Since the attempt on his life, Zai had recognized that loyalty was a variable trait in the Navy. On gray Vada, rebellion against authority was rarely contemplated, but a mutiny had happened here on the Lynx. And it had been Katherie Hobbes, a Utopian by birth, who had stopped it. In the red work lights, her surgical beauty betrayed the values of her hedonistic homeland. But Hobbes was his best officer as well as his ExO.
She would make a good captain one day.
"Sir!" the sensor officer shouted, pulling Zai from his reverie.
"Report."
"I'm getting reflections from the Rix fire!"
"You mean they've hit something?" Hobbes asked.
Zai narrowed his eyes. The Rix search pattern had passed beyond the Lynx minutes ago; its spiral course had taken it a hundred thousand kilometers away. "Yes, ma'am." The man bent back to his headsdown display.
Tyre spoke up. "I'm running an analysis now."
"Old sand?" Zai suggested to Hobbes.
"Not out here," she said. Zai nodded. They had put a lot of distance between themselves and their original intercept point. "Maybe it's old Legis's orbital defenses."
"That would be fantastic luck," Zai said. "If they think they've spotted us, we're home free."
But Hobbes shook her head. Zai knew from experience what the look on her face meant: There was a thought half-formed in her mind, an unhappy one.
"I'm getting oxygen, hydrogen, some carbon," said the sensor officer.
"The recyclables!" Hobbes cried. "That's what they were looking for. Why they went so wide with their search. They weren't looking for us. They wanted to find the reaction mass from our coldjets."
Zai closed his eyes. Of course. Spreading out from the Lynx was a spray of H2O and organic waste, the ejecta from their stealthy acceleration. It would be spread into a huge cloud of ice crystals by now. Boiled by a laser, it would be much easier to spot than a silent star-ship. The Rix would eventually calculate its mass and vector.
And by extrapolation, they would know the vector of the Lynx.
"We seem to have left footprints, Executive Officer," he said.
"Aye, sir," Hobbes answered quietly.
"They've gone to a more focused beam, sir," the sensor officer reported. "They're still sounding the ice. Tracking it."
"We need to maneuver again, Hobbes," Zai said. "And at better than one-twentieth gee."
"I'll warn Frick, sir." Hobbes activated the forward gunnery corn-point and sent the runner into motion.
The captain sighed. He would have to walk a fine line between two dangers. The Rix would extrapolate their position before the Lynx passed out of range. If Zai let the frigate coast, the enemy's laser would find them, followed by their gravity cannon. But if he maneuvered too quickly, the unsecured armor plates would roll through the frigate like a gravity ghost through a ship of glass.
"What's the strongest part of the cargo area, Hobbes?"
"The forewall, sir," Hobbes answered without hesitation. "It's exterior-grade hullalloy; there's vacuum on the bowside."
"So we'll do the least damage if we thrust sternward."
"Yes, sir. But that only changes our position on the z-axis. We're facing directly toward the Rix."
"We need to turn, then. A one-twentieth-gee yaw thrust."
"Any change in yaw and we expose more area to the Rix, sir."
"Yes, Hobbes. We'll turn back as quickly as possible."
"And I'm not sure how much acceleration we can get, sir. We're pretty low on recyclables."
Zai thought quickly. They needed the greatest possible push from the least possible mass. Thus, they needed maximum velocity.
"We'll use the drone launcher. Not the main rail's magnetics"--the Rix would spot that in a second--"the deadman drone. The highest velocity we can get out of it."
Hobbes whistled.
"Without artificial gravity to dampen the reaction? That will cause a jolt, sir."
"A jolt is what we need, Hobbes. And a mechanical event won't show up on the Rix sensors."
Hobbes nodded, understanding. The deadman launcher was designed for a ship that had lost power, its systems fail ing. The launch rail stored its energy mechanically, like a huge crossbow made of wound carbon. "I'll send another runner to the first engineer, Captain. There'll be decompression up there."
Zai nodded, his fingers flexing with frustration. They had only minutes to "make this maneuver work, but using runners to convey mes 97 sages would create at least half a minute of lag-time each way. Any change in plan would catch the engineer off guard.
Of all Zai's first officers, Engineer Frick most rarely worked from the bridge. The Lynx's captain and engineer didn't know each other's thinking. The words of the war sage came unbidden into Zai's mind. A true subordinate is an extension of yourself.
He came to a decision.
"Hobbes, tell Frick you'll be coming forward."
"Sir?"
"We don't know how this is going to work out. More maneuvers may be required. I need you there."
"To do what, sir?"
"To read my mind."
Commando
The sensation of freefall was strangely comforting.
In their orbital homes, the Rix generally slept in zero-gee. Except for the rush of frigid air, h_rd might have been waking from some dark dream. But this was real: She was falling toward her death.
She could see the entanglement facility in the distance, a concentric pattern of lights against the dull sheen of starlit snow. Somewhere in that pattern, a hundred kilometers away, was the landing zone Alexander had prepared for her, but it was much too far away. The world below her was terribly dark. She felt absolutely alone, and thought of Rana, probably still asleep in the cave. Who would bring her food now? Who would mourn her death?
Interrupting her thoughts, the scream of the recon flyer passed her, its running lights a red blur. With its fans inverted, it was falling faster than she. But it was twenty meters away. The machine had very limited senses, nothing that could spot her, even with Alexander at the controls. But h_rd remembered the sensitive thermal imagers that the Imperials had used to hunt her and Rana. She closed her eyes and willed her body temperature upward. Almost immediately, she felt acid in her stomach and a dryness in her mouth, a whirring of the turbine in her chest: the sensations of a heightened metabolism.