At a same instant, a small flotilla of NAVO craft appeared on the horizon, slipping out of time drive like a pack of fleas. Several smaller attack ships—‘sentinels’ as Miko knew them—came hurtling out of the mother craft, eager to engage the Zikri.
The Zikri sat stunned. The four Orbs jerked to action, overcoming their surprise at the sudden appearance of the NAVO ships. They withdrew as one from their tight ring around the disabled Sitty, then put the full force of their attention on the unwelcome NAVO.
Grim minutes reigned. Ships burned, bombs streaked, fires seared, death and mayhem filled the bleak moon’s skyline. From afar, the battle appeared as a bumblebee swarm, disordered and chaotic. The Zikri dropped their uro-bombs from the torque cannon mounted on their spikes while the NAVO sentinels unleashed blue ruin in the form of zicon lasers and lumo-bombs.
Two of the Zikri mother ships glowed like fire; then they vibrated dangerously, prey to lethal NAVO sentinel spray. Several tri-wing sentinels went up in flames. The NAVO flagship was getting bombarded with debris and bomb shatter. Her hull showed breaches in many places. Now her conning towers were crushed and cut away from her and the transmission dishes were ripped off like ripe corn under the bombs of the Zikri.
Miko tore his gaze from the gruesome scene. He concentrated on correcting his course, to a place far away from Rogos. He must get power back to the main console! He thrust away with auxiliary power from their exposed position with whatever weak force the ship had left.
Sitty limped along, widening the gap from Rogos at a frustrating, slow pace. It was well below light speed, but try as he might, Sitty’s time drive refused to function. He suppressed a curse.
A blinding flash arced from a Zikri Orb. Sitty’s viewport showed a wall of fire, lighting the viewport. Two sentinels collided with each other and burst into searing flame. Pieces of red-hot wreckage slewed past Sitty and skidded off her titanium hull with a dull clangour.
Miko’s heart skipped a beat. A piece of hot metal in the wrong place would breach the hull.
Another of the Zikri Orbs started to vibrate with wholesome force then imploded into a pool of darkness and was no more.
Out of the terror zone, Sitty drifted, significantly crippled. But off her port bow, a stealth NAVO ship appeared, a quadri-winged sprinter advancing with long-range laser guns. Somehow it had escaped the roil of battle, and came at them at malevolent speed, weapons locked.
Miko mouthed a curse. No shrewd manoeuvring could outwit the dragnet. He cried out a half chittering grunt, riddled with defeat, while a dozen NAVO craft, the last remaining, set up a radiation net that blocked escape from three sides. Facing their only escape flank was a grim phalanx of NAVO sentinels, armed, with enough firepower to destroy two moons. Cold remuneration was in order.
Audra gave a wild squeal of exultation. Why? Miko was perplexed. Could she not see they were doomed?
With an almost wily smirk on her eerie face, she released the detonation timer on the Zikri decoy vessel.
Almost at once, Miko, by happenstance, felt the surge of gamma power returning to the main boosters. He jarred the main power to life. Sitty II thrust out on an escape vector toward far Cassiopeia.
Like hundreds of times before, Miko witnessed the wonder and power of the light-speed time drive. From the craft’s nose flared a cone of luminosity stretching to near infinity. Majestically it appeared before them, of a thousand unnameable colours, like a tornado funnel out of a twisted storm. It was some wormhole to nowhere. One small adjustment, a hair’s width out of place, and the tunnel could lead them as far as the Altair wastes.
Sitty disappeared in a wormhole of time drive fantasy. The effect was indescribable, a scintillating kaleidoscope of light and colour. From the previous blast, the Zikri decoy ship had exploded in red ruin behind them and everything within a fifty cubic mile radius become an instant cinder, including most of the NAVO craft.
Audra’s forethought of installing the detonator had been a wise decision, however ruthless, thought Miko...
Miko and Audra laughed in unison—How could the NAVO and Zikri fools not see the mirror of their own doom?
The joint enemy would be more than upset when they saw how their attacks had failed. At least, whatever bands of them were left.
Only milliseconds before entering the time cone, the NAVO sentinel that had been closing the gap had followed at a somewhat near lethal vector. It had caught the tail end of Sitty’s funnel with some luck and now followed at supra-light speed. It was within striking distance, and the pilot, without a moment’s thought, blasted a crippling ray into Sitty’s stern.
Sitty rocked wildly. The time drive edged toward the threshold of instability. The guidance system could fail, thought Miko, and send them all into a nether dimension.
The Trynium in her computers died. The ship plummeted three thousand feet, jarred out of the cone, bypassing the time-light continuum, threatening to dematerialize them all. The sentinel followed, sucked along by relativistic inertia. By some freak chance, they escaped oblivion, a dark death lost in the time stream forever—but now they were knocked back into reality.
But what reality? To Miko’s horror, he saw Rogos’s disc bulging some ninety thousand miles below like some amber goblin. How could that be? They should be light years away! They had not even gained a few thousand miles on their supra light journey. It made no sense.
Miko uttered a strangled cry. They were right back where they had started. They would be sitting ducks to NAVO
