They had travelled only a few minutes at three apparent S-gees, with Tarkos squeezed down in his seat and nearly blacked out, when the radiation and the virtual particle spill-over from the beam washed over the cruiser. All the controls went dead.
_____
The waves of radiation continued, unabated. There was no point in rebooting the cruiser’s systems. Tarkos and Bria pulled their helmets on and waited. The engines sputtered on a few times, only to die again when the next beam passed, its particle discharge generating a wave front of electromagnetic energy, followed by stray quantum virtual-particle wash so strong that the ship’s shields held back only a fraction of the impact. Tarkos’s suit shrieked alarms but maintained its own shield integrity. Without that, he would have been kil
