Pulsar Race (Starship’s Mage #9.5) - Glynn Stewart Page 0,19

didn’t see what had happened. One moment, the lead five ships were continuing on in a rough cluster, all heading toward beacon seven.

The next, there were only four. The racing shuttle with the unexpectedly skilled pilot was just…gone.

“Going evasive!” Charpentier snapped. “Ivan, if you can cover us at all, now is the time!”

Restoya jerked sideways at twenty gees, barely in time to avoid the racing shuttle’s fate. This time, Ivan did see what was going on. Even in the midst of the chaotic storm of the twin pulsars, a laser beam stood out.

“Someone is shooting at us,” he barked. “Our new first-place dude has some kind of laser. Your sensors suck; I can’t even resolve the power level.”

He grunted as another five-subjective-gravity burst smashed him into the acceleration chair.

This time, the shot hadn’t been aimed at them. One of the racers behind them disintegrated as the beam took them head-on. Suddenly, there were only three racers in the lead bubble—and given how much trouble Ivan was having seeing the rest of the racers, he suspected no one else knew anything was going on.

“How do they have weapons?” Charpentier demanded as he twisted the ship through another set of evasive maneuvers. “It’s the one damned rule. No one is supposed to have any weapons.”

“I can’t stop a laser beam, Karl!” was Ivan’s only response. “Keep us from getting hit!”

There was nothing he could do, not with a jump matrix. All Restoya’s runes could do was augment his jump spell. If he’d been aboard a proper warship with a true all-purpose amplifier, the racer-turned-pirate would already be dead.

Not that Ivan had ever actually turned an amplifier on a ship with living crew. He’d actively avoided any posting that had even the slightest chance of combat—he knew his weaknesses.

Acceleration crushed him again and he activated the acceleration chair’s full functions. The injectors held off for the moment, but the safety bars expanded, wrapping him in a full cocoon of pressurized gel.

“Thanks, was going to tell you to do that,” Charpentier said grimly. “I don’t know what the range on that laser is, but it’s just us and them now.”

Three ships had died in under a minute and Restoya was on her own in between two pulsars.

“What do we do?” Ivan asked.

“You’re the navy officer; why are you asking me?” his friend snapped. “All I can do is dodge around the bastard and prep for full thrust. What kind of range is he likely to have?”

“It looks like a standard RFLAM turret,” Ivan replied, surprising himself as the answer popped into his head. “Probably concealed to prevent the Race Master detecting it, but it’s a standard half-gigawatt beam with six cycling chambers. He can fire once a second forever, and the focal point will adjust out to about four light-seconds, but in this environment, he can only really target us at about half a million klicks.”

A Rapid-Fire Laser Anti-Missile system was the key missile defense of any warship worth its salt—and while the five-hundred-megawatt system was common on smaller Navy ships, it was also available for civilian use.

A lot of freighters and courier ships that expected to travel the Fringe or other less-secure areas would have two or three of the turrets. Against an unarmed civilian ship like Restoya, though, the beams were just as effective as a real battle laser.

“Check the injectors,” Charpentier ordered. “We’re juicing up as soon as you’re ready. I was about to pull this anyway; I just wasn’t expecting to be shot at.”

Another set of beams flashed through where they might have been, and Ivan said a prayer of thanks to any deity that happened to be listening. If their enemy had brought two of the turrets in, they’d already be dead.

As it was, they were dodging one laser at a time and Karl Charpentier appeared to actually be up to that task. Ivan had known his friend was a good pilot, but in that moment, dancing through the storm of radiation between two pulsars and being chased by an enemy with a lightspeed weapon, he realized that he’d been wrong.

Karl Charpentier was an amazing pilot.

“Injectors are lined up and clear,” Ivan reported. This was going to suck. There were two of them, covered in plastic casings and aiming tubes now pressed against the base of his neck. The needles did not look small.

“Let’s make this…”

Silence.

“Karl?” Ivan asked—and then looked at the screen. They still weren’t alone, but it wasn’t the same ship. The RFLAM-armed racer was gone, expanding