"Ready, Megarea?"
"I am. I just hope the repairs are."
Alicia nodded in grim understanding. Megarea had labored unceasingly on her drive since their flight began, ignoring less essential repairs, and all they could say for certain was that it had worked … so far.
Maintenance remotes had built entirely new control runs in parallel with those cobbled up in such desperate haste, but they hadn't dared shut down long enough to shift over to test them with Howell's squadron clinging so closely to their heels.
Nor had they been able to test Megarea's other repairs. Twenty-five percent of her drive nodes had been crippled or destroyed outright by the same hit that smashed the control runs, and she'd had spares for less than half of them. Her theoretical grav mass was down five percent even after scavenging the less damaged ones, and while she'd bench-tested the rebuilt units, no one cut suspect nodes into circuit while underway in wormhole space.
Unfortunately, the maneuver they were about to attempt left them no choice. They'd been forced to leave their turnover far later than planned because of how much more quickly the "pirates" had closed the gap, and they would need every scrap of deceleration they could produce, tested nodes or no.
"Coming up on the mark, Alley." Megarea broke into her thoughts quietly, and Alicia drew a deep breath.
"Thanks. Tisiphone?"
"I am prepared, Little One. Relax as much as you may."
"I'm as relaxed as I'm going to get." She heard the quaver in her own voice and forced her hands to unclench. "Come ahead."
There was no spoken response, but she felt a stirring in her mind as Megarea extended a wide-open channel to the Fury with no trace of her one-time distrust. They reached out to one another, weaving a glowing web, and Alicia forced down a stir of jealousy, for she was excluded from its weaving. She could see it in her mind's eye, taste its beauty, yet she could not share in its creation. Beautiful it might be, but it was a trap-and she was its prey.
Currents of power crackled deep within her, and then the web snapped shut. She gasped and twisted, stabbed by agony that vanished almost before it was felt, and her eyes opened wide.
The seductive glitter of her madness was gone. Or, no, not gone-just … removed. It was still there, burning like poison in the glowing shroud Tisiphone and Megarea had woven, but it could no longer touch her. Blessed, half-forgotten peace filled her like the hush of a cathedral, and she sighed in desperate relief as her muscles relaxed for the first time in days.
"Thank you," she whispered, and felt Megarea's silent mental caress.
"It is little enough, and I do not know how long we may hold it," Tisiphone replied more somberly, "but all we may do, we will."
"Thank you," Alicia repeated more levelly, then gathered herself once more. "All right, Megarea-let's do it to these bastards."
Lois Heyter hunched over her console in concentration, then stiffened. "Tell the Old Man we have decoy separation!" she snapped.
No more missiles fired. James Howell's lips were thin over his teeth as he waited out the last dragging seconds to energy torpedo range. If he were aboard that alpha synth, this was when he'd go for a crash turnover-
There! The fleeing Fasset drive suddenly popped over, and he started to bark orders-then stopped dead. There were two sources on his display! One continued straight ahead at unchanged acceleration; the other hurtled towards him at a starkly incredible deceleration, and he swore feelingly.
He gritted his teeth and waited for Tracking to sort them out. Logic said the genuine source was the one charging at him in a frantic effort to break sublight and lose him … only it was coming at him at over twenty-five hundred gravities! How in hell could the alpha synth produce that kind of power after its long, limping run? A fraction of that increase would have kept it out of his range, and alpha synth point defense or no, not even a madwoman would have endured that heavy fire if she could have avoided it!
The source continuing straight ahead maintained exactly the same power curve he'd been watching for days, which might well indicate it was genuine, and that made his dilemma worse. If he decelerated to deal with the closing source and guessed wrong, the still fleeing one would regain a massive lead; if he didn't decelerate and the closing source was the genuine ship, he'd lose it entirely. One of them had to be some sort of decoy-but which one?
Whichever it was, he had to identify it quickly. The peculiarities of wormhole space augmented the deceleration of the closing source to right on three thousand gravities, and his squadron's acceleration translated it into a relative deceleration of more than forty-seven KPS per second. He had barely four minutes before it went sub-light, and if he didn't begin his own deceleration at least thirty seconds before it did, he'd lose it forever.
Fasset drive generators were virtually soundless, their quiet hum as unobtrusive as a human Heartbeat. But not now. Alicia clung to the arms of her command chair, teeth locked in a white, strained face, and the drive screamed at her like a tortured giant, shaking Megarea's iron bones like a hurricane until her vision blurred with the vibration.
The decoy, one of only two SLAM decoys Megarea carried, streaked away on their old course, and shipboard power levels exploded far past critical. Meters blew like molycirc popcorn, rebuilt control runs crackled and sizzled, patched-up generator nodes shrieked, and it went on and on and on and on… .
"Turnover!" Lois Heyter barked. "We have turnover!" Her eyes opened wide, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "Dear God, look at that deceleration rate! How in hell is she holding it together?"
The cybernetic brain of the battleship Audacious noted the changing gravity signatures and adjusted its own drive. Vectors would converge with less than ten percent variance, it calculated with mild, electronic satisfaction.
Time was running out. Howell found himself pounding on the arm of his chair. If Tracking couldn't differentiate in the next ten seconds, he was going to have to go to emergency deceleration just to play safe. Losing distance on the alpha synth if he'd guessed wrong would be better than losing it entirely, he told himself, and it did his frustration no good at all.
The leading source flickered suddenly, and his eyes narrowed. There! It flickered again, power fading, and he knew. The range was down to four and a half million miles when Howell's entire squadron flipped end-for-end and began to decelerate madly.
"Fifty seconds to sublight." Blood streaked Alicia's chin, her hands were cramped claws on her chair arms, and her battered brain felt only a dull wonder that they were still alive, but Megarea's mental voice was unshadowed by the hellish vibration. Forty. Thirty-fi- They've flipped, Alley!"
"Here they come, boys and girls," Simon Monkoto murmured over his command circuit. He sat relaxed in his command chair, but his eyes were bright and hard, filled with a vengeful hunger few of his officers had ever seen in them. His gaze flicked over his display, and his mouth sketched a mirthless grin. The second group of gravity sources would drop sublight in nine minutes- out of range to hit the "pirates" but on an almost convergent vector.
"Cut your drives!" he snapped as Alicia DeVries broke sublight, and every one of his ships killed her Fasset drive.
"There's Simon-right on the money!" Megarea announced as the mercenaries appeared on her display and then vanished in the equivalent of a deep-space ambush. Without active drives, they were invisible to FTL scanners; the "pirates" wouldn't be able to see them until their light-speed sensors picked them up.