Chapter 40: Against The Shroud Ray [I]

"It’s turning," Harper whispered from the vanguard station, her hand hovering over the arming studs.

Out in the black, the massive light-swallowing wings tilted.

It didn’t use thrusters like they had... It just leaned into the drift like it was leaning into water and slid toward them with terrifying liquid grace.

"Evasive burn!" Leo roared, his fingers digging into the cradles. "Full burn! Put the asteroid cluster between us and that thing!"

THOOM!

The twin ion drives screamed to life and the Wanderer-7 kicked away at maximum burn, crushing everyone deep into their seats as Leo rolled the ship thirty degrees and dove for the iron boulders they’d been mining hours earlier.

"Five kilometers per second!" Jin-Ah yelled, watching the velocity tape climb. "Six! Seven!"

"It’s matching us!" Ms. Tachibana shouted as the silver lines around her head flared into frantic spirals. "No... it’s accelerating! Nine kilometers per second and climbing! It’s cutting our escape angle!"

Leo glanced at the aft radar.

The black manta was eating the gap with unnatural speed.

It didn’t tumble or bank like a machine... its hundred-and-fifty-meter wings rolled in slow hypnotic waves like a shark gliding through deep water, and every second they burned, the gap shrank by two kilometers.

’Come on. Come ON. Faster, girl, faster...’

"It’s faster than us!" Harper gritted out, her knuckles white on her armrests. "Cap, it’s gonna run us down before we even reach the rocks!"

Leo looked at the closing numbers.

He looked at the rocks, they were still too far away and still tumbling lazily in the starlight like they had all the time in the world... Unfortunately Leo didn’t.

’Then we don’t run.’

"Turret," he snapped through the link. "Unlock all rails!"

CLANK... WHIRRR!

On the spine, the S-Rank Twin-Barrel Mag-Rail Turret swung a full hundred and eighty degrees and locked both barrels onto the black shadow closing in behind their engines.

Lock!

’Let’s see how you like this, you overgrown kite.’

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Four tungsten slugs screamed out of the barrels at eighteen kilometers per second... the same slugs that had turned the Brood-Mother into mist... and crossed thirty kilometers in a fraction of a second.

CLANG! SPARK!

They hit the Shroud Ray dead across its broad flat back as Leo was already waiting for the explosion but it never came.

Showers of orange sparks burst across its dark skin as all four slugs ricocheted off the overlapping black plates and spun away into the void like pebbles skipping off frozen granite.

PTANG! PTANG! PTANG!

It didn’t flinch and it didn’t slow down by a single millimeter either.

"The slugs bounced!" Harper shouted in pure horror. "Leo! They BOUNCED off its back!"

[Correction... they were rejected. This unit has never seen a creature refuse eighteen kilometers per second before. This unit would be impressed if it were not about to die.]

"Pulse lasers!" Leo barked.

ZAP-ZAP-ZAP-ZAP!

The twin lasers under the nose spat fast emerald bursts that struck the beast’s hide and simply sank in.

The light-drinking chitin swallowed them like dry sand swallowing water, leaving faint smoking scorch marks that faded back to dead black in three seconds.

"Ninety-two percent of the heat is just gone!" Jin-Ah reported, her voice shaking no matter how hard she fought it. "We can’t get through its back! It’s a living battleplate!"

’Eighteen kilometers per second,’ Leo thought, cold sweat crawling down his spine. ’Eighteen kilometers per second and it just shrugged? What kind of abominations exist in space...?’

"Look at its spine!" Chloe cried from the lower deck, her green eyes wide and ringed with scarlet. "Leo! It’s charging something! I can feel the electricity in the iron!"

Down the ridge of the Shroud Ray’s back, from its blunt head to the tip of its whip tail, a row of jagged crystal ridges began to glow.

They were not orange like the Stalkers’ stingers.

Cobalt blue, building with terrifying speed as arcs of lightning crawled across its wings and jumped between the rows of hooked teeth lining their undersides... and its wings spread wide and curled upward like a pair of black iron gates getting ready to slam.

The hair on Leo’s arms stood straight up.

"Brace!" he roared. "EVERYONE BRACE!"

The Shroud Ray flexed its spine.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ... CRACK!

A ring of pure bioelectric light blew out of its back in every direction at once.

The blue wave hit the Wanderer-7.

BZZZZZZZZT... SHATTER!

It didn’t punch a hole in the armor... It went straight through the Graventhal like the plates weren’t there and overloaded every sensor, every relay and every circuit on the ship in one stroke!

The bridge went pitch black.

The runners died, the holo-consoles vanished, the deep purr of the fusion core choked, sputtered and cut out, and the gravity failed and lifted everyone’s boots off the deck!

The neural link went dead in the back of Leo’s skull.

It was like going blind and deaf at the same time, like someone had reached into his spine and switched him off.

"AH!" Camila shrieked in the dark, floating up against her harness.

"We lost power!" Harper yelled, her straps rustling. "Leo! Leo, I can’t see anything!"

"My console is dead!" Jin-Ah’s voice had a raw edge of pure panic Leo had never heard from her before. "Main bus is down! Life support is offline!"

"Is it going to eat us?!" Camila sobbed. "Is it going to eat us?!"

"QUIET!"

Leo’s voice cracked through the freezing dark like a whip.

"Nobody move! Hold your straps!"

In the silence of the dead ship, he looked out through the canopy. Without the bridge lights the black outside was perfect... except for one thing.

The blinding blue ridges of the Shroud Ray, twenty kilometers out and closing fast, its wings already curling down to wrap around the dead corvette like a burial shroud, its hooked teeth glinting in the light of its own lightning.

...Four seconds passed.

...Five.

The cold was already creeping in through the vents.

His breath was starting to fog in front of his face, and somewhere behind him Camila was praying in Spanish under her breath.

’Come on... reboot... cycle the core, you stubborn bastard. CYCLE!’

HISS... HUMMMMMMMMM.

Deep in the belly of the ship, the fusion core coughed and caught.

CLANK!

The gravity slammed back down and dropped everyone into their seats as the runners flickered twice and blazed back to life, and the consoles snapped back into the air screaming amber warnings!

The link punched back into his spine like a defibrillator.

"Power restored!" Jin-Ah gasped as cold air rushed back through the vents. "Core at ninety-eight percent... We have engines!"

"Then RUN!" Elena shrieked, gripping her rail with her face white as paper. "Turn us around and burn! It’s right on top of us!"

Leo looked at the canopy.

Fifteen kilometers... Its wings were spread so wide they swallowed half the viewport.

The slugs had bounced, the lasers had sunk in... It was faster than them, and the next pulse might cook the core for good.

They couldn’t outrun it, they couldn’t hide from it in the rocks and running only gave it an open shot at their unarmored engines.

The pull in the small of his back went cold and hard as iron, and the fear in his chest just... burned off.

’I’m not dying running.’

"No," Leo said.

He kicked the port thrusters wide open and wrenched the Wanderer-7 into a savage hundred-and-eighty-degree spin, pivoting until its turret, its lasers and its brand-new harpoon were pointing dead center at the monster coming down out of the stars.

"Then we fight it."

The ship slid through its reverse pivot with a brutal groaning shudder of cold-gas thrusters.

PFFFFFFFT... GRRRRRRNNNN!

Out past the canopy, the universe seemed to twist inside out.

The Shroud Ray banked on some invisible plane, its black wings flexing like sheets of cured leather as the pale blue ridges on its spine pulsed with angry rhythmic surges, lighting up the frozen vacuum in stuttering flashes of electric sapphire.

Leo’s jaw locked so hard his molars screamed.

"Battle stations! Lock your harnesses!" his voice cracked through the comms. "We aren’t running! We take this bastard apart piece by piece...!"

The bridge didn’t wait.

The days of stumbling through corridors like dazed schoolgirls were over... The dead moon and the asteroid belt had hammered them into one iron unit.

"Jin-Ah, manage the bus! Give me ninety percent to the forward thrusters and the dorsal rails! Strip everything non-essential!"

"Diverting auxiliary systems!" Jin-Ah yelled, her fingers blurring across station three as the deck bucked under her boots.

’Three primary draws,’ she calculated with cold frantic speed. ’The turret capacitors eat twelve percent per salvo...The ion drive needs twenty-two percent to evade. If life support falls below five percent, cabin pressure drops to seventy kilopascals. I have to balance the knives while the floor is falling.’

"Sensei, track its wing flex! Don’t let it slip out of the dorsal arc!"

"Locked on target!" Ms. Tachibana stood rigid over the projection well as the silver rings at her temples spun in tight blinding spirals, painting the Ray’s flight vectors straight into Leo’s feed.

’It moves like an ocean manta,’ she thought, her breath coming in tight sharp gasps as she watched its tail whip through the dark. ’It relies on local spatial curvature. When its left wing dips, it isn’t rolling... it’s compressing the gravity boundary to slingshot itself across our bow!’

"Elena, harpoon station! Warm the winch!"

"The launcher is primed, stray!" Elena shouted from the auxiliary weapons console, her fair face pale and fierce and her hands clamped on the manual firing grips.

’It has to work,’ she thought, her heart slamming against her ribs like a trapped animal. ’The dampeners, the tether, the stator... I built it with my own hands. If this harpoon fails, we are crushed into a ball of scrap.’

"Harper, damage control! Grab the welder and watch the lower conduits! If a line blows, bypass it before the bridge burns!"

"Moving!" Harper ripped her harness open and snatched her tool kit and the Vulcan-IV torch in one hand. "Try not to turn us into a tin pancake while I’m in the basement, Cap!"

"Camila, hydroponics! Keep the seals tight! If that thing cracks the hull, don’t let our food freeze!"

"I’m on it! I won’t let it touch my babies!" Camila was already sprinting down the companionway with an emergency hull-patching kit strapped to her shoulder.

"And Chloe..." Leo’s voice dropped half a fraction softer on a direct channel to the airlock. "Hull exterior... Magnetic boots locked... Stand by the harpoon housing. If that cable catches on an armor plate when we fire, knock it loose."

"I’m ready, Leo," Chloe whispered back, she was calm and deadly cold.

Out on the exterior hull, just forward of the ventral harpoon housing, she locked her boots to the dark metal with the oxygen dome humming around her helmet.

Her fingers sank eight centimeters into a reinforced maintenance groove, and her eyes burned with steady scarlet fire as she watched the monstrous shadow come down out of the stars.

’I love Leo...’ she thought with the vacuum around her freezing. ’I won’t let this fish touch his ship.’

"Here it comes!" Ms. Tachibana shouted. "It’s folding its wings! It’s DIVING!"

"It’s going to ram us!" Jin-Ah screamed.

"HOLD ON!"

BOOM!

The Shroud Ray struck.

It didn’t pulse again.

It used its whole hundred-and-fifty-meter body like a battering ram, folding its wings back into a black arrowhead and crossing the last five kilometers in a blur before its flat head slammed straight into the Wanderer-7’s starboard bow.

KRA-KOOOOOOOOM!

Twenty thousand tonnes of corvette got kicked sideways through the vacuum like an empty can across asphalt as the dampeners shrieked under a four-hundred-percent surge and everyone slammed into their harnesses!

"AAAAAH!"

SCREEEEEEEEEECH!

As it slid past, the rows of hooked teeth under its wing raked down the entire starboard flank, spraying fifty-meter arcs of sparks into the black and gouging trenches eight centimeters deep into the brand-new hyperalloy!

Leo felt every single tooth through the link, like fingernails dragged down his own ribs.

[WARNING: Starboard Armor Belt breached! Structural Integrity: 91%... 84%!]

[Fusion Core Output fluctuating! System Power: 100% ? 78%!]

"It cut us!" Harper yelled up from below. "Leo, it cut right through the plates!"

"I KNOW! I felt it!"

"Hold the drift... hold the drift..." Leo hissed through his teeth, his arms shaking in the cradles as the ship tried to tumble.

PFFFFT! PFFFFT! PFFFFT!

Three hard bursts from the port thrusters snapped the nose back around just as the beast banked wide for a second pass.

He just let the turret follow his eyes.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! CLANG! CLANG!

Two slugs ricocheted off its armored ridge... but the third caught the base of its whip tail!

KRAK!

Black scales shattered and a five-meter chunk of flesh blew off in an explosion of pale blue ichor that froze into glittering crystals in the vacuum!

"HIT!" Jin-Ah screamed. "It bled! Its tail can bleed!"

Leo’s lips pulled back from his teeth, and the blood was singing in his ears now.

"So it’s not invincible," he growled. "It’s just armored in the wrong places..."