So far his sensors had detected no changes in the alien radio traffic. To Drago even their code sounded somehow laconic. Hopefully this meant they'd accepted his three small craft as normal.
The pirates slowed their approach now, as if to join the battle group, intending to come alongside one or more of the large ships. Drago's fists and belly had clenched. "Not yet," he muttered, "not yet… NOW!"
It was as if the Bachelor's master had heard him; less than a mile from the nearest cruiser, he released three torpedoes. A moment later there was a great flash, the explosion driving the cruiser sideways. Magnified on his bridge screen, Drago saw flame and debris vent from the breached hull. Even as he'd fired, the Bachelor's skipper had activated his strange-space generator. A second later the pirate vessel winked into warpspace.
Drago emitted a single explosive "Yeah!" Then his gaze fixed on the Ludmilla, intense again. She'd been trailing the Bachelor by about two miles. This was a delicate moment. Kunming's most urgent question was whether the aliens had force shields. The Ludmilla's skipper was to hold his fire until they'd had time to generate shields, if any. Then they'd surely generate them, if they had them.
Seconds passed-dragged-three, four, five… No shields. It seemed to Drago they'd had abundant time. Meanwhile the Ludmilla had slowed to avoid overrunning her target. "Not yet," he muttered. "Not yet. Not… " Then, faintly luminous in the blackness, shields began to form. "Now!" he shouted. At that instant the Ludmilla launched her salvo. Almost as quickly the battleship's war beam hit her, and seconds later the pirate's unarmored hull blew apart in a widening sphere of gassed metal and debris.
Time to leave! The Minerva had half-closed the gap. As Drago activated the strange-space generator, her light hull resonated to an alien target lock. Had it been a torpedo lock, he'd have been in warpspace before the torpedoes reached him. As it was, a war beam began its non-explosive but sustained and intense energy transfer an instant before the Minerva left F-space.
An instant too short for human reaction, though the temperature increased. Then Drago stared at his screen. It showed not the indigo blue his shipsmind used to represent warpspace, but the restful yellow it showed for hyperspace.
"Gracious god," he breathed. He knew exactly what had happened. In the moment when warpspace was generating-in that small fraction of a second-the beam had corrupted his warpdrive, and he'd entered hyperspace instead.
His first officer too sat staring, then finally spoke. "Looks like we're screwed," he said softly.
"Screwed, rolled over, and screwed again," Drago answered, then paused. "Take the helm. I've got a report to make." Getting up, he started aft to the cabin shared by his savant and her attendant.
It had been evening in Kunming when Drago Dravec notified War House of his emergence in the Hibernia System's cometary cloud. So instead of going to his apartment to sleep, Admiralty Chief Fedor Tischendorf had lain down on the couch in his office, just a few strides down the corridor from his savant's suite. When Drago's next savanted contact arrived, the admiral's night yeoman woke him. The admiral was off his couch instantly, wide awake and energized, and reached the savant's couch in under a minute, his shoes on but unsecured.
The savanted exchange was recorded and backed up on War House's AI. And on the admiral's powerful mind, where it instantly began to make connections, tying it into the extensive interconnected matrix that was his understanding of reality-his personal, internal version of the universe.
The session took nearly an hour, the information sometimes coming slowly: the size of the system defense force and the planetary guard flotilla; their distances from Star; descriptions of the enemy warships; the masses of the battleships and cruisers, their outriggers… and of course their shields, beam locks and radio frequencies. Important stuff.
Tischendorf imagined the pirate screening his cube-visuals and data-deciding what was meaningful and what wasn't. And when in doubt, telling it. Better the error of excess than to leave something out that might prove important. Invaluable.
The admiral wasn't surprised that one of the corsairs had funked out. He wouldn't have been shocked if none had carried it through.
The last thing Dravec mentioned was being scorched by a war beam in the moment of escape.
"Did you take damage?"
"It knocked out my warpdrive and FSP dish. So I can't use the F-space potentiality to navigate, and I can't use dead reckoning like I could in warpspace. I'll pop into F-space from time to time though, if I can, and see if I can figure out where I am and what direction I've been going. Ever hear of anyone making it back like that?"
The admiral pursed his lips, then answered. "No, Drago, I haven't. But I'll put someone on it; see if we can come up with something useful for you. Maybe we can. We've been performing wonders on industrial mobilization. We've got the beginnings of a real fleet under construction, and your information will be extremely useful. All of it. We'd hoped the aliens hadn't developed shield technology-it would have given us an important advantage-but just knowing it will help us plan, and save lives and ships."
He paused. "And, Drago, check in with us from time to time, just so I know you're alive. For what it's worth, I wish you well. If you make it back, and if you're interested… the fleet can always use more good officers."
A very long way off, in another, very different universe, Drago Dravec grimaced at Tischendorf's words. If Henry Morgan was dead, and he just about had to be, then Drago owed loyalty to no one but his crew. They'd waited three long days at rendezvous, and Morgan hadn't shown. While Minerva, Bachelor, Ludmilla and Aztec had arrived within minutes of each other. Presumably Morgan was dead.
"I'll think about it, Admiral," Drago said. "Meanwhile, do me a favor: pass along my apologies to Ambassador Khai." Only now did he realize he didn't know her first name. "I expect I made a lot of trouble for her. And she's quite a person, quite a lady. Maybe I should have let her handle things, but I didn't trust that bastard Rees. Basically he's psychotic."
They wound up the session then. War House's master artificial intelligence had not only backed up the recording of the session in real time, it had uploaded a copy to the prime minister. Meanwhile, for Tischendorf, it was less than two hours before time to get up, so he simply took off his shoes and lay down on his couch again.
Where he dreamed of drifting derelict in hyperspace.
Chapter 15
Recruits
Bulk carriers were well suited for conversion to "snooze ships"-stasis ships-for evacuating colonies. They were extremely large, and their holds readily segmented by decks, dividing them into numerous levels.
In Esau Wesley's broad, low-ceilinged compartment, the aisles between the stasis lockers were packed with men; the sexes had been separated when they'd come aboard. Which left Esau uneasy, because he didn't know where his wife was. Women and men, they'd been told, needed to be put in separate holds for prestasis processing. "Processing," he discovered, meant getting ready for three and a half months of stasis; a kind of deep sleep, they'd been told. "Standard" months, whatever that meant. They'd also been told they wouldn't get any older in stasis. He'd wondered if that meant setting back their birthdays three months, but hadn't asked. The man who'd told them things had one answer for all questions: the single word "later."
They hadn't even been fed since the night before boarding the ship. By then they'd had to show their nakedness to what he supposed were physicians, who among other things had stuck them with needles, drawn blood, looked at their teeth, and shamelessly examined their private parts.