Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [41]
But this was not what stole her attention. Spiraling around the Pincushion, the dust devils merged into a single front of billowing electrified dust—a Faraday cage, better even than the castle’s cage that could withstand the electromagnetic pulse from major nuclear explosions—still growing, still reaching upward, higher into space.
And at its rising crest, she saw—no, not a girl—a vortex of destruction wrapped around an invisible and fierce presence, spinning, changing faster than Naomi’s virtual displays could catch—and hopefully faster than the targeting devices of InsectiEye destroyers. Some of them were down. She saw shards and pieces tossed about by the storm, the forming and dissolving eddies in the wide-field plasma nets cast over the area by the remaining three, could almost feel the strain on their computational resources.
Then, she noticed a sudden change in their strategy and realized why they grew bold. The Dancer was no longer shooting back.
Behind Naomi, the attack was nearing the critical point.
“Xng!” She yelled out into space, oblivious to danger. “Xng!” If you are still alive. . . .
IT HAPPENED JUST BEFORE THE ACTIVE NUCLEUS OF THEIR MINI-galaxy accumulated enough power to discharge its jets. The Dragon Guard ships suddenly reversed their engines in a powerful combined thrust, sending a stream of plasma down, straight into the pulsing heart of the plasmoid—and then swung the butterfly wing sails across the stream.
Thrown out of the funnel, they watched that plasma reach the nucleus, short-circuiting the gaps of high magnetic pressure separating the plasmoid from the mini-galaxy’s two spiral arms. Confined within the funnel, the electromagnetic pulse absorbed the released energy. At nearly the speed of light, it pierced the castle’s anti-plasma shield and smashed through many feet of the protective Faraday cage layers in the walls.
The castle died.
In an abruptly eerie quiet, the Task Force “Trafalgar” dispersed in a rosette above the castle, braking in a horizontal flight. Darkened, grown heavy like a corpse in its suddenly material substantiality, the castle watched with the dark empty sockets of its observation bubbles as the ships wheeled back and thousands of tiny stars—the Dragon Guard invasion force—landed unopposed, claiming for themselves the keys to Mars.
The Order of Flamethrowers was back.
THEY ROSE AT THE CREST OF THE DUST STORM, ONE STEP ahead of its unrolling spiral “staircase.” With all their indicators in the red, Nathi himself was now teetering on the edge of coma. The charge in their Dragonclaws had run out long ago.
Hold your breath. Just hold your breath.
She hardly heard him, wasn’t looking back. She didn’t see the last InsectiEye destroyers crash, cut down by invisible light from above. Light as a feather, they were lifting up—the Dancer of the sky, just barely one step above the storm. They rose, spiraling around the Needle—and, where they passed, she saw the flywheels turning faster.
Look! The prayer wheels. They turn. We turn the prayer wheels!
They felt the echoes of the electromagnetic pulse like millions of resonating gongs, like alternating bursts of cold and fire running over their electromagnetically sensitive skin, and as a sudden urge to breathe. Although but a tiny fraction of the focused power that hit the castle, those echoes could still kill them easily.
They lived. With eyes wide open, they entered a tunnel full of light and floated toward its other end—but didn’t find it, caught by a magnificent magsail frigate that dove from the sky to shield them, like a mother bird, with half-burnt wings.
10
“G——— ?”
Had someone just called their name? But it was gone—together with her family.
They opened their eyes. The same