by David Weber
"Bad, Ma'am," Onslow said heavily. His screen image's shoulders hunched against the exhaustion and strain trying to drag him under, and his sentences were short and choppy. "No one's ever been this high in the eta band. Our scanners are packing up; they can't make the shift over the theta wall. We tried linking with Dauntless, but her scanners are in even worse shape." He drew a ragged breath and rubbed his puffy eyes. "I can't lock in a good solution, Ma'am. I'm sorry."
Santander closed her eyes under the strain of a responsibility greater than any task force or fleet commander had ever faced. One she faced with but a single dreadnought and only one heavy cruiser.
Beyond the hull, Defender's translation field was a crackling corona, a crawling sheet of icy flame no human had ever seen before. The eta band was worse than anyone had thought, and conditions in its uppermost levels were indescribable. Humanity had no business in this haunted, curdled space, in these distorted dimensions where even time felt twisted and alien. But they were here, and all of her destroyers had died, absorbing missiles meant for Defender, to get them here.
She shook the thought aside, forcing her mind back to the task at hand. She had one MDM left—only one. The Kanga cruisers and the Grendel were as dead as her destroyers, but three heavy units remained . . . three targets for her single missile. They had expended most of their own MDMs on her destroyers, but her increasingly unreliable instruments could not tell her exactly how many they still had. It could be as few as two or as many as six—she simply didn't know. And the only way to find out, she thought grimly, was to offer her own ship as a target.
"All right," she said finally, "how close do we have to get under these . . . conditions?"
"Two hundred thousand kilometers, Ma'am." Onslow's mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his words, and she flinched inwardly. Less than one light-second? That wasn't point-blank—it was suicide range. Under normal circumstances, that was. Here? Who could know? "Even then," Onslow continued slowly, "Gunnery can't guarantee to hit the Ogre. They're still holding translation lock—God knows how—and sensor conditions are so bad that the seeking systems can't possibly differentiate target sources, however close we come."
"All right," she sighed. "We're sixty-five hours from the theta wall, but our options won't change." She met his eyes levelly and drew a breath. "Close the range, Captain," she said formally. "Get us close enough to score just once more."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Onslow said simply, and the drive shrieked as it was suddenly reversed.
The abrupt alteration was a strange and terrible anguish in the uncanny surrealism of the eta bands, and Santander fought the quivering pain in her muscles and nerves, watching her plot as the range to the fuzzily defined dots of the enemy shrank. The glowing diamond of her last escort clung immovably to Defender's flank as the heavy cruiser Dauntless matched her flagship's maneuver.
"Range twelve light-seconds," Miyagi reported. "Eleven . . . ten . . . nine . . ."
"Bandits are slowing," Tracking reported suddenly, and Santander bit her lip. The Kangas had been glued to full power since detection, disdaining any tactical maneuvers as they followed the precise, preplanned course to their Takeshita Translation. She'd hoped they wouldn't change that now.
"Range still dropping," Miyagi said tersely, "but the closure rate's decreasing. Eight light-seconds. Coming up on seven."
"Hostile launch!" Tracking snapped. "Multiple launch. Four—no, five incoming! Time to impact twelve seconds!"
Santander's eyes met Onslow's in horror, but neither spoke the truth both recognized. The enemy had preempted their own attack. His MDMs would arrive before Defender reached launch range. They had no way to know how good his targeting was. All they knew was that, unlike them, he was firing up-gradient, which meant his missiles' seekers would be far less degraded by the local conditions . . . and that there were five of them. The Kangas' odds of scoring a hit had to be several times as great as Defender's, which meant Santander had to launch now. She had to get her own MDM off before the incoming fire killed her ship and destroyed the weapon in its tube. But she couldn't hope to hit her target at this range and under these conditions, and the commodore's brain whirred desperately as she tried to find some answer—any answer—to her impossible dilemma. Only there wasn't one. There was only—
"Ma'am! Dauntless—!" Her plotting officer's shout whipped her eyes back to the display, and a fist squeezed her heart as the heavy cruiser began to move relative to Defender. Slowly, at first, then more rapidly. The commodore had a moment to realize that Captain McInnis had rammed his drive power past the red line. He'd known this moment might come, and her mind shied like a wounded horse from the thought of what conditions must be like aboard the cruiser as she crashed across the screaming distortion of Defender's drive wake and offered herself to Defender's executioners.
There was time for no more thoughts than that as Dauntless met the incoming missiles head-on. No more time for thought—only for grief as her last remaining escort vanished in a wracking spasm of outraged space-time and took the missiles with her.
"He did it," she said softly, appalled by the cruiser's sacrifice. Yet elation warred with her horror, and the realization touched her with self-loathing. Dauntless had died, but now no Kanga MDMs remained, and that was the only thing she could think about now. No other consideration was acceptable, and she kept her gaze on her plot, refusing to meet any other eyes.
"Captain Onslow," she heard her voice as if it belonged to someone else, "hold your fire, please. We will close to ten thousand kilometers and match speed and translation with the enemy before we attack."
The range dropped unsteadily, and inner ears rebelled as drive surges added to the stress already afflicting Defender's crew. The Kanga commander was desperate, Santander thought coldly. He'd shot his bolt, freeing Defender to seek optimum firing range at last, and he juggled his own drive frantically. But there was little he could do, and the dreadnought closed grimly, matching him lunge for lunge, sliding inexorably closer until the fringe of her own translation field was barely five hundred kilometers clear of her foes'. She dared come no closer, but at this range her missile could not miss at least one of her enemies, despite the fuzziness of her fire control. Not even Trolls would have time to react before it struck home, yet even at this short a range, fire control couldn't guarantee which enemy their bird would destroy.
Commodore Santander sat tensely in her command chair, knuckles white on its arms. One last shot . . . one chance in three. . . .
"We're as close as we can come, Ma'am," Onslow reported tersely.
"Very well, Captain. Fire at will."
"Missile away—now!"
It happened like lightning. There was scarcely time to register the launch before the missile flashed into the enemy formation . . .
. . . and struck the remaining Trollheim full on.
Josephine Santander sagged in her command chair. They'd come so far, paid so much, and they'd missed. Defender rode the Kangas' flank at less than a light-second, and it was over. The Ogre still had to make its final translation, but she couldn't stop it. She couldn't even follow into normal-space to engage the Kangas there. They knew when they were going, and even if she'd known that herself, it would have taken months of calculations by the best theoretical physicists to put Defender on the same gradient and follow them.
She'd failed. The bastards were going to get away with it, and there was noth—
But then her brain hiccuped suddenly, and she straightened slowly as an idea flickered. It was preposterous—insane!—but it refused to release her. . . .
She raised her head, looking into the screen to Defender's command bridge. Onslow had aged fifty years in the last twenty seconds, she thought, and his shoulders were as slumped as hers had been.
"Captain?" He didn't even blink. "Captain Onslow!" His dulled eyes flickered, and a tremor seemed to run through him.
"Yes, Ma'am?" His voice was mechanical, responding out of rote reflex.
&
nbsp; "We may still have an option, Steve." He looked at her incredulously. "We've still got Defender's multi-dee," she said softly.
His face was blank for an instant, and then understanding flared.
"Of course." Life returned to his eyes—the blazing life of a man who has accepted the inevitability of something far worse than his own death and then been shown a possible way to avert it after all—and suppressed excitement lent his voice vibrancy as he nodded jerkily. "Of course!"
Animation rippled across the flag bridge as the commodore's words sank home. Defender herself could become a weapon. It had never been tried before—as far as anyone knew—but it was a chance.
"Nick?" Santander watched Miyagi fight off his own despair to grapple with the new idea. His was the closest thing she had to an expert opinion.
"I . . . don't know, Ma'am." He closed his eyes in thought, his tone almost absent. "It might work. But it wouldn't be like an MDM . . . not a surge so much as a brute force hammer. There's the Harpy, too, and the interference of our n-space drive. . . ."
Sweat gleamed on his forehead as he tried to envision the consequences, then he opened his eyes and met her gaze squarely.
"I'll need to build some computer models, Ma'am. It might take several hours."
"In that case," she said, glancing at the chronometer, "you'd better get started. Even with their evasive maneuvering, we're only about sixty hours from the wall."
"Yes, Ma'am. I'll get on it right away."
"Good, Nick." She stood with a chuckle that surprised her even more than the others. "Meanwhile, I'm going to take a shower and grab a little nap." She reached out in a rare gesture of affection and squeezed his shoulder. "Buzz me the minute you have anything."
Commodore Josephine Santander walked slowly from her bridge. As she stepped through the blast doors into the passage, she heard Miyagi calling sickbay for another stim shot.
"All right, Nick."
Commodore Santander leaned back in her chair, incredibly restored by a shower and eight straight hours of sleep. Her crushing sense of failure had been driven back by the forlorn hope of her inspiration, and her face was calm once more, filled only with sympathy for the bright, febrile light in Miyagi's eyes. He was paying the price for seventy hours of strain and stim shots, and his glittering gaze held a mesmerizing quality, like the fiery intensity of a prophet.
"I can't give you a definitive answer, Ma'am, not without more time than we have, but the models suggest three possible outcomes." His voice was as tight and intense as his eyes.
"First, and most probable, we'll all simply go acoherent." He said it without a quaver, and she nodded. Survival was no longer a factor.
"Second, and almost as probable, all three ships will drop into normal-space with fused multi-dees and heavy internal damage—possibly enough to destroy them. If our own multi-dee were up to Fleet norms, we'd have a better chance of surviving than they would; as it is, it's a toss-up. Either way, though, they'll be light-months from Sol without FTL capability and in easy detection range of Home Fleet's pickets. Which—" his grin was feral, flickering with drug-induced energy "—means the bastards are dead."
Captain Onslow made a savage, wordless sound. He, too, had rested, yet he was not so much restored as refocused, with a flint-steel determination to destroy his enemies. Steven Onslow was a wolf, his teeth death-locked on a rival's throat, unwilling and possibly even unable to relinquish his hold.
"Third, we may push them right through the theta wall," Miyagi went on. "I can't predict what will happen if we do, Ma'am, but I suspect it will still throw them into a Takeshita Translation. On the other hand, our hitting them will screw their flight profile all to hell. We might throw them further back than they planned, but it's more likely they'll come up short, and the degree of deviation is absolutely unpredictable, whichever 'direction' it goes. There's even a faint possibility we could toss them into the future. In any case, the further from their planned break point we hit them, the wider the diversion will be."
"I see. And if they go through the theta wall, what happens to us?"
"Commodore, I'd say there's about an even chance we'd go with them. It depends on two factors: the exact mass-power curve of our translation fields at impact and how close to phased our n-drives are. Our scan data's too unreliable for us to match deliberately, but the tolerance is pretty wide—assuming my model's sound." He showed his teeth again. "I'm wired to the eyebrows, Ma'am, but I think it's solid."
"And if we go with them?"
"Then we're probably looking at something very like possibility two, Ma'am. All three of us in normal-space, no multi-dees, and unpredictable degrees of damage all round. The odds are we'd bleed a lot of the surge in the translation, so the damage might be less extensive than if we don't break the wall, but that's only a guess."
"I see." She looked at her two ranking officers. "Captain Onslow?"
"I say do it," the captain said savagely. "Even if we don't kill them outright, we may drop them in short enough for Home Fleet—or a fleet, anyway—to be waiting for them."
"Colonel?" The commodore swiveled her gaze to Leonovna.
"The Captain is right, Ma'am. It's our only option."
"I agree," Santander said calmly. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and nodded. "Very well, we'll try it. But when we do, we'll play the odds—all of them. If we do drop into normal-space and all three of us survive, we'll have our hands full. The Ogre's got at least as much firepower as we do and a lot more defense, and they still have their Harpy." She nodded to Leonovna. "Assuming she survives—and we do, of course—your interceptors are going to be outnumbered three to one. Can you hack those odds, Colonel?"
"My birds are better, Ma'am, and so are my people. We'll keep the Harpy off your back." Leonovna's smile echoed Miyagi's.
"Good. But, Colonel, remember this—" Santander stabbed her with her eyes "—the carrier is secondary. The Ogre and the Kangas are what matter. If even one Kanga tender gets away, you will break off the engagement and pursue it. Kill that tender, Colonel Leonovna! If they dust the planet, everything we've done is meaningless. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Ma'am," the colonel said softly.
"All right." Santander glanced at the bulkhead chronometer. "We're still over forty hours from the wall. I'll give you twelve hours to make your final preparations. Captain, have Doctor Pangborn and his staff get out their injectors. I want every member of this crew to get at least six hours of sleep during that time if it takes every trank in his dispensary."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Very well," the commodore said. "Let's get to it, then." She rose, and the others rose with her, but she stopped them with a raised hand.
"In case I don't get a chance to tell you afterwards," she said quietly, "I just want to say well done . . . and thank you."
She held their eyes for a moment, then turned away before they could respond. They followed her from the briefing room in silence.
" . . . so our attack plans have to be extremely tentative," Major Turabian, Strike/Interceptor Squadron 113's exec, said. "Red and Blue Sections will be tasked with fighter suppression and armed accordingly. White and Gold Sections will carry mixed armament. White Section's primary target will be the Harpy; Gold Section will form the reserve with primary responsibility for nailing any Kanga tenders. Captain Hanriot will lead Red Section, Captain Johnson will have Blue, and I will lead White. The Colonel will lead Gold Section and exercise overall tactical command. Primary and alternate com frequencies are already loaded into your birds' computers."
He sat down, and Ludmilla Leonovna crossed slowly to the traditional lectern, her hands clasped behind her. Interceptors required youth and fast reflexes, and the colonel was by far the oldest person in the squadron, yet she looked absurdly young as she faced her crews. Like them, she wore her flight suit, her side arm riding low on her hip, and if she looked like the newest of new recruits, none of them were fooled. This was a veteran outfit, all of
whom had flown combat with the colonel before.
"All right, people," she said softly. "I only have a few points.
"First, you can all count, so you know casualties will be high—accept that now, but don't resign yourself to being one of them." Her voice was cool and calm; only her sharpened eyes betrayed her own tension. "Anyone who goes out expecting to get the chop will get the chop, and we need to kill Trolls and Kangas, not ourselves.
"Second, you've got better onboard systems, smarter weapons, and more reach—maintain separation and use them. Don't screw around in gun range.
"Third, kill any Kanga tender any way you can out here, but if it turns into a stern chase, either get them short of atmosphere or make damned sure you use a heavy nuke. We don't know what kind of bugs they're carrying, and if they get to air-breathing range, any non-nuke shot could be as bad as not shooting at all."
She paused and surveyed them levelly once more, as if to make certain that they all understood.
"And fourth, remember this: Whenever we are when the shit stops flying, we're going to be in life-support range of a planet full of humans. And humans, people, have bars." A soft chuckle ran through the assembled flight crews. "And while—" she flashed a wry smile "—I am the sole member of this squadron who doesn't partake, I realize full well that I'm going to have to buy every one of you thirsty bastards a drink. But I warn you—I'll be damned if I'll listen to more than one glorious lie from each of you!
"All right," she said when the laughs died away, "let's saddle up." And her flight crews funneled through the hangar deck hatch.
Colonel Leonovna strode briskly to her own interceptor. Some pilots carried out a meticulous inspection of their birds before any launch, but she wasn't one of them. Sergeant Tetlow had looked after her fighter for over three subjective years; if anything ever had been wrong, Tetlow had fixed it long since.
Yet this time she paused by the ladder, looking up at the sleek shape of her weapon. A hundred meters from blunt nose to bulbous stern but barely twenty in diameter, the interceptor crouched in her launch cradle like Death waiting to pounce. Her hull bore a stenciled ID number, but, like most such craft, she had been named. Yet this name had been chosen not by her pilot but by her tech crew, who knew all about their squadron CO's heritage and her fascination with history. The name Sputnik Too gleamed in scarlet above the golden stencils of thirty-four oddly shaped silhouettes: one for each fighter Ludmilla Leonovna had killed. Under them were thirteen larger silhouettes, representing the starships squadrons under her command had destroyed. She looked at them silently, then reached up to touch the lowest—and largest—symbol, the silhouette of an Ogre-class capital ship. Only her interceptor had returned from that multisquadron strike.
