“Alright, well. You guys make your Switch and get out of there. Patton: I love you. You’re the best friend anyone could ever have had. And I was a shitty one. You deserved better. You have the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known. I’m so sorry. Please get away. If you can, get word to my parents that I love them. Maybe leave out the drugs and the butt stuff.”

I killed the transmission and focused back on the display.

What the hell was the Timelance doing? Clearly, they weren’t going to try and kill me just yet. Which meant they were going to see if I had the Chime. Then they would kill me or torture me. What an endgame: death, or torture and death.110 As for right now I could only guess that they were going to take me alive – trail me until the reactor ran out of fuel or until they decided to board the ship. I was nearly out of options.

I tapped the big screen on the console and brushed through the menus until I found the weapons system. I had that nuke. And I had the dilaceration cannon. Aptat had used it on the Terror’s Glaive and chopped the thing to bits. Oh, shit, I forgot. “Hello?” I said in a vaguely ceilingward direction, “Uh, charge the dilaceration cannon.”

Instantly, the menu showed the cannons powering up. Slowly. Next, I scrolled through and found the missile. Maybe I could fire that first and then the cannons right after?111

I tapped the missile – there was only the one – highlighting it in white. “Shoot that ship in front of us.”

I leapt in the chair as the missile launched from the Silent Child toward the Timelance. A direct hit, but no explosion. Nothing. “What happened?”

The display put up a schematic, showing the route the missile had taken, which was directly through center mass. “Why didn’t it explode?”

MISSED.

“What do you mean, missed?” I yelled. “It was aimed right at it!”

“Can we fire the dilaceration canon?”

SURE.

“Great, let’s do that one.” My mouth went dry.

OK.

“Target the Timelance,” I said. The ship complied. It almost felt too good to be true. With them flying out in front of me, it was a pointblank shot. I couldn’t miss. They were sitting ducks.

“Friends?” I said into the com one last time. “This is it. You there?”

I waited two more seconds then gave the order. “Fire!” Nine planar lasers, white as the sun, sliced the void into ten vertical stripes of black, cutting through the Timelance. A direct hit.

I blinked away the afterimage and refocused on the display.

The ship was still there. In one piece. Bewildered, I mumbled to myself. “Did we fire the canon?”

YES.

Did we hit them?”

NO.

“What happened?”