Tahota stared at her. “Gods, what’s going on?”
“I’m not sure.” Soz spoke quietly. “Whatever happens, I’ve faith in your abilities and your decisions.”
Tahota nodded, acknowledging her words. “My thanks.”
Soz paused. “Kurj told me something once.”
“Yes?”
“That you were his closest friend.”
The admiral exhaled. “I am honored.”
“Gods’ blessings, Starjack.”
“And to you.”
Then they closed the link.
Soz pushed a hand through her hair. “Charon, get me Admiral Barzun.”
“On channel three.” The screen rippled again, clearing to reveal a man with iron gray hair, a beak of a nose, and a square jaw.
“Imperator Skolia,” Barzun said.
“We have to assemble the Radiance Fleet now,” Soz said. “The psiberweb is collapsing. We have a day, perhaps less.”
Barzun swore. “Why is it collapsing?”
“The Triad link isn’t stable.”
“Gods almighty.” The admiral stared at her for a full count of five before he asked, “Are we going to Eube or Onyx?”
Quietly Soz said, “To Eube.”
27
Admiral Starjack Tahota and Colonel Claymore Raines strode side by side along the gravel path in New Metropoli. The ground curved up ahead of them, barely discernible as deviation from the horizontal. Trampled gardens stretched on either side and starlight flooded through dichromesh windows overhead. All around them, personnel jogged by, duffels slung over their shoulders.
“I’m getting confirmation from the other habitants,” Raines told her. He held his hand to his ear as data came over the comm on his headset. “They’ve almost finished loading evacuees.”
“Good,” Tahota said.
Ahead of them, people were converging on one of the great elevator columns that would ferry them out to the docking areas at the hub of the space station. She and Raines made their way through the crowd to a lieutenant directing traffic.
“How many more loads do you have scheduled?” Tahota asked.
“This is the last group, ma’am,” the lieutenant said.
Tahota nodded. “Well done.”
As she and Raines took off again, Tahota pushed back the tendrils of hair that had escaped the braids on her head. Her people had implemented a contingency plan for evacuation, using computer databases to dictate what units took what personnel and equipment where, coordinating every last action, from the flow of people down to thousands of minute details that a less prepared force might have missed. But for all that, she still knew this was a desperation move.
Instead of gearing the 300 thousand ships at Onyx for battle or suicide runs, she filled them with Onyx personnel. When ESComm moved in, the evac fleet would move out. The stations were almost empty now, a sparkling cluster of deserted islands in the sea of space.
To “collapse” their sphere, the Trader ships would have to invert into superluminal space, converge on Onyx, drop back into normal space, and re-form the sphere close enough in to attack. Any ISC ships trying to flee would be extracted by ESComm telops. But Tahota suspected most of those telops were untrained providers struggling to monitor a huge volume of space. Their job would be even trickier during the collapse, particularly with the Onyx periphery defenses harassing the ESComm fleet. Whether or not that would distract the telops enough to let any ISC ships slip through undetected depended on how well prepared ESComm was to counter the Onyx periphery defenses.
Tahota had no idea what was happening out on the periphery. Onyx had lost psiberweb contact with its outlying bases. The fragile thread of hope for a successful evacuation depended on the answer to one question: how well had Althor Valdoria kept the secrets of Onyx?
Messages flooded Tahota’s mind, almost all from volunteers reporting for duty. Not everyone had boarded the evac ships; a few hundred thousand were staying behind to help the last strike Onyx would ever make against ESComm. Even knowing the price they would pay, still they volunteered.
The observation bay where Tahota and Raines were headed was in the hull of this cylinder in the gigantic double-barreled habitat that made up New Metropoli. They entered the bay by a trapdoor in the “ground” under their feet and climbed down a ladder to a platform. With the apparent gravity directed out from the axis of the cylinder, the observation bay lay “below” them, a dome of dichromesh glass bubbled out from the hull. Platforms were scattered throughout it, linked by catwalks and ladders. Standing above the transparent bubble, looking out into space, Tahota felt as if she were poised over a great abyss.
As New Metropoli rotated, other habitats came into view, including the Third Lock. The stations were dangerously close to one another, given their immense sizes. On Tahota’s order, her people were drawing them together into as small a volume as possible.
Reports poured into her nodes. In only two hours, almost two billion people had boarded the evac ships, a tribute to the efficiency of a force linked by a web that permeated their lives, even their minds, though most weren’t psions. Tahota rated only two on the Kyle scale, having more empathic ability than 99 in every 100 humans, but not enough to qualify as psion. Even so, the extensive biomech in her body allowed her to develop a symbiosis with the electro-optic webs almost analogous to telepathy. But she could never enter psiberspace, a fact she had always regretted.
Hundreds of people already filled the bay, gathered on platforms and catwalks, and many more were streaming in from other trapdoors. Monitors around the bay showed similar scenes throughout Onyx.
“There’s so many,” Tahota said to Raines as they climbed to the main platform, about halfway down the bubble, near its curving wall.
“It’s the same on every station.” He sent her a copy of a file she also had waiting in her queue. All together, 400 thousand people had stayed behind.
“Gods,” Tahota murmured. “ISC better have enough medals for them all.”
A buzz came from the comm in her wrist gauntlet. Raising her arm, she said, “Tahota here.”
“Admiral, this is Colonel Oppendayer, on the battle cruiser Pharaoh’s Shield. We’ve packed in the last stragglers. The evac ships are ready to go.”
“Good work,” Tahota said. “Launch on my order.”
She called up a continually updating file from one of her spinal nodes. Her biomech web accessed her optic nerve and a display appeared in front of her, a translucent image in the air. When she winked her right eye, the image moved to the right, toward the glass wall of the bubble, leaving her view of the bay unobstructed. The image showed the ESComm sphere enclosing Onyx, two million ships spread over a shell with an area almost eighty light-years square, roughly sixty billion kilometers on average separating vessels. Without a psiberweb, the sphere was far too big for real-time communication among its constituent ships. It could take well over fifty hours for a light signal just to go from a craft to its nearest neighbor.
However, ESComm telops were monitoring the sphere and had so far caught every decoy ship Onyx sent out, extracting them from both real and superluminal space. Soon ESComm would collapse the sphere, bringing it in to only a few million kilometers from Onyx, just far enough out for the ships to dump their velocity on approach to the stations. Tahota already knew they could pull off the maneuver on a much smaller scale; they had used it with vicious success on ISC outposts. But seeing it from a force of two million daunted even her experienced eye.
Raines was listening to his ear comm. “Admiral, we have hookups now to every station and ship. You’re all set.”
“Good work.” Tahota drew in a breath, knowing this was the time she should produce a stirring oration that would inspire the billions waiting to hear her voice. Given her limited oratorical abilities, she would have to make do with a few simple words instead.
She spoke, and her voice carried throughout Onyx. “In a few moments, you will all make history.” It wasn’t
the most original opening line, but it would do. “We expect ESComm to collapse their sphere within five minutes. That’s when we’ll launch the evacs. Gods know, I wish I could promise you will all make it. I can’t do that. But I know of no force better trained to make this work, no force with greater courage or skill.”
A rumble of approval rippled through her listeners. When it quieted, she said, “We know ESComm has state-of-the-art quasis tech for dealing with large accelerations, so we expect it will only take them ten minutes to converge on Onyx, maybe even less.” To collapse the sphere that fast meant the ships had to travel at about a hundred thousand times light speed. The speed itself was easily attained, but the accelerations were daunting. “What that means,” she said, “is that the evac ships will have less than ten minutes to get out.”
Tahota took a breath. “Those of you who volunteered to stay behind should have been assigned fuel bottles by now. With 400 thousand of you, we’ve covered almost every bottle on every station. We all know ESComm can stop our self-destructs now, but try to engage them anyway. They will expect it.”
She glanced at her display. The habitats had moved farther inward, leaving the Lock on the edge of the cluster. “ESComm wants these stations intact. As soon as they’re within range, they’ll go after our electro-optic webs, to control our systems so we can’t blow anything up. After you try to engage the self-destructs, simply surround each of your assigned bottles with a second Klein field.” Whether it would actually be “simple” remained to be seen. It wasn’t a procedure they had ever had reason to test on this scale, given that putting one fuel bottle inside another achieved nothing except making the fuel inaccessible. However, the apparent stupidity of such an action meant ESComm had no reason to have countermeasures for it either.
“You must wait until the last evac ship has inverted out of here before you make the new bottles,” she continued. “Under no circumstances should you start before the evac ships invert.” Looking out at her people, she raised her voice until it resonated throughout the bay. “I am honored by the service of every last one of you. Your courage will be remembered throughout history, when parents tell their children how the heroes of Onyx broke the back of the Eubian Empire.”
They gave a subdued cheer then, from all over Onyx. Tahota swallowed, moved by the bravery of all these men and women who volunteered to follow her despite the enormity of the threat they faced. She saw no sign of regret from anyone.
Colonel Oppendayer spoke over her ear comm. “Admiral, the Trader ships are accelerating in preparation for inversion.”
“Ready on my order for evac launch,” she said.
On her display, the ESComm sphere began to shrink and fade as its ships accelerated inward and then vanished into inversion. Data reeled off in her mind; hundreds of Trader ships inverted, thousands, hundreds of thousands.
“Three ESComm battle cruisers inverted,” Oppendayer said.
Tahota studied the sphere. Only forty-six ESComm vessels remained yet to invert, the largest cruisers, monsters the size of cities.
“Admiral!” Oppendayer said. “We’ve got ESComm Stingers dropping into normal space out at only seventeen million kilometers.”
Damn. They had come in faster than she expected. “Launch the evac!” The last ESComm weapons platforms had yet to invert, but she dared wait no longer.
The evac force surged out from Onyx like spherical light waves diverging from a point source. The bigger the area of space they scattered across, the harder they would be to catch.
Raines cupped his hand to his ear. “Admiral, we’ve got about 10 percent of the ESComm fleet now, at about fifteen million kilometers out from Onyx in a spherical distribution.”
Oppendayer spoke in her ear comm. “The forward wave of our evac force is inverting. Jag starfighters, Wasps—there go the Asps. Cobras—we’ve got a destroyer into inversion.”
At her side, Raines swore. “And we’ve got ESComm Stingers on approach to Onyx. The first wave of their weapons fire will hit the evac in forty-six seconds.”
“Oppendayer, get our ships out of here,” Tahota said.
“We’re 60 percent inverted,” Oppendayer said. “Seventy-two. Eighty. Eighty-eight.”
Her display showed which of her ships hadn’t yet made it: the battle cruisers, still lumbering up to inversion speed. “Come on,” she muttered. “Go!”
Raines said, “About 30 percent of ESComm fleet now on approach to Onyx.”
Three ISC cruisers remained. As Tahota watched, two inverted. Only the largest, Pharaoh’s Shield, remained.
“Oppendayer, get out of here,” Tahota said.
“Shield hasn’t enough speed,” he said.
“Do it anyway.”
“ESComm Annihilator fire incident on Shield,” Raines said.
No answer came from Oppendayer as the cruiser went into quasis. On Tahota’s display, beams of energy highlighted in red hit Pharaoh’s Shield. One deck of the cruiser imploded, only a fraction of the mighty ship’s girth, but a warning of its overtaxed quasis.
“Shield, invert, damn it!” Tahota said. “Now!”
With a ripple of spacetime, the giant cruiser melted out of space, flowing around a singularity in reality. The ship was large enough that the effect wasn’t instantaneous; it poured out of the real universe.
Then it was gone.
As a cheer went up from the bay, Raines spoke to Tahota in a low voice. “Evac fleet launched, Admiral.”
Tahota let out a breath. She raised her voice and directed her next words to the 400 thousand volunteers still at Onyx. “Make your Klein bottles.”
All around her, in the bay and on the monitors, she saw soldiers directing their attention to palmtops, gauntlets, and control bands as they went to work.
At her side, Raines said, “We’ve got 90 percent of the ESComm fleet converging on Onyx.”
Tahota nodded, intent on the data flowing into her spinal nodes. The overlap between the emergence of the ESComm vessels and the departure of the evac ships had been too big. But the evacuation was out of her hands now. All she could do was pray.
Then Raines said, “The ESComm battle cruiser Flagstone is hailing New Metropoli. Admiral Kaliga on comm.”
Tahota stared at him. “Xirad Kaliga? The admiral who commands ESComm?”
“Not that Kaliga,” Raines said. “A cousin, apparently.”
“Put him on,” Tahota said.
A four-meter screen lowered from the ceiling until it hung about five meters in front of Tahota. An image formed on it, a tall officer in a black uniform and knee boots, with carnelian ribbing on his sleeves. His gaunt face had a cold Highton ascetism.
Tahota nodded. “Admiral Kaliga.”
“So,” he said, “The infamous Starjack Tahota.”
Tahota hardly thought she rated “infamous.” She was more known for her organizational skills. Given that those skills were all focused on waging war against ESComm, though, she supposed that could qualify her for infamy from their point of view.
“We accept your terms of surrender,” Tahota said.
“You haven’t much choice,” Kaliga told her. “It’s remarkable, in fact. A base that had 300 thousand ships to defend it now has none.”
“Remarkable,” Tahota agreed.
“Did you really expect that game to work?” he asked. “Tuck your tails and run? We caught the pups, you know.”
She felt a sinking sensation. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No? Can you see the screen behind me?” He motioned to someone outside her field of view, and Tahota’s screen suddenly filled with the image of an ISC frigate tethered to an ESComm destroyer. She recognized the frigate. It was one of her evac ships.
Damn. “Yes. I see it.”
“Watch,” Kaliga said.
Tahota watched. The two ships continued to drift in space.
An ISC officer spoke in her ear comm. “Admiral Tahota, this is Major Byr. I may be able to eavesdrop on the comm chatter
among the ESComm ships. It’s scrambled, but I think I can break their code.”
She didn’t want to speak into her comm with Kaliga watching, so she sent a thought to one of her nodes. Can you link me to Byr?
Yes, it answered. I can transmit to the picoweb in the hull of New Metropoli, which can then link to his console.
Major Byr, can you read me? Tahota thought.
“Loud and clear,” he said.
Get that spy line on their chatter.
Out in space, the captured ISC frigate drifted next to the ESComm destroyer that tethered it. Still nothing—
The explosion made no sound. The frigate simply disappeared in a burst of debris and radiation. The ESComm ship remained unaffected, having gone into quasis.
Tahota clenched her teeth. Next to her, Raines muttered, “So much for Halstaad.”
Kaliga appeared on the screen again. “You were foolish, Admiral, trying to deceive us.”
“You had no cause to destroy that ship,” Tahota said. “You’ve also just violated the Halstaad Code of War.”
Dryly Kaliga said, “You can lodge a complaint with ESComm.”
Major Byr spoke in her ear. “Admiral, according to my sensors, they only have a handful of ISC ships out there.”
Good work, she thought. Byr’s information implied three possibilities: ESComm had destroyed the evac ships, taken them elsewhere—or missed them altogether. She prayed it was the last.
Admiral Kaliga put his hand on his ear and tilted his head. For a moment Tahota feared he was listening to her chatter with Byr. Then he said, “Double Klein bottles, Admiral Tahota? What were you thinking?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I’m sure you do.” He listened on his comm again, then laughed. “Good gods. Hiding Klein bottles inside bigger Klein bottles.” He dropped his hand. “How bizarre.”
“I see.” Tahota let a note of strain enter her voice. It wasn’t hard, given the situation.
“We’ve taken your fuel bottles out of the silly Klein fields you put them in,” he said.