Her mind flashed the command to her last missile, and it blasted away in the instant before the first nuclear missile came howling up her own wake.
"What the fuck?" Captain Moulder's incredulous question echoed the thought in every mind as yet another fireball-this one vast beyond comprehension-splintered the night two hundred thousand feet above the Atlantic. A massive surge of EMP smashed over the task force, burning out even "hardened" radar and communications electronics effortlessly, as a five hundred megaton blast designed to destroy an Ogre-class superdreadnought expended its fury upon the insignificant mass of a single tender.
The dreadful glare of nuclear fusion washed down over the carrier battle group, blinding every unwary eye that watched it, and radiation detectors went mad. The awesome ball of flame hung high above the ocean, and then there was another, smaller flash, and another, and another. The terrible chain lightning reached away over the horizon like a curse, and confusion roiled in its wake. Clearly those blasts were not directed at them, but, in that case, who the hell was shooting at whom?
Then the shockwave of that first, monster explosion rolled over them like a fist.
"Bull's-eye, Skipper! Bull's-"
That was all O'Donnel had time to say before the Troll commander's last missile caught up with the wildly evading Sputnik. It punched through O'Donnel's desperate ECM like an awl, and its proximity fuse activated.
Leonovna felt the terrible damage like a blow in her own flesh, and she knew Sputnik was doomed. Smoke flooded her cockpit, and power-loss warnings snarled in her mental link to her ship, yet it wasn't in her to give up, not even now. She fought the dying fighter's controls, and Sputnik strove heroically to respond, heaving her nose up in an impossible arc, battling to give her pilot one last shot.
The Troll commander tracked his crippled prey to four hundred thousand feet, sliding in behind the hated cralkhi pilot. It had taken his last missile, but it had been worth it. He avoided the cralkhi's dying efforts with ease and savored the cold, crawling fire of vengeance as he watched its drive shudder, and he sliced even closer as the interceptor lost its field and coasted higher in the near-vacuum on momentum alone.
As Sputnik rose past 500,000 feet, his power guns fired, and a shattered wreck plunged toward the water waiting patiently ninety-five miles below.
CHAPTER FIVE
Captain Richard Aston, US Navy, soon to be retired, lounged back and watched Amanda's self-steering gear work. A brisk westerly pushed the fifty-foot ketch along, and he supposed it might have been called a quiet night, except that it was never quiet on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His radio muttered softly to him through the open companion, for he'd found himself unexpectedly hungry for the sound of other human voices as the sunset faded into purple twilight, yet the night-struck ocean spoke to him in voices of its own. Wind whispered in the rigging, Amanda herself creaked and murmured as she worked through the swell, and the splash and gurgle of water was everywhere, from the rippling chuckle of the bow wave to the bubble of the wake and the sounds of the rudder.
His pipe went out, and he considered going below for more tobacco, but the idle thought never rose much above the surface of his subconscious. For a change, he was too comfortable even to think about moving.
He smiled lazily. Single-handing across the Atlantic was hardly the restful occupation many an armchair sailor thought, and the last week had been strenuous. High winds and wicked seas had given him more than a few anxious moments two days ago, but Amanda's deep, heavily weighted keel gave her tremendous stability, even in a high wind and despite her unusually lofty rig. And then the wind had whistled away, the seas had smoothed, and, at least for the moment, the Atlantic had donned the mask of welcome.
He knew it was a mask. A lie, really. It was a game the ocean played, this pretending to be a gentle, docile thing. But he loved it anyway, in part because he knew it was a lie. If it was a game, then they both played it, he thought, waxing poetic in his relaxation, and knowing that it was one only made moments like this even more to be treasured.
He raised a shielding hand against his running lights and stared up at the sky. The stars were incredibly brilliant out here, away from the pollution and light glare of the land. That was one of the other things he loved about sailing at night-the sheer beauty of the star-spangled vault above him. He always saw it as a sea of dark, cobalt velvet strewn with gems, though it wasn't an image he'd ever been able to share comfortably with most of his professional colleagues. It would have sounded a bit strange from a hulking, far from handsome, slightly bent and battered fellow like him.
He lowered his hand and glanced at the reassuring shape of his radar reflector. He preferred to sleep during the day at sea, for merchant ships had grown increasingly careless about keeping close visual lookouts in the age of radar, and Dick Aston knew enough about technology to trust it no further than he must. Radar reflectors were all very well, but they relied upon functional radar on the other end, and lackadaisical visual lookouts were more likely to spot his bright red sails by daylight than in the dark. Taken all in all, he chose to spend his nights at sea making sure he saw anybody else before they didn't see him. And, of course, there were the stars, weren't there?
He glanced back up and frowned in sudden surprise. What the-?
His left hand groped in a locker, feeling for his powerful binoculars, but he never lowered his eyes from the brilliant streaks tracing fiery paths through the night. They seemed to be descending, but that wasn't all they were doing-not by a long chalk! They looked almost like shooting stars, but he'd never heard of meteors that changed trajectory in mid-course!
He jammed the binoculars to his eyes, adjusting to Amanda's movement with practiced ease as he held the flaming lines in his field of vision. It was no help; whatever they were, they were far too distant to make out details, even with the glasses. In fact, they must be at one hell of an altitude for him to see them at all at this range!
They seemed to be heading roughly in his direction, but they were dropping rapidly towards the southern horizon. Whatever they were, they looked like they'd impact long before-
He froze as a spark suddenly separated from one whatever-they-were and streaked away, dancing crazily. Damn it, that had to be a controlled flight path! No free-falling object would pursue such an insane course. It was almost as if the thing were taking evasive action!
The thought popped into his mind and lodged there as one of the other light streaks arced impossibly back towards the fleeing spark. He watched intently, then winced-even at this distance-at the suddenly redoubled brilliance as the dot which had spawned the spark hurled a pair of fiery darts at the pursuing one ... just before still more brilliant specks lanced out from the pursuer, heading for the spark!
He blinked rapidly, compensating for the painful intensity of those flashes. In 1973, Lieutenant (j.g.) Dick Aston had found himself in the Sinai, attached to the Israeli army as an observer, and he'd never forgotten the morning he'd watched a massed Israeli-Egyptian dogfight. He remembered the smoke trails of the missiles, the suddenness and silence with which they'd appeared so high above, the white wakes of contrails and the plunging black and red fireballs of broken aircraft. He remembered well ... and somehow he knew he was seeing an insane echo of that long ago madness.