“What kind of something? I need more information.” There was no hint of love in her voice, nor should there be. She was the captain of a vessel under fire. “I didn't expect trouble this early, but it makes sense for them to disrupt us before boost if they can.”
“It's . . . coherent light. Sorry, coherent X rays.”
“Could it be the spalling laser on King's Fist?”
“That would be my first guess,” Conrad agreed. “Although the range must be pretty extreme, or the damage would be much worse. That laser's frequency is tuned specifically to interfere with wellstone's command-and-control signals, and to set up destructive resonance in the fibers. Wait a minute, I'm getting broken threads in the sail as well. The laser's spot diameter is about sixty meters, so according to the computer it's firing from a range of just over three light-seconds.”
Luna was almost exactly 1.29 light-seconds from Earth, and although Conrad would never admit it publicly, after years of intensive training in near-Earth space he still measured it that way in his mind: three light-seconds was nine hundred thousand kilometers, about two and a half Earth-moon distances. Also very close to the Limit of Influence or LOI, where Sol's gravity began to dominate over Earth's, making stable orbits impossible. Not that that mattered here and now, but it was how he'd been trained.
“It's a probing shot,” he speculated. “They don't expect to do any real damage. In fact, they may be using the spalling laser just to light us up, to make it easier to target some other weapon. The spot is shrinking, though. We're closing fast with the source.”
“Find it.”
“Trying to, ma'am, but King's Fist is stealthed. Anyway, all the light and heat are confusing the sensors.”
Indeed, for practical purposes they were inside Barnard at the moment. It was a smaller, cooler star than Sol, but that did not by any means make it a clement environment to pass through. At this depth in the chromosphere, Sol was at least predictable; navigating through it was like flying a kite in a steady gale. But Barnard, with less power output per hectare of surface, was a knotted mess of flailing magnetic fields that spiked and dropped away without warning. The particle flux alone was enough to snow out most of the preprogrammed sensors in Newhope's hull, and for all his programming expertise, Conrad knew almost nothing about sensor design. Stuck with the ship's normal, unmodified arrays, he felt as though he were peering out through the pores of a blindfold.
“Look at the shape of the spot,” Xmary suggested. “The beam is circular, right? But I'll bet you're seeing an oval smear across our bow, and from that you can compute the incidence angle. And from the changes in the spot size you can get the divergence angle, and therefore the range. Trace the beam right back to its source.”
This surprised Conrad. It was an ingenious idea, and certainly nothing his childhood Xmary, the Denver party girl, would have come up with. He loved her as much now as he had back then—or so it seemed, at any rate—but he supposed people did change, slowly, like wax dolls in the warmth of a closed hand. Decade by decade the differences were imperceptible, but across the span of centuries that fiery girl had changed almost beyond recognition. Was the escape from childhood a special case? Would there be changes this large in her future as well?
“Conrad!”
“Tracing,” he acknowledged. Then: “Okay, the error bars are half the size of the data, but . . . we're coming in clockwise around the sun, and it looks like they're orbiting counter. I guess they'd have to, to be able to catch us this early. If these estimates are valid, we're closing with them at twelve hundred kps, with closest approach occurring about fourteen minutes from now.”
“Shit,” she said. “They're already damaging us from the outer limits of their weapons range. Things can only get worse.”
“Surrender now,” Bascal's recording suggested, breaking off from his song for a moment. “It's not too late. I'll be merciful, truly.”
“Dry up,” Xmary told the image. Then, to the holie window where Feck could be seen fussing with his reactor feeds, “Feck, I need you to go live with the engines a minute early, but not at full thrust. Go to seventy-five percent, and then institute a random walk program.”
“Dispersing our downrange?” Feck asked.
“Precisely.”
A kilometer beneath them, the engines began to groan.
“I don't understand,” Conrad said, feeling suddenly ignorant and out of place. He was an experienced naval officer, yes, but these two had worked together for almost two hundred years, facing heaven knew what sort of surprises and freak accidents along the way. They had a whole vocabulary about it, a rapport that went far beyond the merely romantic. This was hardly a time to be jealous, but just the same his heart cringed self-consciously. Here was a rival he could never match.
“Me either!” Eustace chimed in. “Can you explain?”
“We can't vary our course,” Xmary said, her tone bordering on impatience. “Not much, not enough. We can juke to the side, as in a collision-avoidance maneuver, but then we'll have to juke back again or our net velocity will be in the wrong direction. Very slightly, but over six light-years those slight errors become very costly in terms of distance, in terms of fuel. But what we can do is vary our acceleration along the direction of travel. This changes our arrival time without also changing our destination, and it makes our velocity and position harder to predict. It's a stealthing trick for vehicles like this one, which are inherently unstealthy. Comes in handy sometimes when the miners decide to get cute.”
“I can hear every word,” Bascal's image told her. “You are compromised, Captain. Why fight when your opponent knows your every move?”
Grinding her fists, Xmary turned her eyes on the thing. “First of all, the real Bascal Edward is forty-five light-seconds away, with Barnard in between us. You can't communicate with him—not in real time. And if you're relaying this conversation directly to Fist, which I imagine you are, even they have to wait three seconds to get it, and then three more for their beam to get back here to us, by which time we can be kilometers off from where they think we are. Try hitting that.”
“The spot is gone,” Conrad reported as, at the ertially shielded edges of perception, the ship whined and jerked around him. “They've lost track of us.”
“For now,” warned Bascal. “They will find you again, and make you the martyrs you're so determined to become.”
“I see something!” Eustace said, from the Information seat beside Conrad. “On the radar, it's a blip. It's a cloud.”
“Confirmed,” Conrad said, checking his own radar display, which by default was much smaller than Information's. He enlarged it. “They've released a swarm of projectiles in our path.”
“Size and number?” Xmary demanded.
“A few thousand pinheads. It's nothing the nav lasers can't handle,” Feck said, peering into some display of his own. “But why aren't they stealthed? I think these are decoys, Captain. We shoot at these, vaporizing a path, but the real danger is somewhere in front or behind. Pebbles of antimatter, I'll bet, suspended in a jacket of superabsorber. With propulsion modules, so they can stay out of our path, then juke into us at the last moment.”