The Lost World, page 14
This would not stand.
Azel would bend their reptilian minds once more to the great project. That would have to wait, however, as there was something else, something more important he needed to do right now.
Azel used his electronic impulses to connect with several old machines. Through them, he saw the smashed aquarium tank and the broken skeleton. That must mean the piece of filthy flesh, Riker, had rejected the inducement of the clone gift.
At that moment, Azel reconnected with the main servitor machine, the one that had warred against the Saurians all this time. A flood of data flowed into the great crystal intelligence. Azel understood that the one named Riker had a shuttle and would attempt to reconnect with the scout ship in orbit.
Then Azel understood it all—the nefarious plot. Surely the enslaved ones, the Saurians, would attempt to destroy the portal to underspace, the road back to the normal universe. If that were to happen—
Once more, Azel felt great dread. He yearned to return to the regular universe and destroy the Yon Soths. In doing that, he would annihilate all the contaminated life there.
Thus, Azel now needed his inner lattices to be reconnected. But first—
I must focus. Azel told himself. I must focus my energies. Even now, the Saurians readied the piece of flesh, Riker, to go to his shuttle.
I will use plans within plans, Azel said.
As the energy flow increased within him, Azel activated a different energizer. This, he would use to stop Riker. But just in case that act failed—
There was a crystalline sound, like shattering glass, from the great three-story crystal named Azel. It was Shardkin laughter.
The shattered glass sounds increased. Then Azel bent his energies and his crystalline will to swat a flea that could change everything if he did nothing about it.
-35-
In orbital space aboard the Kit Carson, Valerie was sound asleep, but she dreamed. She dreamed of someone chasing her. She did not see who did this. The chase happened in darkness, but Valerie ran regardless, terrified that she might accidentally fall into a pit. She could feel a malevolent intelligence seeking to ensnare her mind, and that frightened her.
All of a sudden, the monster started to shriek. What could that mean? It shrieked more. Was it almost upon her?
With a shake of her head, Valerie awoke and became aware that she lay on her cot in her cabin and that a klaxon was blaring. She sat up, wiped sleep from her eyes, and looked at a clock.
Ah, this was a sensor alert, not a shipwide alarm.
Valerie arose, threw on her uniform jacket, and pulled on pants and shoes, exited her cabin, and hurried to the bridge. There, she relieved the others, who looked exhausted and very glad to see her. Valerie would have asked for a report—they started to give it. Their exhaustion seemed extreme, however, and their wits at the end.
“Did you log it?” Valerie asked.
Ensign Yu nodded while blinking, as if having trouble keeping his eyes open.
“I’ll have the AI explain it,” Valerie said. “I want you to go to bed immediately.”
Yu nodded, turning, actually stumbling for the exit.
Lieutenant Briggs followed Yu.
That was odd, Valerie realized. Did this place wear out the crew faster than ordinary? Yu and Briggs were new this mission, having never been into the Beyond before. Or had she summoned them at the end of their last shift, and had they been up for too many hours?
Valerie rubbed her forehead. She should feel more alert than she did. Why had she dismissed them so quickly? That was odd. Maybe this place was distressing her more than she realized. The small bridge did feel cramped when there were too many people on it, and she expected Keith to be here at any minute. But was that a good reason to relieve the others before they had explained the situation properly?
“I don’t think so,” Valerie murmured.
Then Keith burst onto the bridge, his hair disheveled.
“What’s wrong?” Keith asked. “Why was the alarm blaring?”
“I don’t know yet,” Valerie said.
“What? Why don’t you know? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know that,” Valerie said.
Keith looked at her strangely.
She sat down at the sensor board and asked the AI what the matter was. She soon discovered that one of the crystalline structures, the huge spires near where Riker had landed, had activated and sent out pulses of all sorts.
“That’s not good,” Keith said.
Valerie jerked around, realizing he’d been watching over her shoulder.
He stepped back.
“You’re right,” Valerie said, “this could be critical. The spires were inert until now.”
“Has it centered on us?” Keith asked.
Valerie rechecked the panel. “It has sent a few tentative pulses in our direction. So it must know of our existence.”
“What about Riker?” Keith asked. “Do you think he has anything to do with this? It was the spire nearest his shuttle that had activated.”
Valerie nodded. “If it were Captain Maddox down there, I’d say he had awakened something and made it angry. Riker was Maddox’s sidekick… is his sidekick. Would he do something similar then?”
“Are you feeling okay?” Keith asked.
Valerie turned to him. “Not one hundred percent. How about you?”
“I feel sluggish.”
Valerie turned back to the sensor and then swiveled to Keith again. “This must be confirmation Riker is doing something. Is that something a screw-up or a Captain Maddox-like turnaround? I wish the captain were here.”
“I know,” Keith said. “But he isn’t so we have to do this on our own steam. We can do this.”
“We’re as good as Maddox, is that what you’re saying?” Valerie asked.
“Forget about Maddox. It’s you and me. Let’s do this. Let’s figure it out. We’ve already done a lot.”
“Right, Valerie said. She turned back to the panel and concentrated as she aimed a sensor at the spire in question. That spire appeared to have electronically linked with several others nearby. They also energized more. But this didn’t seem to be—
A spear of concentrated light fired from one of the spires. The beam thrust into orbital space at them.
As Valerie observed, the scout ship shifted under her so the beamed flashed past the scout, missing them. She heard a faint buzz, turned and saw Keith at the helm.
The feeling of disorientation subsided, as if she’d taken a pill to clear her mind. “What did you do?”
“Moved us,” Keith said, hunched over the controls. “I also activated our shield, weak as it is, and then activated the cloak. They know we’re here, but maybe the cloak will help hide us from them. My mind also feels sharper with the shield up. I’m thinking the spire first beamed some kind of mental fog energy at us.”
“Yes,” Valerie said. “That must be it.” That would also explain Yu and Briggs earlier, and why she had simply dismissed them.
Valerie swiveled back to the sensors. Two other spires fired spears of energy into orbital space. Each beam struck a slightly different location, although uncomfortably near the scout.
“It’s using a patterned attack against us,” Valerie said, “as if working off a grid. That means our enemy knows we cloaked and is trying to hit us anyway. Can you outmaneuver the spires?”
“I’m already working on it,” Keith said.
The ace lieutenant nudged the scout in one direction and then another. All the while, the Kit Carson rose out of low planetary orbit. In time, that should put the scout out of range of the enemy spires. The beams seemed to have a limited scope.
“I can’t outfox the beams forever,” Keith said. “They’re going to get lucky one of these times. We should ask ourselves why whoever is doing this is doing this.”
Valerie nodded. “It has to be due to something that Riker did.”
“Are you sure?”
“How could I be? However, logic highly suggests it. Before this, the spires were inert. After Riker went down, things are coming online again. He must have done something down there, got himself into trouble, most likely. And we have no way to help him, to reach him from up here.”
“I wouldn’t say we have no way to help,” Keith said, “as I have a thought.”
“Spit it out, mister,” Valerie said.
“We have one small antimatter missile for emergencies just like this. Let’s send it down and do a grand EMP over everything.”
“That’s a great idea,” Valerie said sarcastically. “And how does Riker lift off in his dead shuttle?”
“Well, he doesn’t,” Keith said, frowning. “I hadn’t thought it through that far yet.”
“No,” Valerie said, snapping her fingers and pointing at Keith. “But I think the antimatter missile… let’s take out one of the spires.”
“The first one?” Keith asked.
“No, the radius of the antimatter blast from it would surely kill Riker or at the very least destroy the shuttle.” Valerie did some quick calculations on the panel. “Ah, we hit…” She put it on the main screen and pointed. “That spire.”
“Got it,” Keith said. “The only problem is the beams. The spires can beam the antimatter missile as it comes down. Those strike me as good planetary defense systems.”
“Right,” Valerie said, thinking hard. “Ah. Do you have a drone linkage to the missile?”
“I can make one,” Keith said. “But how does that help us?”
“Does the missile have a fold mechanism?”
“As a matter of fact, this one does,” Keith said.
Valerie straightened from her console. “Mr. best damn pilot in the fleet, you will link with the missile. Then you’re going to guide it down right onto that spire.”
“Will that help us against the other spires?” Keith asked.
“I have no idea. But let’s fight back instead of just acting like a punching bag.”
“Yeah,” Keith said. “That’s an excellent idea.” He got up.
“Where are you going?”
“To check the missile and make sure everything is set.”
“And who’s going to move the scout about as you do that?”
Keith nodded. “You go and do it, Valerie, if you know what needs doing?”
Valerie stared at him.
“Sorry, Commander, I’m sure you know.”
“Let’s not make an issue of it. I’ll get it done. You keep us alive until then.”
“Aye, aye, mate,” Keith said.
Valerie exited the bridge on the run.
Keith continued to outmaneuver the crystalline-fired beams in order to keep the cloaked scout ship intact.
-36-
Having completed her task with the missile, Valerie stood on the bridge of the Kit Carson, her eyes fixed on the sensor display. The scout ship maneuvered subtly around the planet, its cloaking field helping against the searching, stabbing beams.
The towering crystalline spires that dotted the planet’s surface had been inert when they’d arrived, as she’d already noted. Now, three of them posed an immediate threat to the Kit Carson. Clearly, the shuttle couldn’t leave the surface while the spires were operational. That was another reason for hitting back.
“It’s time to launch,” Valerie said.
Keith established a link with the missile’s guidance systems. “Here we go,” he said, having donned manipulation gloves and virtual reality (VR) goggles.
The antimatter missile detached from the bottom of the Kit Carson. Its thrusters fired. As the missile cleared the scout’s cloaking field, the energy beams from the planetary spires began to shift, moving toward it.
Keith saw everything through the goggles.
The missile built up velocity quickly. Then, Keith began to twitch his fingers, the gloves maneuvering it. The missile corkscrewed and juked, pulling high-G turns that would have liquefied any human pilot. The beams lashed out at new headings, a fraction of a second behind the missile’s newest positions.
Even though this was deadly serious, Keith laughed with delight. Maybe he still was the best damn pilot in Star Watch. He rolled his shoulders, getting into this. The crystal spires were too slow for the likes of him.
“The spires are doing something strange,” Valerie said.
“They are?” Keith asked. “Like what?”
“The sensors indicate it’s some kind of plasma discharge. How does our enemy think that’s better? Plasma will be much slower than beams.”
“Maybe the plasma is an area-effect weapon,” Keith said. “My margins for errors have likely just gotten less.”
As he spoke, globules of superheated matter erupted from the crystal spires, arcing toward the missile’s projected flight path.
“No you don’t,” Keith said, his gloved fingers twitching crazily. The missile maneuvered into a tight spiral, threading the needle between two converging plasma bolts. How much area did the plasma discharges cover? If they covered too much, it wouldn’t matter what he did.
Keith laughed with glee. The plasma clot erupted like a bomb, flashing killing energy, but the missile still responded to his control, meaning the plasma had missed.
“Do better, jerk wads!” Keith shouted. “I’m your worst nightmare.”
Valerie rolled her eyes even as she was glued to the sensor screen. Despite Keith’s boasting, she was grinning wide. They might not have Maddox, but she did have Keith Maker the Ace.
“Oh, crap,” Keith said. “I should have thought of that.”
“What?” Valerie said.
“This is getting bumpy.”
As the missile streaked through the golden atmosphere, the air around it began to ionize, creating a plasma sheath that threatened to disrupt its guidance systems. The missile shook violently and it jittered off course.
“Let’s try this,” Keith said, compensating, using the building heat to create additional lift. “Oh yeah,” he said, executing a series of split-S maneuvers.
The spires no longer fired plasma bolts, but went back to the beams again. These flailed in empty space, the missile either ahead or behind them, often by less than a meter.
“You losers have just lost the battle,” Keith gloated.
The ace activated the missile’s fold mechanism. For a second, nothing happened.
“Is the plasma sheath too strong?” Keith asked. “I should have figured this would happen.”
A beam speared straight at the missile, hit, and the then the missile vanished from its current position.
“Did the beam destroy the missile?” Valerie shouted. “I’m not seeing any debris.”
“Hold your horses, girl. We’ll know in a second. Yes!”
The missile reappeared less than a kilometer from the easternmost spire, its antimatter warhead was primed and ready.
Under the goggles, Keith eyes widened with delight.
The crystal spire loomed before the missile, a colossal shard of translucent material, pulsing with internal light. Around it, a lush jungle of emerald vegetation stretched as far as the eye could see, alien flora swaying in a breeze that seemed to carry whispers of ancient secrets.
Keith clenched his manipulation gloves into fists. That sent the final command to the missile in its terminal dive. Inside the warhead, the magnetic containment field began to destabilize. The instant before impact, matter and antimatter collided in a harsh release of energy.
For a split second, it seemed as if time froze. Then, with a flash, the antimatter annihilated its matter counterpart. A sphere of energy expanded outward at relativistic speeds, the initial gamma ray burst instantly vaporizing everything within a hundred-meter radius.
The crystal spire, for all its alien grandeur, stood no chance against the fundamental forces of the universe unleashed upon it. The spire shattered, its fragments accelerating to hypersonic velocities as the expanding fireball blew them outward. The emerald jungle around it was also obliterated, trees and vegetation reduced to their constituent atoms in the blink of an eye.
As the initial flash faded, a mushroom cloud of superheated plasma began to rise, carrying with it the pulverized remains of the spire and surrounding landscape. The shockwave raced outward, flattening everything in its path for kilometers in every direction. What had once been a vibrant alien ecosystem was now a charred wasteland, the ground fused into glass.
On the Kit Carson’s bridge, Valerie and Keith watched, both of them grinning widely.
“There you go,” Keith said in a gloating voice. “The crystal target is destroyed as ordered and promised.”
Valerie nodded, with her smile slipping. “Did we neutralize a threat or just piss it off even more?”
“The other two spires are no longer emitting beams, no longer trying to destroy us,” Keith said. “I’d say we taught our adversary quite a harsh lesson.”
Valerie looked at him. “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I am,” Keith said.
Valerie sighed.
“What?” asked Keith.
“Now we wait to see if Riker will ever show up,” Valerie said.
“Oh, yeah,” Keith said. “There is that, huh? Well, we gave him a window of opportunity. Now, the old boy has to get moving and use it.”
-37-
The antimatter explosion that shattered the easternmost crystal spire sent a cascade of unforeseen consequences rippling across the alien landscape. As the blinding flash faded, an electromagnetic pulse of unprecedented magnitude surged outward, carrying with it a torrent of corrupted energy. This wave of destruction slammed into the two remaining operational spires, causing an abrupt shutdown in their energy.
But the chaos didn’t end there. A backwash of energy rebounded from the deactivated spires. This energy crashed back into Azel, the Shardkin.
For a being that had never known physical pain, the sensation was akin to a punch to the gut. The shock to Azel’s system caused a momentary loss of coherence. As the disorientation faded, replaced by a cold, calculated fury, Azel realized the nature of the attack.
The scout ship possessed a sting of particular power. Combined with the cloaking and amazing flight patterns of the missile itself—
Azel would bend their reptilian minds once more to the great project. That would have to wait, however, as there was something else, something more important he needed to do right now.
Azel used his electronic impulses to connect with several old machines. Through them, he saw the smashed aquarium tank and the broken skeleton. That must mean the piece of filthy flesh, Riker, had rejected the inducement of the clone gift.
At that moment, Azel reconnected with the main servitor machine, the one that had warred against the Saurians all this time. A flood of data flowed into the great crystal intelligence. Azel understood that the one named Riker had a shuttle and would attempt to reconnect with the scout ship in orbit.
Then Azel understood it all—the nefarious plot. Surely the enslaved ones, the Saurians, would attempt to destroy the portal to underspace, the road back to the normal universe. If that were to happen—
Once more, Azel felt great dread. He yearned to return to the regular universe and destroy the Yon Soths. In doing that, he would annihilate all the contaminated life there.
Thus, Azel now needed his inner lattices to be reconnected. But first—
I must focus. Azel told himself. I must focus my energies. Even now, the Saurians readied the piece of flesh, Riker, to go to his shuttle.
I will use plans within plans, Azel said.
As the energy flow increased within him, Azel activated a different energizer. This, he would use to stop Riker. But just in case that act failed—
There was a crystalline sound, like shattering glass, from the great three-story crystal named Azel. It was Shardkin laughter.
The shattered glass sounds increased. Then Azel bent his energies and his crystalline will to swat a flea that could change everything if he did nothing about it.
-35-
In orbital space aboard the Kit Carson, Valerie was sound asleep, but she dreamed. She dreamed of someone chasing her. She did not see who did this. The chase happened in darkness, but Valerie ran regardless, terrified that she might accidentally fall into a pit. She could feel a malevolent intelligence seeking to ensnare her mind, and that frightened her.
All of a sudden, the monster started to shriek. What could that mean? It shrieked more. Was it almost upon her?
With a shake of her head, Valerie awoke and became aware that she lay on her cot in her cabin and that a klaxon was blaring. She sat up, wiped sleep from her eyes, and looked at a clock.
Ah, this was a sensor alert, not a shipwide alarm.
Valerie arose, threw on her uniform jacket, and pulled on pants and shoes, exited her cabin, and hurried to the bridge. There, she relieved the others, who looked exhausted and very glad to see her. Valerie would have asked for a report—they started to give it. Their exhaustion seemed extreme, however, and their wits at the end.
“Did you log it?” Valerie asked.
Ensign Yu nodded while blinking, as if having trouble keeping his eyes open.
“I’ll have the AI explain it,” Valerie said. “I want you to go to bed immediately.”
Yu nodded, turning, actually stumbling for the exit.
Lieutenant Briggs followed Yu.
That was odd, Valerie realized. Did this place wear out the crew faster than ordinary? Yu and Briggs were new this mission, having never been into the Beyond before. Or had she summoned them at the end of their last shift, and had they been up for too many hours?
Valerie rubbed her forehead. She should feel more alert than she did. Why had she dismissed them so quickly? That was odd. Maybe this place was distressing her more than she realized. The small bridge did feel cramped when there were too many people on it, and she expected Keith to be here at any minute. But was that a good reason to relieve the others before they had explained the situation properly?
“I don’t think so,” Valerie murmured.
Then Keith burst onto the bridge, his hair disheveled.
“What’s wrong?” Keith asked. “Why was the alarm blaring?”
“I don’t know yet,” Valerie said.
“What? Why don’t you know? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know that,” Valerie said.
Keith looked at her strangely.
She sat down at the sensor board and asked the AI what the matter was. She soon discovered that one of the crystalline structures, the huge spires near where Riker had landed, had activated and sent out pulses of all sorts.
“That’s not good,” Keith said.
Valerie jerked around, realizing he’d been watching over her shoulder.
He stepped back.
“You’re right,” Valerie said, “this could be critical. The spires were inert until now.”
“Has it centered on us?” Keith asked.
Valerie rechecked the panel. “It has sent a few tentative pulses in our direction. So it must know of our existence.”
“What about Riker?” Keith asked. “Do you think he has anything to do with this? It was the spire nearest his shuttle that had activated.”
Valerie nodded. “If it were Captain Maddox down there, I’d say he had awakened something and made it angry. Riker was Maddox’s sidekick… is his sidekick. Would he do something similar then?”
“Are you feeling okay?” Keith asked.
Valerie turned to him. “Not one hundred percent. How about you?”
“I feel sluggish.”
Valerie turned back to the sensor and then swiveled to Keith again. “This must be confirmation Riker is doing something. Is that something a screw-up or a Captain Maddox-like turnaround? I wish the captain were here.”
“I know,” Keith said. “But he isn’t so we have to do this on our own steam. We can do this.”
“We’re as good as Maddox, is that what you’re saying?” Valerie asked.
“Forget about Maddox. It’s you and me. Let’s do this. Let’s figure it out. We’ve already done a lot.”
“Right, Valerie said. She turned back to the panel and concentrated as she aimed a sensor at the spire in question. That spire appeared to have electronically linked with several others nearby. They also energized more. But this didn’t seem to be—
A spear of concentrated light fired from one of the spires. The beam thrust into orbital space at them.
As Valerie observed, the scout ship shifted under her so the beamed flashed past the scout, missing them. She heard a faint buzz, turned and saw Keith at the helm.
The feeling of disorientation subsided, as if she’d taken a pill to clear her mind. “What did you do?”
“Moved us,” Keith said, hunched over the controls. “I also activated our shield, weak as it is, and then activated the cloak. They know we’re here, but maybe the cloak will help hide us from them. My mind also feels sharper with the shield up. I’m thinking the spire first beamed some kind of mental fog energy at us.”
“Yes,” Valerie said. “That must be it.” That would also explain Yu and Briggs earlier, and why she had simply dismissed them.
Valerie swiveled back to the sensors. Two other spires fired spears of energy into orbital space. Each beam struck a slightly different location, although uncomfortably near the scout.
“It’s using a patterned attack against us,” Valerie said, “as if working off a grid. That means our enemy knows we cloaked and is trying to hit us anyway. Can you outmaneuver the spires?”
“I’m already working on it,” Keith said.
The ace lieutenant nudged the scout in one direction and then another. All the while, the Kit Carson rose out of low planetary orbit. In time, that should put the scout out of range of the enemy spires. The beams seemed to have a limited scope.
“I can’t outfox the beams forever,” Keith said. “They’re going to get lucky one of these times. We should ask ourselves why whoever is doing this is doing this.”
Valerie nodded. “It has to be due to something that Riker did.”
“Are you sure?”
“How could I be? However, logic highly suggests it. Before this, the spires were inert. After Riker went down, things are coming online again. He must have done something down there, got himself into trouble, most likely. And we have no way to help him, to reach him from up here.”
“I wouldn’t say we have no way to help,” Keith said, “as I have a thought.”
“Spit it out, mister,” Valerie said.
“We have one small antimatter missile for emergencies just like this. Let’s send it down and do a grand EMP over everything.”
“That’s a great idea,” Valerie said sarcastically. “And how does Riker lift off in his dead shuttle?”
“Well, he doesn’t,” Keith said, frowning. “I hadn’t thought it through that far yet.”
“No,” Valerie said, snapping her fingers and pointing at Keith. “But I think the antimatter missile… let’s take out one of the spires.”
“The first one?” Keith asked.
“No, the radius of the antimatter blast from it would surely kill Riker or at the very least destroy the shuttle.” Valerie did some quick calculations on the panel. “Ah, we hit…” She put it on the main screen and pointed. “That spire.”
“Got it,” Keith said. “The only problem is the beams. The spires can beam the antimatter missile as it comes down. Those strike me as good planetary defense systems.”
“Right,” Valerie said, thinking hard. “Ah. Do you have a drone linkage to the missile?”
“I can make one,” Keith said. “But how does that help us?”
“Does the missile have a fold mechanism?”
“As a matter of fact, this one does,” Keith said.
Valerie straightened from her console. “Mr. best damn pilot in the fleet, you will link with the missile. Then you’re going to guide it down right onto that spire.”
“Will that help us against the other spires?” Keith asked.
“I have no idea. But let’s fight back instead of just acting like a punching bag.”
“Yeah,” Keith said. “That’s an excellent idea.” He got up.
“Where are you going?”
“To check the missile and make sure everything is set.”
“And who’s going to move the scout about as you do that?”
Keith nodded. “You go and do it, Valerie, if you know what needs doing?”
Valerie stared at him.
“Sorry, Commander, I’m sure you know.”
“Let’s not make an issue of it. I’ll get it done. You keep us alive until then.”
“Aye, aye, mate,” Keith said.
Valerie exited the bridge on the run.
Keith continued to outmaneuver the crystalline-fired beams in order to keep the cloaked scout ship intact.
-36-
Having completed her task with the missile, Valerie stood on the bridge of the Kit Carson, her eyes fixed on the sensor display. The scout ship maneuvered subtly around the planet, its cloaking field helping against the searching, stabbing beams.
The towering crystalline spires that dotted the planet’s surface had been inert when they’d arrived, as she’d already noted. Now, three of them posed an immediate threat to the Kit Carson. Clearly, the shuttle couldn’t leave the surface while the spires were operational. That was another reason for hitting back.
“It’s time to launch,” Valerie said.
Keith established a link with the missile’s guidance systems. “Here we go,” he said, having donned manipulation gloves and virtual reality (VR) goggles.
The antimatter missile detached from the bottom of the Kit Carson. Its thrusters fired. As the missile cleared the scout’s cloaking field, the energy beams from the planetary spires began to shift, moving toward it.
Keith saw everything through the goggles.
The missile built up velocity quickly. Then, Keith began to twitch his fingers, the gloves maneuvering it. The missile corkscrewed and juked, pulling high-G turns that would have liquefied any human pilot. The beams lashed out at new headings, a fraction of a second behind the missile’s newest positions.
Even though this was deadly serious, Keith laughed with delight. Maybe he still was the best damn pilot in Star Watch. He rolled his shoulders, getting into this. The crystal spires were too slow for the likes of him.
“The spires are doing something strange,” Valerie said.
“They are?” Keith asked. “Like what?”
“The sensors indicate it’s some kind of plasma discharge. How does our enemy think that’s better? Plasma will be much slower than beams.”
“Maybe the plasma is an area-effect weapon,” Keith said. “My margins for errors have likely just gotten less.”
As he spoke, globules of superheated matter erupted from the crystal spires, arcing toward the missile’s projected flight path.
“No you don’t,” Keith said, his gloved fingers twitching crazily. The missile maneuvered into a tight spiral, threading the needle between two converging plasma bolts. How much area did the plasma discharges cover? If they covered too much, it wouldn’t matter what he did.
Keith laughed with glee. The plasma clot erupted like a bomb, flashing killing energy, but the missile still responded to his control, meaning the plasma had missed.
“Do better, jerk wads!” Keith shouted. “I’m your worst nightmare.”
Valerie rolled her eyes even as she was glued to the sensor screen. Despite Keith’s boasting, she was grinning wide. They might not have Maddox, but she did have Keith Maker the Ace.
“Oh, crap,” Keith said. “I should have thought of that.”
“What?” Valerie said.
“This is getting bumpy.”
As the missile streaked through the golden atmosphere, the air around it began to ionize, creating a plasma sheath that threatened to disrupt its guidance systems. The missile shook violently and it jittered off course.
“Let’s try this,” Keith said, compensating, using the building heat to create additional lift. “Oh yeah,” he said, executing a series of split-S maneuvers.
The spires no longer fired plasma bolts, but went back to the beams again. These flailed in empty space, the missile either ahead or behind them, often by less than a meter.
“You losers have just lost the battle,” Keith gloated.
The ace activated the missile’s fold mechanism. For a second, nothing happened.
“Is the plasma sheath too strong?” Keith asked. “I should have figured this would happen.”
A beam speared straight at the missile, hit, and the then the missile vanished from its current position.
“Did the beam destroy the missile?” Valerie shouted. “I’m not seeing any debris.”
“Hold your horses, girl. We’ll know in a second. Yes!”
The missile reappeared less than a kilometer from the easternmost spire, its antimatter warhead was primed and ready.
Under the goggles, Keith eyes widened with delight.
The crystal spire loomed before the missile, a colossal shard of translucent material, pulsing with internal light. Around it, a lush jungle of emerald vegetation stretched as far as the eye could see, alien flora swaying in a breeze that seemed to carry whispers of ancient secrets.
Keith clenched his manipulation gloves into fists. That sent the final command to the missile in its terminal dive. Inside the warhead, the magnetic containment field began to destabilize. The instant before impact, matter and antimatter collided in a harsh release of energy.
For a split second, it seemed as if time froze. Then, with a flash, the antimatter annihilated its matter counterpart. A sphere of energy expanded outward at relativistic speeds, the initial gamma ray burst instantly vaporizing everything within a hundred-meter radius.
The crystal spire, for all its alien grandeur, stood no chance against the fundamental forces of the universe unleashed upon it. The spire shattered, its fragments accelerating to hypersonic velocities as the expanding fireball blew them outward. The emerald jungle around it was also obliterated, trees and vegetation reduced to their constituent atoms in the blink of an eye.
As the initial flash faded, a mushroom cloud of superheated plasma began to rise, carrying with it the pulverized remains of the spire and surrounding landscape. The shockwave raced outward, flattening everything in its path for kilometers in every direction. What had once been a vibrant alien ecosystem was now a charred wasteland, the ground fused into glass.
On the Kit Carson’s bridge, Valerie and Keith watched, both of them grinning widely.
“There you go,” Keith said in a gloating voice. “The crystal target is destroyed as ordered and promised.”
Valerie nodded, with her smile slipping. “Did we neutralize a threat or just piss it off even more?”
“The other two spires are no longer emitting beams, no longer trying to destroy us,” Keith said. “I’d say we taught our adversary quite a harsh lesson.”
Valerie looked at him. “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I am,” Keith said.
Valerie sighed.
“What?” asked Keith.
“Now we wait to see if Riker will ever show up,” Valerie said.
“Oh, yeah,” Keith said. “There is that, huh? Well, we gave him a window of opportunity. Now, the old boy has to get moving and use it.”
-37-
The antimatter explosion that shattered the easternmost crystal spire sent a cascade of unforeseen consequences rippling across the alien landscape. As the blinding flash faded, an electromagnetic pulse of unprecedented magnitude surged outward, carrying with it a torrent of corrupted energy. This wave of destruction slammed into the two remaining operational spires, causing an abrupt shutdown in their energy.
But the chaos didn’t end there. A backwash of energy rebounded from the deactivated spires. This energy crashed back into Azel, the Shardkin.
For a being that had never known physical pain, the sensation was akin to a punch to the gut. The shock to Azel’s system caused a momentary loss of coherence. As the disorientation faded, replaced by a cold, calculated fury, Azel realized the nature of the attack.
The scout ship possessed a sting of particular power. Combined with the cloaking and amazing flight patterns of the missile itself—
