Chapter 15: Burn Toward Night
Day 89 – 06:00 station time
Throttle up: 0.15 g steady
Course: brown-dwarf cluster, 12 light-hours core-ward
Objective: find, fix, finish Vulture
Karl felt the new acceleration push him deep into the re-padded couch—Hearth-Hammer living up to its name. Four shuttle drives sang in rough harmony, their common manifold glowing violet on the monitor. Outside, Haven-3 dwindled to a toy wheel, then a spark, then nothing. Behind them the red dwarf shrank to a coal-chip; ahead the cluster loomed black against black, a fistful of dead suns pulling them forward.
He kept the basil-leaf crest in his peripheral vision—green paint untouched by the matte-black that covered everything else. Thirteen tally marks beside it caught lamp-light every few seconds, reminding him whose heartbeat rode in the metal.
Miguel sat propulsion, eyes flicking across temperatures. "Manifold delta-P holding at two percent. Drives one and four running two degrees hot. Within margin."
"Copy," Karl answered. "Selene, hull temps?"
"Outer skin plus-eight above ambient. Armor conducting fine. No hot spots."
The intercom crackled. Jun's voice from sensor bay: "Long-range sweep clean so far. Cluster gravity well will fuzz returns once we're inside. Estimate fuzz starts in seventy hours."
Karl nodded. Seventy hours to close, then they'd be hunting by eye and instinct in a soup of brown-dwarf infrared. He keyed the ship-wide. "All hands, set four-hour watches. Maintain suit-ready. We hunt quiet from here."
Day 90 – 14:20
Range to cluster: 9.4 light-hours
Relative velocity: 1 580 km/s
The trumpet blues played low in mess—now a galley again, table welded back for the living. Tala sorted medical kits, counting ampoules of coagulant and burn gel. She taped a small photo of Lina Ortega inside the kit lid. "So I remember who we're patching for," she said when Karl passed.
He understood. Medics needed reasons not to freeze.
Jun drifted in, handed him a data-slate. "Refined the beacon analysis. Echo's attacker burned at 0.22 g for eighteen minutes. Same curve Vulture used on two other raids—Meridian files match within two percent. Signature confirmed."
Karl felt the information settle like lead shot. They were chasing a ghost already proven lethal. He signed the slate and returned it. "Good. Let's make that curve their epitaph."
Night cycle—ship time 22:00—he took the bridge alone. Lights dimmed, drives humming, he spoke to the portraits taped above the console.
"Twelve more beats, cousins. We're coming."
Day 91 – 03:50
Range: 7 light-hours
First fuzz on scopes
Brown-dwarf infrared began washing returns. Stars ahead shimmered in false-colour, gravity wells bending space-time like thick glass. Jun switched to short-wave lidar—narrow pulses less prone to refraction. Blips flickered, none matching ship mass.
Karl ordered passive-only: no active lidar, no long-range comm. If Vulture lurked inside the cluster, he wanted to see them before they were seen.
He reduced thrust to 0.08 g—enough to keep crew under minimal weight, save fuel, lower heat signature. The manifold cooled; drives purred instead of roaring. Silence became a weapon.
Day 92 – 11:10
Range: 5 light-hours
Visual contact negative, heat contact possible
Selene and Tala suited and cycled outside, inspecting armour welds under thrust load. They found micro-fractures along the lance mount—stress from new vibration. They ground grooves, re-welded, wrapped molecular tape. Rios followed, spraying coolant mist to speed cure. Task took four hours; ship never slowed.
Back inside, Selene presented Karl a fist-sized chunk of slag—resolidified weld bead. "First blood," she joked. "From our own hide." He set the lump on the console beside the basil leaf—steel's offering to green.
Day 93 – 19:00
Range: 3 light-hours
Gravity turbulence increases
Drives hiccuped as space-time bent. Miguel fought trim, adjusting injector pulses millisecond by millisecond. Temp spikes danced across his board. "She's labouring," he muttered. "Like sucking soup through a straw."
Karl laid a hand on his shoulder. "Ease her. We don't need speed. We need quiet."
Thrust dropped to 0.05 g—barely a whisper. The ship drifted more than burned, sliding toward the cluster heart.
Day 94 – 02:30
Range: 1.2 light-hours
Contact
Jun's voice cut the dark. "Passive heat spike, bearing two-seven-mark-four. Black-body temp 290 K, size consistent with 80-metre hull. No transponder. Drifting but powered."
Karl's pulse matched the old forty-three. "Range?"
"Nine hundred thousand klicks. Closing slowly."
He studied the plot. The contact sat in a Lagrange pocket between two dwarf masses—perfect ambush ground. If it was Vulture, they were loafing, waiting for prey to wander in. If it wasn't, they needed to know before they opened fire.
He ordered a drift approach: cut thrust, coast ballistic, use cold-gas RCS only for micro-corrections. RCS budget: 22 m/s. He wrote 22 on the console and circled it.
Day 94 – 08:45
Range: 400 000 km
Visual resolved
Optical scope revealed a black needle, 80 m, no lights, thrusters cold. One dorsal blister—likely weapon bay. Hull scarred by micrometeor impacts but lines intact. Miguel compared silhouette to stolen corporate files. Match probability: 94 %. Vulture.
Karl felt ice slide down spine. The thing that murdered Echo floated half a million klicks away, asleep or pretending.
He called a war council in the galley. Five faces under dim red light. He spoke soft.
"Plan: close to 2 km undetected, lance the drives, disable weapons. If they surrender we board, free prisoners, take evidence. If they fight we burn them down. No second passes. Questions?"
Selene: "Armor on their drives?"
Jun: "Estimated 40 mm composite. Lance can pierce at 1.5 km if we hold beam 8 seconds."
Tala: "Prisoner recovery priority?"
Karl: "Highest. That's why we're here."
Miguel: "Escape route if they out-gun us?"
Karl: "Full burn retrograde, drop canisters as chaff, pray. RCS holds 22 m/s for final dodge. That's all we get."
Nods all around. No one smiled. Resolve tasted like copper.
Day 94 – 18:00
Range: 50 000 km
Drift complete
Hearth-Hammer floated silent, drives cold, only life-support trickling power. Inside, crew suited helmet-ready, rifles locked. Karl floated to the observation blister, pressed glove to glass. Vulture filled the view—a black predator asleep under starlight. He whispered, "Steel remembers."
Back on bridge he keyed the intercom. "All hands, battle stations. Lance to standby. Target acquisition in T-minus forty minutes. Count loud."
Chronometers rolled. Forty-three minutes became forty-two, forty-one… the old rhythm returning, but now shared by five hearts instead of one.
At T-minus ten he powered the lance coils. They whined high and hungry. Reactor ramped to 102 %, bottles glowing violet. He laid cross-hairs on Vulture's aft drive section, where fuel lines converged like veins in a throat.
T-minus two minutes. He opened a channel—wide band, no encryption. "Vulture, Vulture, this is Hearth-Hammer. You are targeted. Power down drives, open bays, prepare to be boarded. You have sixty seconds."
Sixty counted down inside his helmet, echoed by five others. No reply. The black needle drifted, silent.
At zero he pressed fire.
A thin violet thread lanced across vacuum, invisible until it kissed hull. Armor glowed white, slagged, parted. The beam walked a line along the drive section—eight seconds held perfect. Atmosphere vented in a glittering cloud. Still no return fire.
Karl lifted finger off trigger. "Target drive section eliminated. Stand by boarders."
He expected return fire, expected panic, expected something. Instead Vulture simply… bled. No thrusters flared, no weapons deployed. Either they were stunned or long dead inside.
He swallowed hard, keyed the intercom. "Prepare boarding. Breach at dorsal blister. Keep rifles low, eyes high. We move in five."
He unstrapped, rifle across chest, and felt the forty-third beat march in his boots—twelve for the dead, one for the living, one for the steel about to speak.
The lance had opened the door. Now they would walk through and see what ghosts waited inside.