The loyalists weren’t the only ones to have worked out this method of resupply.
The wormhole to Naxas approached. The Naxids formed into a long line and vanished through it. Hot on their heels came loyalist missiles, racing at relativistic velocities with their lasers and radars pounding out to light up the system before Chenforce arrived.
Chenforce took its time. Michi reduced the deceleration to three-quarter gravity and gave everyone three hours’ holiday. Meals were laid on the mess room tables for the first time since pursuit had begun, and the crew ate in shifts. A modest amount of alcohol was decanted, enough to produce a glow in the crew.
Alone in her cabin, Sula drank fragrant tea sweetened with clover honey, ate her dinner, then had three desserts. Every cell in her body rejoiced at the low gravities. She lay on her bed and slept in dreamless peace till Spence arrived to help her into the vac suit.
Reduction in deceleration of course meant that the fleets would meet earlier, not later. And Michi was still pushing ahead, still doing her best to demolish the Naxid timetable.
Chenforce flashed into the Naxas system with every sensor operator straining for sign of the enemy, and with Sula having switched her display to virtual. The sensor missiles that had gone into the system earlier had done their work—bits of the system flashed into her mind almost immediately, jigsawing together until she saw, like a spatter of brilliant stars against the blackness, what the Naxids had been running toward.
For a moment her heart lurched. It seemed that a vast enemy fleet lay ready in the system—but of course at this stage it would look that way, the real ships surrounded by scores of decoys that loyalist observers had not yet sifted out from the genuine warships. But even if ninety percent of the enemy force were bogus, the size of the force still surprised her.
They were right where Sula had thought they’d be, having swung in succession around a pair of the outer gas giants, and were now burning at eight or nine gees acceleration for a rendezvous with the survivors of the Magaria fleet, which was decelerating briskly in an effort to keep the rendezvous.
Those heavy gravities that were torturing the Naxids were Michi’s fault, for having pressed the pursuit.
“Sensors, I want ranging lasers on those new blips,” Sula said.
“Already done, my lady.”
The relativistic sensor missiles were racing through the system too swiftly to keep the enemy in their sights for long.
The rest of the system seemed bare, however. The Naxids had cleared away everything for this final combat.
Lady Michi, speaking in the clear, transmitted her demand for surrender. Only time would tell whether the government on Naxas was headed by someone as chatty as Dakzad had been at Magaria.
“My lady,” said Maitland, “I have a preliminary analysis of the enemy. Some of those blips are…well, they’re very large.”
“I’ll take a look.”
She enlarged the sensor image on her display. Some of the blipswere large—not just large, but gigantic, and they were gigantic both in radar and laser-ranging images.
Theycouldn’t have, she thought at once. The war simply hadn’t gone on long enough for the Naxids to have built a squadron of giantPraxis -class battleships like those destroyed at First Magaria. Even under the accelerated building schedules produced in wartime, it would have taken ages to put one of those giants together.
She counted. There were nine overlarge blips. There had only been eight battleships in the entire Fleet, and they had all been destroyed.
The big ships had to be something else.
They had to be warships simply because they were here. There had been plenty of time for all nonwarships to clear the system. But the overlarge blips couldn’t have been built as warships, they had to have beenturned into warships.
They were converted transports, big ones like the vast ships Sula had seen in orbit around Magaria.
“They’re converted merchant ships,” she said, and immediately felt the relief that sighed through Command.
Merchants couldn’t be much of a threat, she thought. In the days after First Magaria, when Zanshaa was expecting a conquering Naxid fleet every minute, a number of small private vessels had been requisitioned by or sold to the Fleet, given a few missile launchers apiece, and sent to patrol the Zanshaa system as “picket ships.” Fortunately, the ridiculous craft had been withdrawn from service before the Naxids had the chance to wipe them from existence.
But these Naxid ships, Sula thought, weren’t yachts and little transports and small merchantmen. These were the largest vessels in existence, bigger even than the oldPraxis -class battleships, even if they weren’t built for war. All that was needed to turn them to warships would be missile batteries, the addition of turrets for point-defense weapons, an electronics upgrade, and extra radiation shielding for the crew compartments and certain other parts of the ship. The craft wouldn’t be very maneuverable, and damage control would probably be worthless, but there would be lots of redundancy. As missile platforms, they would be serviceable enough.
The conversion could probably have been done in a couple months. If the order went out after the Naxids lost Zanshaa, the conversions would start appearing about now, too late for Second Magaria. It was a desperate move, but a reasonably practical one.
Sula began calculating how many missile batteries could be crammed into a space capable of holding ten thousand citizens, like the transports she’d seen at Zanshaa.
The total was frightening.
She asked for a line to Chandra Prasad.
“Yes, my lady?” Chandra said. The camera showed her properly suited, with her helmet in place. Sula, whose helmet was not in place, suddenly felt exposed.
“Those big blips,” Sula said. “They’re large converted transports.”
Distance caused a few seconds’ delay between Sula’s words and the response.
“Yes, my lady,” Chandra said. “We’ve worked that out.”
There was the tiniest bit of condescension in her voice.Yes, we know that, don’t bother us.
“Have you worked out how many missile tubes a large transport can carry? Something like six hundred.”
A few seconds later Sula saw Chandra’s face fall.
“I doubt they carry that many,” Sula said. “For one thing, transport from the magazines would be incredibly complicated. But we shouldn’t dismiss those ships just because they started out as merchants.”
Her tone echoed Chandra’s condescension. It was the least she could do.
“I’ll tell the squadcom,” Chandra said.
Ten seconds later Michi had joined the conversation.
“Sixhundred ?” she demanded. “How do you figure that?”
Sula explained. The huge hemispheric hull of a transport had a vast surface area. Each missile launcher took only so much of that surface area. Add it all up, there could be lots of launchers.
Missiles were cheap. Launchers were cheap. The offensive element was the cheapest part of a warship—the most expensive components were the engines, and merchant transports came with those already fitted.
The limitation on the total number of launchers wasn’t a factor of the surface area, but of the amount of plumbing necessary to feed the missile batteries their reloads. Missile batteries needed to be near the magazines, and both the magazines and the batteries needed heavy radiation shielding, and the heavy shielding needed structural support. Sula guessed that most of the big ships were completely empty except where missile batteries had been jury-rigged to the exterior, all on special support struts.
“Thank you for this,” Michi said. There was a little X between her brows, just beneath the bangs. “I’ll give this some thought.”
“No matter how big the ship,” Sula said, “it still takes only one missile to destroy it.”
Michi gave a weary smile. “I’ll bear that in mind, Captain.”
Michi had two days to think about the converted transports, because at the current rate of closing it would take that long for Chenforce to catch the enemy. The Naxids could always maintain distance, but they would still have to fight before they got to Naxas.
Sula knew the battle was going to happen wherever the Naxids wanted it to. If Michi had adopted her suggestion and pressed the pursuit without decelerating, she would have caught the enemy-before the reinforcement could have caught up with the Magaria survivors. She would have destroyed the Magaria contingent and then swept on to Naxas before the converted transports could have interfered.