Three actinic flashes lit the deck, casting shadows back from Svensndot and the Dirokimes. It was second- hand light, the display’s emergency signal of nearby detonation. Run like hell was the message any rational person should take from that awful light. It would be easy enough to break synch
… and lose tactical control of Aniara fleet. Tirolle and Glimfrelle bent their heads away from the local window, shying from the glare of nearby death. Their whistling voices scarcely broke cadence, and the commands from Olvira to the others continued. There were dozens of other battles going on out there. Just now Olvira was the only source of precision and control available to their side. Every second they remained on station meant protection and advantage to Aniara. Breaking off would mean minutes of chaos till Lynsnar or Trance could pick up control.
Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen’s targets were destroyed now. The price had been high, half of Svensdot’s friends. The enemy had lost much to protect those targets, yet much of its fleet survived.
An unseen hand smashed Olvira, driving Svensndot hard against his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows. Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by one small monitor. ’Rolle whistled softly, “We’re out of the game, Boss, least while it counts. I didn’t know you could get misses that near.”
Maybe it wasn’t a miss. Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor. Maybe we’re already dead. Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated, the wave front reaching Olvira before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer part of the ship’s hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt insulation floated across the room on the ventilator’s breeze.
“Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn’t have been clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!” And somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship’s surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the Olvira’s automation…
Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across the screen. “Central automation suspended. Display management suspended. Drive computation suspended.” Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. “Hei, ’Frelle, it looks like ’Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most of this back!”
Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case Tirolle wasn’t far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor’s hardened processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted. (Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that should have been disabled along with all the rest of Olvira’s automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.
… and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with numerical superiority. If they’d fought properly, they might have won. Instead they’d destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities—and knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit, and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy’s behavior.
Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.
Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed. The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future. It might better have been a wake—for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part way through the meeting, a new window appeared, a view onto the bridge of the Out of Band. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The erstwhile “godshatter” was nowhere in evidence.
“What more to do?” said Johanna Haugen. “The damn Butterflies are long gone.”
“Are we sure we have rescued everyone?” asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot bit back an angry reply. The commander of Trance had become a recording loop on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in the deep night.
“We’ve accounted for everything, even to vapor,” Haugen spoke as gently as the words allowed. “The question is where to go now.”
Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, “Gentlemen and Ladies, if -”
Trenglets looked up at her transceived image. All his hurt transformed into a blaze of anger. “We’re not your gentlemen, slut! You’re not some princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more.”
The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. “I—”
“You put us into this suicidal battle,” shouted Trenglets. “You made us attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our path.”
“I doubt that would have helped, sir,” said Ravna. “The Blight seems most interested in where we’re bound.” The solar system just fifty-five light-years beyond the Out of Band. The fugitives would arrive there just over two days before their pursuers.
Jo Haugen shrugged. “You must realize what your friend’s crazy battle plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction of its present size. If it chose to continue, we might have been able to protect you at this, this Tines’ world.” She seemed to taste the strange name, wondering at its meaning. “Now… no way am I going to chase them there. What’s left of the enemy could wipe us out.” She glanced at Svensndot’s viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might blame Out of Band, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot’s word that had persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara’s sacrifice had been illspent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to him at all now. “Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous in one thousand seconds, Kjet.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Good.” Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna Bergsndot. Seconds later, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes—and Ravna Bergsndot looking out her window from Out of Band.
Finally, Bergsndot said, “When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security. I always dreamed of being rescued by your company from fates worse than death.”
Kjet smiled bleakly, “Well, you got the rescue attempt,” and you not even a currently subscribed customer. “This was far the biggest gun fight we’ve ever been in.”
“I’m sorry, Kje—Group Captain.”
He looked into her dark features. A lass from Sjandra Kei, down to the violet eyes. No way this could be a simulation, not here. He had bet everything that she was not; he still believed she was not. Yet—'What does your friend say about all this?” Pham Nuwen had not been seen since his so-impressive godshatter act at the beginning of the battle.
Ravna’s glance shifted to something off-camera. “He’s not saying much, Group Captain. He’s wandering around even more upset than your Captain Trenglets. Pham remembers being absolutely convinced he was demanding the right thing, but now he can’t figure out why it was right.”
“Hmm.” A little late for second thoughts. “What are you going to do now? Haugen is right, you know. It would be useless suicide for us to follow the Blighters to your destination. I daresay it’s useless suicide for you, too. You’ll arrive maybe fifty-five hours before them. What can you do in that time?”
Ravna Bergsndot looked back at him, and her expression slowly collapsed into sobbing grief. “I don’t know.
