Then, with a soft command, he powered up his control systems. Much of the display was standard, concerned with handling the ship in its normal modes under the FTL drive or the sublight drives, after his years of training as familiar to Pirius as his own skin. Most of these displays were Virtual: only life-support controls were hardwired, so they wouldn’t pop out of existence no matter what hit the ship. But now Nilis’s additions booted up. Designed in haste and patched in hurriedly, they overlapped each other as they competed for space, crumbling into flaring, angry-looking crimson pixels.
Torec was grumbling about this. “Lethe,” she said. “It’s just as it was back in Sol system. You’d think they would have ironed this out by now.”
Commander Darc said, “We’re all under pressure, Engineer.”
Despite Torec’s complaints, one by one, the ship’s systems came up. When most of the flags shone green with “go,” Pirius snapped, “Engineer?”
“It’s as good as it’s going to get,” Torec said gloomily.
“Then let’s get on with it.”
Pirius grasped a joystick and pulled it back steadily. He could feel the ship around him coming to life: the thrumming of the GUT-energy power plant, the subtle surges of the sublight drive. But as the ship lifted off the dirt, he could feel an unwelcome wallowing as the ship labored to cope with its additional mass. The inertial shielding seemed to be hiccupping too. He wasn’t surprised when an array of indicators turned red.
As they hovered over the dirt, his crew labored to put things right. “The problem’s the power plant,” Torec called. “The weapons systems have been patched into it. There’s enough juice to go around, in theory; the problem is balancing the demands. Greenship power plants aren’t used to being treated like this.”
“Work on it, Engineer,” Pirius said. “That’s what these trial flights are about, to flush out the glitches and fix them.”
“Well spoken, Squadron Leader,” Darc said dryly. “But you might want to look at your handling. That extra mass has screwed our moments of inertia.”
Pirius said, “The nav systems have been upgraded to cope with the changes.”
“Well, the patches don’t seem to be working. The central sentient thinks it’s stuck in one sick ship.” Darc laughed. “It isn’t so wrong.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Pirius said grimly.
The crew continued to work until they had got the blizzard of red lights down to a sprinkling. Then, when he thought he could risk it, Pirius lifted the ship away from the Rock. The ascent was smooth enough.
Pirius glanced down at the receding asteroid. He could see the shallow pit from which they had lifted. Standing around it, in defiance of all safety rules, was a loose circle of skinsuited techs. These complex trials, as Nilis’s team tried desperately to turn their prototypes and sketches into a working operational concept, had drawn a lot of cynicism from these world-weary techs, especially the Engineers’ Guild types: these observers were here, he knew, not to watch a successful trial, but to see a cocky pilot crash and burn. His determination surged. It wouldn’t happen today.
Darc sensed what he was thinking. “Give them a show, Pilot.”
Pirius grinned, and clenched his fists around his controls. The Earthworm hurled itself into the sky, straight up. The sublight jaunt, peaking at around half the speed of light, lasted only a fraction of a second, but Pirius glimpsed blueshift staining the crowded stars above him.
When it was over, Rock 492 had gone, snatched away from his view. And the target rock was dead ahead, exactly where it was supposed to be.
He felt a surge of triumph. “Still alive — oh, Lethe.” He was encased in red lights once more.
“We need to stabilize the systems,” Torec warned.
Pirius sighed. “I hear you, Engineer.” Once again the crew went to work, nursing their deformed steed; gradually the red constellations were replaced by an uncertain green.
The target, only a couple of hundred kilometers away, was just another asteroid, a bit of debris probably older than Earth. This Rock had been used for target practice by crews from Arches for generations. It was impossible to tell if the immense craters that pocked its surface were relics of the asteroid’s violent birth, or had been inflicted by trigger-happy trainees.
“Look at that thing,” Darc said. “Looks as if it has been cracked in two.”
Pirius said, “Let’s see if we can’t crack it again. Engineer, how are the weapons?”
Two threads of cherry-red light speared out from the pods on the Earthworm’s main body and lanced into the battered hide of the target rock.
“Nothing wrong with the starbreakers,” Torec said.
“Then let’s try the black-hole cannon.”
“My displays are green,” said Torec. “Most of the time anyhow.”
“Your course is laid in, Pilot,” Darc called from his navigator’s seat.
Pirius settled himself in his seat, smoothing out creases in his skinsuit. He stared at the rock, trying to visualize his flight.
Nilis had explained his latest tactics carefully. The microscopic black holes fired by the cannon had been enough to destroy a Xeelee nightfighter, but they would be pinpricks against a Galaxy-center black hole, and the living structures that fed off it — unless, Nilis had determined, two holes could be fired off together. If the holes could be made to collide correctly they would emit much of their mass- energy in a shaped pulse of gravitational waves — and Pirius had seen, in the wreckage of Jupiter, how much damage that could do. If such a bomb were set off at the event horizon of Chandra, the great black hole would flex and ripple, “like a rat shaking off fleas,” as Nilis had said.
But such a feat required huge accuracy. The greenships were going to have to fly around the black hole at an altitude of precisely a hundred kilometers above the event horizon: precisely meaning not more than ten meters out. Such a jaunt through the twisted space around a massive black hole was going to be “fun,” in Darc’s words, and the resistance of the Xeelee was going to make it more fun still. If they couldn’t achieve that degree of accuracy, the mission was a waste of time.
So today’s test was crucial. If Pirius couldn’t hit a dumb piece of rock, then Chandra was out of reach.
As the systems stabilized, the crew grew quiet. They would have to work together tightly during this maneuver. As pilot, Pirius would direct the line, navigator Darc was to check the accuracy of their trajectory, while engineer Torec worked the weapons. But the closest approach, during which they would have to fire the cannon, would happen in just a fraction of a second.
Darc said, “Pilot? I think we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Roger that. Engineer?”
“Do it.”
Pirius took his controls. The ship quivered, poised. “Now or never,” he said. He closed his fists.
The rock flew at him, exploding to a battered wall that seemed about to swat the greenship out of space. At the last moment the asteroid swiveled, dropped beneath his prow and turned into a lumpy landscape. Closest approach — but as the black-hole cannon fired, it was as if the ship had taken a punch to the guts — and red lights flared everywhere.
And then his blister flooded with impact foam, and he was cut off, embedded in a rigid casing, in the dark. It was over, as suddenly as that.
Frustration raging, he screamed, “Tactical display!” A working sensor projected a tiny Virtual image onto the inner surface of his faceplate.
The cannon had actually fired, and dotted yellow lines, neatly sketched, helpfully showed the track of the black-hole projectiles. They missed each other, and passed harmlessly through the loose bulk of the target rock, which sailed on, ancient and serene. And at the moment of closest approach the ship had exploded. Three crew blisters came flying out of an expanding cloud of debris.