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  “I haven’t got it completely worked out. About those sensors…”

  “What sort, Captain?”

  “Thermal. We can’t very well bounce radar off them, not without alerting them that we’re still alive. That means we track them passively. Wide-angle thermal arrays for initial acquisition, then a scope to get up close and personal.”

  “I’ll get a party on it, sir.”

  “If my plan is going to work, we need fire control.”

  “What are we going to shoot?”

  “SMs. Battery One intact?”

  Sotheby nodded. “I doubt we’ll be able to hit anything, but we can probably launch.”

  “That is all we need,” Mark replied.

  The idea that was nagging at him was not the best one he’d ever had. In fact, it was the sort of thought that comes to a man only in the most dire of straits.

  Which was as good a definition as any of their situation since about thirty seconds after they launched the Trojan Horse.

  #

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Lisa Rykand’s eyelids twitched as she woke from a nightmare. She couldn’t remember the dream itself, but the residue of dread it left behind was a memory from her distant past. When she was seven, her family lived in an old, drafty townhouse in London. Somehow she’d gotten the idea that a monster lurked in her closet. She would wake each morning, shivering, not from the cold, but from fear.

  The monster was back.

  A hand shook her shoulder and a gentle voice cooed in her ear. “Time to wake up, Lisa. Open your eyes.”

  Strange, she thought. The monster has a pleasant voice.

  She opened her eyes. Above her was the face of Dr. Carr. He was staring down at her. Behind him were the blue painted bulkheads of sickbay.

  “Doctor, what am I doing…?”

  She didn’t finish the question. It was then that memory came flooding back and she knew that the monster that disturbed her dreams this time was real. Mark was dead and he would remain so for the rest of her life. What was she to do?

  “How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

  “Depressed, angry, lost,” she answered. “How should I feel?”

  “Do you want something to calm you?”

  “Can you keep me drugged for the next fifty years?”

  His professional smile was ruined by the sad look in his eyes. “I’m afraid not.”

  “How long did I sleep?” she asked, lifting her arms to stretch and yawn. If it hadn’t been for the deadness in her heart, she would have felt almost human.

  “Eighteen hours. We had you slated for the full twenty-four, but the Captain wants to speak with you.”

  “Captain Cavendish? What about?”

  “He will tell you. Do you think you can dress yourself, or should I have an orderly help you?”

  “I can dress myself, doctor.”

  “All right. Call if you need me.” With that he departed, and activated the privacy field that caused the walls of the small cubicle around her bed to turn milky white.

  Lisa pulled herself erect and floated to the washbasin. Being in microgravity, she made no attempt to turn on the faucet. For one thing, it wouldn’t have worked. Instead, she reached into the drawer where a wet sponge was housed. She washed the stink of yesterday’s stress away and brushed her teeth. Someone had retrieved a clean uniform from her cabin and a few items of makeup, which she almost never wore aboard ship. She decided that today would be an exception. She lightly powdered her face, applied eye liner, and lipstick, then slipped into the shipsuit and cinched the belt at her waist. She combed the tangles out of her hair before putting on her slippers and found that she felt as human as possible. Under the circumstances.

  She checked her appearance carefully in the mirror screen. Today would be a bad day. Everyone she met would feel sorry for her, and pity would flow like a river.

  She turned off the polarizer, returning the cubicle walls to their transparent state, before venturing out into sickbay’s common area. One of the orderlies glanced up and gave her that look. She pretended to ignore it.

  “I’m ready to be released, Doctor.”

  “Need an escort?”

  “No. Where is the captain?”

  “In his day cabin.”

  “Thank you for making me sleep. It kept me from thinking about… yesterday.”

  “If you have any problems sleeping tonight, come see me,” the medical man ordered. “Now, get along. We don’t want to keep the commanding officer waiting.”

  Captain Cavendish’s day cabin was on Delta Deck, on the other side of the ship. Lisa navigated to the starboard shaft, up one deck, and then around the passageway to where a Marine guard stood anchored to the deck beside a hatch labeled COMMANDING OFFICER.

  “Captain asked to see me,” she told the guard. “Commander Lisa Rykand.”

  “You can go in, Ma’am,” he said, keying the control that retracted the hatch. It might have been her imagination, but he seemed to give her that look as well.

  Lisa floated inside. Cavendish was strapped into his chair behind the desk. He directed her to take one of the two chairs in front. Lisa noted that he didn’t appear to have slept.

  When she was properly anchored, Captain Cavendish regarded her for long seconds without saying anything. His expression shifted through a jumble of emotions. Something was wrong. The protocol for these occasions was well established. A captain should strive for the delicate balance of sadness and sympathy perfected over the centuries by funeral directors, the better to calm the grieving subordinate. Instead, he seemed agitated.

  “Captain, you wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, Commander, I did.”

  “Is something wrong?” It seemed a particularly inane thing to ask after yesterday.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said. “I even thought about not telling you. However, you have a right to know.”

  “Know what, sir?”

  “Your husband is alive.”

  The words were delivered in what seemed to be plain Standard. Even so, she had trouble comprehending them. For an instant, she thought Cavendish was playing a particularly cruel practical joke, but to what purpose?

  “Alive, sir? How do you know?”

  “Communication from Sasquatch. The Trojan Horse exploded almost immediately after they launched it. The cruiser was badly damaged and a lot of people were killed. Commander Rykand wasn’t one of them.”

  “Was his name on some sort of a list? Could it be a mistake?”

  “No mistake. He is the senior officer aboard. He has taken command. The message was in his voice.”

  Mark? Alive? The dread she had been holding at bay vanished as though a switch had been flipped. Her heart raced and she could hardly breathe. She wanted to scream and to leap out of her chair and dance for joy. Only military decorum and her seat belt prevented her from doing any of those things. Otherwise, she might have injured herself when she crashed into the overhead.

  Then a suspicion began to grow, at first tempering and then engulfing her joy. Something was wrong. Cavendish did not seem to share her excitement. It didn’t take much thought to deduce why.

  She frowned. The words, when she finally got her mouth under control, were bitter. “Mark’s alive, but he isn’t going to stay that way, is he?”

  #

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence as it was the Captain’s turn to search for words. Finally, he said, “I don’t want to give you false hope. He’s alive, but they are in a desperate situation. They have fewer than thirty survivors trapped aboard a hurtling mass of scrap metal. They are in pure ballistic flight directly into the heart of the most powerful Broan-controlled system of which we are aware. Their engines are gone, they can’t maneuver, and they damned well can’t take to the lifeboats.”

  Lisa nodded. “And the Broa have dispatched three ships to intercept them. Any further news on that?”

  “None. We are too far out to detect them. All we
have is your initial report. If they are being dispatched from the planet, it could take most of the next ten days for them to match velocities and rendezvous. If they are starting in the asteroid belt, they could be there in half that time.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” Lisa asked.

  “It’s a long shot, but we are organizing a rescue. Whether we will be too late…” Cavendish let the statement die away.

  The storm of emotions that had flowed through her veins in a span of less than a minute left Lisa drained. There is an old expression: You can’t wet a hurricane.

  Suddenly she felt very tired, despite having just slept for eighteen hours. “Perhaps, sir, you should start at the beginning.”

  “Perhaps I should,” Cavendish replied, leaning back in his chair. “The call from Sasquatch came in about two hours ago. You can imagine our surprise and excitement when we heard a human voice coming out of your eavesdropping computer.”

  “The call came in by radio, not comm-laser?”

  “Apparently, their lasers are inoperative.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your husband reports the Trojan Horse exploded immediately after launch. There was a malfunction and the Horse tried to jump to superlight. That deep in the gravity well, it couldn’t stabilize its field, and so it exploded, releasing its stored energy against Sasquatch’s hull.

  “The damage was extensive. Hangar Bay and Engineering are gone, along with their crews. Shrapnel accounted for most of the other dead and injured. Among the survivors, there are broken bones and other injuries. Casualties among the officers were high. Captain Vanda is alive, but has a serious head injury. That left your husband the highest ranking officer. He has assumed command.”

  She nodded. “That’s just like Mark. He’ll always step up when prudence dictates his best course is to keep his mouth shut. What are we doing to rescue them?”

  “I dispatched Yeovil just after our discussion, yesterday. They are on a high-acceleration, continuous-boost trajectory to get to Sasquatch before the Broa do. My orders were to close to missile range, and make sure there was nothing left that the Broa might find informative.”

  “And since you’ve found out they are alive?”

  “About an hour ago, I ordered Captain Sulieman to shift to a minimum time rendezvous orbit. That will add thirty-six hours to his flight.”

  “When will he reach them?”

  “If all goes well and the Broa don’t interfere, Yeovil will match orbits next Thursday.”

  Lisa blinked. Her training was in linguistics, but her years in the Navy had taught her the true scale of planetary systems. Sabator was a large star, with a correspondingly large temperate zone. Karap-Vas was the fifth planet, and well out from the primary.

  Galahad had taken up position as close in as they could without risk of being spotted. If Yeovil was going to reach the crippled starship in only five days, she would have to pile on the gees. Starship crews are young and healthy, but Yeovil’s spacers were risking their lives.

  “Does Mark know about the rescue?”

  Sulieman shook his head. “We can’t tell him, not without revealing our own presence.”

  “And if the Broa do interfere?”

  Cavendish stared at her, no longer the kindly captain consoling a member of his crew. “If Captain Sulieman concludes that rescue is not possible, I have ordered him to carry out his original orders.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said in a barely audible voice. “I had figured that out myself. General Order Seven.”

  He nodded. “General Order Seven. Can you live with that?”

  “I don’t see that I have a choice.”

  “You surprise me, Commander.”

  “Sir, I don’t know whether you know it, but this whole campaign was originally Mark’s idea. He and I were involved in the initial planning for this war. We were members of the team that thought up General Order Seven.

  “When I saw that explosion yesterday, I thought they had set off the self-destruct on purpose or by accident. Now that I know the extent of their damage, why didn’t they?”

  “They can’t. Their nuclear charge was destroyed in the explosion. Commander Rykand made it clear that he has no means left aboard to vaporize the ship to prevent capture.”

  “So if rescue isn’t possible and Sulieman fails to missile Sasquatch out of existence, we will have provided our enemies with dozens of human bodies to autopsy. Mark will be dead for no purpose.”

  Cavendish scowled. “That won’t happen. Your husband has a plan to prevent it.”

  “I thought you said that he can’t blow up the ship?”

  “I said that he has no means onboard to do so. He has his people working feverishly to restore the forward battery of superlight missiles.”

  “What good will that do? He can’t fire them at Sasquatch. They don’t work that way, and he certainly can’t fight off an entire star system.”

  “He doesn’t expect to.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lisa said.

  “Are you sure you want to know this?” Cavendish asked.

  “Of course. What is Mark going to do?”

  “His plan is to fire an SM at the first Broan craft that approaches the ship. His strategy is to destroy the target if he can, but to provoke a Broan response if he cannot.”

  “He’s trying to antagonize them?”

  “Those were his exact words.”

  “But why…?”

  Lisa had opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again with a snap. Her tired brain had just caught up with the conversation. She and Mark lived in close quarters through three Long Jumps. She knew him better than any other human being alive. She knew how her husband thought.

  There is an evolutionary quirk in the human race, a chasm that can never truly be crossed. For all of human history, men had hunted for prey while women gathered berries, tended the crops, and took care of the children. This natural dichotomy of labor conditioned the two sexes to react in diametrically opposite ways in the presence of danger.

  At the first sign of trouble, women scoop up the children and run in the opposite direction, while men grab their spears and rush to the sound of battle. It is an impulse that women can never really understand, any more than men can understand how it feels to have a baby grow inside a womb.

  “So,” Lisa said heavily, “he wants to attack them and provoke them into blasting Sasquatch out of the sky!”

  “That is his strategy,” Captain Cavendish confirmed.

  #

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “We’ve got two thermal sensor arrays in place, Captain,” Gwen Tasker said. She and Mark Rykand were huddled over an outsize diagram of Sasquatch spread out across a jury-rigged table at the back of the bridge. The diagram was a riot of color. Damage showed as red splotches, while handwritten notations in various colors showed the progress of their damage control efforts. The entire aft end of the ship had been circled in red and simply labeled ‘destroyed.’

  “What is the view angle?” he asked, observing the two green hash marks on opposite sides of the ship that denoted the sensors.

  “Five degrees above and below the ecliptic. The electronic steering circuits are fried, I’m afraid, so we’ll have to spin the ship to get circumambient coverage.”

  “Oh, my poor stomach! How fast?”

  “One revolution every ten minutes should do it. With two sensor panels, that will give us a five minute sweep rate, more than sufficient to see anything headed this way.”

  “And the scope?”

  “Scopes! We’ve got two. They’ve been fitted with IR detectors. The motorized gimbals and control systems are fully functional. We should have them deployed and calibrated within the hour. I’m having them installed in the dorsal and ventral maintenance locks on extensions so we’ll be able to look in any direction we need to.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. Even though the spin will be slow, make your announcement prior to firing the attitude control jets. W
e’ve been through too much to have someone break a leg through carelessness.”

  “Yes, sir. With your permission…”

  “Go. Get it done.”

  Mark watched the engineer expertly arrow through the hatch before turning back to the damage control chart. He gazed over the forest of notations and felt a certain pride at all they had accomplished in only thirty hours.

  Getting a warning off to the fleet had been the most important accomplishment. If they went down fighting — Mark still didn’t let himself think “when they went down fighting” — it would not be in vain. If nothing else, the next time Headquarters got a harebrained scheme, they might think about it longer than they had this one.

  And should the Navy again try to maneuver the Broa into leading them to their home world, at least the ship assigned to carry the Easter Egg would know to put distance between itself and the Trojan Horse before powering generators.

  In addition to the one-way comm capability, they had patched numerous holes, got the computers back online, rigged two working screens for the bridge, and prepared a sanctuary to which they could retreat for a last stand. In a bit of gallows commentary, one of the crew had painted a sign on the mess hatchway: MASADA

  The mess deck now housed every spare gas cylinder they could find, all of their food stores, and supplies of all sorts, including their medical stocks. In fact, the most capacious compartment on the ship was becoming cluttered.

  Mark had ordered one additional modification.

  Located around the periphery were four large barrels, each with six high-pressure oxygen tanks strapped around their circumference. The barrels were filled with machine oil and magnesium shavings. Each was topped with a jumble of tubes leading to the oxygen tanks, various electrically operated valves, and triply redundant explosive initiators. Pairs of wires from the initiators ran to timers bolted to nearby mess tables.

  Mark’s plan was to entice the Broa into firing on the ship with their heavy weapons. It would be a quick, painless death and the cleanest way to accomplish General Order Seven. However, if the Broa failed to be enticed, his homemade bombs would have to do.

  While one party worked on the incendiaries, he gathered up the rest of his effectives and ordered them to collect bodies and body parts from all over the ship. These were placed reverently in the large storage compartment across the passageway from the mess. It had been a gory, emotionally draining task for everyone involved.