Dead Reckoning

The cloud of fighters pulled away from the Nightstalker. Every second two or three would blink out of normal space-time.

"We only have a few minutes!" cried Jolt. "Thresher -- can we jump?"

"You don't want to follow them, do you?" The First Mate was alarmed.

Thresher checked his displays. "Hyperdrives are online, charge at 80 percent -- ready when you are."

Jolt turned to the First Mate. "No, following them would be suicide. We're going to acquire their hyper-vector!"

Turning back to look at The Eye, Jolt continued giving orders. "Eye -- take helm control. Pure evasive maneuvers, we're just taking pictures."

"I see." The First Mate paused and considered. "That's actually a good idea. We can narrow down the region of space they might re-appear. I'll paint them with our targeting computer -- then we can crunch the data." He took position on the weapons console.

The Nightstalker peeled away from normal space, and entered hyperspace.

It was surrounded by a bubble of Euclidian 3-space, and moving in a region with at least 7 macroscopic dimensions. The ship's interocciter scanned the convoluted manifolds of hyperdimensional regions of equilibrium of gravitiational potentials, where similar bubbles enclosing the fleeing fighters could exist.

"Now entering the first valence. I have a drive signature! Power at 77%." Thresher monitored the ship's systems on his console.

Two bubbles of Euclidian space met and merged. The fighter blinked into and out of existence in front of the Nightstalker as the starship briefly matched the fighter's frame of reference.

"We got a lock-on! Keep going, we don't know if they're all going the same place!" The First Mate was excited.

"That was a good one. I have a full interocciter scan of the vessel." Thresher watched the data pump along a schematic progress bar from the front sensor array to the main computers.

Up left counter-clockwise an elongated bubble untwirled over a local vortex, surrounding a pair of fighters flying on the buddy system.

Shocked to see Corporate corvette spin into their context, the rear pilot, Bob-Luke, radioed his companion, Dworkin.

"Whoa! Look at that!"

Dworkin turned a key in his cramped cockpit and fumbled to enter a four-digit code on a small key-pad taped to the dashboard of his fighter. A cyan light lit by a display labelled "WARHEADS ARMED."

"Got a shot -- I'm taking it!" Dworkin's trigger finger twitched on the fighter's yoke.

Two missles steamed from the racks beneath the fighter's stubby wings. The flight path to the Nightstalker was short and straight, and the warheads detonated just behind the corvette.

A tiny nuclear charge detonated, and the pulse of radiation and neutron flux struck a thick layer of cobalt alloy, vaporizing it and transmuting the metal into a souce of bio-toxic gamma radiation. The explosion of super-heated plasma was not as brisant as a proper warhead for space combat, but the expanding wave of irradiated cobalt held on for considerably longer before decaying.

The idea behind a bug bomb is not to create a huge crater, but to spread a powerful yet short-lived gamma emitter over as broad an area as possible in on a planet with an atmosphere. In space, the plasma cloud spread and cooled quickly, attenuating the effect of the nuclear charge.

The shock waves impacted the Nightstalker, shaking the hull. A frost-like layer of radioactive cobalt alloy cooled and condensed onto the hull of the corvette, flash-frozen by the ship's shields.

"Dworkin? Are you all right?" Bob-Luke radioed his companion.

Dworkin smiled as the NIghtstalker struggled to stay in hyperspace. "Got the bastards! You go, farm boy! Make your momma proud."

"I ain't Number Seven, ma'am. Not even close." The young man sounded scared.

"Yes, you are, boy. You're the one..." Dworkin dropped out of hyperspace, leaving her wingman to continue to the target.

On the bridge of the Nightstalker, panic reigned. Thresher checked his displays.

"The data feed made it to the main computer before the rads scrambled our sensors. What a mess!" Thresher was secretly dreading the clean-up action that would come next. While he was largely radiation-proof, the clean-up and disposal protocols were arduous; it was going to be a very long extra-vehicular activity before their ship could return to settled space.

Jolt scowled as she sunk into the captain's chair. "Dammit, we've been slimed."

On the surface of Suburbia Prime, a small figure entered the courtyard of a hurriedly abandoned tent city. She looked down at her jacket.

She was wearing her M-Seven badge. She was Number Six. If anyone were still keeping lookout here, in this desolate former place of temporary industry, they might hold her for a friend and ally.

Jinx Bubastis proceeded into the courtyard, and passed by a still-smoldering firepit. Clothing and papers were blowing in the wind. A thread-bare baby doll lay in the dusty debris. Jinx looked at it, and felt a swell of memory.

She had been feeling strange since her encounter with Peter. Her powers were vastly reduced -- most of her abilities were locked up in the crude parody of the material world he had constructed in her mind. She was having difficulty concentrating, and suspected that Peter was having similar problems.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would banish the thoughts from her mind, but now her mind was not entirely her own, and she did not have the strength to push her thoughts and feelings away.

She looked at the doll, and remembered another camp, a long way from here. Her father had left an hour ago, gone to find wood for the cooking fire. She was playing with her battered doll when she heard a young hunter rushing into the camp. She threw the doll down into the dust, much like the one she was looking at now.

She did not understand what he was yelling. Behind him, two men carried a slumping form in a blanket.

She remembered being hungry, and followed them into the central clearing, hoping to get a slice of tongue from the hunters' kill. As she wobbled towards them on her little girl legs, they unwrapped the blanket.

It was not a carcass, but a corpse. Her father's chest had been torn open by shrapnel. Her hunger turned suddenly to horror, as she contemplated eating his tongue.

From inside her mind, Peter's voice begged quietly, "Make it stop. Make it stop..."

She pushed the memory away, and with it the protests of her prisoner. "Suck it up, vat-meat." The rage and shame from the memory gave her a renewed sense of focus.

Now she felt a strange sort of curiousity, a nervous, jittery drive to know. She remembered feelings like this, when she was studying sorcery, but this was different -- a heartfelt yearning for things to make sense, a joy in understanding. It was a strangely intoxicating and pleasant feeling.

She triggered the elevator to the underground warehouse. The lights went on, illuminating containers in neat rows. She opened one of them, and she felt a wave of excitement. Her incuriousity about her colleagues' plans seemed strange to her now.

Approaching the cubical console, she reached for the back and flipped the latches with an unfamiliar movement that was suddenly second nature to her. Detaching the storage module from the internal bus, she held it in her hand and smiled.

Soon, they would know for sure.