Hegemony

Hegemony

by Mark Kalina

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012, Mark Kalina

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. The names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are the products of the author's imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to any organization, group, event or location is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements:

--A very big Thank You to Douglas D. Collins, for the epic job he did in editing and supplying feedback.

(Any remaining typos, mistakes in grammar, style, etc., are there in spite of Doug's good work, and are my own dumb fault.)

--Another big Thanks to George H. Hepker VI, who dealt with all sorts of formatting issues.

-- Franz Berner helped create the new cover and came up with fantastic 3D renders of the ships. The cool-looking ship on the cover is his work. Thanks!

--A lot of the technological assumptions in this story were informed by things I read on a website called Atomic Rockets (www.projectrho.com/rocketstub.html), maintained by Winchell D. Chung, jr. It's an excellent site with a lot of information on plausible and realistic space craft, weapons, etc. Highly useful.

(Any mistakes or nonsense regarding the science part of the science-fiction in this novel are either intentional or my own fault. For those that are my fault, there would be a lot more of them if not for the information I got from Atomic Rockets.)

Contents

-- Chapter 1

-- Chapter 2

-- Chapter 3

-- Chapter 4

-- Chapter 5

-- Chapter 6

-- Chapter 7

-- Chapter 8

-- Chapter 9

-- Chapter 10

-- Chapter 11

-- Chapter 12

-- Chapter 13

-- Chapter 14

-- Chapter 15

-- Chapter 16

-- Chapter 17

-- Chapter 18

-- Chapter 19

-- Chapter 20

-- Chapter 21

1

From just over a billion kilometers away, the dwarf star burned like a distant, constant flare; the brightest light in the darkness, but still only a pinpoint of red fire. And the darkness was very empty.

Any star system is largely empty. In any star system, if one were to take the combined mass of all the planets, all the asteroids and ice fragments, even of the star itself, and average it against the volume of space through which the gravity of that system's star hold measurable sway, the result would be statistically indistinguishable from hard vacuum.

But the importance of a star system isn't measured in mass. A round speck of iron and silicon wreathed in a thin bubble of gas could be a habitable world, home to millions or even billions of people. A ball of fusing hydrogen could be the sun gives that world warmth and light.

There was no such importance here; the red dwarf's system lacked any worthwhile planet within its vast volume, no living worlds and no concentrations of resources valuable enough to draw life from other places. It didn't even rate a proper name of its own, just a designation, Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II, based on the name of a more important star system; Sigma-Charybdis.

Indeed, but for an accident of astrography the unremarkable red dwarf system would have had no importance at all. The system's only value was its location. It was conveniently positioned and its galactic orbit was stable; no faster and no slower than its neighboring stars.

Most colonies were founded within one or two FTL transits of at least one other inhabited system, but the Sigma-Charybdis system was an exception to that rule. The Sigma-Charybdis system boasted such a concentration of exotically valuable resources that it was worth exploiting even though it required a minimum of three FTL transits to reach from the next nearest inhabited system. And that was what gave meaning to the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system; the red dwarf system served as a navigational stop-over, a waypoint on the long flight between the economically crucial Sigma-Charybdis mining colony and the greater volume of the multi-stellar Hegemony of Suns.

For an instant the vacuum of the empty Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system pulsed with the energy of two brief wormholes; two points of space-time unfolded, opening up, bringing something out of nothing. Nearby particles of dust and atoms of hydrogen flared into high energy radiation and then fell silent as space-time collapsed back to vacuum, leaving behind two dark slivers of man-made alloy and composites. The two ships' sleek dagger shapes marked them out as warships; civilian ships had no need to adopt volumetrically inefficient forms for the sake of steeply angled armor or radar-defeating stealth.

Aboard the two ships, sensors listened and watched, seeking out any hint of visible light, infrared or radio energy which might show that anyone had seen them. Against optical or thermal sensors, the ships' stealthing would help them not at all; anti-radar stealth served only to degrade enemy targeting radar in the final, laser-blinded, close-range instants of an engagement. If there had been anyone there to see them, the two ships would have been seen. But there was nothing. And finding nothing, the two ships drifted, silent, unseen, content to wait.

More than two hundred hours passed. And then the almost empty system was again brightened by the coronae of space-time unfolding under the stress of momentary wormholes. This time there were four wormholes, each existing for a fraction of a microsecond before collapsing. Four more ships emerged from FTL transit into the waypoint system.

The four were large ships. They were cargo carriers, freight-liners in the parlance of the industry that created them, meant to transport huge masses along established routes. Each massed over two megatons, though more than half of that mass was cargo and much of the rest was reaction mass for the ships' plasma drives.

The four freight-liners had emerged in the empty space above the system's ecliptic plane, bursting one by one into local existence across twelve seconds of time and almost three hundred million kilometers of space, like a strobe-light illuminating the dark emptiness of the system with impossibly brief, bright flashes.

Something had gone wrong. Warnings and alarms flooded the command system of the freight-liner Ulia's Flower within a second of FTL emergence. Captain Hans Rilk scanned the data with an intense frown, then deactivated the alarms. There was no immediate danger, and the ringing announcements that the FTL emergence had gone wrong were redundant to anyone looking at the incoming sensor data that showed the disposition of the four ship convoy.

God damn it, the freight-liner's captain subvocalized, checking data feeds from the ship's auxiliary sensors, but the data kept showing the same thing.

The FTL transit hadn't felt any different... the countdown to initiation, the checking and double-checking of systems, had all been routine. The actual instant of FTL transit had been too brief to sense, as always. The sudden thrum of the ship's power systems, which most people thought of as the moment of FTL transit, actually occurred just prior; the actual transit was over in a fraction of a microsecond.

The rest of the bridge crew were reacting, sending out queries and commands. The captain acknowledged and directed, going through the both the routine checklist for FTL emergence and the rarely used checklist reserved for an FTL emergence error.

At length the stand-down from FTL transit was complete. Hans Rilk sighed and let his head drop back against the head-rest of his command pod, squeezing his eyes tightly closed before opening them. He was the captain of the Ulia's Flower, and the second senior-most captain of the four-ship convoy.

The four ships had been intended to arrive together, no more than a million kilometers apart from one another. Instead they had been scattered across several hundred million kilometers, with none of the ships actually emerging in the specific volume of space they had aimed for. Still, Rilk thought a bit grudgingly, it could have been worse. Given that there had been an FTL emergence fault, the actual emergence wasn't as bad as it could have been; not a disaster.

He frowned once more as sensors gave him more and more data showing the details of the faulty emergence, and sighed again. Not quite a disaster.

There was always, he knew, a chance of an FTL emergence fault. The risk was implicit in any attempt to coordinate an FTL transit so closely between four ships. But it had been a small chance, a low probability of error. This time the probabilities had come up badly for the four ship convoy.

Actually, as his FTL navigator could tell him, had told him before, it wasn't a matter of probability so much as of intrinsic uncertainty.

Actually, thought Rilk with annoyance, the fact was that FTL Transit Navigation was numbingly complex and radically counter-intuitive. Technically speaking, Rilk knew, it wasn't actually 'FTL,' faster-than-light, at all. The momentary wormholes that ships used to transit interstellar distance took two points in space-time and made them one. The ship's velocity never exceeded the speed of light; in fact, a ship making a so-called FTL transit never actually crossed the intervening space at all. Still, the misnomer FTL transit was all but universal. Even the experts used the term.

Rilk did not fully understand the actual physics of how a ship's singularity reactor induced the wormhole that transited a ship from one point in space-time to another. Past a certain practical level of knowledge, that was the realm of specialists. He knew what FTL transit entailed as far as running his ship was concerned, but his grasp of the theory only went as far as the basics. Still, he did know that the principles of FTL transit involved intrinsic uncertainty. Indeed, uncertainty was the fundamental underpinning of the whole process. The more one tried to define one parameter of an FTL transit, the more uncertain other parameters became. And that uncertainty imposed limits on what a ship could do.

Some of those limits made intuitive sense to Hans Rilk; others were utterly counter-intuitive, even paradoxical.

Range was a limit. An FTL transit could not reach across more than a few dozen light years of space. That made intuitive sense, to Rilk.

Gravity was another limit; trying to initiate a wormhole too close to a gravity well, even a very weak gravity well, added enormous, dangerous levels of uncertainty to the process. It was far safer and more reliable to accelerate out into interplanetary space, where only the distant whisper of gravity from a system's star held sway, before starting an FTL transit. On the other hand, it was also dangerous to try to emerge too far from a gravity well; opening a wormhole in deep interstellar space was both difficult and risky, hence the utility of systems like Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II.

Emergence precision was another limit. An ideal emergence point was undefined, anywhere within an empty volume of space tens of millions of kilometers across. Trying to control the point of emergence too closely increased the odds of trouble. That led to a counter-intuitive corollary; very short range FTL transits, within the volume of a single star system, were more complex, and more likely to go wrong, than larger, less precise transits across interstellar space. It was, Rilk mused, as if the process that generated a wormhole somehow resented any attempt to rein in its intrinsic uncertainly.

And most counter-intuitive of all, trying to coordinate FTL transits between multiple ships increased the risk of a problem for each of the ships involved. FTL navigators talked about non-local interactions and chaotic quantum resonance, but the terms were elusive to Rilk. The fact remained that trying to get ships to stay together, to enter and exit their FTL wormholes at the same time and place, pushed the limits of the process.

Of course one could, and did, push the process. Ships pushed for greater range, for greater precision, and for coordinated transits. But pushing the process and attempting a high-stress FTL transit meant accepting a certain probability of trouble.

There was a risk of a chaotic FTL emergence, with ships winding up somewhere other than where they aimed for. Other times, there might simply be a failure to initiate the FTL transit in the first place. The real problem was that when an FTL transit went wrong that way, it caused (or was caused by, or at least somehow correlated with) a severe destabilization of the femto-singularity at the core of a ship's singularity reactor, which was both the source of a ship's power and the key to being able to make FTL transits in the first place.

The man-made femto-singularities that were at the heart of a singularity reactor were never fully stable to begin with; each had a limited lifespan before instability built up past all attempts to re-stabilize, and the sub-atomic singularity collapsed into nothingness. Even a routine use of a singularity reactor for FTL transit induced destabilization, requiring the singularity reactor to be re-stabilized before it could be used for FTL again. An FTL emergence or initiation fault risked severe, possibly irretrievable, destabilization of the singularity.

It was never really safe, mused Rilk, to push around a black hole... not even a very, very small one.

There were some planet-bound religious sects that claimed that each singularity was a captive demon, or a gateway to hell; their followers refused to travel off-world, lest their souls be ripped away. There were times, when a new singularity was forced into being at the heart of the reactor, or just before an FTL transit, when Hans Rilk was not perfectly certain they were wrong.

This time, the FTL transit had scattered the four ships by hundreds of millions of kilometers, and worse for their schedule, had severely destabilized the singularity reactors on all four ships.

It could, Rilk knew, have been much worse. None of the ships' femto-singularities had collapsed. A singularity collapse would leave a ship with no power except her backup fission reactor. A singularity reactor was the only sort of fusion reactor that was viable for a ship; conventional containment-fusion reactors delivered only a fraction of the power of a singularity reactor of the same size, and they couldn't be made compact enough to serve as backup reactors. Instead, most ships used ultra-compact, high efficiency fission reactors for emergency power. A ship's backup fission reactor would provide enough power to maintain life support and call for help, but not nearly enough to power a ship's plasma drives. And of course, without the singularity, there could be no FTL transit.

For that matter, in a real worst-case, a singularity could even destabilize violently, generating a vast, uncontrolled burst of energy before it collapsed. That rarely happened unless the reactor was badly damaged, but if it did happen, it left nothing of the ship but vapor and radiation.

The emergence error could have been worse as well; there were wild stories, officially discounted with perhaps a bit too much fervor, of ships that emerged in the wrong star system, or more confusingly, in the wrong temporal framework; there were tales of ships attempting to cross light-years in an instant instead being thrown years into the future, displaced in time instead of space.

Nothing like that had happened. But there would be a substantial delay for the convoy as it maneuvered back into formation. These waypoint systems on the periphery of the Hegemony of Suns were not perfectly safe. There were independent, anomic, colonies out there, existing outside of the nomos of Hegemonic Law. Many of them harbored or spawned pirates. There were also the nomadic void-runners, the so-called Brotherhoods, who eschewed any home world and lived in their ships, stopping only to raid or trade, as seemed best to them.

Four freight-liners together, with coordinated defenses, would give most raiders pause, while one ship alone would be a very tempting target.

So there was space to cross under conventional plasma drive; carbon reaction mass fed in towards the singularity, close but not too close; close enough for carbon to be crushed together to the point of gravitic fusion, but not quite close enough to fall into and upset the delicate balance of the femto-singularity at the heart of the ship's reactor. The resulting stream of ultra-energetic neon and helium plasma was fed into the ship's plasma drives. There it mixed with more reaction mass, converting thousands of times more carbon into ultra-high energy plasma thrust.

The ships' drives lit up with nuclear fire, illuminating the empty darkness of the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system with hundred kilometer long spikes of plasma as the four huge ships maneuvered to regain their lost formation.

Setting aside the huge power of the plasma drive, it was still fundamentally a rocket. But to Rilk, an enthusiastic student of the history of early space flight, it was hard to place a singularity reactor-powered plasma drive in the same mental picture as a historical chemical rocket of the sort that mankind had first ridden into space. The plasma drive's power output was greater than the combined power output of the entire Earth had been in the era of the first rocket flights. Had one of those old-Earth chemical rocket pioneers somehow been able to see the sight, the plasma drive's exhaust, a torrent of radiation streaming out at almost ten percent the speed of light, would have seemed more like a stellar phenomenon than rocket exhaust.

And still, for all that power, the thrust could only accelerate the multi-megaton ships at a quarter of a standard gravity. It would take more than a hundred hours for the four freight-liners to cross the volume of space they had been scattered through. For the crews of the freight-liners, the slow hours of waiting had begun.

For the crews of the other two ships, drifting silently through the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system, the time of waiting was over.

Hans Rilk sat in his command pod on the bridge of the Ulia's Flower and rubbed the bridge of his nose. For all the excitement of the chaotic FTL emergence, the slow business of regaining the convoy's formation was tedious. There was nothing for the captain to do except monitor the ship's systems and watch as the Ulia's Flower exactly traced her plotted vector. At times like this, even on watch, the mind tended to wander.

Rilk could envision his ship perfectly. The Ulia's Flower was a huge teardrop shape, with a rounded bow, lightly armored to deal with the occasional micro-impact, and a narrow stern that held the main plasma drive. Forward of the drive and behind the bow were the huge cargo holds that gave the ship her purpose, and forward of those, nestled into the ship's bow, was the relatively small volume of the crew's accommodations and the command-and-control spaces from which the ship was operated. Swept-back radiator spines and sensor masts, mounted along the ship's ventral and dorsal aspects, gave the an appearance rather like some sort of deep-sea creature.

The two megaton freight-liner Ulia's Flower was an old ship, older than Rilk, who was on the wrong side of five hundred thousand hours himself; sixty, in Old-Earth years, though Old-Earth years were a fading measurement. Old-Earth history was a hobby of his... though if pressed, Rilk would admit that Old-Earth had very little to do with humanity now.

His thoughts were all over the place today. Momentarily, he shut off the data feeds and opened his eyes, taking in the faded metal bulkheads and worn crew pods of the bridge. There was nothing to see here, save the forms of his command crew. His first mate, who was also his wife, looked younger than her hours, at ease in her pod, eyes closed and mind open to multiple data feeds sent directly into her brain from the ship's systems. It was disorienting to try to see with both biological eyes and direct interface feeds at the same time. A glance caught his own reflection in one of the glossy backup video screens of his own command pod. The reflection showed a broad-shouldered man, balding, with a fringe of graying hair above a wide, deeply lined face, with a large nose and deep set brown eyes. His full beard was still mostly dark, though shot through with gray. He had once looked quite dashing, he knew, with a wild mane of dark hair and a thick dark beard; a bit wild. It was a good look for a space captain. He could still manage to look stern and commanding for new crewmembers, at need. But the face that looked back at him was no longer even close to young.

It was still going to be a pretty good run, Rilk mused, even with the delay. The increased destabilization from the bad emergence meant that it would take much longer than normal to stabilize the drive's singularity before it was safe to make another FTL transit. Worse, the need to use the singularity reactor to power the plasma drive meant that it wouldn't begin re-stabilizing until the long main engine burn was done, in a hundred and thirty more hours. Then it would take at least two hundred hours, maybe more, to stabilize the singularity enough to safely initiate another FTL transit. Compared to an ideal emergence, this navigational mess would probably cost the ships at least an extra two hundred and fifty hours; added to the hundred hours or so it should have taken, with a properly executed FTL transit, it was going to be three hundred and fifty hours all told... over fourteen days, by Old-Earth measure. Rilk had spoken sternly with the ship's navigator, but there was no indication of any actual mistake. Just probability; just bad luck.

This delay would cut into profits for the ships' owners, and that meant cancellation of both the crews' and captains' schedule-bonuses. But on this run even that wouldn't be a disaster. The margin on this cargo was very robust and despite the delay, the run was still going to be profitable. Even the crews were going to do well on this one; for a rare change, the crews' secured profit shares were much larger than the now-forfeited schedule-bonuses.

It was an unusual cargo, really. The four-ship convoy carried almost four megatons of alloy-bearing ore; not the sort of thing that usually paid the costs of interstellar transit. Almost any sort of ore was much cheaper to mine in the same system that was going to use it. Gold, for instance, didn't even come close to paying the costs of interstellar shipping. It was almost never economically feasible to ship mineral wealth between the stars. Almost. The only exceptions were the richest ores of fuel-grade uranium, or of the platinum-group metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, osmium, rhodium and ruthenium.

The Ulia's Flower and her sister ships were laden with the latter sort of ore; mixed platinum group metals, primarily rhodium, in astounding concentration, but with all the other platinum group metals present in high concentrations as well. Prior to stating this contract, Rilk had never heard of anyone finding ore of this quality... ore valuable enough to be worth interstellar shipping costs.

As far as Rilk knew, the Sigma-Charybdis system, where the ore was mined, was a unique anomaly as well. To the crews that worked in the system's hellish, high radiation environment, huddling inside heavily shielded mining platforms, it was just Charybdis, a monster that would devour them with killing radiation for the slightest mistake.

Sigma-Charybdis had once been a widely spaced binary star system: a fast burning type O supergiant star, distantly orbited by a white dwarf star. It had been blasted apart by a type II supernova, probably less than a hundred million hours ago; barely more than ten thousand old-Earth years; very recent by stellar measure. The gravity of the small second star, almost a tenth of a light year distant from its exploding partner, had captured a fair sample of the products of its stellar sibling's supernova. The high value elements and exotic alloys that could be mined in the ravaged remnants of the system, by the megaton, would have cost a hundred times more to obtain by normal means.

And that was enough to pay for the cost of mining operations in spite of the high radiation and the cost of multiple FTL transits. The Sigma-Charybdis Charter Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of the mighty Kerril Resource Recovery cartel, KRR, had founded the mining colony only ninety thousand hours ago (barely a decade in old-Earth years). Now the mining operation was generating profits on a scale that made major planetary economies take notice, even after tariffs and taxes paid to the Central Throne and to the relevant system-archons.

For bulk-shipping outfits like the one that chartered the Ulia's Flower and her companion freight-liners, transporting megatons of the almost unbelievably high-grade ore from Charybdis to Yuro, the nearest major Hegemonic system, generated a massive profit margin. KRR had its own shipping fleets, of course, but moving them to the fringe of Hegemonic space had proven more costly than doing the job with more local shipping.

All of which put Hans Rilk here, in command of a ship that had been crewed and commanded by his extended family lineage since before he was born. His uncle had been captain of this ship when Rilk first went into space. Now the Ulia's Flower was his command. Rilk supposed that when he retired, some cousin or nephew might be her next captain. But for now the ship was his. It was his fourth trip on this same run in the last ten thousand hours; just over 14% longer than an old-Earth year.

Old Earth seemed to be on his mind, just then. His family was rich, for a demos family. It would not have been impossible for some of them attain nobility and enter the ranks of the aristokratai. But so far, no one of his family who might have had that chance had accepted. That leap had been too much to brave. Still his family could afford historical analysis of artifacts and records, so that, unlike most commoner families, the Rilk lineage had not lost its own history during the Escape. Hans Rilk knew of his ancestors. He knew his family came from a part of old Earth that had been called Holland. And he knew that his family had committed generations to the business of commanding ships.

There were records, so old that archaeolinguists had been needed to decipher the language they were written in, that hinted strongly that there had been men named Rijlk or Rijk at the helms of pre-industrial sea-going ships, when wind and sails were the means of propulsion and the stars were only for navigation.

More reliable records showed that there were Rilks commanding fission powered ocean-going ships a hundred years (almost a million hours) before the Escape, when the final colonization ships had left Old Earth. Very few families had records going back so far, even among the Aristokratai.

For Hans Rilk it was a pleasant conceit, to pass slow time, to imagine his ancestors' reactions to his own life. He could show an imaginary ancestor his ship, and try to explain the singularity reactor, and the neural interface controls. He would explain the commonplace things: the way Earth languages had been changed by the Escape and the utility of modern Translang, the way time was measured by people who rarely stayed in one place long enough to see a full orbital year of any one planet. Most humans measured their lives in tens of thousands of hours now, in place of the old-Earth years. Ten thousand hours was a seventh part longer than an old-Earth year, and though Rilk had an amateur historian's affection for the old-fashioned measurements, ten-thousand hour units, tenkays, were, he admitted, just as functional... though perhaps lacking in the romance of ages past.

We are a long way from there and then, thought Rilk, in time and space and even in the nature of what we call human... in things I do not quite know the measure of. We are a long way from being a single people of a single world, Rilk thought, and then admitted that the thought was folly; humans had never been a single people on Old Earth either.

2

Time was measured in long seconds.

Zandy was on the beam. The interceptor was centered on the output of the Number Three Primary Laser Array, boosting hard at eighty-two gees towards the enemy ship. The enemy was focusing a tertiary laser array on her; she increased polymer flow to the bow-shields and launched another set of optical sensor-relay drones on a trajectory that ought to take them out of the dazzle-blinding pattern of the enemy laser. No joy; the enemy seemed to have it in for her, personally; all three drones flared and died, giving her no new sensor data. She was flying blind. She had the sensor feed from the Conquering Sun, her mother-ship, but it was light-lagged by almost two seconds, and her mother-ship was being laser-blinded too. The data wasn't totally useless, but it was nowhere near as good as getting some of her own sensors into the game. Seconds were a long time for an interceptor on an attack run.

The interceptor was riding the laser of one of the Conquering Sun's Primary Laser Arrays, PLAs, catching the enormous output of the huge laser array in its variable geometry parabolic reflectors and focusing it to turn carbon reaction mass into high energy plasma thrust. Zandy adjusted the magnetic nozzle of her drive and her thrust vector changed accordingly, slewing the interceptor in a corkscrew as she signaled the vector change back to her mother-ship. She could direct thrust in almost any direction, so long as it was powered by the PLA of her mother ship. But she needed that laser; there was no way get sustained high thrust from an onboard power source in something as small as an interceptor.

There was also no way to focus killing laser energy from the assault-ship out as far as an interceptor could be propelled, using its reflectors to focus the distant laser of its mother-ship. That meant that interceptors, propelled by laser power from their mother-ships, were the weapons of choice for deep space battle.

For a moment she was off the beam, switching seamlessly to a burst of micro-fission pellets for thrust, before the mother-ship tracked her maneuver and tasked another PLA to propel her. The engine switched back to laser power. She was out of the glare of the enemy blinding laser now, and she triggered another spread of sensor drones to launch. This time she had a decent few seconds of new data before the enemy blinding lasers found her.

The bow-shields were bleeding vaporized polymer fast, and she upped the injection rate of fresh polymer into the shields to maximum. The shields were deployable panels of smart-metal and composite mesh that held a fluid barrier of ablative polymer between her and the enemy lasers. Her onboard polymer reserves should hold out for the brief remaining duration of the attack run.

More importantly, the new sensor data suddenly gave her a targeting fix on two enemy interceptors screaming out to meet her. Her closing vector towards the enemy ship was up to almost 680 kilometers per second now, and the enemy interceptors were doing about 370 kps reciprocal. The closure rate was over a thousand kilometers per second, a third of a percent of light speed.

There might be a second wave of enemy interceptors beyond this one, she thought, but it would be too late. Interceptors launched this late wouldn't be able to engage her before she was in range of their mother-ship, especially since the enemy boost lasers would be getting dangerously hot; her own mother-ship was venting geysers of coolant trying to manage the big lasers' waste heat.

But she had a target now and the decision to take the shot was almost subconscious. She selected half of her anti-interceptor warheads and tasked them, launching them out into the laser-saturated space around her. The small projectiles' fission motors flared for a violent second, deploying the warheads to minimum stand-off range. Lasing rods aligned at the now unseen targets' probable positions and the multi-kiloton yield warheads detonated in flashes of nuclear fire, sending out coherent blasts of X-ray energy.

An instant after the warheads were launched she was executing another random vector variation and dropping salvos of micro-decoys, seeking to evade a possible counter-attack from the enemy interceptors. Her own blinding lasers were tracking across the most likely volumes of space where the enemy interceptors might have deployed sensor drones; their main sensors would be blinded by tertiary laser arrays from her mother-ship, just like the enemy ship was blinding her.

She assumed that the enemy interceptors had taken shots at her too, but she never got confirmation of it. If she had scored any interceptor kills, she would find out from the mother-ship's records. Her own sensors told her nothing about it.

Her second spread of sensor drones were fully cooked now, burned to uselessness by hostile laser energy, and she launched a third salvo. She was off the beam again, and her fission fuel reserves were falling fast to keep up her thrust. Her acceleration was jolting all along the range from sixty to almost ninety gees; a constant rate of acceleration was almost as quick a form of suicide as drifting on a fixed vector would be. The only thing saving her now was that the enemy ship's own sensors were being flooded with blinding lasers, making it impossible for the enemy ship to keep a concentrated point of laser light focused on her constantly evading interceptor. If she let her interceptor drift on a fixed vector, or even accelerated at a constant rate, the enemy's secondary laser arrays would track her and burn through her bow-shields in a matter of scant seconds.

The enemy ship had scant seconds left. Captain Ari-Kani of the Hegemonic assault-ship Conquering Sun had chosen to gamble, dedicating all of his ship's PLAs to a long-range offensive strike, powering a salvo of twelve interceptors, two full waves, for a long duration burn and holding back nothing for powering a defensive salvo of interceptors. The huge ship still had her secondary and tertiary laser arrays for defense, to blind enemy sensors and try to burn down inbound interceptors and warheads.

Committing all of her Primary Laser Arrays and launching only twelve interceptors allowed time for half of the Conquering Sun's big boost-laser arrays to cool down without interrupting power to the interceptors. But the lasers generated vast amounts of waste heat when they fired. Even with half the beams shut down for cooling at any given time, the Conquering Sun's radiator spines were glowing with waste heat and the huge ship was venting streams of super-heated coolant to keep the lasers from overheating. There was no margin to power a second salvo of interceptors, a defensive salvo, without cutting power to the attack salvo.

Heat buildup would eventually force the big lasers to shut down, even with the massive coolant expenditure and the alternation of half the lasers between cooling and firing cycles.

But not soon enough for this enemy, thought Zandy. She didn't know what her sibling interceptors were doing, but she was almost in range of the target ship, past its first defensive wave of interceptors and too close for a second defensive wave to get in her way before her own weapons would be in range. She found the beam again and accelerated on laser power; there wasn't much fission fuel left, but that didn't matter.

Now she was just within maximum range; she could launch her ship-killers now, but the odds of a kill were still low. The power of the warheads' nuclear detonation-pumped X-ray lasers was enormous, but the focus accuracy was very poor. Not to mention that the target ship was stealthed to degrade last-instant radar targeting and was pumping out blinding lasers to degrade optical sensors. So the weapons had to get close to work. It would take only a few more endless seconds to get the target deeper into her range envelope.

Ideally she would have wanted to wait till her interceptor shot past the target ship, giving her weapons a clear shot behind the enemy's bow-shields, but there was too much enemy fire and the odds of living long enough for that were too low.

The enemy's tactics were more conventional than her side's. Five or six interceptors, a single wave, had been held back as defenders, to try to stop her and the other interceptors in her wave. It was a futile defense against the dozen inbound interceptors, but it let the enemy shoot a full wave of a half dozen interceptors at her mother-ship, unopposed. But if she could kill the enemy ship, the enemy interceptors would lose power; limited to their internal fission fuel, the enemy wouldn't be able to maintain a high acceleration attack run, and without the ability to evade at extreme accelerations, the enemy interceptors would be swatted out of the vacuum like flies stuck to fly paper.

The beam suddenly died. Fission took over again, giving her some acceleration, but there was less than 10% reserves left. No time. She frantically looked though rear facing sensors. The Conquering Sun was no longer lasing for her; all the PLAs had been re-tasked!

Her acceleration was down to 58 gees, and the bow-shields were suddenly subliming faster than the polymer could be injected; a secondary laser array from the enemy mother-ship was trying to track her, and doing a better job now that her acceleration had fallen off. She could evade at full acceleration, but that would use the last of her fission fuel. Range was down to just over ten thousand kilometers, falling fast. Decision was instant. She pushed for maximum acceleration, straining the structure of the interceptor at eight-eight gees, ramming herself out of the focus point of the laser. Even so, the bow shields failed and the hull began to melt and sublime. If the laser had been perfectly focused, it would have shattered the composite and metal interceptor with a sledgehammer thermal shock. As it was, she had long seconds left to trigger the high-yield anti-ship warheads. A half-dozen megaton-range nuclear explosions blossomed as the anti-ship warheads generated sprays of X-ray laser pulses that were an order of magnitude more powerful than those she had sent at the enemy interceptors. A low-yield weapon might have been stopped by the massive ablative