The skeletal horror across the table from her froze momentarily. “I shall ask, Captain. It will mean a major change from our current boost program, but I see no reason why not . . . I shall ask.”
“I do not intend to let the traitor escape, Jean,” Sondra murmured. “But there is no point in telling her we agree to her proposal if it is obvious that we cannot make such a rendezvous.”
There was silence in the cramped command center for a few minutes. Then the lieutenant spoke. “Captain, we have sufficient reaction mass to make a zero-zero rendezvous with the Branch Office Five Zero. To do so, we will need to make an initial course-correction burn in less than eighty thousand seconds. However, the navigators also volunteered the opinion that the Branch Office Five Zero cannot make a rendezvous with us—if they attempt to do so, the pursuing missiles will overhaul them at least two days before our closest approach.”
“How annoying.” Black-buffed claws dug into the torso restraint bars of Sondra’s acceleration cradle. “We can’t have that. Lieutenant: I intend to reply to the traitor, agreeing to her request. I will also notify her that we shall dispose of her pursuers as a gesture of goodwill. We will then execute the necessary course correction to rendezvous with her, and resume deceleration.”
“Yes, Captain.” A pause. “Are there other instructions?”
If Sondra’s battlebody had teeth, she would have bared them. “We will proceed as I ordered. Once we are established on the deceleration-and-rendezvous trajectory, you will instruct Weapons Factory Two to intercept the traitor’s pursuers and destroy them. Ideally, the flyby and destruction will take place no more than a thousand seconds before rendezvous.” She paused.
“Are we actually going to rendezvous with the traitor?”
“No. While the interceptors are detonating, we will execute a lateral burn on maximum impulse. The detonations and the burn are to conceal the release of free-fall bombs from Weapons Factory One, targeted on the Branch Office Five Zero’s course to rendezvous. I want them to have as little warning as possible.
“I want to be so close to the kill that I can see the explosions myself. So close that I can feel them on my skin. So close that I have to grow new eyes afterward.”
Space battles are boring.
This came to me as an unexpected and unwelcome discovery. But consider: Space is vast, and for the most part our vehicles accelerate slowly, at rates measured in milligees—approximately a centimeter per second squared. Yes, there are exceptions, the high-impulse flare of a nuclear-thermal rocket and the continuous-centigee burn of a starship. And in the final seconds and minutes of an engagement, there is the gut-punching shove and roar of chemical thrusters, prodigiously wasteful of reaction mass, jinking and weaving and desperately trying to make or break a targeting lock. But for the most part, space battles are a slow dance of orbital dynamics and continuous low-thrust acceleration for days or weeks or even years: a dance that culminates in a terrifying minute of battering, deafening evasive maneuvers followed by sudden death or survival, and more weeks or months of slow, steady thrust. If anything, the course of a space battle resembles a gambling game in which both sides make some preparations in private, expose other aspects of their strategy to their rivals—and the match is determined by a final throw-down. But it’s a game which one or more of the participants never gets to play again. There is no guarantee that there will be a winner, but there is always at least one loser. If you peer closely at it, you might even discern a resemblance to certain types of option trades.
As a banker, I did not find this to my taste. So after a couple of days I went to talk over my anxiety with Rudi.
“Yes, it’s a gamble,” he agreed. “But we’re going to win. We have palmed several cards, yes? Doubtless your mother believes she is the one who is going to win, and she, too, is concealing cards about her person. But she clearly doesn’t have a teleport engine aboard her vessel, so we’re going to win.”
“How do you know she doesn’t?”
Rudi cocked his head and stared at me. “Because we’re not dead. Honestly, Krina, I expected better!”
“I’m an accountant, not a warrior!” I protested. “I don’t murder people for a living. Not like Mother.”
“Well, you’ll have to learn. At least enough to keep up, if you aspire to become a branch manager for the Permanent Assurance.”
“Where do you suggest I—” I broke off, for Rudi was no longer looking at me. A chime from the retina on his wall drew his attention.
“Incoming message,” he noted. “From your mother, for your eyes.” (That it had found its way to Rudi’s attention first did not escape me.) “Would you like to see it?”
“‘Like’ is not the word I’d choose, but I suppose I have to . . .”
The retina flashed, then reconfigured to display a stylized boardroom. My mother sat enthroned at the head of the table, robed in the ceremonial pinstripes of her calling: Arrayed on either side sat a row of corporate officers, all sisters of mine, dressed alike in the sober priestly vestments of the merchant banker. I recognized the room, with a pang of homesickness, as the Blue Committee Room of SystemBank New California, the holy sanctuary wherein the wealth of star systems was parceled up and lent to the supplicant debtor colonies. It was, of course, more than twenty light-years away (and therefore this whole diorama was just as much a fake as my message to my mother had been), but it affected me deeply all the same.
“Daughter.” Sondra addressed me directly, with hauteur and dignity. “That I am distressed and perturbed by your activities should be no surprise. I wish that you had harnessed your hitherto-undemonstrated talents in service to this institution rather than conspiring in secrecy with traitors to defraud us. But under the circumstances, I can see no circumstances under which you could restore my trust in your good faith. So your resignation is accepted.
“I understand your desire to skulk in shame from Dojima System. And you are correct about this vessel’s possession of a general-purpose beacon laser. Of your crude attempt to blackmail me into giving you access to it, I shall say no more. Your request for a direct rendezvous is accepted, and as your crew will have noted, I am already decelerating toward the indicated meeting point. I am curious as to how you intend to deal with your pursuers, though: Aren’t they going to overhaul you if you stop accelerating ahead of them?
“I look forward to accepting your surrender in person once we are less than a light-minute apart.”
The message window closed. I looked at Rudi. “I’d better give her the cover story about the bombs,” I suggested. “Otherwise, she might start to suspect the truth.”
“Yes. Why don’t you do that?” Rudi’s tongue made a leisurely pass around his muzzle, then he winked at me coyly. “I have some more cards to mark. Might as well get started now . . .”
Days passed. Then a week. Then most of another week.
Shortly after we received Sondra’s message agreeing to a face-to-face parley, the drive flares from the flotilla of interceptor missiles trailing us out of Shin-Tethys’s gravity well sputtered and faded out, one by one, leaving the interceptors adrift and falling farther behind. To all appearances, they were not designed for a deep-space pursuit of such duration. It was a most convenient result, for they wouldn’t catch up with the Five Zero again until almost two hours after the scheduled rendezvous with Sondra’s starship: And even then, drifting helplessly, they would be trivially easy to evade.