Europa pride of that planet's fleet, was wrecked by a cloud of air-borne micro-organisms that metabolized atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen with most sorts of plastic, and left hydrochloric acid and poison gases behind as waste products.
Maxwell, a supersophisticated heavy cruiser from Bandwidth, was attacked not only by the foam worms, but by a species of spider-things bred to eat human flesh. The latter murdered the crew before the former could wreck the ship.
Conventional armament spread its more familiar sort of horror as well; lasers, torpedoes, exploding limpets—all did their work and League ships died.
Thomas tried to ignore the death, the destruction, and concentrate on the battle itself, the progress of the opposing forces.
It was working, as well it should be. The Guard's Outpost fleet was passing through the League's fleet to link up with the Capital fleet around the baryworld. The Combined Guard fleet was eagerly taking the chance to form into one fighting force. And the Guard fleet seemed to be significantly larger than anyone expected, with any number of smaller and slower ships deployed. After their losses at New Finland and Britannica, it was incredible that they could field that many ships. But then, this battle was for all the chips. If they lost here, they lost altogether. No point in holding reserves. They must have stripped their docking ports clean, must have taken along every space tug and broken-down old rustbucket.
The elderly admiral watched the screens. Yes, the Guards were forming up nicely about the baryworld. It was almost time. "Comm. Raise HMS Sapper if you please."
"Sapper is standing by, laser link ready."
"Very good." Suddenly, the admiral's voice shifted and he spoke in a stern, abrupt tone of voice. "Sapper, this is Admiral Sir George Wilfred Thomas. I hereby instruct you to proceed with Procedure A1A in exactly ten minutes from my mark—3,2,1, mark."
"Order received and acknowledged, admiral," said an efficient sounding voice from Sapper. "Activation codes to be transmitted in nine minutes, fifty-five seconds. Allowing for speed-of-light delays, you should detect first results in ten minutes, thirty-eight seconds."
"Thank you, Sapper. Good luck." Thomas swung around to face the comm officer, and spoke with the same crisp severity in his voice. "Send to all ships. Emergency Priority. Break off any and all engagements with the enemy and proceed at full thrust away from the baryworld. You must be underway within nine minutes. That is an Emergency Priority order. Send it now. Clear the tactical view off the main screen and get me the highest magnification you can on the baryworld. Those of you here in this room are about to find out about the closest held secret of the war. Officially, it's called Bannister."
The moment he had given the Bannister orders, Thomas wanted to countermand them. There had to be another way. But it was already too late for that by the time Eagle's own engines lit, for Sapper had sent the start codes, and nothing could bring them back.
The main screen shifted to the view from a long-range camera that was already zooming in on the dark, barren, cold lump of rock. Here and there, tiny sparkles of white flame could be seen as Guard ships maneuvered and lit their engines.
"It will start in a moment," Thomas said quietly. "Unofficially, everyone called it WorldBomb."
The viewscreen was filled by the rough, worn old face of the unnamed baryworld, formed by the slowest and most tedious process of gradual accretion over billions of years. It was a very old, very tired-looking sort of world. Suddenly, there was a bright lance of fire, and then another, and another, across its scarred and cratered face, and then it seemed as if the entire surface of the tiny world was afire.
"Implosion phase," Thomas said. "Hundreds of small explosions, from shaped nuclear explosives placed all over the surface of the planetoid. The bombs shatter the rock, and force Shockwaves in toward its core to concentrate the explosion—smashing the structure of the world."
From equally spaced points around its surface, a dozen huge and terrible tongues of blood-red fire shot out from the baryworld, reaching out far into space, casting a horrible ochre tint across the universe.
"There go the larger nukes, the deep bombs. The flame is jetting back up the tunnels we dug to place them."
And then, in a blast of pure white radiance, the baryworld itself swelled up, expanded, exploded—the little planet shattering into a billion bits of shrapnel that were flung out into space at terrible velocity.
Ninety percent of the Guard fleet was within fifty thousand kilometers of the baryworld when the WorldBomb was detonated. None of them had a chance. A huge pulse of electromagnetic energy, born of the nuclear explosions, flashed through the Guard fleet, scrambling computer banks, throwing circuit breakers, forcing arcs and shorts in electronic equipment. The Guards ships were instantly blinded and crippled. Hard on the heels of the electromagnetic pulse came a virtually solid wall of rock fragments, from mountain-sized boulders down to grains of dust and molecules, all moving at incredible speed. All of it rushed out from the world that was no more, slamming into ships, ripping through their hulls, tumbling ships end-for-end, crashing one ship into another. A large fraction of the baryworld's mass had been vaporized altogether, and expanded out into vacuum as a shock wave of terrible force, popping hulls and ports and hatches that were meant to hold pressure in, not keep it out.
The problem with explosive weapons in space has always been the lack of an atmosphere to carry the shock wave, the absence of debris to be thrown. In short, in a vacuum, an explosion has no mass to throw around. By destroying a small world, the League had solved these problems.
The command center crew watched the screen in stunned silence. Then the comm officer let out a low-pitched wail, and Thomas could hear the sound of quiet sobbing. "That's horrible, that's horrible," a voice whispered over and over, so quietly that at first Thomas thought the chanting was inside his own head. But no, it was the detection officer, his face ashen-white, unable to tear his eyes from the screen as the cloud of dust and debris that was once a tiny world and a proud fleet of ships expanded out into space.
"Even though that is a terrible, terrible end," Thomas said, "at least it is an end. And I shall ask myself if I truly had to do this for the rest of my days. But the war is over."
But Admiral Sir George Wilfred Thomas didn't know about Starsight.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Starsight
Captain Romero happened to be watching the monitors when the flaring light that was the baryworld's death blossomed across the dark of space. It took him a moment to realize where and what that terrible light had to be, and he was suddenly afraid. Who had done that, Guard or League? The great battle had begun, and he was here, still days out from Capital, cooped up with aliens he had grown to distrust.
D'etallis was irritated by the human's bothersome nervousness, and once again toyed with the idea of killing Romero immediately. But no, they might need a human face to parade in front of the cameras later on. She could endure Romero's company a while longer. He could die with lots of company, on Capital.
Ariadne
Perhaps there was no practical, rational need for caution anymore. Any fool who could count the number of ships left knew the days of the Guardians were over. After the barycenter disaster, there was nothing much left to oppose the League forces with. But Gustav knew warriors were not always practical or rational in defeat. Even he burned with a white-hot anger, a new hatred of the League that had smashed so many ships, killed so many young men, humiliated his planet and his nation. Johnson Gustav, who knew the Guards had started this war, who had known all along that the Guards must lose, even Johnson Gustav, who still might be executed as a traitor—even he thirsted for mindless revenge against the League for what they had done.
And Nike Station was still there in orbit, bristling with weapons that could leave a smoking crater where Reunion was. No, there were still plenty of reasons to be careful when talking to the League Contact party and Reunion. He waited until Nike was below the horizon, and then Gustav went to
the comm room and set up the link himself.
He didn't know that Nike had deployed snooper buoys in orbit.
Reunion
Reunions radio crackled and came to life. "Gustav to Reunion. Come in please."
Cynthia looked up from her work at the computer. She hit the right buttons and said, "This is Reunion. Wu speaking. Stand by a moment." She shut off the mike for a second and shouted down to the lower deck. "Message coming through from Gustav!" As the others scrambled up the ladder, she kicked the mike back on. "Go ahead, Lieutenant."
"There's some news you ought to know—the League has just plain destroyed the Guard fleet. We pulled every ship we had into the fight, and they were all virtually wiped out. It's all over but tidying up the details. The war is over, and—and your side won, in spite of the data that Prigot fellow seems to have given us." Gustav couldn't resist that dig into League sensibilities.
"Prigot fellow!" Mac cried out. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Gustav had assumed that the League people would have heard of Prigot through channels, but he hadn't expected to get that much of a rise out of them. "According to a report I've gotten, a man claiming to be a citizen of Capital, calling himself George Prigot, slipped through both the League and Guard detection systems, and got to a station orbiting Capital. I just got a very brief description of what he had to say, but apparently his information had a lot to do with the timing of the Guard attack on the League—for whatever good it did us."
There was a pause, and then Gustav's voice went on. "In any event, I'm not clear if Prigot claimed to have been a prisoner of the League or if he was pretending to cooperate with you. But he crossed the line the first moment he could, so obviously he was a double agent. I don't know all of what he told us. One thing he did say was that the Nihilists would betray us. No one seems to be taking him seriously on that. I take it you've heard of this Prigot?
Mac felt suddenly sick inside. George a turncoat? A double agent? No, it was impossible. It couldn't be. The two of them had risked their lives for each other a dozen times on New Finland, and George had again and again provided information vital to the League war effort. Gustav had to be lying, there was no other explanation. But how the hell could he have known who George was, or that he was with the League fleet? What motive would Gustav have for lying?
And George had changed sides once before. . . .
Joslyn took her husband by the arm, tried to comfort him with a quiet touch. She knew how much George meant to Mac, how responsible her husband felt for his friend.
Mac shook his head and tried to collect his thoughts. "Yes, I've heard of Prigot," he said angrily. "But that's to one side. Lucy has told me time and time again that you want to cut this war short, end it before too many die. It seems to me that this is the time for you to move."
"I quite agree," Gustav's voice replied over Reunions speakers. "I called asking for your advice in how best to proceed. The same person who told me about Prigot was primarily interested in getting contact with your side to start some very quiet talks. I believe you have a League diplomat along with you. Is he available?"
"Right here, lieutenant," Pete called out. "My name is Gesseti, Peter Gesseti. Exactly what would the topic of those quiet talks be?"
"Very simply, Mr. Gesseti, we want to kno—"
The speaker went dead.
Nike Station, Orbiting Outpost
Nike's comm center had been jumpy ever since Sprunt had vanished. They were the ones who finally picked up the chatter Ariadne was broadcasting, though they weren't able to locate the receiving station or locate the answering frequency. They only heard Gustav's side of it, but that was enough.
Laser Gunner's Mate Henderson didn't get told what was behind his orders, but he could guess. The damned CIs. They must have taken over Ariadne altogether. For Henderson's money, he wished they had ordered him to blow the place up, except there were probably still loyal Guards have on her, prisoners. If there had been any ships at all left docked to the station, or orbiting the planet for that matter, they could have sent someone to arrest them all, but there weren't any ships. Which left things to Henderson. He powered up his cannon, tweaked up its long-range aiming unit, waited for the next close pass, and sliced every aerial and antennae clear off Ariadne. That would shut them up. And if a comm station was silenced, it couldn't do any harm.
Reunion
Cynthia worked the comm controls frantically. "They're gone! Nothing, no carrier. Not just our signal, but everything that should be coming off Ariadne is gone. Oh, my God."
"No!" Lucy cried out, grabbing at the microphone. "Johnson! Damn it, come in!" Suddenly tears welled up in Lucy's eyes, the first tears she had allowed herself in a long, long time. "Cyn, shut the radio off," Mac ordered. "Before they can trace us, too. I'm sorry, Luce."
Thousands of kilometers away, Johnson Gustav closed his eyes, sighed, and felt defeat. The game was up. They had caught him. He thought of all the things he had never be able to tell Lucy, and cursed the universe that had brought them together only to tear them away from each other.
Task Force Command Center, Eagle
Thomas felt drained, used up. He knew the reasons all those ships had had to die, but he didn't have to like it, or feel good about killing them. No man or woman goes into space without falling in love with spacecraft—with all spacecraft—with the very idea of those splendid miracles of metal and glass and plastic that spanned the dark between the planets.
And the WorldBomb had smashed hundreds of those wondrous machines, killed thousands of people who had no greater flaw than being born on the wrong side of the line.
But he had a job to do now, still. He ordered prize crews to pick up survivors, and then turned his attention to the next task.
Unless the Guards saw sense and surrendered, he was going to have to bleed his fleet white trying to break through Capital's defense screen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Aboard Starsight
L'anijmeb performed the navigation check slowly, carefully, and then ran the whole test over again. All was well. They were on course—and no human group, League or Guardian, seemed to have spotted them yet. No human but the Guard's first Guidance, Jacquet, and a very few Guard officers, knew they were coming—and now that the Nihilists had changed the ship's course, the humans would have no idea where or when Starsight would arrive. There was some danger that the humans would realize what was happening and attempt to stop Starsight, but that was of no matter. If L'anijmeb could even get Starsight into the atmosphere for a few moments, that would suffice. Like most Nihilists, L'anijmeb didn't much care are about dying. She glanced across the cabin at the pathetic little halfwalker.
"You'll want knowledge, M'Romero," L'anijmeb said in her slow English. "We should be landed in just over twenty-six of your hours." And you, little halfwalker, will be dead in twenty-seven, she thought.
Aboard Reunion on Outpost
Mac stuck his head up through the opening in the deck plates and shouted through the overhead hatch. "Okay, Cynthia, run the phase-three calibration." Mac ducked back into the underdeck and watched the test meters hook up to the C2 generator. The displays flickered briefly and settled down to satisfactory settings. Joslyn nodded at the figures. "That's it. It ought to work. Only way to be surer than we are now is to try it." She started unplugging the test gear.
A strange sense of calm had come over the Reunion. It was all over now. All they had to do was sit tight and wait for some word from the League. Suddenly, there was time on their hands.
Charlie watched as Mac and Joslyn climbed out of the underdeck. "I still don't see why you're bothering to hook that thing up anyway," he said. "Or even why Cynthia swiped it off Ariadne in the first place."
"In case we needed to get the hell out of this star system on our own," Cynthia said, climbing down from the control room.
"Yeah, but the League won" Charlie objected. "We won't need it. The League can come get us or we can fly out to the barycenter and me
et them. Why hook it up now?"
"Could be we won't need it," Mac said. "If so, we've kept ourselves busy, instead of just sitting around doing nothing. And let me put it this way: If we do need a C5 generator for some reason, we'll really need it. They just blew up their own comm station to silence Gustav. If they track us down, and come for us, we're going to want to be able to run and run fast."
Pete Gesseti applauded, and winced slightly as he did. He arm was still pretty sore. "Spoken like a true paranoid pioneer. Take a lesson or two from Mac, Charlie. He's gotten out of plenty of nasty situations. And you do that by being sure you can use any advantage you've got, and thinking of all the unpleasant possibilities. If we keep that mind, we might up the odds on getting out of here alive.
But I sure as hell wish I knew what Gustav was going to say. Poor guy."
"Poor Lucy," Joslyn said. "It didn't take much imagination to see there was something there. Where did she go, anyway?"
Charlie shrugged. "Out. Just put on her suit and left without a word while you guys were in the underdeck hooking that thing up."
"What's she up to?" Joslyn asked. "Do you think she was going to try and patch things up with the Outposters?"
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