The airscreen switched to the current transluminal returns from the Rix battlecruiser. Its main engine had swung ninety degrees, pursuing the Lynx now rather than braking to match Legis XV, letting the black-body drones drift on.
Fortunately, the larger battlecruiser was the slower ship. It could make no more than six gees.
Hobbes regarded the airscreen. The Lynx was pushing hard to put distance between herself and the battlecruiser, also headed perpendicular to the original Rix line of approach. They would have nineteen minutes of acceleration under their belts before they reached their closest passage by the Rix warship.
The math was easy: nineteen hundred seconds at twelve gees advantage, and a minute of float. Two hundred and twenty thousand kilometers of breathing room.
The blackbody monitors couldn't touch them out here. Intended to be absolutely silent, they had no drives--the Rix had effectively abandoned them. But the battlecruiser's chaotic gravity weapons had a much greater range. And without an energy-sink manifold to shunt the energy into space, the Lynx was terribly vulnerable.
The flag bridge underwent another shudder, and the captain's cup of tea traveled across the table toward Hobbes, rattling as if carried by a ghost who badly needed a night of sleep.
The apparition passed.
"At least she's not optimized for offense," the captain said.
The officers nodded. The blackbody drones and their ammo supply must have taken up space normally reserved for offensive weapons. But it wouldn't take much to hurt the Imperial warship. And the Rix captain knew the Lynx had dumped its energy sink. The manifold was still glowing behind them, spreading like an exhausted supernova.
"They could be in turnaround," First Pilot Maradonna suggested. "With no receiver array, they can't contact the compound mind. Maybe they've given up."
"So why come after us?" Tyre asked.
"They could be angling out of the system," Second Pilot Anderson argued. "They'd want to swing away from Legis's orbital defenses."
Hobbes shook her head at this wishful thinking. "If they were abandoning the mission, they'd gather those drones first. But they came straight after us. They want our blood."
"Which is perhaps a sign of our success," Zai added. "Their array is destroyed. They want the Lynx's carcass as a consolation prize."
Hobbes sighed. Captain Zai had never been one to paint success in rosy terms.
"They might be buying time to fabricate another receiver array," Anderson said.
"They couldn't possibly," the first engineer interjected. "The thing was a thousand klicks across! It'd take months and megatons of spare matter."
"Ten minutes left," Zai said. The battlecruiser's gravity weapons would soon be in range. "Perhaps this discussion of Rix motivation can wait."
His fingers moved, and the real-time view shifted into the future, using current vectors to extrapolate the moment of closest passage. "Very soon, we'll have less than a light-second between ourselves and a pair of terawatt chaotic gravity cannon," he said.
"Assuming she's mounting normal weapons, sir," Anderson said.
"So far, we haven't seen the usual mix. Certainly not of drones. The battlecruiser was outfitted for making contact with the compound mind and nothing else. Perhaps it wasn't equipped with offensive weapons at all."
"Let us assume the worst," Zai said.
"We've still got all four photon cannon, sir," Second Gunner Wilson said. "They can do a fair amount of damage even at a light-second's range. If we get the first shots in, we could disable--"
Captain Zai shook his head, cutting the man off.
"We're not firing at the Rix," he said.
Eyebrows raised across the room.
"We're running silent."
Hobbes smiled to herself. The Lynx's officers had committed themselves to the captain's initial plan for so long--had been so ready to bring their attack to the battlecruiser at any cost--that they hadn't realized the obvious: With the receiver destroyed, the Lynx had completed its mission.
Survival was again a priority.
"Shut everything down," Hobbes explained. "No sensors, no weapons charged, go to freefall conditions--total silence."
"The only activity will be coldjets: to keep ourselves aligned head-on with the Rix," Captain Zai added. "Without a heat-sink manifold, our z-axis profile is less than two hundred meters across. We'll be a needle in a haystack."
"Head-on," Gunner Wilson whispered. "You know, sir, the forward armor is reinforced for meteoroid collisions. Depleted uranium and a microlayer of neutronium. We could even take a hit and survive."
Zai shook his head. "We'll eject the forward armor." Wilson and the others recoiled. Hobbes had to sympathize. When the captain had first explained this idea to her, she was convinced he had finally cracked. Now that she'd thought about it, his plan made sense. But it still had a ... perversity about it that mere logic couldn't shake.
First, the energy-sink manifold, now their armor. For the second time in this battle, they were throwing away their defenses.
The captain remained silent, as if enjoying the shock his pronouncement had created.
So Hobbes again explained: "That armor is reflective. If they search for us with wide-focus laser fire, they'll pick us up as a big red spot."
"We could paint it black," someone suggested after a moment's thought.
"Not under high acceleration, and not in time," the first engineer said flatly.
The logic of the captain's idea slowly settled over the room, like some dermal drug sinking into the skin.
No weapons. No defenses. Just the blackness of space between the Lynx and the enemy. A high-stakes gamble. Hobbes saw the discomfort on the officers' faces as they struggled to accept the plan. They were safer running silent, it was undeniable, but they would be relinquishing control of their fate to luck alone. It offended their sensibilities. They were the crew of a warship, not passengers on some commercial shuttle.
Hobbes decided to interrupt the frustration filling the room. She had to give them something to do.
"Perhaps we could fill the forward cargo compartments with some protection against chaotic gravitons. Do we have any heavy metals?" Hobbes asked.
After a moment, Marx nodded. "The minesweeper fragmentation drones use depleted uranium. Not much, but it's something."