42.0

Kur’s drive had shut down. The dragon, blacker than black, hurtled toward its target, its cold engines invisible to sensors, the subtle curves of its hull too slippery for the blind, grasping fingers of radar to find purchase.

Ravi, having undone the EMU’s restraining straps, floated uneasily in the cramped space of the docking station. Within minutes of the dragon’s throwing them into zero g, Ravi’s stomach had revolted. He’d been unable to find anywhere to be sick, but Lisette had saved the sol, breaking open a cartridge of waste bags and presenting one of the oddly shaped sacs for his immediate use. He’d accepted the offering with a mix of gratitude and shame, before tossing the finished product into the recycler.

“You’re not really built for space, are you?” Boz had needled.

“Go sard yourself.”

That had been twelve hours ago. Kur remained silent. Even the monitors had gone dark. It was about as exciting as watching ice grow on the gantry.

And yet boredom had never been so terrifying.

Without warning, the monitors switched themselves on. Light from the screens cast blurred, muted colors onto the front of their suits.

Tactical displays.

The engineer in him deduced that the dragons must be signaling each other via Newton. Staccato bursts of laser sent to the starship and bounced on to their destinations, all but impossible to detect, giving each dragon a precise impression of what the others were doing.

The subtleties of the displays eluded him, but the three groups of three that had departed Newton were now separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Ao Qin’s flight, with more distance to cover and traveling faster than the others, was arrowing toward Chandrasekhar; Con-rit’s, significantly slower and with the shortest journey, was closing in on Bohr. And Kur’s flight . . .

Kur’s flight was hunting Archimedes, their velocity tailored to reach his target at exactly the same time as the others.

Ravi’s breath was coming quicker than it should.

Fafnir had the lead, her target not the ship but Archimedes’ crippled torpedo, its sabotaged transponder still wailing into space. Some little way behind and on a different vector was the dragon Ikuchi, also heading for the torpedo. Backup should Fafnir fail, Ravi supposed. By Ravi’s reckoning, Kur himself would reach Archimedes maybe two hours after Fafnir hit the torp.

Two hours to persuade him to abort.

Ravi returned his attention to Fafnir and the torpedo.

And frowned. The monitor showed the torpedo as a dot floating some distance above an arbitrary horizontal grid, surrounded by a cloud of numbers. Another dot denoted the dragon, and a third, Archimedes.

“So, what’s that?” Ravi murmured, fingers caressing the screen.

The torpedo’s dot had fissioned into two. The new contact was accelerating sluggishly away from the torpedo in the direction of Archimedes. The numbers indicated a blinding blast of radiation belching from its engines, so much so that the torpedo and its screaming transponder flickered erratically on the display.

“Do you think it’s a glitch?” Lisette asked.

“Maybe. But it doesn’t look like a glitch.”

“It is the lifeboat James Clerk Maxwell,” Kur said, breaking his silence and startling all three of them in the process. “She was alongside the weapon for several hours and is now headed for home. Why would that be, do you think?”

Something uncomfortable squirmed in the pit of Ravi’s stomach. Kur was asking him for help. And Kur’s purpose was to obliterate everything he loved in the universe.

But Kur was also the only thing in the universe that might save them.

“They’d have been trying to fix whatever it was Boz did to the torpedo,” he said. “Doesn’t look like they succeeded.” In his mind’s eye, he could see Chen Lai directing operations, his face impassive beneath the mirrored visor of his spacesuit. Had he despaired when he realized that the task was beyond them? Had he let the despair show?

“This is our analysis also. Similar attempts have been made by Bohr and Chandrasekhar, with similar results.”

With a small shock, Ravi realized that the dragon had been testing him. Kur was a weapon of war. He didn’t need the help of a wet-behind-the-ears trainee engineer for tactical analysis. He wanted to see if Ravi would tell him the truth.

Perhaps as a reward, the dragon left the tactical displays on. Fafnir continued to close with Archimedes’ crippled torpedo. Ikuchi and Kur kept distant and silent company.

The minutes crawled.

“How much longer?” Lisette asked. “I can’t make sense of the jinting monitors.”

“Soon, I think. The—”

“I can’t see it.” Fafnir cut in. “I should be able to see it by now, but I can’t.”

“Perhaps it is better disguised than we gave it credit for,” Kur suggested.

“From this distance? I think not. Something is wrong. Something—”

An all-too-human roar of frustration echoed through the speakers.

“It’s a decoy!” Fafnir snarled. “A tin can and a transmitter, nothing else. The target has escaped! It must already be behind us and heading for the Mother Ship.”

Ravi slammed painfully into the side of a bulkhead as Kur spun himself around. He grabbed one of his EMU’s restraining straps and hauled himself back to his seat. Not a moment too soon. Kur’s drive exploded with a deafening roar. The straps smacked flat against the back of the EMU before he had a chance to fasten them. Five gs. Six. Seven. Everything looked gray. He could feel his mind starting to slip away.

Zero g and silence. Ravi’s stomach rebelled at the sudden change. Pain lanced through his chest, but nothing came out. He had nothing left. Not even bile.

Kur flipped again. Ravi was slammed into the side of the EMU, and a sudden pitching threatened to toss him out of it altogether. He made a hasty grab for the restraining straps and snapped them into place.

A wall of sound smashed against his ears as the drive relit, forcing him deep into the EMU’s padding. Less intense this time. Three gs, maybe. Still brutal, but at least he could breathe.

“What’s happening?” Lisette asked.

Ravi forced himself to look at the monitors, “above” him now, and tried to make sense of the readings.

“All the dragons have turned around. Looks like they’re scrambling to get back to Newton. No, wait. They’re spreading out even more than they were already. I think they’re trying to find the fleet’s torpedoes.”

“They fixed them all?” Boz asked, clearly displeased.

“They must have.” It was hard to focus with so much weight pressing down on his eyeballs. “I can see the decoys, and the dragons and the ISVs, but there’s nothing on the screens that looks like a torpedo. I don’t think the dragons know where they are.”

“How is that even possible?” Lisette asked.

“Space is big, torpedoes are small. If they set off while the lifeboats were close by, the wash from the lifeboat’s engines would have masked any possible signal from the torpedo’s own drive—for long enough to get going, at any rate. The drives could be shut down by now, or producing only fractions of a g. If so, I’m guessing they’d be hard to pick out, even for a dragon.”

“Maybe worry about that later,” Boz suggested. “What are those red things?”

On the monitors, translucent, vaguely teardrop-shaped bubbles were detaching themselves from Archimedes, Bohr, and Chandrasekhar, each one headed toward a specific dragon.

“I don’t know,” Ravi said. “Kur?”

“They are probability fields for CQMs.”

“CQMs?”

“Close-Quarter Munitions. Antimissile missiles and mass-driver rounds. Once we opened our drives in pursuit of the torpedoes, we became visible to the enemy. Several dozen missiles and many thousands of mass driver rounds are headed in our direction. We can’t track them all. The probability field shows where they are most likely to be. The range is extreme but presents a danger nonetheless.”

A frisson of fear ran through his body. Even though Kur was still accelerating at three gs, the teardrop shape was gaining on them.

“How long before they reach us?”

“Nineteen minutes.”

“Can’t you outrun them?” Boz asked.

“At this range, it would be easy enough to do, but I would burn too much fuel, it would break our search pattern, and the acceleration required would kill you.”

Ravi suspected it was only the first two reasons that mattered. He and Boz exchanged a quick look. Without a word, both reattached their suit gloves and helmets, though they kept the visors open. Lisette, after a moment’s hesitation, followed their lead. Ravi’s attention returned to the probability fields.

They reached Fafnir first, and then Ikuchi, enveloping them in red bubbles. Their icons started to flicker blue on the monitors.

“What’s that?” Lisette asked.

“Countermeasures. Dragons have CQMs also.”

“You have CQMs?” Ravi didn’t know why, but the thought struck him as incongruous.

“Of course. Your torpedoes will have them too, no doubt.”

“I don’t think so,” Boz said. Her head shook inside her helmet. “If those hulls were carrying mass drivers and missiles, I’d have seen ’em.”

“A design flaw, then. I, for one, would not like to fly the void defenseless.”

Ikuchi vanished from the monitors.

The leading edge of the probability field reached Kur. Ravi held his breath.

Nothing happened.

“Well,” Lisette said. “That was an anti—”

The drive cut out. Lisette floated against the restraining straps. Then yelped as her head banged against one side of her helmet and then the other.

Kur pitched and yawed with dizzying ferocity.

Ravi retched again, painful and dry. The drive roared in his ears. Eight gs at least, then a stomach-churning absence of thrust, then five gs, then one. Pitch and yaw. Pitch and yaw. Six gs. Zero. Unseen cooling systems hissed and rumbled with the stress.

A sound like tearing metal ripped through the hull, hammering at his ears, shaking his body to the bones. It stopped as suddenly as it started.

“Are we hit?” Boz asked. “I don’t think—”

The tearing metal sound drowned her out. Ravi’s teeth rattled in their sockets.

It stopped. Started again. Stopped.

“We’re not hit,” Lisette said. She sounded breathless. “It’s a mass driver or maybe an auto-cannon. Kur must be taking on incoming missiles.”

“And you know this how?” Boz challenged.

“We’re alive, aren’t we?”

Further conversation was interrupted by the blasting of the drive. But it was less urgent this time. The g- forces were gentler, the changes in attitude less abrupt. Ravi was able to study the monitors. The probability fields had vanished. The missiles presumably spent or shot down, the mass-driver rounds too widely dispersed to present a danger. There was still no sign of Ikuchi. Eight dragons remained, moving back to their search patterns.

“We are out of danger for the moment,” Kur said. Ravi had expected him to sound exhilarated, or exhausted, or . . . something, but the LOKI was the same as ever: distant and inhuman. “There is still no sign of the torpedoes, and Ikuchi’s loss is a . . . problem. We cannot cover the possible trajectories as we would like. I must consult with Ao Qin and Con-rit.”

The dragon fell silent again.

Archimedes, Ravi knew, must be falling away beneath the soft, insistent push of Kur’s engines. Far above them lay Newton. And somewhere between, undetected in the dark, were three fleet torpedoes, each headed to a fiery rendezvous of its own.