of the system. Between wormhole jumps, the Fleet and its decoy screen performed random changes of course to baffle any relativistic missiles fired at them.
The wormholes were unusually close together, and the entire journey to Magaria took only sixteen days. The first eight were spent accelerating, and then the blazing antimatter torches were turned toward the enemy and a deceleration began. Jarlath had gone in fast with the Home Fleet and lost almost everything; Tork would go in more slowly, grapple the enemy with slow deliberation, and crush him with superior weight.
Martinez spent most of his transit time in Command gazing fretfully at the tactical display. He took his meals there and often slept on his acceleration couch. He had been caught away from Command during one attack and nearly broke his neck: he wasn’t going to let that happen again.
He stared at the display and watched the slow advance of the little symbols that represented the Orthodox Fleet as they crawled across the display’s vast emptiness. Decoys were shown in pink, real ships in red. At the head of the long column of red was the little clump that was Squadron 17. Martinez wondered what Sula was doing as she sat at the point of Tork’s spear; if she sat in Command, as he did, and watched her ship creeping toward its destiny.
The long hours of waiting in Command produced a restlessness in Martinez that worked itself out in motion. When he wasn’t watching the tactical display, he walked the corridors ofIllustrious, wandering from one department to the next, watching his crew as they too waited for the Naxids. He knew the value of his own ship and crew by now and wasn’t interested in detailed inspections; and when the crew braced to attention, he was quick to set them back to their work. He chatted informally with the department heads and sometimes with the ordinary recruits; he tried to project an air of quiet conviction in victory, the assured confidence of the veteran commander leading his crew to yet another inevitable conquest.
To his surprise, he found that the crew didn’t seem to need his confidence—they had plenty of their own. They possessed a moral certainty of victory that Martinez began to find inspiring. He had hoped to cheer his crew, and instead they cheered him. It would have seemed churlish not to live up to their trust in him.
The Orthodox Fleet plunged on through the three systems that neither side could truly claim as their own. Along the way, Tork issued demands for obedience and surrender. This was fairly pointless in the case of the first two systems, which were largely barren of life save for a few mining colonies. These, having surrendered to the Naxid fleet when the enemy were heading for Zanshaa, now surrendered with equal alacrity to the loyalists heading the other way.
In the third system, Bachun, Tork demanded that he be able to broadcast to the population. The Naxid governor declined to answer. Intercepted transmissions from the planet showed joyous celebrations in honor of a record harvest and increased industrial production, all testifying to the efficiency of the new regime.
Tork fired a missile straight at Bachun’s capital city. Without missing a beat, his messages began to be broadcast throughout the system. Tork recalled the missile.
To Martinez, it was beginning to look as if there would be no suspense until the Fleet reached Magaria.
He was wrong. When the alarms began to chirp, he was suited on his acceleration couch. He knew from the sound of the alarm tone what had happened before Warrant Officer Pan, the sensor operator, could cry his warning.
“We’re being painted by a targeting laser!”
“Engines!” Martinez shouted over him. “Cut acceleration. Pilot, rotate to heading one-two-zero by zero-eight- zero! Weapons, all point-defense lasers on automatic! Comm, get me Lady Michi! Engines, sound warning for acceleration!”
Gravity and the distant rumble of the engines ceased. The ship began its swing to its new heading. Inside the vac suit, Martinez’s heart sounded like a roll of thunder.
Michi had given the squadron standing orders for this situation. All ships would disperse without the need for an order from the flagship.
“We’re still being painted, my lord,” Pan said, more quietly.
The acceleration warning began to clatter. “Everyone med up,” Martinez said, and reached for the med injector in its holster by the side of his couch. He pressed it to his carotid and fired into it a precise dose of the drug that would—it was hoped—keep his veins and brain supple and safe from the effects of heavy acceleration.
The others in Command took their injectors and did likewise.
The ship ceased to swing. “One-two-zero by zero-eight-zero,” the pilot said.
“Engines, accelerate at six gravities.”
The roar of the engines overwhelmed the feeble warning tones of the sensor board. The room became a blur as Martinez’s acceleration couch dropped to its zero point.
“Captain, what’s the problem?” Michi’s voice, hoarse with her battle against acceleration, sounded in his earphones.
“Enemy targeting laser,” Martinez said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m in my sleeping cabin. I got to my bed in time. Does—”
The squadcom’s voice was drowned by a shout from Pan. “Here they come!”
“Ten gravities for one minute!” Martinez called.
He saw the flashes of white on the tactical display that were incoming missiles, a perfect swarm of them shooting out of Bachun Wormhole 2 like a stream of water caught by a stop-action camera.
The ship shuddered and groaned under the great surge of gravity. Martinez clamped his jaw in order to force blood to his brain. His vision darkened, narrowed to a tunnel focused on the tactical display. He saw blooms of bright light flash on the display as antimatter missiles detonated. Symbols flickered, indicating thatIllustrious ‘s point-defense weapons were firing. He fought for breath and consciousness, aware that control of the battle had never been his, that he would either live or die in the next few seconds and that he was helpless to make any difference…
The great pressure on his chest and mind eased. He had never felt he would be thankful to experience a mere six gravity acceleration.
Expanding clouds of plasma floated in the void ahead of the ship, showing where the oncoming Naxid missiles had destroyed part of the fleet’s decoy screen. Silver flickers on the display indicated rapidly receding missiles that had flashed through the system so fast they failed to acquire a target. By the time they finished decelerating and had begun their return to the point of origin, the Second Battle of Magaria would be over, one way or another.
There seemed to be no new missiles coming their way.
“Reduce acceleration to one-half gravity,” Martinez said.
Michi’s voice sounded in his earphones. “I take it we’ve survived, Lord Captain?”
“No casualties in the fleet, my lady. We seem to have lost forty or so decoys.”
“Message for the squadcom from the Supreme Commander,” said Nyamugali at the comm station.
“Forward it to her.”
Martinez heard the message secondhand, since his channel to Michi was still open when she played it.
“The lord commander,” said a chiming Daimong voice, “reminds Squadron Commander Chen that no element of the fleet is to disperse without permission of the Supreme Commander.”
Tork, Martinez thought, at least had the virtue of consistency.
More decoys were launched to fill the gaps caused by the surprise attack. Tork then launched a missile to destroy the source of the ranging laser, which turned out to be Wormhole Station 2.
“The old pirate,” Michi said, with feigned affection.
Illustrioussuffered the expected number of sprains and broken bones during the attack. No one was incapacitated. The Naxid strike had come to nothing, but the crew of the wormhole station observed the Orthodox Fleet’s reactions, and would have been able to deduce at least some of the icons on their screens that represented real ships and some that were decoys.
Perhaps that had been the whole point.
Martinez wrenched off his helmet to relieve himself of the scent of spent adrenaline that was souring his suit, then examined the spectra from the brief battle. There had been over two hundred enemy missiles, he saw. Most had missed completely. Only two squadrons had tried to starburst, his own and Sula’s.
