Aurora Burning (The Aurora Cycle #2)(120)

Fin shrieks as Zila slams on our thrusters, pinwheeling away from a spray of railgun fire. A missile explodes soundlessly off our wing, another right in front of us, the inertial dampeners that provide the gravity around our little ship struggling to compensate as Zila throws us into a spiraling dive. Glancing at our scopes, I realize we’ve picked up pursuers—TDF fighters, snub-nosed and angry-looking. I can’t blame them for shooting at us—we’re wearing Unbroken colors, after all. But still …

“Four bad guys coming in fast on our bow,” I report.

“Stern!” Fin winces as another missile explodes. “That’s the stern, Scar!”

“Dammit, I told you I don’t know anything about spaceships!” I shout. “They’re on our ass, okay? Four very shooty ships on our very shapely asses, Zila!”

“I see them,” Zila replies. “Hold on.”

“Shapely asses?” Fin mutters.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed, de Seel.”

We weave and roll through the chaos, the black outside us lit up like fireworks on Federation Day. And Zila is putting on an impressive show, no doubt, but she’s not an expert pilot by any stretch, and even with auto-guidance assisting her, I wonder how long all this can go on. Outside our forward blastscreens, the black is red with fire and blood. Earth is throwing everything it can at the Syldrathi fleet, but these Syldrathi are Unbroken. Trained every moment of their lives for battle. Fanatically loyal to the psychopath leading them—so much so that they were willing to sit back and applaud as he destroyed their damn sun.

And my heart is slowly sinking in my chest, because the thing of it is, we’re part of a moving battle here. Charging right toward the heart of the Terran solar system. We’re already past the Kuiper Belt, closing fast on Neptune. And I don’t know what the range on the Weapon is, but every minute that goes by, the Unbroken fleet draws closer to my homeworld and the sun it orbits.

The sun they’re going to destroy.

The Weapon flickers again, lit from within, as if there’s a heart made of pure light pulsing inside it. The glow comes from the rear of the ship, but the whole Weapon responds, lighting up like a length of crystalline optical cable.

“Why is it doing that?” Fin whispers.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“It’s kinda scary—”

I gasp as I’m slammed back in my chair, Zila performing a barrel roll that sends us spiraling up and between two Syldrathi cruisers. The TDF fighters on our tail have picked up pursuers of their own, and two of them break off to engage. But two are still back there, chasing us like we stole their lunch money.

The Weapon pulses again. If I squint at it, the light seems to be gathering at one end. Those strange, abstract shapes at the bow (Ha! See, I can be taught!) look like they’re glowing brighter with every pulse.

“We need an alternative strategy,” Zila declares, twisting us through the firestorm.

“You mean a Plan B?” I ask her.

She glances over her shoulder and nods. “And we need it now.”

“What makes you so sure?” I ask.

“I am not. But the Eshvaren Weapon is clearly accumulating power.”

“Zila, we have eyes,” Fin says. “But that doesn’t—”

“Perhaps your eyes noticed the positions of the Unbroken vessels?” she asks. “The way their formation is shifting?”

A near-miss missile blast rocks us, and I nearly swallow my tongue. But squinting at the holo displays, the readouts from our tactical computer, I realize …

“The Unbroken fleet is moving out of its way.”

“They have been vacating the Weapon’s forward firing arc for the past three minutes,” Zila reports. “They clearly know it is preparing to fire.”

“Shit,” I breathe.

I look at our scopes, the holo displays of our little solar system. The gas giants of Neptune and Uranus. Saturn with its beautiful rings of ice, Jupiter with its great red storm, which has been raging for the past seven hundred years. Beyond the asteroid belt is Earth’s first planetary colony—the red orb of Mars. Then on to our pale blue dot, Earth, the planet where I grew up, my home, my world. Past that, scorching Venus, where it’s so hot the skies rain molten lead. Last of all, Mercury. And at the center of it, of all of this, these billions of lives, this history, this civilization, a small yellow sun. The star at the heart of my solar system.

The star Caersan is going to slay.

“What can we do?” I ask. “How can we stop it?”

“This vessel lacks sufficient firepower to damage the Weapon,” Zila says. “But we are flying Unbroken colors. We can get close to it.”

Fin blinks. “How close?”

Zila glances at him, twists her controls. “Very close.”

The Weapon pulses again. The light gathering, twisting inside it. It’d be beautiful if it weren’t so awful. An ending, all the colors of the rainbow.

“You mean ram it,” I breathe.

“This ship weighs over two hundred tons,” she says. “It is capable of achieving six-factor velocity with sufficient acceleration time. If we collide with the Weapon at top speed, we will impact with force equivalent to several high-yield thermonuclear devices.”

“But we can’t destroy the Weapon,” I frown. “We need it to beat the Ra’haam.”