Hobbes nodded. The Rix would have tracked the Lynx until 450 seconds ago, when they'd dropped into darkmode. But the coldjets had pushed the Lynx onto a new vector.
The captain had taken a risk with that. The coldjets used waste water and other recyclables for reaction mass, and Zai had shot half the frigate's water supply, and even a good chunk of the emergency oxygen that was kept frozen on the hull. The ship had gotten an additional bit of kick from ejecting the reflective bow armor with high explosives. They were now thousands of kilometers from where the Rix thought they were, but they had almost no recyclables to spare. If they lost their main drive to enemy fire, it would be almost a year before the low-acceleration rescue craft available on Legis could make it out to repair and resupply them. A single breakdown in the recycling chain--bacterial failure, equipment malfunction, the slightest nano mutation--would doom them all.
And despite herself, Hobbes wondered if the Navy would prioritize rescuing the Lynx. With a war on, there'd be plenty of excuses to delay chasing down a stricken warship that was flying toward Rix space at two thousand klicks per second. Laurent Zai was still an embarrassment to the Emperor. They would all make good martyrs.
"Short bursts: one, two, three," the sensor officer counted. "Low power lasers now; they're looking for reflections."
"What are their assumptions?" the captain asked.
Ensign Tyre, who had been moved up to the bridge from Data Analysis, struggled with the limited processor power and her heads-down's unfamiliar physical controls. The silent-running passive sensor array was basically a host of fiber optics running from the hull to the same small, shielded computer the pilots had been complaining about.
"From where they're shooting, they seem to think we've doubled back on them ... at high acceleration."
"High acceleration?" Hobbes murmured. "But we obviously aren't under main drive."
"They're being cautious," Zai said quietly. "They think we may have developed a stealthy drive in the last eighty years, and that we're still bent on ramming them."
Of course, Hobbes thought. Just as the Rix evolved from one war to the next, so did the Imperials. And the Lynx was a new class of warship, only ten absolute years old. It had nothing as exotic as full-power stealthy acceleration, but the Rix didn't know that.
Katherie Hobbes turned the page of the captain's writing tablet, giving herself a clean piece of paper. With a few long strokes, she drew a vector line of the Lynx's passage through the battlecruiser's gravity-cannon perimeter. Writing letters was difficult, but her fingers seemed to know instinctively the curves of gunnery and acceleration.
Over her career, she'd traced the courses of a thousand battles, imagined or historical, on airscreen displays. Her tactical reflexes seemed to guide the pen, rendering the Rix firing pattern as the sensor officer called it.
The two ships' relative velocity was still roughly 3,000 kps--it would take hours of acceleration to change that appreciably. Thus, the Lynx's course was practically a straight line running nearly tangent through the sphere of the gravity cannon's effective range, like a bullet passing through a dribble-hoop ball at a shallow angle. While they were inside the sphere, the Rix could hit them. But the frigate would pass out of range within minutes.
"They've gone to higher power, with a wider aperture," Tyre said.
The Rix weren't firing to kill now; they had reduced their laser's coherence to increase the area they could cover. They were hoping that a low-energy hit would reflect from the Lynx, or cause a secondary explosion that would give her position away.
In effect, they had replaced their sniper's rifle with a flare gun. "They're picking up the pace. I can see a pattern now: a spiral from our old course," Tyre said.
"How fast is the spiral expanding?" Hobbes called, her pen frozen above the paper.
"Outward at about a thousand meters per second."
Hobbes looked at the captain, her spirits lifting. The Rix were sounding a vast area. They had assumed the Lynx was still under heavy acceleration, at multiple gees rather than the micromaneuvers they were actually making.
"The enemy seems to have overestimated us, Hobbes," Zai said.
"Yes, sir."
Hobbes turned to another fresh page of paper, filled it with a line spiraling outward and dissected by radials from the center: a spiral grid.
Thinking that the Lynx was still under her main drive, the Rix were casting a wide net. But the firing rate of the battlecruiser's laser would have an absolute limit. In order to search such a huge volume, they necessarily had to reduce the grain of their search grid; the Rix net had wide holes in it. If the Lynx were broadside to the battlecruiser, the low-res search might have picked up the two-kilometer-long craft. But the frigate was bow-on, her hull only two hundred meters across from the Rix's perspective. And with the bow armor ejected, only naked black hullalloy remained to reflect the laser.
Hobbes drew a small circle in the circular grid, a minuscule gnat slipping through the web of a spider looking for fat flies.
"They're going to miss us, sir."
"Yes, Hobbes. Unless they're very lucky."
First Engineer
"One hundred ninety-nine. Two hundred."
"All right, shut up!" First Engineer Watson Frick shouted to the dogged ensign. "Keep the count going, but silently. Let me know when you get to eight hundred." Frick's skin tingled as if he were under a sonic shower. The ensign had been in positive territory--counting up--for two minutes. No matter how imprecise the count might be, the Lynx was certainly within range of the enemy's capital weapons by now. At any moment, a gravity beam might swing across the ship and mangle them all. They had at least another six hundred seconds before they were out of danger.
Frick's side still throbbed--yes, a few ribs were definitely broken-- as he regarded the hastily assembled armor plates.
The last piece was in place. The hullalloy shielding was spread across the cargo area to maximize coverage of the ship. There were seams, even naked gaps, but he couldn't seal those without using cutting torches rated for hullalloy. And that would show up on the Rix sensors like an SOS beacon.
The problem was, the plates were practically floating free, held to 91 the bow hull only by stronglines and monofilament. Engineer Frick had counted on using the recyclables stored in the cargo area to pack the hull sections into place. But the containers were all empty, the water ejected.