-=0=-***-=0=
Captain Morales glared at his display as his cruiser led the pursuit. HMS Implacable and her sisters were losing ground steadily, but their target was in ideal range ... and they were accomplishing exactly nothing.
The entire operation was insane. No one could steal an alpha synth—only a trained alpha synth pilot could even get aboard one! But someone had stolen this one, and precisely how Admiral Marat expected a cruiser flotilla to stop it passed Morales's understanding. The forts might have a chance, but his ships didn't. The damned thing was laughing at them!
Another useless missile salvo vanished far short of target, and the captain swore under his breath.
"Somebody get my bloody darts!" he snarled. "Maybe they can stop it!"
-=0=-***-=0=
"You're kidding me!" Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen.
"The hell I am." There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. "We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell."
"Jesus," Horth muttered, and looked up as Governor General Treadwell hurried into PriCon. Given the governor's lifelong dislike for planets, he preferred to make his home aboard the HQ fortress. Now he leaned forward into the field of Horth's pickup and stabbed Marat with a glower that boded ill for the port admiral's future.
"And just what," he asked coldly, "is going on here?"
-=0=-***-=0=
"I knew this was a formidable vessel, Little One, but it surpasses even my expectations. What might Odysseus have accomplished with its like?"
"With me in his corner, he'd've owned the damned planet," the AI put in during an interval between salvos, and the Fury laughed silently.
"Indeed, Little One, I believe the machine speaks truth. It would seem we chose well."
"Yeah? Well, next time let's discuss things before you come all over larcenous, okay?"
"Very well." Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. "But—"
"Hang on, Alley," the AI interrupted. "The forts just came on-line."
-=0=-***-=0=
"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?
"I'm afraid not, sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."
"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.
"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."
"I see. Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We shall have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go—certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."
"It'll be blind fire, sir," Horth protested, wincing at the thought of the expense. Without lock, she'd have to fire virtually at random, and SLAMs required direct hits. Trying to smother a half- seen target as small as the alpha synth would use up prodigious numbers of multi-million-credit weapons.
"Understood. I'll authorize the expense."
"Very well, sir." Horth nodded to her fire control officer.
"Engage," she said.
-=0=-***-=0=
Alicia bit her lip as the fixed fortifications opened fire at last and hordes of red-ringed, malignant blue sparks shrieked after them. The forts were designed to stop ten million-tonne superdreadnoughts, and the volume of fire was inconceivable.
The Supra-Light Accelerated Missile, or SLAM, was the Empire's ultimate long-range weapon. Close in concept to the drones starships used for FTL messages by starships, a SLAM consisted solely of a small Fasset drive and its power source. The weapon had to be half the size of an assault shuttle to squeeze them in, but they made it, in effect, a targeted black hole, and very little known to man had a hope of stopping one. A starship's interposed Fasset drive mass would take one out, though stories about what happened when the ship's drive was even minimally out of tune were enough to curl one's hair, and not even a SLAM could get through the final defense of a capital ship's Orchovski-Kurushu-Milne shield. Unfortunately, a Fasset drive wouldn't work inside an OKM shield, and no weapon could shoot out past one, either. Both of which points were moot in this case, since nothing smaller than a battleship could spare the mass for shield generators.
The only good thing was that SLAMs weren't seeking weapons—mostly. No homing systems could see around their black holes, and despite the fact that their acceleration was little more than half that of the Hauptman effect, their speed and range quickly took them out of guidance range of their firers. A very near near-miss could still "suck" its way into a hit by gravitational attraction, which was why they weren't used when enemies were intermingled, but what the AI's jammers were doing to the forts' targeting systems meant the chance of any one of them scoring a hit was infinitesimal.
Only they were firing a lot of them. Alicia's thought was a tiny mental whisper as the outer works began to range upon her, and she squirmed down in her couch. It was like driving a skimmer into a snowstorm—surely not all of them could miss.
"On the contrary," AI told her. "They're just throwing good money after bad, Alley. Watch."
The AI changed its generator settings, swinging the drive's black hole through a cone-shaped volume ahead of them and dropping its side shields, trading a bit of its speed advantage over the cruisers to turn the drive field into a huge broom that swept space clear before them. Nor did it refocus the field in any predictable fashion. The drive's gravity well fluctuated—its strength shifting in abrupt, impossible to predict increments sufficient to deprive any tracking station of a constant acceleration value—and its corkscrewing mass "wagged" the ship astern like a dog's tail, turning it into an even more impossible target. A cyber synth might have been able to duplicate that maneuver and still hold to its desired base course, though it would have been far less efficient; nothing else could.
The drive was no shield against SLAMs coming in from astern or the side, but the ship's unpredictable "swerves" gave the coup de grace to the forts' fire control. SLAM after SLAM slashed harmlessly past or vanished against the drive field, and Alicia felt herself relaxing despite the nerve-racking tension of the continuous attack.
"Bets on how many they're willing to waste?" the AI asked brightly.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Governor, we're wasting our time." Treadwell shot Admiral Horth a venomous glance, and she shrugged. "If you wish, I will of course continue, but we've already fired twenty percent of our total SLAM armament. That's four months production, and there's no sign we've even come close to a hit."
Treadwell's jaw clenched and he started to reply sharply, then shook himself and relaxed with a sigh.