staring at the man who touched her, and he wasn’t Martinez but the almost-Martinez, Terza’s son, who gazed at her in malicious triumph from beneath his heavy brows…and then she wokeagain, heart lurching against her ribs, and saw the glowing pastel displays of Command and the crew drowsing at their stations while Haz in Auxiliary Command conned the ship.
Both fleets were going to have to decelerate in order to have a hope of maneuvering in the Naxas system. Until they arrived at the turnover point where the deceleration would normally start, Michi continued her accelerations. The Naxids continued to flee before them. Michi was going to wreck the Naxids’ schedule past all repair.
Sula began to think that Michi should continue the accelerations regardless. Press the Naxids to the point where it was impossible for either side to maneuver in the system, only to flash through it on their way to the next wormhole. The Naxids would have to accept straight-up combat this side of their home planet in order to keep Chenforce from blasting the place en route to somewhere else.
She contacted Michi and made this suggestion. Michi said she’d take a few hours to think about it, and a few hours later sent Sula a message saying she’d decided against the idea.
“We don’t know what’s there,” she said. “Going in slower gives us more time to work out our options.”
Sula shrugged with shoulders three times their normal weight. She concluded that Michi probably had a point.
Chenforce rolled and began its deceleration. The Naxids rolled and decelerated as well. Due to the delay in rollover, gee forces were heavier than during the accelerations. Sula felt as if the big hand of the almost-Martinez had clamped on her throat. Her heart raced to erratic surges of panic. She fought against the fear. In the shower, she scrubbed herself with perfumed soap to scour off the sour odor of spent adrenaline.
The Naxids’ deceleration wasn’t quite as heavy as that of Chenforce. The loyalists were slowly overtaking them. Sula checked the trajectories and matched them against a current map of the Naxas system, which featured eleven planets dotted around the primary. Chenforce would overtake about halfway toward the Naxid home world, having just passed the orbits of three gas giants.
Therewere reinforcements then. Most likely they would sweep around one or more of those gas giants and burn like fury to join the Naxid fleet before the battle.
Sula messaged these speculations to Chandra Prasad. The tactical officer answered that she, Michi, and Captain Martinez had already worked it out, but thanks anyway.
Sula consoled herself with the thought that at least there were a few other keen minds in the squadron.
A swarm of Naxid missiles raced into the systems, hundreds of them. Alarms flashed along Sula’s displays. The missiles decelerated, approached the Naxid ships, and were taken aboard.
The loyalists weren’t the only ones to have worked out this method of resupply.
The wormhole to Naxas approached. The Naxids formed into a long line and vanished through it. Hot on their heels came loyalist missiles, racing at relativistic velocities with their lasers and radars pounding out to light up the system before Chenforce arrived.
Chenforce took its time. Michi reduced the deceleration to three-quarter gravity and gave everyone three hours’ holiday. Meals were laid on the mess room tables for the first time since pursuit had begun, and the crew ate in shifts. A modest amount of alcohol was decanted, enough to produce a glow in the crew.
Alone in her cabin, Sula drank fragrant tea sweetened with clover honey, ate her dinner, then had three desserts. Every cell in her body rejoiced at the low gravities. She lay on her bed and slept in dreamless peace till Spence arrived to help her into the vac suit.
Reduction in deceleration of course meant that the fleets would meet earlier, not later. And Michi was still pushing ahead, still doing her best to demolish the Naxid timetable.
Chenforce flashed into the Naxas system with every sensor operator straining for sign of the enemy, and with Sula having switched her display to virtual. The sensor missiles that had gone into the system earlier had done their work—bits of the system flashed into her mind almost immediately, jigsawing together until she saw, like a spatter of brilliant stars against the blackness, what the Naxids had been running toward.
For a moment her heart lurched. It seemed that a vast enemy fleet lay ready in the system—but of course at this stage it would look that way, the real ships surrounded by scores of decoys that loyalist observers had not yet sifted out from the genuine warships. But even if ninety percent of the enemy force were bogus, the size of the force still surprised her.
They were right where Sula had thought they’d be, having swung in succession around a pair of the outer gas giants, and were now burning at eight or nine gees acceleration for a rendezvous with the survivors of the Magaria fleet, which was decelerating briskly in an effort to keep the rendezvous.
Those heavy gravities that were torturing the Naxids were Michi’s fault, for having pressed the pursuit.
“Sensors, I want ranging lasers on those new blips,” Sula said.
“Already done, my lady.”
The relativistic sensor missiles were racing through the system too swiftly to keep the enemy in their sights for long.
The rest of the system seemed bare, however. The Naxids had cleared away everything for this final combat.
Lady Michi, speaking in the clear, transmitted her demand for surrender. Only time would tell whether the government on Naxas was headed by someone as chatty as Dakzad had been at Magaria.
“My lady,” said Maitland, “I have a preliminary analysis of the enemy. Some of those blips are…well, they’re very large.”
“I’ll take a look.”
She enlarged the sensor image on her display. Some of the blipswere large—not just large, but gigantic, and they were gigantic both in radar and laser-ranging images.
Theycouldn’t have, she thought at once. The war simply hadn’t gone on long enough for the Naxids to have built a squadron of giantPraxis -class battleships like those destroyed at First Magaria. Even under the accelerated building schedules produced in wartime, it would have taken ages to put one of those giants together.
She counted. There were nine overlarge blips. There had only been eight battleships in the entire Fleet, and they had all been destroyed.
The big ships had to be something else.
They had to be warships simply because they were here. There had been plenty of time for all nonwarships to clear the system. But the overlarge blips couldn’t have been built as warships, they had to have beenturned into warships.
They were converted transports, big ones like the vast ships Sula had seen in orbit around Magaria.
“They’re converted merchant ships,” she said, and immediately felt the relief that sighed through Command.
Merchants couldn’t be much of a threat, she thought. In the days after First Magaria, when Zanshaa was expecting a conquering Naxid fleet every minute, a number of small private vessels had been requisitioned by or sold to the Fleet, given a few missile launchers apiece, and sent to patrol the Zanshaa system as “picket ships.” Fortunately, the ridiculous craft had been withdrawn from service before the Naxids had the chance to wipe them from existence.
But these Naxid ships, Sula thought, weren’t yachts and little transports and small merchantmen. These were the largest vessels in existence, bigger even than the oldPraxis -class battleships, even if they weren’t built for war. All that was needed to turn them to warships would be missile batteries, the addition of turrets for point- defense weapons, an electronics upgrade, and extra radiation shielding for the crew compartments and certain other parts of the ship. The craft wouldn’t be very maneuverable, and damage control would probably be worthless, but there would be lots of redundancy. As missile platforms, they would be serviceable enough.
The conversion could probably have been done in a couple months. If the order went out after the Naxids lost Zanshaa, the conversions would start appearing about now, too late for Second Magaria. It was a desperate move, but a reasonably practical one.
Sula began calculating how many missile batteries could be crammed into a space capable of holding ten thousand citizens, like the transports she’d seen at Zanshaa.
The total was frightening.
She asked for a line to Chandra Prasad.
