the first.
He hunched forward, glanced up sharply and picked up the second photo. He couldn’t be certain, but the woman in the photo looked like Nadia Pravda. She wore a vacc suit.
“I brought them right away,” the class three operative said.
Hansen leaned back. This woman was ambitious, a climber, in Highborn terms.
“I knew you’d want to see them,” she said, smiling, promising many things with it.
Yes, a climber indeed. “These photos were taken during night duty?” he asked.
“Yes, Chief Monitor.” She cocked a hip and her smile grew.
“I take it that only you have seen these?”
“Yes, Chief Monitor. I knew you’d be interested. The man is a shock trooper. The computer matched him. Marten Kluge is his name.”
“Very good work,” said Hansen. “Does your superior know?”
“I hope I did the right then by bringing them directly to you.”
Hansen gave her his patented fox-with-a-chicken-in-his-mouth grin. “Would you wait outside, please? And tell no one else about this.”
“Yes, Chief Monitor.”
She exited. Hansen studied the photos and then called on the intercom for his best clean-up man. The Praetor wanted the shock troopers, and he would give them to him. But first, he planned a little revenge of his own, a few more key deaths, some returned product and mouths that would never talk. Too bad the class three operative who had given him this would have to die.
The door opened and a short, wide-shouldered monitor entered. His gray eyes seemed dead, lifeless, without any emotion.
“I have a little assignment for you, Ervil,” Hansen began.
21.
Behind her dark visor, Admiral Rica Sioux chewed her lip.
A little over a week of weightlessness had given her chest pains. She refused medication, as that would be a sign of weakness. And if the others saw weakness as they neared the Sun Works Factory—
She squeezed her eyelids together. The waiting wearied her. She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned.
The First Gunner raised his gloved thumb.
He tapped the command-pad on his arm. His visor slid open, revealing a dark, bearded, unwashed face. Hollow marks ringed his brown eyes. He was from Pakistan Sector, a good officer, one of the last true loyalists aboard the beamship.
Ship etiquette overruled her wants. Admiral Sioux chinned a control, and her visor slid open. She was old, with a terribly wrinkled face, as only her Native American ancestors seemed to have ever had. Her longevity treatments had started late, and she’d never had time for skin tucks. So her face showed all of her one hundred and twenty-one years of age.
Admiral Sioux scrunched the flat, triangular-shaped nose that dominated her face. The command capsule stank of unwashed bodies and stale sweat. She peered around the small circular room, with its sunken pits and VR-module screens. Only half the posts were filled. Some of the officers lay strapped on the acceleration couches in the center of the capsule. They were apparently asleep as their visors pointed up at the low ceiling.
“Admiral,” said the First Gunner. “I think you should look at this.”
“Do you smell that?” she said.
“What? Oh, yes, yes, of course. If you’ll please look at this, Admiral.”
“Maybe I should order them out of their suits. We’re past the radiation leakage.” She knew she should have already thought of that.
“Admiral Sioux.”
“Admiral!”
She scowled, not liking the First Gunner’s tone.
“Admiral,” he said, pointing at his VR-imager.
She studied the readings and frowned. “Radar pulses?” she asked.
“Enemy.”
A sharp pain stabbed her chest. She wanted to vomit. So she clenched her teeth together.
Of course, the Highborn would launch new robot probes. And just as certain, a few of the SU Cruisers in this region were supposed to have tracked and destroyed them. SUMC had assured her of that.
“As per your orders, Admiral, the beamship’s ECM warfare pods are inactive.”
She chewed her lip, thinking. The
No, definitely not.
“Admiral—”
“Let me think!” she said. Her rheumy old eyes glittered, a window to the reason why at her age she still captained a ship. Not just any ship, either, but an experimental super-ship.
In a little less than two weeks, Mercury would reach perihelion, its closest distance to the Sun: 46 million kilometers. During much of those two weeks the fiery Sun looming behind the
Admiral Sioux was certain the Highborn didn’t have a combat beam that could reach this far, at least not accurately. She grinned tightly. Space warfare brought a unique set of problems to the game.
Light traveled at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second. So a laser beam shot from the Sun to Mercury at perihelion (46 million kilometers) would take nearly 2.6 minutes to reach the target. Yet how did one spot the target? If by radar, the beam had to travel to the target, bounce off it and then return. That took 5.2 minutes. If by optics… it had better be damn good optics, and there had better be enough light to see by, too.
What if the target shifted or jinked just a little? Then by the time the beam reached its target, the beam would sail harmlessly past, that’s what.
Admiral Rica Sioux studied the radar signal being bounced off her precious beamship. They had traveled from the Sun for over a week. She needed approximately eleven more days to bring her to what the SUMC tacticians on Earth considered her practical, outer-range limit. When Mercury reached perihelion, its closest orbital distance to the Sun, the
Admiral Sioux grinned, and some of the chest pain went away.
By their very nature, spaceships moved, shifted and jinked. But space habitats, especially world spanning ones like the Sun Works Factory, their orbital location was known to a mathematical nicety.
In eleven days, the target would be a little over 30 million kilometers away. Her ultra-powerful proton beam,
