The Terra Nova shuddered and slapped herself sideways, lumbering away from the chaff can.
“Safe distance—mark!” the helm officer called. “Helm, correct attitude and bring us to CORE-parallel-negative course—NOW!”
The ship lurched harder, twisting end-over-end to come about, and Dianne could feel the vibration of the att jets. The jets cut, and then came another slap from the opposite side as the helm officer killed the rotation. “On attitude,” he called. “Stand by for main-engine throttle-up.”
The acceleration caught at Dianne, shoving her down into her command chair. Caught at her, and did not let go. A dull roar seemed to come up from nowhere as the engines’ shuddering vibration began to fill the ship.
“Point five gees,” the helm officer said, shouting to be heard over the increasing roar of the engines. “One gee. One point five. Two gees. Two point five. Three. Three point one. Safety limit at three point two gravities.”
“Give us some leeway,” Dianne shouted into her headset, watching the numbers on the tactical screen. “Throttle back to three point zero.”
“Throttling back, three-zero.”
“Intercept on chaff cloud in fifteen seconds,” Gerald called. “We’re going to take some impacts.”
That was an understatement. The ship was going to plow into any number of the tiny, insubstantial bits of chaff, moving at thousands of kilometers an hour relative to the ship. The Terra Nova’s micrometeoroid shielding had been designed to protect the craft for a hundred-year trip between the stars. It would be able to take the strikes, but it was going to be a rough ride for all of that.
“Decoys running, armed and active!” the Defense Officer called out. “Second chaff can showing good telemetry and ready to blow as programmed.”
There was a sudden new vibration and the ship seemed to lurch just a bit, as if had run into something—as indeed it had. They were in the chaff, and taking strikes on the hull.
“All stop on engines,” Dianne called. The noise of the engines vanished, and the great weight lifted—the first moment she was even aware that it had been pressing down on her. Now they could hear the clittering patter of the chaff impacts on the hull, echoing through the ship’s interior.
Dianne checked her radar display screen, now a perfect fog of murky white, the chaff particles reflecting and backscattering the CORE’s radar pulses in all directions. The CORE had entered the chaff cloud itself by now, was passing through it on a course opposite to the Terra Nova’s and just a few kilometers away. But you could not tell that from the screen. It was impossible to get a radar fix on anything in that bright cloud.
And if they could not see the CORE, then the CORE could not see them. They were safe for the moment, barring accidental collision. For the moment. Never mind that. They had a fight to fight. “Tracking Officer, what have you got on visual and IR?”
“It’s a little murky, ma’am, but clear enough for our purposes.”
Dianne pulled up the visual image and was presented with a cloud of murk, filled with shimmering bits of blur, the millions of bits of chaff shining by reflected light as they tumbled through space, the camera shuddering and bouncing as its shielded housing took repeated hits from the chaff. In short, the imagery was a mess. Good thing the Tracking Officer could make sense of it, because she couldn’t.
“The CORE just went right past us,” the Tracking Officer said. “No sign that it spotted us at all.”
“Second chaff should be blowing now,” the Defense Officer called out.
“Good. That will keep the damned thing blinded longer. Just a few seconds longer,” Dianne said. Of course, she was damned near close to blind herself at the moment. She struggled to make sense of the visual display.
“Hamato, can you clean this imagery up a little? I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“What? Oh, ah, ma’am, you must have punched up the raw data image. Pull up the NVIRTH screen.”
“NVIRTH being what?” Gerald asked.
“Noiseless Visual-Infra-Red Tactical Hybrid,” Hamato said. “It subtracts the noise elements out of the visual and IR, pulls in the course projections from tactical and corrects—”
“Shut up, Hamato,” Dianne said. Some of these kids got too involved with the tricks the hardware could do. Results were what mattered. She punched up the NVIRTH channel and was rewarded with a crystal-clear display, the CORE and the decoys neatly labeled. The CORE was moving at terrifying speed, the decoys rushing about the sky in all directions, just the way they had for Cargo 43.
Dianne leaned in and stared at the screen, holding her breath, knowing it was bare seconds now. Either it would work, and they would live, or it would fail, and the CORE skymountain, the CORE hunter-killer asteroid, would kill them.
“Decoys switching from evasive to homing mode,” Reed called out, but Dianne could see that, too. They were turning, coming about, moving in on the CORE instead of running away.
The CORE had to go for the decoys. If it understood in time, it could escape, get away, turn and search for the Terra Nova just as the ship came out the other side of the chaff cloud. And then they were all dead.
The CORE came out of the first chaff cloud and moved straight on, deep into the second cloud. Maybe it was moving so fast it had no chance to react to the brief moment of clear skies. Damnation, that thing was moving fast! It was already out of the second cloud now. At best, two or three seconds to traverse it. Would that be enough? Would it confuse the CORE just enough that it would not think to look back the way it had come?
“CORE maneuvering! Diving down, negative y axis,” Hamato called out, but Dianne could see it too. Turning, down hard about, almost at right angles, aiming toward the rearmost decoy, the one where Cargo 43 had been.
Yes. Yes. They had won! Unless the blast was not powerful enough. Unless a CORE could take even that much punishment—
“CORE closing on Decoy Seven. Collision imminent—”
And the screen vanished in a flare of brightness, a dazzling glare. The proximity bomb in Decoy Seven detonated at the programmed ten meters from its target, and CORE 219 flew straight into a fusion explosion, a blare of stellar power tearing a hole in the middle of the darkness.
The CORE was lost to sight, stopped almost dead in its tracks by the force of the blast, but still moving slowly forward, into the heart of the explosion, into the furnace.
The other decoys moved in, accelerating toward the explosion, diving for the CORE.
“We are approaching edge of chaff cloud,” Hamato said.
With the suddenness of someone snapping on a light, the Terra Nova came out of the chaff cloud, rushing away, quickly moving far enough off to get a clear line of sight on the death of the CORE.
For death it was. Now there could be no doubt.
Someone slapped a switch, and threw the imagery from the hi-res cameras onto the main screen, zoomed in on the fast-receding end of the battle. Another explosion, and another, and another, flared in the sky, blinding the screen. Then, out of the glare, tumbling end over end, lumbering through the darkness, the CORE emerged from the fireball.
Another decoy homed it, slammed into its target, and the darkness blazed again. The CORE cracked open, splitting along its long axis. A huge chunk of material sheared off, and a something squirmed free, a great grey oblong shape, surrounded by a cloud of lesser shapes— all of them, the big one and the small ones, shuddering, twitching, spasming in their death throes.