The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfeld Read Free Book Online Page A

however. If he could only get his remaining sandcaster to respond. It was barreling toward the huge receiver array on target, but intact. The drone itself would punch through the thin mesh of the receiver, leaving a hole no more than a meter across. Useless. He needed it to explode, to spread its sand.
    Marx cursed the empty ramscatters. Why did those things invariably launch all their flechettes? With even a single projectile, he could destroy the failed sandcaster, unleashing its payload.
    Perhaps he could ram the sandcaster with one of his other craft.
    The scout itself was without maneuver capability, the damaged fusion drive ejected. The decoy drone was too small, and its mass wasn’t sufficient to crack the tough canisters of sand. The stealth penetrators were even smaller, with only their silent but achingly slow coldjets for movement. They couldn’t ram the sandcaster at anything faster than a few meters per second. The empty ramscatter drones were Marx’s only hope.
    He opened up a narrowcast channel to the two ramscatters, and gave them trajectories as precise as his expert software could calculate. But these were weapons that thought in kilometers, not meters. The ramscatters themselves were not designed to ram, but to launch flechettes, and their onboard brains weren’t capable of tricky flying. Marx knew he would have to fly them in himself, from the remote perspective of the scout drone, with sufficient precision to strike the meter-wide sandcaster.
    With a three-millisecond light-speed delay, this was going to be tricky indeed.
    Marx smiled quietly.
    Truly, a task for a master pilot.
flocker squadron
    The squadron intellect found itself cut in half.
    True to their aim, the first few flockers had struck the gravity generator, in the center of the manifold where the enemy prime should have been. The generator was immediately destroyed, and the manifold began to discohere. The neat ranks of energy sinks drifted slowly away, expelling their energy in the assumption that their mothership was dead or retreating.
    The radiation from the flaring manifold formed a yoke around the neck of the line of flockers. Individual flockers were moving across the threshold at the rate of five per microsecond; the whole five-kilometer line would be through in under a millisecond. Communication between the drones that had flown through the manifold and those that hadn’t was swamped by noise, and the drones still on the near side of the manifold began to have decision-making difficulties. The squadron’s democratic intelligence crumbled as its constituent drones disappeared, each new quorum vanishing into the void microseconds after being established.
    The rear end of the squadron was paralyzed with indecision; the scenario was changing far too quickly.
    On the other side of the blazing manifold, the foremost flockers had quickly spotted the missing enemy warship, and declared themselves to be their own decision-making entity. The
Lynx
was a bare two hundred meters away from the manifold’s crumbling center. The flockers’ maximum acceleration was three thousand gees. From a standstill, they could have hit the target almost instantly. But they were flying past the enemy prime too quickly. With a relative velocity of more than one percent of the speed of light, no craft the size of a flocker would have sufficient reaction mass to reverse its course.
    The forward decision-entity sent desperate messages back through the manifold, giving the squadron the enemy prime’s new position. But the signals were overwhelmed by the radiation spewing from the abandoned energy sinks, and within a thousandth of a second, three thousand more flockers hurtled uselessly past the
Lynx
.
    Finally, with a firm majority in possession of the facts, the growing farside squadron intellect solved the communications puzzle, firing a coordinated set of message beams that reached the last few hundred flockers just in time.
    Most of these drones had no