The Plasma Master

  Chapter 2Ф

  They each ate dinner alone, and Ned went to sleep wondering what he was going to do to repair the situation before the StarBlazer fleet arrived and he and Mirana had to work together. He decided finally that the first thing he should do was apologize, so first thing in the morning he went and knocked again on Mirana’s door. Surprisingly, she answered it.

  “Mirana, I’m sorry about last night, again. I shouldn’t have …”

  Ned was cut off by Rinel Marnax as she rushed into the room. “Mirana!” she shouted. “The fleet’s here! Inside Venom!”

  “What?” Mirana shoved her way past Ned, into the center storage room. “Gerran’s here already?”

  “No! Not Gerran’s fleet! The Anacronian fleet! Practically the whole thing! I just looked at the scanners, and the sky is just swarming with warships!”

  “Oh, no. Ned, do you know what this means?”

  Ned was relieved to see that the anger was completely gone from Mirana’s face. Perhaps that simple apology had been enough. “Off hand, I’d say that the party’s off.”

  “No. We can’t quit now. We just have to change our plans.”

  “What part don’t we change?”

  “The part about us. We’ll just leave for Viper’s fortress now. If Gerran gets here and Venom’s warp field is still intact, he’ll assume we’ve failed and go back. He has to go back if he wants to stay alive.”

  “Mirana,” Rinel said, “This must mean that Gerran’s plan was betrayed somehow. That means Dark Viper might be expecting you, too.”

  “That’s impossible,” Ned said. “There’s no way the Shadow Master could have found out about the plan.”

  Mirana was already moving. “Grab something to eat, Ned. I’ll check the internal sensors and make sure it’s safe for us to leave. Rinel, you’d better keep the kids out of the front room. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as we can.

  “Can’t we get a message to the General?” Ned called out as Mirana disappeared through a doorway.

  “No, not in time. Not without being detected. Hurry!”

  Sixteen minutes later Rinel Marnax was leading Mirana and Ned up through the corridors to Venom’s surface to where Nemesis had landed itself three days earlier after continuing through the entrance corridor on autopilot. They stopped at an airlock to say thank-you and goodbye, and then Mirana led Ned out onto Venom’s inner shell. Sunlight beat down on them in a perpetual noon as they made their way across the black landscape toward absolutely nothing, as far as Ned could tell; there was only metal in all directions until the land curved skyward in a concave non-horizon that blurred away all detail. Mirana stopped after about a hundred yards, where the lines on the ground formed an X. She motioned Ned to stand next to her, withdrew a controller from her suit’s pocket and pressed a button. A tractor beam caught the pair and levitated them into the air, dropping them onto an invisible surface high above the ground. There was a slight vibration as huge doors closed, and then the shadow field covering the inside of Nemesis’s shuttle bay dropped.

  “Now we just hope no one saw us,” Mirana announced. “Get out of that space suit and follow me to the pricom. Maybe this time I’ll even tell you what we’re doing ahead of time.”

  Ned noted several enemy warships on long-range scanners as Mirana headed for their target. It almost seemed a shame that they needed to preserve secrecy for as long as possible, or she would have been able to destroy a few of them along the way. Then again, Ned wondered if that thought were merely an unconscious desire to delay the inevitable conflict a bit longer. In any case, Mirana flew in a direct line toward Dark Viper’s base, almost all the way across Venom from Rinel’s concealed home. Ned saw the fortress in detail as he approached. Four curved spires thrust upward from Venom’s surface, all pointing in toward the center of the formation. The vast building complex below was similarly symmetrical, and structures that Ned assumed were weapons protruded from everything. The fortress was ringed by a low, circular structure, which Mirana said marked the perimeter of the shields. She brought Nemesis up until it was near the place where the shields touched the ground and then stopped.

  “You’re going to like this, Ned. You know about the problem with static warp fields. Well, there’s one around this fortress. But there’s a way through, now that we have Nemesis. See, in order to block warp travel with a static field, you have to have the field resonate on all of the warp phases you want to block. It’s pretty simple for a planet’s power generators to charge a field that resonates on higher levels than any known ship can go, including Nemesis. But no one ever bothers with subspace, because traveling in subspace would make you go a lot slower, and it would be really easy to take you out while you were moving through the shield.”

  Ned was smiling. “But Dark Viper can’s see us, so it doesn’t matter how long we take.”

  “Right. It would have taken forever to get through Venom’s shell that way, but this shield’s small enough to make it reasonable.”

  “One question though. Why stop with the shields? Why not drop into subspace and travel inside the fortress, and then send missiles or something into normal phase space and blow the fortress up from the inside?”

  “Good thinking again, but it won’t work. If we tried to send a missile into normal space that was already occupied by something as dense as the fortress, the missile would explode in subspace and damage us, not the fortress. There are other reasons too, but the physics get complicated. Ask Smardwurst when you get back. We’ll just have to settle for the shield.”

  Mirana dropped Nemesis into warp negative one and proceeded to move through the shields. It took over four hours to move just the length of the ship, even with the ship’s above-average thrusters firing at full power. Ned was glad when they returned to normal space.

  Mirana surveyed the massive fortress towering over them. “Well, we made it. Now I try to figure out the general layout of the fortress so we can make a semi-intelligent guess at Viper’s position. Unless of course you just want to step out of the ship and use your Plasma. Maybe Viper would come out to meet you, but I have a feeling he’d fire every weapon he’s got at us instead. What do you think?”

  “Mirana, I think you should see this.”

  Mirana glanced at the sensor screen Ned had been looking at. When she looked up at him, her face had gone pale.

  General Marnax had dropped out of warp a safe distance from Venom, as planned. Also as planned, he found that a small hole had been opened in Venom’s static warp field, so Marnax arranged to send the fleet through. The passage through the hole was executed flawlessly, and it was not until he dropped out of warp inside Venom that Marnax realized that he had made a very, very serious mistake.

  The decoy had failed. Anacron’s fleet was waiting for him.

  Before Marnax could even think about escape, the opening in the warp field that Dark Viper had so conveniently given him closed, sealing the StarBlazer attack force inside.

  Then the final battle between StarBlazer and Anacron began.

  Starfighters poured out of their mother ships like angry bees defending a hive. Battleships spewed laser and missile fire into the enemy fleet in a continuous burst of searing energy. Captains and Admirals poured frantically over diagrams of the battle zone, seeking to optimize their attack resources. But even a child could have summarized the situation that day as the battle ensued; StarBlazer was surrounded from the moment it arrived, and it was being ripped apart.

  For the moment, though, that fact did not carry any weight for Marvis Harvey. He had recently won several major victories over the Empire, and he viewed this battle as his chance to use the knowledge he had gained from those victories to repay his enemies for what they had done to his homeworld. He gave Black Fang an escort of twenty Crusher-class warships and sent it into the largest mass of enemy ships. The specialized weapons on Black Fang dematerialized several ships in a matter of minutes and sent dozens of others into a mad frenzy to escape. Most failed. Harv
ey usually left starfighter matters completely to Ambelshack Devorion, but today he gave Starhawk explicit instructions as to which starships they should attack and defend. In this way, Harvey used the most skilled and experienced starfighter pilots to balance the scale of power in exactly the right places. After an hour of fighting, StarBlazer was still losing, but it was not losing as badly.

  Harvey mainly kept Galactron out of the fighting, not wanting to endanger himself and the General. However, he occasionally used the ship to annihilate groups of enemy warships that made severe tactical mistakes and opened themselves up to attack. The starship Harvey really wanted, though, was Nemesis. It hurt to think of the damage the advanced weapons on that ship could be causing and were not. Instead, Nemesis was probably parked somewhere on the other side of Venom, waiting for that fool Mirana Kelar to carry out her side of the plan. You owe me, Kelar, Harvey thought. You’d better make this good.

  “I was going to come with you,” Mirana told Ned as she pulled her stolen Anacron-issue battle suit on, “but this changes everything. There’s no way Gerran is going to break out of here unless we can help him. I’ll give you as much of a map as I can, but you’ve got to find the Emperor and defeat him. I’m going to see about the shield generators. If I can bring the shields down, they might have a chance. I’ll take you as far as I can, but be ready to run.”

  Ned listened in silence as he pulled on a suit identical to Mirana’s; rather than draw immediate attention, the idea was to try to pass themselves off as Anacronian soldiers for as long as possible before being detected. The Emperor would undoubtedly have himself surrounded with thousands of soldiers, so two more should not make much difference.

  Mirana had explained their plan of attack during the passage through the shields, and by now it was firmly implanted in Ned’s mind. Before they had left the pricom, Mirana had programmed Nemesis to extend its shadow field downward until it intersected a subterranean corridor. Nemesis had then fired a high-power laser with a very narrow beam into Venom’s shell, slicing out a piece of the ground down to the corridor like a cookie cutter. After shielding was installed in order to keep the air from escaping, a tractor beam had lifted the section upward, and now it was time to enter. The airlock’s outer door slid open, and Ned and Mirana jumped out, using their suits’ booster rockets to slow their descent to the ground. The fortress looked enormous from here, even though only a part of it was visible from this point of view. Mirana motioned Ned over to the hole Nemesis had cut in the ground just a few yards away, and once again they jumped down. Mirana had Nemesis lower the cut-out ceiling section back into place.

  Ned looked around. Viper’s fortress was nothing like he had imagined. They were standing in a black, roughly circular tunnel extending forward and backward farther than Ned could see, with only a red light strip on each side of the tunnel to illuminate the way. There was absolute silence, and there was no one in sight. Ned wondered what Mirana was thinking of all this, but he knew that her face would reveal nothing of her emotions, even if it were not hidden behind her suit’s tinted visor. She raised the rapid-fire blaster rifle she had slung over one shoulder, checked the smaller blaster at her hip, and started forward. Ned followed, his own blaster rifle also held ready, his eyes searching the sensor readout on the weapon’s top for some sign of movement ahead or behind. There was nothing.

  The tunnel went on like that for a long time. They walked in silence for over twenty minutes, and still there was nothing but the circular walls and the two red light strips. Ned was already nervous, but after this long, monotonous walk his heart was pounding. He was finally inside Venom, at most a few miles from Dark Viper himself, but Ned had somehow expected that he would feel more prepared by the time he got this far. He had to assume that Mirana knew what she was doing; she had not failed him yet. Still, hadn’t Mirana predicted that Viper’s fortress would be crawling with soldiers? She had said before that she had been a certain distance inside the fortress, but maybe they were much farther than that now. Did that mean that Mirana no longer knew exactly what she was doing? It did not matter, Ned decided, and the time for such questions was past. He was the Shield Master, and even if things went wrong, he was going to win. He had to.

  At last the tunnel reached a T-junction. The intersecting passage sloped slightly, up to the left and down to the right. Mirana turned right and kept walking. Still there was no sign of movement. The computers built into their suits and weapons had been drawing a rough map as they had uncovered new territory, and after a while Ned noticed that the passage they were in not only sloped downward, but it also curved slightly to the around to the left. Presumably, Ned supposed, the passage would continue to spiral downward until they reached … something. He decided he would be best off not trying to guess what.

  It was not long before the passage began to cease its monotony. Other passages intersected the one they were in. Mirana passed them all by without slowing. There were differences in the walls, as well; occasionally there were slight cracks outlining rectangles in the walls – doors, perhaps, although it was impossible to tell. Still, there was no sound, no movement. Ned was just beginning to think that Dark Viper lived alone in this massive fortress when Mirana fired her weapon, destroying something up ahead. In the same movement she spun around and fired again, once again destroying her target before Ned could see what it was.

  There were more up ahead, though, and this time Ned caught sight of them. They were robots of some kind, composed of the same black material as the walls. They did not look like they were primarily for combat purposes, since they each only carried a single blaster, similar to the ones Ned and Mirana had. Two green eyes glared out at them from the otherwise-featureless faces. Ned did not bother to contemplate the robots’ appearance, though. As soon as he saw them he raked laser fire from his blaster across them, detonating their power generators. Mirana destroyed three more robots behind them, and then there was silence.

  Ned scanned the darkness furtively, but neither his eyes nor his scanner indicated that there were more robots close by. As they continued down the hall, faster this time, Mirana spoke for the first time since their departure from Nemesis. “They seemed to be nothing more than maintenance droids. It looks like Dark Viper doesn’t feel that he needs protection down here. In any case, the robots shouldn’t be much of a problem unless they attack in large groups.”

  “Should I use my Plasma now?” Ned asked. “I think we can assume Dark Viper knows we’re here.”

  “Not necessarily. If he did, don’t you think he’d have all of his forces converge on us? It seems to me like the weak security force he does have is automatic. Don’t use it yet.”

  The robots attacked again just seconds later, more this time. Mirana had to duck into an intersecting corridor to escape the robots’ crossfire. She set two grenades at the intersection and then ran with Ned down the new hallway before the grenades detonated and collapsed the ceiling, blocking the robots on the other side. This hall soon intersected another spiraling one, and once again they started descending. After little more than a minute, the scanners showed several dots moving toward them from several directions.

  “Mirana …”

  “I see them. Keep moving.” Mirana took another series of intersecting passages in order to keep from being surrounded, but when she came out in a large room that spilt off into several passages, she stopped. “They’re coming from four or five directions now,” she said. “This is where we split up. I’m going to draw their fire and then head in this direction. According to the scan I did back on Nemesis, there’s a major power source over that way. If it’s not the shield generator, it will at least give me some idea of how to get to it. There’s nothing you can do to help me now; you’ll just slow me down. You go on ahead, and try to continue downward as far as you can go. I wish I could help you more, but you’re on your own. Got it?”

  Ned nodded. More emotions than he could count were boiling up inside him, but he forced them down. “Good luc
k,” he said simply, and then he took off along a downward-sloping passage. He heard explosions behind him as Mirana sealed off several passageways, and then there was silence again.

  Once again Ned forced down the confusion, telling himself that Mirana knew far more about this sort of thing than he did. Then a thought pried itself to the front of Ned’s mind: Mirana had not told him anything more because they had finally reached the part of the mission that she had mentioned back on Galactron when she had first explained it to him; Mirana’s plan no longer took Ned into account, and it was now up to him to make his own victory. She had left him, and from then on she would no longer even take Ned into consideration. Ned slowed. So, what was he going to do? There was no sound of pursuit; perhaps Mirana had succeeded in drawing it after her. Was that wise? Could she handle all of those robots by herself without Ned’s Plasma to protect her? Should Ned continue farther downward in an attempt to get close to Dark Viper before he detected Ned’s presence, or should he try to draw the Emperor to him? He started walking again, deciding that he might as well follow Mirana’s previous advice until he thought of a better idea.

  Minutes later he was attacked again. He detected the robots before they reached him, and his laser destroyed them before they could bring their weapons to bear. More were on the way, though, and Ned knew that this time he would not be able to evade them; he was going to have to stand and fight. He planted his back against a wall and waited.

  Laser fire came from the left and right at once, and Ned jumped out of the way just in time. His blaster tracked the shots from the left and destroyed the robot there, and he jumped aside just as the robot on the right moved into position and fired again. Ned destroyed it and then threw a grenade in its direction to slow the other robots approaching from that passage. His scanner showed that several robots were massing ahead of him. Mirana undoubtedly would have been able to deal with them, but Ned was not nearly as skilled as she, and he figured his cover, if he ever had any, was just about gone. He ran toward the robots ahead, weapon blazing.

  Two robots exploded instantly, followed by two more. But there were too many this time. A laser bolt tore through Ned’s helmet, sparking Shield Plasma to life against his face. Ned dropped another robot, and then several more shots hit him. He was not sure, but he thought he felt a slight stirring in the Plasma around him. Had Viper heard? Ned destroyed a few more of his attackers, but by then his body was engulfed in blue light. It was over, he realized. The time for stealth had long since passed. His blaster rifle exploded, struck by an enemy laser. Ned dropped the remnants and extended his arm.

  Just like he had done on the asteroid, Ned channeled the Plasma around him and gathered it about his hand. Venom’s Plasma shuttered as it was disturbed, but Ned was able to control it despite the strange sense he had felt in it. A broad band of light surged forward from Ned’s hand and exploded into the robots in front of him. More robots were approaching, dozens this time, but the euphoria he had felt on the asteroid was returning, and Ned felt truly invincible. He started forward once more, slicing apart everything that moved. After a while he became aware of a new stirring in the Plasma force, a series of eddies that felt entirely foreign. They were emanating from somewhere ahead. He’s found me, Ned thought, but the idea evoked no fear, only anticipation.

  Ned ran on for several minutes more before realizing that the robots had stopped attacking. The stirring in the Plasma had ceased as well. Ned’s thoughts went back to what Mirana had said about the Plasma force being addictive or subversive, and he realized that there might be more to her words than he had understood. He stopped for a moment to calm himself down, quenching the light that had been enveloping him, gathering the Plasma about him once more. He was going to have to watch himself, he realized. By losing track of himself like that he might have put himself in serious danger.

  He really had lost track of himself. Looking around, Ned noticed that the corridor had changed significantly. It was colored grey now, with normal white lighting overhead and clearly-defined doors. His mapping computer had been destroyed along with his space suit, so he was now hopelessly lost. First things first, though. Ned engaged his battle suit, then turned in the direction from which he thought he had felt Dark Viper’s power and began walking.

  The battle was going very, very badly. Galactron, Black Fang, and the rest of StarBlazer’s more powerful ships were still intact, but dozens of smaller ones had perished in the effort to defend them. Marvis Harvey was holding the battle together, but the StarBlazer casualties were exceeding those of the Empire.

  General Marnax had long since given up the goal of attacking Dark Viper’s fortress. Even if he were to succeed in destroying it, the Anacron fleet would still be able to annihilate the StarBlazer force before Marnax could take control of any of Venom’s defenses. As if to simplify Marnax’s options, the Anacronian fleet had transmitted a message early on, informing him that the Empire would accept no prisoners, no surrender. It seemed the only option now was escape through one of Venom’s doors.

  Of course, the Anacronian leaders were aware of that. All of the doors were heavily guarded by starships, not to mention the ring of laser cannons circling each door. Breaching those defenses was no easy process. The StarBlazer fleet had inflicted heavy damage on one of the doors, but it was not nearly enough. Not only would it be necessary to completely destroy both the inner and outer doors in order to allow StarBlazer’s ships to escape, but any ship that made it out would immediately become a target to the innumerable weapons that dotted Venom’s outer surface. The only way to make a successful escape would be to be go to warp before the lasers locked on, and not many ships would succeed in that.

  Perhaps none would. Perhaps it was all over.

  Gerran Marnax watched the viewscreen as Galactron’s guns destroyed another enemy warship. It’s not enough, he thought. We can’t win like this.

  “Sir, ten Anacron ships approaching. Eight destroyers and four Nova-class cruisers. Golden Eagle is under heavy starfighter attack and has been forced to drop out of our escort.”

  “Get me Iron Talon,” Harvey ordered. Nredj Holmrk appeared on the viewscreen. “Holmrk? Where’s Captain Devorion?”

  “He gave me command of the ship and left the pricom not a minute ago. Didn’t say why. What do you need?”

  “Golden Eagle needs starfighter assistance. Galactron is about to be attacked by ten enemy warships.”

  “I’ll take care of it, sir. I think Captain Devorion is heading in your direction too.”

  Ambelshack Devorion was the type who looked for opportunities to ignore protocol. One of the most important protocols in starfighting was that you never traveled alone, but if there ever was an excuse to ignore that, this was it. His fleet had been reduced to twenty-one ships, and there was no way he was going to pull even one of the remaining fighters out of the fight just to follow him into something like this. All of the Starhawk pilots were elite to say the least, but not one of them would be able to keep up with Ambelshack in what he was about to do.

  His first target appeared up ahead: one of the destroyers closing on Galactron. Laser fire immediately streaked out at Ambelshack’s fighter, but his ship and his mind were so quick that he dodged all of the shots out of pure reflex. Further up ahead was the ship’s starfighter escort. High-powered missiles from Ambelshack’s ship locked onto two of the enemy ships from a ridiculously long distance. They fired so fast that the ships had no chance to break the target lock, and both missiles obliterated their targets. At a closer range, two panels slid open on the underside of Ambelshack’s ship, revealing supercharged tractor beam emitters. Ambelshack scattered a part of the enemy fighter fleet with shots from his wingtip particle beams and then locked onto one of their ships with a tractor beam. Modifying the beam to integrate with the enemy ship’s shields, Ambelshack extended the beam off of the captured ship and directed it toward another fighter. Trailing this chain of two enemy fighters, Ambelshack continued to approach the destroyer as
he added another ship to his chain, then another. A few shots exploded against his shields, causing minimal damage. The tractor beams had captured a chain of eight starfighters by the time Ambelshack was point-blank with the destroyer. He fired an energy disruptor at the destroyer’s shields where they protected the engine ports in order to weaken them slightly, and then he flew straight toward the spot he had hit. At the last instant he pulled up into a steep climb and deactivated the tractor beam. Laser shots from the destroyer tore at the underside of his ship, but Ambelshack pulled away before too much damage could be done.

  The starfighters Ambelshack had temporarily captured were not nearly as maneuverable as his. The first plowed into the weakened portion of the destroyer’s shields, followed by the second. By the time the sixth fighter exploded against the shields they were so weak that a breach opened. The seventh fighter flew through it and crashed into the destroyer’s exposed aft, while the eighth was able to barely escape.

  Dodging enemy fire, Ambelshack flew in again for a final run. He targeted the hull of the destroyer where the shields had been stripped away and fired a turantium missile at it. The missile burst open as it struck the destroyer, spilling turantium acid all over the hull. The turantium instantly burned into the metal, exploding into a chain reaction that tore its way to the destroyer’s warp drive. A purple ball of light burst out from the destroyer, engulfing everything it touched.

  Ambelshack lamented the fact that Starhawk had only been able to construct just that one turantium missile as he targeted the next destroyer.

  This one still had a healthy supply of missiles in reserve, and it fired several of them at Ambelshack as he approached. He destroyed many of them long before they reached him, but the others he evaded by taking advantage of his fighter’s phenomenally short turn radius; nothing could stay on his tail for very long. He had hoped that this ship’s starfighter escort would shy away from him after what had happened to the people defending the previous ship, but they did not. He was forced to hunt down and destroy most of them before he could get a clear run at the destroyer.

  At last he had the starfighters on the run and set up his attack on the enemy ship. He flew toward it, evading missiles and firing occasionally with his lasers in order to mask what he was really doing. As the destroyer began to fire at him with its laser cannons, Ambelshack released a nearly-invisible fluid from the back of his starfighter. The fluid was highly viscous, and it clung to the release valve on his ship, spreading out behind him in a wide wake. Ambelshack dodged the incoming laser fire just barely so that the lasers struck the fluid trailing behind him. The energy from the lasers caused the fluid to sparkle and glow, and soon it had absorbed the combined energy of several dozen laser blasts. Again Ambelshack’s ship was struck a few times, but still his shields held. When the fluid was saturated with energy, Ambelshack set a collision course with the destroyer, charging his warp drive as he went. He went to warp just before he struck, avoiding the destroyer by passing through hyperspace instead. The fluid was pulled toward hyperspace by the trailing edge of Ambelshack’s warp field, but the effect soon decayed – just as the fluid struck the destroyer’s shields. The combined energy from the warp field and the absorbed laser power shattered the shield barrier, leaving the destroyer an easy target for nearby StarBlazer ships. It was reduced to scrap in minutes.

  “Only zeld ships left,” the officer on Galactron reported. “Starhawk also eliminated most of the enemy fighters around Golden Eagle; it will be joining us momentarily.”

  Nice work, Marnax thought.

  “Sir,” came another report, “they’ve managed to keep Black Fang away from the door. The attack force you sent there has just been wiped out completely.”

  Harvey slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair. “Form another attack force and get it in there as soon as possible. Bring Galactron up with Black Fang. We’ve got to free up that ship now, or we’ll never get out.”

  Harvey and Marnax exchanged glances, and their thoughts were conveyed easily without words. Small victories, tremendous losses. This battle was as good as over. Six hours, Harvey thought. If we don’t do something major by then, StarBlazer will cease to exist and Dark Viper will rule the galaxy. Then determination welled up within him once more and he turned his mind back to the task at hand. “Varnes, that attack cruiser over there is vulnerable. Rip it apart.”