“What poetic imagery.” Greatly daring while she was in Captain Mode, he took her hand.
She ignored him and pursed her lips in thought. “But they are underway in our direction, from Sol toward Wunderland. They would have to be Third Fleet stragglers, right?”
Bruno picked his words very carefully. “Not necessarily. Could be Fourth Fleet.” He rubbed his thumb across the smooth back of Carol's hand. It was reassuringly warm to his touch. At least she didn't seem frightened.
“In which case…” she prodded.
“They could have seen us and looped around. Don't forget that spacedrive of theirs.” He shrugged. “Third or Fourth Fleet, doesn't matter. The point is, I think they want our ship.”
“And us, too, maybe.”
Without humor, he added, “That is, if they are kzin warcraft. They could be something even worse.”
Carol grunted. “You're such an optimist.”
“Probably as good at optimism as you are at poetry.”
She frowned a little, and shook her head. “Wouldn't make any sense, to waste that much delta-v and time…”
“But Captain-my-captain,” he replied, half smiling at his pet name for her, a twinge of normalcy amid the nervous tension of the navigation deck, “they can pull hundreds of gees, remember. Take 'em just a couple weeks after we pass them to decelerate, turn around and re-accelerate up to relativistic speeds.”
Carol shook her head at the concept of accelerating from a standstill to seventy percent of light-speed — in a week. To a Belter, that idea must smack of magic. “Plus extra time to maneuver around the drive wash.”
Bruno blinked, then grinned widely. “That's right. The drive wash is hard gamma and plasma.”
She smiled without mirth. “That's the joke, my loyal crew: When is a weapon not a weapon?”
“When it is a spacedrive,” he replied. “Angel's Pencil taught us that.”
“It could cook the kzin through and through, their precious reactionless drive and all.” Carol bared her teeth, white in the dim light of the holoscreens.
The Sun-Tzu's backwash was a plume of ionized hydrogen and hard radiation, jabbing behind it like an enormous scythe. In the high interstellar vacuum, it bristled with blue-white ferocity, fully a tenth as long as the solar system was wide.
Bruno's mood sobered. The cranky antimatter drive had its limitations as a weapon; it was difficult to orient, slow to start or shut down, and very hard to maintain. They would have to shut it down to re-aim it — the stabilizers couldn't be overridden without reprogramming while the drive was quiet.
Could the Sun-Tzu stop the kzinti in interstellar space, with inferior weapons and almost no maneuverability? The ship had never been designed for warfare. All Sun-Tzu was designed to do was quickly deliver Dolittle and crew — and the cryovial with its Finagle-damned virus — to Wunderlander space. Antimatter drive or not, the kzinti ships could literally run rings around the Sun-Tzu.
The Sun-Tzu was mostly ice. Water was an effective if imperfect shield against both the relativistic impact of dust particles lancing in from forward, and the harnessed hell of the experimental antimatter drive aft. It looked far larger than it was. Thus, it could give some protection against kzin weaponry.
Up to a point.
But first things first, Bruno reminded himself. Fooling around with the drive while it was on would certainly be suicidal. They would have to shut it down and reorient the entire ship. That would give them added doses of radiation, because they would lose the added deflecting power of the drive's hundred-kilogauss magnetic fields.
Even with those fields, their cumulative radiation doses slowly edged up, watch by watch, inexorably. Eventually, the autodoc would be unable to repair the continual cellular damage of sleeting atomic fragments and piercing photons.
He felt a jarring sense of disloyalty, even though he knew it was irrational. Part of Bruno said: This was not the mission. They were supposed to go to Wunderlander space, with Bruno fully Linked into the Dolittle's computers, and Carol and the revived crew of the Sun-Tzu sealed away in the cargo compartment with the opened cryovial.
Then he would lose Carol forever, but not to another man or woman. To a virus older than the human race. But in a way, they would never be closer.
Bruno felt dizzy, and wished that Carol wasn't in the next crash couch, so he could pop a few mood modifiers from his autodoc. His emotions lurched, trying to keep up with his logic. Carol finally squeezed Bruno's hand hard and held his eyes with hers.
“I think our best bet is to get the drive pointed at your little red blur,” she said, pointing at the holoscreen. “That will answer the question once and for all. If your little blip moves in response, we'll have our answer. Natural phenomena in deep space don't maneuver around drive wash.”
Bruno nodded, part of him marveling at the easeful beauty of how her facial muscles moved. How would she look after the virus did its work? The Dream repeatedly showed him a portion of that awful truth: hairless, domed forehead, elongated jaw without teeth, leathery skin like armor. But Carol's eyes would be unchanged, looking sadly at him from her virus-altered face.
He yanked himself back into the factual, crisp present. Time enough for worry later. “Uh, right, you're the boss. But if there are ratcats out there, I'll bet they have thought about that particular scenario, and have some nasty contingency plans.”
“What else is new?” Carol rapped, her tone cold as cometary ice.
A slow silence passed between them. It was her play now.
“Begin shutdown subroutine,” she formally told the computer, repeating the command twice more for verification. Another window in the holoscreen opened, displaying the shutdown procedure, complete with schematics and data analyses. Step by step, the silicon mind of the Sun-Tzu strengthened the magnetic bottle confining the glittering deadly cloud of anti-hydrogen, and increased power to the ionizing lasers that kept the fuel in manipulable form.
At the same time, the computer slowly decreased the inflow of normal matter — scavenged up from the interstellar gas in their path, mixed with the ices of the Sun-Tzu's iceball hull — which created the harnessed Hell inside the reaction chamber. It was a delicate, slow-motion ballet of electronics and engineering, carefully balanced and monitored.
A slight miscalculation, and the Sun-Tzu would become a pocket nova in ten microseconds.
Bruno watched the on-line shutdown telemetry with all his attention, wishing mightily that he was Linked. The itch had become a craving that burned in his neck socket. But then, if he were Linked, he would not have Carol's immediate warmth. Nor would he care. And right now he needed her contact and comradeship more than anything.
Even more than Linkage, he told himself confidently.
He could feel Carol's hand squeezing his own almost to the point of pain. Many minutes passed as the computer balanced each incremental decrease in normal matter infall with increases in magnetic confinement and ionization. The holoscreen displayed the slow process as a series of inexorable discrete events. Neither Bruno nor Carol said anything as they watched and waited, but the joint pressure of their laced fingers was reassuring, the affectionate comfort of skin contact.
A homey and human thing, pitted against an alien threat.
The steady thrumming of the drive slowly decreased with each step in the shutdown protocol. Decreasing thrust was scarcely noticeable from moment to moment, but Bruno felt a heady lightening.