“Aspect change on contact Delta,” Mattu shouted. “Angling twenty-three degrees away from our decoy, I think they fell for it, mum.”
“Or they’re just going through the motions,” Susan said. “Any tells on bogeys Alpha or Charlie?”
“Nothing yet. They’re … wait one.”
Automatic alarms sprang to screeching life through the CIC. “Bubble blowing!” Broadchurch shouted over the wails.
“Alpha or Charlie?” Susan barked.
“Neither mum, it’s Delta. Repeat, Delta!”
An electric shock of panic ran from Susan’s scalp to her tailbone. The one she’d ignored, because it was too obvious. They’d hid right in the middle of her assumptions. “How far?! Are we in the gooey zone?”
“Negative,” Broadchurch replied. “We’re safe, barely.”
Susan relaxed the death grip on her chair’s armrests. “Are they inside the treaty line?”
“By twelve klicks, mum.”
“XO, laser free, target their rings.”
Miguel turned his head toward Warner. “Weapons, laser free. Full power. Target rings for a mobility kill. Repeat. Mobility kill only.”
“Lasers hot. Mobility kill, aye sir.” Warner tapped a few icons, refined her targeting lock, and pressed the button.
For an almost imperceptibly short moment, the lights and displays in the CIC dimmed as the ship’s power system adjusted to the sudden, violent depletion of bank after bank of capacitors as the laser array gobbled up every spare electron.
A beam of coherent light energy only forty-five centimeters across, yet powerful enough to supply electricity for an entire continent, raced out into the night at Einstein’s speed limit, covering the fourteen-hundred-and-seventy-kilometer distance between the Ansari and the raider in a span of time scarcely worth mentioning.
And it was still too late.
“Do we have a hit?” Susan pleaded, almost leaning out of her chair.
“Negative,” Warner said, dejected. “The beam bent. Their bubble closed before we got the shot off.”
“Shit!” Susan pounded her armrest with a fist.
“And now they’ve jumped,” Broadchurch reported. “They’re gone, mum.”
“If we had a window, we could’ve stuck an arm out and waved at them,” Miguel said before thinking. Susan shot a glare his way. “Sorry, mum.”
“And,” Mattu tagged in, “our decoy was caught in the gooey zone. I’m sorry, mum, but it’s slag.”
Susan’s teeth ground against each other. She felt a migraine coming on. “All right, it could have been worse. Another few hundred klicks and we would’ve been the decoy, and there’s still three enemy decoys out there we can recover for the lab rat to tear apart for intel. Charts, set course to—”
As she said it, three fusion bottles let go simultaneously, adding a trio of incredibly short-lived stars to the history of the universe.
“Er, sorry, mum,” Mattu said, “but the Xre decoys have all self-destructed.”
“Of course they have.” Susan stood up from her chair. “XO, you have the Com. Recover our missiles, then jump back and grab our drones. Let me know when you’re done.”
Miguel nodded. “Understood, mum. Where will you be?”
“In the pool. And the rest of you, take your relief already. You all look like hammered dog shit.”
Susan stalked out of the CIC, her head filling with proper butterfly stroke form and lap counts, anything to push the thumping she’d just taken to the background. She shoulder-checked Nesbit as she passed him to get to the hatch.
In a rare moment of self-awareness, Nesbit had the presence of mind not to say a word.
SIX
“Tyson!” called out the matronly voice from near the back of the restaurant. He locked eyes with Valeria Sokolov as she waved from a small booth in the left corner by the wall. The CEO of NeoSun beckoned for him to join her.
Paris had only received her lunch invitation fifteen minutes earlier. Tyson had to reschedule two calls and cancel a crisis response meeting to accommodate the impromptu rendezvous, but not even he could afford to decline a meeting with the leader of the second largest transtellar in human-controlled space. Especially when he was running a joint project with her company.
Tyson nodded to her and moved toward the booth, grabbing a napkin from an empty table as he passed to wipe a bead of sweat from his brow. He’d had to run from the pod to arrive in time. He’d not exercised in ages. Muscle-toning retro-virals made it unnecessary. Of all the improbable sights people on the sidewalk could have seen that afternoon … Actually, watching him duck into a casual-dining chain restaurant might be even more ridiculous.
Tyson slid into the booth opposite from Sokolov, the imitation leather of the bench seat feeling strange under the silk of his trousers.
“Thank you for coming, Tyson. I realize it was short notice.”
“A trifle.” Tyson waved away her concern. “Just juggled some things around, you know how it is. But, Valeria, I have to ask…” He waved an arm to encompass their surroundings. “Really?”
Sokolov chuckled. “Don’t be rude, Tyson. It’s quaint; besides, it’s good to remind ourselves how the other half lives now and then. There’s joy to be found in simple pleasures.”
“Like the joy of two-for-one appetizers that made a fifteen-light-year trip a few degrees above absolute zero only to get reheated in a microwave?”
“Salt and saturated fat taste delicious no matter how far they’ve traveled.”
A young woman, wearing a uniform, wholesome in a not overly attractive way, slid up to their table with a small data pad on the back of her right wrist. Her left wrist and hand were decorated in a delicate lattice of traditional henna designs that she probably thought made her seem exotic or cultured.
“Hello, folks. My name’s Cassidy and I’ll be taking…” A flicker of recognition passed over her features as she glanced at Tyson, but it passed in an instant. “… care of you. Can I get you anything to drink besides water?”
“Just green tea for me, please,” Tyson said. “Hot.”
“I’ll have a vodka press with a twist of limon. Make it a double,” Sokolov said.
“Okay.” Cassidy entered their drinks into her pad. “I’ll be right back with your drinks and
