“Captain, we’ve got a very faint wake coming in from the east, too,” her plotting officer said, and Lady Adrienne frowned. That had to be the Achuultani vanguard, and it was way ahead of schedule.
“Emergence times?”
“Bogey One will emerge into n-space in approximately seven hours twelve minutes, ma’am; make it oh-two-twenty zulu,” Fleet Commander Oliver Weinstein said. “Bogey Two’s a real monster to show up at this range at all. We’ve got a good hundred hours before they emerge, maybe as much as five days. I’ll be able to refine that in a couple of hours.”
“Do that, Ollie,” she said, relaxing again. The vanguard wasn’t as far ahead of schedule as she’d feared, just a bigger, more visible target than anticipated.
Adrienne sighed. It had been easier to command Nergal. The battleship’s computers had been no smarter than Herdan’s, but they’d had nowhere near as much to do. If she’d needed to, she could be anywhere in the net through her neural feed, but Herdan was just too damned big. Even with six thousand crewmen aboard, less than five percent of her duty stations were manned. They could get by—barely—with that kind of stretch, but it was a bitch and a half. If only this ship were half as smart—hell, even a tenth as smart!—as Dahak. But they had only one Dahak, and he couldn’t be committed to this job.
“Herdan,” she said aloud.
“Yes, Captain?” a soft soprano replied, and Adrienne’s mouth curled in a reflexive smile. It was silly for a ship named for the Empire’s greatest emperor to sound like a teenaged girl, but apparently the fashion in the late Empire had been to give computers female voices, and hang the gender.
“Assume Bogey Two has scanners fifty percent more efficient than those of the scouts which attacked Earth and will emerge into n-space twelve hours from now. Compute probability Bogey Two will be able to detect detonation of Mark-Seventy gravitonic warheads at spatial and temporal loci of Bogey One’s projected emergence into n-space.”
“Computing.” There was a brief pause. “Probability approaches zero.”
“How closely?”
“Probability is one times ten to the minus thirty-second,” Herdan responded. “Plus or minus two percent.”
“Well, that’s pretty close to zero at that, I guess,” Adrienne murmured.
“Comment not understood.”
“Ignore last comment,” Adrienne replied, suppressing a sigh. It wasn’t Herdan’s fault she was an idiot, but after talking to Dahak—
“Acknowledged,” Herdan said, and Lady Adrienne pressed her lips firmly together.
“Scout emergence into n-space in fourteen minutes, sir.”
“Thank you, Janet,” Senior Fleet Captain Tamman said, wishing he could share his tension with Amanda, and wasn’t that a silly thought when he’d taken such pains to insure that he couldn’t? Well, he admitted, “pains” was the wrong word, but he’d only gotten away with it because he’d found out about Colin’s compulsory personnel orders assigning all pregnant Fleet personnel to the Operation Dunkirk crews a good month before Amanda had.
He thought she would forgive him someday, but he’d almost lost her once in La Paz, and then a rifle slug went right through her visor aboard Vindicator. It was only the Maker’s own grace it hadn’t shattered, and she’d used up most of her helmet sealant and all of her luck. He was taking no chances this time.
“Emergence in five minutes,” Janet Santino said politely, and Tamman shook his head. Woolgathering, by the Maker!
“Come to Red One,” he said, and his command staff settled into even more intimate communion with their consoles. His own eyes focused dreamily on the red circle delineating their target’s locus of emergence, barely twenty light-seconds from their present position, while his brain concentrated on his neural feed, “seeing” directly through Birhat’s superb scanners.
That courier had done a bang-up job of timing its jump, given the crudity of its computers, to hit this close to an exact rendezvous with the vanguard.
“Emergence in one minute,” Santini said.
“Alpha Battery,” Tamman said gently, “you are authorized to fire the moment you have a firm track.”
“Emergence in thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Now!”
The red circle suddenly held a tiny red dot. There was a brief, eternal heartbeat of tension, and then the missiles fired.
They were sublight in order to home, but only barely so. They flashed across the display, and the dot vanished without fuss or bother, twenty kilometers of starship ripped apart by gravitonic warheads it had probably never even seen coming.
“Target,” Birhat’s velvety contralto purred, “destroyed.”
“Thank you, Darling,” someone murmured. “I hope it was good for you, too.”
“Well, that’s the first hurdle,” Colin said as he digested Tamman’s brief hypercom transmission.
“As thou sayst,” Jiltanith agreed.
Colin nodded and looked around, admiring Dahak Two’s spacious command deck and awesome instrumentation, and knew he would trade it all in a heartbeat for Dahak’s outmoded bridge. Not that Two wasn’t a fantastic fighting machine; she just wasn’t Dahak. But Dahak couldn’t fly this mission, and Colin refused to send his people to fight without him. Assuming anyone survived the next few months, that might be something he’d have to get used to. For now, it wasn’t.
At the moment, Two was tearing through space at better than eight hundred times light-speed. Herdan was closest to the vanguard’s projected emergence, and the ships which had spread out to cover the courier’s probable emergence points hurried toward her. They could have made the trip in a fraction of the time in hyper, but then the vanguard might have seen them coming.
It was all right, he told himself again. Those Achuultani clunkers were so slow all twelve of the ships he’d committed to the operation would be in position long before they emerged.
“Approaching supralight shutdown, Captain,” a female voice said.
“My thanks, Two,” Jiltanith replied, and that was another strange thing. Colin might be an emperor and a warlord; he was also a passenger. Two could not be in better hands, but it felt odd to be riding someone else’s command after all this time, even ’Tanni’s.
He turned his attention to the display, and the bright green dots of his other ships blinked as Two went sublight and the stars suddenly slowed. There came Tor, the last of them, closing up nicely. Good.
“All units in position, Sire,” Jiltanith said formally. “Stealth fields active.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Colin said with equal formality. “Now we wait.”
Great Lord of Order Sorkar hated rendezvous stops, especially in the Demon Sector. Battle Comp assured him there was no real danger, and Nest Lord knew Battle Comp was always right, but there were too many horror stories about this sector. Sorkar was not supposed to know them—great lords were above the gossip of lower nestlings—but unlike most of his fellows, Sorkar had won his lordship the hard way, and he had not forgotten his origins as thoroughly as, perhaps, he ought to have.
Still, this visit had been almost boring, despite those odd reports of long-abandoned sensor arrays. Sorkar had longed for a little action more than once, for the urge to hunt was strong within any great lord, but Protectors were a commodity to be preserved for the service of the Nest, and he was too shrewd a commander to regret the tedium. Mostly.