Wagers on the Plating

What price was a sensible gunner willing to wager on an unpaid bar tab?

Brannar wedged the heel of his mag-boot into the expansion joint between two overlapping nickel-iron scales, bracing against the rhythmic heave of the star-manta's dorsal plates. Out in the ink, two hundred kilometers past the exit of the Iron Shoals, Prince Haelmund's three heavy cruisers waited behind their web of kinetic suppression buoys. Between the cruisers and the manta's snout, three fast imperial picket corvettes tore through the vacuum at twelve thousand kilometers per hour, their nose-mounted laser designators painting scarlet lines across the beast's four-kilometer hide. If those scouts held their triangulation lock for another twenty seconds, the cruisers' prow rail-cannons would vaporize the beast and everyone riding it.

Brannar unlatched the heavy lightning lance from his shoulder rig.

"Velskr," Brannar said over the helmet channel, his jaw tight against his comm collar. "Stop admiring the scenery and bank five degrees port. The lead picket is angling for a clean bead on our midsection."

Fifty meters ahead, perched on the highest crest of the dorsal nerve cluster, Velskr hauled back on the glowing superconducting reins. The harness groaned under eighty tons of tension. Velskr did not flinch; his faceplate caught the cold glare of the cruisers' running lights, and his grin showed clear through the glass.

"She doesn't like turning toward the buoys, Brannar!" Velskr shouted back, static crackling across the open frequency. "The field smells like dead copper to her! Take their eyes out and I'll find us a seam!"

"Ten marks says you clip a buoy before I finish cycling the coils," Brannar muttered.

"Put down twenty," Velskr shot back. "And stop wasting charge on small talk."

Brannar knelt against the plating. The manta shuddered beneath him, an eight-second muscular expansion that drew solar radiation through its lateral gills and sent a ripple of magnetic distortion across the hull plates. In a vacuum, a sniper had no windage to calculate, but a four-kilometer bio-mechanical beast generated its own local gravity shears. A stray electromagnetic pulse from the beast's cooling spiracles could warp an unshielded plasma bolt by thirty yards over a ten-kilometer run.

Brannar did not fire unshielded bolts.

He drove the lance's heavy tungsten grounding spike deep into an inactive neural sensory socket. The socket accepted the cold alloy with a dull metallic click, and the lance's copper capacitor bank began drawing current directly from the manta's subterranean bio-reactors. A string of pale green diodes flashed across Brannar's visor display, syncing the weapon's optical rangefinder with his retina.

Above them, six silver House Valdemar drones held formation in an intercept hexagon. Their micro-thrusters flared in unison as the lead imperial scout opened fire with twin rotary cannons. A cloud of hyper-velocity flak chewed across the vacuum. Two Valdemar drones darted into the stream, their deflector shields flaring violently as they absorbed the kinetic hail. Metal fragments ricocheted off the manta's scales, pinging like ball bearings against an anvil.

"Torvund," Brannar said, adjusting the elevation dial on his lance's rear stock. "Your father's toys are taking a beating up here. Tell them to angle their deflectors thirty degrees retrograde or their heat sinks will melt before the second pass."

From the skiff hitched to the manta's lateral collar, Torvund's cultivated accent cut cleanly through the background hum. "House Valdemar escorts are engineered to endure protracted skirmishes, gunner. However, I have adjusted their dispersion pattern to minimize thermal saturation. Do endeavor to shoot straight; replacing their sacrificial plates is a remarkably expensive proposition."

"I'll send the invoice to your brother," Brannar said.

The lead picket corvette closed the gap to forty kilometers, banking hard to bring its dorsal torpedo tubes to bear. The ship was a sharp wedge of matte-black armor, venting blue hydrazine bursts from its attitude thrusters as it aligned its targeting laser with the manta's primary engine vents.

Brannar tracked the corvette's prow in his crosshairs. He waited through the heave of the biometal plate beneath his boots, counting down the manta's breathing cycle. Four seconds. Five. At the seventh second, the dorsal armor contracted, flattening out into a steady, rigid plane.

Brannar pulled the primary sear.

The lance bucked against his shoulder with a solid kinetic thump. A spear of coherent cerulean lightning lanced across the void, burning a straight ultraviolet track through the scattered propellant gas. The arc did not strike the corvette's armored nose. Brannar had aimed two meters astern of the command cockpit, right where the port attitude-control manifold fed fuel into the main thruster bell.

The lightning discharge severed the manifold cleanly. High-pressure propellant erupted from the ruptured line, turning into an expanding cloud of white frost that instantly ignited under the engine exhaust. The asymmetric thrust threw the corvette into an uncontrolled tumble, its laser designator spinning wildly across the stars as the ship spiraled outward into the Iron Shoals debris fringe.

"First runner down," Brannar said, working the manual bolt to vent the spent ionization cartridge. A wisp of superheated vapor escaped into the vacuum and vanished. "Odds on our immediate vaporization just dropped to four to one, Velskr. You owe me twenty marks."

"Put it on my tab at the Anchor Ring!" Velskr called out, leaning hard against the left rein as the manta answered the helm, banking its enormous starboard wing to shield the crew from the cruiser line. "Second one is diving from high dorsal!"

Brannar looked up through his visor's magnified reticle.

The second imperial corvette had split off from the formation, utilizing the carcass of an ancient shattered communications satellite as cover. It emerged from behind the tumbling solar panels at ten thousand kilometers per hour, nose cannons spitting tungsten darts in short, vicious bursts. Kinetic rounds chipped divots from the manta's scales ten yards to Brannar's left, showering his armored suit with pulverized nickel dust.

Brannar did not shift his boots. He tracked the diving ship, calculating its angular velocity against the manta's rolling turn. The corvette wove through erratic corkscrews, maneuvering to foil automated targeting computers.

Unfortunately for the pilot, Brannar did not use an automated computer.

He leaned his shoulder into the lance's padded cheek rest, leading the dive by two full hull lengths. He accounted for the gravitational backwash of the manta's trailing tail, waited for the crest of the respiratory wave, and squeezed the secondary trigger.

The second bolt of lightning split the darkness. It took the diving corvette squarely across its lower sensor blister, ripping through the primary avionics spine. The warship's guidance grid went dark in an instant. Deprived of steering authority, the corvette skimmed across the star-manta's outer wingtip, clipping a jagged armor ridge before careening helplessly into the empty black.

On Brannar's visor, the crimson fleet-triangulation locks from Prince Haelmund's heavy cruisers flickered, broke, and dissolved into amber search sweeps. The cruisers' main rail-cannons fell silent, robbed of their precision telemetry.

"Spotter grid shattered," Brannar reported, feeling the heavy hum of the lance begin to sputter. "We bought ourselves ninety seconds before the battlecruisers recalibrate their wide-aperture arrays."

"Good shooting, gunner!" Velskr's laugh was sharp and reckless over the line. "I'll double your bounty when we clear the gate!"

"Don't celebrate yet," Brannar said, looking toward the third picket.

The surviving scout corvette, trailing black exhaust from a grazed stabilizer, had abandoned its firing run. Its pilot did not retreat toward the heavy cruisers. Instead, the small warship inverted its thrusters, locked its main afterburners into a continuous emergency burn, and aimed its armored prow straight down the centerline of the manta's head.

The telemetry vector flashed scarlet across Brannar's heads-up display. The imperial pilot was not trying to paint a target. He was burning thirty thousand pounds of armored alloy directly into the manta's unshielded left sensory eye at maximum acceleration.

Brannar dropped his crosshairs onto the descending wedge and pulled the trigger.

The lance gave a dull, hollow metallic click.

On the stock, the capacitor readout glowed a stubborn, flashing red. The recharge countdown blinked at twenty-eight seconds. The charging coils were completely dry.

The suicide burn closed the distance: six kilometers, five kilometers, four. The corvette's prow glowed white-hot as its auxiliary burners pushed the engine past thermal limits.

Brannar stood up straight on the nickel-iron scales, resting the empty barrel of the lance against his hip. He clicked the crew frequency directly over to the skiff.

"Capacitors are flat, Torvund," Brannar said, his voice level in the cold silence of the channel. "The payout on this beast surviving the next ten seconds just hit zero. Tell me your family clearance works on suicide runs, or we're all settling our accounts in the void."