“Acknowledged. Halcyon out.” Susan turned to Okuda and Culligan, which was not hard in the little frigate’s cramped CIC. “You heard the man, hit that cruiser with everything we’ve got, reprisal be damned. It’s crowding my personal space.”
“Urgent from Lynz,” Hurg shouted across the mind cavern.
“To a mouth with it!” Thuk commanded.
Hurg nodded and pointed at the mouth nearest Thuk’s seat.
“Derstu, it’s Attendant Lynz.”
“I know who it is, Lynz. Sing!”
“My team is in the lockout. The coil is back in sequence, but I’m still not comfortable—”
“If it fails, will anyone be around to discipline you?”
“Ah, no, Derstu. Our brains will be atoms before the first nerve impulses reach them.”
“Excellent! Good work. Hold onto something.” Thuk cut the link.
“We’re leaving?” Kivits implored.
“We’re going somewhere, that’s for sure.”
“Where, exactly?”
Thuk angrily stabbed a blood-claw at a crowded little spot in the star system’s map.
“There. Get the weapon ready.”
“Hits on Carnegie!” Mattu pumped a fist. “Multiple breaches. They’re venting atmosphere. EM is dropping off. Looks like a mission kill. Yes, Halcyon confirms, Carnegie is out of the fight. They’re running up the white flag and requesting recovery teams.”
“Afraid we’re a tad busy at the moment,” Miguel said absently as he considered the plot. The Paul Allen had done exactly as Kamala had predicted and bubbled to their far side, completely opposite of Carnegie’s position in a classic pincer move. What she hadn’t expected was for Perez to make the trip in four short legs, each at a right angle to the last, alternating between the PAC’s fully redundant paired set of Alcubierre rings until her heading and momentum had come completely about to bring her on an intercept course with her prey instead of merely matching velocities. They were closing now, less than twenty thousand klicks apart, and it would be a lot closer by the time Ansari could kill her momentum and use her superior acceleration to start growing the gap again. All the while fighting off wave after wave of missiles and hundred-megawatt-range laser pulses.
It was a brilliant maneuver. If Perez had been just a little bolder, she’d have executed the jump a half an hour ago before they were in a position to knock out her escort cruiser. Not that it mattered in the final equation.
“Halcyon Actual reports they’ve been cut out of the enemy’s tactical network. We’re running blind again.”
“Only surprise is it took them so long to figure it out. What’s our magazine status?” Miguel demanded from his borrowed chair.
“Sixty-eight ship-killers still in their tubes. Twenty-seven percent on counter-missiles,” Warner replied, trying to sound upbeat, but …
“Decoys?”
“Fuel expended,” Mattu said. “They still have power for another hundred minutes or so, but they can’t maneuver.”
“Get them pumping out as much EM clutter as possible. And ready the retro-reflector cloud.”
“Pump up the boomboxes and ready the RRC, aye, sir.”
“Allen is launching birds,” Warner said. “Seven-five, wait, nine-zero ship-killers inbound. Twenty-three minutes to impact.”
Ninety missiles. Miguel rubbed a hand on his brow, surprised to find sweat accumulating there. Almost a fifth of the PAC’s full complement in one go. They didn’t have the data links to control that many birds, but they didn’t need to. The point was saturation. Warner’s opposite would slave them together in groups of two or three, randomly trading individuals between groups to keep Ansari’s CiWS and counter-missiles guessing about their movement and behavior. Out of that flock, only one or two needed to connect to finish the job.
The battle had entered its third hour, and the laws of attrition were taking an awful toll. It was a credit to everyone aboard that they’d lasted so long against such vastly superior firepower, but the end was in sight.
“Options?”
Mattu was first to answer. “Kill the engines, go EM dark, reel out our towed sensor buoy and crank it to full active, turn our broadside into the attack to give us our best sensor coverage and bring the most CiWS batteries and counter-missile tubes to bear, deploy the RRC, then pray to Brahma.”
“No,” Warner cut in. “Turn away from the attack, go to emergency burn, antimatter be damned. Gives us another couple minutes to engage them and forces the missiles to waste more time and fuel maneuvering to hit us on our flanks or be burned up in our fusion plume. We can still dangle the towed array to see through our own exhaust, and if any missiles try to go up our skirt, we’ll see it coming and can vector thrust to roast them.” She thought for a moment. “But I do agree with praying.”
“To Brahma?” Miguel asked.
“I’m willing to audition new gods for miracle duty at this point.”
Miguel grimaced. He wanted to run simulations on both ideas and see which came out better, but by the time he had, any advantage gained would likely be lost courtesy of the delay anyway. He made a snap judgment, pure instinct.
“Charts, turn and burn. Emergency flank speed away from the Allen. Tell Halcyon to get ahead of us and stay there. Scopes, deploy our tethered array once we’re on our new course. Be ready to disperse the RRC in a halo around us once the birds are five thousand klicks out. I want them to see nothing but our fusion torches and their own radar reflections.”
It had the advantage of simplicity. The retro-reflector cloud was about as last-ditch as countermeasures got. Nothing more than a constellation of hundreds of thousands of tiny Mylar origami cubes that snapped open as soon as they were clear of their containers, the reflectors’ unique geometry returned any light or radiation back to its point of origin, no matter the angle of incoming vector. The more energy they pumped into active sensors trying to get a lock, the more they’d blind themselves in the glare.
Trouble was, they blinded defender’s and attacker’s active scans alike. They also blew any hope of
