Blaedergil's Host by C.M. Simpson (reading well .TXT) 📕

further enquiry, as he quickly changed the subject. “You said it was urgent.”

“We must close our contract early.”

Skymander frowned, and his color subsided.

“You wish to make the delivery, early?”

“We are on our way.”

“Stand clear of the warp point. We are coming to you.”

Skymander ended the call, and Mack looked to Case. He ended up saying nothing, but the navcom showed us slowing, and I felt the ship give an almost imperceptible shudder.

“Keep the crew in their pods,” Mack said. “Tens. Are the fire teams in position?”

“Done.”

“Keep the weapons off-line, but stand-by with the shields. I don’t want to send the wrong message.”

“Done.”

“If anyone needs the head, now’s the time.”

We went, but not all at once. No one wanted to get caught short, but none of us knew how long it would take for the Skymander’s Flag to appear through the jump point. Personally, I hadn’t thought he was that close, but that depended on the speed he’d anticipated travelling at, when he’d said he wouldn’t be at High Costral for three standard days.

If he decided he needed to go faster, who knew how much he could cut that time by.

Case steadied the ship at a safe distance from the warp point, and I wondered how Skymander knew where we’d be. What if we had our warp points mixed? There was at least one other way into and out of the solar system.

“Not from the direction he’s travelling in,” said Mack.

I thought he might be about to explain, but Tens interrupted.

“Incoming. Stand by.”

We stood... not literally, but we waited, and then something began to emerge from the warp point, and our boards lit up.

“Case, back her off. Tens, keep those weapons tied down, and check for port breach.”

Port breach?

My boards showed nothing, but they weren’t hooked into security. I used the implant to hot-step across to Tens’ security array, and pulled the feed into my head.

“Holy fuck,” I murmured, but Tens, Mack and Case all ignored me; they were far too busy: Case, because she was getting the ship out of collision range; Tens, because there were flashes of yellow flaring and fading throughout the ship; and Mack because he was overseeing it all.

I touched nothing, but I watched everything, and plotted several course resolutions Case could use if she needed them. These I sent over to her console, as I watched the big ship roll in, and saw patches of red begin to bloom along the hull.

“Get those, Cutter,” Tens said, and I watched another dozen amber flares go live on the lower decks.

I didn’t bother asking how Tens knew I was in his system. I didn’t care. No doubt we’d be having words about that when this crisis was over. Right now, I needed to make sure those comms mines didn’t get their greasy little claws into our ship’s systems.

Suweet!

Tens had loaded some pretty good protection into the defensive array. I tweaked two of them and watched the red blotches shard to nothing. That didn’t help with the alert for an all-systems intrusion coming through the comms lines.

“Fuck!” which only goes to show that Tens is as potty-mouthed as I am when he’s under pressure.

I didn’t need him to tell me which line of green needed to be dealt with, first. Tens was still working to repel another wave of amber, and I didn’t want to know what was happening to the men and women trying to teleport in. I sure as shit doubted they were being returned to their point of origin.

“Where I can, Cutter. Where I can,” and Tens sounded like he was speaking through gritted teeth.

I chased down the first wave of green, blocking it with a hastily thrown program designed to act like a dam wall, which blocked and then dissipated the attacking code. The first one worked, and I flicked a second out and into the path of the other attack.

That one didn’t work so well, the attack pile-driving through the block, and continuing to the ship’s central processor.

“For fuck’s sake, lock it down!” and I didn’t need an explanation to know that Tens was talking to me.

The first stream was stopped, but that second stream was operating in a more aggressive format. Not entirely my beast, but, whatever. I guessed whoever was running the code was used to meeting defenses head on, which meant they could probably outgun me in the coding department, which meant I should try something different—and I probably couldn’t take them on in the aggression department, either.

Right, so subtle it was.

I let the code go past me, so to speak, ignoring Tens’ squawk of frustration as another three teleport attempts blossomed and failed. As the line of green slid by, infiltrating further into the system and heading for the security section, I slammed a worm into the center of it, and let the damn thing, loose, limiting its spread to the aggressor code, and ordering it to dissipate once the target coding was gone.

I watched as the green stream broke into slivers, and then sharded to nothing.

“Nice work,” Tens breathed, and we waited for the next attack.

Case kept the ship backing away from the behemoth coming through the gate, and I sent her a revised plot, one that took her through the wormhole, if she needed it. None of us were really ready for the brief flash of a half-formed figure that appeared and then disappeared from the control room. We definitely weren’t prepared for the secondary flash that put Tens’ console out of commission.

“Down!” Mack shouted, and we dived beneath our consoles, even Case, although the ship suddenly rolled to the left, and I guessed she’d hooked into the controls with her implant and was planning on flying it blind.

“Not good,” I muttered, but I didn’t see that she had much choice.

“Perfect,” said Skymander, from the center of the command center, and I peered out from under the console to see him standing in the center of a circle of heavily armed men. “I see I chose a