He kept his eyes on the drive status, on the maneuvering thrusters. They were making the transit much faster than usual, and a misfiring maneuvering thruster at the wrong moment could throw them off course and into the swirling nothingness at the edge of the slow zone. He didn’t know whether that would be a good death or not, and he wasn’t interested in finding out.
Without visual telescopy, the thousand-kilometer circle of the gate wouldn’t have been more than a speck on the monitor before they were already through it. Almost before he could register the passage, the Roci’s thrusters fired. The crash couches didn’t hiss so much as click as they snapped to his right and then sharply back again. Alex’s vision clouded a little at the edges, the blood in his brain stirred by the shifts of inertia.
The first thing was enemies. The Roci’s radar was already sweeping the system, her telescopes looking for the drive plumes and her radio array listening for the transponders of Laconian ships. Already five had lit up, but they were identified as Transport Union ships with legitimate business in the system. There weren’t very many points of interest in Laconia system. It was still too new for the spread of human stations that Sol system had. There were some, though. An ice moon around the system’s single gas giant had a scientific outpost on it. One of the inner, rocky planets had been mining titanium for half a decade. Rumor was that Duarte had set aside one of the Ceres-sized dwarf planets as the site of a massive art project that was underway. The first real enemy the Roci found was almost halfway to the empire’s home. A pair of Storm-class destroyers already burning out toward the gate. And then, behind them, close to the planet, the unmistakable heat and energy signature of a Magnetar-class battleship.
Alex pushed his fingers to the control pad at his side and typed out a message.
NO GUARDS AT THE GATE. THEY DIDN’T SEE US COMING.
A few minutes later, Naomi managed a reply. OR THEY COULDN’T IMAGINE ANYONE BEING THIS DUMB.
He would have laughed if he could catch his breath. They’d been at eight gs since they came through. He’d done worse, but he’d been younger when he did it. The Storm, Quinn, Cassius, and Prince of the Face were all behind them, their trajectories making a thin fan pattern. At the gate, the first of the Donnager-class battleships emerged into normal space and angled off on a vector different from their own. The threshold level on Naomi’s model dropped slowly on his screen, measuring mass and energy and safety. The moment it was low enough, the second battleship arrived. The light delay from the ring to Laconia was almost three hours. So everything they were seeing in system was from the past. But it also meant that the closest Laconian ship wouldn’t know the enemy had arrived for a little over an hour and a half, and Laconia proper twice that. Alex didn’t let off the burn. By the time the response came, their fleet needed to be scattered as far through the system as it could be.
If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi’s team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans. Any head-to-head battle was a win for Duarte. So it was better that there not be any. Not until Naomi could pick them.
Alex switched over to visual telescopes and looked back at the receding gate. It was already tiny, but he could make out the drive plumes of the emerging ships when they came through like new stars being born. And behind them, the real stars and the wide, beautiful smear of the galactic plane. The same, more or less, as it always was.
Three hours later, the enemy destroyers killed their drives. Light delay meant that they’d seen the intrusion into their space and reacted, and the evidence of response was only just arriving. Alex wondered if they’d cut drives when they saw the Roci come through or if it had taken a few unexpected drive plumes lighting up their gate to make them nervous. If he’d cared enough, he could have done the math and figured it. He did enough to know that the news of their appearance hadn’t reached Duarte and the Laconian capital and that it would very, very soon.
In his couch, Ian grunted. For a moment, Alex was afraid it was a medical problem. Some people reacted pretty badly to their first extended high-g burn. But then the message came from Naomi.
DROP THE BURN. WE HAVE A MESSAGE.
Alex thumbed the Roci back down to half a g. All around him, he heard the others gasp and sigh. He did a little of the same himself.
“Kefilwe,” Naomi said. “Let’s have that message.”
“Yes, Captain,” Ian said. “To your station?”
“I think we’ll all be interested.”
A woman not much older than Ian appeared on their monitors. She had sharp features, pale lips, and the blue uniform of Laconia, and her forehead was furrowed. Confused. Not alarmed.
“This is Captain Kennedy Wu of the Laconian destroyer Rising Shamal to the unidentified destroyer and its escort. You have made an unauthorized and unscheduled transit into Laconian space. Please cut your drives at once. If you are in need of assistance—”
Someone behind Kennedy cried out in alarm. Alex thought they said It’s the Storm or That’s the Storm. Something along those lines. The Laconian captain’s concern changed to fear and anger in a heartbeat. Alex tried to put himself in her place. The stolen ship that had murdered the pride of her navy, killed the unkillable, and was now showing up where it had no business being. He and Naomi knew all their antimatter supply had gone up with the Tempest, but he watched Captain Kennedy wonder.
“Attention, Gathering Storm. You are to cut engines immediately and surrender control to me. Any attempt to approach Laconia will be treated as hostile and met with immediate and—”
A different voice called out. This time Alex was sure of the words. More contacts. This one’s big. That had probably been one of the Donnager-class ships coming through. Captain Kennedy looked away from the message, checking something on another monitor, and the message ended.
“Well,” Alex said. “I think they noticed us.”
“Got to think High Consul Duarte’s going to be having a distressing day, don’t you?” Ian said.
Naomi pulled up the tactical display. The vastness of Laconia system simplified so much that all their ships pouring through the gate were a single, minuscule yellow dot.
“Orders?” he asked.
“They’re coming for the Storm first,” she said. “Bring us on a slower burn toward the gas giant. And get me a tightbeam to Captain Sellers on the Garcia y Vasquez. We’ll make it look like we’re open for a fight there, and the Neve Avivim can burn like hell to get around like they’re going to make it a pincer. As soon as the destroyers commit to that, we’ll change it.”
“Copy that,” Ian said.
Behind them, another ship came through the gate. Hundreds of drive plumes arced in shallow curves or wide, spreading like dust in a high wind.
The siege of Laconia had begun.
Chapter Forty-Three: Elvi
If she could have, Elvi would have moved her work someplace else. A lab of her own would have been best, her rooms with Fayez a damned close second. But the data was at the university and the Pen, so that was where she went. And at first, she resented it. The breakthrough came when she could finally put aside Cortázar’s work on changing Duarte and get back to her own data.
Her reports from the dead systems felt like letters from a past life. The breathlessness she’d felt upon realizing that there were literally rains of glass on the one semihabitable planet in Charon seemed almost childish now. She looked back at it and saw her own wide-eyed wonder, and even felt an echo of it. The massive crystal flower with filaments running though the petals like vacuum channels, gathering the energy of Charon system’s wildly fluctuating radiation and magnetic fields like daisies collected sunlight, if daisies had been thousands of kilometers wide. She still thought the crystal flowers could be a kind of naturally occurring interstellar life. And the massive green diamond . . .
She looked at that one for a long time before she understood what she was really thinking. Then she took a tablet with the readouts and data to Cortázar’s private lab. She hated being in the room with him, hated having him at her back, but she didn’t have an alternative.
“Yes,” Cara said, when she looked at it with her flat, black eyes. “I know about that.”
Xan was sleeping. Or resting with his eyes closed, which was probably the same thing from where Elvi sat. Cortázar, at his desk, scowled at the two of them—Cara and Elvi, leaning against different sides of the clear plastic cage like girls comparing lunches at university. He went back to eating a sandwich with an air of disapproval.
“Is there anything you can tell me about it?”