Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

comrades. They crawled, walked, flopped back towards
their trenches.
    But the red light erupted again, raking flat across the curved
landscape. The beams lanced through the bodies of the wounded as they
tried to crawl, and they staggered and fell, cut open and sliced - or
they simply exploded, the internal pressure of their bodies
destroying them in silent, bloody bursts.
    Still Luca was unharmed, as if this withering fire was programmed
to avoid him. But, turned around and battered, he didn’t know where
his trench was, where he should go. And dust was thrown up around him
by silent detonations, obscuring his vision. He saw a brighter light
ahead, a cool whiteness, as if seen through a fog of dust and frozen
blood. He pulled himself out of the crater and crawled that way.
    Again the fire briefly faded. There was no air to suspend the
dust, and as soon as the firing ceased it fell quickly back to the
ground, or dispersed into space. As the dust cleared the white light
was revealed.
    It was no human shelter but the Sugar Lump itself, looming towards
the Rock.
    The Xeelee emplacement, a huge projection of power, was a cube,
shining white, that spun slowly about shifting axes: it was an
artefact the size of a small planet, a box that could have contained
Earth’s Moon. And it was beautiful, Luca thought, fascinated, like a
toy, its faces glowing sheets of white, its edges and corners a
geometrical ideal. But its faces were scarred and splashed with
rock.
    He saw this through a stream of rocks that soared through their
complex orbits towards the Sugar Lump. They looked like gravel thrown
against a glowing window. But these were asteroids, each like his own
Rock, kilometres across or more.
    Red light punched through his shoulder. He stared,
uncomprehending, as blood founted in a pencil-thin spray, before his
suit sealed itself over and the flow stopped. He was able to raise
his arm, even flex his fingers, but he couldn’t feel the limb, as if
he had been sleeping on it. He could sense the pain, though, working
its way through his shocked nervous system.
    An explosion erupted not metres away.
    A wave of dirt and debris washed him onto his back. At last pain
pulsed in his arm, needle-sharp. But the dust cleared quickly, the
grains settling out on their millions of parabolas to the surface
from which they had been hurled, and the open sky was revealed
again.
    A face of the Sugar Lump was over him, sliding by like a
translucent lid across the world, the edges too remote to see.
Asteroids slid past its surface, sparking with weapons’ fire. The
plane face itself rippled, holes dilating open like stretching
mouths, and more Xeelee ships poured out, nightfighters like darting
birds whose wings opened tentatively.
    But a new fire opened up from the Rock, a blistering hail of
blue-white sparks that hosed into the surface of the Sugar Lump
itself. This was fire from a monopole cannon, Luca knew, and those
blue-white sparks were point defects in spacetime. The Xeelee craft
emerging from the Sugar Lump tried to open their wings. But the blue
sparks ripped into them. One nightfighter went spinning out of
control, to plummet back into the face of the Sugar Lump.
    These few seconds of closest approach were the crux of the
engagement, its whole purpose. Monopoles, point defects, would rip a
hole in a nightfighter wing, or a Sugar Lump face. But you had to get
close enough to deliver them. And you had to hit the Xeelee craft
when they were vulnerable, which meant the few seconds or minutes
after the nightfighters had emerged from the Sugar Lump emplacements,
when they were slow, sluggish, like baby birds emerging from a nest.
That was why you had to get in so close to the Sugar Lump, despite
the ferocious fire, and you had to use the precious seconds of
closest approach as best you could - and then try to get out before
the Xeelee assembled their overwhelmingly superior weaponry. That was
why Luca was here; that was why so many were screaming and dying
around him.
    Luca felt hate well up inside him, hate for the Xeelee and what
they had done to mankind, the deaths and pain they had inflicted, the
massive distortion of human destiny. And as the human weapons ripped
holes in the Xeelee emplacement he roared a visceral cry of loathing
and triumph.
    But now somebody stood over him, shadowed against the Sugar Lump
face.
    ’Bayla? Teel?’
    A heavy hand reached down, grabbed a handful of his tunic, and
hauled Luca up. He was carried across