“Well, it’s obviously possible,” Natasha said; she sounded more intrigued than alarmed. “I don’t understand how the mechanism holds together under those conditions.”
“You’re missing the point,” Dimitri said.
“Which is?” Natasha asked with cool politeness.
“They’re going to a great deal of effort to hide something from us above those stars.” He indicated the image from the Dublin, which showed the star’s vast curvature. The uniformity of the image was broken by a shimmering patch of silver and yellow particles that obscured over half of the surface. “This is the only sensor blind spot in the star system. Something is going on behind that interference, something they clearly consider extremely important to their attack.”
“The Primes are generating identical interference patterns in the other systems,” Anna said. “It’s a constant pattern.”
“Oscar,” Wilson said, “we have to know what they’re covering up.” He hoped the tension wasn’t showing in his voice. But if the Primes did have something equal or even superior to quantumbusters this war was already over. A lot of his family would leave on the lifeboats that were in the last stages of assembly above Los Vada. If they have time to reach them. He assumed he’d be relatively safe on the High Angel, though God alone knew where it would fly away to.
“Roger that,” Oscar said. “Standard sensors are useless this close to a star. We’re going in closer.”
“Good luck,” Wilson told him.
The first tremor caught Oscar by surprise. His heart jumped in response. “What the hell was that?”
The others were all lifting their heads from the flight couches, checking around the cabin. For what, Oscar couldn’t imagine. A crack in the hull that was letting in solar wind? Crap. He’d always known and accepted that any attack powerful enough to have a physical impact on the starship would simply destroy it. Now another judder ran through the vessel, stronger this time—and they were still intact and alive. “Somebody talk to me.”
“I think the exotic energy blasts from their diverted-energy-function nukes just hit our wormhole,” Dervla said. “I’m certainly seeing a lot of unusual fluctuations around our compression dynamic wavefront.”
“Oh, great,” Oscar said. “A new threat. How badly can that hurt us?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “We never covered anything like this in training. It don’t think it can break our boundary.”
A shudder made Oscar tense his whole body as the couch straps vibrated against him. It was like riding a white-water raft. The hologram display wobbled as his eyes tried to focus. He switched to virtual vision for primary information. Just in time, as the next judder shook his body. Curses were mumbled through the narrow operations segment.
“Ten seconds to the missile formation,” Hywel said.
Oscar consulted the navigational grid. They were flying toward a star at nearly four times the speed of light. He wanted to say something to Dervla about making sure their course was correct, but harassing people at inappropriate moments wasn’t the sign of good captaincy. So he trusted her with his life.
She was taking the Dublin in a long curve to solar south of the Prime incursion, heading past them to an altitude of four hundred thousand kilometers above the star. The shaking began to reduce as they left the explosive umbrella behind.
Their hysradar image began to sharpen as Hywel and the RI brought filter programs on-line. Now the exotic energy pulses were displayed as black circular wavefronts, fading as they expanded. “The ships are still in there,” Hywel said. “And they’re expending missiles at a phenomenal rate even by Prime standards. Oh. Wait—” The image shifted drastically as he instructed the RI to shift the main focus a hundred eighty degrees. “What’s that?”
In the middle of the projection, a lone dot was rushing headlong into the star.
Oscar read the associated figures. “Dear God, that’s a hundred-gee acceleration.”
“Two minutes until it reaches the corona,” Hywel said. “What is that?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it at all. Wilson, are you receiving our hysradar data?”
“Yes,” the answer came back. “Can you hit it with a Douvoir missile?”
“Not that close to a solar mass,” Reuben said. “The gravity curvature is too strong.”
“He’s right,” Dervla said. “Our wormhole generator is having trouble maintaining boundary integrity this close. There’s a lot of gravitonic distortion.”
“Oscar, we have got to know what that device is going to do,” Wilson said. “Can you drop out of FTL and observe with standard sensors, please.”
Oscar heard at least two sharp pulls of breath inside the operations section. “Roger that, stand by for full sensor observation.”
“Just how good is our force field?” Hywel muttered.
“It can stand this proximity,” Teague said. “But we need to avoid combat with the Prime ships.”
“I’ll try and remember that,” Oscar said dryly. “Okay, Dervla, take us out of the wormhole. Hywel, full sensor scan as soon as we’re in real space.”
“Aye, sir.”
Oscar couldn’t help himself; his body braced as the FTL drive opened the wormhole and the Dublin slid out into real space. Nothing happened. No blinding white light and intolerable heat flooding through the cabin. Damn, I’m twitchy. He blinked, and started to study the sensor imagery.
Visual sensors showed a universe of two halves. One white, one black. For an instant he was back above the Dyson Alpha barrier in the Second Chance, where space was divided into two distinct sections. This time, there was nothing passive about the sheer white surface four hundred thousand kilometers away. The star’s corona was in constant turbulent motion with waves and surges radiating a gale of particles outward; ghostly prominences danced above the seething gas, flexing and twisting in the intense magnetic field. Space above them was dotted with the neon graphics tagging Prime ships and missiles.
“They’ve seen us,” Hywel said. “Missile flight changing course. Accelerating at twenty gees.”
“How long have we got?” Oscar asked.
“Five minutes until they reach nominal engagement distance.”
“Okay. What about the device they’ve fired into the star?”
The imagery expanded as Hywel tracked the device with as many sensors as he could. It was still accelerating into the corona at a hundred gees. A long wake of swirling plasma stretched out for thousands of kilometers behind it. Shock waves rippled away from its protective force field, creating violet circles that were immediately torn apart by the raging solar wind.
“That is a very powerful force field,” Teague said. “I’m not sure we could withstand that kind of environment. It had to be built specifically for this flight.”
“So what kind of device do you send into a star?” Hywel asked, his voice edgy.
“A bad one,” Reuben said. “And I don’t care how good its force field is, it won’t survive much longer. The coronal density is picking up, and that speed will generate impacts that could puncture anything.”
“But there’s no kind of—” Hywel began. “Oh, the fusion drive has switched off.”
Oscar watched the dark speck as it drilled through the super-velocity plasma. He realized he was holding his breath. “If it’s a quantumbuster?” he asked.
“Then we’re probably dead,” Reuben said. “But even if its force field holds out until it’s within range of the chromosphere, the effect of the blast will be minimal as far as Hanko is concerned. If you’ve got them, use them against the planet directly. Don’t screw around letting them off an AU away like this.”
Oscar waited as the device streaked downward. He wondered if he had time to update his secure store. Probably not. He’d done it this morning, and decided that he probably didn’t want to remember this time in the Dublin anyway. Although…should he leave his future incarnation a message from now saying he didn’t want to remember? Stupid idea.