The drone was under automation now, but the captain wanted Marx at the controls when it made its approach.
"Don't lose that craft, Marx," Hobbes said. "We're short enough on drones as it is."
Marx rubbed his eyes. "No, ExO Hobbes. But I'd better get to my canopy."
He rose slowly. "Sir," he added shakily, giving a small bow to the captain before he left the command bridge.
When the master pilot was gone, Gunner Wilson spoke.
"Sir, it can't be a warship. It's too big. It would dwarf anything we've seen from the Rix before."
"It's bigger than a Laxu colony ship," Hobbes said. "And that's the biggest powered craft the Empire's ever encountered."
"It might be nothing," Captain Zai admitted. "Part of a lightsail from their original acceleration. Even a section of the receiver array, something that was damaged and removed years ago."
Hobbes nodded. It could be a planetoid for that matter, its course purely coincidental. But that seemed unlikely.
The object's approach course almost perfectly bisected those of the battlecruiser and the assault ship that had attacked the Empress' palace.
Whatever it was, the object had to be Rix.
Commando
H_rd felt a tapping on her face.
She pulled off the hood of the ablative suit and raised her head above the surface, shaking snow from her head. The repeater that had summoned her scuttled away as she sat up.
The cold had thoroughly penetrated her body. Rix commandos felt pain, but rarely longer than was necessary for their bodies to deliver a warning. After the long fall through frigid air and the hours buried in the snow, however, h_rd felt ice and agony in every muscle. The cuts on her face had scarred, and her broken nose felt bloated. Even her hypercarbon joints were stiff.
She let her body temperature rise. An increase in heat would return some of her flexibility. The Imperials' thermal imagers might find her more easily, but her whereabouts would be obvious soon enough. The summons from the little repeater meant that Alexander was only a few minutes from effecting its takeover of the entanglement facility. Therefore, h_rd was about to be rescued. A host of small craft under the compound mind's control waited on the other side of the wire, ready to assist in her extraction. The commando's rescue wasn't a humanitarian gesture on Alexander's part, however. Her exit would merely be a diversion.
So, the messier the better.
The repeater scuttled away as she stretched her muscles. The path the small machine took indicated the direction from which the attack would come. H_rd moved after it, again crawling with an interrupted 159 gait to conceal herself from motion sensors. But she moved faster now, a little carelessly. Alexander wanted the Imperials to respond to her departure with main force to distract them from the movements of the repeaters. The propagation of the compound mind's control was now entering a critical stage.
Over the last six hours, the gospel of Alexander had spread among the repeaters, each convert adding another to the fold every few minutes. As in any geometric progression, the number of repeaters controlled by Alexander was arcing upward dramatically. Very soon, more than half of the repeater colony would be in motion. Even the Imperials were apt to realize that something was up.
Unless something dramatic occupied their attention.
Suddenly, shooting stars appeared on the horizon before h_rd. Arcs of light reached into the sky. Flashes emanating from just below the horizon showed where land mines were detonating. Concussions and the ripping howls of autocannon followed almost twenty seconds later: The wire was four kilometers away. H_rd stood and began running toward the wire, headed straight for the conflagration. A surge of joy filled her. This was the most dangerous part of the mission, but it was good to finally stretch her legs.
The sky came alive, each luminous missile distinct in the cold, clear air.
The wire had come under attack by Alexander's ragtag armada, a mob of automated flying machines: weather dirigibles, bird migration monitors, ground effect crop dusters, solar-reflector kites. All of Legis's air-traffic spotters had disappeared from their stations a few days before, and the small percentage that had survived the perilous trip to the arctic were also in the attacking host. A few dislodged environmental satellites arced across the sky to crash into hullalloy-armored emplacements. Even a handful of walking and flying toys that h_rd had salvaged from aircraft luggage joined in, feinting to draw fire from the wire's guns and sacrificing themselves to trip booby traps, monofilament snares, and land mines.
The motley flotilla posed little danger to the facility, of course. Very few of the vehicles assaulting the wire were a match for even a single militia soldier. But the Imperial defenses were set to maximum response, alert for any attack on the facility since Rana Harter's escape with h_rd. The wire's arsenal was pouring thousands of heavy-metal rounds per minute into kites made of mylar, launching missiles the size of aircars at weather balloons, expending cluster mines on children's toys.
H_rd ran toward the melee, pulling her Rix blaster from her mission pack. She'd hardly used the weapon since the firefight in the palace, conserving its powerful charges for when she would need them most.
The recon flyer was on the other side of the wire, under Alexander's control and waiting for the defenses to exhaust themselves against their figmentary attackers. The wire was designed to deliver a short, punishing blow, delaying an enemy until reinforcements arrived. Its supplies of ordnance were limited.
H_rd's scanner set up a wail. She swept it across the horizon to locate the first of these reinforcements on their way: a pair of ground-effect vehicles racing toward her from the central barracks of the facility.
The commando changed direction, running parallel to the wire now. For this first trap to work, she had to get to the far side of the snowdrift landing zone. H_rd reduced her blaster to a diversionary power setting and dropped to a firing position.
She took aim and fired a long stream of random photons at the GEVs, the blaster sweeping across the EM spectrum to suggest a wide array of weapons. She checked the scanner.
The hovercraft spotted her, and changed course, angling toward her. More vehicle signatures appeared behind them on her scanner. It was working. The Imperials thought that she had come through the embattled wire. Believing that the attacking force had penetrated the terrific fire zones of the perimeter, they would be worried.
H_rd's sharp eyes now caught a flicker of light from another sector of the facility. Another, smaller contingent of Alexander's conscript army was attacking the wire from a new direction. Overall, Alexander had committed four separate groups to divide the defenders' resources. The other three were utterly insignificant, but perhaps the Imperials would outthink themselves and assume that the true attack was a feint.