The smartcore identified them as Hawking M-sinks. Force fields wouldn’t protect Paula from them.

Another moon exploded. Sequential ripples of exotic energy swept outward, blocking any return to hyperspace. Paula powered the Alexis Denken straight down toward the gas giant, accelerating at fifty gees. Internal gravity compensators could shield her from only about thirty of them. Biononics had to support her body physically as the punishing force tried to crush her into a puddle of flesh across the decking. Even with that enrichment it was tremendously difficult to breathe. She’d gotten her left leg at a slight angle; it made a bad sound as it flattened out.

One of the small inner moons was below her, a cratered rock two hundred kilometers in diameter, three thousand kilometers farther along its orbital track from her vertical vector and moving sedately away. She fired a quantumbuster at it, modifying the effect field format. When the weapon activated, it converted a quarter of a cubic kilometer of rock right at the moon’s core. The moon shattered instantly. Millions of rocky shrapnel fangs detonated outward from the micronova in a lethal supervelocity cloud. The particles vaporized as they went, blowing off expanding flares of indigo and topaz ions like primeval comets. Space was filled with a dense clutter of energized mass. The Hawking M-sinks flew into it and began to absorb the deluge of lively atoms. Vapor or rock shards, it made no difference; the event horizons sucked everything down. In doing so, their courses wobbled slightly. As the drives attempted to compensate, their efficiency fell off due to the nearly exponential increase in mass they were now propelling.

The Alexis Denken raced away from the underside of the hellish fireball, hurtling straight for the agitated stormscape below.

Mellanie’s Redemption flicked back into space one and a quarter million kilometers above the yellow star. She hung there for a couple of seconds while the forward cargo bay opened and the fuselage force field started to fizz with violet stress patterns. The planetary FTL device shot out, and Troblum took the starship straight back into transdimensional suspension.

“How long?” Aaron demanded.

“Ten minutes to initiation,” Troblum said. Catriona was back at his side, her beautiful face tragic with concern. “Establishment will take longer. And no, I don’t have a fucking clue how long. Nothing more I can do. We just sit and wait now.”

Oscar was keeping track of the hysradar return. He winced when one of the gas giant moons broke apart within a bloom of exotic energy. That was one hell of a fight, as bad as Justine and the warrior Raiel. Oh, crap! “Hey!”

Everyone looked at him. In the packed cabin that was quite intimidating.

“You didn’t think this ship could survive anything the Cat threw at it,” he said to Troblum. “Why?”

“Because it couldn’t,” Troblum replied. Catriona was directing an aggressive stare Oscar’s way, which he ignored.

“But you have the Sol barrier technology. That can withstand any Commonwealth weapon.”

“Mellanie’s Redemption doesn’t have that kind of protection,” Troblum said.

“But … your armor does.” So I assumed the ship would as well. Shit!

“Yes. I just built my armor. But before now I couldn’t ever use the design the Accelerators developed from the Dark Fortress; that would have revealed what we’d got.”

Oscar wanted to grab the front of Troblum’s toga suit and give the huge man a shake. “But if we haven’t got that kind of force field, how the hell do you think we’ll get past the warrior Raiel?”

“They’ll let us past. Won’t they?” Troblum said in a puzzled tone that verged on hurt. “When we explain that we’re on a mission to shut down the Void.”

“Shit,” Tomansio grunted.

For once even Aaron was startled.

“Troblum,” Oscar said very firmly. “Give me full access to your TD linkage. Now.”

“What are you doing?” Inigo asked.

“Calling the one person who might be able to help.” He grimaced as another one of the gas giant’s moons was blasted into a tsunami of exotic energy. “If she’s still alive.”

The Alexis Denken hit the upper atmosphere at fifty kilometers a second. Paula ordered an immediate deceleration as they plunged toward the first truculent cloud layer. It didn’t seem to make much difference. Disintegrating gases gouged a five-hundred-kilometer tail of incandescence in their wake, a giant pointer for the Cat’s sensors. The juddering was phenomenal; as an indicator of how much punishment the starship was encountering, it was badly worrying. Acceleration forces were still crushing her down onto the decking.

Far above, the first flaming debris from the small rock moon was following her down, dazzling points of light churning through the atmosphere, jetting out vast plumes of black smoke. The terrible buffeting broke them apart into hundreds of smaller chunks, which then shattered again and again. A vast plain of electrical fire sank down toward the clouds. The basic energy the impact was spinning off created enormous lightning discharges that flared for thousands of kilometers through the higher atmospheric bands.

It made sensor coverage difficult. But just before she sank into the second cloud layer, hysradar located the Cat’s ship chasing her down.

Paula hurriedly changed her direction, angling the regrav units’ propulsive effect sharply to try to flatten out her trajectory but still heading down.

“I see you,” the Cat called through an interference-saturated link.

“If you stop now and rendezvous with your force fields down, I will simply place you in suspension with your original self,” Paula replied. “Any other course of action will result in your termination.”

“Darling Paula, this is what I love about you. That psychoneural profiling is actually the installation of blind stupidity. Come to me. I can remove it for you.”

The Alexis Denken’s sensors detected another M-sink being fired. Now the entire gas giant was doomed, though its final destruction would be weeks away. Paula suspected the Cat had done that to make sure there would never be any hiding place beneath the gas giant’s furious storms. Paula fired a quantumbuster, then angled the Alexis Denken down through the fourth and final cloud layer. Below that was a zone of perfectly clear hydrogen extending for several hundred kilometers. Huge vertical pillars of lightning snapped on and off within the gap. At their base, a smog of hydrocarbons eddied uneasily atop the pressure boundary where the atmospheric compounds were finally compressed into a liquid. The sight vanished in a blaze of white light as the quantumbuster activated.

“Naughty, darling,” the Cat taunted. “My turn.”

The hysradar showed Paula two missiles curving up from the Cat’s ship, arching up through the clouds, where the density was reduced. Of course they could accelerate far faster than the poor Alexis Denken, which was tunneling through the compacted hydrogen.

They started to plummet again.

“Oh, fuck,” Paula grunted, and dipped ever closer to the smog band.

Her smartcore surprised the hell out of her when it announced that Oscar was calling through a TD link.

“Little busy,” she sent.

“Appreciate that. But we’re in trouble.”

“Doesn’t it work?”

“That almost doesn’t matter. This ship has no protection from the warrior Raiel. Can you ask Qatux to have a word, please.”

The missiles were quantumbusters. They activated a hundred kilometers ahead. A solid wall of energy hurtled toward the Alexis Denken, only partially slowed and absorbed by the enormous density of the lower atmosphere. Paula dived into the hydrocarbon soup.

“Do what I can,” she promised. Some remote part of her brain was chuckling over the irony.