Here Be Dragons (4 page)

No one had quite figured out how the outsiders had maintained a perfect record of finding and killing the drones—but if Elena had to guess, they were doing the exact same thing that she was doing to them.

“No more than usual, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. “And the bearings don’t match.”

“They must have followed her trail,” Elena said. “Traced the signal to Jupiter, and then back out into space.”

“Our ploy did not fool them for long,” Vijay said.

“Es lo ques es,” Elena said. “We knew they weren’t stupid. And it could only work once anyway.”

“Let us hope that it did,” Demyan said.

“Excuse me, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. “But if the outsiders can triangulate the signal’s source, can’t they find its destination also?”

She never got a chance to answer.

“Vampire! Vampire inbound,” Vijay said.

It was an outsider missile, hunting for something to kill. Elena leapt forward, and her straps bit into her stomach and chest. The missile streaked away from
Gabriel
and fell upon her companion instead
.
A single bright explosion bloomed on the holo, and then another. Both faded quickly into the darkness. A thousand chunks of shrapnel had wiped
Cherub
off the face of the sky.

“Twenty minutes,” Demyan said.

He wiped his brow, and as if on cue Vijay and Hassoun did the same. All of
Gabriel’s
compartments were carefully air conditioned and ventilated, and the crew’s uniforms were moisture wicking, designed to regulate their body temperatures. Elena rubbed her own forehead and found it dry.

“Where’s my visual?”

“First image coming now,” Vijay said. As one the four of them looked up at the holo, and waited for their first glimpse of the enemy.

It reminded Elena of a dragonfly.
Gabriel,
with her graceful hull and tall sails, resembled a four winged bird of prey in flight. But the outsider ship was spindly and insectile. Its tiny metallic body, a dull brick red on the thermal camera, jutted with long legs and slender antennae. Elena could see solar panels, infrared telescopes, and radar dishes. Everything about it looked weak and frail—except for the trio of sturdy missiles ringing the hull. The outsider craft was no larger than a whale, and
Gabriel
outclassed it by such a laughable margin that Elena had to remind herself that one of these things had surprised and killed
Archangel.
As far as anyone knew, she had never seen it coming.

“A drone,” Vijay said.

“No que no?”

“Who could live inside that machine?”

“Machine?” Elena asked. “For all we know, that’s what they look like.”

In forty years, there had never been an official contact. No one had ever seen or spoken with an outsider. Their signals had never been intercepted, as radio communication was next to impossible around Jupiter. Even their hardware had never been recovered in anything but pieces, and the debris had been free of organic compounds. The outsiders had appeared during the dark days after the Storm, when humanity’s back had been turned, and claimed the outer solar system as their own. No one knew who the outsiders were, or what they looked like, or where they had come from. They were a strange noise coming from a darkened room—one that had been empty just a moment before.

“Your orders, Captain?”

The outsiders had found
Cherub
and
Seraph
faster than anyone had anticipated.
Gabriel
could continue to run cold and try to cross the border at a gallop, disarmed and defenseless. Or she could start the fight now, against hopeless odds. Hassoun met her gaze, and searched her eyes for the plan that he knew she must have ready. He hesitated only briefly before returning to his station when he found nothing within them.

“Tell Okoye to heat up the ballista,” Elena said.

“Captain,” Vijay said, “we do not have a target.”

Elena stared at the gridwork of red dots on the holo. She had always been terrible at recognizing constellations as a child, and her father had spent countless evening hours on the mountaintops trying patiently to demonstrate the hunter, the swan, the dragon. Elena felt then as she did now. She saw no pattern, only points, perfectly alike. The telescopes identified a second drone as she watched, indistinguishable from the first. They even radiated at the exact same temperature.

She saw at a glance that all thirteen shared a single infrared signature. The outsiders had rigged their craft to look identical, to disguise those that were truly different. In order to match the drones’ output, a larger vessel would have to do exactly what
Gabriel
had done—power down almost completely and leave itself defenseless. Elena took over the holographic projector and backtracked through the flight log. The crew glanced up from their stations, but she said nothing. Instead she watched
Cherub
die, and waited to see how the enemy had reacted.

Twelve of the thirteen appeared to shift in their orbits, nudged aside by their maneuvering thrusters. Elena recognized the behavior from the unmanned vehicles she had handled as automatic evasive maneuvers—the drones had sensed danger, and gone into flight or flight mode. A human operator could take over unmanned vehicles and issue commands directly, but otherwise they relied on autonomous routines that told them how to react in any given situation. They were machines, and had no choice but to follow their programming.

But the thirteenth hadn’t tried to evade at all. It had made a choice.

“That one,” she said, and illuminated it for Vijay. “Number seven. That’s our target.”

A single fuel cell ignited in the engine room and poured energy into the coils at the front of the ship, and
Gabriel’s
hull temperature began to climb.

Vijay computed the firing solution, and handed it off to Demyan. The helmsman went to work with the gyroscopes embedded in the hull throughout the ship, and torqued
Gabriel
and swung her around so that she appeared to be flying slantwise, her nose aimed off course.

“In position,” he said.

Elena nodded once to Vijay, and spoke.

“Fire mission.”

Vijay pulled the trigger, and a second timer appeared on the holo and began counting down from ten.

He had merely confirmed the order. At this distance, and these speeds, the shot had to be calculated down to the millisecond, entirely by computer. Fighting a battle in space was like shooting a speeding bullet out of midair—even a thousandth of a degree of error would result in a clean miss. Elena kept her eye on the target for every tick of the clock. This would be only the second time that
Gabriel
would fire in anger, and this time she would enjoy it.

The countdown hit zero, and the ship shook so violently that her teeth rattled in her jaw.

“Payload is away,” Vijay said.

The steel ball that had erupted from the massive barrel in
Gabriel’s
bow was instantly the fastest manmade object in history. The power needed to propel an object at that speed could have destroyed the ship had the safeties failed. If the ballista had been fired on Earth, it would have melted its own barrel.

“Shut it down, now. Demyan, new target. Go deep.”

Her helmsman powered up the gyroscopes again, and swung the nose of the ship around so that she was once more pointed forward along her trajectory, towards a drone that waited ten thousand kilometers behind the line.
Gabriel
carried none of the midsized cannons that armed other warships—there simply wasn’t room for them—and the ballista’s barrel was so long that there had been no choice but to build it directly into her skeleton. It could be aimed in no direction but forward, which ensured that
Gabriel
would always face the enemy. Other ships were made to fight, but she
had been built to kill.

“Fuel cell shut down,” Hassoun said. “Auxiliary power, vital systems only.”

Gabriel
had made her move. The ship’s temperature had risen several dozen degrees during those five minutes, and would now drop as rapidly as radiation could manage.

“Stand by for power.”

Elena watched the round race away. Ten kilometers opened up between it and
Gabriel
every second, and the holo zoomed out to keep both of them
on screen. The round passed the halfway mark, and
Gabriel
disappeared from the frame as it and the holo closed in on the target. Elena silently willed the outsider captain—whoever or whatever that was—to keep his nerve and not change course.

The enemy ship went hot, and she could see it bright and clear. Elena felt her heart slam against her chest.

Just before he had died, Commander Anwar Azzam had sent home a final image from his infrared telescope. It had been a ruby hanging from the night sky, two crimson pyramids joined together at the base. Each line, each face had been geometrically perfect, and there was no sense at all of up or down, or port and starboard. It had been built by those who called space their home. The ship that had torn the
Solstice
and its crew apart a few moments later had looked just like this one.

The ballista round struck the outsider ship. It burrowed into the hull, and a gout of flame leapt from the hole and into space. The shell turned white hot and sliced through the ship, and tore an exit wound in the other side. A spray of plasma erupted like blood from an artery. The shockwave blew the ship apart at the middle, and twin explosions shattered both halves a half second later.

All this happened in less than a second. Elena breathed as the debris flamed out and went dark, and left behind nothing but black space.

“Power up, now. Demyan, ignition on my mark, all hands prepare for acceleration.”

All four fuel cells ignited and poured energy into the combat systems.
Gabriel’s
temperature skyrocketed, but Elena no longer cared. The outsiders knew she was here. The thrusters came online first, and the magnetic coils inside the guns energized as the ballista recharged and reloaded.

“Vampires incoming.”

“Hold fire!”

Both missiles accelerated and went terminal, and dove on their target. They raced through empty space, then flipped and retrofired their rockets to try and come around for a second pass. Neither of them had seen
Gabriel,
and they chased shadows until they exhausted their propellant. The drones had tried to bluff her.

A minute later, twelve search radars activated, and six more missiles ignited.

“Hard burn, weapons free!”

The four massive rockets at the stern ignited, and
Gabriel
surged forward. Elena felt an invisible hand press down on her body, and she sank into the water filled cushions of her chair. A chill came over her as the air wafted over her body towards the rear door. Her eyes turned pink as delicate capillaries burst inside them.

Gabriel’s
guns twisted in their mounts and fired, and streams of nine millimeter slugs the size of marbles spat from their barrels. Two missiles took a bad angle and missed completely, and crossed paths behind her. Their wakes burned an enormous red X on the holo. They had absolutely no chance of reacquiring, and self-destructed harmlessly. A second pair of missiles straight ahead went to hard burn and sprinted for her. The guns tore them apart more than one hundred kilometers out, and by the time
Gabriel
sailed through the shrapnel it had scattered like a summer rain. A few fragments scraped the hull, and then she was clear.

“Ballista?”

“Thirty seconds,” Vijay said.

The final pair swung in abaft to pursue, and
Gabriel
fired behind her back. The missiles swayed their rocket nozzles from side to side to evade, but the closing speed was nearly one hundred kilometers per second, and bullets no bigger than pistol rounds sliced them to pieces. Elena watched twin holographic explosions flare at the center of the bridge. The projectors had been overwhelmed with weapons fire from every direction, and twisted and zoomed crazily to catch it all.

Elena felt a tremor in the air, like the beat of a bass drum.

“Hit!” Hassoun said. “Multiple impacts, hull intact, no breach.”

The outsider shells beating on the fuselage had struck as hard as their mass in dynamite, and had cut no deeper than the sheath of titanium muscle beneath
Gabriel’s
carbon
skin. Most of the drones were now behind her, and the breakneck speed which had been so lethal a few moments before worked in
Gabriel’s
favor once again as the cannon shots glanced off the hull. Elena watched the guns track the targets that Vijay selected. Another missile died, then a second. The fire trailed off as the drones fell further and further behind.

“We’ve crossed the border,” Demyan said.

Alone of the bridge crew, he had yet to raise his voice. He activated the avram, and the ship
seemed to shudder again, just once. Elena knew that she had imagined it.
Gabriel
slid invisibly to starboard, and shifted into a new orbit, pushing back against the embrace of Jupiter’s gravity as hard as she could. There was no telltale rocket burn, no wake to follow. Soon her trail would be entirely cold.

The final drone fired and missed, just a few hundred kilometers ahead. Its sensors told it that
Gabriel
was still on course, not burning her rockets or thrusters, yet her position changed every time it took a shot.

“Ballista ready.”

Vijay didn’t wait for the order. He fired, and the shell obliterated the drone and smeared a trail of hot vapor across space.
Gabriel
overtook the remains a few moments later and burst through them like a cloud.

“We’re clear,” Demyan said.

“Situation?”

“Eleven contacts remain, Captain,” Vijay said. “Closest distance, five hundred kilometers and climbing.”

“Damage report.”

“No breaches, hull is intact,” Hassoun said. “No casualties, all systems operational.”

Gabriel
was already nearly a thousand kilometers inside the border, and even at full burn it would be almost physically impossible for the drones at the border catch her. She expected a second line of defense, and a third, but there was too much space in between the planet and its libration point to guard it all. It would take a dark miracle for the outsiders to find her now. Elena Gonzales Estrella was the first human being to win a victory over the outsiders since Captain Muller had triumphed at the Battle of the Kirkwood Gap, and she had done it on their doorstep.