Free Battle at Zero Point by Mack Maloney Page B

Supertime-capable prop cores mat size and mass didn't matter. Everything moved the same, at the same top speed. The SG warship spotted the Kongo just as the Kongo's scanners lit up like a string of small suns. The scout ship turned one eighty, and its pilots booted into full crank, the highest speed a prop-core vessel could achieve within the atmosphere of a planet. The red SG warship turned six and went to full crank power as well.
    The chase was on.
    The only advantage the scout ship Kongo had was its physical size. It could go places the bigger SG ship could not.
    Zipping up to orbit and spanking into Supertime was not an option for it, though. The dynamics said it would have to slow down ever so slightly to make the leap. When it did, the SG ship would have it at a disadvantage. Certain destruction would result.
    No, the scout ship would have to use its diminutive size to get out of this one. And do so quickly.
    The terrain of Doomsday 212 suddenly became its best ally, especially the craggy surface and the surfeit of valleys and mountain passes. The Kongo's pilots brought their ship down to just 200 feet off the deck and kicked in the vessel's terrain-avoidance system. This would allow it to keep that 200-foot cushion between it and any object in its path. Or at least that's how it was supposed to work.
    The pursuing SG warship, however, had enormous arrays of sensors and tracking equipment; it did not lose sight of the scout ship for very long. The SG ship was also bristling with weapons, most of monstrous proportions and designed to do battle over great distances in space with ships almost as large but nowhere near as quick as she was.
    These were the dreaded master Z-beam weapons. They could destroy a two-mile-long warship at distances up to 50,000 miles. The crimson SG ship now trained these night-marish giants on the fleeing scout ship and began blasting away with wild abandon. Overkill by any measure, but particularly hellish in this instance.
    This torrent of destructo-rays made the fusillade that the scout ship had used to destroy the first SG ship look puny by comparison. The Kongo was twisting and turning through canyons, along valleys, up and over mountains, hitting hypersonic speeds, breaking the sound barrier with thunderous reports, the huge red behemoth not a half mile behind.
    In this running barrage, mountains were disappearing, dry riverbeds were being blown to dust, buttes and mesas reduced to piles of subatomic glass crystals. And it went on like this for what seemed like a very long time, even though the chase became more desperate for the Kongo with each passing second.
    There was only so long the scout could keep zigzagging before the gunners on the big ship would find their mark or, more likely, collapse an entire mountain on top of them.
    The heat of battle is a funny thing, a different mind-set takes over, whether the combatants are throwing stones at each other or trading blasts of vaporizing Z beams. The politics of the person shooting at you takes second preference over the desire of saving your own skin. Still, it was not lost on anyone aboard the tiny SF scout ship, as it careened its way through miles-deep river valleys and over titanic mountain ranges, that the people shooting at them—the same people who had just destroyed one of their capital ships—were not supposed to be their enemies. In fact, technically at least, they were supposed to be brothers. They all belonged to the same military, the Imperial Forces, and were sworn to the common goal of fighting against the enemies of the Empire and bringing the words and vision of the Emperor to every corner of the Galaxy.
    But this, this was both alarming and unprecedented. The two services had been barking at each other for nearly three centuries—but there was no turning back from this. More than 8,000 were already dead in the internecine battle, and still it was less than a half hour old. So even as they were racing along at top