Rosen started to open his mouth, then clamped it shut. He didn't trust his voice to keep steady, any more steady then his hands. He clenched his fists, despising himself for his jitters, and looked again at the range readout. Then, irrationally but irresistably, he darted a glance out the wide-sweeping armorplast viewport.
Good God! Does the crazy woman mean to get within
visual
range?!
Rosen wondered wildly if, in spite of everything, maybe the Raehaniv weren't really human after all. But then he swept his eyes over Naeriy and the others in the control room. They all looked as nervous as he felt.
Grashkul, Effectuator of Expansion, surveyed the expanse of the flagship's commamnd center with satisfaction. He had only recently arrived to take personal command of the system battlefleet, although he had departed from Raehan as soon as possible after taking over from the late Kulnakh.
The thought of the former Effectuator of Expansion soured his mood. Kulnakh had been right, of course. They should have launched probing attacks through the displacement point to gauge the strength of the opposition in Seivra. And if that opposition had proved to be no stronger than he thought it was (having exhaustively studied the picket's report, including the imagery of the oddly old-fashioned-looking ship that had attacked it) then they should have gone through in full force, accepting whatever losses it took to recapture Seivra. Yes, Kulnakh had been right . . . but Grashkul wasn't about to say so aloud.
At least the unknown inferior beings had displayed equal caution, allowing time for the entire battlefleet to be concentrated here. Brobdingnagian battleships like this one, armed primarily with long-range missiles, made up the rear echelons, behind the somewhat smaller, faster battlecruisers with their batteries of energy weapons, including plasma artillery powered by fusion plants of the scale on which the Korvaasha built ships. Nothing could come through from Seivra and live—of that he was certain.
A harsh series of sounds suddenly awoke at the communications console. After a moment, the operator turned and spoke across the command center in the far-reaching low frequencies of Korvaash speech.
"Effectuator, I have received a somewhat incoherent message from the commander of a courier vessel enroute from Raehan. He urgently advises us to scan a certain region of space which I have taken the liberty of downloading to the sensor controls. Of course," he continued, doing a rapid calculation, "the message was sent over twenty
rizhula
ago."
Grashkul understood. Neutrino-pulse communication over a sufficiently long range ouside a gravity well could effectively exceed lightspeed—the carrier beam itself did not, of course, for neutrinos were not really massless as had once been thought; but the information-carrying pulses could be propagated along it faster, as much as five times as fast in fact. But it took
real
distance to take full advantage of the effect. So this courier commander's alert held a slight time lag.
"Instruct the computer to compensate, and scan the area," he ordered. A few moments ticked by while his command was carried out. He motioned a subordinate aside and seated himself at the scanner console. Then he gazed at the readout and froze.
"
Now
, Aelanni?"
Aelanni shook her head in a preoccupied way, oblivious to the pleading note in Rosen's voice. The Terran drew a shaken breath and glanced out the viewport again.
There was no possible doubt. He could distinctly make out the serried ranks of tiny objects far ahead, their visible separation gradually growing as he watched.
They really
were
coming into visual range!
Grashkul surged erect from the scanner console. "General fleet alert!" he bellowed. "All ships are to come up to full power and . . ."
"
Aelanni, you crazy
shiksa!"
Simultaneously with Rosen's yelp came Aelanni's command. "Launch all missiles!"
Naeriy's hand swept over an array of lights and the fleet's linked computers implemented the targeting solution they had already worked out during the long approach. Full salvos of missiles leaped from all the ships simultaneously and sprang ahead. Piling their acceleration atop the ships' velocity, they swept into the Korvaash formation too swiftly for any thought of defense by ships in the process of receiving new orders.
The first hit awoke like a small but very intense sun. Others followed in such rapid succession as to seem a chain reaction, a spreading contagion of flame as one Korvaash ship after another expanded and split apart in a horrible, unnatural birth of hellfire.
The armorplast of the viewport automatically polarized, saving the eyesight of all in the control room of the still-approaching
Liberator
. Aelanni, eyes riveted on the spectacle, gave a second order. "Launch message drones!"
A second series of salvos dropped from the ships, but these sped toward the Seivra displacement point, past the savaged Korvaash defenders who grew in the screens at an ever-accelerating rate.
And then they were past, flashing by with the velocity to which they had been pulled by Tareil's gravity over the past weeks. And as they passed the holocaust, insanely close, the shock wave reached them. The expanding, superheated gas of vaporized metal, plastic and Korvaasha formed a wave front through which they passed, still in free fall.
Artificial gravity could not begin to compensate, and
Liberator
bucked and plunged madly. Rosen was flung to the deck but Aelanni hung onto a stanchion and remained grimly erect. Rosen gazed up, half-stunned, and saw her standing steady amid chaos, illuminated by the lightninglike flashes of continuing explosions from the screens. There was no wind for her hair to blow in, but there should have been, for she was like an elemental spirit of vengeance and destruction riding the storm that she herself had loosed on the world.
And then the moment was over. The still-exploding Korvaash ships were receding astern, the deck steadied, people picked themselves up, and Aelanni calmly gave the order for the prearranged course change. Then she extended a hand and hauled Rosen to his feet.
"What's a
shiksa
?" she inquired.
"Quiet!" Grashkul thundered, momentarily stemming the flood tide of panic-stricken reports and queries. By sheer presence, he quelled the incipient hysteria (which would have looked like mild agitation to human eyes, but which was without precedent among the Korvaasha) in the command center of the undamaged flagship.
"No more reports! We can assess the damage later." He turned to his chief of staff. "Get all ships with undamaged drives turned around and go to maximum boost in pursuit of those ships. The damaged ships that still have weapons capability can keep watch on the displacement point."
"But Effectuator," the chief of staff replied with a slight quaver in his voice which meant what open hand-wringing would have in a human, "we'll never catch them! A stern chase . . ."
"Effectuator!" The impropriety of the interruption from the scanner chief would have been shocking at any other time. "The inferior beings have altered course! They have ceased retrofiring and are now proceeding on a course of . . ." A series of figures followed, delivered with the machinelike precision of old, to Grashkul's relief. Conditioning was reasserting itself.
"Then it
won't
be a stern chase," he declared with vicious satisfaction. "We can intercept them on that course—it will take time, but we can do it. And"—he glanced at the command readouts, noted the estimated tonnage of those ships, and made a mental adjustment for the efficiency of Raehaniv engineering—"we still have what must be ten times their firepower." He turned back to the chief of staff. "Get with Navigation and carry out your orders, Kaathgor!"
"At once, Effectuator!" But Kaathgor hesitated momentarily. "Ah, Effectuator . . . what of that second salvo of missiles the inferior beings launched?"
"What of it? They all missed and proceeded outward. Something must have gone wrong with their targeting." Grashkul was as close as any Korvaasha ever comes to fidgeting with impatience. He
had
to overhaul and obliterate these intruders, whoever they were, thereby salvaging something from this debacle.
Kaathgor's voice broke into his thoughts. "That is the point, Effectuator. You see, they are proceeding directly toward the . . ."
Grashkul's pent-up rage erupted. "Enough!" he roared with a volume that hurt Korvaash auditory apparatus. "Stop wasting time and carry out your orders, you . . . female!"
At the deadliest insult in the Korvaash language, Kaathgor's face and voice went totally expressionless. "Of course, Effectuator," he said smoothly. "It will be as you command."
The Korvaash warships that could still do so lumbered into correct alignment, and fusion fire speared blindingly from their drives, sending them on the optimum intercept course. No one except Kaathgor—who had no intention of bringing it up—noticed that that course happened to take them away from the Seivra displacement point on its emergence bearing.
Meanwhile, unnoticed, the missiles that were not missiles reached that displacement point.
DiFalco tumbled into
Andy J.
's control room, cursing the fate that had—of course!—brought the long-awaited alarm in the middle of his first sound sleep in far too long. Varien, he noted, was already there, strapping himself into his assigned acceleration couch.
"Report!" he rapped, midway into the command couch.
"It's confirmed, sir," Farrell stated, excitement barely under control. "That first emergence was one of the message drones—it's broadcasting like mad now. The other one should start any time . . . there! They're both ours!"
DiFalco and Varien exchanged looks. The weak link in their plans had, from the beginning, been the problem of coordinating two fleets on opposite sides of a defended displacement point. No non-material signal could be sent through, so they had devised material ones: missiles whose warheads had been replaced by very simple transponders and very complex nav computers that might attempt the displacement transit that had heretofore been the exclusive province of manned vessels. Of course, they knew better than to rely on such new and chancy devices; the odds against one of them making a successful transit were overwhelming. So Aelanni's ships had foregone a second missile salvo, instead devoting their entire launching capacity to a swarm of the new drones that would—they hoped—beat the odds by sheer numbers.
DiFalco expected exultation on Varien's face and saw annoyance. "Only two, out of all those drones . . . !"
"That's exactly two hundred percent of what we need," DiFalco snapped. "Aelanni's there! Mister Farrell, execute Plan Omega, Phase One!"
Fusion drives roared and, at an acceleration that only their counteracting artificial gravity fields made endurable, they began their run at the displacement point. By the time they reached it, they had built up such a velocity that precise computer control was required to activate the gravitic pulse that would hurl them through it at precisely the right moment. But the programming did its work, and they burst into the Tareil system at a pace that would normally have been sheer insanity for attackers of a defended displacement point.
At least, DiFalco thought as the stars rearranged themselves into the sky of Raehan (
the sky Aelanni grew up with
, flashed through his mind), the speed of their transition didn't seem to intensify its discomfort. Then the instrumentation stabilized, and scanners began to detect the drifting wreckage from which they could deduce the full dimensions of what Aelanni had wrought.
"Holy shit," DiFalco breathed, looking up from the readout. Varien muttered something in Raehaniv.
Then they were in among the fields of ball bearings the Korvaasha had strewn along the emergence heading. The millions of dense little objects would normally have reduced ships moving at their velocity to collanders. But each cruiser put out its forward deflector shield and, like a man advancing into driving rain with an umbrella held in front of him, drove grimly through the metal storm.
"Colonel," Farrell called out, "we've pinpointed Aelanni's force, and their pursuers." The tactical holo tank activated, revealing a small cluster of friendlies and a larger mass of bogies on converging courses only a few degrees apart.
It was, DiFalco thought dourly, going suspiciously well. Aelanni had led the Korvaasha on almost precisely the chase they had planned on. Now they'd have to start playing it by ear.
"Mr. Farrell, resume acceleration on optimum pursuit course. And give me a projection on when we can expect to catch up to the Korvaash force."
Fusion drives that had been cut off for the transit—no need to unnecessarily complicate an already tricky maneuver—reawoke, and again there was a slight surge before the compensating fields could take hold. Ahead of them, the pyrotechnics intensified as ball bearings impacted the deflector shield at an even higher relative velocity and were burned out of existence by lost kinetic energy that had to go somewhere.
"Ready with that computer projection, Colonel," Farrell reported. DiFalco nodded, and the holo tank awoke into new activity as glowing lines curved ahead along projected courses at accelerated time. Aelanni's green line and the red Korvaash one slid together while his own green track was still some little distance away. Then it, too, intersected the others, and all three continued on together in what would be an embrace of death.
Aelanni would just have to take it for a while.
Varien was also looking at the tank, face expressionless. DiFalco recalled his own attempts to convey the difficulty of coordinating simultaneous force deployments over vast separations of space and time, but he did not remind Varien of it.
My character must be improving
, he thought gloomily.
"Continue on course, Mr. Farrell," he ordered. "And pass the word to stand by for combat with those immobile Korvaash units ahead. It looks like we're going to pass them within missile range."