Damn.If she were to die—a highly likely occurrence—she would have liked to take a few of the enemy with her.
Before her hung the flight of missiles, their greater acceleration assuring that they were continuing to fly from her even though their drives had shut off when the deception was discovered. They were querying her for instructions. She scanned the displays and tried to find another target. A bewildering number of possibilities swam before her vision. How many of them were real?
The sour smell of her own body had become a permanent presence in her vacuum suit. Nearly two months of constant acceleration had battered and bruised her, drained her energy and left her listless. (The other cadets made jokes about her applying the acceleration drugs via patches instead of firing them into her neck; “Patch Girl,” they called her.) Fortunately, Jarlath had decreed two days of near weightlessness at the end of the long acceleration toward Magaria, a chance for Home Fleet personnel to gather wit and strength for the upcoming battle. Sula had alternated between obsessively rechecking the diagnostics of her pinnace and simply, blissfully, floating in her rack, feeling her muscles and ligaments, taut as twisted rope, slowly begin to slacken, a process almost as painful as the accelerations had been.
They were hardly slack now, not after the hours of acceleration burns that led to the Fleet’s leap through the Magaria wormhole, only to be followed by the remorseless, only slightly less than lethal acceleration that followed her launch fromDauntless . Now that weightlessness was sending blood through her body, her limbs were wakening to their pain. She tried to ignore it and instead apply her mind to the displays, but it was difficult to focus on the bewildering swarm of data.
The last time she’d been in a pinnace, she was locked for endless days with a dead man. It was hard to forget that even under the present circumstances. It had taken an act of will to enter the pinnace and close the hatch behind her.
She forced her mind to the displays.
Cruiser Squadron 2, nine heavy cruisers that includedDauntless , led the Home Fleet’s assault and was now well clear of the expanding plasma field created by Jarlath’s initial covering barrage—missiles fired through the wormhole to explode ahead of the Fleet and make a hash of enemy radar screens. The barrage served a dual purpose: to prevent rebel missiles from locking on, and to conceal the last minute maneuvering he hoped would catch the Naxids by surprise. Jarlath had wanted firepower in the lead, so the heavy cruisers of Squadron 2 were followed by the ten older cruisers of Cruiser Squadron 1, just now emerging from the radiation cloud on a slightly diverging course from Squadron 2. Behind them, still in the process of emerging from the expanding plasma cloud, the rest of the Home Fleet, marked by the towers on flame on which stood Battleship Squadron 1, the six giantPraxis -class ships with which Jarlath hoped to overwhelm the enemy.
Ahead were the Naxids, a bewildering array of formations cutting across and through each other’s paths between Barbas and Rinconell. As yet, only a few appeared clearly: the Naxids weren’t using active radar themselves, and the Home Fleet loyalists had to wait for their own radar to find the enemy and reflect back before they could get a clear indication of their foe.
Most of what they detected seemed to be decoys, just like those Sula had been sent to chase. She paged the sensor images back through time and found that her set of decoys had been maneuvering just asDauntless and the other cruisers had emerged from the plasma screen, and she and her missile barrage had been fired at what looked like a squadron of small ships setting up to make a run at their flank.
The Home Fleet’s radars were slowly revealing formations of the enemy, and Sula calculated trajectories to the nearest of these. But the two lead cruiser divisions were already hurling missile barrages at those enemies, and for her to add her own force to these seemed the height of redundancy. She decided to continue on her course and wait for an opportunity. The only order she gave was for her pack of missiles to rotate and make a short burn that would drift them toward her instead of away.
From her point of vantage she saw the battle develop, saw more enemy squadrons appear on the displays, saw clouds of hot plasma and blazing gamma ray bursts as missiles began to explode. Saw ships and formations of deadly missiles maneuver behind the curtains of expanding radiation. Saw missiles emerge from behind the clouds and saw the flashes as antiproton beams flashed across the intervening distance.
The two heavy cruiser squadrons maneuvered ponderously nearer the enemy, two Naxid squadrons that Sula’s sensors now recognized as the eighteen ships commanded by the Home Fleet defectors, Elkizer and Farniai. The opposing forces were on courses that would intersect, both heading for Barbas to slingshot around the big planet and head for the inner system.
“Starburst,” Sula found herself muttering. “Starburstnow .” But the cruisers maintained their formation, and so did the enemy. The space between the converging squadrons was a continual boil of radiation through which the opposing radars sought in vain. The flashes of antiproton and laser beams became a steady pulse of fire, like strings of fireworks flashing in the sky.
“Starburstnow .”
As if they heard her, the cruisers began to separate, the ships rotating, engines burning in different directions. Sula didn’t see the final missile barrage coming, only the brilliant flashes that burned out all sensors on her boat’s starboard side. Most of the symbols on her display faded, replaced by less brightly colored symbols representing a purely theoretical position. To Sula it was as shocking as a slap to the face. When part of the schematic universe in her head faded, it was as if half her brain had died.
“Computer: superimpose radiation counter!” she said. She detected a hint of panic in her own voice and tried to fight it down.
The radiation counter, at least, was still working, and it showed repeated waves of gamma rays, neutrons, and short-lived pi-mesons, the strange fruits of collision between antihydrogen and normal matter. A succession of peaks as missiles exploded, dozens of them altogether.
She waited for the radiation to die back, then switched on alternate detector arrays—the designers of the pinnace hadassumed she’d lose sensors and thus provided multiple redundancy. The sensors showed that her pinnace was engulfed by the ferociously hot, expanding cloud of plasma caused by multiple missile strikes. There might be other vessels in the cloud, but if so, they were hidden by the electromagnetic storm that surrounded her.
Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she tried to force her senses by sheer willpower to penetrate the cloud. Surely there were survivors. Surely there were friendly ships in the cloud, ships that had perhaps lost their sensors or other electronics but with crew still safe in their hardened shelters…
Minutes passed. Sula licked her dry lips with a sandpaper tongue. The expanding plasma cloud lost density and cooled, and her sensor range gradually increased. And then the pinnace burst out of the cloud, and the radar universe suddenly flared in her skull.
Her heart surged as another vessel emerged from the cloud, on track to be one of Cruiser Squadron 2. The vessel was followed by another. Sula shifted from radar display to optics, tried to get as close a view of the two ships as she could. Her hope was strained as taut as her knotted muscles: surely one of these wasDauntless.
Recognition eluded her. Optical details were vague: the computer was filling in speculative elements where the optics were lacking. There was something strange in the display. Both ships seemed to beglittering, as if they were trailing comet-tails of shimmering sparks.
It was only when she switched to infrared that all became clear. The two cruisers werehot : heat-energy boiled off them, an abrupt contrast to the cold despair that began to chill her veins. She didn’t know the melting point of the cruisers’ tough, resinous hulls, but she suspected that it had been exceeded. If there were oxygen in space, the hulls would be on fire. Even if the crew were in their shelters, they had probably been baked alive as heat radiated inward.
Sula gave a start as the lead ship blew up, the antimatter fuel spraying out another cloud of gamma rays. She got her sensors switched off in time to prevent damage, and when the radiation counter showed that the radiation had dropped, she cautiously switched them on again. The first ship had been obliterated, and the second had been hit by a large piece of debris, or perhaps just by the massive sledgehammer of gamma rays and neutrons, because it was now tumbling end over end.
Nothing else emerged from the cooling plasma cloud but debris.
No survivors, Sula thought. Nineteen ships of the Home Fleet had just been wiped out. That eighteen rebels had also been destroyed hardly seemed to matter.
Sula floated in her webbing and tried desperately to process this information. She’d hardly got to know her
