Chapter 115: Starfall Sever

"Then we take its escorts off it first," Leo said. "Elena, the ventral pair... Clear me a lane."

"Targeting ventral corvettes!" Elena’s hands swept across the weapons console with textbook precision. "Point-defense batteries to full continuous output! Harpoon capacitors at one hundred and ten percent!"

ZAP-BOOM! ZAP-BOOM!

The twin shoulder-mounted batteries lanced out in thick beams of crimson light and carved straight through the missile salvos streaming from the two lower corvettes.

Twenty heavy warheads went off one after another in a long chain of orange fireballs that lit up the whole vacuum like a festival.

Straight through the heart of the explosions, the Mirage burst into motion.

FLASH!

Vexa triggered her Violet Afterimage at point-blank range, and the seventy-meter interceptor split into five glowing violet ghost ships that fanned out across the dark in wild impossible arcs.

The Federation targeting computers lost their locks completely, and their reticles jumped from one afterimage to the next while the real Mirage slid right under the shields of the second corvette.

ZAP-CRACK!

Its twin pulse cannons barked in high-pitched bursts and shredded the raider’s starboard thrusters, and the corvette went spinning off in helpless circles, venting sparks from its flank.

"Got one, Leo! Got one!" Vexa shrieked, half triumphant and half hysterical. "Did you see?! Tell me you saw that!"

"I saw!" Leo shouted back. "Nice one, Vexa...!"

"Second corvette’s crippled!" Aoi called out over the din. "The flanks are broken, Leo... but the frigate is accelerating straight at our bow!"

The one-hundred-and-twenty-meter frigate tore through the cloud of missile debris like an iron leviathan.

Its hull was armored in thick overlapping plates of dark crimson composite, and wrapped around the whole superstructure was a shimmering hexagonal barrier, layer on layer of it, pulsing with dense military-grade power.

CLANK-WHIRRR!

Elena slammed the launch stud on the ventral console.

KA-THOOOOOM!

The four-meter Graventhal harpoon blasted out of the corvette’s belly at seven kilometers per second, trailing its carbon cable like a striking silver viper.

SZZZZT-WHANG!

It struck the frigate’s forward shield dead center, and the barrier caught it like a wall of solid glass and flung it sideways in a spray of blue sparks.

The cable whipped wildly through the void, and the winch groaned under the violent kick.

"Harpoon deflected!" Elena’s composure cracked for half a second. "The spike’s intact, but that’s a Tier-3 phase-shield... It’s shedding forty thousand megawatts of kinetic load without even buckling... Reeling in!"

WHIRRR-CLANK!

The winch dragged the spike back home into its housing without a single bend in it, and it seated with a heavy thud they all felt through their boots.

"Turret salvo away!" Harper yelled, and dumped four tungsten penetrators straight down the frigate’s centerline.

PING! PING! PING! PING!

All four slugs hit the shimmering barrier and spread out across it in harmless rippling blue waves, and the heavy warship kept coming straight at the Wanderer-7’s bow.

"Seventeen left!" Harper’s voice cracked. "Cap, I’m bouncing off it! I can’t get through that thing!"

The frigate’s prow split open like a jaw, and inside it, a huge heavy-bore rail-cannon was humming with a blinding amber light.

KA-CHOOOOM!

It fired before anybody could shout a warning.

Leo felt it a split second early, the guide in his back yanking hard to starboard, and he threw the corvette into a violent corkscrew roll with every attitude jet screaming at once.

The round went past the port flank so close that the shield flared white along the whole length of the hull, and the proximity alarms howled like dying animals.

"HOLY—" Harper yelped, slamming sideways into her harness. "Cap, warn a girl first!"

"Didn’t have time!" Leo shot back, already hauling the nose back around. "...Hold onto something!"

’That was way too close... one more of those and we’re done.’

The frigate’s barrel glowed brighter, cycling again, and this time it was tracking them through the roll.

LOCK!

"Their rail-cannon is cycling!" Jin-Ah yelled, white-faced, with her fingers flying across her slate. "If that round hits our forward hull, the slate plates will fracture... Sixteen seconds! And they’re not slowing down, Leo, they’re going to ram us straight through our shields!"

Through the forward canopy, the crimson prow of the frigate filled the whole sky, less than three kilometers away and closing at thirty kilometers per second.

Behind it, the third corvette swung wide on its flank to cut off any escape, and the fourth hung back, painting them with its targeting lasers.

’Lasers can’t burn through, the harpoon bounced and Harper’s slugs are doing nothing,’ Leo thought, and his heart was slamming against his ribs. ’Okay... okay. It’s that or we die here.’

He felt every eye on the bridge land on the back of his head at the same time.

Nobody said it out loud, but every single one of them knew what he was about to do, and he could feel their fear like a hand on his shoulder.

’Sorry, girls... I’ll be cold for a while.’

He closed his eyes.

Deep down in the most private part of himself, past the golden embers of his sealed potential, he reached out and touched the silver-white rune that had been waiting there since the Vein.

...Starfall Sever.

The moment his will closed around it, the rune woke up.

Cold flooded him from the inside out, so sharp and so total that his breath caught in his throat, and the whole bridge seemed to tilt and fall away around him.

He could see it.

He could see space itself, laid out around the ship like a sheet of black glass, every distance and every angle and every ship sitting on it like a stone on a frozen lake... The frigate... The third corvette swinging wide behind it... The fourth one hanging back and even the drifting rocks beyond them, kilometers out in the dark.

’Oh... oh, that’s insane,’ he thought, and a crazy breathless laugh almost slipped out of him. ’I can just... draw on it.’

Through the crystal cradles, his will poured out through fifty meters of Graventhal hull like water through an open floodgate.

He opened his eyes, and they had gone pale and silver all the way through.

He looked at the crimson frigate rushing at his bow, and he traced one single line across the black glass of space.

He started it at the frigate’s prow, dragged it diagonally down through the warship’s heart, and then, without lifting his will, bent it hard to the left so it swept on through the third corvette sitting wide on the frigate’s flank.

SHING!

Every person on the bridge felt reality snap like a pane of glass under a hammer, and the sound of it rang straight through their teeth even though the vacuum outside carried nothing at all.

...A hairline crack of blinding silver light opened across the void.

It was so thin the eye could barely hold it, and it crossed the three kilometers between them in no time at all.

SLICE!

It touched the frigate’s phase-shield, the same barrier that had shrugged off tungsten slugs at twenty-four kilometers per second and flung a Graventhal harpoon aside like a toothpick, and the shield simply came apart along the line as if it had never been there.

The silver crack went on through a meter of composite bow plating, through the reinforced titanium keel, through the crew decks and the antimatter housing and out through the starboard thruster block in one clean unbroken plane then it bent, exactly where Leo had bent it, and swept on across the dark.

The third corvette’s captain had half a second to see it coming.

SLICE!

The line passed through the eighty-meter raider from its dorsal spine to its keel, and the whole ship went on drifting in one piece for a heartbeat, perfectly whole to look at.

The line kept going...

Five kilometers past the corvette, it reached a drifting slab of grey asteroid twice the size of the Wanderer-7 and cut it clean in two, and the halves rolled slowly apart in the dark, their faces polished smooth as a mirror then the silver light faded, and the two warships came apart at the same time.

KRA-KOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The frigate slid open into two mirror-smooth halves along a perfect diagonal cut, and its severed antimatter lines spilled into the vacuum and ignited in a blinding bloom of white-hot fire that tore both halves apart in an expanding sphere of vaporized metal and chained ordnance blasts.

KRA-BOOOOM!

A second explosion bloomed off its flank as the corvette’s reactor went with it, and the two halves of the eighty-meter raider tumbled away from each other, trailing fire and broken bulkheads.

A drifting cloud of glittering shrapnel and boiling gas hung where a flagship and its escort had been half a second before.

DING!

[Starfall Sever: Activated!]

[Line Traced: 9.4 km]

[Targets Severed: Tier-3 Frigate, Tier-2 Strike Corvette, 1 Asteroid!]

[Threats Neutralized: +2!]

Leo stared at the silver script floating in front of his eyes, and somewhere under all the cold, a slow disbelieving grin tugged at his numb mouth.

’Nine kilometers... one swing. What the hell did that wheel give me?’

Silence slammed down over the Wanderer-7.

Harper sat frozen with her hands hovering over the turret controls and her mouth hanging open.

"Cap..." she whispered. "Cap, did you just... cut the rock behind them too?"

Nobody answered her.

Elena was staring at the two mirror-smooth halves of the asteroid on her sensor feed with her lips slightly parted, and Jin-Ah’s slate had slipped out of her fingers and was dangling from its wrist strap.

"Remind me," Harper breathed, "to never, ever piss you off..."

CRACKLE-HISS!

Vexa’s voice drifted in over the channel, completely hushed and trembling.

"By the twin suns... he bent it. He cut the sky and he bent the cut..."

The fourth corvette didn’t even try to fight.

Its captain had just watched his flagship and his sister ship carved apart like fruit by one stroke out of an unshielded Tier-1 scout, and his voice came screaming across the open band in a dozen panicked languages at once.

PFFFFFFFT-BOOM!

Its aft thrusters flared into an emergency overburn, and it wheeled away in a ragged desperate turn, dumping heat sinks and countermeasures behind it as it fled into the deep dark at full burn.

The fight was over then the cold came.

CREAK!

A sound like river ice cracking carried across the command dais.

Leo was still sitting in the throne with his bare hands resting in the crystal cradles, and when he tried to stand up, his body flatly refused.

...From the tips of his fingers, a thick crust of pure white frost was spreading outward with terrifying speed.

It sealed his knuckles in jagged needles of ice, climbed his wrists and split the cuffs of his black shirt, and raced up his forearms while the veins beneath it turned a sickening pale blue.

HISSSS!

The frost climbed over his shoulders and wrapped around the base of his throat, and the lower strands of his dark hair went white.

CLATTER-CLATTER!

His teeth chattered so hard the vibration rattled through his whole skull, and every ragged breath left him in a thick white plume.

’Cold... so cold... worth it though... definitely worth it...’

The girls’ voices were shouting his name somewhere far away, like they were calling to him from the other end of a long frozen tunnel, and he couldn’t turn his head to look at any of them.

WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP!

[Warning... The Master Captain’s core temperature is 33.1°C and falling. This unit requests that someone warm him immediately.]

BZZZZZT-CLICK!

"Leo?" Vexa’s voice came back over the channel, and the awe had gone out of it completely.

The Mirage swung in so close across the bow that her small white-helmeted figure was pressed right up against the canopy glass, staring in.

"Leo, why aren’t you talking? You did it, they’re running! Leo, say something... Why is your face that color?!"

He wanted to tell her he was fine, the way he always told all of them but his jaw had locked so hard it wouldn’t open.

"Somebody answer me!" Vexa’s voice climbed into a thin frightened wail. "Why is there ice on him?! Is he hurt?! Is that my fault?! I should’ve been faster, I should’ve been right there, I should’ve..."

Jin-Ah reached out with one shaking hand and muted the channel.

"LEO!" Harper’s scream was raw with terror as she tore herself out of her harness.

"Captain!" Elena gasped.

Camila dropped the tray she’d been holding and ran for the dais with tears already spilling down her cheeks, and Chloe lunged from the hatch with a small wordless sound.

Aoi got there first.

She cleared the railing of the cartography pit in one desperate vault that sent her glasses skittering across the deck, sprinted across the dais on bare feet and dropped hard onto her knees right in front of the throne.

"Leo!"

Up close, she could see the frost growing in the corners of his eyelashes, and she could see him trying to say her name while the word froze in his mouth before it could come out.