The Shattered Sphere

Aboard CC43

The cargo ship fired its attitude jets again, even as the main engines continued to fire at maximum thrust. Dr. Yuri Alexandrovich Sakalov felt his tired old body being rattled about like a pea in a pod, despite the best efforts of the restraint system. It did not matter. True, if he survived, he would be covered with bruises from head to foot. But he was not going to survive. If there was any subject on which he was expert, it was the behavior and abilities of the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitters. And if a CORE decided to hit a ship, no amount of maneuvering was going to save it.

Yuri Sakalov tried, in the midst of the thundering chaos, to think through his life, as it ended. He had regrets, many of them. Things he had done, and had not, women he should have loved, mistakes he should not have made. And yet. And yet.

He was just about to die trying. Surely that counted for something.

The ship lurched suddenly, the engines cut out for a few seconds, and fired again. Sakalov frowned. What was the point of all these wild gyrations? It could not gain them anything but a few seconds of futile respite.

Soon now. He knew it would happen too fast for him even to be aware of it. The multi-megaton mass of the CORE would be moving faster than a bullet when it struck. There would not even be time for pain when it—

The Guardian smashed into the target, this time half-expecting another undetectable impact. But this time the Guardian struck a large mass moving at high velocity. Not enough to kill the Guardian, of course, or even to do it significant harm, but the impact was violent enough to stun it, confuse it, knock it off course.

Huge explosions ripped through the target, engulfing the Guardian in a shockwave of shrapnel and gas and heat and light that dissipated almost immediately. Debris of all sizes and descriptions tumbled through the sky.

And suddenly, where there had been two large bodies moving through space, now there was but one, surrounded by a cloud of wreckage.

Though still disoriented by the force of the impact, the Guardian felt pleased with itself.

It had destroyed an agent of the Adversary.

Or at least, so it thought.