out of the system. The Fortresses brought themselves about ponderously, breaking away one by one to reduce the chance of a collision. They were safe enough to fly grouped in a straight course, but their incredible mass reduced their turns to half-controlled slides.
“I had expected they could keep up better than that,” Quendari remarked with some disgust. “I will have to begin braking now, and give them a chance to catch up.”
“Where are we going?” Keflyn asked.
“Jupiter,” she explained, then paused when she saw that the young Starwolf did not recognize the name at all. “Jupiter. The fifth planet in this system, and a fairly hefty gas giant.”
“Why go there?”
“For our health,” the ship answered. “And also for the hydrogen.”
Quendari had to slow herself considerably, and the better part of twenty minutes passed before the massive shape of the gas giant began to grow large in the viewscreen. The tremendous gravitational surges of the sun had not greatly affected the larger, more remote outer worlds, although little Pluto had slipped its orbit completely and had disappeared long ago on its long, lonely voyage through the stars. Keflyn knew the names of none of those planets, forgotten in the depths of time. Jupiter had lost a few moons in its relatively small orbital slip, with no evidence of whether they had spiraled out or down.
The Valcyr looped around the planet in a quick, close orbit, the width of that world so great that the passage brought her several minutes she needed for the Fortresses to catch up with her. As she came around the other side, she moved forward aggressively in a sudden dart, rushing into the cover provided by a small moon that was between herself and the approaching Fortresses. The Union Forces moved out along a wider line into attack formation, giving every indication that they would be charging straight through, probably to hit the Valcyr from behind with their rear cannons. They were so completely armed that the direction of attack made little difference.
Quendari waited until they were almost within range, then she moved out from behind her cover slowly. She seemed to hesitate a moment before she banked completely over, belly up, and began to fall rapidly toward the planet. She approached straight in, her tapered nose aimed like a black arrowhead directly at the planet as she engaged enough reverse thrust to stand herself on end, holding herself to the greatest possible speed that she dared. She opened one transport bay just enough to eject a drone, which hurried to hide itself on the surface of the moon she had just left.
The Valcyr shaped her powerful battle shield into a long, narrow blade more than twenty kilometers in length, parting the cold, upper atmosphere of the planet in a fiery shell. She had only just returned to space after forty thousand years, and she seemed to have a hard time staying there.
Donalt Trace stood in the center of the Challenger’s vast, crowded bridge, watching the scan image as the Starwolf carrier continued its curious run straight in toward the planet. She was already slicing into the icy, upper layers of ammonia clouds at an almost impossible speed, more than thirty thousand kilometers per hour.
“Where the hell is she going?” he mused aloud. The old game began again. Velmeran began his feigns and ploys, luring Trace into the required response. His part now was to look beneath the obvious, to see how the proper and predictable reply was actually the first move into a trap. It reminded him very strongly of their last meeting, in a battle between a Fortress and a carrier above another giant world. He almost enjoyed a return to the game.
“Commander?” Captain Avaires moved closer, standing at dutiful, even eager attention. “It must be an evasive maneuver, sir. They bit off more than they could chew, and they know it.”
Trace frowned, displeased with the situation all the way around. He wished that Maeken Kea could have been here to command this ship. He wished even more that he could have spared her to lead the attack on Alkayja, but he dared not. She was too valuable held in reserve to pick up the pieces if something went wrong. And there were no bright, competent Feldenneh to crew his ships, their race once again refusing to accept duty in military ships.
“I think I know,” he said, pausing a moment to watch the screen. “They can lose themselves even from scan by dropping down into the upper reaches of the hydrogen layer, but it’s not just to hide. They can jump out of cover from time to time to draw our fire, showing themselves just enough to give us a ghost image and invite us to start mining the clouds with our missiles. If we throw away our missiles on the Methryn, then we cannot destroy Terra.”
“We ignore them, sir?” Avaires asked.
He shook his head. “Taking the Methryn is more important than destroying one essentially uninhabited world. But I do not want to throw everything we have at them and still have the Methryn hiding in these clouds. Order the Fortresses to spread themselves in an evenly spaced orbit as close as we dare to go down. The moment they show, I want to be able to drop a dozen missiles on and ahead of them before they can go back down.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have missile bearing stingships ready to go down into the atmosphere if we get the chance, but launch no ships until I give the orders,” Trace added. “I want no energy emissions or other types of clutter in space to distract those scan images. Settle the ships in close orbit and close down the engines, but have shields standing by.”
“At once, sir.” Avaires hurried to the com station to relay those orders.
Trace stood alone on the bridge, watching as the Starwolf carrier disappeared into the deeper reaches of the planet’s hydrogen shell.
The Valcyr slowed quickly as she penetrated through Jupiter’s dense atmosphere and into the depthless ocean of liquid hydrogen. She elongated her shields even more, bringing them up to even greater strength as the pressures continued to mount, trapping a pool of low-pressure liquid hydrogen within her shields to act as insulation against the increasing temperature. Pouring all the power she dared through her main drives, she was barely able to maintain an initial speed of about seventeen thousand kilometers. That speed would continue to fall as she pushed steadily deeper and tremendous pressures turned the hydrogen from liquid to a thick plastic.
The heat was a strong consideration. Her shields were opaque to the radiation of heat, but temperatures inside that shell continued to climb. She had actually planned that reaction, since the volume of low-pressure hydrogen within the shell would try to expand as it warmed, providing outward pressure to reinforce the shields. Even so, the ship itself would eventually begin to heat dangerously as the trapped hydrogen against its hull warmed. Quendari estimated that she faced a journey of at least two-and-a-half hours, a long time to survive temperatures that might eventually reach twelve to fifteen thousand degrees in the surrounding hydrogen.
She was running blind, even her space-distorting achronic sensors hopelessly scrambled by the fierce electric and magnetic currents running through the liquid hydrogen. Visual was even more useless, and she kept her main viewscreen blanked out. She was orienting herself by the pull of gravity as she aimed straight down toward the heart of the planet, estimating her progress as best she could from her speed and the external pressure against her shields. At almost exactly two-and-a-half hours, her speed began to slow to a relative crawl. She had penetrated more than halfway to the core of the planet to the depth of liquid, metallic hydrogen, turned into a dense, molten, metallic substance by the tremendous temperatures and pressures.
“This is as far as we go,” Quendari announced. “My speed has been cut so low that I could spend hours trying to push forward enough to make any difference in our distance from the core.”
“Are they still out there?” Keflyn asked.
“Yes, I suppose,” she answered, not very certain. The drone that she had left had only one command, to transmit a tight, achronic beam into the core of the planet if the fleet moved out of close orbit. Otherwise it was to keep communication silence, reducing the possibility if giving itself away.
“We might as well do it,” Keflyn agreed. “At your discretion.”
“Warming the conversion cannon for firing, building the power reserve to one hundred percent,” Quendari reported. “The jump drive is powered up and standing by.”
Keflyn nodded. “When you are ready.”
She would have been amused, if the circumstances had not been so incredible. Quendari persisted in granting her every courtesy as Commander, although she felt that she was just along for the ride. She had been able to make a few suggestions in recalibrating the jump drive so that it was far less likely to run away with itself, until permanent alterations could be made.
“All ready,” Quendari reported a few moments later. “At my count. Three. Two. One.”
