Quoted By:
“Pressure. Constant acceleration strains the body even at moderate burn-rates.
I spent the past week ensconced in an acceleration chair, weathering the crush of military thrust using a tailored mixture of vascular stabilizers and muscle relaxants. The automated drive maintenance cycles were my sole respite: performed daily for a half-hour of shipboard time. Just barely enough time to join MERRYGATE in the observation blister to behold the burning corpus of Mizar-A.
When we had first arrived in this system, the primary star had been little more than a cyan speck – the first among equals in a sky filled with a multitude of stars. Now, Mizar-A dominated our viewscreen like a baleful eye, washing out its cosmic siblings with cold, cobalt-blue light. Arcs of coruscating plasma foreshadowed its gaze, giving birth to charged-particle waves millions of kilometers wide.
In less than a month, the RAIN would have to navigate those electromagnetic currents. A tight slingshot maneuver would allow us to exploit the same principle used to hide the Mizarian launch station. The intense radiation output from the MIZAR-A would shield us from detection as we circumnavigated the star like an orbiting comet. By the time our vessel was resolvable from the solar background, the station would already be well-within our weapons envelope.
It was a decent plan – made better by the perplexing actions of our adversary. The kinetic impactor that the Mizarians had built was still locked inside its launch cradle – a full two weeks after they had shown it to us to threaten our compliance. From our long range scopes, we could now distinguish drive plumes heading two and from the station – evidence, most likely, that their weapon was not as complete as they had made it seem. MERRYGATE found the entire situation amusing: some of her rage sublimated once she realized that the aliens were losing a gambit that involved their main trump card. It even mellowed the disappointment she felt as several of the core worlds fell behind us. Despite her willingness to acquiesce to my plan, I sensed that her eagerness to employ the RAIN’s world-razing armaments exceeded my own.
