Suddenly concerned, the chief of staff turned and stared at the admiral, who hadn't moved. Concern growing, he stepped over to Villiers' side. "Sir . . . ?"
Villiers turned his command chair to face him. For a shocking instant Santos saw behind that face, saw the full depths of the hell in which the admiral's soul now dwelt. And he spoke as he'd never thought he'd live to speak to Anthony Villiers.
"It's not going to be enough, is it, Sir?"
A tiny smile caused Villiers' mustache to twitch upward. "No, it isn't, Raoul." At any other time, the use of his first name would have sent Santos into shock. Now, like so much else, it didn't seem to matter very much. "The fighters will do a lot of damage. But I think I'm learning how these . . . beings think. They send in what they know will be an overwhelming force and accept whatever losses it takes to secure the objective. They sent two dozen superdreadnoughts into Golan and we gave them a goodfight-so they'll send in at least two or three times that here. They'll just keep coming and coming. . . ." He shook his head slowly. "Our options have narrowed to withdrawing now or . . ." His voice trailed to a halt, and Santos wondered what he was thinking. "Of course," Villiers resumed, "the decision would be an easy one if only Commodore Reichman had gotten here-"
"Sir!" The cry from the com station seemed to shatter a glass case around Villiers and Santos. "The picket at the K-45 warp point reports that Commodore Reichman's ships have begun to enter the system!"
Once again there was a muted cheer. Villiers and Santos stood apart from it. But then Villiers stood up straight. He seemed to slough off his despairing indecision, but Santos, eyeing him narrowly, saw that only the indecision was gone; the despair was still there.
"Well," the admiral spoke with a ghastly caricature of his old briskness, "that settles that, eh? Have Com raise Admiral Teller."
"Sir, you don't have to do this!"
Rear Admiral Jackson Teller forced himself to sit through the delay as his blurted appeal sped across the light-seconds to Rattlesnake and back again. All he could do was stare at the com screen, at the face of the man who'd just condemned himself to death.
Finally, the reply came. "My mind is made up, Admiral Teller. The weight of point defense those SDs mount individually is canceling out our fire-control advantage-especially in light of the fact that our datalinked point defense is useless against their capital force beams. So I am resolved to take point defense out of the equation entirely by taking the battleships in to ranges where their missiles can be used in sprint mode."
"Sir . . . they've already put a dozen superdreadnoughts into this system, and there's no sign they've stopped coming. You can't stop them!" Ordinarily, he wouldn't have dreamed of saying that to Anthony Villiers, but times had ceased tobe ordinary.
"Of course not, Admiral Teller." Villiers' time-lagged response came in a shockingly mild-tone. "With the forces we have available, the idea of stopping them cannot enter our tactical calculations, can it? My objective is to inflict the maximum possible damage on them-hopefully enough to make them pause in their advance. Your responsibility-" (After succeeding to overall command, he did not add) "-will be to gain Commodore Reichman enough time to complete the evacuation of planet A II. And now," he concluded, "I'll sign off. Good luck, Admiral."
"Good luck, Sir." Teller barely had time to make the meaningless noise before the screen went dark. Then he turned to the tactical display's swarming points of light. The green ones representing Villiers' battleships were crawling towards the purple circle that denoted the Golan warp point, still expelling the red dots of enemy superdreadnoughts in a kind of horrid ejaculation.
"Admiral." Francesca Santorelli interrupted his thoughts. The intelligence officer had been here aboard the command battle-cruiser Sorcerer when the attack had begun and was now an ad hoc addition to Teller's staff. "These latest superdreadnoughts to emerge are a new class, judging from some subtle differences in their energy signatures."
"A 'new class,' Commander?" Teller queried, preoccupied.
"Yes, Sir. The first dozen belonged to one of the classes we encountered at Golan-what we've seen of their weapons mix confirmed our initial identification. But these coming now are . . . something else."
"Give those conclusions to the computer, Commander. I want this different class tagged so they show up in the plot."
"Aye, aye, Sir." Presently, thin red circles appeared around the newly arriving dots. And as Villiers' battle-line closed in, Teller began to notice something. The survivors of the earlier superdreadnought waves continued to target the battleships with their force beams. But from the haloed newcomers, no fire came.
Worried, Teller turned to a small screen flanking his command chair's shock frame. It showed the exterior view from a pickup on Villiers' flagship. As usual, not much could be seen of space combat, such were the distances across which it was waged. But the coming clash of capital ships, at what passed for point-blank range, promised to be more visually stimulating than most. Here and there were the flashes of detonating warheads as Villiers' missiles smashed at their targets in uninterceptable sprint mode. Lasers were, of course, invisible in vacuum, as force beams were anywhere. Glancing at the tac display, Teller saw that the battling heavyweights were passing very close indeed now. In fact, the dots of Rattlesnake and a hostile were almost brushing against each other on the plot. He looked back to his private screen and thought, with a faint prickling of the neck, that the stupendous enemy ship would be visible were there light from a nearby sun for it to reflect. . . . There! Maybe that was it, occluding a tiny segment of the dense star-fields. . . .
Almost too swiftly for Teller to catch, what looked like coherent lightning flashed from the enemy ship to a point just to the left of the pickup, not far away on Rattlesnake's hull. As Teller bunked his dazzled eyes, the universe as revealed by the pickup shook and lurched violently and then went out.
Teller's stunned silence lasted less than a heartbeat. "Com!" he roared. "Raise Rattlesnake at once!"
"No can do, Sir," came the com officers harried voice. "They must have taken a serious bit-their communications array is out."
"Keep trying." Teller whirled on Santorelli. "What in God's name was that thing?"
"Unknown, Sir." The intelligence officer sounded as shaken as Teller imagined he himself did. "It happened too fast for any kind of analysis. But . . . we're getting reports from some of the other battleships, and some of them are downloading some meaningful data." She studied that data while Teller watched with horror as one after another of the green dots in the tac display began to flicker and then vanish.
"Sir," Santorelli reported after a time, "we've got enough readouts now-that weapon has a hellacious emissions signature-for some tentative conclusions. What we're looking at seems to project a bolt of plasma contained in an electromagnetic bottle."
"But that's crazy!" blurted Teller's own staff spook. Lieutenant Tranh's feelings about being shouldered aside by a visiting lieutenant commander made him even more argumentative than the theory itself would have. "That mag bottle couldn't hold together for more than an infinitesimal amount of time after leaving its generator."
" 'Infinitesimal' might be a little strong, Lieutenant," Santorelli retorted. "But in essence you're right. Still, the fact that it's near light-speed makes it workable as a short-range weapon. And within that range . . . it must be almost like a directional fusion bomb."