“Yes, ma’am.”
Her thumbnail hesitated for a moment on the wax of the seal. I’m glad we never had kids, she thought; her husband was in Naval Air, out of Portsmouth. The paper sprang free with a slight tock sound.
The commodore’s eyebrows rose. “Make course for the Angolan Abyssal Plain,” she said. “Down to the bottom, and wait.”
* * *
ABOARD DASCS MAMBA
TRANSLUNAR SPACE
NOVEMBER 4, 1998: 0500 HOURS
“God,” Marya muttered. The new trace on the screen was matching velocities fast.
She was in the pilot’s couch of the yacht, where she had been since the takeoff. Never leaving it, except for a few dashes to the head. The floor around her was littered with the wrappers of ration bars; it was important to keep up the blood sugar. Sleep you could avoid, by popping stim, even when you were accelerating at a continuous 1.3 G. Over forty hours now since the last sleep, and things were beginning to scuttle around the edges of her peripheral vision. The icy clarity of her senses was growing disconcerting, a taunting, on-edge twisting that left you wondering if the information coming in to the brain was accurate. Could she really smell so sour already? Am I thinking straight? The dimmed lights still seemed hurting-bright.
Her eyes flicked back to the board. The Draka cruisers were still there behind her, three of them. Not gaining much; this ship was fast. Grotesquely overpowered, and the deuterium-boron-11 reaction was fantastically efficient. The first drive that really didn’t need reaction mass; all it produced was charged particles for the coils to squeeze aft . . . Those cruisers were fourth-generation, deuterium-tritium fusion. This much continuous boost was probably doing their thrustplates no good at all, they must be using just enough water mass to protect the diamond films. Still, eventually they would get close enough to get parallax and bring their beam weapons to bear.
An alarm chimed, one of the warships’ lasers was impinging on the Mamba’s thrustplate. Marya’s fingers touched the board, and the magnetic fields twisted slightly against the fusion flame. The Mamba skittered sideways . . . The Draka craft were still light-seconds away, enough to make dodging easy. Missiles and slugs were out of the question without matching or intersecting vectors; not enough sustained boost.
“Oh, shit, no way I can fight this thing,” she muttered, looking over to the vacant couches. One untrained person could just barely pilot it, on an idiot-proof minimum time, maximum thrust boost, if they knew the theory and how to stroke computers. A quarter of the screens were dead anyway, the com systems, all of them down, and no time to check why without getting sliced into dog meat by the pursuit. In the meantime she was half-delirious and wholly terrified.
She laughed. “And I feel great. Fucking wonderful!” Because she was doing, accomplishing; perhaps only her own death in a quick flare of plasma, but that would be something. It was helplessness that was the worst thing about being a slave. Not abuse, not privation, not the ritualized humiliation; it was not being able to do anything except what they wanted. This was the most alive she had felt in twenty years.
The new trace was still closing. Marya blinked and recalibrated. Her eyes felt dry, but the lids slid up and down as if lubricated with mercury.
Whatever it was was boosting at 2G to match velocities, and had been for the better part of a day. Better than the Mamba herself could do. Again she looked in acid frustration at the dead com screens; there was probably enough information flying back and forth, threats and warnings and demands, to tell her everything she needed to know. I might as well put a message in a bloody bottle and throw it out the airlock, she thought. 3K klicks and closing at 1k per second relative. Soon they would be in visual distance, as something more than a point of light . . .
“Visual,” she muttered to herself, unconscious of speaking aloud. “Maybe, if they’re looking—”
Impatiently, she called up the maximum magnification and waited. Presently it appeared, no class of vessel she was familiar with. For a chill moment she thought it might be another like the craft she was flying; the tapered-wedge shape was plainly meant to transit atmosphere. Then she saw the Alliance colors, the Space Force blazon. Even the name Sacajawea. It was bigger than the Mamba as well, corvette-sized, a couple of thousand tonnes payload. Her hand touched a section of the console.
-Airflight mode-
[CURRENTLY IN VACUUM], the computer replied with electronic idiot-savant indifference to circumstances.
-Airflight mode, landing lights, exterior.-
[OPERATIONAL: ON/OFF (Y.N)?]
She touched on. Off. On . . .
“Sir.”
Frederick Lefarge looked up from the plotting console. The Sacajawea was one of a dozen shuttlecraft the New America would carry, mirror-matter powered, equally suited to atmosphere or deep-space work. That was easy enough with a power supply as energetic as antihydrogen. If the New America ever sailed, it would be a one-way trip with not much hope of return, and a long time before a functioning economy could be established at the target star. Her auxiliaries had been designed to last a century, and do everything from lifting kilotonne-mass loads out of a terrestrial-sized gravity well to interplanetary freighting. This one could cross the solar system and back in forty days, without refueling.
And it could fight an Imperator-class cruiser quite handily; hence the large bridge crew. Lefarge looked hungrily at the spread of trajectories on the board before him. Those Snakes were going to get a very unpleasant surprise, if push came to shove.
“Sir?” That was the Sacajawea’s captain, Ibrahim Kurasaka.
“Sir?” Lefarge said in turn. He outranked the other man but there was only one commander on a bridge. For that matter, his manning a board here was irregular, but there were times when the book didn’t matter all that much.
“Ab . . . Brigadier Lefarge, I’m getting a damned odd pattern of visuals from that Snake pleasure barge.”
“I’ll be glad to take a look,” Lefarge said. An image blinked into the center of his screens, and he narrowed his eyes. Not a random pattern . . . Suddenly, he chuckled harshly.
“You didn’t go through the National Scouts, did you, Captain?”
“No, Brigadier, I didn’t,” Kurasaka said. He was Javanese-Nipponese, and the Indonesian Federation had not been advanced enough for a universal youth movement back then.
“That’s an antique system; Morse, it used to be called. Probably in the datastore; let me . . . yes.” He raised one hand with enormous effort against the drag of acceleration and began keying. After a moment: “Oh, my God.”
“Marya, Marya! Ma soeur, ma petite soeur—”
For a moment she was lost, content simply to hold him. Then she pushed herself to arm’s length. There was shock in his eyes, enough that she was startled. Do I look that bad?. Forty hours of stim, but still—
“Fifff—” Appalled, she stopped. The stammer she had overcome so long ago was back. Not now, not now! A medical corpsman was floating down the connecting tube behind her brother, crowding along the wall to let the squads of Intelligence types past as they headed for the quick ransacking of the Mamba that was all the available time would allow. She had an injector in her hand, and the single-mindedness that went with the winged staff that blazoned her elbow. Antistim and trank.