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Something else arced through the air, its source Arach, and its terminal whine familiar. Cormac ducked down as this missile landed amidst the spreading tendrils and exploded, spreading something like phosphorus across the ground. The blast seemed to propel Cormac through an area of new growth, where shoots like giant red asparagus speared up from the incinerated remains of stalks. He stumbled through a mass of red vines writhing under painfully bright sunshine, and out onto charred ground scattered with smaller blood-red shoots of new growth. Dracomen emerged either side of him, then Blegg came stepping out backwards concentrating fire up into the face of some attacker. Arach came last, two ca
‘I’ve got you now,’ came Thorn’s voice over com.
Ru
17
USER (underspace interference emitter): this device works by rhythmically inserting and removing a massive singularity through a runcible gate. The U-space interference this causes will knock any ship within its vicinity back into realspace. The singularity is contained by an inverted gravity field which is in turn powered by tidal drag, since the singularity is spi
- From ‘Quince Guide’ compiled by humans
As a precaution, when the two dragon spheres came together, Mika had again do
‘Can you hear me, Dragon?’ she asked, halting for a moment.
Nothing.
What was happening? The two spheres were breaking their co
The gull door closed and Mika stared at the controls for a moment before taking hold of the joystick. With no AI available to fly the craft for her this time, she must now do so herself. A finger brushed against a touch-plate gave her ‘systems enabled’, then engines droned as she raised the joystick. The craft rose smoothly until it fell outside the influence of the manacle gravplates, then it jerked through vacuum as if a tether had been cut, but with no real loss of control. Mika aimed for the sunlight between the two curved draconic surfaces, the screen before her polarizing on the glare.
Dragon scales hailed against the hull, some of them hitting it quite hard before spi
The previous co
Clear space now in the full glare of the sun. Mika turned the craft about, shut down the engines, and enabled available automatics to keep it from colliding with anything else that might be tumbling about out here. Slowly drawing away, she felt like a mouse scuttling from between two bull elephants begi
Then it started.
Almost as one, ripples began to cross the surface of each sphere. They revolved once around each other, while still drawing apart, then accelerated away together. Perhaps ten miles away from her, a laser flashed between them, blackening an area of Mika’s reactive screen. As the screen cleared she saw a mist of plasma and glittering scales rise from the surface of each Dragon sphere, and in one sphere a glowing canyon became visible to her. She realized then that from her present position she did not know which sphere was which, because she could not see the manacle. But, then, how would knowing that help her?
The spheres began revolving around each other again, and now she caught quick glimpses of the manacle on one of them. Then their revolutions slowly drew to a halt, the sphere without the manacle occluding the other from her view. Laser strikes threw it sharply into silhouette, and streamers of plasma fire and debris shot out all around it. Then something seemed to distort space, flattening the one sphere she could see into an ellipse. The wall of distortion sped towards her even as she started the craft’s engines and grabbed the joystick. It struck. The entire craft rippled, emitted a tearing crash, and bucked as if someone had taken hold of the very fabric of space and snapped it up and down like shaking dust from a carpet. The screen disintegrated, blowing out the air supply, metal visible around her suddenly contained whorls and ridges. Then she blotted out any view by coughing blood onto her visor. It felt to her as if someone had smacked an iron bar simultaneously against every bone she contained, then shoved a barbed harpoon through her and twisted it, knotting up her insides.