Throttle Fifty

Diana held on as the Cerberus shook and rumbled. Something went loose somewhere in the ship and she heard the distinct sound of metal clanging against metal.

Two of the cameras that allowed her to see out of the ship winked out and her view screens went black for a moment.

The floating image of the ship hovering next to her flickered and turned orange in parts as the ship registered damage to itself. More worrisome was the display that had her shield power on it. It was entirely off.

“ChaOS?” Diana asked.

“I’m still here, Mistress.”

She sighed. “Okay. What’s our condition like?”

The AI took a second to reply. “Structurally, we are mostly fine. The Hercules is still intact, as is our phase three surprise. The Cerberus’ exterior hull has been damaged in a few places. Mostly heat damage.”

“Heat?” she asked.

“The Pride of Bolgia’s lasers kept firing even after our shields went down.”

“Alright,” she said. She glanced ahead. The ship was listing, its engines all off for the moment. The spin brought them around and she got a visual of the flagship. It was less than a kilometre away still. The ship’s shields were flickering. The entire vessel was covered, but she suspected that they’d switched to a backup shield.

More interesting were the fires dotted across a few spots on the vessel. One of the large guns was missing outright, and a few sections of the hull were rent or torn.

“How badly did we hit them?” she asked.

“Not terribly. The biggest source of damage was their own gun. It attempted to fire within a microsecond of a missile striking it. The damage was self-inflicted. A misfire. Otherwise… seventeen micro-missile strikes. And I count six-hundred plus impacts across the vessel from debris against the hull. The main shield went down for two and a half seconds.”

Diana tsked. “That’s rough. Looks mostly superficial though, gun aside.”

“Indeed. Other than losing one of its eight main batteries, the ship is unlikely to have suffered much.”

“Well, we dinged it. I wonder if that’s worth half-points,” she asked.

“We will have to argue with the race organisers. Zil Rossi and the Foxtail are currently chasing down Probers some sixteen kilometres away. Shall I inform her of your survival?”

“Not just yet. What’s our heading?”

A few more screens came on, and some of the orange sections on the ship’s health display turned green as the ship repaired itself. The system map pinged as a long line appeared going through it. Her current trajectory, which looked like it would fling her past the planet.

“Well, that’s no good,” she said. “Think we can angle back towards the capital?”

“We could, but I’m afraid relighting the engines might give away the fact that we are still space-capable,” ChaOS said.

She hummed. “Phase two, then. Can we make it look disastrous? An explosion at the right place might thrust us planetward, then we can fire the engines, make it look like we’re trying everything to get away. You know, like a dying ship would.”

“Indeed. I’m relocating most of our still-intact nanomachines back to the phase two craft. One minute, seventeen seconds until we are ready to fake an appropriately dramatic explosion.”

“Oh, make sure we fall apart while going through the atmosphere. No big chunks, but you know…” She made a gesture, mimicking meteors scattering apart. “Give the cameras something dramatic to see.”

“Oh course, Mistress. I shall relocate some of our very limited supply of resources to ensure a dramatic entry.”

“That’s why you’re the best,” she said.

“Setting off the first explosive now. Hang on,” ChaOS said.

Diana settled into her seat, teeth together and tongue back. The explosion hit as explosions usually did, suddenly and violently. The plethora of systems in place to dampen impacts and reduce g-forces on her body kicked in, and the worst she felt from the blast was a rough shove and a hard rattle.

More things clanged around the hull, but she kept an eye out on the health display. The important systems remained green.

“Firing thrusters,” ChaOS said.

All across the ship, the manoeuvring thrusters on the outer hull fired up. They didn’t burn anywhere near as hard as though they could have. For a moment, it looked as though the ship was righting itself relative to the planet and evening out its tumble through space, then one of the thrusters started to burn hotter and hotter, flames licking out of it until something burst and there was another, second explosion.

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“That was on purpose, right?” Diana asked.

“Indeed.”

The Cerberus continued to spin, and as it revolved around itself, a chunk of its hull was flung off and into the void. More pieces of the ship fell apart.

Diana imagined that to onlookers it would seem as though the vessel was disintegrating.

“How long until we hit atmo?” she asked.

“Seven minutes,” ChaOS said.

“Hmm.” She reached under her seat, opened a small compartment there, and pulled out a cold beverage in a plastic sac. She fit the tube on the end of the sac into her mouth and began drinking.

“We’re being scanned quite heavily,” ChaOS said. “I have adjusted our trajectory to make it seem as though we will crash off the shore of the main continent, an area far from any noticeable civilization.”

“Oh, that’s good thinking,” she said. No need to make the officers of the Bolgian navy worry about her ship crashing into the capital. If they did, they might swat her out of the air. It was better that they assumed that she was out of the race. “How are we going to make that last minute adjustment?”

“I’m afraid that we will have to poke a hole in the charade to fire one of the main thrusters for a sustained period. We’ll be skimming just outside of the outer atmosphere before reentering over the capital. The angle should make the reentry even more spectacular though.”

“Oh, I see.”

Diana checked the local system map. Quite a few racers had been taken out by the blockade. Still, well over half had made it through and were currently either still fighting, were trying to evade swarms of fighters and missiles, or had already hit the planet’s atmosphere and were falling towards the surface.

It annoyed her that she wouldn’t be the first through, but that wasn’t the main objective of the race.

“Is Hercules ready?” she asked.

“We are entering the final stages of phase two prep, Mistress. We will be ready to deploy Hercules as soon as we’re through the upper atmosphere.”

Diana grinned. “Good, good. I’ll need a surface map. And could you highlight our targets? We’re going to want to hit them from afar. There are others that will have plenty of time to play around already.”

“It’s likely that the surface is also guarded. The Bolgians seemed ready for the arrival of the racers. It stands to reason that they’ll have anti-air emplacements protecting their capital as well.”

She nodded. “Good point. I imagine they’re just as enthusiastic about missiles on the ground as they are in space?”

“I cannot tell yet, though it does seem like that would be the natural conclusion to draw, based on their displayed doctrine,” ChaOS said.

“Make sure the Hercules’ point-defence is operating at maximum efficiency, then,” Diana said. She was itching to be down on the planet already. Waiting was always hard for her. Waiting while in the middle of an active race? That was really pushing her already small bit of patience to the breaking point.

Diana spent the next few minutes chewing on her straw while eyeing the other racers. Abatrath and most of his cohort had made it past the blockade. His trick with staggering the planet-ward flights was working, and it helped that his corvette was well-suited to fighting off fighters.

She noticed that one ship blew up in the air just as it entered the atmosphere. It had been tailed by a Bolgian Prober all the way down.

“Can the Bolgian fighters fly in-atmo?” she asked.

“As far as I am aware, no. They might be able to survive the descent if they are equipped with parachutes.”

They weren’t. Not the one that had followed that one racer too deep into the planet’s atmosphere. She tipped a figurative hat to that pilot. They had hunted down their foe to the bitter end, even if it might have cost them their life.

“Hey, ChaOS,” she said. She had an inkling about something. It was nagging her now.

“Yes, Mistress?”

“Are we close enough to listen to the planet-side broadcasts?”

“Only the strongest signals. Most are encoded military transmissions. I could use some processing power to decrypt those. Only a few civilian signals are making it out here.”

“Check in on those. The civilian ones. Look for… I don’t know. Propaganda, stuff about the great dear leader, cult and religious stuff. I want to know what’s going on down there.”

The AI was quiet for a moment. “Do you suspect that there’s a lack of tyrants in this Tyrant Cracker?”

“Maybe. That’s what I want you to find out.”

***