The black-and-gray uniformed woman looked up as a quiet buzzer purred. A light blinked, and she slipped into her synth-link headset and consulted her computers carefully, then pressed a button.
"Get me the Old Man," she said, and waited a moment. "Admiral, this is Lois Heyter in Tracking. We've got something coming in on the right bearing, but the velocity's wrong. They're still too far out for a solid solution, but 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 EW.
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 AR-12359/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 Megaira picked off yet another incoming salvo, and Alicia winced. Thank God Megaira 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 Megaira'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, Megaira?"
<I am. I just hope the repairs are.>
Alicia nodded in grim understanding. Megaira 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 Megaira'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.> Megaira 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 Megaira 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 Megaira 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 Megaira'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, Megaira—let's dance."
* * *
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 deceleration of the closing source to right on three thousand gravities, and his squadron's acceleration translated it into a relative deceleration of more than forty-seven KPS per second. He had barely four minutes before it went sublight, and if he didn't begin his own deceleration at least thirty seconds before it did, he'd lose it forever.
* * *
Fasset drive generators were virtually soundless, their quiet hum as unobtrusive as a human heartbeat. But not now. Alicia clung to the arms of her command chair, teeth locked in a white, strained face, and the drive screamed at her like a tortured giant, shaking Megaira's iron bones like a hurricane until her vision blurred with the vibration.
The decoy, one of only two SLAM decoys Megaira carried, streaked away on their old course, and shipboard power levels exploded far past critical. Meters blew like molycirc popcorn, rebuilt control runs crackled and sizzled, patched-up generator nodes shrieked, and it went on and on and on and on . . .
* * *
"Turnover!" Lois Heyter barked. "We have turnover!" Her eyes opened wide, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "Dear God, look at that deceleration rate! How in hell is she holding it together?"
The cybernetic brain of the battleship Audacious noted the changing gravity signatures and adjusted its own drive. Vectors would converge with less than ten percent variance, it calculated with mild, electronic satisfaction.
* * *
Time was running out. Howell found himself pounding on the arm of his chair. If Tracking couldn't differentiate in the next ten seconds, he was going to have to go to emergency deceleration just to play safe. Losing distance on the alpha-synth if he'd guessed wrong would be better than losing it entirely, he told himself, and it did his frustration no good at all.
The leading source flickered suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. There! It flickered again, power fading, and he knew.
The range was down to four and a half million kilometers when Howell's entire squadron flipped end-for-end and began to decelerate madly.
* * *
<Fifty seconds to sublight.> Blood streaked Alicia's chin, her hands were cramped claws on her chair arms, and her battered brain felt only a dull wonder that they were still alive, but Megaira's mental voice was unshadowed by the hellish vibration. <Forty. Thirty-fi—They've flipped, Alley!>
* * *
"Here they come, boys and girls," Simon Monkoto murmured over his command circuit. He sat relaxed in his command chair, but his eyes were bright and hard, filled with a vengeful hunger few of his officers had ever seen in them. His gaze flicked over his display, and his mouth sketched a mirthless grin. The second group of gravity sources would drop sublight in nine minutes—out of range to hit the "pirates" but on an almost convergent vector.
"Cut your drives!" he snapped as Alicia DeVries broke sublight, and every one of his ships killed her Fasset drive.
* * *
<There's Simon—right on the money!> Megaira announced as the mercenaries appeared on her display and then vanished in the equivalent of a deep-space ambush. Without active drives, they were invisible to FTL scanners; the "pirates" wouldn't be able to see them until their light-speed sensors picked them up.
Alicia nodded in understanding, then gasped in relief as Megaira cut the drive's power levels far back. The dreadful vibration eased, yet there was a grim undertone to her relief as she felt the AI prepping her own weapons. If the SLAM drone had lasted just a little longer, Megaira might have broken back past Howell's ships to join Monkoto. She hadn't, and Monkoto or no Monkoto, she was still in the "pirates" range, with no choice but to decelerate towards them or lose the shield of her Fasset drive. But if she decelerated too rapidly—or if they began to accelerate once more and overran her—the range would be less than two light-seconds when she penetrated their formation.
A jolt of sullen fire went through Alicia at the thought. She clenched her teeth as her madness lunged against its restraining net, hungry for destruction, and felt Tisiphone at her side as she fought it down. It subsided with an angry grumble, and sweat beaded her forehead. She'd won—this time—but what would happen once the shooting started?
<Alley! Check the gravitics at two-eight-oh!>
* * *
The dreadnought Procyon erupted from wormhole space with her entire brood, and the alpha-synth was still there, decelerating into their teeth.
James Howell bared his own teeth. DeVries was a drop commando, not a Fleet officer, or she would've known better. If she'd simply cut her drive, he might not even have been able to find her; as it was, she was bidding to break back through his formation in another suicide attack.
That was the only explanation for her maneuver, but this time her ship was hurt and he knew what he was up against.
Orders crackled out, and his formation opened to receive its foe.
"Commodore!" It was Commander Rahman, his face taut. "We're picking up another grav source! It's still supralight, but decelerating quickly. Estimate breakout in . . . six-point-one minutes at thirty-one light-minutes, bearing two-eight-six, one-one-seven. At least thirty sources."
Howell stiffened, and his stomach tightened as Rahman's data appeared on his plot.
Those other sources were decelerating, if far less madly than DeVries had, and their vector converged with his own. Not perfectly, by a long chalk, but close enough they could match it if he tried to accelerate back up to supralight. Jesus! Could DeVries have known they'd be here?
It didn't seem possible. If an ambush had been intended the ambushers would have arrived ahead of time to lie doggo without revealing drive signatures. But what else could it be?
Numbers tumbled across the bottom of his display as Tracking calculated frantically, and he swore. Yes, they could go sublight on a converging vector or accelerate back supralight with him even if he went back to max acceleration, but they'd never be able to engage him as long as he continued to decelerate. They'd have to kill their own velocity, then go in pursuit, and his people were already killing speed. He'd have too much of a head start to be caught short of wormhole space on a reversed course . . . which was the coldest of comforts.
Jaw muscles lumped as he turned his hating gaze back to DeVries. They might not be able to engage, but they'd still get good scanner readings, and that meant his entire pursuit had been for nothing.
He glared at the alpha-synth's dot. All for nothing. Everything they'd done, all the people they'd killed, and it was all for nothing! Once his ships were fingerprinted, Treadwell's dream of building a new empire on the "pirate threat" would be dead. It might take months for Intelligence to put it together, but the true nature of the "pirate" squadron would be a glaring arrow pointed in the right direction.
Yet there was one last thing he could do. DeVries wasn't racing to meet the newcomers. She was still decelerating towards him. The shoot on sight order still held; she dared not confront the Fleet any more than he did, and she was accepting the threat she knew in a desperate effort to evade the new one.
Which meant he could still kill her, and perhaps—
"SLAMs!" Rahman screamed. "SLAMs bearing oh-oh-three, one-two-seven!"
Howell's head whipped up in horror as malignant blue dots speckled his display. Where had they come from? There was nothing out there! It was—
And then his sublight sensors finally picked up the ships ahead and "above" him, firing down past his drive masses as he decelerated towards them.
* * *
<Go, Simon!> Megaira shrieked, and Alicia's bloodlust spasmed against the web. A strand parted, and Tisiphone hurled herself at the weakness, blocking the thrust of madness. She didn't get it all. A tentacle of fire groped through Alicia's brain, and breath hissed between her teeth.
The SLAMs flashed in, and Howell's ships lunged into frantic evasive action. The short range meant the SLAMs were still building velocity when they arrived, and she snarled as Procyon evaded an even dozen, but two battlecruisers were less fortunate, and she twitched in ecstasy as they died.
* * *
Eleven capital ships hung on James Howell's flank, their velocity within ten percent of his own, and he'd lost Trafalgar and Chickamauga. Verdun replaced Trafalgar in the tactical net, but only she survived to support Procyon. Had the dreadnought's AI remained, she alone might have matched all eleven of her opponents, but it didn't. She retained her brute firepower and defensive strength—not the fine-meshed control to make them fully effective.
Understanding filled him. There had been an ambush, but not of Fleet units. The energy signatures told it all. Somehow, DeVries had linked up with the mercenaries at Ringbolt. An alpha-synth—and only an alpha-synth—might have nailed Gregor and had the speed to reach Ringbolt before making for the rendezvous to bait the trap. There was only one way those slow-footed battleships could have brought him to action, and he'd swallowed the bait whole. But what about the ships even now breaking sublight? They couldn't have been part of the plan; he knew Monkoto's reputation, and the mercenary would have been in place long since with every unit he had.
Conjecture raced through his mind in split-second flashes of lightning. The other units couldn't be from Gomez's Fleet district—not unless Brinkman had been found out and the whole operation broken from the other end, and in that case there'd be a hell of a lot more than thirty drive sources! Could they be still more mercenaries? Some last minute ally of Monkoto's who'd arrived late?
It didn't matter. What mattered was that the only way to avoid fighting both enemy forces was to take Monkoto head on . . . and that was suicide.
But perhaps not for everyone. If any of his people could break through the mercenaries, they might turn true pirate, or perhaps take service with a Rogue World far enough from Franconia not to realize what they'd been. It wasn't much, but it was all he could offer them—that and a chance to kill some of the bastards who'd ambushed them.
* * *
"Come to poppa, you bastards," Simon Monkoto whispered.
He'd hoped for still more SLAM salvos, but then he'd expected the renegades to accelerate back up to wormhole out. They hadn't, and now they were hidden behind the drives pointed straight at him. The battle to come had just turned even uglier, but his own ships matched the "pirates' " maneuver. Thanks to the battleships, their maximum deceleration was less than the enemy's, but it would be enough to insure a long and deadly embrace.
* * *
"Up their asses, Megaira!" Alicia snarled.
<Are you sure, Alley? I'm not in good enough offensive shape to add much to Simon's firepower.>
Megaira's worried voice tore at the corona of violence building in Alicia's mind. She clenched her teeth, sweating, trying to make herself think, and a part of her screamed in warning. The web about her madness sang with stress, and it was crumbling. She felt Tisiphone between her and it, felt the Fury pouring herself into the fraying web.
She writhed in her chair, fighting to keep her jaws locked on the order to engage. She could break off. She could curl away from Howell and leave him to Monkoto's unwounded ships, and she knew she had to. She and her companions were the only ones who knew the truth about Treadwell. They couldn't let themselves die yet. She knew it; yet she couldn't let go. She held her course, and the most she could do was strangle the order for Megaira to redline her deceleration.
* * *
The edge of James Howell's squadron "overtook" Monkoto's. Screening destroyers and light cruisers suddenly found themselves broadside-to-broadside at ranges as low as fifty thousand kilometers, and energy torpedoes and beams ripped back and forth. Point defense was irrelevant; misses were almost impossible, and battle screens were blazing halos wrapped about fragile battle steel. Two renegade destroyers and a light cruiser vanished in star-bright fury, but Commodore Falconi's heavy cruiser flagship went with them, and the death toll was only starting.
Monkoto and his allies had known what it would be like the instant they realized Howell wasn't going to run for it. They could have broken off, but they hadn't come to break off. The two fleets interpenetrated and merged, racing side-by-side while the hammering match raged.
Procyon's massive beam and energy torpedo batteries opened fire, and a dozen destroyers and cruisers died in the first salvo. Verdun poured her own fire into the maelstrom, but two of O'Kane's battlecruisers locked their batteries on her, and her fire slackened as more and more of her power was shunted frantically into her battle screen. She writhed, cored in their fire, and Procyon blew one of her attackers to vaporized wreckage.
Not in time. Verdun's screens failed, a tight-focused salvo of particle beams ripped through them, and she vomited flame across the stars.
Procyon rounded vengefully upon her killer, but Audacious and the battleship Assassin were on her like mastiffs. They were far smaller, slower, less heavily armed, but their cyber-synths were intact, and thunder wracked the vacuum as the leviathans spread their arms in lethal embrace. Two more battlecruisers raced to join them, then a third, and all six rained javelins of flame upon the dreadnought.
Eight million tonnes of starship heaved as something got through a local screen failure, and Monkoto's wolves set their fangs in the flanks of the crippled saber-tooth. Howell ripped his attention away from them long enough to check the main plot and swallowed a groan. Procyon was attracting more and more of the mercenaries' attention, but there were more than enough destroyers and cruisers to pair off in duels with his own units. Ships flashed and vanished like dying sparks, damage signals snarled in his synth-link, and Tracking had finally identified the newcomers: Fleet battlecruisers, already gaining on Procyon with their higher rate of deceleration.
He glared at the red switch on his console. He could engage the shield and laugh at Monkoto's attack . . . but there was no point. He couldn't accelerate with the shield up; only drift, knowing that when he finally lowered it, the enemy would be waiting. He raised fiery eyes to Commander Rahman.
"Get the battleships!" he snarled.
* * *
Alicia's nails drew blood from her palms as the battleship Assassin blew apart. She remembered Esther Tarbaneau's gentle brown eyes, and her lips writhed back from her teeth as the red holocaust broke free within her.
The hell with Treadwell! The hell with everything! The mercenaries were fighting her fight, dying her death. She felt Megaira and Tisiphone battling to turn her madness, and she didn't care.
"Now, goddamn it!" she snarled. "Everything we've got now!" and Megaira wept as she obeyed.
The drive thundered and shrieked in agony, and the alpha-synth began to close on the cyclone of dying starships.
* * *
Simon Monkoto's teeth met through his lip as Assassin vanished. First Arlen, now Tadeoshi and Esther—but he had the bastards. He had them! His flagship's AI noted a fluctuation in Procyon's defenses, a wavering the dreadnought would have sensed and corrected had her own AI survived. But it hadn't, and Audacious flashed orders over the net. One battleship and four battlecruisers threw every beam and energy torpedo they had at the chink in Procyon's armor, and her Fasset drive exploded.
* * *
Alicia's banshee howl echoed from the bulkheads as the dreadnought's drive died, and her eyes were mad.
The mercenaries peeled away from Procyon, for they no longer needed to endure her close-range fire. They'd broken her wings, destroyed her ability to dodge. Once their own ships got far enough from her to avoid friendly SLAM fire, she was dead, but Alicia didn't think about the mercenaries' SLAMs, didn't care about the short-range weapons still waiting to destroy her. All she saw was the lamed hulk of her enemy, waiting for her to kill it.
* * *
HMS Tsushima decelerated towards the savage engagement, and her captain's brain whirled as she digested the preposterous sensor readings. Fleet units locked in mortal combat with mercenaries?! Insane! Yet it was happening, and Brigadier Keita's briefing echoed in her ears. If the mercenaries were here to engage pirates, then those Fleet units must be pirates, for no engagement this close and brutal could be a mistake. Both sides had to know exactly who they were fighting . . . didn't they?
Tsushima was the lead ship of the task force, already approaching SLAM range of the fighting, but Captain Wu held her fire. Even if she'd been certain what was going on, only a lunatic would fire SLAMs into that tight-packed boil of ships, for she would be as likely to kill friends as enemies. But what was that one ship doing so far behind the melee? It was moving at preposterous speed, overhauling the others, but something about its drive signature . . .
"Captain! That's an alpha-synth!" her plotting officer said suddenly, and Wu's face went white. There were no Fleet alpha-synths in this sector; the only two previously assigned to it had been ordered out so that there could be no confusion.
Wu swallowed a bitter curse and looked at her plot. She'd heard the gossip, knew how close Keita and that Cadre major, Cateau, were to Alicia DeVries, but Keita's flagship was ten light-minutes astern of her. DeVries would vanish into the maelstrom in half the time it would take to pass the buck to him, and when she did, Tsushima could no longer fire her SLAMs in pursuit.
She didn't want to do this. No Fleet officer did. She knew each of them had prayed that he or she wouldn't be the one it fell to. But she was here, and the order still stood.
* * *
<SLAMs, Alley! SLAMs!>
Megaira's shriek of warning—small and faint, almost lost in her hunger—touched some last fragment of reason. Alicia saw the SLAMs racing after her, and that sliver of sanity roused, intellect fighting instinct run mad.
Tisiphone hurled herself into the tiny flaw in the hurricane, and Alicia jerked back in her command chair, gasping as the Fury smashed through to her. The terrible roaring eased, and understanding filled her.
"Break off, Megaira." She choked the words out, thoughts as clumsy as her thick tongue. She clung to her guttering sanity by her fingernails, feeling the blood-sick chaos reaching for her yet again.
"Evasion course. Wormhole out," she gasped, fighting for every word, and reached for the only escape from her madness. "Tisiphone, put me out!" she screamed, and slithered from her chair as the Fury clubbed her unconscious.