Thrusting Toward the Cruisers

Could an assembly of scrap-iron coils and stolen graviton conduits hold together under forty gravities of downward acceleration, or would Velskr’s wild hands pull them all into atomized dust? Torvund gripped the vibrating control yoke of the hunter-skiff, locked against the star-manta’s obsidian dorsal ridge, watching the telemetry bars spike into scarlet alarm. He needed to keep the beast’s neural bridle from snapping across its dorsal spine before the three imperial cruisers closed the firing funnel.

Ahead in the hard vacuum, seventy yards along the beast’s glistening hide, Velskr stood braced against the rushing stellar wind. The void-rider had wedged his mag-boots into a furrow between two dermal armor plates, leaning his entire body weight backward against the twin grav-reins. Blue corona discharged from the reins' emitter rings, biting deep into the manta’s central sensory nerve cluster.

The four-kilometer leviathan groaned through its bio-luminescent skin, its sapphire light twisting toward an agitated violet. Its massive pectoral fins curled downward, beating against invisible gravitational ripples, dragging the entire mass into a perpendicular plunge toward the void below.

Having scrambled down from the dorsal scales into the skiff’s rear battery deck once his lance ran dry, Brannar crouched within Torvund’s peripheral view, venting a sharp rasp of disgust into the suit audio. The siege-gunner tapped the weapon's casing against the deck plating.

"Capacitors are barely clawing past twenty percent, and he's aiming for their keels," Brannar barked across the local suit comms. "Cruisers carry twin spinal mass-drivers along the topside ridge. Underneath, they only have short-range rotary flak. Smart choice, if we survive the dive."

"There is nothing remotely smart about steering an apex predator like a drunken dray cart," Torvund replied into his helmet microphone. The leather grips of the skiff's yoke trembled beneath his gauntlets as he countered the immense torque bleeding off the manta's spine. "Velskr handles a four-kilometer star-beast the way a trench laborer handles an entrenching spade. A delicate touch on the dorsal ganglion would yield twice the rudder authority with half the mechanical stress."

Velskr’s gravelly laugh crackled through the static-choked link. "Save the lecture on imperial horsemanship for port, Torvund! Feed the coils more juice or the spade is about to snap in half!"

A shrill tone screamed from the skiff’s avionics board. The starboard graviton coupler was running hot, its heat sinks glowing dull orange through the vented housing. The immense magnetic drag produced by Velskr’s brutal dive was forcing reverse-polarity current back into the skiff’s power bus.

Above them, the three imperial heavy cruisers had formed an interlocking wedge. Their dark titanium bows cut through the starlight, thruster banks flaring cobalt as they corrected their vectors to match the beast's sudden drop. Long dorsal barrels swiveled downward, struggling to depress their targeting angles past twenty degrees. Flak batteries along their ventral skirts had already opened fire, filling the void with clouds of proximity-fused tungsten pellets.

Pellets pelted the manta’s hardened dermal armor, leaving scorched craters and bouncing away into the black. A direct cluster tore through the beast’s left stabilizer vane, causing the creature to shriek an ultrasonic pulse that rattled the skiff's hull bolts.

The starboard coupler gauge spiked past seven hundred percent. A foul smell of fried copper slipped past the skiff’s scrubber filters.

Torvund watched the coil casing buckle under the thermal expansion. If the starboard bridle link sheared, the manta's right fin would snap straight, pitching the beast directly into the convergence point of the cruisers' dorsal railguns.

He slapped the yoke's magnetic lock, freed his boots from the pilot deck, and stepped out onto the narrow catwalk along the skiff’s chassis. The vacuum pulled at his suit seams, thirty gravities of inertial drag pressing him flat against the guardrail.

In his right hand, Torvund swung his heavy harmonic calibration wrench, its three-pronged tip humming with acoustic resonance. With his left, he keyed the broadcast transponder stitched into his collar, sending an executive priority pulse to the six House Valdemar drones circling overhead.

"Formation hex-array," Torvund commanded, his diction clipped and precise despite the bone-crushing g-force. "Slave your induction loops to my diagnostic frequency. Now."

The six disc-shaped drones snapped into a tight circle above the melting coupler. Their azure chassis lights shifted to regal gold, projecting overlapping magnetic nets down toward the burning housing.

Torvund lunged across the gap between the skiff's catwalk and the manta's dorsal plate, driving the tines of his wrench straight into the coupler’s manual shunt port. Sparks cascaded across his faceplate in blinding yellow sheets. The magnetic recoil bucked against his arms, threatening to dislodge his shoulder, but he leaned his shoulder into the wrench’s cold-forged lever, twisting the internal valve forty-five degrees clockwise.

"Bypass engaged," Torvund announced through clenched teeth. "Drones, absorb the excess flux!"

The six Valdemar drones shrieked as hundreds of thousands of volts flooded into their internal capacitors. Their outer shells glowed cherry red, dumping the violent excess heat into the void through wide radiator fins. The whining groan of the starboard coupler dropped an octave, settling into a deep, stable purr.

On the console seventy yards ahead, the bridle telemetry snapped from blazing crimson back into an emerald baseline.

The manta's dorsal spine shuddered as the clean, uninterrupted current surged through its dermal conduits. With the graviton field stabilized under the double-overload, Velskr threw his weight sideways, hauling the left rein with both hands while planting his boots into the beast's armored ridge.

The four-kilometer manta responded with terrifying agility. Its right wing cut upward, slicing through the vacuum like an obsidian scythe, rolling its colossal body ninety degrees onto its edge. The beast slipped cleanly beneath the depression limits of the three cruisers' spinal rail-cannons.

A heartbeat later, the lead cruiser fired its main batteries. Twin kinetic slugs the size of freight railcars tore through the empty space where the manta had been drifting half a second earlier. The sheer displacement of the near-light-speed rounds threw shockwaves through the local gravity field, shaking the manta’s spine like an earthquake.

"Torvund!" Brannar shouted, bracing himself against the skiff’s gun-mount as the void warped around them. "Hold on to your aristocratic hide! We're under their skirts!"

The star-manta surged directly beneath the ventral hull of the lead cruiser. The warship’s massive keel stretched across the sky like an artificial continent of matte-gray plating, venting superheated plasma from its secondary maneuvering thrusters.

Down here, within fifty yards of the warship’s belly, the cruiser’s defensive screens could not fire without scorching their own hull. But the backwash from the cruiser’s kinetic thrusters struck the manta like a solid wall of iron.

A blistering turbulence of ionized gas and kinetic counter-pulses slammed into the beast's dorsal ridge. The auxiliary steel-braided tethers holding the hunter-skiff to the manta's hide screeched under the strain.

One auxiliary cable snapped with the crack of a sniper's rifle, whipping through the vacuum and gouging a deep scar across the skiff’s cockpit canopy. A second cable parted, its frayed strands glowing white-hot in the thruster wash.

Torvund locked his arms around the catwalk stanchion as the skiff tilted violently toward the void. Above them, the dreadnought’s ventral sensor towers scraped within twenty yards of the manta's upper fin, their proximity alarms painting the vacuum in strobe-flashes of emergency amber. Another bridle lead sheared apart under the screaming kinetic wash, leaving Velskr clinging to a single thrumming cable as the two leviathans converged at ramming speed.