“Starburstnow.”
As if they heard her, the cruisers began to separate, the ships rotating, engines burning in different directions. Sula didn’t see the final missile barrage coming, only the brilliant flashes that burned out all sensors on her boat’s starboard side. Most of the symbols on her display faded, replaced by less brightly colored symbols representing a purely theoretical position. To Sula it was as shocking as a slap to the face. When part of the schematic universe in her head faded, it was as if half her brain had died.
“Computer: superimpose radiation counter!” she said. She detected a hint of panic in her own voice and tried to fight it down.
The radiation counter, at least, was still working, and it showed repeated waves of gamma rays, neutrons, and short-lived pi-mesons, the strange fruits of collision between antihydrogen and normal matter. A succession of peaks as missiles exploded, dozens of them altogether.
She waited for the radiation to die back, then switched on alternate detector arrays—the designers of the pinnace hadassumed she’d lose sensors and thus provided multiple redundancy. The sensors showed that her pinnace was engulfed by the ferociously hot, expanding cloud of plasma caused by multiple missile strikes. There might be other vessels in the cloud, but if so, they were hidden by the electromagnetic storm that surrounded her.
Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she tried to force her senses by sheer willpower to penetrate the cloud. Surely there were survivors. Surely there were friendly ships in the cloud, ships that had perhaps lost their sensors or other electronics but with crew still safe in their hardened shelters…
Minutes passed. Sula licked her dry lips with a sandpaper tongue. The expanding plasma cloud lost density and cooled, and her sensor range gradually increased. And then the pinnace burst out of the cloud, and the radar universe suddenly flared in her skull.
Her heart surged as another vessel emerged from the cloud, on track to be one of Cruiser Squadron 2. The vessel was followed by another. Sula shifted from radar display to optics, tried to get as close a view of the two ships as she could. Her hope was strained as taut as her knotted muscles: surely one of these wasDauntless.
Recognition eluded her. Optical details were vague: the computer was filling in speculative elements where the optics were lacking. There was something strange in the display. Both ships seemed to beglittering, as if they were trailing comet-tails of shimmering sparks.
It was only when she switched to infrared that all became clear. The two cruisers werehot: heat-energy boiled off them, an abrupt contrast to the cold despair that began to chill her veins. She didn’t know the melting point of the cruisers’ tough, resinous hulls, but she suspected that it had been exceeded. If there were oxygen in space, the hulls would be on fire. Even if the crew were in their shelters, they had probably been baked alive as heat radiated inward.
Sula gave a start as the lead ship blew up, the antimatter fuel spraying out another cloud of gamma rays. She got her sensors switched off in time to prevent damage, and when the radiation counter showed that the radiation had dropped, she cautiously switched them on again. The first ship had been obliterated, and the second had been hit by a large piece of debris, or perhaps just by the massive sledgehammer of gamma rays and neutrons, because it was now tumbling end over end.
Nothing else emerged from the cooling plasma cloud but debris.
No survivors, Sula thought. Nineteen ships of the Home Fleet had just been wiped out. That eighteen rebels had also been destroyed hardly seemed to matter.
Sula floated in her webbing and tried desperately to process this information. She’d hardly got to know her shipmates in the few weeks she was aboard, with everyone strapped side by side into their acceleration couches and fighting for every breath. She couldn’t claim to have lost any friends. But still,Dauntless was the closest thing she had to a home, and now it was gone, along with its nearly four hundred crew.
And Captain Lord Richard Li was gone. He was the nearest thing she had to a patron, and she could say farewell to the promised lieutenancy.
He put me on my first pony,Sula thought, then gave a bitter laugh.
Forget about ponies and lieutenancies. None of these would matter if she didn’t survive the next few hours.
Even as she made this resolution, a part of her mind was making calculations. The Home Fleet’s fifty-four ships were now down to thirty-five. The enemy started with somewhere between sixty and ninety ships—with radar restricted to the speed of light, not all had yet shown up on the displays—and had now been reduced to somewhere between forty and sixty. Settle on fifty, then, as a mean.
Fifty-four versus seventy were better odds than thirty-five versus fifty. Sula couldn’t shake off the feeling that she had just seen the Home Fleet begin its death agonies.
Ahead, beginning its swing around Barbas, was a Naxid heavy squadron, featuring a suspiciously large blip that Sula suspected was the enemy flagshipMajesty of the Praxis. They were decelerating now, with the obvious intention of letting the remaining Home Fleet overtake them and bringing on an engagement. Sula considered sending her missiles after them, but suspected it would be futile. She couldn’t attack an entire squadron on her own, and the Home Fleet was somewhere behind her, concealed by the expanding, cooling plasma cloud that markedDauntless ‘s destruction.
She programmed in a modest two-gravity burn for both herself and her missiles, intending to close on the Home Fleet while she tried to work out what to do next.
While the burn was going on, two squadrons of small ships, frigates and light cruisers, shot out of the cooling plasma cloud behind her. Her sensors registered the pounding of their radars on her boat’s skin. Then a light cruiser hurled missiles into space. Chemical rockets flared and died; the bright antimatter torches ignited. Sula tracked their headings, and saw that one barrage was heading for the decoys that had initially been her target. Another barrage was heading for a different set of decoys.
And a third was heading right for her.
She gave a startled cry of protest as her heart thundered into overdrive. Without thought, she flung the pinnace around its center of gravity and opened the engine to a constant six gravities. The hull groaned as the engines fought inertia, and her suit clamped gently on her arms and legs. Only then did she send a message, via comm laser, to the firing ship, a light cruiser that was leading a division of frigates.
“This is Cadet Lady Sula ofDauntless!” she said. “You’ve opened fire on me! Deactivate your missiles!” She tried to keep hysteria out of her voice but doubted she’d succeeded.
The missiles kept on coming, closely packed in a furious acceleration that the retreating pinnace couldn’t match. More missiles flew from the squadron, aimed at anything the sensors could detect regardless of range. Whoever was acting as tactical control officer had clearly lost his head.
Sula got busy, voice and hands giving orders to her own missiles. Three of her twenty-four began to burn hard to intercept the threat. Whoever was controlling them saw the danger to his barrage and ordered the attacking missiles to spread out. She countered, ordering the rest of her missiles to speed away from the Home Fleet, then commenced an acceleration she knew would leave her senseless. As gravity took her by the throat, she could feel her heart flail in panic. She managed to get her sensors off before both she and her terror lost the fight against unconsciousness.
When her programmed acceleration was over, a vestigial memory of fear helped her to claw back from the velvet black depths of unconsciousness. Her suit gradually released her arms and legs. The radiation counter showed the aftereffects of massive explosions, and readings showed that the hull was very hot. Sula could hear the whirring of the cabin cooling system. Because she couldn’t view anything, she ordered another furious acceleration, and when she awoke again, both the radiation and heat had dropped. At this point she dared to activate some sensors, and behind her saw the vast hot bloom of an explosion that seemed to take up half of space. No missiles appeared to be following her out of the cloud, and the only missiles she could find on her display were her own.
She kept her engine going until the cloud began to dissipate, at which point she shut it down in hopes that a pinnace without acceleration wasn’t worth being fired on. She could feel patches of sweat in her armpits and crotch and between her breasts, and her heart still throbbed within her chest as if urging her to run as fast as she could.
The lead elements of the Home Fleet slowly appeared through the dissipating radiation fog. The cruiser flagship had been joined by its entire squadron in flinging out missile barrages, now toward the heavy Naxid squadron ahead. Sula didn’t think much of their chance of success, especially as the missiles were taking the long way around Barbas, following in the enemy’s wake instead of cutting the corner, which might actually have made sense.
And then another flight of missiles leaped from the rails and fired.
At Sula.Again.
Grim, determined anger sang through Sula’s nerves as she again programmed her own missiles to intercept. This time her message was broadcast to every ship in the two light squadrons, sixteen ships altogether.
“Listen, you fucking moron.”The words were forced from her diaphragm as gee forces built. “This is Lady Sula of theDauntless, and you’ve just fired on mefor the second time! ” She glared into the camera and screamed, “Do I look like afucking Naxid, you piece of rodent shit?Stop panicking, get a grip on yourself, and call off your missiles!” With one hand she thrust a vile gesture at the camera pickup. “I hope I live long enough for you to court-martial me over this, you useless bastard!”
She felt better for having vented the anger, but the missiles were still coming. She programmed a massive acceleration and turned off the sensors. As her head thudded against the padding in the back of her helmet and she felt the miniwaves drumming against her back, she clenched her teeth and fought the smothering blackness that started to creep over her mind…
Consciousness returned more slowly this time, a slow rise from an oblivion akin to death. It took Sula a while to focus on the displays even though they were projected onto her visual centers. The radiation count was high, and so was the hull temperature, but neither were as hot as after the first barrage.
Still, she was thankful for the slabs of radiation shielding that surrounded the cockpit.
When she turned on the sensors, she saw the cloud of plasma behind her, again obscuring her view of the fight. No missiles were coming at her, and she had eighteen of her own left. When the clouds finally dissipated, the light squadrons seemed to have lost interest in her: now all the ships were firing on the Naxids ahead. The area on the far side of Barbas was a continual boil as Naxid missiles met those of the loyalists.
Sula programmed her own swing around Barbas, but her wild accelerations away from the oncoming missiles had forced her out of the most efficient route. She swung wide and had to burn hard to get herself onto the line for Magaria’s sun, the next step on the loop around the system.
It had been over two hours since she transited the wormhole. She allowed herself a drink of water and ate half a ration bar. It was flavored with some chemist’s idea of strawberry, and the taste didn’t encourage her to finish the second half. She had to open the faceplate of her helmet to eat, and the cabin’s interior smelled hot, as if someone had forgotten to turn off a stove burner.
The two light squadrons, taking the inner track around Barbas, had pulled ahead of her. Behind them came Jarlath’s six huge battleships, and behind them a heavy and light cruiser division, both of which were dueling with pursuers, to judge by the missile bursts in their rear.
The light squadrons were firing less regularly now, which argued that they might have realized their munitions were not unlimited, but the space between them and Fanaghee’s squadron was still opaque with detonations, one blaze of plasma after another.
Disaster happened so quickly that Sula barely had time to register what was happening before the loyalist squadrons were engulfed in flame, a succession of colossal bursts in and among them.
Nothing came out the other side of the expanding plasma spheres. Sixteen ships had just been blown to bits.
Sula’s stunned amazement was followed by a burst of rage. She wanted to shriek, to pound a fist against the armored walls of the cockpit. But instead she forced her mind to work at what had just occurred.
It seemed that missiles had flown through the plasma screen undetected. Then she decided that wasn’t what happened. The missiles hadn’t accelerated. They were launched, burned for a short time while their signature was obscured by plasma bursts, and then just lay in wait, drifting toward the oncoming ships. If the light squadrons had seen them at all, they’d seen what appeared to be debris. The missiles let the light squadrons overrun them and then detonated.
That was how Martinez had hit Magaria’s ring, Sula remembered, let unpowered missiles drift in while no one was looking. Fanaghee had learned a trick from her enemy.
The odds were horribly against the Home Fleet now, nineteen ships against something like fifty, and Jarlath had to know it. The Battleship Squadron broke into two divisions of three ships and began massive accelerations to overtake Fanaghee, whoseMajesty supported eight heavy cruisers. Sula watched in awe as she calculated the growing velocity: everyone aboard the battleships had to be unconscious, with the computers doing the steering.
What Jarlath was attempting seemed worthy of her support. The battleship division had to take out the enemy heavy squadron or no one was escaping Magaria alive. Sula programmed her own acceleration and burned an interception course for the Naxid squadron, her missiles spreading out in a wave in front of her. Again, the antimatter engines blazed, flattening her against the couch. Again, she fought against unconsciousness until it spun her into blackness.