Alicia had listened to the com without response, perfectly willing to let them dither while she watched through her sensors, wrapped in fascination and a sort of manic delight, and she and her-allies? symbiotes? delusions?-perpetrated the greatest single-handed theft in the history of mankind. But the voices on the other end of the com link were changing as Groundside got itself together, and now a new, crisp speaker was on the line.
"Captain DeVries, this is Port Admiral Marat. I order you to decelerate and heave to immediately. If you refuse to comply, you will leave me no choice but to consider you a hostile vessel. Respond at once."
"They sound a bit upset," the AI observed. "Ha! Look at that"
A mental finger guided Alicia's attention to the blue fireflies of a dozen cruisers' suddenly activated Fasset drives in Soisson's orbit and data on their capabilities slotted into her brain. It was an incredible sensation, completely different from an assault shuttle's instrumentation.
"How bad is it?"
"Those hulks?" The AI sniffed, and Alicia bit her lip at the scathing tone. It was like listening to herself in what Tannis called "insufferably confident mode," and she felt a sudden stab of sympathy for her friend. "I've got a ten-minute head start, and they can't come within twelve percent of my field strength, even this close to a planet."
"What about their weapons?"
"They're some threat," the AI admitted, "but I'm not too worried. My data on their fire control isn't complete, but I know enough to screw their accuracy to hell. They'll have quite a while to shoot-maximum beam range is about fifteen light-seconds, and half-charge energy torps have about five more LS of reach-but they're going to be lousy shots."
"Great, but I think you left something out-like missiles."
"So? Cruisers are too small to mount SLAMs. Their Hauptman coil missiles have an effective range of about ten light-minutes, but the best they can reach before burn-out is point-six-cee. Then they go ballistic, and there's no way one cruiser flotilla's gonna saturate my defenses."
"You would appear to value yourself highly, Machine." Tisiphone sounded so sour Alicia almost suspected she'd like to see the ship destroyed just to put the AI in its place, but she continued levelly, "Still, the capabilities you describe accord well with what I have learned of your kind."
"Thanks for the compliment, even if it did sound like pulling teeth."
"How long will they be able to engage us?" Alicia asked hastily.
"Well, we've got a quarter LS lead on them now, and we'll go on opening it at forty-three KPS squared till we hit Soissons's Powell limit and I can really start opening up. They'll be point-seven-oh-three LS back when we hit the curb, which gives us ten minutes at thirteen hundred gravities-call it an edge of twelve-point-five KPS squared-while they're still poking along at thirty-one-point-seven Gs, and we'll still better than double their acceleration even after they cross the curb. That means we'll open the range to eight-point-two light-seconds before they get up to half our acceleration and draw entirely out of beam range in another thirteen-point-three minutes. They'll lose energy torpedo range three-point-nine minutes after that. Call the beam envelope twenty-two minutes from now and the torpedo envelope twenty-six, but their missiles'll have the range for two more hours."
"What about the fixed defenses? They've got SLAMs, and we've got to get past both rings on this course."
"Phooey on the fixed defenses!" the AI snorted, and Alicia winced.
"I hope you're not being over-confident," she suggested in her most tactful mental tone, tracing their projected course through the ship's sensors. The AI wasn't even trying to avoid the orbital forts-it was headed straight towards them, directly across the system's ecliptic. The inner ring, the true core of Soisson's defenses, orbited the planet at three hundred thousand kilometers, right on the edge of Soissons's Powell limit. The far sparser ring of outer forts were placed halfway to the star's Powell limit, forty-two light-minutes from the primary-and SLAMs had a maximum effective range of thirty-seven light-minutes. At their projected rate of acceleration, they'd reach the outer works in two and a half hours, and both fortress rings could engage them the whole way. Even after they passed the outermost fort, it could hold them under fire for several hours. That was a lot of engagement time, and Alicia would vastly have preferred to boost perpendicular to Franconia's ecliptic and open the range as quickly as possible.
"You just think that's a better idea, Alley," the AI informed her, following her thoughts with almost frightening ease. "If I try that, I expose our stern to the fire of every unit in the inner ring while we're still moving slowly, and the drive mass is out in front, remember? It doesn't offer any protection to fire from astern. This course uses the planet to block a good chunk of the inner defenses and interposes the drive against fire from the outer ring while we close. Besides, I'd have to decelerate, reorient, and accelerate all over again to put us on the right wormhole vector for our destination, and Admiral Gomez is out here somewhere on maneuvers. I don't know where, but I'd rather not spend fourteen additional hours mucking around sublight and give her time to work out an interception."
"Are you sure about that? She's got less firepower than the forts."
"Sure, but her dreadnoughts all have cyber synths and the legs to stay in range of us for a long time- maybe as long as ten or twelve hours if they hit their interception solution just right. I don't have enough data on her fire control to guarantee I could outsmart that many AIs long enough to pull away from her, but I've got all the specs on the forts' fire control. They're overdue to refit with new generation cyber synths, too, which means their present AIs are a lot dumber than a dreadnought's. They won't even see us."
"And even if they hit us," Tisiphone observed, "they will find us most difficult to injure, will they not, Machine?"
"I'm getting kinda tired of that "Machine" business, but, yeah. They don't have anything smaller than a SLAM that could stop me, Alley. Trust me."
"I don't have much choice. But-"
"Whups! Pardon me, people-and I use the term lightly for one of you-but I'm going to be a little busy for the next few minutes."
The pursuing cruisers had spread out to bring their batteries to bear past the blind spots created by their own Fasset drives, and the first fire spat after the fleeing alpha synth. The percentage of hits should have been high at such absurdly low range, but the attackers were hopelessly outclassed. Nothing smaller than a battle-cruiser mounted a cyber synth, and even a cyber synth AI would have been out of its league against an alpha synth. Alicia's other half could play evasion games a mere synth link couldn't even imagine, far less emulate, and its battle screen was incomparably more powerful than anything else its size.
Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously. Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.