The diversion had served its purpose. The
Standfast
commenced firing on the blips moving toward the wormhole, but the incoming ships were already deep enough inside the wormhole
’
s complex gravity field and moving fast enough that accurate targeting was all but impossible. Space and time were wildly warped and twisted by the wormhole
’
s intense gravitation, sending laser fire and mass-accelerator fire skewing off in strange, unexpected directions. Even so, the
Standfast
scored a series of direct hits on the attackers. Whoever was in charge of those guns might have been slow to react, but he or she was a remarkably good shot.
Five, six, seven, eight of the attackers flared into nothingness as the
Standfast
raced toward them, all weapons firing. But that still left half the attackers coming on.
The closer the
Standfast
got to the wormhole, the more difficult it became to target her weapons. But she had to get closer, and closer still, if she was going to be able to bring her weapons to bear on the remaining targets. Another volley of fire, every shot a clear miss. And another volley, this time taking out two of the intruders.
“
Oh, no,
”
Koffield said.
“
Stars in the sky,
no!”
Sayad had been concentrating so hard on the screen that she had all but forgotten Koffield was there. What had he seen that she had missed?
Then she saw. The
Standfast
was moving too fast, getting too close. She was going in, all guns blazing. She was redlining, headed down into the black hole
’
s gravity well, past the point of no return. She would either have to go through the wormhole, or crash into the surface of the black hole.
And she was nowhere near any of the alignments for a safe transit through one of the approach nexi.
The
Standfast
made no attempt to save herself, but instead flew in closer to the intruders, setting up for one last desperate all-weapons volley, getting in under the six remaining targets, firing directly into their paths. She fired everything she had, and then, before her guns and laser even reached their targets, she fell in toward the black hole
’
s event horizon, far, far away from any of the approach nexi.
She was too close, going too fast. The datalink died with the ship, but the suddenly blank screen told Sayad all she needed to know about what happened next.
Within a blink of an eye, the flicker of a moment, the
Standfast
had been destroyed, torn into a million, a trillion microscopic fragments, every man and woman -aboard ripped apart with shattering speed, down to and beyond the molecular level. They had been ground up, shredded into subatomic nothingness by the gravitational vortex of the black hole before they even had time to know they were dying.
The rest was silence.
The crew of the
Upholder
stared at their screens in horrified, frozen shock. This wasn
’
t supposed to happen. It made no sense. How could—
“
They
’
re coming through!
”
Koffield shouted into the mike.
“
All weapons, fire at will. The
Standfast
died trying. Don
’
t let her down.
”
It was what the crew needed to hear. They shook off their shock and their horror and refocused on their duties.
Sayad blinked, drew in breath, and tried to do the same. No more data coming from the downtime feed. All right then, work from last positions and trajectories. Factor in projected paths of the access nexi. Feed it all to the battle-projection Artificial Intelligences that weren
’
t designed to track targets coming up
out
of the timeshaft, and pray they could do the projections, and that the probabilistics projections weren
’
t completely smoke and mirrors at the moment. She massaged and routed the data, and saw projected exit trajectories appear on her display. She converted them to firing solutions, and piped them to the weapons consoles.
It was guesswork piled on guesswork, but there was no time for anything better—and no way to produce it, no solid numbers to work from. It had taken precisely twelve seconds for her to go from raw data in to firing solutions out, but Sayad doubted she could have done much better work if she had taken twelve years.
“
Well-done, Ensign Sayad,
”
Koffield said.
“
Now we wait, if not for long.
”
“
No, sir. Projected arrival in fifteen seconds—mark.
”
“
Here comes our turn,
”
Koffield said.
Right on schedule, a flare of blueshift light blossomed
out of the event horizon, and then another, another, an
other, until all six of the surviving intruders had punched
through. Sayad felt a sick knot in the pit of her stomach—
the enemies had known the codes, and the
Standfasts
last
volley of fire, the one she had died to make, had been for nothing at all.
But then there was no time.
Weapons section took the conn, and the
Upholder
came
about hard, placing the cylindrical ship
’
s long axis at right angles to the wormhole, so as to bring the most possible firepower to bear. Her main weapons opened up at once,
directing laser and railgun fire at the twisting, dodging intruders. Sayad checked her instruments and got her first di
rect mass, size, and acceleration readings on their uninvited
guests. No doubt about it—those had to be uncrewed ships. They were too small and too dense to carry both crew and any sort of acceleration shielding, and they were accelerating hard enough to squash any human passenger into red paste with or without shielding, accelerating faster
than any ship she had ever seen or heard of. It was precious
little comfort that her tracking projections had proved accurate enough that the weapons systems were able to start targeting the moment the intruders emerged.
The
Upholder’s
lasers locked on to the first target, and
chased it relentlessly as it dived and twisted and pinwheeled through a complex evasive-action sequence. The target held
together far longer than it should have under main-laser
fire, but whatever its very impressive shielding was made of,
it couldn
’
t protect the intruder indefinitely—not from the
multigigawatt intensity of the
Upholder’s
firepower. A sec
ond bank of the main lasers locked on the target, doubling
the energy being pumped into the intruder
’
s hull. It flashed
over, blowing up in a spectacular blaze of glory that blinded half the
Upholder’s
sensors and detectors for three very long seconds before the damper systems could recover.
The position-predictors did their best, but the surviving
five targets were performing evasive escape maneuvers. Even three seconds of sensor-blinding was enough to make the old tracking projections worse than useless.
The weapons systems lost five more irreplaceable seconds as they tracked and scanned for the surviving intruders. Sayad slaved her screens to the weapons display and watched their frantic search. Koffield stayed with her, watched the battle off her screens. No sense rushing to the weapons boards. He had already given all the orders he was going to give. All he could do was sit back and watch. He could do that just as well from Sayad
’
s stations, without distracting the gunnery teams. But the gun crews weren
’
t finding anything. Sayad flipped back to her own tactical search algorithms and ran them against the weapons-sensor data.
And found the intruders again. Or maybe the intruders had found
them.
“
Bloody hell!
”
Sayad cried out.
“
Bogie, coming straight at us, right through the wormhole blind spot!
”
She thought at first it was a variant on diving out of the sun, one of the oldest dogfight tactics there was. The intruder had the wormhole directly astern, and was barreling straight for the
Upholder.
But no. No, not straight for the
Upholder.
But near enough, only two or three degrees up-Y from straight-line on the wormhole. And almost certainly, the intruder had no detection gear capable of finding the
Upholder.
If the intruder had known where the
Upholder
was, it either would have revectored to ram, or aimed for just about any other spot in the sky. In fact, the intruder she was tracking had ceased evasive action. Either it expected that the
Upholder’s
detectors would not recover in time, or its automatic-sequencing system had told the intruder to do so. In either case, the intruder had not spotted them. Chance, damned-dumb chance, and nothing else, had sent the intruder flying right across the
Upholder’s
bow.
She checked range and rate on the new target. It was coming almost straight for them, all right, but it still had a long way to go before it reached them. It could be tough to fire on a target that was coming straight on, as opposed to traveling laterally. They had a good ninety-five seconds until it was within a prime firing solution. Sayad relayed the new tracking to weapons control, and saw by her boards that they had just located an intruder themselves.
She cleared her main board and brought up the symbol-logic displays for the destroyed intruder
’
s trajectory, the intruder she had found, and the one the weapons team had found. She studied the three, looking for relationships and patterns that might lead her to the other three that were still unaccounted for. She added her arrival projections, and the pre sensor-blinding tracks as well. The big screen was a tangle of traces and vectors, dots and lines, color-coded sym-log gibberish.
But Sayad could read it all. The incomprehensible mishmash made perfect sense to her. The pattern was clear. Whoever had sent these probes through the wormhole had set up pseudorandom evasive patterns that ended with the surviving intruders in a radial-symmetric dispersal pattern, each craft heading off in a different direction. She frowned, and thought fast.
Thirty-two attackers to begin with, but half of them diversionary. Sixteen actually attempted to get through the wormhole, but the
Standfast
had taken out ten of them, and
Upholder
had killed one. She had good current realtime tracks on two of the survivors, and she had no doubt the weapons team would take them out in short order. That left her with three intruders for which she had no reliable current track. She had lost them in their evasive-maneuver phase, thanks to that sensor-blinding explosion of
Upholder’s
kill.
Think.
Six intruders. Three accounted for. Three missing. Six out of sixteen intruders programmed to go through the wormhole and disperse. She worked her board controls, slicing up the sphere of space around the wormhole into sixteen pyramid-shaped sectors, the points of the pyramids meeting at the center, at the worm-hole.
The geometry required mostly six-sided and some five-sided pyramids to allow an absolutely precise fit, but she ignored that level of nicety for the moment. She threw the tracks of the detected intruder up into her improvised radial-sector map, and was not in the least surprised to see it was easy to match them up with the centerlines of three of the sectors. Each of the known intruders was moving on a direct radial course out from the wormhole, each moving more or less precisely down the center of its assigned
“
slice
”
of space. It was so tidy, so accurate, that Sayad had not the slightest doubt that the remaining three intruders would likewise be found in the centerlines of
their
sectors.
That
was a mistake on the part of whoever had programmed the intruders, and a big one. It meant she only had to search near the centerlines of the remaining sectors, thus eliminating about 99 percent of her search area.
Well, if the person who had programmed the intruders loved order so much as to be tempted into one mistake by it, maybe he or she had made another.
She had tracks for those three, but they were more than a minute old, closer to ninety seconds by now: far too old to be of any direct use. But they at least told her the arrival order for all six of the intruders that had gotten past the
Standfast.
She compared it against the known intruders
’
sector assignments.
And there it was. Breathtaking. Perfect. Tidy. And incredibly stupid. The intruders had been slotted into their sectors in order of their arrival, rather than at random. All she had to do was figure out where in the arrival sequence an intruder had been—something she could derive easily enough by noting the moment of each arrival—and she would know just about where to look along the lengths of the centerlines of three particular sectors of space, to find the missing intruders.
Her fingers danced over the controls. She focused the long-range detectors at the appropriate points in space— and was rewarded with almost immediate detection returns on three bogies.