Prador Moon

'I should give you weapons clearance.'

'You already gave it back at Grant's World.'

'You don't need it again?'

'Not unless you cancel that clearance. I advise you not to do that.'

It was more of a warning than a threat, but not much more.

As they surfaced from U-space, Tomalon closed up with Occam and banished his interior perception of the bridge, becoming one again with the ship and its sensors. They arrived only minutes behind the two Prador ships, and minutes were all it took. A long, glittering cloud of debris lay directly ahead like a scar across vacuum—all that remained of the transfer station. The two ships lay beyond it, gleaming in red light as they accelerated towards the dwarf sun, probably to slingshot round and fling themselves clear before engaging their U-engines again. Still hurtling along at the velocity with which it earlier entered U-space, theOccam Razor ignited its fusion engines and accelerated too. Weapons turrets and platforms rose, missiles and solid rail-gun projectiles loaded. Tomalon expected Occam to shoot out a swarm of rail-gun missiles as before, but that procedure abruptly stood down.

'Why not?'

'Further information package received. While controlling the craft we left, Aureus also sent telefactors to study the remains of the Prador destroyers. The exotic metal armour contains piezoelectric layers and s-con grids linked to what Aureus finally identified as thermal generators. Small strikes merely provide them with more energy with which to strike back.'

'Hence that particle beam they hit us with?'

'Certainly.'

'Our options now?'

'We get, as one Jebel Krong would say, 'up close and personal' We need to hit hard enough to kill them before they can utilize the energy from our strikes.'

The paths of the two Prador vessels now diverged. One swung away from its slingshot route, spun over nose-first towards theOccam Razor, and began decelerating.

'Ah, it seems they want to talk,' Occam commented.

Within Tomalon's perception the view into a Prador captain's sanctum opened out, revealing the limbless captain floating just above the floor. Tomalon understood, from intelligence gathered during other conflicts, this to be a Prador adult, and that the fully limbed troops ECS more often encountered were the young. It grated its mandibles to make some hissing and bubbling sounds, and the translation came through a moment after.

'So ECS does have some real ships,' it said.

'Would you like to reply?' Occam enquired.

'Why not?' Tomalon sensed the link establishing and spoke out loud, 'Who am I addressing?'

'I am Captain Shree—a name you will know but briefly.'

'Well, Shree, we do have real ships and you have sufficiently irritated us that we feel beholden to use them.'

'I look forward to our meeting. It is a shame we cannot meet in the flesh, but alas I have a war to help win and no time to peel that admirable vessel to find you.'

'Fuck me, B-movie dialogue. Why is this character talking?'

'Perhaps to make him the focus of our attack rather than the other vessel,' Occam replied.

'Should we ignore him and go after the other one?'

'I rather think not. If we do we'll have Shree behind us. Upon experience of their destroyers I am not sure if we could survive that particular vice.'

'I see that your companion captain is not so anxious to make our acquaintance,' Tomalon noted.

'Oh, but Captain Immanence has a rendezvous to keep. He passes on his best regards and looks forward himself to encountering more vessels like your own. Thus far the conflict has become boringly predictable.'

The Prador vessel now launched a fusillade of missiles, zipping up in the light of the sun like emergency flares. TheOccam abruptly swerved and now did launch rail-gun projectiles, but aimed to intercept the missiles rather than hit the Prador ship. On their current trajectory the solid projectiles that did not strike missiles would pass above it, but only just—it would look like a near miss. Within the great ship Tomalon observed some alterations being made: CTD warheads being diverted away from the low-acceleration rail-guns usually used, to one of the more powerful ones. They were being loaded along with the solid projectiles so that every tenth launch would be a CTD.

'Isn't that a little dangerous?' he asked. Such warheads were not often accelerated up to relativistic speeds, since the stress might cause some breach of the antimatter flask they contained. If that happened while the missile accelerated up the gun rails the results might be… messy.

'Not nearly as dangerous as giving this ship time to take us apart,' Occam replied. 'The chances are one in twenty of an in-ship detonation.'

Prador missiles began exploding in vacuum as the projectiles slammed into them. Shree's vessel immediately changed course to intercept any of those projectiles to get through—deliberately putting itself in their path. Occam slow-launched programmed CTD warheads down towards the sun, and ramped up its acceleration towards the enemy. Both vessels came within each other's beam range. A particle beam struck theOccam Razor, cutting a boiling trench through hull metal. Tomalon felt this as pain, but this being a facility of which he felt no need, he tracked down its source—a diagnostic feedback program—and cancelled it.

Occam used lasers to hit incoming missiles, intercepted others with hard-fields, then opened up with masers on the Prador ship. It seemed a foolish tactic, in view of what they now knew about that exotic metal armour, but Tomalon understood that Occam did not want Shree to realise how much they knew. The missiles launched down towards the sun, came up with the solar wind—more difficult to detect—and closed on Shree's vessel. The Prador began to hit them with lasers, but some got through and exploded on the exotic metal hull. Huge dents became visible, and one split in which fires glowed, but even as Tomalon saw these, the dents began to push out and the split to close. Now four particle cannons targeted theOccam Razor, using the energy these strikes generated. They ripped into theRazors hull. One of them struck a weak point and exploded through, and Tomalon observed internal beams glowing white hot and ablating away, some massive hard-field generator cut in half, human living quarters scoured with fire that would have incinerated anyone in there.

The two ships were still on a collision course, and Tomalon realised the Prador vessel would not divert—it did not need to. In a seemingly desperate measure theOccam Razor turned—taking more particle weapon strikes on fresh hull metal—to use its main fusion engines to change course. The sudden massive acceleration caused huge floor sections and corridors, already weakened, to collapse inside the ship. The ship's internal mechanisms began reconfiguring it, relocating the bridge pod, and moving other more vulnerable ship components deeper inside. A close pass at mere hundreds of kilometres. A beam strike hit the hull and passed straight through the ship, exploding out of the other side.

'Close enough,' said Occam coldly, and began firing that rail-gun.

They were unlucky, the one in twenty chance playing against them as the sixth CTD detonated inside the rail-gun. The explosion tore into thousands of tonnes of superstructure and hull, shattered much inside the ship and filled it with a brief inferno. Tomalon clung to the arms of his interface chair as the entire bridge pod flew twenty metres before slamming to a halt against a bulkhead. He thought that was it, they were dead, but still connected into the sensor arrays he watched three antimatter warheads, travelling at a substantial portion of light speed, strike home on the Prador vessel. The triple explosion seemed as one to human perception, but Tomalon slowed it so he could truly see what happened. The first detonation pushed a crater into the ship's hull nearly a quarter of its size, the second ripped through and exploded from the other side to blow out a glowing funnel of the super-tough metal, and the last finished the job—cutting the ship in half.

Tomalon viewed the devastation within theOccam Razor. He was glad not to have felt it as pain, because this would have been of the smashed-open ribs and evisceration by fire variety.

'The other ship?' he enquired.

'It has gone,' Occam replied.