“Agreement. Their mass sensors may have detected the curvature of local space around us.”
“Destroy them, then. Before they alert others to our presence.”
“That may already have happened. We detected radiofrequency transmission from those ships several
Emphatic Blossom considered this for a moment.
“Then gather what is available of the fleet so far. We will launch the attack at once.”
“We have yet to reestablish contact with two and a half twelves of our vessels.”
“They will join us eventually. As will the Fleet of Raucous Driving. When the time is right.”
“The crew is ready. Our weapons are prepared.”
“The threat is there.
America
“Fire missiles!” Allyn cried. “Dump everything!”
Thirty-two Krait missiles, two of them in the one-hundred-megaton range, streaked off her Starhawk’s launch rails, accelerating at maximum. With their closing velocity, they would impact in seconds.
“Now hard one-eighty,” she commanded as the last missile pair flashed from her rails. “And
There was no sense in holding back with the Kraits. The object bearing down on the four fighters was enormous-a dwarf planet some nine hundred kilometers in diameter and massing over nine times ten to the twenty kilograms-about 900 quadrillion tonnes. That put it roughly on a par with the dwarf planet Ceres, orbiting within Sol’s Asteroid Belt.
The four fighters all were turning now as tightly as they dared, swinging around their flank-projected drive singularities. Allyn could feel the unequal tug between her head and her feet now, a sure sign that she was riding right on the deadly edge of high-G destruction.
Some thousands of kilometers away, a beam from the oncoming monster ship brushed Cutler’s Starhawk…not enough to damage his shields, but explosive ablation kicked his fighter at the critical point of his turn.
“I’m hit! I’m hit!” Cutler cried…and then his Starhawk was in a helpless tumble, whipping in close around his drive singularity. The singularity winked out as his drive projectors failed, but his ship was already fragmenting.
The icon on the combat display flared and vanished.
“Stay with the turn, people!” Allyn called. “Stay with it!..”
And then the three remaining fighters had completed the 180-degree turn and were under full acceleration, fifty thousand gravities. She tensed, waiting for the first impact from astern…
And then the first Kraits were slamming home against the super-ship, nuclear fireballs blossoming silently in the night.
“I’m picking up other ships now, Skipper,” Walsh told her. “They’re powering up, starting to move…”
“I see them.”
Her AI picked out some seventy other vessels…with more appearing all the time as they received new orders from their flagship and began to power up. Allyn felt a cold prickling at the base of her neck; there might be hundreds of vessels out there, masked by their shields or still too far out to register on her fighter’s sensors. God in heaven, how were they supposed to fight
But the large asteroid-starship they’d just slammed with their missile barrage was half-molten now, its surface glowing white-hot in places, and it was trailing a faint, hazy stream of gas and debris. They’d clobbered the thing, all right, and hurt it, bad.
She hoped they would be seeing all of this back on Earth through the CCT.
She doubted that she’d be alive long enough to deliver the recordings in person.
The Turusch thought in terms of pairs, and of pairings, of joining two in such a way that they became one.
It was a biological imperative, with twinned individuals working closely together under the same name and designation, but the principle could be applied to ships and tactics as well. Emphatic Blossom at Dawn’s ship, the
Emphatic Blossom-one of them-gave an order, and the Radiant Severing blasted through weakening crust in a geyser of loose rock, nanolaminates, and hot gasses. It would have been good if others of
In fact, the inhabitants of
“We should be prepared for the possibility of further attacks,” Blossom’s twin said.
“Agreement. I do not understand how those fighters found us, lost in so vast an emptiness. They either have technological resources of which we have been unaware, or there are numerous enemy fighters in this area, operating in small groups.”
“Agreement. It seems unlikely that they could seriously hamper the Fleet of Objective Silence, however.”
“Obviously, single strikes, hit-and-run assaults like the one just past, can destroy or cripple even our largest vessels.”
“The high closing speed and short period of awareness worked against us. We could not deploy sand, or other defensive measures.”
“As has been noted before, we must not underestimate these creatures. The Sh’daar Seed has warned us that they are extraordinarily adaptable, resourceful, and tenacious, that they
“Agreement.”
Another surprise was in store for the Turusch strike force.
But it would be some minutes yet before that surprise revealed itself.
