gunner popped flares, spamming the incoming missiles with bogus code and signals to overload its onboard VE in the hopes of getting it to veer off course or detonate early. In the same instant, he pulled back on his controls and spun the defensive turret around to acquire one of the incoming targets. With a squeeze of the trigger he struck it with a quad-linked burst that spat out through the inky void and ripped through the drone’s shell.
Explosions rippled through the belt as many of the missiles went astray. Some detonated early, acting on bogus proximity data. Some slammed into asteroids they couldn’t see. Two actually collided with each other. In the hailstorm of outbound particles from each of these explosions, Sybil’s sensors failed to pick up any more missiles.
Right as the second drone got a firing solution on the Shrike, Sybil slammed on the ship’s brakes; decelerating hard to break the target lock the drone had on them.
Several things happened at once.
The drone’s blaster bolts sped past them and struck another asteroid.
Squint shouted, “Got one!” and turned the other drone on its fellow, turning it to dust with three tenths of a second’s worth of concentrated fire.
Out of her periphery, Sybil spotted the Hissak soaring towards the front of the cockpit, trapped in an untethered freefall.
Not one but two missiles struck the Strike’s prow. The first detonated early, pelting the craft’s already taxed shields with shrapnel and exotic particles. The shield flickered. Not dead, just weakened. It was enough. The second missile struck home, glancing off the ship’s hardened top hull and detonating immediately.
In the resulting explosion, the cockpit’s glass got hit by enough shrapnel to create a spiderweb of cracks. Impossible, according to the vendor who’d sold it to Duncan. Yet, the Nethra often ignored such laughable concepts as safety standards.
The Hissak hit the window and the glass shattered into a thousand shards of heavy-duty supposedly vac-rated glass, flying inward towards the cockpit’s occupants. For a single terrible instant, the snake woman was suspended in midair, her visage reflecting from a dozen different angles off all the shards Sybil was staring through. Several of these shards came within a finger’s width of stabbing the hybrid pilot or her companions. Then the decompressive force won out, sucking the Hissak bodyguard and all the shards of glass out into the vacuum along with a massive quantity of the cockpit’s air.
A pressure door slammed down to protect the rest of the ship from decompression, but the cockpit’s window seals malfunctioned as they attempted to close off the breached glass. The shutter over the main panel was busted, rent inward by the explosion and then out by all the escaping air. It spat out a few feeble sparks instead of performing its one and only function.
Typical.
Sybil lifted her left hand up and called upon her psionic gift. Cryokinesis. It took her five achingly long seconds spent screaming into the void, popping a blood vessel in her left eye from the strain, but at last a wall of ice crystals formed over the shattered window, sealing off the cockpit from the harsh vacuum.
The Shrike’s flickering shields stabilized at a whopping 13% as she dropped her hand to the controls and gassed the accelerator, no longer holding back on the speed. For better or worse, now that all remaining occupants were strapped in, the gloves could come off.
Seventeen CD-750 attack drones appeared off to her starboard as she sped the Shrike past the massive asteroid she’d been using as a shield.
Missiles flared to life and blaster bolts spat their way from a dozen sources.
With fine adjustments and a feather touch, Sybil slipped her vessel through everything they threw at her, passing through the tumbling rocks and voracious enemy fire like a surgeon’s scalpel carving its way through a patient’s flesh.
Gunner grit his teeth and swiveled his guns around to open fire, spitting out four bolts at a time into the oncoming cloud of targets. His thick fingers flew across the console, attempting the same trick that had worked last time and spamming the incoming missiles with bogus data. Two missiles detonated early and a third veered violently off course, but the rest stayed on target.
“They’re networked!” the Orchallen announced.
Networked smart missiles learned each time they failed to hit their targets, relaying targeting data to the next round of missiles fired from the launcher. The VE hivemind operating this little drone fleet was likely analyzing everything they were doing, ticking off boxes and eliminating probabilities, seeking whichever course of action resulted in the Shrike’s total obliteration.
“Oh fuck it!” he roared.
With a stomp on a recessed foot pedal, Gunner flipped open a false panel along the Shrike’s spine and revealed a highly illegal set of missile launchers known as Stymphalian Mark Seven Flak Cannons. At a flick of a thumb-switch hidden under an otherwise useless button on Gunner’s console, a flock of non-explosive interceptor rockets sprang out into the void. Their sole function was to fly into the teeth of the incoming missiles and swat them out of the sky. Even without a payload however, those nasty little spikes could pack quite a punch on unshielded targets out here in space. As such, the Satyrs deemed them unsportsmanlike and outlawed their use. What the Satyr’s didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.
Explosions lit up her sensor screen.
Squint’s rogue drone hung back and waited for the others to pass him by before he slipped into the swarm’s midst and began opening fire. He cut down two drones and nicked a few others before the remainder turned on him and decimated his drone.
“Fourteen left. Few of them are a bit dinged up. I got control of two others before their VE kicked me off the system. Keeping one up my sleeve for the right moment. Tell me when you want the second one to deploy.”
“Got it,” Sybil acknowledged, corkscrewing the Shrike through an intricate loop to evade a trio of colliding asteroids and their resulting debris.
“Second missile wave down,” Gunner reported. “Third one will be a bitch.”
Sybil’s eyes scanned across her instruments.
T-minus thirty-three million keys (kilometers) to destination. Little over three minutes at their current velocity.
Sybil throttled the ship up to Minus Two—just two notches shy of lightspeed—knocking her time-to-intercept down to a mere two minutes, thirteen seconds.
“Squint, deploy the drone. Gunner, fuck the quad-laser. Open up with the splinter cannon. Let’s show these bots who’s–”
“You habb a wot?” Nolan demanded, still struggling to speak with his bloody nose. “How the thuck you got a pulthar cannon? It’th illegal!”
Duncan shushed the Montgomery magnate. “It’s also going to keep us alive. Shut up.”
Nolan stopped talking and kept a hand clamped up under his nose.
Gunner cranked what looked like a throttle. “Be a doll and line me up a clean shot.”
“With pleasure,” Sybil agreed, tilting the Shrike’s prow around to starboard without sacrificing any of their forward momentum. In ages past when daredevils like her were limited to ground-based vehicles, this little stunt would have been called drifting. In space it was more of a controlled strafe, but the principles were the same.
She flew with her head pointed left, making slight adjustments in their course as she side-slipped the ovular craft through the asteroid belt. Her HUD fed her telemetry from the ship’s sensors, allowing her to see right through the side of the cockpit like it wasn't there, and gaze out into the asteroid belt to avoid the next set of obstacles.
“Squint, activate both drones and open fire.” Duncan commanded from his crash chair. Though he was comfortable relying on Sybil’s expertise for the fancy flying, he was still the Captain. It seemed too soon to her, but he didn’t have a ship to fly, maybe he’d spotted something she hadn’t. She trusted him to keep an eye on the bigger picture.
Just one of the four Pulsar splinter cannons powered up. A stream of blaster bolts, kinetic slugs, and exotic particles spat out of the three-barreled monstrosity flashed out. Enough force was expelled to actually shift the Shrike back, and Sybil had to feather her maneuvering jets to compensate on the fly.
Gunner laid down a torrential gout of fire in the path of the incoming drones. Enough to reduce a Kintari ground regiment to dust and echoes in a heartbeat. Against the attack drones and their evasive programming, it halved their numbers.
Squint’s second rogue drone coughed up a full complement of missiles and turned them against its fellow drones just ahead of the incoming splinter fire.
When the smoke cleared, they were alone in the asteroid belt.
“Scanners clear,” Squint reconfirmed for the benefit of the three cockpit occupants not jacked into the Shrike’s sensor suite. “Smooth sailing from here on in.”
Sybil swung the Shrike back around to face the right direction and throttled back to something a little less breakneck. Without the threat of drones and missiles on her tail, she picked a gentler path through the belt and settled in for a more casual approach.
Blue hopped out of his seat and attended to Nolan’s wounds. The CEO attempted to wave the Maur off, but a few gruff words set the Terran straight and he became compliant.
Minutes passed, and at last they came within visual range of their target.
Squint ran a scan and projected the results up for all to see.
The frigate was just a shell worn by a stealth corvette. The bulkheads and cargo spaces welded onto the smaller, more powerful craft like a second skin. A clever design. But it hadn’t stopped the drifting gestalt vessel from colliding with a massive asteroid floating out along the outer belt. The result was a crash-landed ship embedded within a deep trench in the asteroid’s outer surface.
Sybil decelerated and guided the Shrike in towards the main hangar.
