The rear end of the squadron was paralyzed with indecision; the scenario was changing far too quickly.
On the other side of the blazing manifold, the foremost flockers had quickly spotted the missing enemy warship, and declared themselves to be their own decision-making entity. The Lynx was a bare two hundred meters away from the manifold's crumbling center. The flockers' maximum acceleration was three thousand gees. From a standstill, they could have hit the target almost instantly. But they were flying past the enemy prime too quickly. With a relative velocity of more than one percent of the speed of light, no craft the size of a flocker would have sufficient reaction mass to reverse its course.
The forward decision-entity sent desperate messages back through the manifold, giving the squadron the enemy prime's new position. But the signals were overwhelmed by the radiation spewing from the abandoned energy sinks, and within a thousandth of a second, three thousand more flockers hurtled uselessly past the Lynx.
Finally, with a firm majority in possession of the facts, the growing farside squadron intellect solved the communications puzzle, firing a coordinated set of message beams that reached the last few hundred flockers just in time.
Most of these drones had no chance to reach the enemy prime, even accelerating at three thousand gees, but a few of those who had spread out to provide parallax found a vector, and barreled through the dissipating manifold toward their target.
Most were vaporized by the still seething energies of the manifold, or missed, their reaction systems destroyed before they could line up on target. But seven of the small machines slipped through random dark spots in the manifold, and hurtled--burned, blinded, all but dead--into the belly of the Lynx.
Pilot
Master Pilot Marx glared at the images in his second sight, his frustration growing.
He had shifted his viewpoint to one of the ramscatter drones, which was currently hurtling toward the sandcaster. The collision course looked good, but the view left everything to be desired.
The perspective was cobbled together using data from all over Marx's little fleet. The dim senses of the ramscatter itself were on passive mode to keep the Rix from spotting it. The other drones were bathing the sandcaster in active sensory pulses, to help keep their sister craft on track. Marx's scout drone, his only craft with decent sensors, added its passive view from 5,000 kilometers distance. The light-speed delays afflicting all this data ranged between two and five milliseconds, more than enough to muddle things when attempting a hundred-meter-per-second collision between two tiny spacecraft.
The Lynx's onboard expert software was supposedly compensating for the delays, which varied continuously as the drones accelerated. But the view looked wrong to Marx.
Synesthesia was shaky. Not with the jittering frame of a helmet camera, but with a shimmer, like the shudders that afflict eyes that have stayed awake all night and are facing the morning sun. Marx felt hung over and queasy in the ramscatter's viewpoint, unsure of reality. He wished he could use active sensors, but if the scout gave off any EM this close to the battlecruiser, the Rix would target it in seconds.
Marx swallowed, feeling dizzy. His scout spun, tumbling as it approached the battlecruiser. He checked the speed of the rotation. That was it: The spin of the scout matched the period of the screen jitter.
Marx swore. He had intentionally tumbled the scout to make it appear dead. Now he was paying for it with this sickening, shifting second vision. Why wasn't the damned expert software compensating? Perhaps the Lynx's shared processors were simply overwhelmed.
Should he risk righting the scout? A quick blast from a docking jet would do the trick. But any activity from the large scout craft would draw the Rix's attention, and it was his only link to the front line.
Marx ordered himself to stop whining. He had once flown a craft the size of a fingernail in a raging hailstorm, and on another occasion had lost all depth perception in a rotary wing dogfight with a half-second roundtrip delay. This jittering viewpoint was nothing. He synchronized his breathing to the phasing blur of his canopy, and forced himself to ignore the growing nausea deep in his stomach.
The ramscatter drone shot toward its target. At least the bulbous surfaces of the sandcaster provided a clear image. Marx piloted the little drone in short bursts, trying not to alert the Rix to its presence.
The trajectory felt right. It looked as if he was lined up on the sand-caster, ready to burst the fat canisters.
Marx's view improved as he closed. He could just make out the cross-hatching of the fragmentation pattern.
Five seconds to impact. Suddenly, a flare of projectile fire blazed in his peripheral vision. The canopy view twisted, pulling apart into two images as if his eyes were going crossed.
In the dizzying maelstrom of the disintegrating view, Marx saw new enemy craft: several blackbody monitor drones. Driveless and silent, they had been drifting along with the battlecruiser, utterly invisible until now. They spewed depleted uranium slugs--at a rate of ten thousand per minute, his software estimated--at the ramscatters.
His view whirled. All his drones with active sensors had been destroyed. Marx fought to control the ramming ship, but nothing on the canopy's screens made sense. With an effort of will, he pulled his hands from the control surface, searching for meaning in the storm of light before him.
Suddenly, a fist seemed to strike him in the stomach. A decomr pression alarm sounded!
The Lynx was taking hits. The flockers were here.
Gravity in the canopy spun for a moment, a further disorientation. Acid filled his throat. The disjunction between visuals and his inner ear was finally too great. Marx pitched forward in his canopy, and vomited between his knees.
He looked up, bile still in his mouth, and saw that he had missed. His ramscatter drone had flown past the sandcaster.
Marx struggled to bring it around for another pass, but the long, hard acceleration revealed it to the Rix monitor drones, which raked it with fire.
His ramscatters were destroyed, and Marx's synesthesia view of the distant battle dimmed to shadows and extrapolations.
Then a host of explosions rolled through the Lynx, and Marx realized that they were all dead.
Executive Officer
Katherie Hobbes saw the collision icon go bright orange, but the sound of the klaxon hadn't time to reach her before the shock waves struck.
Her status board flared, red sweeping up through the decks as the flockers plowed through hullalloy and hypercarbon like paper. The shriek of decompression came from a dozen audio channels.