[You know,] Carcass' sardonic voice filled Roxi's mind as she desperately pulled a nearly relativistic jackknifing turn -- so intense that it pushed the life support of her few remaining organic bits to their upmost to keep her from stroking out -- that ended with the sixteen planet-cracker antimatter bomblettes on stabdrive capable strike fighter frames overshooting her location and plunging into the upper atmosphere of a bloated jovian. [I think the Voidbringers might have figured out what our plan is.]
The gas giant's atmosphere flared and trembled upwards -- a bulge nearly the size of a thousand Terras, reaching up and away from the planet towards Roxi's feet as she skidded through the void at a hyperbolic tangent compared to the rest of the solar system. With the bomblettes no longer behind her, she snapped her head up and glared at the
Bountiful Dawn
. The last of the wallowing super-freighters, with the final Iron Bomb nestled securely within her exposed hull, was currently burning as hard as she possibly could -- harder, actually. The crew had sacrificed their long term survival and short term agency by programming the fusion torch drive to ignore all programmed restrictions and put it into the harshest burn possible, before throwing themselves out of the airlock to drift through space.
On the one hand, it was a bad idea to drift through space in vac suits without pickup.
On the other hand, Roxi had to admire them. They'd looked at the fact that drifting through space in a solar system thronging with Voidbringer strike craft, stray kinetic weapons, and detonations like the one she had just evaded...was
still
better than sticking in a ship pulling a hundred Gs.
So they had just chucked themselves into space.
[Ya think?] Hugh muttered.
The first few Iron Bombs had been textbook deployments. The freighters had dropped from E-space into their chosen systems, flown in close to the supergiant stars that had been chosen for demolition. Then they had dropped the Bombs, turned, and burned hard enough to hit a safe jump point, then slipped back into E-space. Easy.
This one, though?
[We have a target lock! Munitions away!] K'iren said, and Roxi's shoulders opened as a pair of micro-muntions shot out, jinking and corkscrewing wildly. One was beamed out of the sky by the dorsal X-beam turret of the Voidbringer destroyer that was trying to keep up interdiction and fighter support. The other struck the destroyer and cracked it in half with a flare of blue-white light and a hissing spray of hard radiation. [And that's the last of our radioactives, we're down to pure kinetics and the Grazers.]
[I wouldn't use your left Grazer,] Heinlein said, quickly. [Remember?]
Yeah, I'm not about to forget the hole in my fucking palm, Clarksworld!
Roxi thought, seeing another flight of Voidbringer fighters banking down towards the unmanned
Bountiful Dawn
. She shot forward, accelerating away from the truly fascinating pyrotechnics that were happening on the gas giant behind her. Her tangent corrected itself, transforming from a wild ellipses, then a circle, then back into another hyperbolic line. But this time, it was lancing through where the Voidbringer fighters would be again in ten seconds.
The oblong black darts that were the Vidbringer's strike fighters didn't even try and swing around to engage her. They opened up with their nose mounted kinetics and their wing mounted X-beams. What passed for the
Dawn's
ablative armor bubbled and hissed across meters of the bulbous, beetle shaped hull sections, while sparks hissed and flashed along the dorsal spine of the ship. But the fighters had needed to pull their noses up at the last second -- to try and evade as Roxi shot between them, her right palm leading her corkscrewing motion.
The end result?
Six dead voidbringer fighters --
if I was counting, I'm sure the number would be quite impressive...
- and only light damage on the super-freighter. Of course, light damage added up. By now, several of the secondary fusion torches were down and the ship had gone from pulling hundreds of Gs to merely pulling dozens: Taking out a single engine on one side forced the ship's automation to shut down an engine on the other, to prevent listing.
How much longer?!
Roxi thought, desperately, as she saw the flicker-flash of four more E-space entries. Two carriers and...two goddamn battleships. Their spinal kinetics were already in-line with the
Dawn
, but they had entered into the system far enough to be out of hammerlock range. That meant that if they fired, the
Dawn
could have enough time to spot the incoming projectile and effect evasion -- all it would take would be adjusting their trajectory minutely for a few seconds and every bit of energy would be lost.
The battleships started fixing that by flaring their own torches on and the carriers started to help by launching wave after wave of fighters.
ETA!
Roxi thought, when her crew hadn't responded in a few moments. Her brain was running fast, and her simulated bridge was running even faster, but at the speeds that space combat took place at, especially with the energy and tech both she and the Voidbringers were throwing at one another, there was still only so much time to sit around gobsmacked.
[[Thirty seconds for the Dawn,]] Hugh said, quietly.
[Fifteen for hammerlock,] K'iren said.
Okay, then...
Roxi thought. She shot forward, ignoring the fighters.
[We have target lock and...incoming AM2s!]
I know, Hugh!
She thought.
Kay, do something about it.
[Oh, will harsh language work?] Despite her snark, K'iren already had a solution programmed. As Roxi darted ahead of the
Dawn
, her ankles opened and several kinetic darts with small thrusters attached launched from her. They shot away from the super-freighter, intersected the incoming antimatter tipped missiles, and then detonated themselves into shotgun sprays of fine particulates, which the antimatter missiles flew through when they were still significantly denser than vacuum. The armor ablated and the containment units were shattered into fragments -- turning each antimatter missile into a miniature star.
Roxi ignored it. She instead was looking at the super-freighter and Carcass, having intuited what she was thinking, threw up the structural diagrams. The big reason why she wasn't delivering the Iron Bombs herself was that starships...for all that they were incredibly useful and effective, had a scaling problem. Roxi had been given a great way to understand it, explained to her by Carcass during their training days back on Found -- before she had been Roxi.
How do thumbtacks work? They make the pressure of your weird mammal thumbs focus into a single point, pushing through the wall. Bizarre invention. Why not made something that doesn't damage the wall? Anyway, starships have the same problem. It's ameliorated by some clever design from the Pantheon -- a-grav and kinetic barriers working together to turn your immense strength applied in a small area into a wider area. But there are limits to that widening -- meaning in many tasks, a starship is simply too small.
If Roxi gripped the Iron Bomb and just threw it into the sun, what she'd do would...put her hands through the incredibly fragile housing and break the fucking thing. It'd hit the sun as a pile of scrap. But with the crew vacated and the ship shot to shit, the
Dawn
now could serve as one gigantic pile of scrap that she could do with as she wanted -- while containing and protecting the Iron Bomb in the webwork of a-grav corsets and kinetic barriers that had kept it secure against the maneuvering and evasion so far.
We'll reimburse them, right?
She thought as her palms punched into the front of the ramscoop's covering. She clenched her hands on what felt like thin tissue paper, wadded up and balled into her hands -- but in actually were several layers of thick hull plating, compacting together under her yellow and black fingers -- and then she shifted her arms, making an ungainly throwing motion as hard as she could. Her shoulders groaned and she felt the power requirements of the motion -- drawing not merely on the advanced metamaterials of her arm muscles, but in the various agrav field projectors and kinetic manipulators that were threaded through her upper torso, spine, and legs, all put to the same goal of propulsion by the most ancient means.
[Who the fuck cares?] K'iren asked as the super-freighter picked up just enough extra momentum to clear the final stretch of space between it and the surface of the supergiant.
[Actually, the surrounding frame will work better on the Iron Bomb -- extra protection from the blazing heat of the sun. Once it melts and the bomb triggers, it'll be closer to the core, means the supernova goes off bigger, harder and oh shit, run!] Hugh said, his voice becoming a panicked scream in the last bit.
Roxi was, currently, doing her damnedest. The battleships, hammerlock range being significantly further for her than for the wallowing behemoth of the
Dawn
, were still firing their petajoule kinetics on shotgun mode. It was more than a little annoying -- and that was the word that Roxi stuck to because 'terrifyingly random' and 'oh shit I might die' wasn't exactly what she wanted to think of right now. She kept jinking wildly, trying to avoid the focusing arrays of X-beams and grazers and impactors and everything else that the Voidbringers were chucking her way, while also getting her orbit closer and closer to the pining beacons of the
Dawn's
crew.
"Go on! Get out of here!" the captain -- a Frellin girl who couldn't be more than sixty eight, which (for Frellin) basically made her on par with a Terran teenager. "You have to get back to Found and join the fleet!"
"No offense, Captain Quirenren, fucking shut up!" Roxi snapped. Internally:
Okay, Car, you have approximately fifteen real world seconds to figure out how to save twelve Frellins in HESS-12s and two hours of air left.
[Ten, actually,] Carcass said, his voice soft.
Roxi realized that two of the beacons had flat-lined -- it looked like they'd either been too close to a radburst or unlucky with a kinetic projectile. She hissed quietly.
Damn it!
