"Time to crossover?" she asked Miyagi.
"Forty-five minutes for translation crossover. How soon we can overhaul them spatially depends on how far we want to level-reach on them."
"And from crossover to the theta wall at their present power curve?"
"Another hundred and twenty hours, Ma'am."
"All right." She sat up straight, meeting Onslow's eyes. "Captain, you will reduce drive power to maintain this spatial interval until you have attained a six level advantage, then go to full power and overhaul them. We'll have the scanner advantage for fire control, and we'll just have to take our chances on level drop when we fire."
"Yes, Ma'am. Understood."
"Nick," she said softly to Miyagi, "close up the tin cans. Put them between us and the Kangas when we begin to overhaul."
"Yes, Ma'am. They'll understand."
"That doesn't make me like it," she said bleakly, then pushed her inner anguish aside. "Once we start overhauling, they'll probably shift formation to keep those cruisers in our way, but we'll be shooting down their throats. Even with level drop, that should let us take out a cruiser with only a pair of missiles, and if we can blow them out of the way, we'll have a shot at the leader. That's all we really need. Just one good shot at him."
"Agreed, Ma'am. But what about their translation lock?"
She knew what he meant. By locking their multi-dees in phase, the enemy ships presented what was, in effect, a single target to Defender's MDMs. It was a colossal game of Russian roulette, for the level drop penalties meant that once her missiles were launched, Defender had no means to influence the ships they actually targeted. And just to make things more difficult, the massed defensive systems of all the targets could combine against her salvos.
"We'll just have to do our best, Nick. It's the only game in town."
She brooded over her plot a moment longer, then sighed.
"All right, Commander," she said finally, "get those destroyers moving."
CHAPTER THREE
Commodore Santander gripped her command chair arms to still the tremble of her fingers, and her face was haunted. Fifty-three sleepless hours might explain her gaunt, hollowed cheeks, but not the ghosts behind her eyes.
A strange and terrible tension had invaded Defender's heart, and the viscous air shimmered with a vibration as eerie as it was indefinable. It wore away at tempers and fogged minds which sought to concentrate on vital tasks, and voices sounded tinny and unnatural, falling upon the ear with a peculiar brittleness-a sense of dОjИ vu, as if each sentence were an echo of something which had been said but a moment before.
She no longer tried to hide her fear. It would have been pointless, for her people all shared it, just as they shared her exhaustion. Worse, every one of them knew what she knew: the fate of the human race rested upon their shoulders ... and they were failing.
"All right, Steve," she said, "how bad is it?"
"Bad, Ma'am," Onslow said heavily. His screen image's shoulders hunched against the exhaustion and strain trying to drag him under, and his sentences were short and choppy. "No one's ever been this high in the eta band. Our scanners are packing up; they can't make the shift over the theta wall. We tried linking with Dauntless, but her scanners are in even worse shape." He drew a ragged breath and rubbed his puffy eyes. "I can't lock in a good solution, Ma'am. I'm sorry."
Santander closed her eyes under the strain of a responsibility greater than any task force or fleet commander had ever faced. One she faced with but a single dreadnought and only one heavy cruiser.
Beyond the hull, Defender's translation field was a crackling corona, a crawling sheet of icy flame no human had ever seen before. The eta band was worse than anyone had thought, and conditions in its uppermost levels were indescribable. Humanity had no business in this haunted, curdled space, in these distorted dimensions where even time felt twisted and alien. But they were here, and all of her destroyers had died, absorbing missiles meant for Defender, to get them here.
She shook the thought aside, forcing her mind back to the task at hand. She had one MDM left-only one. The Kanga cruisers and the Grendel were as dead as her destroyers, but three heavy units remained ... three targets for her single missile. They had expended most of their own MDMs on her destroyers, but her increasingly unreliable instruments could not tell her exactly how many they still had. It could be as few as two or as many as six-she simply didn't know. And the only way to find out, she thought grimly, was to offer her own ship as a target.
"All right," she said finally, "how close do we have to get under these ... conditions?"
"Two hundred thousand kilometers, Ma'am." Onslow's mouth twisted with the bitter taste of his words, and she flinched inwardly. Less than one light-second? That wasn't point-blank-it was suicide range. Under normal circumstances, that was. Here? Who could know? "Even then," Onslow continued slowly, "Gunnery can't guarantee to hit the Ogre. They're still holding translation lock-God knows how-and sensor conditions are so bad that the seeking systems can't possibly differentiate target sources, however close we come."
"All right," she sighed. "We're sixty-five hours from the theta wall, but our options won't change." She met his eyes levelly and drew a breath. "Close the range, Captain," she said formally. "Get us close enough to score just once more."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Onslow said simply, and the drive shrieked as it was suddenly reversed.
The abrupt alteration was a strange and terrible anguish in the uncanny surrealism of the eta bands, and Santander fought the quivering pain in her muscles and nerves, watching her plot as the range to the fuzzily defined dots of the enemy shrank. The glowing diamond of her last escort clung immovably to Defender's flank as the heavy cruiser Dauntless matched her flagship's maneuver.
"Range twelve light-seconds," Miyagi reported. "Eleven ... ten ... nine ..."
"Bandits are slowing," Tracking reported suddenly, and Santander bit her lip. The Kangas had been glued to full power since detection, disdaining any tactical maneuvers as they followed the precise, preplanned course to their Takeshita Translation. She'd hoped they wouldn't change that now.
"Range still dropping," Miyagi said tersely, "but the closure rate's decreasing. Eight light-seconds. Coming up on seven."
"Hostile launch!" Tracking snapped. "Multiple launch. Four-no, five incoming! Time to impact twelve seconds!"
Santander's eyes met Onslow's in horror, but neither spoke the truth both recognized. The enemy had preempted their own attack. His MDMs would arrive before Defender reached launch range. They had no way to know how good his targeting was. All they knew was that, unlike them, he was firing up-gradient, which meant his missiles' seekers would be far less degraded by the local conditions ... and that there were five of them. The Kangas' odds of scoring a hit had to be several times as great as Defender's, which meant Santander had to launch now. She had to get her own MDM off before the incoming fire killed her ship and destroyed the weapon in its tube. But she couldn't hope to hit her target at this range and under these conditions, and the commodore's brain whirred desperately as she tried to find some answer-any answer-to her impossible dilemma. Only there wasn't one. There was only-
"Ma'am! Dauntless-!" Her plotting officer's shout whipped her eyes back to the display, and a fist squeezed her heart as the heavy cruiser began to move relative to Defender. Slowly, at first, then more rapidly. The commodore had a moment to realize that Captain McInnis had rammed his drive power past the red line. He'd known this moment might come, and her mind shied like a wounded horse from the thought of what conditions must be like aboard the cruiser as she crashed across the screaming distortion of Defender's drive wake and offered herself to Defender's executioners.