The Depths of Time Read Free Page B

then another, another, an other, until all six of the surviving intruders had punched through. Sayad felt a sick knot in the pit of her stomach— the enemies had known the codes, and the Standfasts last volley of fire, the one she had died to make, had been for nothing at all.
    But then there was no time.
    Weapons section took the conn, and the Upholder came about hard, placing the cylindrical ship ’ s long axis at right angles to the wormhole, so as to bring the most possible firepower to bear. Her main weapons opened up at once, directing laser and railgun fire at the twisting, dodging intruders. Sayad checked her instruments and got her first di rect mass, size, and acceleration readings on their uninvited guests. No doubt about it—those had to be uncrewed ships. They were too small and too dense to carry both crew and any sort of acceleration shielding, and they were accelerating hard enough to squash any human passenger into red paste with or without shielding, accelerating faster than any ship she had ever seen or heard of. It was precious little comfort that her tracking projections had proved accurate enough that the weapons systems were able to start targeting the moment the intruders emerged.
    The Upholder’s lasers locked on to the first target, and chased it relentlessly as it dived and twisted and pinwheeled through a complex evasive-action sequence. The target held together far longer than it should have under main-laser fire, but whatever its very impressive shielding was made of, it couldn ’ t protect the intruder indefinitely—not from the multigigawatt intensity of the Upholder’s firepower. A sec ond bank of the main lasers locked on the target, doubling the energy being pumped into the intruder ’ s hull. It flashed over, blowing up in a spectacular blaze of glory that blinded half the Upholder’s sensors and detectors for three very long seconds before the damper systems could recover.
    The position-predictors did their best, but the surviving five targets were performing evasive escape maneuvers. Even three seconds of sensor-blinding was enough to make the old tracking projections worse than useless.
    The weapons systems lost five more irreplaceable seconds as they tracked and scanned for the surviving intruders. Sayad slaved her screens to the weapons display and watched their frantic search. Koffield stayed with her, watched the battle off her screens. No sense rushing to the weapons boards. He had already given all the orders he was going to give. All he could do was sit back and watch. He could do that just as well from Sayad ’ s stations, without distracting the gunnery teams. But the gun crews weren ’ t finding anything. Sayad flipped back to her own tactical search algorithms and ran them against the weapons-sensor data.
    And found the intruders again. Or maybe the intruders had found them. “ Bloody hell! ” Sayad cried out. “ Bogie, coming straight at us, right through the wormhole blind spot! ” She thought at first it was a variant on diving out of the sun, one of the oldest dogfight tactics there was. The intruder had the wormhole directly astern, and was barreling straight for the Upholder.
    But no. No, not straight for the Upholder. But near enough, only two or three degrees up-Y from straight-line on the wormhole. And almost certainly, the intruder had no detection gear capable of finding the Upholder. If the intruder had known where the Upholder was, it either would have revectored to ram, or aimed for just about any other spot in the sky. In fact, the intruder she was tracking had ceased evasive action. Either it expected that the Upholder’s detectors would not recover in time, or its automatic-sequencing system had told the intruder to do so. In either case, the intruder had not spotted them. Chance, damned-dumb chance, and nothing else, had sent the intruder flying right across the Upholder’s bow.
    She checked range and rate on the new target. It was coming