INTERLUDE: 'The Best Laid Schemes O' Mice An' Centaurs…'

"The vanguard is nearly complete," Subaltern Lord Brakar assured the Minor Lord who commanded their strongholds. "We await the arrival of a greater eights of the fastholds that Lord Shihak has dispatched from the Foremost Lodge before we move on the target crèche-hunter world."

Brakar's force of strongholds, fastholds, venturers, rovers and spotters were cruising at sub-light speeds just outside the cluster where the crèche-hunter's most populous world was located. Concealed in the vastness of space in an area where the sole stellar body was a burnt out dark star, the Sakqua believed their vessels were safe from the prying eyes of the infernal crèche-hunters.

Now one of the vanguard's spotters that happened to be under the command of a novice sub-chieftan was speeding toward them beseeching the vanguard for assistance. Apparently, the gamin's ship was fleeing from a crèche-hunter vessel that seemed to possess 'arcane powers.' Brain-addled nestling.

Brakar muttered a request to the vanguard's Reckoner. In response, the Reckoner directed a dozen or so venturers to intercept the intruding crèche-hunter ship. They had to eliminate that ship before it could escape and warn the crèche-hunters about the vanguard's presence. Brakar fervently hoped that the venturers could destroy that ship. If not, he'd have no other choice but to launch the offensive either to destroy the population on the target planet or cripple its defenses, allowing Lord Shihak's Minor Hunt force, which followed closely on the vanguard's heels, to strike the death blow to the crèche-hunters' world.

Chapter 7

F.S. Witchcraft – Void between the Xanadu Cluster and the Gamma Quadrant

"Wow," Commander Macklin Brown of the Fleet said woodenly. "The specs they gave us for those naval rifles don't do them justice."

Lt. Commander Sarah Nelson's electronic lenses simply stared at what was left of the rogue moon's surface after she'd tested her new spaceframe's A-Potential rifle turret. Rather than shaving ten meters of granite from the top of one of its mountains, the entire mountain range had been obliterated by energy drawn directly from the Dirac Sea that underlay hyperspace.

"Are you impressed by those...those...abominations, Mack?" she stammered.

"Hell, yeah, I'm impressed! Aren't you?"

"Not really," she lied. "This beast is extreme overkill, if you ask me. The Olympus-class suits me far better than being installed into this…this juggernaut!"

Mack shook his head and managed to hold his tongue. They'd begun the shakedown cruise nearly a month ago yet Sarah continued to harp about her dislike of the dedicated warship hull and just wouldn't let it go.

In the past, brain ships were normally no larger than a Visby-class corvette. Sarah's prior spaceframe, an Olympus-class long range scout, was a little smaller than a corvette.

However, when the Adu's had proven that a brain ship had the ability to control a stealthy and deadly warship that could go toe-to-toe with a standard Fleet light cruiser, Vice Admiral Amato had decided to plug Sarah into one of the Sorceress-class hunter-killer destroyer hull shells. The Sorceress had all the bells and whistles to make it a deadly killing machine. She was armed with fusion and anti-matter missiles, A-Potential rifles, twin plasma cannons mounted in fore and aft turrets, plasma torpedoes designed to destroy fixed positions or slow moving vessels, as well as being clad in the Alfa proof, self-replicating ablative armor that also absorbed sensor waves to allow the ship to stalk its prey in the cold depths of outer space.

Just as he was certain she was going to go on another tiresome rant about how they'd shoehorned her into this tub without a 'how-do-you-do,' Sarah startled him by announcing, "Hey, Mack? Something just dropped out of hyperspace nearby."

He strode to the viewscreen to study the image he saw there. Then he turned toward her control column. "Sarah, please give me a detailed scan of the object."

"Here it is, Mack," she muttered, her response sounding from console speakers that mimicked the speaking voice of her old body. While she cruised toward the target at .25 c, Sarah interpreted the incoming data. "Sensors say it's too small to be a ship." Moments later, she announced, "Got it! It's a distress torpedo. Give me a minute and we'll be in the torpedo's transmission range."

As she closed on the torpedo, another transition wake congealed .1 AU away from the Witchcraft. A sliver of a ship bearing the same alien markings and configuration as one of the ship's that had attacked the Schlein Gamma system several months ago emerged from the anomaly. Its arrival displaced vast amounts of stardust that swept across the sensors embedded along Witchcraft's hull like the water that had flowed around Sarah's long lost body when she had competed on her Academy swim team. "Hey, it's one of those Sakqua ships that tried to nuke Xanadu!"

"Talk to me, Sarah. Have they noticed us yet?"

"Their weapons are hot but they're ignoring us. They're going after the torpedo."

Mack pursed his lips. "That's odd. Maybe they're hunting that torpedo. It's got to be one of ours-they wouldn't try to kill one of their own."

"The torpedo is transmitting…now." She decoded the message then reported, "According to this, a freighter in route from the mining colony at Frietag Gamma Seven to Xanadu was attacked by the Sakqua vessel, the very one we have on our scope."

Suddenly, the other ship veered away from the torpedo and raced off into the void.

"We've been made!"

"Yeah, but you know what? I think this is our lucky day. If Admiral Amato wants us to engage in a live fire exercise, why not do our part to help the war effort at the same time?"

She mentally shrugged and said, "I'm game if you are. I guess we're going to play Space Rangers today, 'Rocky.' Plotting intercept course. Engaging…now!"

"I knew I shouldn't have let you watch that ancient pre-Imperium 2-D video series I bought at that antique shop on Port Tau Ceti with me," he grumbled.

One of the many things the Sorceress-class could do the Olympus-class could not was the Sorceress' faster acceleration to maximum pursuit velocity. As she pushed the ship to .5c, the maximum speed she'd use in normal space to avoid time dilation problems, she asked, "I wonder why he hasn't tried to transition into hyperspace? If he did that, he'd force me to attempt to establish a tracer lock."

He simply shrugged and said nothing as they continued their stern chase.

Seven hours later, the Witchcraft had almost reeled in the fleeing vessel. After battle analysis at Xanadu had determined the Sakquan inertialess drive was appreciably slower than the Fleet's magnetic drive. The lizards' best speed in real space was .35c and that allowed Sarah to make up the difference in a relatively short period of time.

While he activated the weapon systems, she switched the viewscreen from tracking to tactical mode. Just then the DEW proximity klaxons blared throughout the Witchcraft's hull. On her long range scanners, Sarah detected another ship four times distant than the target ship they'd been chasing. A moment later, another two ships were plotted on their tactical screen, followed by several more vessels. Thirty seconds later, their scanner revealed enough to show there were hundreds of vessels, many the size of Fleet heavy cruisers, in a globular holding pattern out here in the middle of nowhere. And here Mack and she were running hell bent for leather right smack into the middle of a formation of Sakquan vessels that were rapidly coming up to speed and activating their targeting scanners!

"I'm switching inertial dampeners to maximum! Beginning deceleration procedure—"

"Wait a second!" he yelped. "We can't just let the guy we've been chasing go Scot free!"

"Oh yeah? Watch me! We've got to survive, return to Xanadu and warn Amato about the Sakqua formation."

"Look, we've got one shot at that enemy raider."

"I said, we're leaving…" Then she fell silent as her rangefinder pinged, signaling she'd obtained a lock-on. Suddenly, he launched a volley. A dull shudder rumbled through her hull as a full salvo of Peregrine torps was released. The brain and her brawn watched as a dozen arrowhead symbols flashed onto the tactical screen, representing the torps that closed on their target at fifty-plus gees.

The Sakqua vessel veered from its escape run and tried to acquire her torpedoes. However, the vessel only had three, perhaps four, lasers that could protect it from Witchcraft's swarm. It was only a matter of time.

Her sensors detected several flashes of laser fire before a Peregrine slipped past the protective streams of high energy and that was all she wrote. The torpedo's 200-kiloton warhead homed in at 100 kilometers per second, piercing screens designed to diffuse particle beams and lasers. It detonated and converted the small ship into superheated plasma in the blink of an eye.

As the flash from the explosion died, she veered their ship hard to starboard and declared, "Well, I hope your single-minded obsession hasn't killed us both, 'Captain Ahab.' Course laid in!" she exclaimed. "We're transitioning to sponge space. By the way, we're going to make one jump followed by a second, I hope."

He eyed her control column when he heard that last part. "What do you mean by, 'I hope?'"

"Just trust me, all right?" she snapped.

"Fine!" he barked just before she rerouted the energy produced within her matter/antimatter reaction chamber into the stardrive located in her aft section and hurtled the ship beyond the barriers of Einstein's relativity into Hermes's realm.

Several seconds later, when she'd reached the half-way point of her plotted course, something forced the ship to drop back into real space as she'd planned. Sarah snapped on her forward sensor array as her sublight velocity increased on its own volition. A titanic force now drew her toward something dead ahead. In the center of her viewscreen, a dark object cleaved a crescent-shaped wound amidst the incandescent stardust. Even more troubling than the dark star's appearance was its hypergravity.

"We're falling toward that thing, aren't we?" he asked.

"Not if I can help it," she growled. "Reversing course! Magnetic drives online, eighty percent maximum output."

She dumped the energy into her aft primary generators and the ship jerked as its drive resisted the dark demon's pull. Although she was no longer approaching it like a bat out of Hell, it still had her hook, line and sinker.

"Eighty-five percent maximum output."

Falling...they were still falling.

"Ninety!" she shouted, not knowing why.

Damn it! It's...still...dragging us in...

"Ninety-two point...seven!"

The Witchcraft slowed to a halt, suspended between free space and the ebony orb. Now Sarah took a second to draw an imaginary deep, cleansing breath and nearly jumped out of her ethereal skin when the proximity alert sounded.

She examined her scanner and announced, "Well, it looks like fifty or so of the lizards' ships managed to trace us here."

The enemy vessels maneuvered to intercept the Fleet destroyer. When the Sakqua flotilla had reached extreme weapons range, it launched a swarm of torpedoes.

"Mack! Enemy ships have launched a spread of torps...they're coming our way!

Sarah immediately turned her focus on dealing with the torps and finding a way out of what she'd intended as a tactic to lose her pursuers. Now it looked as if her maneuver had turned into a death trap. She put all of her nanoprocessors to work on both tasks. Moments later the 'escape' subroutine wormed its way from her CPU's queue first. She reviewed it and cocked both of her phantom eyebrows in disbelief. When the 'torpedo intercept' subroutine followed shortly thereafter, she shrugged inwardly. That result appeared to be quite mad, as well, yet not as harebrained as the first subroutine.

All right then, she mused, torpedoes first. She set the proximity fuses on several Osprey high yield fusion warhead torpedoes and launched them. The weapons accelerated sluggishly as their drives struggled against the dead star's oppressive gravity well. Sarah willed them on, her phantom brow sweating profusely as her mind seemingly pushed them to the intercept point. Then as her torps interdicted the approaching swarm, they exploded, bathing the enemy weapons in nuclear hellfire. The flash of the explosion overloaded her sensors, blinding her for precious moments. So while she waited for the scanners to clear, she charged her laser batteries to prepare for the interception stage of her plan.

Moments later, her ethereal eyes opened wide as Sarah gaped at the target area. Nearly all the enemy torps were destroyed, leaving only a few stragglers. Sarah felt the flutter in her mind ease somewhat as she drilled the remaining torpedoes out of the sky with her lasers.

That last trick with the torpedoes would work only once; the lizards would make certain their next salvo had proper torpedo separation. So she poured every erg of energy into her magnetic drive, pivoted the Witchcraft's bow nearly perpendicular to her orbit and dived.

While the ship plunged toward the dark star, Sarah activated Mack's damper field that pressed the large-framed man deeply into his chair. Mack was a bear of a man, almost six feet six inches tall and two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle. His seat almost seemed more like it was built for a child when it came to him, however it was far sturdier than it looked.

After she'd secured her brawn from the stress of acceleration that would soon follow, she counted down silently while they stared at the viewscreen and watched the dark star's surface rise ominously toward them. As the screen filled with surface features that sharpened into clarity with each passing moment, the dark star's ebon jaws appeared to open wide to engulf them, offering the promise of a dark, cold grave.

At the end of her countdown, she shouted, "Initiating slingshot trajectory! Magnetic drive at maximum output!"

The Witchcraft danced along the edge of the ebony sphere and scuttled an invisible plane along its event horizon. The ship quivered as her structure almost exceeded her tolerances. Sarah struggled to hold the vessel together, using Witchcraft's structural integrity fields to stave off complete and total disaster. Finally, breakaway occurred, snapping the ship away from the dead star like a slingshot. Soon, Witchcraft was far beyond both the oppressive gravity of her natural nemesis and the weapon systems of her alien foes.

Mack heard the grin in Sarah's voice. "The enemy vessels are on the far side of the dark star, some being dragged down to their destruction, others wallowing in shallow orbits. Maybe a few of them might manage to escape but it'll take them several hours to do it."

He smiled warmly at her control column. "Well, let's not wait around to see if they manage to figure out the trick you just used to escape from that…thing."

"You'll get no argument from me on that, Mack," she drawled.

When they'd soon achieved .5 c and were several AU's away from the demon star, Witchcraft leaped into hyperspace on a direct heading to Xanadu. Once they arrived, they'd apprise the Gamma Sector Commander, Vice Admiral Amato, that the lizards had returned and weren't messing around this time.

Oh, they'd also inform the good admiral their Sorceress-class hull shell was the cat's meow and would suit the both of them just fine from now on.

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