Providence – Part 7
Even with weight slowly falling off, with our finances firming, and with several major and statistically significant achievements under my belt, I still have bad days. It’s going to happen. Sadly that means my wife has to absorb a non-zero amount of friendly-fire. No physical or verbal abuse, so lets not even go there, it’s just that I am Super-Saiyan levels of grump when I get like that, and tend to be very negative and fatalistic.
And please do not mistake me, I am not using this as a chance to excuse my behavior. I am simply explaining it. There is a significant difference between the two. I am allowed to be broken, to have my down periods, and to be a crazy curmudgeon. That does not mean I am free from the consequences of my condition however. Rest assured I have made restitution with the wife, who has dealt with this with the patience of a saint, but I still have to pick myself up after each episode and try to crawl back to the starting line.
It’s a lot harder when I’m forced to be bruised and battered to even start the race, but everyone has their cross to bear. More and more, I’m just grateful I get to be in the race at all. Winning it is the furthest thing from my mind. My whole life is focused on just making it to the finish line and letting the chips fall where they may.
Providence – Part 7
The ships were wrong. Elongated and bulbous, having more in common with weeds in a garden than with any space faring vessel she had ever seen or heard of. They were a riot of colors as well, all bright and slightly poisonous shades of greens, yellows, oranges, and blues. As they begun to move, Janet had a single moment to realize something else: there did not appear to be any engines on the ships either.
All sense of swagger, of confidence, and reckless enjoyment of danger fled. This wasn’t some Clan mounting a surprise offensive, or some carefully crafted scheme between human beings.
This was an assault by forces unknown, using technologies she’d never encountered even once in almost ten years of high stakes racing and Clan espionage across all of the established human galaxy. She banked towards the planetary body, recording the underside of the disk as she shot towards it like a rogue comet. Janet wore no smile, and took no chances. She simply shot three of the five compact nuclear warheads she carried on board directly at the disk. The ships were already in pursuit, globules of light looking like so much flung mud washed around her forceshell, and once she had delivered her payload, she dropped all pretense of attack and gave her engines every drop of power she could squeeze out of her over-worked reactors.
The disk, at least as large across as the habitat at its widest point, was supported by three enormous green trunks that resembled trees more than they did any normal construct. The disk itself gleamed, but as she streaked over it, she noticed that it wasn’t metal at all, but rather a series of enormous petals, overlapping and brightest silver in color. They flowed slightly, as though caught in a breeze, and as they began to move, they gathered in light and began to glow. The nuclear payload would take a few moments to arrive, the trade off of using them instead of simply accelerating a projectile to percent of light-speed. She hadn’t had enough distance for such projectiles to amass enough speed to matter, but as she cleared the disk and banked hard towards habitat unit, she watched in a mixture of horror and awe as the gigantic petal weapon fired.
The glowing petals went from waving as though in a slight breeze to gyrating like a hurricane blasted them from three different directions at once. They slammed into one another in chaotic, relentless fashion, and as the seconds ticked down before the payloads arrival, the disk fired once more. Light spewed forth, nearly blinding in it’s brilliance, but almost before it had left the disk it disappeared, morphing into the raw force which had hammered at Clan Inoue’s forceshell.
Janet’s missiles arrived shortly after the weapon had fired, and the explosion which followed would’ve done any old-Earth action movie proud. Janet’s love of such movies not-with-standing, the alien craft were hot on her heels. They had been forced to take the long way around the sudden conflagration where their enormous weapon had once been. The motion of the ships had a fish-like quality to it, as though they were propelled by invisible fins or flippers. Janet wasted absolutely no time on guessing why they moved in such an odd pattern, she simply cut all aspects of her forceshell that weren’t covering the rear or flanks of her craft, and raced for her life. The weapons clung to her shell wherever they hit, remaining and continuing to damage them before dissipating either through exposure to vacuum or some other aspect of the forceshell layering.
Janet flew with the grace of all the years she had spent racing through artificial obstacle courses, through metropolitan areas, enormous sewer systems, even in naked space as automated turrets fired upon her. She made cover where there was only emptiness, whirled through maneuvers that should’ve made her pass out even with all the internal g-force dampening she had available. The minutes felt like hours, but the habitation shelf was looming larger in her viewport. She began prepping a secure com to her mother, giving her the full update on everything Janet had been able to discover.
She never sent the com. She could barely even breathe.
The habitation shelf forceshell was bulged in the middle, as though it had only just formed as was barely able to hold in all the pressurized atmosphere that was being asked of it. Slowly, she could see new layers extending outward to reinforce it and bring it back in line, but it was clear that significant damage had been done to it. That damage was what had rocked Janet to her core.
Where the office complex should be in the middle of the habitation shelf was only a collection of jagged and melted metal, torn support struts, and debris barely held in place.
The rest of the complex lay strewn across the bottom of the forceshell, torn and beaten into rubble so small it was hard to tell it had been a building at all.
Janet didn’t even hear the sound of emergency alarms as her forceshell strained against the multiple hits she was taking.
In the most dire emergency any Clan had ever faced, the most competent members of their administration had just been eliminated. Janet was now the only voice of leadership the Clan had.
And she wasn’t ready.
To be continued…
Petalfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
