it looks like our friend hasn't been able to hold the range open as planned.' She listened, then nodded. 'Yes, sir. We'll stay on it.'
She went back to her plot, and the close-grouped ships of war began to accelerate through the deep gloom between the stars. There was no great rush. They had hours before their prey dropped sublight-plenty of time to build their interception vectors.
James Howell glared at the enemy's blue dot and muttered venomously to himself. He'd fired off over half the squadron's missiles, and he might as well have been shooting spitballs! It was maddening, yet he'd given up on telling himself things would have been different if Procyon's cyber synth had survived to run the tactical net. To be sure, Trafalgar's AI was less capable than the dreadnought's had been, but not even Procyon's could have accomplished much against the alpha synth's fiendish ECM.
He knew that damned ship was badly damaged; the debris trail it had left at AR-12359/J would have proved that, even if its limping acceleration hadn't, yet it refused to die. It kept splitting into multiple targets that bobbed and wove insanely, and then swatted down the missiles that went for the right target source with contemptuous ease. What it might have been doing if it were undamaged hardly bore thinking on.
But its time was running out. His ships would be into extreme energy torpedo range in seventy minutes, and even an alpha synth's defenses could be saturated with enough of those. If they couldn't, he'd be into beam range in another eighteen and a half minutes, and no point defense could stop massed beam fire, by God!
'Admiral,' Lois Heyter said tensely from Simon Monkoto's com screen, 'we're picking up a second grav source-a big one-and it's decelerating hard.'
'Put it on my plot,' Monkoto said, and frowned down at the display. Lois was right; the second cluster of gravity sources, almost as numerous as those speeding towards them from AR12359/J, was decelerating. He tapped his nose in thought. He supposed their arrival might be a coincidence … except that there was no star in the vicinity, and Simon Monkoto had stopped believing in coincidence and the tooth fairy years ago.
He juggled numbers, and his frown deepened as the newcomers' vector extended itself across the display. If those people kept coming as they were, things were about to get very interesting indeed.
A fresh sheet of lightning flashed and glared against the formless gray of wormhole space as Megarea picked off yet another incoming salvo, and Alicia winced. Thank God Megarea had no need of little things like rest! The 'pirates' had been in missile range for over two hours, and if their supply of missiles was finite they seemed unaware of the fact. Anything less than an alpha synth would have been destroyed long since. They hadn't been supposed to reach missile range before turnover, but 'supposed to' hadn't counted on Megarea's damage. Alicia's nerves felt sick and exhausted from the unremitting tension of the last hundred and thirty minutes, yet the end was in sight.
'Ready, Megarea?'
'I am. I just hope the repairs are.'
Alicia nodded in grim understanding. Megarea had labored unceasingly on her drive since their flight began, ignoring less essential repairs, and all they could say for certain was that it had worked … so far.
Maintenance remotes had built entirely new control runs in parallel with those cobbled up in such desperate haste, but they hadn't dared shut down long enough to shift over to test them with Howell's squadron clinging so closely to their heels.
Nor had they been able to test Megarea's other repairs. Twenty-five percent of her drive nodes had been crippled or destroyed outright by the same hit that smashed the control runs, and she'd had spares for less than half of them. Her theoretical grav mass was down five percent even after scavenging the less damaged ones, and while she'd bench-tested the rebuilt units, no one cut suspect nodes into circuit while underway in wormhole space.
Unfortunately, the maneuver they were about to attempt left them no choice. They'd been forced to leave their turnover far later than planned because of how much more quickly the 'pirates' had closed the gap, and they would need every scrap of deceleration they could produce, tested nodes or no.
'Coming up on the mark, Alley.' Megarea broke into her thoughts quietly, and Alicia drew a deep breath.
'Thanks. Tisiphone?'
'I am prepared, Little One. Relax as much as you may.'
'I'm as relaxed as I'm going to get.' She heard the quaver in her own voice and forced her hands to unclench. 'Come ahead.'
There was no spoken response, but she felt a stirring in her mind as Megarea extended a wide-open channel to the Fury with no trace of her one-time distrust. They reached out to one another, weaving a glowing web, and Alicia forced down a stir of jealousy, for she was excluded from its weaving. She could see it in her mind's eye, taste its beauty, yet she could not share in its creation. Beautiful it might be, but it was a trap-and she was its prey.
Currents of power crackled deep within her, and then the web snapped shut. She gasped and twisted, stabbed by agony that vanished almost before it was felt, and her eyes opened wide.
The seductive glitter of her madness was gone. Or, no, not gone-just … removed. It was still there, burning like poison in the glowing shroud Tisiphone and Megarea had woven, but it could no longer touch her. Blessed, half-forgotten peace filled her like the hush of a cathedral, and she sighed in desperate relief as her muscles relaxed for the first time in days.
'Thank you,' she whispered, and felt Megarea's silent mental caress.
'It is little enough, and I do not know how long we may hold it,' Tisiphone replied more somberly, 'but all we may do, we will.'
'Thank you,' Alicia repeated more levelly, then gathered herself once more. 'All right, Megarea-let's do it to these bastards.'
Lois Heyter hunched over her console in concentration, then stiffened. 'Tell the Old Man we have decoy separation!' she snapped.
No more missiles fired. James Howell's lips were thin over his teeth as he waited out the last dragging seconds to energy torpedo range. If he were aboard that alpha synth, this was when he'd go for a crash turnover-
There! The fleeing Fasset drive suddenly popped over, and he started to bark orders-then stopped dead. There were two sources on his display! One continued straight ahead at unchanged acceleration; the other hurtled towards him at a starkly incredible deceleration, and he swore feelingly.
He gritted his teeth and waited for Tracking to sort them out. Logic said the genuine source was the one charging at him in a frantic effort to break sublight and lose him … only it was coming at him at over twenty-five hundred gravities! How in hell could the alpha synth produce that kind of power after its long, limping run? A fraction of that increase would have kept it out of his range, and alpha synth point defense or no, not even a madwoman would have endured that heavy fire if she could have avoided it!
The source continuing straight ahead maintained exactly the same power curve he'd been watching for days, which might well indicate it was genuine, and that made his dilemma worse. If he decelerated to deal with the closing source and guessed wrong, the still fleeing one would regain a massive lead; if he didn't decelerate and the closing source was the genuine ship, he'd lose it entirely. One of them had to be some sort of decoy-but which one?
Whichever it was, he had to identify it quickly. The peculiarities of wormhole space augmented the
