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Two starships raced toward one another, converging on the distant spark of Franconia, and a message reached out across the gap between them. Even light seemed to crawl at such a range, but Megarea sped to meet it even as she decelerated. The outer ring of orbital forts brought their fire control on line, searching for her, dueling with her ECM, and the AI noted the changes in their sensors. She was well outside range—for now—but she was committed to enter it, and the upgrades of the last few months would reduce her ECM's efficiency by at least forty percent.
She considered reporting to Alicia, but there was no point.
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"Look! She's still decelerating!" Ta
"Maybe we were," Keita agreed, but he met Ben Belkassem's eyes behind her and shook his head minutely.
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"Admiral Horth, Bogey One is transmitting."
"Well?" The admiral eyed the com rating narrowly, alerted by something in the man's voice. "What does he say?"
"We don't know, ma'am. It's an awful tight beam and it wasn't addressed to us—we just caught the edge of the carrier as it went past, and it's encrypted."
"Encrypted?" Treadwell's voice was sharp, and the com rating nodded.
"Yes, sir. We're working on it, but it's going to take time. It's imperial in origin, but we've never seen anything quite like it."
"And it's being sent to the alpha synth?" Horth pressed.
"Yes, ma'am."
The admiral nodded, then watched Brinkman and Treadwell exchange glances and wondered just what the hell was going on. -=0=-***-=0=
Only three of the outer forts could range on Megarea, but SLAMs streaked out from them, and a low, harsh growl quivered in Alicia's throat as she watched their deadly sparkles come. They were beautiful, their threat lost in the elemental splendor of destruction, and part of her wanted to reach out and embrace their glory. But she couldn't. She must dance with them, avoiding them, cutting through them to reach the object of her hate.
She watched Megarea flirt with death, trolling the SLAMs off course with her electronic wiles, flipping aside to evade the ones she could not enmesh, and the AI's pain was a knife in her own heart. Yet she was beyond pain. Pain only fed her hunger, whatever its source.
Tisiphone stood silent and helpless in Alicia's mind. It was all she could do to keep Alicia's blind savagery from dragging Megarea under and clouding the lightning-fast reflexes which kept them both alive.
She'd never guessed what she was creating, never imagined the monster she'd spawned. She'd seen the power of Alicia DeVries's mind without recognizing the controls which kept that power in check, and only now had she begun to understand fully what she had done.
She had shattered those controls. The compassion and mercy she'd feared no longer existed, only the red, ravening hunger. Yet terrible as that might be, there was worse. She had found the hole Alicia had gnawed through the wall about her i
For the first time in mille
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Vice Admiral Rebecca Horth sat silently, lips pressed firmly together, as the renegade alpha synth evaded her SLAMs. More forts were firing now, and some of them, at least, were coming closer ... but not close enough.
She checked the converging vectors again and frowned. The dispatch boat would pass within a few thousand kilometers of Soissons on its course to meet the alpha synth, but if the alpha synth maintained its present deceleration, it would pass well behind the planet when it crossed Soissons's orbit. Which made no sense, unless ...
She stiffened in her chair and started punching new numbers into Tracking's extrapolations, and her face paled.
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Ben Belkassem stood silent, chewing the inside of his lip raw, and smelled the tension about him. The dispatch boat's velocity was down to seventy-two percent of light-speed, but Alicia's more powerful drive had Megarea down to barely .88 C despite her far shorter deceleration period.
No one spoke, and he wondered if Keita suspected what he did. Probably. Did Ta
He returned his gaze to the plot. Thank God he'd left Megarea the O Branch codes. At least they could talk to each other without Defense Command—and Treadwell— listening in.
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"What the—?" Lieutenant Anders twitched in surprise and looked up at his supervisor. "Sir, Bogey Two's just made a second turnover! She's stopped decelerating and started accelerating again." Emotionless computers considered the changed data, and Anders gasped. "Oh my God— she's on a collision course for Orbit One!"
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Ta
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Fifty-seven minutes after it had been sent, Keita's desperate message converged with Megarea's receivers.
Alicia looked up incuriously as a com screen blinked to life. She recognized the face, but the person who had known and respected—even loved—that man was dead, and the powerful voice meant less than the brutal vibration lashing Megarea's over-stressed hull.
"Alley, I know what you're doing," the voice said, "but you don't have to. We have independent confirmation, Alley; we know who you're after, and I swear we'll get him. You've done enough—now you have to break off." Sir Arthur Keita's eyes pled with her from the screen and his voice was raw with pain yet soft. "Please, Alley. Break off. You don't have to kill nine thousand people. Don't turn yourself into the very thing you hate.
"Alley?" It was Megarea's pleading mental voice. "Alley, they know about Treadwell. You don't have to—"
"It doesn't matter! They knew about Watts and let the bastard live!"
"But Uncle Arthur's given you his word! Please, Alley! Don't make me help you kill yourself!"
Alicia only snarled in response. She turned her eyes from the screen where Keita's face still begged her to relent. She closed her ears to his voice, and deep at her very core, where even she could no longer hear it, a lost soul sobbed in torment. She locked her attention on Orbit One, ignoring the SLAMs still flashing towards her. All that mattered was that distant sphere of battle steel. Her smoking bloodlust craved the destruction to come— and the last, dying fragment of the person she once had been embraced it as her only escape from what she had become.
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"She's not breaking off," Ta
He closed his eyes, then turned to the dispatch boat's commander.
"I need two volunteers. One in the engine room and one on the helm. Put the rest of your people into your shuttle and get out of here."
The lieutenant looked up in confusion, but Ben Belkassem understood.
"I'm a pretty fair helmsman, Sir Arthur," he said.
"What—?" Ta
"No. Let me talk to her! I can stop her—I know I can!"
"There's no time ... and there's only one shuttle. If you don't leave now, you can't leave at all."
"I know," she said, and he started to make it an order, then sighed.
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"Admiral, that dispatch boat's shuttle just separated." Admiral Horth tore herself away from the intensifying fire ripping ineffectually towards the alpha synth and checked her plot as the shuttle arced away from the dispatch boat's base course. It was fourteen light-minutes from Soissons, still streaking for the far side of nowhere at sixty-five percent of light-speed, and no shuttle could kill that kind of velocity. Which meant its crew must be counting on someone else's picking them up ... and must have a very urgent reason for abandoning ship.
The dispatch boat's vector curved very slightly, and Horth swallowed in sudden understanding. Its course had been roughly convergent with the alpha synth's from the start; now the match was perfect, and the dispatch boat was no longer decelerating.
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A blue dot swelled ahead of Megarea on Alicia's mental plot, far larger and more powerful than any SLAM. Her nostrils flared and she bared her teeth as hate boiled within her. She knew what it had to be—and that, unlike a SLAM, it possessed onboard seeking capability.
She hunched down in her command chair, eyes bloodshot and wild, but her course never deviated. She would reach Treadwell or die trying, and dying would be a triumph in itself.
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Sir Arthur Keita glanced at the chronometer. Ben Belkassem had the helm. The dispatch boat's skipper had taken over Engineering, and Ta