“This ship carries one of your leaders in cryosleep,” I answered. “We are transporting her to Loris, the capital of the Commonwealth, at her command.”
“To surrender?”
A diplomat would have found evasive words. A politician would have lied. I was simply a warrior. “To discuss an armistice, a truce, an end to the war,” I said.
“On Commonwealth terms,” the Skorpis admiral rumbled, like a lioness growling.
“On the best terms that can be obtained.”
“Surrender.”
“Not surrender,” I insisted. “An armistice. Peace.”
“Surrender,” she repeated. And I realized that she meant I should surrender my ship to her.
“This vessel is on a diplomatic mission. We are carrying one of the Hegemony’s highest leaders. You cannot order us—”
“Stop accelerating and prepare to be boarded by my warriors,” the Skorpis admiral insisted. “Otherwise we will destroy you, your ship, and the traitoress who wants to surrender.”
I knew that every moment I could keep her talking was a moment closer to the relative safety of superlight.
“On what authority do you make such an unreasonable demand?” I asked, as indignantly as I could.
Her image in my display screen disappeared, instantly replaced by a view of a dozen Skorpis battle cruisers powering toward us.
The Apollo rocked wildly.
“They’ve opened fire on us!” Emon yelled. He was practically at my elbow; his shout was more from sudden excitement than fear. At least, I hoped so.
“Evasive maneuvers,” I said.
You can’t evade laser beams, even at relativistic speed. With a dozen battle cruisers within range of us, they blazed away, catching us in a cone of fire that sizzled our defensive screen and sent all the meters on the bridge deep into the red.
It was a race to see whether they could overload our screen and penetrate it before we achieved superlight and winked out of their sector of space-time.
“Cancel the evasive maneuvers,” I said. “All available power to the main engines.”
We were still shaking and rattling from the blasts of laser bolts drenching our screen. And in the static-streaked displays I could see that squadron of battle cruisers coming up on us, far faster than we were. I turned to Frede, strapped into the seat beside me.
She knew what I was going to ask before I asked it. “Computer projects complete screen collapse fourteen seconds before we achieve superlight.”
“That’s enough time—”
“For them to vaporize us, yes,” Frede finished for me.
There had to be something we could do.
“Transfer power from the forward section of the screen to the rear. That’s where we’re being hit.”
“But if those battle cruisers maneuver to come in on our forward section…” She did not have to complete the sentence. One shot on an unscreened section of the ship would cut us in two like a hot knife going through butter.
“Do it!” I snapped.
Frede’s fingers flicked across her keyboard. “Computer projects we’ll be in superlight twenty seconds before the screen overloads,” she said. Then added, “If nobody hits us forward.”
We all held our breaths. The ship rocked and shivered under the pounding of the orbital stations’ guns. The battle cruisers were gaining on us steadily. Two of them spurted ahead, trying to get in front of us and attack us from that quarter.
And then we flashed into superlight. All the display screens went blank and our shaking, shuddering ordeal was over.
“We made it!” whooped Jerron, from his engineer’s console.
“So far,” I said.
Frede turned to me. “They know we’re heading for Loris. They can plant squadrons in all the likely places where we’d come out of superlight for navigational fixes. They’ll be waiting for us.”
“Only if we follow the geodesic to Loris,” I said. “Now is the time for evasive maneuvers.”
It was a gamble. We had to reach Loris before the Commonwealth started using the star-killers, but we could not approach Loris on the shortest route because Skorpis battle squadrons would be lying in wait along that way. So we had to take a more roundabout route, yet not such a distorted one that our arrival at Loris would be delayed too long.
How long was too long? I had no way of knowing.