“We have to leave,” said Ondo again. “I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for him. If we'd known he was here, then we could have tried. The Dragon has come for us and we have to get out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It must have triggered three of the orbital nukes I parked in orbit.”
“Nukes.”
“Fission weapons, crude but effective. They've entered the atmosphere and will detonate a kilometre above the ice. We have to leave now.”
“We can't leave. How can we leave?” Once again, she had the unpleasant sensation of her mind ripping into two. What was the Dragon thinking when she and Ondo had no means of escape?
A growing rumble ran through the ice beneath her feet, strengthening each moment, and she thought a nuke must have detonated already; that a superheated blast-wave wall would slam into them at any moment, searing their skin and tissues from their bones. Instead, impossibly, a triangle of metal or stone rose from the ice fifty metres away, like some ancient temple arising from the depths. Then she grasped what it was: the apex of the Dragon, forcing its way up through the pack ice to reach them. It had entered the atmosphere, found a safe descent vector and used the oceans to get to them undetected. Great slabs of ice were pushed up and out as the bulk of the ship forced itself free of the ice. She could feel the heat blasting off it on her face: it had used its beam-weapons to thrust its way through.
The Walker, meanwhile, was retreating into his lair. He'd seen the Dragon and the approaching nukes and had come to the same realisation of what he had to do: power up his ship and escape the planet. But he stopped for a moment to consider the body of the man on the ice in front of him. Perhaps he was making the same calculation Selene was: he could be brought back to life in the Refuge just as Selene had been. His injuries were nothing compared to those she'd suffered.
It was an act of simple malice. The Walker sent an instruction to the blaster atop the turret of his ship. A beam of light lanced down, striking her father's body, turning him to fire and then to ash. The Walker's face lit up red as the weapon played across her father's body.
Fury coiled within Selene; she would kill this Walker even if it meant sacrificing herself. But Ondo seized her by the arm and pulled her away. “If we die here, we'll never defeat them.”
The calculating part of her brain projected likely outcomes of everything that was unfolding around them: their distance from the Dragon, its optimal trajectory as it left the planet, the contrary routes of the nukes as they screamed groundward. Possible escape vectors for the Walker in his Concordance ship.
She chose. She tossed aside the blaster and lifted Ondo off the ground. He couldn't move quickly enough. She threw him across her left shoulder, then raced for the Dragon, at the same time firing instructions at the ship's control systems. Then would be no time for the usual niceties of a prep for atmospheric launch. Her natural tissues burned at the effort of running while carrying Ondo, but she ignored them, amping up her biological response with an artificial burst of adrenaline.
They fell into the Dragon's open hatch. The doorway irised shut and the ship's energy hull zapped up to full power. She felt the ship's drives powering up, shudders of suppressed energy rumbling through its superstructure. It still had to force the bulk of its pyramidal body through the pack-ice. In the sky, the nukes were three kilometres from the ground, fanning out as they arranged themselves into a pattern that would inflict maximum destruction across the polar region. She and Ondo lay in the hatchway of the Dragon, both seeing what was happening, neither able to do much more than watch and wait.
A rising whine of fury shuddered through the ship and then it burst free, firing upwards into the clear air over the pole, climbing at maximum thrust. The violence of the acceleration pinned them to the deck. Ondo blacked out and only Selene's augmentations, overriding her biology, kept her from doing the same. If she lost consciousness, and Concordance intercepted them, she might never awaken. Their escape vector angled away from the pole. There was a moment when the three nukes and the Dragon were at the same altitude, a moment of strange calm. She studied the weapons through the Dragon's sensors, their sleek, malevolent form. The Walker's ship was in the air, too, but it was lower. Maybe some of its systems had degraded during its sojourn in the ice. The Dragon needed only a few more seconds to climb high enough to escape the blast wave from the nukes and they might make it.
The light of three new suns flared in her eyes as the nukes detonated, bathing her dead world in their demonic fury. The Dragon rose, climbing a beat ahead of the atmospheric blast wave. The higher they ascended and the thinner the atmosphere, the less damaging the thermal shock would be. She saw how it would go. She felt a fresh surge shake through the Dragon, as if it had made the same calculation and was putting all its energy into the effort of escaping.
Twelve seconds later, they passed out of the stratosphere mere metres ahead of the raging heat plume.
In the violence and radiation blast of the detonations, she'd lost track of the Walker vessel. Its trajectory had been marginal; most likely it had been engulfed by the explosions and vaporised. The thought of that made her feel a little better.
She turned her attention to local space. Five Concordance ships had arrived in-system, converging on the planet from different angles. Their intention was clearly
