It was possible there was an accelerator ring there, her program concluded. They couldn’t be certain until they were much closer, too. The odds weren’t great, but they’d need to close within two light-minutes to entirely eliminate the chance.
“Shit!” Milhouse suddenly swore. “Jump flare, danger close, danger close!”
“Shvets, kill the engines,” Kelly snapped. “Milhouse, what am I looking at?”
She checked the time. That was fast. They’d been in the Gygax System for just under twenty minutes and no one had been within four light-minutes of them. That meant the RIN had detected them, picked a destination, and deployed a starship inside twenty minutes.
“Dear gods, either someone is really paranoid, or they’ve worked out that we exist,” the tactical officer replied as he transferred data to the main displays. “That’s a Bravado-class carrier, Captain. Forty megatons, a hundred and fifty gunships.”
And the gunships, Kelly was grimly certain, were far more relevant than the rest of the carrier’s weapons. The carrier had emerged just over three million kilometers from Rhapsody in Purple’s jump flare, and the parasite warships were already spilling from her bays.
“She’s between us and Kenku, but we’re looking at barely ten light-seconds of distance,” Milhouse said grimly. “Captain, what do we do?”
“Xi?” Kelly asked softly. “Engines are down; can you hide us at this range?”
“Yes. It gets harder as the range drops, though,” the Mage confirmed. “I can also kill her if she gets much closer.”
Kelly nodded grimly. Rhapsody in Purple was sized more like a civilian ship than a warship, but she had the bones of a military vessel. Most critically, she had an unrestricted amplifier instead of a simple jump matrix.
The carrier had chosen her distance carefully. If her target was a Protectorate warship, anything within two million kilometers was suicide. That was the reach of a Mage with an amplifier, a distance inside which no mundane structure could stand against the power of the scions of Project Olympus.
But it would take Xi almost as much energy to take out each individual gunship as it would take to destroy the carrier. Now there were over a hundred of the parasite warships in space, even destroying the carrier wouldn’t be a victory.
“Killing the carrier looks great on everyone’s record, but it’s contrary to our actual mission,” Kelly pointed out. “We need to know what’s going on at Kenku and Paladin—that there even is a carrier in Gygax says something is happening here.”
Their intel was that the Republic had only built sixteen of the big ships, after all, and the Protectorate had captured or destroyed seven. With just nine of them left, what the hell was one of them doing at the far end of the Republic?
“Shvets, see what we can manage for movement while cold,” Kelly ordered. “Doesn’t need to be much. I just want to go around their search net if at all possible.”
Their current velocity was only a few hundred kilometers per second. It was going to take them a long time to get past the Republic search net if they couldn’t accelerate.
“Xi, how close do they need to get to see through our cloak of invisibility?” she asked her wife.
“I’d say knife range, but we’re already in knife range,” Xi Wu said grimly.
“And if we open fire with the laser, we die,” Milhouse replied.
Rhapsody had two missile launchers and a single ten-gigawatt battle laser. Her laser outclassed anything the gunships carried, but there were also a lot more gunship lasers out there.
And the carrier’s weapons individually outclassed hers—and they were also in effective laser range of the carrier.
“We’re not getting out of knife range quickly,” Kelly told them. “Our best chance is that they figure they had a sensor glitch and go home after a few hours.”
“And if they don’t?” Shvets asked, their voice calm, almost distant.
“We cycle through Xi’s people slowly and surely as we drift toward Kenku at a couple hundred kilometers a second,” she said, yanking on her braid. “We can hide from them unless one of those gunships literally stumbles over us.”
They could even, in theory at least, micro-jump the four light-minutes to Kenku. They wouldn’t be able to conceal their arrival at that point, though, and given that accurate a starting point, she was grimly certain the Republic could find her and catch her.
4
Even a hundred and fifty gunships paled in comparison to the sheer scale of deep space. Four light-minutes from anything of value or interest, they had to be guessing where Rhapsody in Purple could have gone and how close they needed to get to catch her.
“I’d say their estimate is that they can spot us at around sixty thousand kilometers,” Milhouse said as the net took its final shape. “The longest distance between any two gunships is a hundred and twenty thousand klicks.”
Each set of gunships made a square eighty-five thousand kilometers on a side, forming a literal net in space accelerating toward the location of Rhapsody’s jump flare—and, not coincidentally, Rhapsody herself.
It made for a net over a million kilometers across, with six gunships held back to defend the carrier. Just in case.
“I liked it better when my enemies didn’t know our ship existed and weren’t competently paranoid,” Kelly admitted. “Shvets?”
“They’re only accelerating at five gravities,” the navigator told her. “It’s going to be a long few hours while they sweep.”
“Can we get around them?” she asked.
“No,” they admitted. “If we could conceal our full acceleration for those hours, yes. As it stands…no.”
“So, our best chance is to slot ourselves right through the middle of one of those squares and hope they’ve overestimated their scanners,” Kelly concluded. She glanced at her wife’s image on the link from the simulacrum chamber.
“Xi, you know this magic better than anyone,” she admitted to her wife. “Can we hide from them at sixty thousand klicks?”
“Yes,” the Mage said flatly. “We’ll want to bring up every tool we’ve got, though. Heat sinks, baffles, everything. Once we’re within a hundred thousand klicks, it’s down to luck as much as anything else. We should be able to get to fifty so long as the spell doesn’t blip, but every bit of energy we’re radiating is a chance for a blip that wouldn’t matter at longer range.”
“Then we go completely dark at one ten,” Kelly decided. “Milhouse, set it up. How long will it take us to get through that?”
Shvets exhaled and rubbed their eyes.
“Longer than any of us are going to like, skipper,” they admitted. “I’m setting up the course now, but even with their accel, we’re looking at a relative velocity of maybe five hundred KPS. Ten minutes, maybe.”
“We can go full heat-sink for twenty-five,” Kelly replied. “We’ll be drowning in our own sweat by minute twenty, but we can retain functionally all of our heat radiation for twenty-five minutes.”
They’d then need to radiate it, but she could pick the direction she did that, and there was always some angle to vent heat where no one would see it.