Her attack raced away.
She was busy trying to coordinate the defenses against another massive strike by the converted transports when an enormous plasma bloom flared on her virtual display.
“What’sthat ?” she said aloud, and refocused her attention.
One of the giant transports had just blown up. Massive amounts of antimatter had detonated, and the hot expanding plasma sphere was engulfing other ships.
Sula wondered how it had happened. There was no indication that any loyalist missile had even gotten close.
There were no secondary explosions, so it appeared that none of the other transports were destroyed. But flying through a furious bombardment of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and blazing plasma couldn’t have done the other squadron elements any good.
The huge converted ships stopped firing. They began to lumber through a series of evasive maneuvers.
Something had them frightened. Sula sent a pack of missiles after them to keep up the scare.
More missiles splashed white fire against the night. An enemy warship flared and died, leaving two other ships isolated.
She picked them as her next targets and began to plot her attack.
Michi must have followed his suggestion, Martinez thought. One of her antiproton beams must have destroyed one of the converted transports. None of the missiles had gotten close, but a lucky hit with the antiprotons must have hit an antimatter store.
Or an even luckier shot had hit a missile just as it was being launched, and set it and every other missile off within a fraction of a second.
He fired a salvo of missiles at the big Naxid ships, just to see if he could keep their luck consistent.
He picked one of the enemy warships in the opposing squadron and ordered it to become the center of Squadron 31’s attention. The entire squadron began moving toward the target, firing missiles as it went, and moving within the larger vector to the purposeful bob and weave of the Martinez Method.
Martinez was nudging the enemy. The Naxids had starburst and their response was uncoordinated, and he wanted to drive them farther apart and make them even less coordinated. But he couldn’t simply fly into the middle of the Naxids, because then they could throw missiles at him from all sides. He could put his head only so far into the noose. What he had to do was threaten in one direction and then another, wedge the Naxids apart without committing himself in any one direction.
It was a delicate and subtle task. If only the ammunition supply held out.
He scanned the display. Elsewhere in the battle, the last huge barrage of the converted transports was being dealt with by coordinated antimissile defenses. Michi and her opposite number were involved in a furious duel, and it looked as if Michi was gaining the upper hand.
Sula’s squadron, he saw, was threading its way through plasma bursts, striving always to fly through the oldest, coolest bursts in order to keep from completely blinding itself. Sula was in the process of isolating a pair of enemy ships and destroying them.
He looked at the enemy and saw what was probably an unintended pattern in the squadron that faced Sula. If she moved now, if she movedimmediately with her entire squadron, she could detach a second pair of enemy while still keeping the first pair isolated.
Martinez considered sending Sula a message to that effect. He could imagine her scorning the message on its arrival. He could imagine the contemptuous response that would burn across the intervening space between their ships.
But she had to do itnow . It would make a difference.
He was stumbling through his message, which he planned to illustrate with a frozen three-dimensional image of the battle with some hand-drawn arrows added, when he saw that Sula was beginning the movement on her own. She’d seen the opening.
“Cancel that message, Lieutenant Falana,” Martinez said.
Sula was doing just fine on her own.
As usual.
His own wedging was working. He isolated one enemy ship and hammered it till it vanished in a flash of plasma fire. He began moving to drive another wedge between a pair of enemy and the rest of the Naxid squadron.
At that point the squadron of converted transports fired again. The two Naxids that had been engulfed in the plasma storm from the destroyed ship failed to fire, but the remaining barrage was formidable enough, and it occupied much of his attention for the next several minutes.
When he next had the opportunity to view the battle, he saw that Sula and her entire squadron had vanished into a colossal fireball.
She had miscalculated. She had killed two of the enemy and then shifted the squadron’s center of mass toward a part of the oncoming plasma wall that she expected to cool and thin by the time she arrived, giving them all better sight lines of the enemy. But a salvo of Naxid missiles came racing out of a hotter part of the plasma wall and was hit by counterfire right in her path. She was flying toward a blazing hot, opaque, expanding sphere, and before long, Sula knew that she and the rest of the squadron would be blind.
Sensors from her own squadron showed nothing but a flaming hot wall in her path, butConfidence was still receiving sensor feeds from the other squadrons and the pinnaces. The feeds showed no threat, but any perspective on the engagement had its blind spots, and in any case the situation could change quickly.
Sula felt a growing obsession about the blind spots. She fired a volley of missiles into the hot spot anyway, in hope they would fly through the hash and find and locate any enemy missiles that might be about to plunge into the cloud from the other side.
Right. Fat chance.
For a moment she considered a starburst—areal starburst, each ship clawing for maximum distance from the others. That would reduce the chance of them all being hammered while cloaked in the plasma sphere, but on emerging they would have surrendered any advantages that Ghost Tactics gave them.
No, she thought. Just try to get to the other sidefast .
She ordered all ships to blast through the plasma sphere at acceleration of ten gravities. The acceleration began as soon as they entered the plasma.Confidence groaned as the weight came on. An invisible hand began to close on her throat. She watched the radiation readings rise, and the hull temperature with them.
Darkness encroached on her vision. She felt the pillow press over her face. Perhaps she cried out.
An instant later the darkness seemed to fade. She was floating in her harness. A persistent, irritating tone sounded in her headphones. She tasted iron on her tongue.
“I have command of the ship,” said a voice. Belatedly she recognized it as that of First Lieutenant Haz.
Someone touched her arm, her throat. She flailed at him.
“Are you all right, my lady?” There was an edge of panic in Ikuhara’s voice.
Sula pushed him away. She heard the twanging sound as he rebounded off the bars of her acceleration cage.
“Display!” she called. “Cancel virtual!”
The limitless space of the virtual display was replaced by the soft lights and close confines of Command. Ikuhara, clumsy in his vac suit, floated over her couch. His face was a mirror of concern mingled with a touch of fear.
Something dark floated in the air between them, something round and shiny like little marbles.
“What the hell’s going on?” Sula demanded.
“Acceleration canceled,” Ikuhara said. “Health risk to an officer.”
At quarters the state of the crew was constantly monitored by detectors in their sensor caps. Any threat to the health of the crew—any cerebral hemorrhage, blood pressure spike, or heart malfunction—was monitored, and action taken in accordance with a preset program. If enlisted crew stroked out during a battle or even an exercise, it was usually the pulpy’s hard luck; but a threat to an officer could shut down the engines.
“Who was it?” Sula said. She’d have him off her ship the second they could shuttle the invalid away to a nice
