Elvi hesitated. “All at the same time?”
“Within a few seconds of each other.”
“That’s . . . more coordinated than I like.”
Naomi stretched her shoulders. She could feel her strategies shifting. Reconceptualize everything she’d just designed. Still coaching the game, but now it was a game she wasn’t allowed to watch being played . . .
“Let me know as things progress,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
She pulled up the tactical map. The four most critical gates were Earth, Laconia, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. She found the ships closest to each. It took five minutes to calculate the flight solutions she wanted for each of them: hard burns that started braking well inside the ring space. Just enough velocity to make the transit, gather telescopic data, and duck back in. And the point of transit randomized, so that even if the enemy had a back door into their heads, they couldn’t line up a torpedo or a rail-gun strike on the ship.
She was gratified that none of the captains questioned the orders or pushed back at the mission. She set tracking indicators on each of them—tiny red cones that showed the distance the ships had traveled without giving her a precise lock on their actual position. While they moved, she ran simulations on the transit times for the first dozen ships due to pass into the ring space, and what changes to their paths were physically possible. The intercepts that had been certain became clouds of time and place . . .
She was almost annoyed when the connection request came and broke her concentration.
“Hey,” Jim said, and all the control and distance she’d bent herself to building blew away on his breath. Grief slammed into her like a rogue wave, blowing her off her feet and trying to drown her.
“Hey,” she murmured.
“So, we’re about a hundred meters from the surface of the station, and we’re heading in.”
She took down the tactical display and pulled up the Roci’s external camera. It didn’t take a second for the ship to find them. Three dashes silhouetted against the glowing blue of the station. Tags appeared as the Roci marked their positions and velocities. Naomi cleared them. It was enough to see them. Watching was more important than knowing the details. The details didn’t matter.
“I’ve got you,” she said, and the ways that both was and wasn’t true stung. “I’ve got you, Jim.”
“Teresa wants you to make sure Muskrat’s in her crash couch in case you have to do any tricky maneuvering.”
“I’ll see to it.”
One of the little dashes nodded, so that one was Jim. An alert came up from the ship that had peeked into Auberon, and then the one in Laconia. She closed them. It didn’t look like the three of them were moving at all. They were just there, against the blueness. The little egg of Duarte’s ship appeared and grew larger. They were almost there.
“Okay,” Jim said. “We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”
“We’ll give you as much time as we can.”
“It’s going to be okay.” The oceanic optimism would have been a lie in anyone else. Or maybe a prayer.
“Good hunting, love,” she said, and the three dots passed into the blue and vanished. She waited for a moment, but nothing changed. The station remained its enigmatic self. A third alert came, this one from Sol gate. She turned off the external cameras and pulled her tactical map back up.
There were many, many more ships coming now. Hundreds of them, and while most were on fast burns, it would still take them days to reach the gates.
And by then, none of it would matter, because in the Laconia gate data was the game-ender. The Voice of the Whirlwind, last of the three Magnetar-class battleships, was on a killing burn toward the Laconia gate. At its pace, even people in the breathable-fluid crash couches would be risking their lives. Only they weren’t risking their lives at all. Their lives were no more important now than the individual skin cells on a boxer’s knuckles. They would be shattered by the hundreds and not be missed.
The moment the Whirlwind came through that gate, the fight was over, and any forces that Duarte’s hive mind had would be able to flood the ring station and pull Jim and Teresa and Tanaka back out like they were plucking a splinter.
She opened a connection to her little, doomed fleet.
“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said. “Prepare to receive your orders.”
Chapter Forty-One: Jim
This is a bad idea,” Miller said. “I mean, you’ve always been a little dim, but even you have to know this is a bad idea.”