Sighing with pleasure, Peter Raeder raised the stein toward his lips. The beer was cold, drops dewing the sides of the frosted glass. He smiled in anticipation. And then he was going to get in touch with a certain WACCI pilot. . . .
The mirror behind the bar was far more subtle than it lookedfor one thing, the AI governing what showed in it made everyone look younger, better looking, and happier than they were. Not that it wasn't a happy crowd; there was a babble of cheerful noise behind him, and some ill-advised contralto was trying to sing something classical, in the Key of Off. As his lips touched the rim of the stein, the mirror flashed once and then started showing the Space Command logo.
A chorus of groans and curses rose from every corner of the bar, stool, table, booth, the corridor leading to the restroom and the nook where darts and billiards were being played. That logo could mean only one thing, an emergency, and an emergency meant canceled shore leave. The only people who weren't looking worried were unassigned survivors from the Dauntless. Their ship was in the graving dock and would be for months.
"All personnel from CSS Invincible to report on board immediately. Repeat, immediately. All personnel from"
More groans, heartfelt from the carrier's crewpeople, mock-sympathetic from station personnel and the crews of other ships. One bystander muttered "What ho, the Butterfingers," as they moved toward the exit, gulping down their drinks and calling farewells. Two of his comrades grabbed a short, choleric-looking drive tech and walked him out before he could dive for the mocker. Raeder exercised an officer's privilege and scooped up the first sled to float by.
"Why us?" he muttered. This just wasn't fair.
"Life isn't fair," Captain Knott said with cheerful lack of sympathy as he looked down the table at his division heads. "And neither is the Service, not in wartime. The reward for doing good work is more work."
There were mutters of agreement. He called up a stellar map on the holowall, a schematic that showed the Transit points and routes. "The Dauntless picked up more than that antihydrogen."
He looked slightly smug. So did a number of others around the briefing table; it had been quite a feather in the Invincible's cap. Raeder let himself bask slightly in the approving looks. And he'd picked up CPO Paddy Casey, who was tooslightly irregular, but you could always use someone that good. The Dauntless could do without him for a while, certainly.
"She also brought back some intelligence data," Knott went on. "The Mollies are evidently getting sick of our, ah, requisitioning their antihydrogen from the scattered processing plants in their cluster."
A few chuckles. So far, and particularly with what the Dauntless had brought in and the Invincible saved, Space Command was getting nearly as much as it had bought from the energy companies before the war . . . and the Mollies weren't getting anything from the transaction but busted heads and boot-printed backsides.
"So they're consolidating their operations into a series of better-defended sites. As you know, moving raw antihydrogen is a job for specialists." And horribly dangerous at that; one in ten of the automated ships didn't complete their missions. "It'll be more expensive for them to ship it all to a limited number of refineries, but they think that they can make it more expensive still for us."
"The high command," he went on, "thinks we should disabuse them . . . and that if we retaliate immediately after the Dauntless incursion, we can catch them on the hop. Their own tactics tend to be somewhat conservative, so they won't be expecting anything."
There was a moment of silence. One important reason for that was that the Mollies had fewer capital ships and couldn't afford to risk losing them on anything but high-return or unavoidable engagements. Commonwealth Space Command could afford to take more risks because it had more ships . . . but any loss to the ships concerned was unpleasantly final and total to their crews.
"So we're going after one of their new defended central plants, to show them it isn't a good idea. We'll be working with the Aubrey and the Maturin, as before. I'm downloading the initial ops plan to you all, but that's just a framework. We boost from Ontario Base at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow, and we Transit thirty-six hours later. Gentlemen, ladies, let's get going. There's a great deal to do."
"Prepare for Transit. Prepare for Transit."
Peter Raeder slumped back into the seat in his cubby, rubbing at red-veined eyes. His mouth tasted as if a coffee tree had died there long ago, with several rats entangled in the roots. "We're ready," he muttered. "We're actually ready. In from a major action, another bloody major action, then out on a raidall in a week. But Flight Deck is ready."
"Sir."
Raeder looked up. Well, there's the long and short of it, he thought. There was Lieutenant Robbins and Chief Casey, with something on a gurney.
"Sir, here it is," Robbins said. "Paer, Chief Casey gave me some real help with it. He's an artist with a micromanipulator."
Raeder blinked, looking at Casey's huge paws; they looked more suitable for bending horseshoes. Then the fatigue drained away as he saw the synthetic hand resting on the gurney's surface beside a tangle of electronic equipment. It looked less sophisticated than the one he was wearing; the ship didn't have the facilities for plastics that duplicated the appearance and texture of human skin and hair and nails. But what was underneath the plain beige surface . . .
Paddy coughed. "Lieutenant, sir, why don't we let himself try it out? We'll come back in a bit and run the tests," he said with elephantine tact.
Robbins looked at him blankly. Another cough, a wink, a nudge with a foot. "Oh, sure, Chief. Sir, we'll be back in a bit."
The door hissed shut behind them. Raeder forgot it, forgot even the rasp of fierce embarrassment at the thought of taking off his prosthesis with somebody else watching. Slowly he reached out for it, then drew back his left hand. Instead he thought the command that weeks of biofeedback had taught him. Sensation in his right hand ceased at once, except for a phantom itch at the base of his right thumb. The techs and doctors had never been able to eliminate that one, no matter how they adjusted things. He willed againit was like telling a muscle to moveand a hairline gap appeared all around his right wrist, just above where the joint would have been if he still had it. There was a muted click.
He took the right hand in his left, closing his eyes to lessen the weird sensation of gripping one hand with the other and only feeling it with the first. A quick tug, and the artificial hand was off. The stump was a smooth convex surface with four evenly spaced conduits for datajacks and two stout prongs that supported the hand while it bore weight. He put the first hand down on the surface of the gurney and picked up the one that Robbins had developed and built with Casey. It was slightly heavier than the firstprobably they didn't have access to all the fanciest materialbut the couplings on its inner surface were identical. He slid it home with another faint click.
All right so far, he thought, and gave the same mental command. There was a flash of bright heat, and sensation returned with a tingle. He wiggled the fingers, touched each in turn to the thumb, and stroked them down the surface of his keyboard. The sensations . . .
"Hard to say," he muttered.
Raeder brought the fingertips up to his lips. "Yes, definitely a bit more sensitive," he said. "But there's always the acid test."
The top of the gurney held a duplicate of the control pad of a Speed, a testing unit used to calibrate AIs. Raeder pulled the gurney in front of him and slid both hands into the pads. And waited . . .
Seconds later, Robbins and Casey looked up as a grinning Peter Raeder pushed the gurney out into the corridor. "It works! It works!"
"Transit signatures. Recent. Data follows"
Raeder swore under his breath at the relayed voice from the bridge. A similar chorus of groans spread across the flight deck, where the pilots were already sealed into their Speeds.
"How many ships do the eight-legged spalpeens have?" Casey swore as he pulled his head out of an access panel of a Speed. " 'Tis the secondary wave guide on this plasma gun, aschula, sir."
"It's not the ships, it's the fuel," Lieutenant Robbins said, climbing the access ladder. "They can run more standing patrols than we can through areas that just might need it."
"Ah, and isn't that the clever thing to see?" Paddy said.
"Right, it is the wave guide. These things are always giving out."
"Sure, and it's the plasma flux they're guidin'," the engineering tech said philosophically. "Spillover."
"Okay, let's pull the unit and slap in a spareeasier to work on the wave guide on the bench."
They guided down an overhead waldo and fastened it to the massive bulk of the Speed's port plasma gun. An amplified voice rang through the cavernous depths of flight deck:
"Prepare for Transit. All hands prepare for Transit."
"Much more of this and Himself will be gettin' plump," Paddy grinned. "Right back the way we came, a two-day Transit, and then we're trying a new route. It's out of fuel we'll be, soon."
A motor whined and the complex shape of the gun rose. He prepared for the difficult task of worming an arm in to disconnect the fuel feed line that ran from the weapon to the Speed's plasma bottle.
"Let me handle that," Robbins said.
He nodded, then blinked in astonishment as she chinned herself and wormed her whole torso in. There was an interesting wiggle as she worked on the connection.
"Clear!"
He keyed the control on the lift and the gun swung free; with casual strength he guided it down to the surface of a trolley. The machine trundled off, heading for a workbench in one of the bays off the flight deck. Another came with a replacement gun fresh in from a rebuild, and helpfully raised it to the level of the working platform that surrounded the fighting vehicle. Humming under his breath, Casey swung it down.
"I'll get the connector," Robbins said.
"Sir," Paddy replied, watching her work, "yer the first livin' soul I've ever seen who can do that without gropin' around blind. A sad frustration to the designers, I'm sure."
"They do always put the vital parts on the bottom or back," Robbins answered. "For this you either have to be small, or have arms like an ape."
They slid the access panel closed and looked down at Raeder.
"Sir, would you run the verification check? Quicker than getting a member of the squadron."
Raeder nodded briskly. Unusually tactful, he thought. She didn't say real pilot at all. Maybe she's learning to be a human being.
He flexed his new hand and went up the ramp; it sealed behind him with a sough of hydraulics and a tung-chink as the seals went into place. The Speed closed around him, infinitely familiar. Alone in the blue-lit gloom as he settled into the control couch, he grinned to himself at the bittersweet pleasure. He didn't bother with the restraints as he slid his hands into the control gloves and the holohelmet sank to cover his face and shoulders.
"Main power off," he said. "Shipside power feed on."
The status bars came up green on either side of his vision, and the deck sprang into being around him. "Three-sixty."
That gave him a compressed view of the outside, an all-around view squeezed down into a hundred-twenty degree arc ahead of him. Weirdly distorted to a lay eye, but second nature to a pilot.
"Sim run, plasma cannon, port," he said. The AI brought up the icon, circled with a red bar through it to show that the weapon wouldn't actually be firing. It couldn't, not without a feed from the main fusion bottle, which was powered down at the moment . . . but better safe than sorry. Even a partial wasn't a nice thought, not in a pressured-up flight bay.
"Lieutenant Robbins, Casey, give me a direct confirm on the cannon, please."
He could see the squeezed-looking figures jacking in to the plasma gun, datalinking directly, then Casey making a physical check . . . and sticking a marker between two components that had to touch for the weapon to function.
That guy is thorough, Raeder thought. Just as thorough as Robbins, which was saying something. He just did it without looking, as if he was an obsessive-compulsive. It was a wonder a ten-year man with his abilities wasn't higher in rank, until you looked at his record. Wonderful on shipboard, even better in action, but his idea of recreation appeared to be to walk into a bar frequented by Marines and drag his uniform jacket along the floor, daring anyone to step on it. He'd gone up and down the pole several times, reaching CPO twice. And how on Earth had he managed to get a kangaroo out of the Lunaport Zoo and halfway back to his ship before Shore Patrol caught him? Both of them drunk as lords, to boot.
"Casey. How do you get a kangaroo drunk?"
There was an injured silence for a moment. "Why, to be sure, with whiskey, sir. In beer; they're partial to it, I find."
Maybe Robbins will give him an incentive to try for Officer Candidate School. God knew Space Command needed all the leaders it could get, with casualties and the expansion program.
"Confirm stimulation status on port plasma cannon, sir," Robbins said, sneaking a sideways look at Casey. Raeder saw her lips move: a kangaroo?
The holohelmet showed the weapons board. Raeder's hands moved instinctively in the glove, and he felt a surge of triumph as the cannon came out of its slot and tracked smoothly on its swivel pivot. The aiming pip slid over the arched interior of the flight deck, a complete three-sixty turn and then up to vertical.
"Excellent," Raeder whispered. An instructor's voice came back to him from flight school, a martinet with a tongue like a rasp and cold gray eyes, named Oleg Katchaturoff. It had been a triumph ever to get a word of praise from him, until that day when Raeder outflew him in a practice dogfight. He'd come up to Raeder afterwards, and said two words: ochen korrosho. They fit here. "Most excellent."
"Nominal on the plasma cannon," Robbins said. "Thank you, sir."
"Thank you," Raeder replied. "Both of you."
"This is the decision point," Captain Knott said, looking down the table. "We've finally found a Transit route the enemy isn't checking or patrolling. Unfortunately, our antihydrogen reserves are now at critical levels. If our mission succeeds, we'll be sitting pretty. If we fail, we may be trapped outside Commonwealth-controlled space and unable to Transit back to base. Comments, please, ladies and gentlemen."
"It's an important target, but not worth the ship," Larkin said promptly, absently knocking his academy ring on the table. Knott had one just like it. "Sir, I recommend that we return, refuel, and try the route we've found."
Sutton scowled. "With all due respect to the quartermaster, sir," he said, his voice making a liar of him, "We've got a narrow window here. The enemy are patrolling the Transit routes to our target zone vigorously and may step them up. We'd lose two weeks that way with no guarantee that there wouldn't be a task force or at least a scouting corvette waiting right here when we got back. And there's the waste of fuel to consider."
Knott gave him the same polite nod he'd accorded Larkin. Council of war or no, the Invincible wasn't a democracy; the captain could ask for advice, but the responsibility was his.
He looked to the destroyer captains. One of them spread his hands. "We're better set for fuel, of course, sir."
Raeder cleared his throat. "Sir, even if we drop below the level needed and can't pick up any at our target, we can always Transit out to somewhere intermediate and wait for a supply ship. That would still allow us our mission priority."
Sutton nodded to Raeder. He'd been much more friendly since the Dauntless incident. Grapefruit and peas, Raeder thought wryly. You could take a pilot out of the Speed, but you couldn't take the attitude out of the pilot.
Larkin frowned. "Our priority is to commandeer" he preferred the euphemism "the antihydrogen."
"No, it isn't, quartermaster," the captain said. "It's to capture or destroy the antihydrogen, or in any event to destroy the new fortified processing facility before the enemy start building more of them. And that is a very high-priority mission. Denying the fuel and facilities to the enemy is as important as capturing them for us."
They all knew what that meant. Mission first, comrades second, yourself thirdthe unwritten motto of Commonwealth Space Command.
"We will Transit to the target system at" he looked at the watch woven into his uniform cuff "eleven hundred hours. Ms. Ju, please begin."
The XO stood and went over to the wall; it flashed into display mode. "Our initial tactical formation will be . . ." she began.
Raeder felt his pulse leap. Soon the task force would be moving into the unknown, probably into another deadly surprise. He felt a grin fighting to grow and suppressed it. You shouldn't look like a kid at Christmas, not when life and death was at stake.
You can take the pilot out of the Speed, he thought, focusing on the briefing.
"Now, isn't it a fine thing that they've gone t'all that trouble to welcome us," Paddy said.
Raeder grunted, looking at the same tactical display in his hand unit. There weren't any real planets in this system; just one hell of a lot of junk, and junk rich in antihydrogen. It was often that way. Whatever had enriched this sector with antimatter had been rather profligate with it, and the results must have been spectacular while they lasted. What remained was thoroughly mixed up, mostly asteroid belts in orbits where planets would have been otherwise. The sun was an F5, running slightly hot, and variableplenty of solar-particle fog in this one, too. A pilot's nightmare and a guerrilla fighter's dream.
"Pièce de la résistance," Raeder muttered, calling up the refining station specs the WACCIs had gotten on their stealth approach.
The refinery itself was the usual tangle of scattered modules, with the living quarters and control facilities roughly in the center. They were armored, though, with thousands of meters depth of nickel-iron from
the plentiful asteroids and a layer of silica regolith on top of that. You could burrow through that sort of thing with nukes, but it took timeand it was virtually invulnerable to beam weapons, which liberated all their energy on the surface layers. The mass also provided a heat sink for really big defensive beam weapons, bigger than anything a ship could mount. The whole area around the refinery was also sown with parasite mines, disguised as floating bits of rock and ice. They'd stay that way until you came within range, and then explode, driving an X-ray laser burst like the Ice Pick of the Gods at you.
That was bad enough. Orbiting with the refinery to the solar north and south were two forts, with the same sort of armament, only much more of itand swarms of shipkiller missiles, kinetic-energy railgun mounts, you name it. And being located right next to an antihydrogen processing facility, he very much doubted there would be any power shortages here.
"Well, there aren't any enemy capital ships here," Robbins said stoutly.
No, they don't need them, Raeder thought. "We'll see," he said.
Wing Commander Sutton was visibly restraining himself; he looked as if he'd like to throw his helmet on the deck and kick it. Raeder listened to him debriefing to the XO with half an ear, the other nine-tenths of his attention on the crews working frantically on the returned Speeds. Two wouldn't be coming back, but they'd picked up one pilot. The other was ionized gas, along with her craft.
"Sir, it's like sticking your . . . arm into a laser cutter," Sutton said. "Here"
He touched the monitor helmet he was wearing. Casey had gotten Raeder a very nice little pirate feed. It gave an excellent view of the Speeds' first run at the targets, with Sutton commenting on the recorded view from his own holohelmet:
"This part went fine"
The picket ship was a converted merchantman; the weapons and sensor arrays looked tacked on. A second later it looked like an expanding globe of white light. Raeder interpreted the complex weaving of vector cones and data-displays effortlessly; half the Speeds peeling off to keep the orbital forts busy, the others boring in on jinking, weaving courses to take care of the refinery, and the destroyers in a sun-and-planet defensive formation, giving long-range backup with their more powerful beam weapons and long-range missiles.
"This is where it all went to hell," Sutton said disgustedly.
A Speed exploded, flashed into molecular powder by a multigigawatt particle beam. Parasite mines were exploding all across the quadrant the Space Command forces were traversing. Then the holohelmet picture began to degrade, status bars going to the amber of uncertainty, the recorded positions of Sutton's Speeds turning vague.
"Captain, we handled the picket ships; we handled their fortress-based Speeds. But for those forts, you need a battle groupa dozen dreadnoughts, five fleet carriers, and supply ships to keep them topped up with Solar Phoenix bombs and whatnot. The ECM in there alone is a killer; their jammers are pumping out too many watts and turning on a marker laser is a death sentence if those parasite mines pick it up. We can't land a precision strike and just throwing stuff at them is hopeless, the way those things are hardened."
Captain Knott frowned. "Could they have been softened up enough for a second run to work?" he asked.
"Captain, now they're ready for us. If I take another run in there and we futz around trying to hit something vital, they'll kill every last one of us, and we still won't hit anything vital. We might be able to do one pass through the target zone, at really high speeds, because their sensors aren't as good as their firepower. But that's itand our chances would go from near zero to goddamned zip. Sir."
Raeder looked at the wing commander's face. There is the original Can Do guy, he thought. If he thinks it isn't worth trying, then it isn't.
Or . . . Wait a minute. Sutton was as brave as lions were supposed to be but weren't. On the other hand, he was a bit of a linear thinker. He did what he did extremely well, but always in the same old way.
Let's put together two things he said, Raeder thought. Put them together in a way he didn't.
"Do you think this will work?" Robbins asked.
"If I didn't, would I be doing it?" Raeder asked. "Pass the number seven."
It was a heavy power cable. He crawled inside the missile's housing, where the warhead and guidance systems would be normally, and tried hooking it to the broadcast sequencer. It was an awkward, difficult task, in a cramped space with equipment never designed for it. And . . .
"Doesn't fit," Raeder cursed. "Paddy! You useless bogtrotter! This coupling's incompatible!"
"Sure, and aren't they all sassenach dear, sir?" Paddy said. A hand like a mechanical grabber came in and took the coupler out. "We're not doin' with them what the Great Gods of Supply wished we should, and they're havin' their revenge. You just get me a reading on the dimensions of the securin' ring, and I'll have it right as rain. And then Lieutenant Robbins here will do the hookup. And yourself will get back to brain work, which is what you're suited for."
Reluctantly, wiping the sweat off on the arm of his coverall, he obeyed. The missile was sitting on a floater cradle, adjustable for height . . . but there was only one way into the guts of a Dagger Mark IV. From the outside it looked like a funhouse mirror version of an egg, one that had been stretched out to four or five times its proper length and slightly grooved. The exterior looked like a mirror that was perfectly reflective and absolutely black at the same momentsomething impossible, but the Commonwealth had put a lot of R&D money into things like this against the day of need.
"It's going to work, goddamn it!" Raeder said.
Captain Knott was standing nearby, looking perfectly relaxed. Then Raeder saw a slight tick in the skin under one eyelid. All I have to do is my song and dance number, he thought, suddenly humbled. But Knott's in charge. It's his responsibility. Thousands of people, the ships, the missionwho knows, this engagement could turn the course of the war.
If it all went wrong, nobody would blame Commander Peter Raeder, ex-Speed pilot, not-quite-first-Ace of the Mollie War, obscure and insubordinate chief engineer of the Invincible's flight deck.
They'd blame Knott. The worst of it was that Knott didn't give a damn what people thought about him; his anxiety was entirely for his ship, his people, and his mission.
"Sir, we're doing our damnedest, and it will work. I'm not grandstanding."
Knott smiled wryly, the fine wrinkles beside his eyes crinkling almost to the cropped white hair. "Mr. Raeder, the hell you aren't grandstanding. But in our brief, exciting acquaintance I've come to have some confidence that somehow you'll pull off these outrageous stunts." Then, less formally: "How's it going?"
"Well, sir, at first I thought someone in a suit would have to ride these in," Raeder said enthusiastically. "But then Paddy . . . Chief Casey, that is . . . remembered an old technique. We've got the equipment. That's the good news."
Knott sighed. "Don't keep me in suspense."
"Well, the bad news is that with an improvised setup like this . . ."
Sarah James eased the WACCI closer. The long slow trajectory in from the outer reaches of this not-quite-solar system had left the coverall inside her suit smelling badly. The whole little triangular cabin did; the scout craft weren't meant for journeys this long. They could have zipped in much more quickly . . . but even the most heavily stealthed craft in the world couldn't do that without shedding energetic quanta. And even Mollie sensors would have found them.
Inside the holohelmet the brush of microrays across the hull was almost like the wing of some questing bird brushing her face with featherlight deadliness. This was too delicate even for the finest pilot. Instead the WACCI's engines burned in precise synchronization with the swarming sunspots of the hot F5 sun, covered by bursts of radiation and the detritus of the antihydrogen processing plant. Raeder was quiet behind her. He'd been quiet all the way in, running through simulations except for a few brief naps.
Well, maybe he isn't entirely a Speed pilot, she thought.
"Coming up on it," she saidquietly. That made no unearthly difference, of course, but she couldn't help herself. "So far, nothing to indicate their active sensors have caught us."
He gave her a smilenot a pilot's reckless grin, just a smileand put his fingers into a set of improvised control gloves mounted on the arms of the couch where her gunner would normally have sat.
If she'd been wrong, or if the Mollies had made them on passive scanners, the first thing they'd know was when the plasma burst or laser beam hit them. They might just have time to realize what had happened, if they were unlucky.
"Now," Raeder said tonelessly. Sweat matted a lock of black hair to his high forehead as he pulled his helmet down. That turned his face to a nonreflective globe. "Mark. Three. Two. One."
There was a very faint tung sound through the hull. Sarah keyed her own holohelmet, and the ship disappeared from around her. The modified Hawk missile was drifting away from the WACCI like any other piece of the space debris that filled this star's neighborhood instead of planets. She killed the scout craft's engines, taking it down to minimum emissions, drifting cool and signatureless among the manifold specks of light that crawled across the motionless stars. One of them was the orbital fort that was their target. . . .
There. A brief tenth-second burn, and the Hawk's drive filled the field of view with a moment of luminous fogthe AI translating emissions into visible light. It curved away from Sarah, trailing an invisible length of fiberoptic cable. That gave it a link to the cabin of the WACCI, unjammable, undetectable; the technique hadn't been used in war in generations. Velocities were too high in modern conflict, engagements over too quickly, for something so cumbersome to work. Except in this one, special, unique application.
So it's a good idea, she grumbled mentally. Through the helmet she could see the missile's feed. Hour after hour passed, with only an occasional sip from the water tube to mark its passing. Raeder burned the missile's engines for absolute minimum signature and at random intervals. At last it matched velocities with the target. An artificial moonlet of nickel-iron and silica rock, still jagged and foamed from the construction process that had used fusion to melt and shape it. The surface of slag and stone might have been natural, if it hadn't been so raw . . . and if it hadn't been for the installations that pocked it. Railguns poked out, plasma cannon loomed on turntables, and the black caves hid shipkiller missiles. And . . . there.
Sarah admired the delicacy that nudged the Hawk within kilometers of the crucial spots. Did the other one do as well? she asked herself. Impossible to know. There hadn't been any detectable fuss, and that was all she could say.
"Done," Raeder said. His voice was croaking and hoarse with fatigue and tension. "Disengaging line. Over to automatic."
"Signaling," she said, sending a tightbeam coded burst. Risky, but one they had to take. "Gone."
"Now get us out of here!" Raeder was virtually twitching against the restraints that held him in the gunner's couch. And here he was so patient for so long, the dear.
She grinned, half-sympathetically. "Sorry, Commander Raeder. That isn't how we do it, in the WACCIs. We wait for a diversion and sneak out."
"But" He forced silence on himself and sank back. "It's your bird, Lieutenant."
"La jou commence," her navigator murmured.
Drifting in zero g, the cone paths traced across the holohelmet's schematic looked deceptively peaceful. They represented the entire squadron of Speeds boosting at maximum toward the enemy installations, at maximum evasionmaneuvers that would stress pilots and machines at ten-tenths of capacity. Behind them the Aubrey and Maturin were boosting inward, as well. Heavier than the Speeds, and slower off the mark, but their massive engines and inertial compensators meant they could reach much higher velocities. None of them could outrun a beam weapon, though.
All at once the helmet's view dissolved into chaos, fog, static. Sarah's hands tightened. Every Speed was launching countermeasures: screamers, false IFF signalers, nanochaff, beacons, fake ships. The field swam with ghost vessels and voices calling commands with Mollie codes, and databursts carrying viruses that would sow havoc in command-and-control systems if they punched through the Mollie defenses.
"Lieutenant, it's your bird, but I suggest you get us out of here. We won't know if it worked until it worked, and I can't think of better cover."
"Roger Wilco," Sarah said.
She wasn't a Speed pilot, to risk her skin for no good reason. The good reason was over; she brought the WACCI's engines live and began a fast but prudent burn away from the Mollie orbital fort. The fort was stabbing out almost at random, lighting up her detectors like a Christmas tree, but the fire was wild. Once everything on the ship flickered as a heavy plasma burst went roaring by and an X-ray laser spike from a parasite mine came cringingly close. Behind them the modified Hawk would be doing the same thing as the minesfiring a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead to generate a spike of laser energy of enormous power. That spike would be at a different wavelength, though, and designed to carry something other than pure destruction at the other end. And in this flurry of high-energy disruption and energetic jamming, it would probably go unnoticed.
The Speeds were not carrying anything but their loads of jamming and deception apparatus. The destroyers were loaded for bear, but they were approaching far too rapidly for precision aiming . . . except maybe for the Solar Phoenix missiles; they could with luck
The holohelmet shut down after an instant of pure white light, brighter than a thousand suns. She tore it off; the fixed displays on the consoles were showing shields burning out under the impact of a cloud of particles and gamma radiation that did not diminish like that of an ordinary warhead. It went on and on, like the radiation from the surface of a newborn star.
"The gas shell," Raeder said tautly.
In anything like normal circumstances, they'd be worried about the radiation that was sleeting through the WACCI and their bodies. Right now they had more immediate concerns. The Bethe bomb was converting millions of tons of mass to a very rapidly expanding shell of gas. Explosions in space had no blast effect beyond close range, because there was no atmosphere to carry the shockwave. A self-sustaining fusion reaction with that much mass to push made its own tenuous atmosphere, and if they were within range . . .
Blackness.