‘Kandara . . .’ Jessika said wearily.
‘On Mother Mary’s life, I swear I’ll stay in the vacuum. But I have to know if the last Odd Quint body is there. And if the onemind is sending a battalion of quint down here after us, you won’t believe how fast I can run away.’
‘Be careful,’ Yuri said. ‘Please.’
She grinned at the concern in his voice. ‘Middle name.’
Morgan
Yirella couldn’t bring herself to go back into the Morgan’s main council room. The memory of everyone sitting there – talking, arguing, making impassioned suggestions for FinalStrike – was too vivid. So she was sitting in the deck thirty-three cafe yet again, with the Ainsley android on the other side of the table. None of her other android aspects was present. She wondered why that was. Some kind of subconscious insecurity? My own androids are too much of me to reassure me? I need outside validation?
Oh, stop it.
The tactical situation wasn’t all bad. The Morgan was still plagued by twinkles, but they were only minutes out from the gas giant now. Even decelerating, its tremendous velocity was ripping through the nebula plasma, leaving a long contrail of emptiness roiling in its wake. The rest of the armada formation was expanding, ships heading for rendezvous with individual arkships. And Ainsley was approaching the power rings at a speed that was chilling her skin. He wasn’t decelerating at all. The residual plumes of nine Resolution ships were still dissolving behind him, while the white ship was all but invisible at the centre of an impenetrable cluster of fluctuating twinkles brighter than the corona it was approaching.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘That vector you’re taking is dangerous.’
‘Making sure.’
‘Ainsley . . .’
‘The Olyix know what I’m going to do. They’re trying to suffocate me with time flows, kid – really trying. I’m at maximum power output deflecting them. And, face it, my maximum can punch a hole through Jupiter. If I fire a q-v missile, the flow variances in this twinkle clusterfuck would cripple it as soon as it gets outside my hull.’
Even now, her corpus personality – the most rational mind she’d thought possible – just didn’t want to process what she knew was inevitable. ‘So how are you going to kill the power rings?’
‘Up close and personal. Only way. Deliver the q-v myself.’
‘You can’t. We need you. There are thousands of arkships here. We have to save them.’
‘You got this. The technology the corpus retro-engineered out of my mentalic subsections works well on oneminds. Remember what I did to the Welcome ship at Vayan? You can fly those big mothers out of here without me easily enough. That’s what this is about, it’s why we’re here: to save those poor bastards who’ve been cocooned.’
‘I need you.’
‘And I need you to survive. To do that, I have to kill the enclave; you’re not going to get home otherwise. Resisting this time flow shit is too big a strain; it’s going to kick our asses eventually. Without it, you’ve got a decent chance.’
‘Oh, Saints, Ainsley. What about the shield? Can’t you use that? If it hits the inner ring at your current velocity, the inertia will destabilize its precession. It’ll start to drop into the chromosphere, and that’ll be catastrophic.’
‘The shield is backup, kid – because I cannot afford to fuck this up. When I hit the ring, the shield will be on board; it still has the same mass, remember. So either the q-v warhead will get it, or the shield mass will. Either way, we win.’
‘You won’t.’ But she knew it was no good; she could see Ainsley wasn’t altering course. There was no emotional appeal that would make him reconsider. He had reached a healthy fraction of lightspeed now and was starting to redshift.
‘Call it job satisfaction. That’s always been my motivation. You should have seen how we partied back in the day every time we pulled off a deal. Man, we could’ve shown the Romans a thing or two about decadence.’
‘Ainsley?’
‘Get the Salvation of Life home, Yirella. But before you do, find out where the Olyix god is hiding. Say hello to the bastard from me, okay?’
‘Oh, Saints.’
The tactical display showed her Ainsley approaching the innermost power ring. She watched in dread. Given his phenomenal velocity, the margin for error was minute. If Ainsley hadn’t got the course completely right there was no time now to correct. Saints, that means I want the ship to hit.
It did.
Ainsley got the timing perfect, triggering the q-v warheads nanoseconds before any impact obliterated them, but close enough to affect the ring fabric: an impact like a bullet hitting an ice sculpture. The ring shattered, flinging out a massive halo of destruction that swarmed out across the ecliptic. As it disintegrated, the three outermost rings of exotic matter flickered then vanished. At the same time, the iridescent sparks blockading the armada ships were abruptly extinguished.
Where Ainsley hit, the shield expanded – an unnatural black circle against the coronal glare. It began a slow tumble, flipping over and over as it flew onwards through the deranged pirouetting prominences before splashing into the chromosphere. Gargantuan spumes of dense plasma flared up around the disc, folding over to engulf the intruder, dragging it down into the unknown depths.
Then the radial blast of fragments hit the second ring at the two points their orbits crossed. One of the collision areas retained its integrity, while the other broke apart, leaving an unstable mega-loop spinning half a million kilometres above the corona. The first fluctuation took what seemed like an age to build, but then the ring did have a circumference of over eight million kilometres. In reality the deformation was astonishingly fast, and kept building. In less than five minutes the first fissures began to appear, swiftly followed by a chunk a quarter of a million kilometres long breaking off.
‘Trajectory?’ Yirella asked hurriedly as a second massive fragment joined the first, hurtling outwards. Vectors appeared
