A Void Walker vessel, screaming towards the planet on high-g acceleration, was the first to reach extreme weapon's range. She counted three, four more seconds then released the first nuke towards it. Like the Dragon, the simple velocity of the Walker craft would prevent it making significant vector adjustments. She laid down a ring of beam-weapon fire around it: her chances of striking the ship were small, but she hoped to restrict its manoeuvre options further, keep it in the path of her missile. The Walker ship returned fire, attempting to punch the nuke out of space with its own beam-weapons. The missile's tactical Mind responded by dodging and spiralling on its course, always aiming at the Void Walker but making its precise position at any one moment difficult to predict. The beam-weapon shots flashed nearer and nearer the nuke, but none hit, just as none of hers hit the Walker craft.
Armed only with beam-weapons, the Walker needed to get nearer to have any significant chance of hitting her. They would either pull out of their attack before the nuke posed any real threat, or they would persist and try and hit her. She guessed this one would persist; the sensible option would have been to attack in formation with the others, not take her on alone. Most likely, she was seeing the actions of an unthinking fanatic.
She guessed right: the Walker craft continued to accelerate directly at her, beam-weapons flickering. Now the pilot of the attack ship would play a delicate game: if they cut away too early, the accelerating nuke would easily adjust course to pursue them, and then, if the missile got behind them, they were doomed. They would never be able to outrun or dodge a pursuing missile except by jumping into metaspace – and they were all far too near the system's gravity wells to make that a possibility. The Walker's best chance lay in waiting until the nuke had achieved full speed and was close enough that its own manoeuvring ability was impaired, and then attempt to dodge away.
The ploy nearly worked. The nuke was only moments away when the Walker ship threw itself into an ugly, twisting dive, pulling as tight a loop as its high velocity allowed. Selene saw what was happening: the Walker was attempting to come up behind the missile, lock onto its trajectory to unleash forwards beam-weaponry of its own.
She didn't allow the Walker a chance for the plan to succeed. She sent detonation codes to the nuke, and a ball of blinding light blossomed ahead of her, blasting out high-energy radiation. If it struck the Walker ship, the energy would be dumped as heat and the ship would burn or explode. Failing that, there was a chance its control systems would fry in the shower of high-energy radiation. She manoeuvred herself onto a vector away from the worst of the blast.
She detected the Walker arrowing away as well. The attack ship had survived the explosive effects of absorbing all that energy. She nudged herself onto a parabolic approach vector, away from the nuke's radiation sphere. It also looked like she'd inflicted some damage at least: the Walker ship didn't counter-manoeuvre. The ship had power, and she had to assume the pilot was still alive, but it had lost navigation.
Her heart raced as she pulled to within beam-weapon range. She fired with a cry of joy escaping her lips. The Void Walker vessel burst into a sphere of raging light as her weapons struck it.
She'd killed one of them. She thought they'd got Kane at Maes Far, but there was no escaping this moment of destruction.
She forced herself to set her jubilation aside, take a mental step back, consider the wider battlefield. The planet was receding rapidly behind her. Her nanosensor cloud had reported no new Concordance ships on her escape vector. She was still twenty minutes from the 75% jump safety boundary, the very earliest she would dare the translation.
As she assessed the tactical situation, she picked up a narrow-beam comms stream directed at her by one of the Concordance ships, no encryption on it. The ship had a name: the Storm Gatherer. It was tempting to ignore the attempt to communicate, refuse to engage with the enemy, but maybe she'd learn something to her advantage, or at least deceive them in some way. She passed the beam through her bug-neutralizing routines in case Concordance were attempting to infect the Dragon. The stream looked clean, they simply wanted to talk. She relayed the comms to the nearby wall rather than directly into her brain.
The face of a First Augur filled the wall. The metallic purple of her skin was unmistakable: Secundus Godel was here, too. A coincidence? Had the Augur simply been despatched to another trouble spot, or was she pursuing Selene? So far as she knew, Concordance didn't know she'd been on Migdala. She certainly hoped that was the case: if they'd discovered her incursion, it might mean Myrced's role had been uncovered, too. And that wasn't going to be good. Alarming visions of her lover being tortured, pulled to pieces, flashed through Selene's brain.
Focus. Selene blanked the tactical map she had on view around her to make sure Godel could learn nothing, then opened up a return comms beam so they could see and hear her. Artificial enhancements and all.
Godel looked amused at the sight of her. “I see Ondo has despatched his little whore to do his bidding rather than brave the journey himself.”
Selene kept her features neutral, considering carefully how to respond. The familiar rage boiled within her, but she forced it aside. She couldn't afford to give anything away. She was no longer controlled by her fury. The Augur's words were interesting: it appeared Godel hadn't known she was piloting the Dragon, which at least might mean the Augur wasn't pursuing her. Which in turn might mean Concordance didn't know about her
