“That didn’t save our reservoir,” Hurg reminded him.
“True, but that was unoccupied.”
“I know you’ve developed a fondness for the Ansari’s captain,” Kivits said, “but these new ships aren’t hers. Her superiors could easily have disagreed with her decision to let us escape and are here to correct what they see as a mistake.”
Thuk had to admit, that would go a long way toward explaining what they’d seen. But then why was Susan accelerating away from them? Where was she going? Thuk flipped it around inside his skullplates for a few turns to no avail. It would have to wait.
“Hurg, connect me to Attendant Lynz, please.”
“Go for Lynz.”
“Attendant, it’s Thuk. Can you spin me a seedpod?”
“I still have a coil pulled out of service for integrity tests.”
“Can you divert around it?”
“Yes … but that will take almost as much time as completing the tests, and we’d still have to finish them later.”
“We’re in a time crush, Lynz. Can you skip the tests and put the coil in service right away?”
The mouth went silent for a beat before Lynz returned. “That’s against protocol, Derstu.”
“Whoever wrote the protocol wasn’t staring down the spears and javelins of an entire human strike group. Do you vouch for your group’s work installing the coil?”
“Of course, Derstu.”
“Then that’s good enough for me. We’re skipping the integrity test for now. I’ll give you a chance to pull it for inspection as soon as possible. I take full responsibility for any failures that result. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes, Derstu.”
“Good. Get that coil back in service as fast as you can. The harmony’s survival may depend on your speed.”
“So glad I took this ascension,” Lynz said with just enough good humor in his voice to avoid discipline for insubordination. “It will be done.”
“I know it will,” Thuk cut the link. “Now, Tiller Attendant, move us gently seven points off our present bearing.”
“In what direction, Derstu?”
“Doesn’t matter, any direction, just get us off this heading without giving the humans’ husks a light show. Then, we’re going dark as the ocean around us.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Flip complete, mum,” Broadchurch announced. “We’re flying inverted along our heading. Fusion engines throttled back to standard debris-clearing thrust. We’ll lose a half meter per second until we’re pointed the right way again.”
Susan grimaced, but there was nothing for it. The magnetic constriction nozzles of the Ansari’s four fusion rockets were made of incredibly tough stuff, but they were optimized against heat and radiation, not armored against kinetic impacts, unlike the heavy ablative plating on her nose and forward edges of her rings, which were meant to take a few stray dust grains moving at hundreds of thousands of kph. Without the plume to deflect them, the incredibly sensitive innards of the rockets would be a few rice-sized impacts away from failure.
“Aft CiWS platforms warming up to pick off anything too big to be swept away by our fusion plume,” Warner added from the tactical station.
“Warm up the rest of them,” Susan said.
“For the rocks coming at us from behind?”
“Of the tungsten variety.”
“Understood, mum. Bringing up point defense now.”
“And Scopes, put our monocles in the mix, quietly.”
“How many, mum?” Mattu asked.
“All of them.”
“Aye, queueing up ship’s complement of monocle drones.”
Susan studied the plot for the twentieth time in the last hour and a half. The civilian ships in orbit around Grendel had beaten themselves into something resembling a departure line and had begun bubbling out, but that was well outside of her immediate sphere of concern. Further out in the system, the only outward changes in that time had been their relative velocity and position, and the Chusexx had dropped off from their recon drone’s passive sensors after going EM dark themselves.
Good, Susan thought. Maybe they can keep their heads down long enough to get clear of this mess after all. The three “friendly” green icons of the PAC task group hadn’t changed course from their orbital path, but then they wouldn’t for at least another hour and a half. Susan’s light-speed message had only just reached them six minutes ago. Even if they’d already bubbled out, the data stream leaving their IFF interrogation systems would take that long to arrive here.
“We set the table just in time,” Mattu interrupted her train of thought. “The Halcyon’s bubble just popped. And the Carnegie.”
“Where’s the Paul Allen?”
“Nothing yet. Wait one … there she is. But—” Mattu ran a couple calculations through her station. “Bahen ke laude Charts, cross-check me on this.”
Broadchurch looked to their station as the nav data from Mattu’s drones streamed in. “Holy shit,” she said a moment later. “Those incompetent, greenhorn, snotty cruise…”
Miguel cut off the growing tirade. “What’s the matter, Charts?”
“Their exit point, sir. If we’d stayed where we were, they’d have clipped us fifteen klicks inside their gooey zone as the bubble burst. We’d be looking at a broken keel right now.”
Susan suppressed a gasp. Instead, she turned around to look directly into the eyes of her XO and knew without a word that they were sharing the same horrible thought.
There were no greenhorn crews on the bridge of a planetary assault carrier. At over thirty billion nudollars a piece, it wasn’t worth the risk. That had not been a navigation error. Not over such an easy jump.
So, they were being taken to the warehouse after all.
“They got one of my missile groups,” Warner said, like someone who’d just seen her favorite pet run over.
“How many?”
“Half of them. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have bunched them so close together.”
Susan’s teeth ground together. Two dozen ship-killers was ten percent of her offensive missile capacity, and they’d all just been turned into slag in a millisecond without so much as a chipped ceramoplast panel to show for it.
“Did we lose any recon platforms?” Miguel asked.
“No, sir,” Mattu answered briskly. “They’re easier to hide further out, so…”
“Thank goodness for small favors,” Susan said.
“We’re being hailed,” Broadchurch said. “Admiral Perez asking to speak to Ansari Actual.”
“Oh I just bet she
