Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) (4 page)

Replication!

Replication!

Replication!

A trail of newborn nanites followed in our wake. The molecular cloud created by the drones made perfect material for nanite replication.

We accelerated sharply, breaking off and heading toward the nearest building dock.

“Liori, max out the shields! Full energy to the stern hemisphere!”

I activated Plasma Blast.

A blinding sheet of fire cut through the Raiders’ formation, predictably followed by a powerful explosion as the nearest clouds of Molecular Mist detonated with the impact.

The drones’ markers blinked and expired. Swirling jets of plasma spewed into the shipyard, cutting through the unfinished ships and melting the gossamer structures of the docks.

Our own shields were hovering dangerously close to zero. I struggled to stay on course. Debris whirled past, tumbling uncontrollably. The translucent windows of my interface flashed a constant flow of messages.

The Raiders, where were they?

I hurried to employ thrusters, steering my Condor into a narrow gap between two white-hot crossbeams which suddenly spattered a hail of molten steel, hit by heavy laser guns.

We zipped through the open-work structures and swung round, scanning the area non-stop.

Two of the Raiders were down. The others had survived the Plasma Blast but lost their shields and received minor damage in the process. They didn’t chase after us. Instead, they restored their shields and went for the frigate again!

Dammit! My plan had failed to stop them!

Quest alert: Eurasia Rescue. Quest completed!

By destroying the shipyard’s control module, you’ve diverted Avatroid’s attention to yourself, forcing him to abort his attack on the dying Eurasia station. It now has a chance to-

I didn’t read any further. “Charon, nine Raiders are heading toward the Relic!”

“Roger that,” the Haash pilot’s voice barely cut through the interference. The area was at the mercy of a magnetic storm.

The space around us was chock full of cargonite debris.

“Commence nanite replication!”

In two brief flashes, our ships were safely blanketed within a new layer of Steel Mist.

“There’s no way Avatroid’s fleet can get here soon!” Liori’s voice rang with victory. “It’ll take them three hours at least! And now that we’ve destroyed the shipyard’s AI, it can’t make more Phantom Raiders! We’ve smoked over a hundred drones. I’ve done four levels!”

“I’ve done five.”

“Zander, you need to invest in Disintegration. We really need it now!”

Good advice. We had very few ECG projectiles left and mid-range lasers were no good against our enemy’s shields.

There was no time to think it over. We headed off to intercept them. The Phantom Raiders’ antimatter engines were way superior to our weaker plasma units, but the sheer amount of junk littering space didn’t allow them to attain their full capacity.

We closed in.

Our emotions faded. The tension was palpable. The distance between us continued to shrink. The Haash wing couldn’t tackle nine lethal fighters. We had to split the enemy, destroying or at the very least engaging some of them, preventing them from reaching the Relic.

Liori tuned into my idea and began lagging behind, our mnemonic channel offering us a silent means of communication.

A small asteroid came into my crosshairs, complete with a few Raiders skirting it.

Disintegration!

I banked behind a pre-chosen rock, and still my shields dropped all the way down to zero.

The asteroid was reduced to atoms.

My ship’s hull was red-hot. Sensors kept beeping anxiously. I activated the emergency decompression. One less thing to worry about.

The enemy shields were down. Liori charged.

Her Condor traced a complex path through space as she fired non-stop, not letting the Raiders’ AIs restore their shields.

One of the Raiders dissolved in a flash; another’s hull was ripped open by tracers. A weak glow escaped the structural damage — she’d hit the power unit!

The remaining Raiders turned around. Four of them came for me, three went for Liori.

Maneuvering desperately, I broke through their formation, hurrying to her rescue. I got one of the Raiders with my ECGs, showered another one with lasers and sent nanites to attack the third one. I didn’t even try to finish them off but banked into a steep turn — I still had four more AIs tailing me!

We were closing head-on. I focused on their leader, bringing him into my crosshairs.

Disintegration!

Simultaneously two heavy lasers sliced through my Condor. Control panels began exploding all around the cockpit. Navigation equipment and engine controls were down. Spinning uncontrollably, my ship began drifting away from the scene.

I managed to swipe my eyes across the remains of the downed Raider, sending a quick succession of mnemonic commands,

Replication

Emergency Repairs

The latter was an ability I’d acquired when I’d perused the Technologists Clan’s databases.

Immediately nanites set to work with damage control.

I was drifting.

Four of the Raiders had been destroyed but the surviving ones accelerated again and closed on the Relic. They didn’t bother chasing after us to finish us off. We were neither worth their time nor their power resources.

“Zander?” Liori’s voice rang with anxiety.

“I’m fine. You? Any damage?”

“I’ve burned my reverse thrusters. The ship looks like a sieve. But it’s nothing critical. Engines are still working.”

There, I found her! Her reactor was in overload, leaking radiation. Her injuries were much worse than I’d thought. “I want you to try to get to the Relic’s docking pods,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you. My controls are almost restored. Don’t engage anymore. The Haash can finish them off without us now.”

“Zander, I-“

“Just do it! Please!”

We both knew this was a touch-and-go situation. If her reactor failed, there’d be no respawn for her.

“All right... Promise you won’t be long... Make sure you follow me... You promised...”

Her voice distanced, consumed by the crackling of interference.

A
ll I could do during the ten minutes it had taken to fix the ship was watch helplessly as the Raiders went for the Relic. More drones and three cargo ships appeared from the shipyard and headed for the frigate: reinforcements!

The Relic’s heavy ECGs spewed fire three times in a row, downing the cargo ships, then fell silent. They didn’t have enough energy. The tractor beams were consuming most of it.

Space was rife with battle as the Haash confronted both the Raiders and the drones. Still, they were outnumbered badly. I put my foot down. Hold on, guys! Steady just a bit more!

“I can’t see them! Where are they? Where are they-“ an animal growl rose to a scream of agony.

They’d downed Danezerath! The remains of his
yrob
sped past me.

I entered the dogfight head-on, attacking the nearest Raider and planting the remaining ammo into the skirt of its cockpit. Molten metal splattered everywhere. The Raider’s AI attempted to change course — too late. His deadly ship kept accelerating, strafing haphazardly, until it rammed one of the drifting cargo ships and disappeared in a splash of flames.

The laser pulses of three Phantom Raiders continued to rake the Relic’s hull. The frigate shuddered with a number of internal explosions. Her armor burst in places, gutted by decompression. Ugly long gaps in the hull spewed tornadoes of murky discharge and clusters of technogenic debris.

Jurgen wasn’t replying. The frigate’s signature was crimson and deformed.

Her shields were down. The Relic drifted on, her engines dead, as she sacrificed her last remaining watts of energy to the towing beams. The three-mile asteroid obediently followed in the frigate’s wake. Still, its path was littered with debris which continuously collided with the asteroid’s surface, demolishing the last remaining structures of the ancient mine shaft.

My ECGs choked and shut up. I only had one charged accumulator left complete with two localizer lasers connected to it. The rest of my weapons were out of commission.

We were one step away from immortality and a hair’s breadth away from death.

Still, there were only three Raiders left.

I accelerated. I’d managed to burn my shock absorbers so now every maneuver pinned my body to the seat. The Raiders noticed me and scattered. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to second-guess their actions. Two of them would try to attack me while the third one would wait for an opportunity to finish me off.

I steered my ship within inches of the Relic, aligning myself with her as I pierced the murky clouds of debris.

“Someone, cover me!” I wheezed. “I’m engaging!”

I shot up vertically. My vision darkened. The mangled ship’s outline on the screens keeled over and began to distance itself. I had one Raider on a collision course while another one was trying to intercept me as I maneuvered. His laser beams traced past, barely missing my engines.

An
yrob
flashed past, hacked into several pieces, its frayed remains of fiber optic cables sparking. The scorched stump of the pilot’s seat trailed behind, tethered by a cable.

I passed the Raider head-on, just managing to get in a burst from my lasers. The two others flanked me from behind. They weren’t firing yet, trying to save power. Very soon they’d be able to shoot me at point blank.

Take that, you bastards!

I lingered, waiting for the right moment. Just as the Raiders were about to fire, I released a cloud of nanites and sent them a mental image.

Object Replication!

Space exploded.

My mind went blank. One Raider less. Still speeding, he’d rammed the swarm of cargonite pellets head-on. The second one had managed to swerve, avoiding an inevitable collision.

The Relic’s signature was dying away as the frigate had reached the edge of the asteroid belt heading for Argus. But was there anyone still alive on board?

“Jurgen... Arbido... Frieda... anyone! Talk to me!”

Immediately the frigate’s tractor beams croaked. The three-mile rock tumbled and collided with a few smaller boulders. The collisions threw it off course. Slowly the asteroid began to drift away from the collision site, heading back into the asteroid belt.

The two Phantom Raiders were still following me. Space around me seethed with countless collisions. The stars in my screens faded, obscured by clouds of debris. I had no nanites left nor could I replicate them: the suspended mixture of fine rock dust and incandescent gas was not good for nanite replication.

I killed speed, forcing my ship to dive under the chaotically spinning body of a cargo ship.

The Raiders whizzed past, unable to react in time, then swung round, looking for their evasive target.

They didn’t have it easy, either. Their power field emitters were also down, their hulls planished with impacts. Expert warriors, the Haash had put up a good fight. Pale light seeped through numerous breaches in the Raiders’ armor. Their antimatter units had had it. They were destabilizing.

I was going to kill them, then catch up with the asteroid and see if I couldn’t get to the artifact. There was no other option.

The Raiders had located me and followed my radiation trail, the two of them. My reactor was damaged, about to explode at any moment, but I wasn’t even considering ejecting it. I had to make it last as long as I could. The alternative was a long slow death drifting through space.

I skirted the cargo ship and went into a spin, preventing the Raiders from opening fire. I then ducked into a huge hole in its hull and swung round, reducing speed with a few calculated pulses.

The enemy kept tailing me but my radiation trail wasn’t a reliable target — rather more a guideline.

The Raiders’ signatures kept approaching. I spent my last nanites on activating Piercing Vision. My ship’s sensors had been scorched dead, the cockpit depressurized. Many of the control panels had melted.

There they were.

They were still keeping together. The leader turned toward the cargo ship as if sensing the danger coming from within its breach holes, trying to second-guess my actions.

The other Raider’s guns were down but its shield emitters still worked. It was now trying to stretch its sickly power field to cover its leader.

I shouldn’t let this happen! My lasers couldn’t breach their shield.

Thanks to Piercing Vision, my mind expander could “see” the targets well. The nanites kept streaming information but their quantities were dwindling. The Raiders couldn’t see me: my radiation trail created a shapeless blind spot.

I had but a split second to come to a decision.

My thrusters cast a fiery glow onto the ship’s hull. Slowly I turned my Condor round. Her portside was now facing the breach. A powerful side thrust pushed my ship out to face the enemy.

Fire!

Molten metal spewed everywhere. Deep scars started to glow on the Raider’s hull, breathing heat, like the scores left by a clawed gauntlet.

My last accumulator was dead. My ship strafed to one side: mangled and defenseless, stripped of her technogenic power. The overheated reactor gushed radiation everywhere.

I didn’t expect another explosion. The apprehension of my own doom had tricked me into desperation. But I’d smoked the last Raider, after all!

Both of us dissolved in a circle of fire. A torrent of debris shot past. Some of it hit me, sending my Condor into an uncontrollable spin.

The accumulator indicators glowed weakly. I tasted blood in my mouth. I didn’t feel as if I’d won. I felt empty inside. I could barely move. Communications were dead. I had almost no thruster fuel left.

* * *

The asteroid that used to be the Outlaws’ base continued to drift through the asteroid belt. I navigated my disfigured ship past countless rocks and blocks of ice of every shape and size, catching up with it slowly but surely.

I released the last remaining probe. The spherical device headed toward the structure’s vacuum dock gates. They’d been gutted. Deep cracks had ripped through the ancient mine’s framework.

In expectation of the probe’s report, I plotted the trajectories of the nearest asteroids when I detected a Condor drifting nearby.

“Liori!”

Her ship was dead, its reactor block ejected. Most armor plates had been destroyed, the grid of her Condor’s support beams resembling a skeleton’s ribcage.

While the probe was busy studying the ancient mine, I swung my ship around and closed with the drifting ship.

“Hold on, sweetheart... just hold on, my love,” I mouthed non-stop.
Sweetheart, darling, my love
— and I used to think that these words were hopelessly dated and meaningless!

The automatic docking system kicked in, connecting the two crippled ships with a short pressurized hose.

Her cockpit was pitch-black. All the control panels were fused solid. Her empty pilot’s seat had been sliced in two by a laser beam. Tiny droplets of hydraulic liquid floated around it in zero gravity, having escaped the emergency anti-G system.

I received no feedback from the nanites that used to make up Liori’s avatar. She had used them all up when she’d run out of both ammo and power.

I refused to believe this was the end of her. A lump in my throat prevented me from breathing. I felt like screaming. Still, I clenched my teeth and perched on the seat’s edge, scanning the jury-rigged adapter.

Her cyber module was deformed. Its neurochips sported fire damage. Right here and now it was pretty impossible to tell whether Liori’s identity matrix had survived the predicament.

I used a laser from my repair kit to cut out a fragment of the control panel with her cyber module still in it, then placed it gingerly into my inventory. I cast one last look at the silent cockpit and began retracing my steps back on board my own ship.

During the last few days, I kept getting these moments of absolute confusion. My life in other game worlds had been exciting and simple: trouble-free. Words like
grief
,
desperation
or
loss
had never entered my vocabulary. They’d had no meaning. Now that they’d revealed their true sense, my heart struggled to accept them.

The world had changed forever. Your past was dead; your future wasn’t born yet. All you had was this now-moment and the fire-polished fragments of a cybermodule in your inventory. Plus the faint hope that you could still recover the bytes containing the digitized soul of the woman you loved.

* * *

I was closing in on the asteroid. I suppressed all irrelevant thoughts. First I had to get to the Founders’ artifact, then take it back to the Relic and restore the cybermodule containing Liori’s identity. Together we’d be able to work out what was going on, then find our way around our new environment.

The target loomed ever closer. The data collected by the probe seemed positive. The ancient artifact was still functioning. The numerous impacts had damaged the asteroid, creating a plethora of deep cracks in its surface which considerably simplified my task. Basically, the asteroid was only held together by the mine’s powerful superstructure made of cargonite alloy.

I was really pressed for time. The asteroid belt was growing denser. Hundreds of rocks of every shape and size crowded the asteroid, most of them capable of dealing the final blow which could disintegrate the ancient facility.

The reactor had stabilized at 30%. I forwarded all of its power to the shields. Manipulating the maneuvering thrusters, I steered the ship into a dark crevice and began threading my way through the web of distorted and degraded support structures.

My speed kept dropping. I couldn’t help that. My path grew more littered with my every turn. Fractured walls revealed glimpses of mangled rooms — once embedded into the rock and now ripped to pieces. My mind expander greedily absorbed all available data. This was where the Outlaws had built Avatroid!

There must have been loads of precious data still left in the ruins of their cybernetic laboratories, like nanite activation codes which could open new areas of nanite technologies yet unknown to me.

The sensors kept beeping anxiously. The walls of the crevice kept shrinking ever closer — but I now was a mere hundred feet away from my target!

I engaged reverse thrusters, then stopped. The ship couldn’t go any further. I had to get out.

The rock walls quivered treacherously as new cracks traced across them. In places, they dissolved in soundless rockfalls filling the narrow space with sharp fragments of stone that floated in the void, endlessly colliding.

My armored suit wasn’t going to take it. I had to find a different way. I activated navigation lasers and cleared the shortest path with a series of pulses. With a circular motion of my guns, I cut an opening in the nearest mangled bulkhead that offered access to the surviving premises.

The docking hose hissed, expanding. The plasma torches snapped into action.