"Frick, First Pilot: Save us," the captain ordered.
"Aye, aye, sir."
Hobbes felt herself growing heavy as the Lynx's faltering gravity strained to mask their deceleration. The whine of the singularity alarm slowly lessened as Frick brought it out of its critical cycle.
Katherie watched in amazement as debris scattered from the battlecruiser. She couldn't believe the huge ship had disintegrated so quickly. A thousand Rixwomen had died in seconds. And her own fate had been recalled from the precipice just as suddenly.
The captain leaned back into the shipmaster's chair. Hobbes saw for the first time how white his face had become, how tired he looked. Zai's grim expression had seemed so fatal; now the old man looked merely exhausted.
"They made their decision rather more quickly that I expected," he said to her. "Given the light-speed delay, it must have taken about ten seconds for the Rix commanders to decide. They must have been ready, in case we discovered a way to threaten the object."
Hobbes could only say, "You knew what they would do?"
"As I said: When a living god is at stake, self-destruction is the only honorable choice."
Hobbes tried to wrap her mind around his words. He'd been playing chicken, for heaven's sake, but. . . "Why did they self-destruct, sir?"
"They were too distant to stop us, but too close to veer off," Zai I said. "This was the correct moment to initiate our self-destruction, because it left them no choice but their own. Now that they're gone, we don't have to destroy the object."
Hobbes looked at the sparkling screen. She'd never seen anything so ... final. "But all those women." "The Rix think nothing of their own lives, Hobbes. Only their minds matter to them. They've risked war to create this new breed of god. They couldn't let it die. No price was too high."
She swallowed. "I'm not sure, sir. If I were them, I'd have a backup plan."
Zai managed to smile, but she saw the relief in his eyes. He had by no means been sure how this would turn out. "What sort of plan, Hobbes?"
"I don't know, sir," she said quietly. "But they wouldn't leave us free to capture their living god, would they?"
Zai spread his hands. "The situation gave them the choice of two evils, I suppose. They knew that we willing to die for our faith as much as they. We weren't bluffing, Hobbes." Then he laughed tiredly. "But we seem to be alive. Perhaps their faith is stronger than ours."
The words stung Katherie. Facing death, her mind had been consumed by options, by ways to avoid the Lynx's fate. She had even considered treachery.
She was not worthy to wear this uniform.
"Sir," she said.
"Yes, Hobbes?"
"There's something I should tell you. I don't deserve--" she started, then swallowed. "When we were about to--"
"Sir!" interrupted Tyre.
"Report."
"Hidden in the battlecruiser's debris, sir. I'm getting spherical shapes against the background radiation!"
The captain swore. "Blackbody drones."
The Rix had indeed had a backup plan.
Hobbes took over. "Pilot! Six gees on a quick slope, lateral to the battlecruiser's last vector. Now!"
The bridge crew were wrenched by torque as the ship spun to align her main drives. A gunner was thrown from his station into the 221 airscreen pit, skidding through the false sights of synesthesia as if sliding down a hill. Shit, thought Hobbes. The artificial gravity generator was growing chancier by the minute.
And the bridge was almost dead center of the Lynx. What was happening at the extremes, where that quick yaw was no doubt snapping like a whip? Hobbes punched through internal views. She saw crew thrown against walls and ceilings. More casualties. But no decompression--the AG was prioritizing structural integrity.
Then the drive fired, and she was pushed back into her chair.
As her weight increased, Hobbes found herself gasping for breath. Gravity diagnostics were blank, and white dots had appeared at the edge of her primary vision. She wondered if the gravity generators had failed altogether. The Lynx Al would normally intervene in such a situation and shut the drive, but with the frigate taking hits from enemy fire, the software would blindly accept dangerous acceleration.
Hobbes could get no response from diagnostics. Processor capacity was falling: The Lynx's silicon/phosphorus columns were succumbing to the heavy gees. Giant hands pushed against her chest. Without dampening, everyone on the bridge would be unconscious in twenty seconds. Six uncorrected gees would injure and kill hundreds.
But hurtling silently toward the Lynx were more blackbody drones, ready to unleash their incredible firepower at a ship whose armor had been stripped to the minimum.
Hobbes's fingers struggled to gesture as the pressure on her body increased. She finally found a reading from a mechanical accelerom-eter buried deep in the executive officer's interface. Three gees uncorrected, and climbing.
Something was very wrong.
"Cut the burn to two gees," she cried. One of the pilots lifted a heavy hand to execute the order.
Suddenly, the bridge was filled with blazing shapes. Bright traces of light whipped past Hobbes, burning themselves into her eyes. Anvil booms broke against her ears, and her nose filled with the foundry smell of superheated metal. Hobbes heard human screams amid the cries of decompression and rending hypercarbon.
Then the hail of projectiles ended.
Hobbes felt her weight still growing. She looked across the bridge airscreen. Two gunners and all three pilots were torn and bloody. Caught in the sudden fusillade of blackbody drone fire, they'd been torn to pieces.
"Captain!" she cried. Zai's head had rolled back, his eyes opened dully. There was no blood on his face. Of course, Hobbes realized. His artificial limbs were strong, but the acceleration must be tearing up the delicate interface between the prosthetics and his sundered body.
All around her, the Lynx was trembling. If the AG failed completely, six gees would crumple the frigate like paper. Hobbes's accelerometer read four-point-four. Processor capacity was dropping like a stone, as the frigate's columns of silicon and phosphorus shattered under their own suddenly immense weight. Synesthesia grew blurrier by the second. It was only a matter of time before gestural commands were useless.
Hobbes strained to pull herself from her chair. There were manual drive cutoffs all through the ship, human-operated. There was one a few meters from her, among the ragdoll corpses at the first pilot's station.