* * *
The Weasels surely knew by now that they were being followed, because the pursuit was entering its fifteenth hour and not even renegade Khalians would let so long go by without at least glancing at the rear-quadrant monitors. Or maybe they would. Roj checked the scanner readouts for what had to be the thousandth time, and still there was no change in the Delta’s energy state. Maybe it was some sort of elaborate bluff. And maybe the tender they had tried to shoot up had given them more than they’d bargained for, and ruptured the weapons-system power-packs. . . .
“Fish in a barrel,” Roj said aloud.
“Khalians are mammalian,” Minerva corrected. “But I get your meaning. Damaged power-cells?”
“Something like.”
“I’ve had them. No fun. No fun at all. But it should help persuade them to surrender and come back for trial. A military tribunal of their own people seems fair enough to me.”
“Considering the likely verdict, it’s a long way to be bothered dragging them.” Roj looked hard at Minerva’s main lens, as if he were trying to read a reaction from its crystalline structure in the same way as he might gain information from a human eye. There was only his own distorted reflection in this one.
“High, middle, and low justice—but not summary.”
“Anyway, you’re assuming they’ll offer to surrender.”
“And I’m assuming you’ll give them the chance. Don’t disappoint me, Roj. We’ve been through too much together for you to—” Minerva broke off, distracted by something. Then the main viewscreen flickered from tracking mode to a tactical schematic, and in the same instant all of the DEW proximity klaxons started to blare at once. There was a ship on the long-range scanner, right on the edge of sensor pickup, as far beyond them now as the Khalian raider had been during the first moments of the failed interception. A moment later there were two more. Then another ten. . . .
When fifty more scan returns formed on the screen in squadron blocks that were segments of a gigantic globular holding pattern, a sphere composed of more warships than either Roj or Minerva had ever seen gathered together in one place, there was no more doubt. There was an entire bloody battle fleet out there, and they were running at full sublight velocity right into the middle of it. It couldn’t be anything other than a battle fleet, not with the battle computer classifying each of the huge scope returns at the core of the formation as a dreadnought. Like the Fleet’s Emperor-class—except that these dreadnoughts were half as big again.
“Starting deceleration sequence,” said Minerva crisply, and there was an edge in her voice that seemed to anticipate her brawn’s response of “What? But we’ve almost got them. . . .” She silenced the rest of his complaints by simply switching the com board’s output over to the main speaker array and letting him draw his own conclusions. The Language-One unit started emitting the chittering sound of Khalian speech, and Minerva let him listen to it for a couple of seconds before patching in the translator circuitry.
“ . . . pursued, warning, we are pursued, alarm, alarm. alarm! Aid us, Givers! Aid us! Warning, we are pursued, warning. . .”
“You hear? Givers! Dammit, Roj, those are Merchant ships.”
“Heaviest-armed merchantmen I ever saw,” said Roj with a tight little grin.
“Funny man. I was listening to that Intel briefing, even if you weren’t. These are the arms dealers who’ve been supplying the Weasels—that entire fleet belongs to the Mercantile Syndicate. Forget the Delta, Roj, their friends outgun us. Time to leave!”
“First things first,” said Roj. He activated the main fire-control system, tabbed in a weapon-selector prefix, and watched it track briefly on the Khalian corvette. “We’ll be locked on in just a few more seconds. . . .”
“I said, time to leave.” Minerva spoke sharply, irritated at his persistence; and under that irritation, partly hidden by it, was a very real worry about the scale of the opposition facing them. It looked as if the Khalia had only been round one of this war, and she was watching the seconds leave the ring before the bell rang for round two. Watching from the wrong side of the ropes. “If we can see that fleet, its point-defense pickets can certainly see us. And there’s the little matter of reporting what we’ve found out here—if we can get away.”
A slight rhythmic shudder ran through the Valhalla’s hull, and Roj glanced in satisfaction at the dozen arrowhead symbols that had just appeared on the tactical display. A full salvo of Mk-22 torps accelerated toward the Khalian corvette at fifty-plus g. “Oh, we’ll get away all right,” he said, and whether he was feigning the sound of confidence or really meant it, he sounded pleased enough. “It’s more than the Weasels will. Now we can leave.”
Minerva’s sound system uttered an angry exhalation of static. “I hope so,” she said, “I really hope so. . . .”
For all his jauntiness, Roj was uncomfortably aware that his hands were sweating, and more aware still that Minerva had noticed that they were clenched in an attempt to conceal it. The Valhalla’s primary weapons controller was neither faster nor slower than the Olympus on-boards, but it had still seemed like an eternity before all the predictors returned a ninety-nine percent firing solution and were cleared to open fire. It was one of those eternities when only he seemed slow, for in that same achingly protracted two seconds, the readouts beside every ship in the battle fleet had flipped from standby to combat active. That was the reason why he had emptied an entire rotary at the only ship in range: with luck, the flare of multiple thermonuclear detonations would blind their scanners long enough for he and Minerva to get out of the way.
With luck.
That luck was nowhere in sight. Even as the Khalian corvette opened up with its rear batteries in a desperate attempt to destroy the incoming torpedoes and the first warhead went up in a sensor-scrambling pulse of heat and light and radiation that blocked out the screen, Minerva began reporting a shift in the fleet’s formation. It was no longer a holding pattern, but a pursuit—with everything up to and including the dreadnoughts coming after them.
And then the threat receptors screeched, reporting that 230 search-and-track sensors had begun to sweep the area, hunting for something their weapons could lock onto . . . shoot at . . . destroy.
The gunners and the fire-control computers on the Delta-class corvette fumbled their catch, just once. When the catch was for a 200-kiloton warhead homing in at sixty-five kilometers per second, once was enough. The Khalian ship became superheated plasma in an eyeblink, its sole remaining useful function to remain between Minerva and the Mercantile Syndicate’s targeting screens for just a few seconds longer . . . .
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Malin, Fleet High Command regret to inform you that your son was killed because he didn’t have the brains to run away,” said Minerva, all sweetly vicious as her navcomps tried to pick out some safe direction for flight. There was no such direction: there was only dangerous, and very dangerous.
“Thanks a whole heap for that vote of confidence,” Roj said, glaring. “I—”
“—agree, I hope. There’s not much else you can do.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I could take over the gunnery controls and let you concentrate on getting us out of here.”
“Hoity-toity.” Minerva was silent for several seconds, then popped the firing yoke out of its protective recess and switched the monitor to the targeting configuration for manual free fire. “All right, do it. There you go, space cadet. Keep them off my back for, oh, fifteen seconds.”
“Done.” The new gunnery override of the Valhalla-class vessels was meant to give a brawn almost as much fire-control capability as a brain-core; at least so far as using a tool could ever match the reflex ease of using just one extension of a body that was technological state of the art. It was obvious that no human could ever use the facility to its fullest extent, piloting and navigating while at the same time maintaining a full systems mo
nitor and firing on as many targets as the ship had weapons systems to aim at them. Performing the tasks sequentially was understood to be possible, of course—but simultaneously, as the brainship’s core could and did, was impossible.
That fifteen seconds were among the most hectic in Roj Malin’s life, and somewhere around the ninth or tenth he had decided that a teaching post at the Academy wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. Assuming he survived the next five seconds or so intact enough to take up any offer they might think of making.
Had Minerva not been busy about her own affairs, she would have called off the incoming fire in a voice of dreadful calm that Roj had come to know and hate. It was a tone that invariably meant she and her brawn had ended up with their necks on the chopping block again, whether through the machinations of Rear Admiral Agato, Fleet IntelSec, or simply by crash-landing on the Khalian hearthworld only a few hours ahead of an invasion. Whatever the reason, Minerva always sounded the same: dry, dispassionate, and apparently barely concerned at all over what was going on. Roj knew her better than that, but knowing that she was probably as scared as he was did nothing much to help.
Right now she was handling not only the navigation programming, but the ECM and evasive-maneuver randoms as well. It kept the torps from about their ears, but did nothing at all for the accuracy of Roj’s fire as he tried to nail anything that hadn’t been decoyed or dodged. At least the Merchants were still firing wild, without preprogrammed guidance in their warheads so that the torps had to rely on what they could find for themselves. He could tell as much from the peculiar curves and spirals of each missile blip as the seeker head searched in three dimensions for a potential target. Some of their circuitry had probably been fried by the detonation that had taken out the Khalian corvette—but with the size of the battle fleet and the number of ships in it, they could probably fill this sector of space with live warheads and still not run short of ammunition.
And the second wave of torps wouldn’t be suffering the guidance problems of the first. That was likely to be interesting. . . .
“Course plotted and locked in, Roj.” Minerva sounded pleased with herself. “Two jumps initially, and a third if we need to.”
Roj swatted two torps with a sidewise slash of fire from X turret, and realized there were no more. Not for the next twenty-odd seconds, anyway. He sagged in the acceleration chair, breathless as if he had just run a race, and blinked at Minerva’s main lens pickup. “Why, for pity’s sake?”
“In case they can track me FTL. Shearborn could, I can, and the equipment’s no longer what you might call fresh off the drawing board. So, two, maybe three jumps: one to get away from here, one to lose them, one to get some damned hot news to Intel—before they find out by tangling with those battlewagons out there.”
Another wave of torpedoes were closing fast, and this time they were coming in a cloud thick as midges in May. Roj looked, swallowed, and said, “So don’t talk about it. Do it!”
“Uh, okay,” said Minerva, and did.
* * *
Seven minutes later she said a great many more things, connected mostly to the parentage and sexual preferences of whoever had checked the Khalian astrography charts and pronounced them fit for human consumption. “Problems?” said Roj grimly, knowing perfectly well that Minerva didn’t swear without good cause.
“Plenty. I picked up a tracer lock just as we jumped, so expect company. And the data charts on this sector are nothing more than guesswork. They might as well have little puffy-cheeked Cupids in the corners and bloody sea serpents in the middle for all the use they are to me.”
“Here be dragons?”
“Dragons I could tolerate. Here does not be the asteroid field I was aiming for. . . .”
“Again, please? I could have sworn you said ‘asteroid field.’”
“I did.”
“Minerva,” said Roj carefully, “I saw that old vid, and I didn’t like what I saw. Explain what you’re thinking about, please, so that I can get out and walk from here if I have to.”
“You,” said Minerva, “obviously haven’t given any thought to this. I’m not planning any slalom run. But try this: there would be multiple returns on a scanner, most of which would be rocks. And maybe a few of the remainder would be loose torps with proximity fuses. By the time anybody found out we weren’t here, we, uh, wouldn’t be.” Minerva grunted with disgust. “Except, no asteroids. Just a grungy little star and half a dozen grungy little planets.”
“And imminent pursuit.”
“Quite. Pursuit we daren’t lead back to Fleet headquarters. The Merchants’ll get there soon enough, you’ll see.” She thought in silence for a few seconds, and Roj was able to watch how she considered and then rejected various possibilities by the way the bridge telltales for various onboard systems lit up then dimmed again.
But when the main viewscreen came to life with an enhanced image of local-space astrography overlaid with a targeting grid, Roj was on his feet and shouting “Oh no, you don’t!” before Minerva had a chance to speak. “They’ll decommission you, court-martial me, and we’ll both be back out here trying to put right whatever damage you’re planning to the astrography records.”
“There are none, Roj,” she told him soothingly. “No maps, no charts—at least, only the Khalian ones, and they’re of small use as I think I’ve proved already. So what are we doing wrong . . . ?”
“It’s not even as if this ship has the weaponry to do it,” he said, as if that was the final argument.
“Are you sure?” Minerva’s voice was a cajoling purr—and behind it was a steely edge that suggested no was not an answer she was willing to accept. There was a devil of destructiveness in that voice, and a final loss of patience with being chased from pillar to post by enemies and orders in equal proportion. “Wouldn’t you like to see what the Valhalla shell can really do?” she tempted, and then threw in a clinching argument. “Before the Merchants get here and try doing the same thing to us . . . ?”
Minerva had been right in her estimate of how much time they had to spare: not much at all. They used up most of it in making sure that the system was as lifeless as initial scanning had suggested, and the little that remained in finding an appropriately small moon in orbit around one of the outer planets. It had a high concentration of nickel-iron and some very interesting rare metals in its structure, and it occurred to Roj that the less-known parts of Khalian space could well provide a good return on the investment of a certain decorated Fleet vet. It also meant that this particular moon, properly broken up by the judicious application of megatonnage against its plate faults, would provide just the sort of echoes and false returns that they needed to cover a quiet retreat.
Even so, they cut it almost too fine, because a proximity alert started to bleat just as all of Minerva’s carefully targeted bombardment warheads curved down from orbit to hit the moon’s weak points with a simultaneous hammer blow of 350-plus bevatons yield. It came to pieces. Big pieces, little pieces, and an expanding cloud of irradiated metal-heavy fragments that made perhaps the best and most impenetrable chaff that Roj and Minerva had ever had the privilege of hiding behind.
It also made the best bang that Roj had never heard.
What the Merchant cruiser made of it all, he never knew, since neither he nor Minerva waited to ask. They had a report to deliver: on the efficiency of the Valhalla hull-shell; on the destruction of a Khalian raider; on the approach of a potential new enemy of the Fleet—and a confession that for various reasons, the maps of Sector Two-Twelve really did need to be redrawn after all ...
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