But communication among the rest of her fleet was restored within hours. Within days the three ships charted by Premiere Axiom of Naxas docked at the ring station, disgorging hundreds of Naxid personnel to crew the captured vessels. They tended to be young and relatively inexperienced, or seniors drafted out of retirement, and had been told only hours earlier that they now served not the Commandery or the Convocation, but the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis.
By the time the recruits arrived, gangs were already working at converting the captured ships to Naxid use. This was more than tearing out chairs and replacing them with sofas: the radiation-hardened rooms that would shelter the crew during combat had to be completely redesigned to accommodate the Naxid form.
Fanaghee and her original two squadrons separated from the station two days after her reinforcements arrived, and from then on she controlled affairs from her flagship,Majesty of the Praxis. She and her squadrons began a series of heavy accelerations between Magaria, Barbas, and Rinconell, intending to provide a bulwark against any retaliation from the Home Fleet at Zanshaa. The two squadrons under Elkizer joined, already traveling fast. And, one by one, the captured squadrons finished their refits and joined Fanaghee in her defensive circle.
The squadrons from Felarus and Comador were committed elsewhere, but Naxas sent one-half of its ten-ship squadron to Magaria, reserving the others to defend the capital, and some small, individual ships joined from where they had been on detached duty, giving Fanaghee a total of seventy ships. She calculated that Jarlath at Zanshaa probably had fifty-five or so, if he had called in the Daimong from Zarafan, and she considered taking the offensive. The murder of the Naxid convocates had greatly offended her, and she wanted revenge upon the rioters who the enemy proclaimed as heroes, and had in mind for their punishment something more colorful than being thrown off a cliff. The only thing that held her back was the refitted ships, which hadn’t had time to match the speed of her other forces—once she had them all moving at the same rate, she would petition the committee for permission to seize Zanshaa.
In the meantime she readied her defenses. Decoys were fired and echeloned to impersonate entire squadrons—to someone entering the system and gazing at a radar display, the space between Rinconell and Barbas would at first seem to be filled with a fleet three times its actual size. All ships were instructed to proceed without radar—if a newcomer was going to find them, he would have to wait for a radar pulse to reach them and then reflect back, a process that could take hours. Fanaghee arranged her squadrons in their looping trajectories so that any enemy emerging from Wormhole 1 would be sandwiched between two fires, one squadron ahead, another behind.
The captured ships with their new crews gradually built speed. Fanaghee was within a day of petitioning the Committee for permission to launch her strike at the capital when word came from the relay station on the far side of Wormhole 1 that the Home Fleet was on its way, and coming fast.
Scant hours later, the Home Fleet had arrived, and Fanaghee’s plans were put to the test.
FIFTEEN
Sula fought her way out of unconsciousness with an urgent tone bleating in her earphones and panic in her heart. For a moment she flailed, feeling the smothering pillow pressed to her face, and then her mind cleared and she realized she was in her pinnace, with the computer demanding a decision. She clenched jaw muscles, forced blood to her brain, and tried to focus her reviving consciousness on the displays. She’d gone virtual with her primary navigation display, and it looked as if the universe had been painted on the inside of her skull, a curiously empty universe with a single sun and a few planets and asteroids, and with little abstract, colored blips here and there that represented ships, next to packages of floating data representing heading, velocity, mass, and acceleration rate.
To her surprise, she floated weightless in the straps. Her boat’s engine had shut off. She blinked, shook her head to clear it, tried to make sense out of what the computer was telling her.
Decoys.She and her barrage of twenty-four missiles had been fired at decoys, and her computer, analyzing the increasing loads of data pouring in from the sensors, had only just figured that out.
Damn.If she were to die—a highly likely occurrence—she would have liked to take a few of the enemy with her.
Before her hung the flight of missiles, their greater acceleration assuring that they were continuing to fly from her even though their drives had shut off when the deception was discovered. They were querying her for instructions. She scanned the displays and tried to find another target. A bewildering number of possibilities swam before her vision. How many of them were real?
The sour smell of her own body had become a permanent presence in her vacuum suit. Nearly two months of constant acceleration had battered and bruised her, drained her energy and left her listless. (The other cadets made jokes about her applying the acceleration drugs via patches instead of firing them into her neck; “Patch Girl,” they called her.) Fortunately, Jarlath had decreed two days of near weightlessness at the end of the long acceleration toward Magaria, a chance for Home Fleet personnel to gather wit and strength for the upcoming battle. Sula had alternated between obsessively rechecking the diagnostics of her pinnace and simply, blissfully, floating in her rack, feeling her muscles and ligaments, taut as twisted rope, slowly begin to slacken, a process almost as painful as the accelerations had been.
They were hardly slack now, not after the hours of acceleration burns that led to the Fleet’s leap through the Magaria wormhole, only to be followed by the remorseless, only slightly less than lethal acceleration that followed her launch fromDauntless. Now that weightlessness was sending blood through her body, her limbs were wakening to their pain. She tried to ignore it and instead apply her mind to the displays, but it was difficult to focus on the bewildering swarm of data.
The last time she’d been in a pinnace, she was locked for endless days with a dead man. It was hard to forget that even under the present circumstances. It had taken an act of will to enter the pinnace and close the hatch behind her.
She forced her mind to the displays.
Cruiser Squadron 2, nine heavy cruisers that includedDauntless, led the Home Fleet’s assault and was now well clear of the expanding plasma field created by Jarlath’s initial covering barrage—missiles fired through the wormhole to explode ahead of the Fleet and make a hash of enemy radar screens. The barrage served a dual purpose: to prevent rebel missiles from locking on, and to conceal the last minute maneuvering he hoped would catch the Naxids by surprise. Jarlath had wanted firepower in the lead, so the heavy cruisers of Squadron 2 were followed by the ten older cruisers of Cruiser Squadron 1, just now emerging from the radiation cloud on a slightly diverging course from Squadron 2. Behind them, still in the process of emerging from the expanding plasma cloud, the rest of the Home Fleet, marked by the towers on flame on which stood Battleship Squadron 1, the six giantPraxis — class ships with which Jarlath hoped to overwhelm the enemy.
Ahead were the Naxids, a bewildering array of formations cutting across and through each other’s paths between Barbas and Rinconell. As yet, only a few appeared clearly: the Naxids weren’t using active radar themselves, and the Home Fleet loyalists had to wait for their own radar to find the enemy and reflect back before they could get a clear indication of their foe.