Strength and Honor by R.M. Meluch Page A

exhaled. She cast Gaius a fleeting little smile that was a confession of nervousness just passed. They were both feeling better now.
    “That was the naked part,” Calli told Gaius.
    Then lights appeared, flashing off Wolfhound. Someone was hitting her with beam fire from the direction of outer space.
    Because beams traveled at light speed, you never see them coming until they’re hitting you or passing you through gaseous matter.
    Because the attacker was actually hitting a moving target with a light speed weapon, that meant he had to be close.
    Calli clicked on the com, “Wolfhound! This is Captain Carmel. Lieutenant Patel, give me a status!”
    The reply came from the com tech, with a lot of earnest voices audible in the background, “Unknown attacker, Captain. At indeterminate distance. Possibly retreating.”
    Retreating, but still firing. There were a lot of flashes. Wolfhound’s force field sparkled like blown glass.
    The aging Wolfhound did not generate as adamant an energy field as Merrimack’s, which allowed Mack to stand closer to a black hole than any solid object had a right to.
    Still, the Hound’s field was stout enough to weather this barrage. It was not a convincing attack in Calli’s judgment. The beams were having no effect except to light up the ship’s bow. Some of the shots were going wide, which meant the attacker was taking aim from a distance of over several light-seconds. It was not an efficient attack at all.
    Flights of Rattlers, launched from the space fort, streaked out in the direction of the beam weapon. The brute, snub-nosed, bulky gunships of the space cavalry bristled with heavy ordinance, itching for a fight.
    Beams continued to light up the Wolfhound.
    “Has the look of a diversion,” Calli murmured.
    “I concur,” said Gaius.
    The two of them might have been back at the Institute discussing an interesting scenario. Except for the sensation of death tightening Calli’s throat. “So where aren’t we supposed to be looking?” Calli said, checking the Tac readouts.
    Wolfhound’s defensive systems would automatically arrange her force field to present the thickest part of her field toward the source of the attack.
    Wolfhound, like any ship, was most vulnerable through her engine vents in her stern. Calli slammed on the com. “Lieutenant Patel! Never mind the beam fire! Cover the Hound’s ass!”
    A projectile rocketed up Wolfriound’s engine vent. The missile did not penetrate but it made the force field grow tenuous. Made the slender energy hook that held the Spit boat flicker.
    “Numa, you bastard—/”
    In that instant, an incendiary round from somewhere very close and astern pierced the Spit boat.
    A flash of fire filled the cabin.

The dialogs. II.
    JMdeC: I admit that I find the open-ended, negatively curved model of the universe philosophically disappointing. I wanted to see a positive curve. At the end of the Big Bang, I rather like the idea of the Big Crunch, in which everything compresses back down to an infinite point and bangs anew. It reflects the nature of the universe as I observe it around me—death and rebirth. Plants going to seed, dying, born again in their progeny. Instead of a second bang we seem to be doomed to a whimper. It disappoints my sense of what ought to be—cycles of seasons, cycles of procreation. The negatively curved universe ends in eternal night. The Biblical Outer Darkness, where lost souls go in the end.
    A: Well, hell, Don Cordillera.
    JMdeC: Yes. Hell. I reject the medieval, sadistically conceived vision of hell. Hell is the absence of God. If you reject God, then you simply die. If you put yourself into the hands of God, you transcend this physical reality to be with God. After everything else is gone, something lives, while the physical universe of attenuated atoms becomes the Outer Darkness.
    A: That’s where I’m going. And I have news, so are you.
    JMdeC: The corporeal me, yes. The part of me that transcends the physical