‘We followed him out,’ Anderson told the man Thorn. The knight then turned to Arden and said, ‘That case down by your feet, could you open it?’
The woman did as instructed, passing up the sections of bonded amanis-fibre pole to Anderson. The knight, it would seem, was truly mad. The droon would turn him into smoking slurry before he even got a chance to get close.
Thorn said, ‘That weapon, surely you can’t mean to use it against chummy back there?’ He stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Or is it for Mr Crane here?’ At Anderson’s puzzled expression, Thorn added, ‘The big brass bastard is called Mr Crane.’
‘What’s the other thing, then?’ asked Anderson.
‘That’s a vulture,’ Thorn replied. ‘Not one of this planet’s usual life forms, I take it?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ replied Anderson, concentrating on the task in hand.
Why this Mr Crane was squatting beside what looked like a big block of glass, playing some game with a vulture, Tergal had no idea. But looking around at the level arena the two were playing in made him realize why Anderson had chosen this spot.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just kept going?’ Tergal asked. ‘Maybe the brass man…’
Anderson frowned at him. ‘I fight my own battles.’ The knight turned once again to Arden. ‘Would the power from my fence batteries operate your holocapture device?’
‘It would,’ Arden replied, ‘but they would be drained very quickly. How long would you want it to operate for?’
‘Long enough to drain our pursuer.’
‘We could just keep running,’ Tergal suggested again.
Thorn observed, ‘Feeding has distended its body and revealed gaps in its carapace. Using your carbine I could probably cause it some real damage.’
Arden said, ‘That seems a shame, since they are rare, but it won’t stop coming after us, and perhaps it would be better to face it in daylight. I can run the holocaptures for long enough.’
Tergal made no more suggestions. No one seemed to be listening to him. Then abruptly Anderson turned to him. ‘You can leave us, if that’s what you want.’
Tergal took a ragged breath. ‘I might be frightened, but I’m not stupid.’
As he laboured up from hydrogen seas, through storms and chemical maelstroms and acidic hurricanes that would have flayed a human in an eyeblink, Jack realized he was not going to make it. The King of Hearts was bearing down on him just as fast as it could. It had probably used less than ten per cent of its munitions and was also probably very pissed off- though for an attack ship AI that was a normal state of mind. Another scoop run to generate a beam sufficient to destroy the opposing ship was out of the question: the tidal forces exerted by the gas giant would rip apart Jack’s severely damaged structure before he managed a sufficient lase of the surrounding gas to strike at the King of Hearts. Perhaps, Jack idly pondered, now was the time to just turn everything off and let the planet take him. Surely that was preferable to giving King the satisfaction of frying him with masers?
‘Oh no you damned well don’t,’ snapped Aphran. ‘There’s two of us living in here.’
‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Jack said.
‘My first one would be that you don’t give up,’ she offered.
With almost a desultory shrug, Jack began to inventory his weapons. He was still loaded for bear, but that was not the problem: his structure would not be able to bear much more of a load. A near miss with an imploder, or any other CTD for that matter, and he knew he would start to come apart like wet tissue paper. Nevertheless…
‘Oh, I wasn’t really going to give up. That was just an idle speculation. I do have a plan ready.’
‘And what is it?’
‘Time and escape velocity. I just need to give King something to think about.’
An hour later a pillar of flame ignited beside the Jack Ketch as the King of Hearts probed the gas giant’s atmosphere with a megajoule coloured laser, probably only to illuminate the whole area so as to precisely locate its prey.
‘Ah, there you are, Jack,’ King sent.
Jack immediately changed course, but without losing height. This time a tower of incandescence exploded into existence, and the shock wave slapped against the Jack Ketch. Turning his carousels, Jack began selecting and firing missile after missile. Any other weapons were presently out of the question, as they required power from Jack’s own systems to fire, whereas he could launch the missiles under their own power (though in different circumstances he would have launched many of them by rail gun). The swarm rose out of the gas clouds, black in silhouette and poised on achingly bright white fusion flames: strange birds in this bizarre sky.
But before they even made it out into open space masers and lasers began picking them off. Some dodged, putting cloud masses between themselves and their eventual target, but in the end they must come out and make themselves more vulnerable. Shooting fish in a barrel was the expression Jack dredged from his memory banks, feeling a bit like a whale. He sent the signal then for the remaining missiles to detonate long before they reached the King of Hearts.
‘Is this part of the plan?’ Aphran asked.
‘Have you no faith?’ Jack countered.
‘I did until I died.’
Jack let that one lie.
Above him, fires burned in the gas giant’s atmosphere, some of them nuclear and with the potential never to extinguish. These concealed Jack from King. Still climbing, Jack tracked the pattern of maser and laser strikes coming through this protective umbrella. Internally, throughout his ascent, he had reattached the ducts from his scoops to his fuel tanks and had been passively taking on hydrogen. Reaching an apex as the umbrella finally began to disperse, he slanted his course tangential to the gas giant, then injected the fuel into the aligned dropshaft he had used as a particle cannon. This time he had no mind to aim the photonic matter at any enemy, just to benefit from the thrust. Under huge acceleration, he shot out from underneath the umbrella, angled slightly down but building up towards escape velocity. He was minutes away from achieving that velocity when he detected small scanning drones in the surrounding area.
‘You know,’ sent King, ‘it’s frustrating possessing an Oedipus complex when you don’t have a mother. Probably as frustrating as you are going to find this.’
The maser struck the connecting stanchion to Jack’s right-hand weapons nacelle, cut accurately back, and the nacelle tumbled away, trailing fire. The second strike cut away the other nacelle. Jack supposed his offspring was toying with him, and now knew the difference between himself and King. He himself would not have delayed. Whether King was holding back out of a reluctance to kill or some emulation of cruelty, that was moot. Jack cared not one whit—there was nothing usable in the nacelles now anyway.
The next strike King calculated quite finely and Jack reckoned it was using the drones it had earlier dropped throughout the area for accurate triangulation—and as eyes through which to gloat. The maser cut right through Jack’s fusion chambers, and the ensuing explosion peeled open his rear section like a banana. He tumbled through cloud surrounded by his own wreckage. There would be no escape now—he just did not have the systems left to repair such damage in time. Jack awaited the final killing strike and sensed, in that moment, the USER going offline. It was no help to him, however—his U-space engines having been damaged and cannibalized. That King did not finally finish him off, he put down to whatever else was going on out there, or how irrelevant he had become.
‘Time we left,’ said Aphran, as they fell towards crushing oblivion.
Jack laughed, surprised because his reaction was no emulation intended for the comfort of humans but arose from deep inside him. Then his laughter cut off as he felt Aphran’s machinations.