43.0

Kur’s consultation with the other flight leaders led to a slightly different search pattern. Beyond that, however, little changed. The hours crawled by in restless boredom. The dragons’ electronic senses sniffed at the dark.

Of the torpedoes, there was no sign.

Ravi awoke from a troubled doze to find Boz poking him in the shoulder.

“Wha . . .”

“I know where they are.”

“The torps?”

“No. Eighty-two liters of misplaced soy milk. Of course the torps. You hear that, Kur? I can find the torpedoes!” And then, more quietly: “Just don’t make me regret it.”

“You claimed with great confidence that you had sabotaged them. And yet here we are, searching for still-functioning weapons. Why should I listen to one whose sense of her own abilities far exceeds the reality?”

Lisette giggled at that. Even Ravi had to bite back a smile. Boz threw a poisonous look at both of them.

“If your brain was full of neurons instead of circuits, you’d realize there’s no sarding way anyone in the fleet could debug those torps in the time they had. Even I would have had trouble doing it, and I know what I did in the first place.”

“But they did,” Lisette objected. “Which is why we’re on a jinting tachyon hunt trying to find them.”

“They didn’t,” Boz insisted. “They didn’t have time. What they could have done, though—what they must have done—is wipe the nav program altogether and replace it with a new one.”

Ravi was frowning.

“But there isn’t a ‘new’ one. All they could have done is—”

“Reinstall the original. The autonav system for a standard, unmodified probe. Which will take you from point A to point B in the most fuel-efficient way possible.”

“What thrusters do these torpedoes employ?” Kur asked. Ravi might have imagined it, but he thought he detected a hint of excitement in the dragon’s voice.

“Mark Nines,” Boz replied. “Three of ’em.” Using her implants, she flashed every torp specification she had—fuel capacity, mass, stealth-armor dimensions, and a whole lot more—across to the dragon. Ravi doubted she knew what most of them meant, but he also knew that having access to that much information while working for the Chief Navigator would have been too much for Boz to resist.

Three red, curving lines appeared on the monitors.

“Interesting. If you are right, in our haste to make contact, we have inadvertently overtaken them. Their relative velocity is very low.”

“But fuel-efficient,” Boz said smugly.

The three of them lurched in their EMUs as Kur reversed course.

“Surely, you are not going to take the word of a self-confessed and incompetent traitor?” Fafnir asked. Ravi started at the unexpected intervention. He laid a firm hand on Boz’s shoulder to stop her from responding.

“It is a simple matter to put it to proof,” said Kur. “The target’s stealth armor is efficient, but the shape of it on the hull is less so than ours. If I direct high-powered radar at the predicted location, assuming the target is there, the transmission will be deflected, and I will not receive any return.”

“An exercise in futility, then.”

“No. Because you, Fafnir, will be able to detect some of the deflected energy. If the target is there, you will see it and reroute the information to me.”

“And if you shine that much radar in the target’s eyes, it cannot help but see you—as will the cyborg ISVs.”

“A necessary price to pay. We are well beyond the effective range of Archimedes’ CQMs, and the target itself is defenseless.”

“So the cyborg says.”

“So the cyborg says.”

Kur’s activation of the radar was marked by a subtle shift in the monitor configurations.

“There!” Lisette cried, pointing.

One of the red arcs morphed into an icon surrounded by a fuzzy cloud of numbers. Ravi felt himself pushed deeper into the EMU’s padding as Kur increased his acceleration.

“Hey Kur,” Boz said nervously. “Shouldn’t Fafnir do this? If you blow yourself up to take out that torp, you’re gonna take us with you.”

“You say the torpedo lacks CQMs, whereas I have a full load of missiles. No detonation should be necessary.”

Ravi peered at the monitors.

“But isn’t Fafnir closer?”

“I will not trust Fafnir’s existence to the word of a potential adversary. It should not fall to Fafnir to pay for any misjudgment I may have made in that regard.”

“And if I’m wrong, we’ll all be dead too,” Boz said. A small bead of sweat had formed on her temple.

“Indeed.”

Ravi poked Boz in the arm.

Did you tell him the truth? he mouthed.

I hope so.

Boz’s tongue flicked nervously over her lips. Ravi stared at the monitors. Plastered by radar, and with Fafnir routing the signal back to them, the torpedo did not appear to be changing course. Kur’s engines sounded steady in their ears, chaining the three of them to their seats. It was difficult to move.

One of the screens changed to video.

“Jinting Isaac,” Lisette murmured. “Will you look at that!”

It was grainy and monochrome, distorted by image enhancement and extreme magnification.

The Archimedes’ torpedo. Sooty black and seemingly nailed in place against an even-blacker background. A long cylinder with a blunt nose at the front and a pronounced flare at the back. Not as sleek as Kur by any means, but stolid. Menacing.

“Don’t get too close,” Boz warned. “I only messed with the autonav. It can still blow itself up if it wants to.”

As if in response, Ravi felt rather than heard a distant whirring of motors. The dragon’s hull vibrated once, twice, three times. Ravi’s stomach gave a useless heave as the drive shut down and hurled them into zero g. On the monitors, a small blue icon materialized next to Kur. It moved rapidly toward that of the torpedo.

Missiles, Ravi guessed. He looked for them on the video display but saw nothing. The missile icon reached its target.

A blinding flash lit up the screen. The primitive part of Ravi’s brain expected to hear an explosion, but there was nothing. When the feed settled down again, the torpedo was gone. Kur killed the picture, replacing it with a tactical schematic.

It showed the clouds of numbers around Ao Qin and Con-rit shifting almost in tandem. The dragons, confident now that Boz was right, were moving to intercept the two remaining torpedoes.

Ravi found himself lunging against the restraining straps as Kur changed his heading. After a few minutes of zero g, the dragon’s drive relit. But there was scarcely any thrust, little more than a tenth of a g.

Which could only mean that Kur did not want to be seen. He was once more hunting Archimedes. As was Fafnir. The two of them were scrubbing off unwanted vectors in a slow arc, all but invisible to the groping sensors reaching out for them. It wouldn’t be long before both dragons settled onto a new, and deadly, course.

Ravi had to swallow past the sudden lump in his throat.

“Shouldn’t we talk about this?” he asked.

There was no reply.