What Jarlath was attempting seemed worthy of her support. The battleship division had to take out the enemy heavy squadron or no one was escaping Magaria alive. Sula programmed her own acceleration and burned an interception course for the Naxid squadron, her missiles spreading out in a wave in front of her. Again, the antimatter engines blazed, flattening her against the couch. Again, she fought against unconsciousness until it spun her into blackness.
She was awakened by a bleating in her ears and a pain in her chest. As she gasped frantically for air, she realized that the pain was caused by trying to breathe against the weight of gravity.
Gradually, awareness of her surroundings came back to her. She looked for the red lights on the displays, and saw they registered to her own life signs.
Sula sat up with a curse, forgetting that the displays were in her head and she couldn’t get a better look at them by leaning forward. She waited for her head to clear, then read that acceleration had been shut down when her suit detected a blood pressure spike, well into the dangerous levels even for someone in good health. Her body was failing under the pressure of too many gravities.
She looked at her current readings and found them well within the normal level. Weightlessness had brought the dangerous condition to an end, though she should certainly not press her luck with a high-gravity acceleration anytime soon. Then she checked the situation outside her craft and found her missiles still blazing ahead, toward the enemy.
But her missiles seemed redundant now. Jarlath and the battleship squadron had already engaged the enemy, and they were hurling out immense waves of missiles. EachPraxis — class ship had over sixty launchers, and they were all firing, all pumping one tremendous salvo after another from their huge magazines.
Fanaghee’s ships were shooting back. It was impossible to keep any kind of score of the missile tracks—there had to be hundreds of them, and on a hundred different trajectories, some direct, some looping around to attack from an odd angle.
Sula told her missiles to cease acceleration. She’d reserve them for a final blow against the enemy, if such a thing were needed.
The flanks of Jarlath’s ships pulsed with the blaze of antiproton beams, and the ships began to maneuver apart from one another. He had learned from the loss of his two squadrons, and anything that looked like debris in his path was getting blown up.
Two of Jarlath’s ships died first, and Sula gave a cry of rage and despair as she saw the fireballs erupt around them. But Fanaghee’s flagship died next, buried in a wave of missile strikes, and three of the cruisers near her were destroyed in the same fiery salvo.
After that, both sides lost the ability to defend themselves against the oncoming attacks. The missiles flooded in. Fury, triumph, sadness, and despair wrenched Sula as antimatter bursts obliterated friend and foe alike.
In the end nothing was left. Battleship Squadron 1 had ceased to exist, and so had Fanaghee’s heavy ships. It seemed that only she was left, she and her eighteen missiles drifting toward Magaria’s sun.
It was clearly time to quit the battle. There were at least forty Naxid ships remaining, and no more than thirteen survivors in the Home Fleet—maybe less, as there was a continual blaze of action behind her. She needed to swing around Magaria’s sun, then around Rinconell en route for Wormhole 1 and Zanshaa. Her only contribution to the battle, it seemed, would be to expend six of her missiles defending herself against a useless attack fired at her by her own side.
Hatred of her own uselessness stung Sula’s throat. She blinked back tears of frustration and rage. All around her was death and ruin, to which she had not been a participant but an angry witness. In a way, that was worse than dying. Even annihilation had been denied her.
The long hours went past. Sula ate ration bars to keep up her strength and drank an electrolyte supplement to replace what she’d sweated away. She skated the rim of unconsciousness in her burn around the sun, but managed to hang on to herself, to her bitter knowledge of her own uselessness.
The battle behind her died away. Perhaps everyone concerned was running low on missiles. Her detectors showed six vessels of the Home Fleet surviving, pursued by a swarm of enemy.
Six ships, she thought, out of fifty-four. Whole worlds were ending this day.
Including her own. She had hated the Fleet at least as much as she loved it, but it had provided assurance, stability, continuity, and tradition, in addition to mundane things like meals and a modest salary. All that was gone now. Sula was afloat in the void, surrounded only by a thin shell and preceded by a swarm of eighteen worthless, deadly missiles.
Black despair closed in. She could feel its chill fingers touch her face. All that she had done, all that she had been, and it was only for this.
Deathowed her, she thought. Death owed her more than this solitary cruise, this lonely circuit around a wilderness of annihilation.
She and Death had known one another for a long time. It seemed to her that Death should be a better friend than this.
When Gredel returned from opening her account in Lady Sula’s name, she found Caro groping with a shivering hand for her first cup of coffee. After Caro took the coffee to the bathroom for the long bath that would soak the stale alcohol from her pores, Gredel replaced Caro’s wallet, then opened the computer link and transferred some of Caro’s money, ten zeniths only, to her new account, just to make sure it worked.
It worked fine.
I have just done a criminal act, she thought.A criminal act that can be traced to me.
Whatever she may have done before, it hadn’t been this.
After Caro’s bath, she and Gredel went to a café for breakfast, and Gredel told her about Lamey being on the run and asked if she could move in with Caro so that he’d be able to send for her. Caro was thrilled. She had never heard of anything so romantic in her life.
Romantic?Gredel thought. It was sordid beyond belief.
But Caro hadn’t been in the sultry little room in the Laiown quarter, the smell of ammonia in her nostrils while Lamey’s sweat rained down on her. Let her keep her illusions, Gredel thought.
“Thank you,” she said. But she knew that once she was with Caro, it wouldn’t be long before Caro would grow bored with her, or impatient, or angry. Whatever she was going to do, it would have to be soon.
“I don’t know how often Lamey’s going to send for me,” she said. “But I hope it’s not on your birthday. I’d like you and I to celebrate that together.”
The scowl on Caro’s face was immediate, and predictable. “Birthday? My birthday was last winter.” The scowl deepened. “That was the last time Sergei and I were together.”
“Birthday?” Gredel said, in her Earth accent. “I meantEarth day.” And when Caro’s scowl began to look dangerous, she added quickly, “Your birthday in Earth years. I do the math, see, it’s a kind of game. And your Earthday is next week—you’ll be fifteen.” Gredel smiled. “The same age as me. I turned fifteen Earth years just before I met you.”
It wasn’t true, not exactly—Caro’s Earthday was in three months—but Gredel knew that Caro would never do the math, might not even knowhow to do it.
There was so much Caro didn’t know. That knowledge brought a savage pleasure to Gredel’s mind. Caro didn’t knowanything, didn’t even know that her best friend hated her. Caro didn’t know that she had stolen her money and her identity only an hour ago, and could do it again whenever she wanted.
The days went by, and were even pleasurable in a strange, disconnected way. Gredel thought she finally understood what it was like to be Caro, to have nothing that attached her to anything, to have long hours to fill and nothing to fill them with but whatever impulse drifted into her mind. Gredel felt that way herself—mentally, at least, she was cutting her own ties free, all of them, floating free of everything she’d known.