“I suppose it’s possible that she was told a cover story, that she believes that. But I think that would be needlessly complicatingmatters.”
“Yes, sir. Since we captured her after her ship had already vanished through the TRGA, she would have no way of knowing where America had gone.”
“Indeed. Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done very well.”
“What do you want to do with the prisoner, sir?”
Oreshkin considered this. “She might be useful later on, so simply keep her locked up in the brig. Once we destroy the America battlegroup, she will be eliminated. Our orders, after all, are to leave no survivors.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
After Fedorov had left the bridge, Oreshkin spent some time considering the hazy circle of the Penrose TRGA, dead ahead andtwenty kilometers distant. If he sent drones through ahead of the fleet, he would warn the Americans on the other side thatMoskva was coming after them. But now that he was certain that the Americans had gone through to the Dunlop TRGA, he didn’t needa recon.
What he could send through ahead of the fleet, however, was a volley of smart nukes, AI missiles programmed to traverse thePenrose-to-Dunlop path, emerge at the other end, and immediately detonate. If the Americans had ships close by the TRGA’smouth—and he knew that they would—he might be able to destroy or at least disable one or more of them before the Moskva emerged.
Better, the missiles could be programmed to seek out any American ships on the other side and take them out. An initial volleyto clear the area beyond the TRGA, followed by hunter-killers that would track down the Yankee ships and obliterate them.
“Dmitri,” he called, connecting with his weapons officer. “Prepare a flight of ten Umnaya Ptitsa, please. Program one of them to emerge from the Dunlop end of this thing and explode, and the rest to pass through the fireball,find any surviving American vessels, and destroy them.”
“Da, Captain. At once. Ah . . .”
“What is it?”
“Sir, do you wish to target only the capital ships? Or the fighters as well?”
Oreshkin nodded; it was a good question. The Americans almost certainly had fighters close by the TRGA. And the missiles mightbe distracted by the relatively low-value, highly maneuverable targets.
“Target the capital ships, Dmitri. We can mop up the fighters at our leisure.”
“Da, Captain!”
Umnaya Ptitsa was Russian for the PKR-130 “Smart Bird” missile, a variable-yield shipkiller comparable to the American Kraits. They werequite smart, but constrained by their programming to concentrate on just one thing—destroying the enemy.
With luck, when Moskva emerged from the TRGA, Oreshkin would find the American squadron wrecked and helpless.
VFA-96, Black Demons
Omega Centauri TRGA
1446 hours, FST
Lieutenant Commander Gregory watched the slow and stately tumble of the TRGA, which from here had the appearance of a titanicsoda straw rotating around its short axis. C’mon, you damned Russkies! he thought with red-rage ferocity. Show yourselves!
Rage, he found, helped him push aside the pain, the grief, the guilt he felt at Julia’s death.
The guilt had surprised him. What did he have to feel guilty about? It took him a while, in his tortured mind, to figure thatone out. But he figured it out: she had died.
And he had not.
That was a state of affairs that might change, that could be changed, though.
After he’d lost both Meg and Cyn, he’d felt something like this . . . he thought. One of the effects of his treatment had been to cut the memory of their loss from the associated emotion. He still remembered both of them, but the pain was gone.
Yet he could remember there had been pain, and that was what he was dwelling on now. He supposed Mason could fix this feeling of bottomless grief as well, butright now it felt as though the only way to feel better was to fling himself into combat with the bastards who’d killed Julia,even if he would almost certainly die himself.
Emerging target detected.
His Starblade’s AI dropped that alert into his mind, and an in-head window showing the mouth of the TRGA zoomed in on a mote—atiny speck—highlighted by a red CGI box emerging from the huge structure’s maw.
“What the hell is—” Gregory began.
And then it exploded.
The silent flash seared into Gregory’s brain, though the fighter’s optics automatically stopped the glare down to tolerablelevels.
Nuclear detonation, his AI told him inside his head. Approximately two hundred megatons, range ten kilometers.
Fortunately, a fusion explosion that would have vaporized much of a city was far less effective in hard vacuum. With no airto superheat or in which to create a shock wave, with no matter to convert into plasma other than that of the missile itself,the fireball was brief and died away almost at once. There was an equally brief pulse of electromagnetic energy, includinghard X-ray and gamma radiation, but the Starblade’s hull handled that without much problem.
Had there been a ship—the America, say—parked outside the opening of the TRGA, things would have been very different.
“America, America, VFA-96,” he called. “Warhead detonation at the TRGA mouth. . . .”
America, at that moment, was 18 million kilometers away—one light-minute. They wouldn’t see the flash or hear his warning for another . . . make it fifty-four seconds now. Gregory reoriented his Starblade and started moving toward the TRGA, but slowly. That blast had almost certainly been intended to clear any USNA ships away from the opening. It might be followed by another . . . or by a fleet of Russian warships.
The second detonation came a moment later, farther out from the rotating TRGA’s end. Gregory was reporting that blast to thecarrier when another flight of smart missiles emerged, spread by the TRGA’s rotation across an arc of sky, and began to accelerate.
“Missiles!” he yelled through his in-head link with the carrier. “Missiles inbound from the TRGA!”
A whole minute until America would hear the warning. Those missiles were already beginning to accelerate.
“Demons with me!” he called to the
