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CAPTAIN

The haze of points that represented the Rix battlecruiser and her satellites grew more diffuse as the ed too, softening, as if Captain Zai&039;s eyes were losing focus

He blinked reflexively, but the airscreen i hosts continued to blur The two combatant ships deployed still ence, to penetrate and attack the other ship, and to harry the opponents&039; drones The Lynx and the Rix ship beca a slow collision

"Freeze," Zai ordered

The two clouds stopped, just touching

"What&039;s the relative velocity at the edge?" he asked his executive officer "One percent lightspeed," Hobbes answered

Soe let out an audible rush of breath

"Three thousand klicks per second," Master Pilot Marx translated,to himself

Zai let the cold fact of this velocity sink in, then resumed the simulation The clouds drifted into each other, thesun as it approaches the horizon Of course, only the grand scale of the battle lacial At the scale of the invisibly sht would unfold at a terrific pace

The Lynx&039;s captain druned for combat at much lower relative velocities In a norside the battlecruiser, er craft deive the ier ship&039;s defenses Even against Rix cyborgs, Imperial pilots were renowned And the Lynx, as the prototype of its class, had been allotted some of the best in the Navy

But Zai didn&039;t have the luxury of standard tactics He had a mission to carry out

Master Pilot Marx was the first to speak up

"There won&039;t beto it, sir," he said "Even our fastest drones only ees acceleration That&039;s ten thousand meters per second squared One percent of the constant equals threepast thelared into the airscreen

"There won&039;t be much we can do to protect the Lynx from their penetrators either, Captain," he concluded

"That won&039;t be your job, Master Pilot," Zai said "Just keep your drones intact, and get theh to attack the Rix ship"

The master pilot nodded His role in this, at least, was clear Zai let the si waves of drones had little effect on one another They were passing through each other too quickly for any but the luckiest of shots to hit Soon, the outeres of the two spheres reached each other&039;s vital centers The Lynx and the Rix battlecruiser began to take dae; the kinetic hits of flechettes and expansion webs, wide-area radiation strikes froy weapons

"Freeze," Zai ordered

"You&039;ll notice that the adjunct craft have startedhits," ExO Hobbes took up the narrative

"A ship&039;s a et than a two-meter drone," Marx said

"Exactly," Hobbes said "And a battlecruiser is a bigger target than a frigate Especially this particular battlecruiser"

She zooht mote that was the Rix vessel The receiver array becaainst its vast expanse

Hobbes added a scale marker; the array was a thousand kilometers across

"Think you can hit that?" Hobbes asked

Master Pilot Marx nodded slowly

"Absolutely, Executive Officer Provided I&039;m still alive"

Zai nodded Marx had a point He would be piloting remotely from the belly of the Lynx, which would itself be under attack The Ih for its drones to reach the Rix battlecruiser "We&039;ll be alive The Lynx will be inside a tight group of close-in-defense drones We&039;ll railgun them out in front, then have the drones," Hobbes said

"Or as close as they can get," Marx corrected her The Lynx&039;s defensive drones could neverRix attackers at three thousand klicks a second

"And we&039;ll be clearing our path with all the abrasion sand we can produce" Hobbes sighed

"But we&039;ll have our hands full," she finished

Zai was glad to hear the nervous treerous one The staff had to understand that

"May I ask a question, Captain?"

It was Second Gunner Thompson

"Gunner?" Zai said

"This collision of a battle plan," he said slowly "Is it designed to protect Legis? Or to create a tactical advantage for the Lynx?"

"Both," Zai answered "Our orders are to prevent contact between the battlecruiser and the coers moved, and the view pulled back to a schematic of the entire system It filled with the vectors he and Hobbes had worked out that afternoon

"To make it work, we&039;ll have to accelerate spinward, out toward the battlecruiser, then turn over and coe ten gees"

The co the next week suffering under the uneasy protection of easy gravity Uncoee conditions would leave them exhausted for the battle

"And yes," Zai continued "As Gunner Thoives us a tactical advantage, given our orders Our objective is not to engage the Rix battlecruiser in a fight to the death We&039;re to destroy its array as quickly as possible"

"&039;Suicide h velocities,&039;" Thoht To cite Anonymous 167 at hi

"We&039;re under orders, Gunner," Hobbes snapped "Preventing contact between the Rix battlecruiser and the Legis compound mind is our primary objective"

She left the rest unspoken: the Lynx&039;s survival was of secondary concern

Tho Hobbes&039;s eye He was one of those more intimidated by her beauty than her rank "Why can&039;t they just pull the plug on the hed He didn&039;t want his crew spending its energy this way: trying to think of ways to get out of the coive up technology forever," Thompson continued "Just for a few days, while the battlecruiser passed by In boot ca traditional survival techniques We could offer assistance froencies"

"This is a planet, Tho biome Two billion civilians and the entire infrastructure that necessitates Every day that&039;s ten billion gallons of liters, two million tons of food produced and distributed, and a half ency medical responses All of it dependent on the infostructure; dependent, in effect, on the Rix compound mind"

"We&039;d have to soy for four days," Zai continued "On a planet of Legis&039;s population, there will be two hundred thousand births in that time Care to use your survival skills to assist with thee filled with laughter

"No, sir," the , sir"

"How unfortunate," Zai concluded "Then I&039;ll want your detailed analyses of the current attack plan by 200 We&039;ll be under high gravities by 400 One last night of decent sleep for the crew"

"Disy as the senior officers went to present the plan to their own staffs

Hobbes gave her captain a supporting nod Zai was pleased she&039;d been able to defuse the trouble that Second Gunner Tho the superior Rix ship would be an easier sacrifice if the crew thought of it in ter down below But as Tho hiunner was froray family, with as solid a military tradition as the Zais By sorayer than his captain One of his brothers was an aspirant in the Apparatus; none of the Zais had ever been politicals

Perhaps Thompson&039;s words were intended to remind Zai that the Imperial pardon was a sharaceless pardon, paired with an iht yet destroy him, his ship, and his crew

Clearly, Laurent Zai had not been forgiven

COMMANDO

Wielding thehair down to a few centiulators that the commando had injected into her captive&039;s bloodstrea; the woman would remain acquiescent for days As the medical records H_rd had unearthed at the library had shown, Harter suffered from chronic low-level depression Any decent society would have cured it as a matter of course But the Empire found Rana&039;s synesthetic disorder, her savant mathematical ability, useful Ih to both heal Harter and , so they let her suffer

For the Rix, however, the treatment was child&039;s play

Harter was still feeling some side effects Her attention seeues of inactivity, her eyelids shuddering a bit But when shown the colonel&039;s badge she followed orders; the Imperials conditioned their subjects well H_rd set Harter to organizing the strands of her shorn hair by length on the cabin&039;s ornate table, while the commando shaved her own head down to the scalp

The handheld ed, an order from the compound mind A schematic on its screen showed the location of the train&039;sas she worked, the Rix co seen no bald wois, H_rd covered her head with the hood of her unifor, and other bodily markers were used to project status and political affiliation even outside the ht draw attention How odd These unRix hua

Theto life as she entered, its red eyes projecting a lattice of lasers across the newly bald planes of her head A few seconds after these measurements were taken, the station delivered two needles of specially progralev train&039;s storage hold H_rd easily wrenched open the lock there, and liberated a tube of repair smartplastic and another of petroleum jelly

Back in the cabin, she doped the smartplastic with one of the needles, and squeezed it onto the neat pile of Rana Harter&039;s shorn hair The nanoed plastic writhed for a fewoff noticeable heat in the small cabin Thethe hair cuttings These wispy fila thea spiderweb that covered the entire table For a while, the web undulated slowly, as if cataloging, planning Then its motion quickened The whole mass contracted into a solid dome, a milky hemisphere into which the hairs were drawn The surface of the plastic seethed with the ends of Rana Harter&039;s red hair, which protruded and dove back into thethen

It soothed the coant and miniature process unfold Here in the crowded train, she was far too aware of the gross, unRix mass of humanity that surrounded her She could smell them, hear the phatic chatter of their mouths, feel their handiwork in the bulbous curves and plush textures of this supposedly luxurious cabin, inforant concept of privacy The Rix spacecraft and orbitals that had always been her home were spartan and pure: joyful with the clean lines of functionality, the efficiency of intimately shared spaces, the evident perfection of coht joy in waste, ornamentation, excess