George Martin - Aces High

"Yes." Starshine stroked his heroic jaw. "Perhaps I shall compose a poem, about the moral dilemma I face-"

"Hadn't you better go face the asteroid first?" Tach almost screamed.

Starshine scowled like Zeus caught by Hera, but he said, "I suppose so."

The lock dilated. "Farewell," Tach said. "Thank you." He stepped through.

As the outer lock cycled open, Baby transmitted the view from outside very square centimeter of her skin was photosensitive at need-to Tach's mind. Starshine floated out into vacuum, turned his face into the full glare of the sun, now more or less astern, and appeared to take a deep breath. Then he pushed off from the ship, arms and body straightened to a line, and he became a single brilliant yellow beam bisecting eternal night.

"Photon transformation," Tach said, impressed. "Like the tachyon transformation of our ghostdrive, but allowing only lightspeed. Incredible." For a moment he felt almost proud of the wild card.

He shook the sensation off. "I'm going to find it hard," he remarked, "to like that one."

He's sure a prick. I liked the Captain ever so much better.. Tis, they're coming.

Floating, timeless. Pure release, nonexistence/coexistence with all the universe. The final consummation: satori in a laser beam.

But duration must be. Resolution, downward to ego. To matter.

The asteroid awaited. An unlovely lumpish mass of slag, seeming to fall toward Starshine, though his line of sight ran perpendicular to its path.

He rubbed his jaw and frowned. He had a lot more to say to that alien doctor, about the evil his kind had brought the world, about his own culpability in luring that pathetic burnout Trips into wild dangers. But it would have to wait; time passed.

He wondered how much time he had. From the memories he shared with Mark and the rest, he knew the drug lasted an hour. He hoped he could do what had to be done in that time.

He held out a hand. A beam of light leapt from it to Tezcatlipoca's pockmarked surface, dazzling white-hot. A circle of rock raced the spectrum and boiled from the surface in a glowing jet.

He was fabulously strong. But all his strength would not divert the evil mass. Nor did he have the power to destroy the rock. What he could do was use his sunbeam to heat a spot on its flank, so that the stuff of the asteroid flared away like a rocket exhaust at right angles to its orbit. Even now, a million miles from Earth, a tiny deflection would make all the difference.

But even the tiniest deviation in the asteroid's course would require fantastic amounts of energy. And an unknown amount of time.

By increments Starshine increased his output. He felt alive, and huge, and full of power; he could not fail, here before the holy Sun's naked eye, with her energy to sustain him.

At stake was a planet, his planet, Earth, green and gravid.

And, incidentally, his own life, and that of Mark Meadows and the other entities whose existence was somehow locked in his.

At detection's instant Tach knew Hellcat's deadliest weapon was out. The coherent tachyns of her ghost lance would have strewn Baby's component atoms-and his-across a dozen dimensions in an attosecond if it still functioned, and with Baby's ghostdrive gland had also gone her tachyon sense, so they would have had no warning. But Tach gambled that the Swarm attack had disabled the tachyon beam. It would have been the Mother's most urgent target; the planetoid-beings feared the lance, even small ones such as Courser-class ships like Hellcat carried.

Zabb's ship was far from helpless, though. As Baby thrust on a course tangent to hers, crossing outsystem from the path Starshine had taken, a pulse of purple light flashed by to port. I was expecting that, Baby said smugly as she threw herself into an evasive dance, intricate as a minuet, which kept her crossing Hellcat's bows as the other vessel rounded on her.

Together they sent forth a probe, Tach directing Baby's greater raw psionic powei to scan the other craft. He sensed damage that brought bile to his throat, raw wounds with edges burned or withered gaping in Hellcat's flanks. She seeks our lives, he thought, but no faithful ship of Takis deserves the taint of swarmling contagion.

Before he could gain a sharper vision he was cut off by mental force like a guillotine blade. No matter; Baby had sensed enough to evaluate what capacity her rival still possessed. Still, he was surprised.

Spavined slut, consort of barges! Tach felt Hellcat's anger stab Baby like a spear. This jaundiced sun shall taste thee and thy weakling lord.

Brave talk, thou who cannot waddle fast enough to catch me!

Your mental powers have grown, cousin, he projected. A dry chuckle came into his mind. Adversity forces growth. You've come, Tisianne. I take it you found my emissaries on Earth?

Baby was reporting Hellcat's status: Tegument weakened in several sections; a lesion in her main drive organ… I have, thought Tach.

Rabdan was a fool. You've disposed of him? I perceive you have. And Durg? His death was clean, I trust.

He lives, cousin. With malice: He's transferred his loyalty to the groundling who bested him. Your former captive, Captain Trips.

White-hot anger spike: You lie! A moment. But no. Perhaps you begin to understand why I've taken the steps I have, then, Tis.

According to plan, Baby shaped a curving orbit on constant boost. Despite her best efforts Hellcat could not close the range. Her fire control had suffered as well; at this distance the overwhelming superiority of her firepower was cancelled by the more precise aim of Baby's single heavy laser-picking at her, forcing her to trade pursuit for evasion.

I understand you've betrayed our clan and our people, Tach thought.

It seems so, Tis. But consider: this virus you loosed on that hot, heavy world threatens our existence far more surely than the mindless Swarm.

The experiment was a success.

Therein lies the danger. These altered groundlings, these aces, aided you to escape against all our strength. Now you tell me a gangling weakling bested the deadliest bare-hand fighter Takis has produced. Do you not in this see the eclipse of our kind, Tisianne?

Perhaps the fall of the Psi Lords is overdue.

And you call me traitor. The thought felt more wearily amused than outraged.

You would've destroyed the entire species. Of course. They're groundlings.

Agony splashed Tach's brain like acid. He was thrown half out of bed as Baby's acceleration compensator slipped. Baby! Are you all right?

A grazing wound, Lord Tis. I'm fine. But there was a tentative note; she'd never been injured in battle before. He caressed her with a brief, healing mind-touch, drove fiercely at Zabb, So you made common cause with the filthy Swarm?

You've seen what they did to poor Hellcat. This Mother's encountered Takisians before, or shared plasm with another who had, and survived-which ought to tell you much, cousin mine. A pod seeded swarmlings in orbit on the far side of this adoptive world of yours, where they remained inert until we drifted in among them. Then they were upon us, with acid, quick-acting pathogens, and brute force.

We drove them off. Tach's mind filled with images stolen from Rabdan's, of battle in wavering light against amorphous beings whose touch might mean death by irreversible dissolution. Of swordblades glinting, and screams, and the most desperate defense of all, laser pistols flaring in the corridors while peristaltic spasms racked Hellcat's whole fabric. We lost four your old weapons-master among them. The next attack would have finished us. So I chose negotiation.

Violet eyes clenched shut. Sedjur.

After we repulsed the assault, Zabb continued, I managed to touch the swollen dimness that is the Mother's consciousness even as we tended our wounded and flushed the passageways with antibiotic emulsion, to impress on her that I wished to deal. She understood but vaguely; I believe she felt something akin to curiosity at my temerity, wanted to examine me at closer range. I traveled to her in a single lifeboat, passed within.