The ship drove towards its hellish perihelion. On its cramped flight deck spun a simulacra of a binary system: two white dwarfs locked in an vicious gravitational embrace, a combined orbital period of two minutes, twenty-five seconds. An endless, futile pursuit. Their luminosity had been muted to make them bearable. Even so, the display cast double shadows throughout the cabin, a confusion of intersecting lines and hard shapes that slashed across walls and deck like whirling blades. Too late, he thought from the confines of his narrow cell. Too late to change anything. A bright green designator appeared at the periphery of the display. His ship. Then, before he could draw another breath, seven red indicators like flotsam in his wake. Drones.
Excerpt:
The ship drove towards its hellish perihelion.
On its cramped flight deck spun a simulacra of a binary system: two white dwarfs locked in an vicious gravitational embrace, a combined orbital period of two minutes, twenty-five seconds. An endless, futile pursuit. Their luminosity had been muted to make them bearable. Even so, the display cast double shadows throughout the cabin, a confusion of intersecting lines and hard shapes that slashed across walls and deck like whirling blades.
Too late, he thought from the confines of his narrow cell. Too late to change anything.
A bright green designator appeared at the periphery of the display. His ship. Then, before he could draw another breath, seven red indicators like flotsam in his wake. Drones.
His ship had no weapons.
A heavily armoured gravity-whip vessel, it was shielded against the temperatures and tidal stresses of the stars it skirted. Not against warheads. The drones had particle weapons too, but those would be useless, the fan of his exhaust consuming anything they might fire at him. But the warheads....
If he could lock into the gravity well before one detonated, then he could kill his telltale plasma-fusion drive and wink out of existence–at least as far as his pursuers were concerned. A millisecond power manoeuvre at perihelion, and he would be flung out of the system at twice his current velocity.
Two of the furthest indicators shifted to orange, one immediately after the other.
Out of range, their warheads useless. Even if detonated now, their expanding shells of radiation would be beaten back by the furious solar winds, what was left damped by the powerful shielding of his ship.
Another indicator turned orange. Four drones left. The corner of his mouth twitched up in a crooked smile. But the smile collapsed almost immediately under the weight of a bilious memory: the face of his betrayer. Years of meticulous planning had been unravelled by one weak man. A man he had chosen for his political acumen as much as for his overweening ambition. He had thought the man strong, not weak. But he had been wrong. That man was still dying. A painful lingering death that would go on for days, perhaps weeks. It was far too small a consolation.
Another indicator turned.
The cabin temperature had risen sharply in the last few moments. Sweat sheathed him. His body had been enhanced in every conceivable way; yet, there were limits to what even he could bear. Soon he would have to seal his cell, order protective agents to pack around his body, turning off his metabolic processes, insulating him. He watched the display, unwilling to surrender to the oblivion of stasis just yet. As soon as he was out of range of the last drone–