Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [40]
COME ON!
Naomi didn’t have time for a longer speech. Nuclear mini-missiles came at them in narrow, dense fields of automatic fire, locked on their target.
“Keep the course!”
The DareAngel speared ahead at hundreds of kilometers per second, pushing a paraboloid halo of explosions, their defensive lasers searching for nuclear bullets. Even those passing on the sides were dangerous—they were too “smart” to flow in straight paths.
Naomi danced in her ship’s body, her eyes darting—targeting. The DareAngel’s crew had redeployed their integrated minds to the peripheral anti-missile defense, working together like they shared the body of the ship. But even though they swept their laser beams so fast they covered most of the area ahead of them in microseconds, their lasers couldn’t keep their destructive power sustained on maximum for long. They had to make the lasers’ every full-burn count.
It was like waterskiing at high speed, trying to catch the drops of water all around you—and staying dry. It didn’t help that radiation noise masked the mini-missiles’ trails. But the abundant radiation from the many tiny nuclear explosions around them kept feeding their plasma jets.
Come on. Naomi clenched her virtual jaw. For the pain kept coming.
Damage to the X35B group of integration nodes—burning on her tongue. The laser battery on her left virtual forefinger down to 19%. The first crew casualties—
She felt each injury like needles piercing her skin—the ship’s crew like a many-armed and many-bodied dancer, keeping on under a shower of arrows, on wounded limbs—a violin with breaking strings—
— a juggler with blind spots.
Naomi heard an echo of a wizard’s laughter, sinister and triumphant, as if from far away; felt the stinging bite of arrows that came as if from nowhere. They had lost all contact with Rostam’s ship. The same storm that shielded them from wizards now enveloped them like an impenetrable wall. They were the blind eye of a hurricane.
Good. Just a little more. As long as their engines worked.
“Keep. The. Course!” She hoped she was heard. Just keep the course.
She listened to the music of Langmuir waves driven by lasers through the plasma.
Just a little more—
She didn’t notice the explosion that knocked her out.
When she came to, she was whirling through open space in her life capsule.
Propulsion unresponsive. I am sorry, chief.
Her DareAngel personette using a singular pronoun wasn’t a good sign.
How many? she said.
She had suffered a minor concussion and her realtime rad-cleaners had overloaded. Although charged particles were mostly deflected by the ship’s magnetic fields, there was much less that could be done about gamma-ray and neutron radiation from the nuclear explosions.
No matter. She had had it worse.
Survival rate of 46%, at least. From what I can detect. You know, they’re hiding.
True. Sharp burning pain, as if a thin hot poker the size of a nano-needle ran a zigzag scan over her skin—one of the castle’s battle lasers hunting for survivors. She was lucky to escape between its full-burn pulses. Whew. That was a close call. She narrowly escaped Lord Nelson’s fate.
The world was bouncing up and down till she synchronized the virtual displays. Her stuck magsails had carried her way to the north, now spiraling toward the power needles. Far behind her, she could barely detect evasion traces of the crew’s life capsules, scattered by the emergency ejection.
Worry not—she checked her shielding frequencies—we’ ll piece you up in no time.
And, like a mantra: Stay the course. Just stay the course.
Naomi knew the Dragon Guard would hold.
The castle’s missile batteries kept firing into the growing striated funnel with a desperation only equaled by their missile supplies. Above them, the plasmoid at the center of the mini-galaxy pulsed like a heart, compressed between converging spiral arms. While down below, at the base, where the funnel’s gaping maw flared wide around the anti-plasma shield—like jewels framed with the bright silver