“And if the Skorpis found us on one of those other planets?”
“The chances of that happening are so low—”
“But if they do, what are the chances of our surviving? Zero,” I told her, before she could answer. “At Loris we have all the defenses of the Giotto system on our side. We have a fighting chance.”
She looked utterly unconvinced. I could not tell Frede that my real reason for insisting on Loris was that Anya was dying. Even in cryosleep she grew weaker every day. Aten was killing her and the only way to make him stop was to confront him, to overpower him and the other Creators who had allied themselves with him. To kill him.
He would not come to a rendezvous at some out-of-the-way planet. He had made Loris his headquarters, the capital of the Commonwealth. So I had to go to Loris, I had to bring Anya there, I had to face the Golden One.
Frede’s expression made me realize that I was, in all probability, about to get all of us killed.
But I pulled myself up to my full height and gave the order, “Direct geodesic to Loris. No more evasions. We bore straight in.”
“And damn the torpedoes,” she muttered.
“What?”
“An old naval expression. From ancient history.”
With no external points of reference there was no way for our unaided human senses to get any feeling for our ship’s speed. The instruments told us we were hurtling along at many multiples of the speed of light, but for all we could tell the Apollo was sitting still in the middle of nothingness.
Yet the morning arrived when Frede said to me, “We’re within two days of the Giotto system. Time to start sending out message capsules.”
I got the feeling that out there in that blank nothingness surrounding us, the entire Skorpis battle fleet was riding along with us, waiting for us to slow down to relativistic velocity once again, their weapons primed and ready to blast us into an expanding fireball of ionized atoms.
Tension on the bridge grew tighter with each passing moment. We fired off every message capsule we possessed, then used the ship’s matter transceiver to make still more of them, converting some of our food stocks to do so.
“We won’t need more than two days’ worth of food,” I told the transceiver crew. “In three days’ time we’ll be having our meals on Loris.”
“Or in hell,” grumbled one of the technicians when he thought I was too far down the passageway to hear him.
When I returned to the bridge I asked Frede, “How close to the planet can you put us?”
She looked up from her navigational screens, bleary-eyed from concentration and lack of sleep. “Fifty planetary diameters,” she answered. “Half a million klicks. Right smack in the middle of their major defense belt.”
“Good,” I said. “Perfect.”
Then she added, “If the ephemeris data in our computer’s memory files is up-to-date.”
“It should be,” I said.
With a sardonic grin she replied, “Right. It should be.” She put a slight but noticeable accent on the word should. “If it’s not we could hang our asses on the wrong side of the planetary system. Or crash into the planet’s surface.”
Pleasant possibilities.
The ephemeris data was correct and Frede’s navigation was practically flawless. The only factor that we did not foresee—could not have foreseen—was that the Skorpis had decided to attack Loris without waiting for us to appear.
We slowed out of superlight and into the middle of a full-scale battle. The sky was filled with warships and orbital battle stations slashing at each other with laser beams and nuclear-tipped missiles.
Apollo jounced and shuddered as a Skorpis dreadnought loomed directly before us, firing its main battery at a Commonwealth orbital station, but turning its secondary laser banks squarely upon us.
I barely had time to yell, “Battle stations!” Control of the ship automatically went to my command chair; the keyboards set into the ends of my armrests now directly controlled all the ship’s systems. The rest of the bridge crew were there strictly as backup for me.
My intention was to get to the surface of Loris, but in the midst of this battle that was going to be impossible. The planet’s defensive shields were up, powered by every mega-joule their ground-based generators could produce.