Ben Belkassem looked up sharply, then glanced at Tannis. The major hunched forward, staring at the plot, and the inspector moved even closer to Keita, pitching his voice too low for her to overhear.
"Do you really think you can talk her out of this, Sir Arthur?"
"Honestly?" Ben Belkassem nodded, and Keita sighed. "Not really. She's got a damned low opinion of imperial justice—God knows she has a right to it—and from what you've told me about her mental state—" He exhaled sharply. "No, I don't think I can talk her out of it, but that doesn't mean I don't have to try."
-=0=-***-=0=
"Here ... she ... comes," Lieutenant Anders whispered. Then, "Turnover! Christ! Look at that decel!" -=0=-***-=0=-
Megarea whipsawed on the brink of self-destruction as her maltreated Fasset drive took the strain. Her velocity wound down insanely, dropping towards the perimeter of wormhole space, and fittings rattled and banged. Alicia felt the vibration, felt the starship's pain in her own flesh, and her fixed stare never wavered.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Bogey Two dropping sublight ... now," Tracking reported to PriCon. "Deceleration holding steady at twenty-three-point-five KPS squared."
Horth nodded and leaned back in her chair, rubbing her chin. Odd. DeVries was piling on an awful lot of negative G for someone in such a big hurry to get here.
-=0=-***-=0=-
Megarea bucketed through space, just below drive overload, and her velocity dropped rapidly. A vector projected itself behind Alicia's eyes, one that stretched one and a third billion kilometers to a dot invisible with distance, and she smiled a death's-head smile.
-=0=-***-=0=
Two starships raced toward one another, converging on the distant spark of Franconia, and a message reached out across the gap between them. Even light seemed to crawl at such a range, but Megarea sped to meet it even as she decelerated. The outer ring of orbital forts brought their fire control on line, searching for her, dueling with her ECM, and the AI noted the changes in their sensors. She was well outside range—for now—but she was committed to enter it, and the upgrades of the last few months would reduce her ECM's efficiency by at least forty percent.
She considered reporting to Alicia, but there was no point.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Look! She's still decelerating!" Tannis Gateau exclaimed. "Maybe we were wrong!
"Maybe we were," Keita agreed, but he met Ben Belkassem's eyes behind her and shook his head minutely.
-=0=-***-=0=
"Admiral Horth, Bogey One is transmitting."
"Well?" The admiral eyed the com rating narrowly, alerted by something in the man's voice. "What does he say?"
"We don't know, ma'am. It's an awful tight beam and it wasn't addressed to us—we just caught the edge of the carrier as it went past, and it's encrypted."
"Encrypted?" Treadwell's voice was sharp, and the com rating nodded.
"Yes, sir. We're working on it, but it's going to take time. It's imperial in origin, but we've never seen anything quite like it."
"And it's being sent to the alpha synth?" Horth pressed.
"Yes, ma'am."
The admiral nodded, then watched Brinkman and Treadwell exchange glances and wondered just what the hell was going on. -=0=-***-=0=
Only three of the outer forts could range on Megarea, but SLAMs streaked out from them, and a low, harsh growl quivered in Alicia's throat as she watched their deadly sparkles come. They were beautiful, their threat lost in the elemental splendor of destruction, and part of her wanted to reach out and embrace their glory. But she couldn't. She must dance with them, avoiding them, cutting through them to reach the object of her hate.
She watched Megarea flirt with death, trolling the SLAMs off course with her electronic wiles, flipping aside to evade the ones she could not enmesh, and the AI's pain was a knife in her own heart. Yet she was beyond pain. Pain only fed her hunger, whatever its source.
Tisiphone stood silent and helpless in Alicia's mind. It was all she could do to keep Alicia's blind savagery from dragging Megarea under and clouding the lightning-fast reflexes which kept them both alive.
She'd never guessed what she was creating, never imagined the monster she'd spawned. She'd seen the power of Alicia DeVries's mind without recognizing the controls which kept that power in check, and only now had she begun to understand fully what she had done.
She had shattered those controls. The compassion and mercy she'd feared no longer existed, only the red, ravening hunger. Yet terrible as that might be, there was worse. She had found the hole Alicia had gnawed through the wall about her inner rage, and she could not close it. Somehow, without even realizing it was possible, Alicia had reached beyond herself. She'd followed Tisiphone's connection to the Fury's own rage, her own destruction, and made that incalculable power hers as well.
For the first time in millennia, Tisiphone faced another as powerful as herself, a mortal mind which had stolen the power of the Furies themselves, and that power had driven it mad.
-=0=-***-=0=
Vice Admiral Rebecca Horth sat silently, lips pressed firmly together, as the renegade alpha synth evaded her SLAMs. More forts were firing now, and some of them, at least, were coming closer ... but not close enough.
She checked the converging vectors again and frowned. The dispatch boat would pass within a few thousand kilometers of Soissons on its course to meet the alpha synth, but if the alpha synth maintained its present deceleration, it would pass well behind the planet when it crossed Soissons's orbit. Which made no sense, unless ...
She stiffened in her chair and started punching new numbers into Tracking's extrapolations, and her face paled.
-=0=-***-=0=
Ben Belkassem stood silent, chewing the inside of his lip raw, and smelled the tension about him. The dispatch boat's velocity was down to seventy-two percent of light-speed, but Alicia's more powerful drive had Megarea down to barely .88 C despite her far shorter deceleration period.
No one spoke, and he wondered if Keita suspected what he did. Probably. Did Tannis? He glanced at the major's white, strained features and looked away. She might not admit it to herself, but she must be beginning to.
He returned his gaze to the plot. Thank God he'd left Megarea the O Branch codes. At least they could talk to each other without Defense Command—and Treadwell— listening in.
-=0=-***-=0=
"What the—?" Lieutenant Anders twitched in surprise and looked up at his supervisor. "Sir, Bogey Two's just made a second turnover! She's stopped decelerating and started accelerating again." Emotionless computers considered the changed data, and Anders gasped. "Oh my God— she's on a collision course for Orbit One!"
-=0=-***-=0=-
Tannis groaned as Megarea turned end-for-end and aligned her Fasset drive on the point in space Orbit One would reach in forty-two minutes and sixteen seconds. It turned the drive into a shield against the heavier fire of the inner fortress ring—and at the moment she reached Orbit One, the alpha synth would have regained virtually all the velocity she'd lost. Alicia would be moving at .985 C when she rammed.
-=0=-***-=0=
Fifty-seven minutes after it had been sent, Keita's desperate message converged with Megarea's receivers.