“Pilot, time to ’cast interlock with the Flag?”
“Too long, kyo.” Holloway looked up, wild-eyed, and shook his head. “We’d have to bull right through them to reach interlock range.”
“Understood, Thai-i.” Susan’s attention snapped back to the threatwell, where a second pack of Khaid lightweights was barreling in on her flank, trying to get into the shadow of her drive plume. We need to shed some of these dogs, she thought, juggling distance, velocity, and time in a heartbeat. Her stylus slashed through the executive ’well at her console.
“Pilot, new heading. Don’t spare the horses.”
Naniwa responded, still agile despite the burning craters littering her hull and the cloud of vented atmosphere, splintered radiating fins, and other flotsam she was shedding. The battle cruiser shifted course, angling away from the Tlemitl and Asama, which were at the center of their own hot, constantly strobing cloud of detonations, and headed dead-on to the Barrier coordinates loaded into Susan’s threatwell.
“Course correction burn complete, kyo,” Holloway reported. “Nine hostiles now in pursuit.”
“Incoming spread-one-hundred-six contacts,” Konev barked. “Point-defense engaging.”
Susan hissed, feeling her ship’s pain deep down in her gut. “ Sho-sa, prepare to roll mines.”
Oc Chac nodded, attention wrenched away from damage control. He stared at her blankly for a heartbeat, then caught himself and nodded abruptly. “ Hai, Chu-sa! Preparing to roll mines.”
Gretchen picked herself up warily and groped from bunk to desk. Gravity wobbled again, the ship groaning around them, but this time she was ready and held on. Hummingbird had wedged himself into a corner of the room, a comp still in his hand-face tight with some tremendous effort of concentration-and she saw his fingers were a blur on the interfaces. All of his equipment, even scattered under the bunks, was still in operation. Gritting her teeth against a series of bad bruises, Anderssen found her own field comp and flipped it open. Her models were still running, and now they had resolved themselves down to only two alternatives.
“Where are we, Crow?” she gasped, fumbling at the control pad. “We’ve got to get all of this gear secured before we lose g-deck integrity entirely.”
All of her equipment shoveled into the backpack without a problem. A roll of stickytape secured the pack to the bunk, which was in turn welded to the wall of the cabin. Her hand-comp stayed with her, though its interface was tiny in comparison to the bigger units. Hummingbird’s setup was harder to deal with, particularly when her shoulders were itching at the prospect of the next abrupt maneuver. But in a few moments, all of it was stowed save the t-relay, which was a Yule tree of status lights. Grasping the main unit, she cast around for something to secure the device to.
“Leave be!” Hummingbird spared a dark, furious glance for her. “I’ve almost broken into the Khaid battlecast and we’ll need that to survive the next hour. Pin it to the floor, if you must, but don’t move it or disassemble the mechanism.”
You’ll sing a different tune, carrion bird, if this thing cracks you in the head…
She strapped it down as best she could, feeling the metal radiating hot enough to scorch her fingertips. Then Anderssen crawled back to the other corner, wedged herself into place, and thumbed up the display on her hand-comp. Plot position, she ordered the little machine. On the sidebar, Gretchen was heartened to see that node 3^3 3 was still in synch and processing data at a blistering rate. Excellent, but Her latest modeling pass had discarded the data preprocessed by the Mirror scientists and culled from the Korkunov ’s initial telemetry. Something nagged at her, saying it was too old to be accurate. Instead, drawing on the sheer processing power and storage offered by node 3^3 3, she’d asked the comps to sweep through the most basic data flowing back from the Imperial science probes and break it down, looking for gravitational anomalies at a sub-Planck scale. The descriptions of the damage inflicted on the Calexico hinted at a mechanism capable of dissecting battle-steel, which implied the weapon was able to break down the interlocking matrix of the armor without diffusing its impact energy across the enormous, mutually supporting weave of the material.
Her comps now revealed a new “map” of the surrounding space, one far different in detail than the Imperial data they’d received-or stolen. Anderssen cursed, her body jolted with fear. Tearing free of the restraints, she was at Hummingbird’s side in the blink of an eye. She seized hold of the old man’s ear, drawing a bright crimson pinpoint of blood with the corner of one nail.
“Crow! Come back to me. Captain Kosho is trying to use the Barrier as a weapon, and the Imperial data we have is no good for this sector. Break me into the command circuit, right now!”
“Rack eight away,” Oc Chac announced, as a fresh cluster of plasma mine icons popped up on the threatwell. “We’re done, kyo.” The Mayan looked back at Susan, his chiseled face questioning.
“Not enough,” the Nisei woman said, watching the last of her area denial munitions spin away behind the Naniwa. The battle-cruiser was pushing hard at maximum-v for the level of particulates in this area of space, and there were still nine Khaiden cruisers and destroyers racing after her. “Weapons, start dumping delayed-fuse bomb-pods into our wake. I want them on a timer and dark until they tick over on intercept.”
Then she swiveled around, considering the threatwell. Naniwa was now closing fast on the forbidden area indicated by the Mirror scientists. Stabbing flares started to pop up behind them, catching one of the Khaiden cruisers with a direct hit. The enemy ship staggered, losing way, and then plowed through three more plasma mines. Atmosphere began to vent from dozens of punctures, but the other Khaid ships dodged past, their captains and crews alert enough to realize the danger and begin laying down a sweeping pattern of computer-controlled ballistic rounds.
“Pilot, prepare to rotate ship,” Kosho announced, glaring at Holloway. “Rotate in one minute, sixteen-”
Stop, you’ve got to stop!
She jerked, hearing an unfamiliar voice shouting in her earbug.
“Belay that order,” Susan snarled, “who is this?”
Gretchen Anderssen, Captain Kosho. Your charts are out of date-I’m updating your display-now!
“ Jigoku-e ochiro! ” The Chu-sa’s shouted curse startled everyone on the bridge, and Oc Chac turned to stare at her in surprise. Susan’s complexion shaded almost porcelain. The threatwell display mutated wildly, the Mirror coordinates for the invisible Barrier wiped away and replaced by a series of veil-like patterns, overlapping on one another and filled with pockets and eddies.
“Forty seconds to intersection, kyo,” Holloway yelped, his console throwing a dozen alarms.
“Pilot, hard over!” Kosho snarled, punching the collision alarm glyph on her console. Then her stylus stabbed out, marking a new course in the ’well.
“Thirty-nine seconds!”
Naniwa groaned from stem to stern, engines cutting out as the ship rotated, and then flaring as they slewed around into a new heading. Shedding velocity to make the turn, the battle-cruiser was suddenly seconds “behind” where the constant stream of Khaiden missiles expected her to be. Penetrators rained onto her newly exposed “roof,” their onboard comps triggering detonation. Hammerblows boomed across the shipskin, shredding tiles and overloading the thermocouples. Radiating fins splintered all across the Naniwa ’s hull. Secondary plasma charges pierced the shipskin itself, blowing enormous gaps through to the secondary hull. Behind the plasma charge, the penetrator rounds themselves collided with the inner armor at tremendous speed. The triple layer of armor mesh convulsed, trying to shed impact energy across the whole shipframe, but dozens of tiny ruptures punched through, spewing thermonuclear plasma into two compartments just fore of Engineering. Atmosphere vented, blowing out a chaff-cloud of debris.