“Looks like they were waiting for us to show up,” I said.
“The Hegemony must be covering as many of our potential reentry points as possible,” Frede said. “They want to know where we are and how soon we’ll reach the Giotto system.”
Swinging my legs off the bunk and reaching for my tunic, I asked, “How close to Loris can you put us? If we can come out of superlight well inside the system’s defenses we ought to be safe enough.”
“Their automated defenses will shred us within microseconds. Same as Prime and the Zeta system, remember?”
“Message capsules worked then. We could send out message capsules ahead of us, tell them we’re coming in.”
With a frown, Frede added, “And bringing the whole Skorpis fleet with us.”
“What choice do we have?” I asked.
She leaned her back against the hatch to the bridge and did not speak for several moments. I wondered if she did not know what to reply, or if she knew so well that she was rehearsing the words she would use before speaking them.
“We could change course,” she said at last. “Why do we have to go to Loris? Why put ourselves into the lion’s mouth? There are hundreds of other planetary systems, thousands of them. The Commonwealth—”
“We’ve got to bring our passenger to the Commonwealth’s leaders. They’re on Loris. That’s where we must go.”
“We could go to a thousand other planets and send word to Loris,” Frede countered.
“And if the Skorpis found us on one of those other planets?”
“The chances of that happening are so low—”
“But if they do, what are the chances of our surviving? Zero,” I told her, before she could answer. “At Loris we have all the defenses of the Giotto system on our side. We have a fighting chance.”
She looked utterly unconvinced. I could not tell Frede that my real reason for insisting on Loris was that Anya was dying. Even in cryosleep she grew weaker every day. Aten was killing her and the only way to make him stop was to confront him, to overpower him and the other Creators who had allied themselves with him. To kill him.
He would not come to a rendezvous at some out-of-the-way planet. He had made Loris his headquarters, the capital of the Commonwealth. So I had to go to Loris, I had to bring Anya there, I had to face the Golden One.
Frede’s expression made me realize that I was, in all probability, about to get all of us killed.
But I pulled myself up to my full height and gave the order, “Direct geodesic to Loris. No more evasions. We bore straight in.”
“And damn the torpedoes,” she muttered.
“What?”
“An old naval expression. From ancient history.”
With no external points of reference there was no way for our unaided human senses to get any feeling for our ship’s speed. The instruments told us we were hurtling along at many multiples of the speed of light, but for all we could tell the Apollo was sitting still in the middle of nothingness.
Yet the morning arrived when Frede said to me, “We’re within two days of the Giotto system. Time to start sending out message capsules.”
I got the feeling that out there in that blank nothingness surrounding us, the entire Skorpis battle fleet was riding along with us, waiting for us to slow down to relativistic velocity once again, their weapons primed and ready to blast us into an expanding fireball of ionized atoms.
Tension on the bridge grew tighter with each passing moment. We fired off every message capsule we possessed, then used the ship’s matter transceiver to make still more of them, converting some of our food stocks to do so.
“We won’t need more than two days’ worth of food,” I told the transceiver crew. “In three days’ time we’ll be having our meals on Loris.”
“Or in hell,” grumbled one of the technicians when he thought I was too far down the passageway to hear him.
When I returned to the bridge I asked Frede, “How close to the planet can you put us?”
She looked up from her navigational screens, bleary-eyed from concentration and lack of sleep. “Fifty planetary diameters,” she answered. “Half a million klicks. Right smack in the middle of their major defense belt.”
“Good,” I said. “Perfect.”
Then she added, “If the ephemeris data in our computer’s memory files is up-to-date.”
“It should be,” I said.
With a sardonic grin she replied, “Right. It should be.” She put a slight but noticeable accent on the word should. “If it’s not we could hang our asses on the wrong side of the planetary system. Or crash into the planet’s surface.”
Pleasant possibilities.
The ephemeris data was correct and Frede’s navigation was practically flawless. The only factor that we did not foresee—could not have foreseen—was that the Skorpis had decided to attack Loris without waiting for us to appear.
We slowed out of superlight and into the middle of a full-scale battle. The sky was filled with warships and orbital battle stations slashing at each other with laser beams and nuclear-tipped missiles.
Apollojounced and shuddered as a Skorpis dreadnought loomed directly before us, firing its main battery at a Commonwealth orbital station, but turning its secondary laser banks squarely upon us.
I barely had time to yell, “Battle stations!” Control of the ship automatically went to my command chair; the keyboards set into the ends of my armrests now directly controlled all the ship’s systems. The rest of the bridge crew were there strictly as backup for me.
My intention was to get to the surface of Loris, but in the midst of this battle that was going to be impossible. The planet’s defensive shields were up, powered by every mega-joule their ground-based generators could produce.
Swiftly I took in the situation. The Skorpis attackers were not bothering with the planet. They were trying to knock out the belts of defensive stations that orbited Loris. With fanatical bravery they had come as close to the planet as we had before slowing below superlight, risking collisions and even crashes into the planetary surface in their eagerness to surprise the Commonwealth defenders.
Their tactic had worked. They had bypassed the outer rings of defenses, farther out in the Giotto system. Those massive battle stations were in fixed planetary orbits tens of millions of kilometers from Loris. They could be moved, but it would take most of the power they needed for their weapons to activate their propulsion systems and bring them into the battle. And it would take time, too much time for them to make a difference in the battle’s outcome.
Most of the Commonwealth fleet was elsewhere, fighting the war on other fronts. The Skorpis had gambled virtually every ship they possessed, as I feared they would, for this one killing stroke at the Commonwealth’s capital. Now they were fighting to knock out Loris’s belts of defenses and the few ships that the planet could send up. Neutralize the Common-wealth’s orbital defenses and the planet itself lay open to bombardment and invasion.
No telling how long the battle had been going on. In the display screens I saw the hulks of blasted ships drifting lifelessly, saw an orbital station riddled with holes, its spherical hull ripped open and bubbling hot metal. Fragments of shattered ships and stations swirled past us; some of them might have been the bodies of humans or Skorpis, they blew past us too fast for me to tell.
I saw a Skorpis dreadnought slugging it out with an orbital station, laser beams lancing back and forth, splashing off their defensive screens in wild coruscations of light. I slipped the Apollo under the giant Skorpis warship’s belly, probing with our sensors for a weak section in her screen. They were putting most of their power into the forward screen, where they faced the orbital station.