The Dead Fleet (Juggernaut #3)

Sixty Six

Ellie ached.

Her fingers ached where they gripped the controls. Her wrists and forearms ached from wrenching the throttle and flight stick in every possible direction. Her back ached from the tension. Her legs and feet ached from using the pedals, and her jaw and head ached from her determined expression, cast in iron upon her face.

When is this going to end?

The last few minutes had been something of a respite. Since taunting death with her three-dimensional manoeuvre, Ellie had road across the small void at full speed and back into the fleet proper without slowing down.

Two pirate ships missed their opportunity to shoot her down. She was on them and past them before they even realised. Liking their odds they accelerated after her

Two agent fighters flashed onto Ellie's scanner. One above and to the right, the other above and to the left. They saw her and swooped down to intercept, appearing and disappearing between slowly tumbling parts of the fleet.

Ellie checked their distance to intercept, saw the pirate blips behind her, checked over her shoulder and angled up to intercept the agents.

The pirates saw her and followed. The pirates attacked. Decrepit pulse weapons spat out their still-deadly energy blasts.

The agent fighters reappeared.

Ellie aimed for the space between them and increased speed.

The pirates corrected course and pulled up in pursuit, still shooting. The agents broke left and right, circumventing the Valkyrie, favouring the greater threat.

Each agent targeted a different pirate. The pirates ageing weaponry turned on the agents. The agents replied with their own advanced military hardware, and flew through the clouds of glittering dust they created.

They passed each other at the midpoint of their turns and set off after Ellie, but she had already vanished.

A long clear path drifted across Ellie's view. The scanner was clear. She took it. This part of the fleet was one solid mass on one side, and on the other the crunched remains of two mid-sized warships.

Ellie relaxed the throttle, slowed, and caught her breath.

'Mal? Mal? Where are you?' Only digital ghosts replied. 'Tila? Are you out here?' Still nothing.

Ellie checked the scanner again. It was getting to be a habit. The Valkyrie's sensors continued to suck in data by the exobyte from most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Refractive Lidar pulled in surface details from everything within the ships line of sight. Reverb algorithms interpolated everything else. Somewhere inside the ships brain all this data was combined, sorted, analysed and weighed. Known facts were categorised in one area, extrapolated data in another. In a third, heuristic battlespace agents predicted likely outcomes and events based on the first two.

Cold data flowed through the Valkyrie's network, was transformed by visual processing units, was twisted back into a three-dimensional graphical image and appeared on Ellie's screen as the warm glow of the spherical scanner.

And still Malachi was nowhere to be seen.

Ellie rolled her ship, bringing the pock-marked surface of the big ship underneath her. Trying to keep up with all the movement around her, the different sizes, shapes and velocities of every little thing was hard. Setting the ship as a solid frame of reference was a welcome relief, even if it was only for a little while.

The scanner was still clear. Ellie slowed and looked all around her. As powerful as the Valkyrie's sensors were, her human, racing instinct asserted itself.