There was time for no more thoughts than that as Dauntless met the incoming missiles head-on. No more time for thought-only for grief as her last remaining escort vanished in a wracking spasm of outraged space-time and took the missiles with her.
"He did it," she said softly, appalled by the cruiser's sacrifice. Yet elation warred with her horror, and the realization touched her with self-loathing. Dauntless had died, but now no Kanga MDMs remained, and that was the only thing she could think about now. No other consideration was acceptable, and she kept her gaze on her plot, refusing to meet any other eyes.
"Captain Onslow," she heard her voice as if it belonged to someone else, "hold your fire, please. We will close to ten thousand kilometers and match speed and translation with the enemy before we attack."
The range dropped unsteadily, and inner ears rebelled as drive surges added to the stress already afflicting Defender's crew. The Kanga commander was desperate, Santander thought coldly. He'd shot his bolt, freeing Defender to seek optimum firing range at last, and he juggled his own drive frantically. But there was little he could do, and the dreadnought closed grimly, matching him lunge for lunge, sliding inexorably closer until the fringe of her own translation field was barely five hundred kilometers clear of her foes'. She dared come no closer, but at this range her missile could not miss at least one of her enemies, despite the fuzziness of her fire control. Not even Trolls would have time to react before it struck home, yet even at this short a range, fire control couldn't guarantee which enemy their bird would destroy.
Commodore Santander sat tensely in her command chair, knuckles white on its arms. One last shot ... one chance in three... .
"We're as close as we can come, Ma'am," Onslow reported tersely.
"Very well, Captain. Fire at will."
"Missile away-now!"
It happened like lightning. There was scarcely time to register the launch before the missile flashed into the enemy formation ...
... and struck the remaining Trollheim full on.
Josephine Santander sagged in her command chair. They'd come so far, paid so much, and they'd missed. Defender rode the Kangas' flank at less than a light-second, and it was over. The Ogre still had to make its final translation, but she couldn't stop it. She couldn't even follow into normal-space to engage the Kangas there. They knew when they were going, and even if she'd known that herself, it would have taken months of calculations by the best theoretical physicists to put Defender on the same gradient and follow them.
She'd failed. The bastards were going to get away with it, and there was noth-
But then her brain hiccuped suddenly, and she straightened slowly as an idea flickered. It was preposterous-insane!-but it refused to release her... .
She raised her head, looking into the screen to Defender's command bridge. Onslow had aged fifty years in the last twenty seconds, she thought, and his shoulders were as slumped as hers had been.
"Captain?" He didn't even blink. "Captain Onslow!" His dulled eyes flickered, and a tremor seemed to run through him.
"Yes, Ma'am?" His voice was mechanical, responding out of rote reflex.
"We may still have an option, Steve." He looked at her incredulously. "We've still got Defender's multi-dee," she said softly.
His face was blank for an instant, and then understanding flared.
"Of course." Life returned to his eyes-the blazing life of a man who has accepted the inevitability of something far worse than his own death and then been shown a possible way to avert it after all-and suppressed excitement lent his voice vibrancy as he nodded jerkily. "Of course!"
Animation rippled across the flag bridge as the commodore's words sank home. Defender herself could become a weapon. It had never been tried before-as far as anyone knew-but it was a chance.
"Nick?" Santander watched Miyagi fight off his own despair to grapple with the new idea. His was the closest thing she had to an expert opinion.
"I ... don't know, Ma'am." He closed his eyes in thought, his tone almost absent. "It might work. But it wouldn't be like an MDM ... not a surge so much as a brute force hammer. There's the Harpy, too, and the interference of our n-space drive... ."
Sweat gleamed on his forehead as he tried to envision the consequences, then he opened his eyes and met her gaze squarely.
"I'll need to build some computer models, Ma'am. It might take several hours."
"In that case," she said, glancing at the chronometer, "you'd better get started. Even with their evasive maneuvering, we're only about sixty hours from the wall."
"Yes, Ma'am. I'll get on it right away."
"Good, Nick." She stood with a chuckle that surprised her even more than the others. "Meanwhile, I'm going to take a shower and grab a little nap." She reached out in a rare gesture of affection and squeezed his shoulder. "Buzz me the minute you have anything."
Commodore Josephine Santander walked slowly from her bridge. As she stepped through the blast doors into the passage, she heard Miyagi calling sickbay for another stim shot.
"All right, Nick."
Commodore Santander leaned back in her chair, incredibly restored by a shower and eight straight hours of sleep. Her crushing sense of failure had been driven back by the forlorn hope of her inspiration, and her face was calm once more, filled only with sympathy for the bright, febrile light in Miyagi's eyes. He was paying the price for seventy hours of strain and stim shots, and his glittering gaze held a mesmerizing quality, like the fiery intensity of a prophet.
"I can't give you a definitive answer, Ma'am, not without more time than we have, but the models suggest three possible outcomes." His voice was as tight and intense as his eyes.
"First, and most probable, we'll all simply go acoherent." He said it without a quaver, and she nodded. Survival was no longer a factor.
"Second, and almost as probable, all three ships will drop into normal-space with fused multi-dees and heavy internal damage-possibly enough to destroy them. If our own multi-dee were up to Fleet norms, we'd have a better chance of surviving than they would; as it is, it's a toss-up. Either way, though, they'll be light-months from Sol without FTL capability and in easy detection range of Home Fleet's pickets. Which-" his grin was feral, flickering with drug-induced energy "-means the bastards are dead."
Captain Onslow made a savage, wordless sound. He, too, had rested, yet he was not so much restored as refocused, with a flint-steel determination to destroy his enemies. Steven Onslow was a wolf, his teeth death-locked on a rival's throat, unwilling and possibly even unable to relinquish his hold.
"Third, we may push them right through the theta wall," Miyagi went on. "I can't predict what will happen if we do, Ma'am, but I suspect it will still throw them into a Takeshita Translation. On the other hand, our hitting them will screw their flight profile all to hell. We might throw them further back than they planned, but it's more likely they'll come up short, and the degree of deviation is absolutely unpredictable, whichever 'direction' it goes. There's even a faint possibility we could toss them into the future. In any case, the further from their planned break point we hit them, the wider the diversion will be."
"I see. And if they go through the theta wall, what happens to us?"
"Commodore, I'd say there's about an even chance we'd go with them. It depends on two factors: the exact mass-power curve of our translation fields at impact and how close to phased our n-drives are. Our scan data's too unreliable for us to match deliberately, but the tolerance is pretty wide-assuming my model's sound." He showed his teeth again. "I'm wired to the eyebrows, Ma'am, but I think it's solid."
"And if we go with them?"
"Then we're probably looking at something very like possibility two, Ma'am. All three of us in normal-space, no multi-dees, and unpredictable degrees of damage all round. The odds are we'd bleed a lot of the surge in the translation, so the damage might be less extensive than if we don't break the wall, but that's only a guess."