doing.
It took four hours for the Seizho brass to respond, categorically forbidding Severin to destabilize the wormhole. By then, he’d hurled hundreds of thousands of tons of dense matter through the torus, and had begun to detect motion.
The odor of garlic preceded Gruust into the command center. “Lifeboat’s ready,” he reported. He gazed out the huge plate windows of the mass driver as another giant bolt shot off the rails and toward the eerie, hoop- shaped entity in the far distance.
“Why don’t you look after the drivers for a while,” Severin said. “I want to make sure my personal stuff is on the lifeboat.”
The lifeboat wasn’t as cramped as its name might have suggested: it was designed to keep an entire station’s crew comfortable for the journey to and from the station, a journey that might take a month or more. There was a fully stocked kitchen and exercise facilities, and a library of videos, books, music, and other entertainments.
Severin added a stock of insulated clothing, thermal blankets, and warm socks, then returned to the command center.
“The wormhole’s moving,” Gruust said.
“I know.”
By the time Severin had fired off all his ammunition, the wormhole had moved seven diameters on a diagonal course from the plane of the ecliptic, and the messages from his superiors, who were detecting the huge freight- train-sized bolts flying into their system, were growing frantic. Eventually their messages trailed away: with the wormhole moving, the communications lasers were no longer in alignment.
Severin and his crew had a last meal in the station, noodles in a tomato sauce made fiery by dried chiles, washed down by a dark, toasty beer that one of the crew had made with barley he’d brought onto the station.
The Exploration Service traditionally compensated for their loneliness by eating well.
“You know,” Severin said, “I’m beginning to think we shouldn’t leave the Protipanu system.”
“If we stay here,” Gruust said, “they’ll just take us prisoner.”
“I don’t want to stayhere, ” said Severin. “Not in the station. I thought we’d take the lifeboat and grapple it to one of those big chunks of rubble orbiting past. That way we could keep the enemy under observation, and if the Fleet returns, we can give them the information. And if the rebels leave, we can just reoccupy the station.”
“You’re talkingmonths, ” someone said.
There was some discussion of this. Severin didn’t want to live for three or four months with a crew who resented the orders that put them there. But in the end he had his way, and without pulling rank: the others were used to spending time together in isolated situations, and agreed that wrecking enemy plans was worth the extra discomfort and time.
“It’s going to be cold, unfortunately,” Severin said. “To avoid detection, I’m going to have to power as little of the ship as possible.”
“We should get the thermal blankets aboard,” someone said.
“I already have.”
There was a moment of silence. “Well, at least we’ll have a big pay packet waiting when we return,” Gruust said hopefully.
They moved six months’ food supplies into the lifeboat and cast off. Severin already had chosen his rock, an iron asteroid called 302948745AF—the smaller lumps of rock and metal in the Protipanu system were well charted, since they were all potential supplies of reserve ammunition for the mass drivers.
The Naxid flotilla leaped into the system before the lifeboat actually grappled to its new home, but Severin had anticipated this, and made his major deceleration burn before their arrival. He was now drifting gently toward 302948745AF. He knew he should be able to snuggle tight to the asteroid with just his maneuvering thrusters, and without attracting attention by lighting the antimatter engine.
Floating weightless in the lifeboat’s control station, he watched the tall antimatter torches race toward the wormhole. The Naxids were coming fast, decelerating but still moving at nearly half the speed of light. Severin calculated their trajectories and discovered that they were on course…for where the wormholehad been .
It was perfectly possible for them to find out the wormhole had moved. They could detect it visually or by charting its warp of space-time. But the wormhole had been in the same place since its discovery, and the Naxids had no reason to suspect it might have crabbed away from there.
Still, as the minutes ticked by and the blips raced closer, Severin felt his mouth go dry, and cramp pained his hands as they clamped on the stabilization bars at the control panel. It would require a tiny correction in their course to hit the wormhole, one they might make at any moment…
He held his breath. And the Naxid squadron shot past, a clean miss of the wormhole. The little lifeboat’s crew broke into cheers. Severin could only imagine the consternation in the rebels’ command centers as they realized what had happened to them.
While the Naxids increased the fury of their deceleration burn, Severin knew that he’d delayed their plans, whatever they were, by at least three months, probably a good deal more.
He felt a quiet triumph. He’d done the enemy an injury, done it without having a single weapon to fire at them, and with any luck, he’d be in a position to do them another.
In the days that followed his conversation with Tork, Jarlath and his staff worked endlessly on plans for a Magaria attack, and the harder he contemplated the possibilities, the less possible he found it to resist them.
Martinez’s video report, delivered after a transmission delay of some days, provided little hard information about the damage of his missile strike, but it left Jarlath convinced that the missile must have donesomething . Almost all the shielding on a ring station was on its outer rim, facing the sun as it rotated to protect the inhabitants from solar radiation, andCorona’s missile had hit north of the inner rim. The flood of neutrons and highly energetic gamma rays released by the explosion would probably not have done any lasting damage to the ships, but any crew and ring personnel who were not in a hardened shelter had probably got a fatal dose of radiation.
Martinez might have caused a massacre among the enemy, as well as many of the civilian personnel aboard the ring. Casualties to the dockyard workers and other specialists on whom the Fleet depended could have been high. Though hardened military gear would probably have survived well enough, the ordinary electronics on the ring station might well have been slagged—everything from communications to light and power to the electric carts used to haul supplies to and from the ships. Such damage would have interfered severely with the Naxids’ attempts to refit their captured ships.
Ifhe came in fast, Jarlath thought, if the Home Fleet roared in so quickly that Fanaghee had no time to alter her own dispositions, he might well catch her napping. The only way she could match the abrupt and devastating arrival of the Home Fleet would be to subject her own crews to the same merciless accelerations that he was inflicting on his own personnel. But Jarlath had full crews—his people got at leastsome rest—and if Fanaghee had crewed her captured vessels from out of the Naxid ships,all her ships would have skeleton crews. By the time he met them in combat, Jarlath thought, they’d be beaten into undifferentiated protoplasm by over a month of high gravities and standing continual watches, unable to match his crews in efficiency and combat readiness. They would have no real damage control capability. After all, the three squadrons consisted of ships that had only recently been adapted to their species, and whose controls and capabilities would be unfamiliar.
On the other hand, they would have the advantage of position. Two large planets in Magaria’s system, Barbas and Rinconell, happened to have moved on either side of Magaria Wormhole 1, with a forty light-minute gap between them. Fanaghee could keep her squadrons involved in perpetual slingshots between the two planets, or between Barbas, Rinconell, Magaria, and Magaria’s sun, thus keeping her ships at high speed and in a position to slap at his fleet once it emerged from the wormhole.
Jarlath’s staff, however, had worked out a series of maneuvers that would minimize this advantage.
His primary worry, as he saw it, was that he might be outnumbered. But then he heard from Martinez that the enemy squadron from Felarus wasn’t at Magaria, but at Protipanu, and Jarlath realized that not every enemy ship was joining Fanaghee. The Naxids seemed to be dispersing rather than concentrating their force.
Now it seemed more essential than ever to seize Magaria to prevent the enemy from concentrating.
The appearance of the Felarus squadron at Protipanu sent the Convocation into a paroxysm. If the rebels
