“Withdrawal unsuccessful,” Two said emotionlessly, and Colin’s face went bone-white as Tor’s dot vanished forever.
“Execute Bug Out,” he grated.
“Acknowledged,” Jiltanith said coolly.
The nest-killers vanished.
Sorkar stared in disbelief at the reports of his hyper scanners. Almost a greater twelve times light-speed? How was it possible?
But what mattered was that it was possible. And that his scanner crews had noted the charging hyper fields in time to get good readings on them. He knew where they would emerge—at that bright star less than a quarter-twelve of light-years ahead of his fleet.
It could not be their homeworld, not so coincidentally close to the rendezvous, but whatever it was, Sorkar knew what to do if they were stupid enough to tie themselves to its defense, too deep in its gravity well to escape into hyper. He could wade into their fire, take his losses, and crush them by sheer numbers, for he had already proven they could be destroyed.
He did not like to think how many hits it had taken to kill that single nest-killer, but they had killed it. And his own losses were scarcely three greater twelves, grievous but hardly fatal.
He plugged into Battle Comp, but he already knew what his orders would be.
Colin hoped his expression hid the depth of his shock as his ships darted away. He’d known they would take losses, but he hadn’t expected to start taking them so soon, and they’d destroyed less than a half-percent of the enemy. He’d counted on more than that, and no losses of his own, damn it!
But he couldn’t have brought more ships without Dahak to run them, and Dahak had no hyper drive. That was the crunch point, because the Achuultani had to know where he and his ships had run to.
And because of that, Senior Fleet Captain Roscoe Gillicuddy and his crew had died, and Colin had lost six percent of his autonomous warship strength. He didn’t know which hurt more, and that made him feel ashamed.
But the mousetrap had been baited. They’d lost more heavily than allowed for, yet they’d done what they set out to do. He told himself that, but it wasn’t enough to hold the demons of guilt and the fear of inadequacy at bay.
A warm, slender hand squeezed his tightly, and he squeezed back gratefully. Military protocol might frown on a warlord holding hands with his flagship captain, but he needed that touch of beloved flesh just now.
Chapter Twenty-One
Thirty-six days after the brief, savage battle, Dahak kept station on Zeta Trianguli Australis-I and Colin stood in Command One, contemplating the planet his crews had dubbed The Cinder.
He and Jiltanith had tried to name The Cinder something else (’Tanni had favored “Cheese”), but perhaps the crews were right, Colin thought sourly. With a mean orbital radius of five-point-eight-nine light-minutes, The Cinder was about as close to Zeta Trianguli Australis as Venus was to Sol, and Colin had always thought Venus, with a surface hotter than molten lead, was close enough to Hell.
The Cinder was worse, for Zeta Trianguli was brighter than Sol—much brighter. But The Cinder had been chosen very carefully. There were other worlds in the system, including a rather nice, if cool, third planet fifteen light-minutes further out. Zeta Trianguli was old for its class, and III had even developed a local flora that was vaguely carboniferous, but Colin was just as happy it had only the most primitive of animal life.
He folded his hands behind him, watching the display, glancing ever and again at the scarlet hyper trace blinking steadily just inside the forty-light-minute orbital shell of Zeta Trianguli-IV.
Fleet Commodore the Empress Jiltanith sat on her command deck and touched the gemmed dagger at her belt. She’d owned that weapon since the Wars of the Roses, and its familiar hilt had soothed her often over the years, but it helped little today. She knew it made excellent sense for her to be where she was, and that, too, was little help.
She wanted to rise and pace, but it would do no good to display her fear, and there were still many hours to go. Indeed, she ought to be in her quarters—her lonely, empty quarters—resting, but here she could at least see Dahak’s light code and know how Colin fared.
An even dozen Trosan-class planetoids with their heavy energy batteries floated in the inner system with Dahak, and two Vespa-class assault planetoids orbited The Cinder, tending the heavy armored units doing absolutely nothing worthwhile on its fiery surface … except generating a massive energy signature not even a blind man could have missed.
Jiltanith’s eyes moved from the three-dimensional schematic of the Zeta Trianguli System to the emptiness about her own ship. The fourteen surviving crewed units of the Imperial Guard floated more than six light-hours from the furnace of the star, and Vlad Chernikov’s titanic repair ship Fabricator had labored mightily upon them. Much of the damage had been too severe to be fully healed—Two, for example, still bore two wounds over sixty kilometers deep—but all were combat ready. Ready, yet carefully stealthed, hidden from every prying scanner, accompanied by sixty loyal, lifeless ships.
Jiltanith did not like to consider why they were not with Dahak, but the reasoning was brutally simple. If Operation Mousetrap failed, the crewed ships would return to Terra to hold as long as they might and evacuate as many additional Terra-born as possible to Birhat when they could hold no more, but the unmanned planetoids would be sent directly to Birhat and Marshal Tsien.
There would be no point retaining them, for they were useless in close combat without Dahak’s control, and Dahak—and Colin—would be dead.
Great Lord Sorkar’s crest flexed thoughtfully as his portion of the Great Visit neared normal-space once more. This star was suspiciously young to have evolved nest-killers of its own, which reinforced his belief that it could be but a forward base. That was bad, since it gave no hint what star these demons might call home. Unless one of them was obliging enough to flee into hyper and head directly thence, which he doubted any ships as fast as they would do, he could not even guess where their true home world lay.
Except, of course, that it almost certainly had been Lord Furtag’s scouts which had roused these nest-killers to fury. They must have followed a courier to find Sorkar, and only a courier from Furtag’s force could have reached this rendezvous so soon. And that gave Sorkar a volume of space in which at least one of their important worlds must lie. That might be enough. If it was not, it was at least a start. And this star system was another.
Those monster ships’ sheer size impressed him deeply, yet anything that large must take many years to build, so each he slew would hurt the nest-killers badly. He only hoped those who had already clashed with his nestlings would be foolish enough to stand and fight here.
A soft musical tone sounded, and he made himself relax, hoping that Battle Comp noticed his tranquillity. The queasy shudder of hyper translation ran through his flagship, and Defender dropped into phase with reality once more.
“Achuultani units are emerging from hyper,” Dahak’s mellow voice said.
Colin nodded as the dots of Achuultani ships gleamed in the display. He looked around the empty bridge, wishing for just a moment that he’d let the others stay. But if this worked, he and Dahak could pull it off alone; if it failed, those eight thousand-odd people would be utterly invaluable to ’Tanni and Gerald Hatcher. Besides, this was fitting, somehow. He and Dahak, together and alone once more.