Chapter 17:
The Villainess of Caerleon
When I saw Hadrian’s cyan surface again, I was reminded that I hadn’t toured the planet since I was a child. Everything else I knew about the fortress world was through video, curated lessons at the academy, and my father’s stories. The spectacle of seeing Hadrian again almost made me forget we were stepping into a warzone.
Emiko sensed danger and threw Nightwing to port.
“Shields to maximum!” Diane bellowed.
Three separate tracers bolted past the windows like flashes of lightning. Heat washed over Nightwing’s shimmering shields. Diane punched her controls and Nightwing slipped back into subspace.
“Captain,” I yelled. “Those were Phalanx systems.”
“I know. They’re subspace capable,” Diane growled. “Emiko, we need positions on the Phalanxes before they reload.”
“Estimated coordinates are here, here, and here,” Emiko tapped her terminal. “But there’s no guarantee that there aren’t more of them out there.”
A chill crept up my spine. I could feel Emiko’s anxiety rise too. Our intuitions aligned on the same possibility. We both entered a rapid fire evasive sequence.
A tungsten round from a fourth Phalanx tore through the walls of the subspace tunnel right as Nightwing dove and deactivated its Lemmings-Hyder engine.
Back in normal space, Hadrian had come alive. Battleships filled the windows from left to right. Orbital defense platforms rose from geosynchronous orbit. Hadrian itself lit up. Blue luminescent lights dotted the surface and expanded into a planet-wide shield.
Diane’s terminal began to ring.
“We’re getting hailed,” Diane murmured. “It’s Morgan.”
Almost everyone thought the same follow up question.
“Should we decelerate?”
Except for me.
“Negative,” I said. “It’s one of her tricks. She’ll shoot us the moment we’ve stopped. We should go after the Phalanxes like we planned.”
“Should I let her know we’re busy then?” Diane asked.
I thought about it for a second.
“No. Take her call.”
“I hate multitasking,” Diane moaned and answered her terminal.
Befitting of the Witch of Hadrian, Morgan Pendragon had not aged since I had last seen her at one of Arthur’s birthday parties. I could have sworn she wore the same outfit as that day too, a satin dress threaded with silver and jade. Her lips were arranged with an eternal leer, flanked by glossy dark tresses that curled down to her shoulders.
“So, the prodigal daughter returns,” Morgan announced. “And I hear another one is aboard.”
“Keep her talking,” I said. “Emiko, would this routine work?”
“We need to modify the approach vector. It’s too linear,” Emiko replied.
“I’m sorry,” Diane said. “Are you referring to me? I’m afraid we haven’t met.”
“Of course not,” Morgan laughed back. “I’m obviously referring to Hadrian’s prodigal child, Project Number N73215, designation Nightwing. How fascinating. She was supposed to have been destroyed.”
Nightwing banked hard to its starboard side, narrowly predicting the trajectory of another battery of faster than light ferrous rounds.
“Well, if you want to see your baby in one piece, up close,” Diane winced, “maybe hold your fire?”
“Is that why she’s still cruising about?” Morgan asked. “Clever. It was Lady Greymoor’s idea, then? How auspicious that I receive my brother’s fiance on the same day that Nightwing returns to us.”
“Ex-fiance,” Diane corrected.
“So the rumors are true?” Morgan looked genuinely surprised. “I assumed it was another one of Arthur’s capricious tantrums, of which there are many.”
I couldn’t agree more. If she wasn’t trying to kill us, I would have thanked Morgan for the solidarity. Instead, I passed another set of firing solutions to Emiko.
“Looks good,” Emiko whispered. “Captain, we're ready.”
“Maybe you’d like to sit down and talk to us then,” Diane said. “Instead of shooting at us in the middle of space.”
“Ha!” Morgan laughed. “You did not come here to sit and have tea. Do you think the eyes of Hadrian are blind? I can see ships circling the system, the mark of that time worn vessel. Circe is her name. You are here to steal from me. But do I own something so valuable that the Pirate King is risking to show his face in Caerleon space? I admit I’m a tad curious. But I will not suffer unworthy guests, Nightwing. Prove that you deserve a seat at my table or die trying.”
“I guess that’s our cue,” Diane murmured. “Punch it.”
Nightwing rolled over a barrage of missile fire. The bellies of several destroyers radiated with plasma. But we weren’t staying around to watch the fireworks. Nightwing tunneled back into subspace and pitched below another round of tungsten waiting for us there.
“Emiko, you have the gun,” Diane said. “Release the safeties.”
But Emiko didn’t have the capacity. I could feel pain stretching from her mind. She channeled all her energy, and what excess capacity she could snatch from us, into managing the hundreds of deadly projectiles spiraling towards our corvette.
“You take it,” Emiko winced at me.
“Taking the gun” meant something different than it did on the ground. Some people imagined it visually, not so different from a game, with a blood red reticle displayed on your terminal over a frontal view of your ship’s windows. You lined up your crosshairs, maybe you led your target if it was moving, and pulled the trigger.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Firing a weapon in space was not for gun slinging morons who signed up for imperial basic thinking they’ll shoot from the hip and score a lucky kill. It required clean calculus, because if you fired a weapon in space, it moved until it hit something or reached the end of the universe. Never forget the lessons of the infamous Captain Prawn, who fired fusion missiles at his target, missed, jumped to subspace, and arrived at his destination to see his own missiles sparkling outside his window.
Rows of data scrolled across my terminal. Our subspace coordinates, exit vector, the approximate distance to the target, any expected gravitational force, everything that went into computing a firing solution. “Taking the gun” meant the frustrating work of double checking the arithmetic, coarse alignment, calibrated angles around the longitudinal axis, and praying that the instrumentation aboard your ship didn’t fuck up the solution. Then, and only then, did you pull the trigger.
Nightwing decelerated. The first Phalanx was close enough that we could see it from our window. The majority of the ship consisted of one massive barrel. The terminal flashed complete and I palmed the display to fire.
It felt smooth. No recoil. An explosive round, magnetized and accelerated out of Nightwing’s underside weapon, crashed into the Phalanx’s firing chamber. The shaft cracked and buckled and we watched the cinders vent into darkness as we cruised past.
The second Phalanx was on the far side of the local moon. Nightwing slipped through another barrage of fusion missiles and pulsing white lasers and reappeared on the moon’s dark side.
But Morgan wasn’t going to let us pick off her defenses one by one. Three high speed frigates flanked us from the moon’s surface as we slingshot around. The ion cannons that lined on their upper decks glowed bright, and Nightwing’s shields were struck with tight concentrated beams.
“That’s gonna blow the circuits,” Vladimir cried.
“I can contain the damage,” Stephen said. “I’m powering down the shield cells and locking the valves that flow to the others. You have no shields until I can reboot.”
“Do it,” Diane barked. “Stay on target, Emiko. Elaine.”
The frigates didn’t give up the chase. Subspace tunnels shimmered around the second Phalanx as Morgan drew her other forces to its defense. Warheads detonated on our starboard side and scorched the wing. Nightwing pushed through smoke and drifting debris while I watched Emiko furiously work to alter our entry trajectory. Diane shook her head.
“Too much directional thinking, Emiko,” she said. “You can always bluff.”
Emiko took a deep breath, then wiped her coordinates off her terminal. She passed her thoughts to me. I understood. Trickery. Deceit. These were the words stamped throughout her mind.
Nightwing pitched up and arced over the second Phalanx. It was the safest entry angle with every one of Morgan’s ships arriving at the Phalanx’s bow. When Nightwing crested over the top of the Phalanx, we dove in, and Morgan reacted as suspected. The Phalanx’s primary gun swung towards us the moment we committed to the attack.
Nightwing activated its Lemmings-Hyder engine and slipped past the chaos and jumped half a system to the position of the third Phalanx. To almost anyone else, this hackneyed performance would have looked clever. We threw in a complicated maneuver, a slingshot around the moon, and made a precise subspace jump at the second the enemy thought they had caught us pincered.
But Morgan was not the Witch of Hadrian for nothing. Cheap parlor tricks would never impress her. The other half of her fleet waited for us at our exit point, positioned in spirals that funneled towards our target. The hollow metal conduit of the Phalanx stared at us, dared us to approach.
Emiko and Diane welcomed the challenge. Nightwing accelerated. Morgan’s ships closed in. They did not fire a shot. They were gifting that honor to the Phalanx, powering up and reloading as we charged in a straight line. A thread from Emiko’s thoughts mingled with mine.
“Fire when they do,” she said.
I took a deep breath and drifted my hands over the terminal, double, triple checking a firing solution that essentially amounted to shooting in a straight line.
Then, the Phalanx flashed, and I triggered the railgun.
I expected Nightwing to barrel away or make a slight evasive adjustment, but she did none of the sort. She stayed her course. The witch had expected Nightwing to make a last second subspace maneuver. When the Phalanx fired, its tungsten round activated its Lemmings-Hyder drive to catch us in the middle of our escape.
We remained in normal space. Nightwing’s railgun smashed into the Phalanx and splintered its main gun down the center. We cruised past the wreckage as Morgan’s remaining ships slowed and gave up the chase. A beep registered on Diane’s terminal.
“It’s her,” she muttered.
“We can decelerate this time,” I said before anyone thought the question twice. “We passed the test.”
Morgan’s portrait flashed at the head of the bridge. She looked like she was pretending to appear pleased.
“How impressive,” she said. “Welcome to Hadrian.”
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