“No, my lord. I didn’t think to look.”
“Engines!” Martinez cried. “Reduce acceleration to one gravity!”
“Reducing acceleration to one gravity, my lord,” Mabumba repeated.
Corona’sbeams groaned as the oppressive weight eased. Martinez gasped in air, grateful to breathe without labor. He took a half-dozen sweet breaths, then impatience drove him to demand information.
“What are you finding, Alikhan?”
“I’m trying to work the catch to the lid now, my lord.There …I’m reaching inside…”
In the silence that followed, even over the remorseless percussion of his heart, Martinez could hear the metallic scrape of Alikhan’s fingernails whispering against the inside of the cup. And then he heard Alikhan’s deep sigh, a sigh that to Martinez seemed filled with all the despair in the universe…
“Six minutes, my lord.” Tracy’s words were leaden.
“I’ve got them both, Lord Gareth,” said Alikhan in a voice of quiet exultation.
For an instant the hopelessness still clung like a shroud to Martinez’s mind, and then it was obliterated by an electric surge of triumph that almost had him whooping aloud.
“Activate the captain’s desk display,” he said. “Insert his key. Prepare to turn on my mark.Weapons! Kelly! Catch! ”
Cadet Kelly turned as Martinez fished in his pocket for Garcia’s key. The expression on her face was luminous, as if with glowing eyes she were seeing Martinez descend from heaven on rainbow clouds.
The cadet stretched out her lanky arms, and Martinez tossed her the key.
“Insert and turn on my mark.”
“Very good, my lord!”
Martinez opened his tunic and pulled his own key off over his head. He inserted the key into the silvery metal slot on the command console before him.
“Weapons. Alikhan. Turn on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”
Kelly gave a dazzled smile as the weapons board lit up before her eyes. Another light appeared on Martinez’s board, indicating that the weapons were free.
“Alikhan, get to a rack and strap in.”
“Yes, my lord.”
And then, as frantic relief poured into his veins, Martinez turned to Kelly. “Power up point-defense lasers!” he called. “This isnot a drill!” Such was his haste that he had to keep himself from screaming the words like a lunatic.
“This is not a drill,” Kelly repeated through a broad, brilliant smile. “Powering up point-defense lasers.”
“Activate radars aft.”
“Radars activated aft, my lord.”
“This is not a drill. Charge missile battery one with antimatter.”
“This is not a drill. Charging missile battery one with antimatter…missiles charged, my lord.”
The missiles had been charged with their antimatter fuel, each unit consisting of a solid flake of antihydrogen that had been carefully doped with an excess of positrons, which allowed it to be suspended by static electricity inside a tiny etched silicon chip. The configuration was stable and would last for decades, and the chips were so diminutive, well beneath anything that could be seen with a conventional microscope, that as a mass they flowed like liquid. The antihydrogen served both as propellant for the missile and as the warhead—any fuel that didn’t get used up on the approach would go bang at the end of the journey.
The same antihydrogen fuel was used byCorona for its own propulsion, though larger ships used antihydrogen suspended in larger microchips, which provided more power to the engines.
“Screens,” Martinez asked, “what’s the dispersal on that salvo?”
“They’re clumped together, my lord,” Tracy responded.
Martinez pulled the radar tracks onto his own display. The oncoming missileswere clumped, flying as if in formation. One ofCorona’s missiles should suffice to knock them out, but he thought he should fire two just to be sure.
He pulled the weapons board into his own displays and began configuring the missiles. “We’ll fire battery one in salvos of two,” he explained to Kelly. “The first two will take care of the oncoming missiles. The next two will accelerate till they’re just short of the enemy missiles, then cut power and drift through the blast, coming out the far side, heading for the station but looking on the radars like debris—or so we’ll hope. The next pair will burn straight in for the ring station and probably get shot down, but may distract them from the second pair. The fourth pair we’ll keep in reserve.”
Kelly looked a little overwhelmed. “Yes, my lord,” she said finally.
“When you reload, load tube one with a decoy.”
Pressing keypads. “Yes, my lord.”
On a larger ship, there would be a tactical officer to take care of all these details. But as he spun his plans, as his fingers danced in the displays and tapped console pads, Martinez found that he was enjoying himself again, relishing the planning and the execution and, most of all, the little surprise he was planning to spring on the Naxids.
Blow everything. Garcia’s words echoed in his mind, and he felt his pleasure fade. It wasn’t just rebel Naxids on the ships he planned to destroy, it was their captive crews, and the military installations on the ring were only a small part of the huge structure: millions of civilians lived there as well. All would die if his clever little plan succeeded.
He stared for a moment into a dark, cold imagining: the flash, the fireball, the spray of gamma rays. The ring station rent apart, spinning out of control, parts flung into space, others dragged to flame and impact on the planet’s surface by the skyhook cables.
“Three minutes, my lord.” Tracy’s words cut through his reverie, and with a deliberate resolve he put aside the horror of his vision.
“This is not a drill,” Martinez said. “Fire tubes one and two.”
“One and two fired, my lord. This is not a drill.” The gauss rails flung the missiles into space, and the missiles reoriented and ignited. “Missiles fired and running normally.”
Martinez watched them fly away through his displays. “Weapons, this is not a drill. Fire three and four.”
The pair fired, and the next pair, all firing normally.
Martinez decided to put more distance between himself and any detonating antimatter. “Engines, high gravity warning.” The sirens wailed.
“High gee warning, my lord.”
Martinez ordered a resumption of the six-gravity acceleration.
Now we’ll see how they react, he thought as the leaden weights of gravity were added one by one to his chest.
The Naxids must have seen his missile launches, and known thatCorona had teeth. They had to understand that their dense-packed formation of eight offensive missiles would be obliterated byCorona’s counterfire. But it wasn’t too late to save their barrage: they could send orders to the individual missiles to diverge, to separate so they couldn’t all be knocked out at once.
But they didn’t.Corona’s first pair of missiles exploded right in the middle of the enemy salvo, destroying them all in the plasma fireball created when the exploding antihydrogen hit the tungsten surrounding the warhead. A wild, furious cloud of radiation erupted betweenCorona and Magaria, preventing eitherCorona or the Naxids from seeing what was happening on the other side.
The radiation gradually cooled and faded. The first objects the sensors could detect, through the weakening shroud, were the burning tails of missiles five and six heading for the ring; the second thing were missile tails as well, the second salvo of eight fired fromFerogash.
“Twenty-four minutes till impact, my lord.”
That gave Martinez a comfortable amount of time to deal with them. It wasn’t until four of those minutes had passed thatCorona’s radars finally detected missiles three and four falling toward the enemy with their torches extinguished, speed increasing as they were drawn toward Magaria by the invisible threads of gravity.