Klass reported Seeker sensing one of the habitats beginning to move deeper into the waste space.
A second attack came in. He rode this one out behind his screen, using Helispinners sparingly. Let them spend themselves now and be in for rearming when he reached their base.
He noticed an interesting phenomenon: Every ship capable of climbing onto the Web, which had neither methane breather nor human aboard, expended its munitions and ran for the tag end.
The glue of loyalty had come unstuck. They would make no last stand for masters who would abandon them.
Klass reported the second habitat moving, but slowly. Seeker said it was less finished than the first.
The fight at the station was no epic to be recalled for a thousand years. WarAvocat took VII Gemina into the cleared space, screen maxed, ignored the two methane-breather heavies and a dozen human warships, picked an angle from which the station could not defend itself, ran out the funnel, poured in fire till Probe said there was nothing left alive. Then he went after the slower habitat. It had only a four-hour start.
The Outsiders attacked continuously, desperately. WarAvocat heard grumbling because he would not fight back. He ignored it.
The habitat scurried into a swarm of cold matter. That suited WarAvocat fine. There was so much garbage flying around, the Outsiders could not bring but a fraction of their strength to bear. He went to prophylactic screening and began picking them off—never slowing in his pursuit of the habitat.
Catching up took more than a day.
The moment the inevitable became obvious, the Outsiders gave up trying to prevent it.
WarAvocat shouted, "Colonel Klass! Ask Seeker if they can form another brood mass if we destroy both habitats."
She did so. "Negative, sir."
"They've decided to concentrate on saving the other one, then. Do we have contact still?"
"Yes, sir."
"If he loses it, I'll slice off his ears. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
The habitat, once caught, was easy. It had no defenses and could not maneuver.
WarAvocat was in his element now, dealing with an enemy of known strength and capability who was locked into a mission with absolute parameters.
The Outsiders left one watcher—which he deluded with the guile of a Ku and waylaid before he finished the habitat.
Then the real chase was on. It was apparent quickly that it would not be over soon. They knew the waste space. He did not. But he knew where they were and, for the moment, he was invisible to them.
— 147 —
The Valerena tracked events through Tawn. That relationship was nearing its peak heat, where Tawn would be at her most pliable. The Valerena was concerned that WarAvocat would stretch it out so long her influence would wane.
She experimented.
Tawn was invisible to Gemina. Gemina refused to believe she existed. Invisibility would be handy as hell for an interloper with ambitions. She asked Tawn to try to fix it.
Tawn tried. It worked. As long as the Valerena was not in the presence of someone Gemina did accept and recognize.
Perfect.
The Valerena went to work nagging about getting a replica of herself made. Better than being invisible would be being invisible and being able to be two places at once.
— 148 —
Eighteen days since the destruction of the first habitat. The Outsiders had not regained contact with the Guardship, grace of Seeker and Amber Soul. WarAvocat had gotten ahead of the habitat and its convoy. He placed a decoy inside a swarm of cold matter, moved on to another swarm within a stream of very active gas.
He launched secondaries, had them pair with rocks, vanishing in their shadows. "One from your book, Kez Maefele," he muttered.
VII Gemina waited.
The Outsider scouts spotted the decoy, darted back. The convoy stole into the hyperactive gas stream. It would be harder to detect there.
It was not the perfect ambush. The Outsiders' leading vessels tripped it too soon.
For those it was thorough and final.
The Outsiders did what they had to do.
When the shooting stopped, one of their heavies was out and the other was crippled. Their secondaries had spent themselves in suicide attacks so effective WarAvocat elected to slough the Guardship's two outermost layers. The smaller Outsider ships all suffered. Three more perished. But the habitat made its getaway, sustaining minimal damage.
It hurried toward the neutron star whose gravity had helped create the river of hyperactive gas.
Plodding and implacable, Hanaver Strate went after it.
The habitat was down close to the neutron star. VII Gemina could not get into decent range. Neither Guardship nor personnel could withstand the tidal forces that seemed no inconvenience to the methane breathers. Their habitat was nimble enough and shielded well enough to survive everything WarAvocat threw down there.
Forty-two days passed. WarAvocat occasionally pestered the Godspeakers with a shower of missiles and shells. Sometimes the bombardment went on for hours. It did no good.
— 149 —
The Valerena was in her quarters with her replica when the alarm sounded. "That's Red One. They're going to do it. Head for WarCentral so you can be seen with WarAvocat while it's happening."
She turned to her small info screen, glad Tawn was elsewhere and did not have to be managed.
VII Gemina hit the habitat with the heaviest and most prolonged bombardment yet. It did no harm. That was not expected. The flash and crash was meant to keep the Godspeakers blind to what was really happening.
WarAvocat had borrowed from Kez Maefele again.
The chunk of cold matter inbound was eight kilometers by three and was moving one hundred twelve thousand meters per second when the Godspeakers detected it. It was too late for the habitat to prance aside.
Asteroid and habitat met head-on.
The Valerena loped passageways as naked of life as any of VI Adjutrix's had been. They were identically constructed. She located the nexus of nutrient delivery for the Core. It took two minutes to inject ten cubic centimeters of sterile freon into each of two feed lines.
She raced back to her quarters, invisible to the eyes of the thing she had attacked.
The physical effects of the embolisms were trivial. But Gemina forgot how to burn starspace drives and lost track of the critical function in calculations of how to climb onto the Web.
The door to the Valerena's quarters smashed inward. WarAvocat entered behind his living shadow, Colonel Klass, and her permanent sidekick. The Valerena queried, "Hanaver?"
"You overlooked one trivial technical detail when you sent your replica to distract me. She was a virgin. All else could be reasoned back from that."
The Valerena shrugged. "So I've failed to achieve my personal goal. The House is safe." The Guardship had started moving just before the embolisms struck. Helpless, VII Gemina was drifting deeper into the waste space.
"I wouldn't count on that," Strate said. "We hold grudges forever. Colonel."
Klass fired one shot, through the Valerena's brain.
— 150 —
Provik found him tending Midnight's grave, which he still did after all these years. "Kez Maefele, this just came in on one of our Haulers out of the New Presidencies."
Turtle glanced at the brief document. "We were overly optimistic again."
"The strong survive."
Turtle read the document again.
FLEET DIRECTIVE. The Dragon Never Sleeps
WarAvocat VII Gemina Jo Klass
"They do, don't they?"