The Naxid flotilla leaped into the system before the lifeboat actually grappled to its new home, but Severin had anticipated this, and made his major deceleration burn before their arrival. He was now drifting gently toward 302948745AF. He knew he should be able to snuggle tight to the asteroid with just his maneuvering thrusters, and without attracting attention by lighting the antimatter engine.
Floating weightless in the lifeboat’s control station, he watched the tall antimatter torches race toward the wormhole. The Naxids were coming fast, decelerating but still moving at nearly half the speed of light. Severin calculated their trajectories and discovered that they were on course…for where the wormholehad been.
It was perfectly possible for them to find out the wormhole had moved. They could detect it visually or by charting its warp of space-time. But the wormhole had been in the same place since its discovery, and the Naxids had no reason to suspect it might have crabbed away from there.
Still, as the minutes ticked by and the blips raced closer, Severin felt his mouth go dry, and cramp pained his hands as they clamped on the stabilization bars at the control panel. It would require a tiny correction in their course to hit the wormhole, one they might make at any moment…
He held his breath. And the Naxid squadron shot past, a clean miss of the wormhole. The little lifeboat’s crew broke into cheers. Severin could only imagine the consternation in the rebels’ command centers as they realized what had happened to them.
While the Naxids increased the fury of their deceleration burn, Severin knew that he’d delayed their plans, whatever they were, by at least three months, probably a good deal more.
He felt a quiet triumph. He’d done the enemy an injury, done it without having a single weapon to fire at them, and with any luck, he’d be in a position to do them another.
In the days that followed his conversation with Tork, Jarlath and his staff worked endlessly on plans for a Magaria attack, and the harder he contemplated the possibilities, the less possible he found it to resist them.
Martinez’s video report, delivered after a transmission delay of some days, provided little hard information about the damage of his missile strike, but it left Jarlath convinced that the missile must have donesomething. Almost all the shielding on a ring station was on its outer rim, facing the sun as it rotated to protect the inhabitants from solar radiation, andCorona’s missile had hit north of the inner rim. The flood of neutrons and highly energetic gamma rays released by the explosion would probably not have done any lasting damage to the ships, but any crew and ring personnel who were not in a hardened shelter had probably got a fatal dose of radiation.
Martinez might have caused a massacre among the enemy, as well as many of the civilian personnel aboard the ring. Casualties to the dockyard workers and other specialists on whom the Fleet depended could have been high. Though hardened military gear would probably have survived well enough, the ordinary electronics on the ring station might well have been slagged—everything from communications to light and power to the electric carts used to haul supplies to and from the ships. Such damage would have interfered severely with the Naxids’ attempts to refit their captured ships.
Ifhe came in fast, Jarlath thought, if the Home Fleet roared in so quickly that Fanaghee had no time to alter her own dispositions, he might well catch her napping. The only way she could match the abrupt and devastating arrival of the Home Fleet would be to subject her own crews to the same merciless accelerations that he was inflicting on his own personnel. But Jarlath had full crews—his people got at leastsome rest—and if Fanaghee had crewed her captured vessels from out of the Naxid ships,all her ships would have skeleton crews. By the time he met them in combat, Jarlath thought, they’d be beaten into undifferentiated protoplasm by over a month of high gravities and standing continual watches, unable to match his crews in efficiency and combat readiness. They would have no real damage control capability. After all, the three squadrons consisted of ships that had only recently been adapted to their species, and whose controls and capabilities would be unfamiliar.
On the other hand, they would have the advantage of position. Two large planets in Magaria’s system, Barbas and Rinconell, happened to have moved on either side of Magaria Wormhole 1, with a forty light-minute gap between them. Fanaghee could keep her squadrons involved in perpetual slingshots between the two planets, or between Barbas, Rinconell, Magaria, and Magaria’s sun, thus keeping her ships at high speed and in a position to slap at his fleet once it emerged from the wormhole.
Jarlath’s staff, however, had worked out a series of maneuvers that would minimize this advantage.
His primary worry, as he saw it, was that he might be outnumbered. But then he heard from Martinez that the enemy squadron from Felarus wasn’t at Magaria, but at Protipanu, and Jarlath realized that not every enemy ship was joining Fanaghee. The Naxids seemed to be dispersing rather than concentrating their force.
Now it seemed more essential than ever to seize Magaria to prevent the enemy from concentrating.
The appearance of the Felarus squadron at Protipanu sent the Convocation into a paroxysm. If the rebels were dispersing their force, then everywhere was threatened. The Convocation demanded that the Fleet Control Board take steps.
“To protecteverywhere,” Tork muttered, and followed the remark with an obscenity.
Accordingly, it was decided to send a force to Hone-bar, which would silence at least some of the critics. The Laiown squadron from Preowin, not yet arrived at Zanshaa, was tasked for this mission, as was the improvised squadron that would be raised by calling in single ships scattered in the capital’s vicinity. It would be led by the captured Naxid cruiserDestiny, now being adapted for the Torminel crew that would soon be placed aboard her.
It was to this squadron that theCorona of the heroic and by now much-decorated Lieutenant Captain Martinez would be assigned.
FOURTEEN
Martinez stood in the well of the Convocation and let the cheers and applause flood over him. He raised the Golden Orb—the genuine article this time, the heavy baton with the swirling fluid that shimmered and flowed in its glass globe—and the Convocation roared again in answer to his salute.
The Orb had been presented to him, in a glittering jeweled case, by Fleet Commander Lord Tork, chairman of the Fleet Control Board, following a speech of introduction by his family’s patron, Lord Pierre Ngeni. Martinez’s family, his brother and sisters, stood in the visitors’ gallery and applauded with the rest.
Martinez tried not to let his smile, which he hoped radiated confidence and wisdom, turn into a broad, imbecile grin. He thought he succeeded, mostly.
In time the cheering died away, and Martinez was suddenly aware of how loudly his heart was beating. He took a breath, and then a grip on his courage. He turned to the new Lord Senior, Lord Saïd.
“I believe a speech is customary on these occasions, my lord,” he said. In his imagination he heardCorona’s crew whooping at the familiar words.
Lord Saïd seemed surprised by the existence of this custom, but he acceded with grace. “Lord Gareth, you are welcome to address this body of Peers.”
Martinez turned to face the audience, the convocates in their wine-colored uniforms, his family and the Fleet officers in the gallery, the Lord Senior and Fleet Commander Tork standing expectantly just before him, all turned to dark silhouettes by the brilliant spotlights ranged above the platform. Behind all these, of course, were the obscure billions who would watch this moment on video.