Very well. Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. But-

Hang on, Alley, the AI interrupted. The forts just came on-line.

"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha-synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?"

"I'm afraid not, Sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."

"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.

"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha-synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."

"I see." Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We'll have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go-certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."

"It'll be blind fire, Sir," Horth protested, wincing at the thought of the expense. Without lock, she'd have to fire virtually at random, and SLAMs required direct hits. Trying to smother a half-seen target as small as the alpha-synth would use up prodigious numbers of multi-million-credit weapons.

"Understood. I'll authorize the expense."

"Very well, Sir." Horth nodded to her fire control officer.

"Engage," she said.

Alicia bit her lip as the fixed fortifications opened fire at last and hordes of red-ringed, malignant blue sparks shrieked after them. The forts were designed to stop ten million-tonne superdreadnoughts, and the volume of fire was inconceivable.

The Supra-Light Accelerated Missile, or SLAM, was the Empire's ultimate long-range weapon. Close in concept to the drones starships used for FTL messages by starships, a SLAM consisted solely of a small Fasset drive and its power source. The weapon had to be half the size of an assault shuttle to squeeze them in, but they made it, in effect, a targeted black hole, and very little known to man had a hope of stopping one. A starship's interposed Fasset drive mass would take one out, though stories about what happened when the ship's drive was even minimally out of tune were enough to curl one's hair, and not even a SLAM could get through the final defense of a capital ship's Orchovski-Kurushu-Milne shield. Unfortunately, a Fasset drive wouldn't work inside an OKM shield, and no weapon could shoot out past one, either. Both of which points were moot in this case, since nothing smaller than a battleship could spare the mass for shield generators.

The only good thing was that SLAMs weren't seeking weapons-mostly. No homing systems could see around their black holes, and despite the fact that their acceleration was little more than half that of the Hauptman effect, their speed and range quickly took them out of guidance range of their firers. A very near near-miss could still "suck" its way into a hit by gravitational attraction, which was why they weren't used when enemies were intermingled, but what the AI's jammers were doing to the forts' targeting systems meant the chance of any one of them scoring a hit was infinitestimal.

Only they were firing a lot of them. Alicia's thought was a tiny mental whisper as the outer works began to range upon her, and she squirmed down in her couch. It was like driving a skimmer into a snowstorm-surely not all of them could miss.

On the contrary, AI told her. They're just throwing good money after bad, Alley. Watch.

The AI changed its generator settings, swinging the drive's black hole through a cone-shaped volume ahead of them and dropping its side shields, trading a bit of its speed advantage over the cruisers to turn the drive field into a huge broom that swept space clear before them. Nor did it refocus the field in any predictable fashion. The drive's gravity well fluctuated-its strength shifting in abrupt, impossible to predict increments sufficient to deprive any tracking station of a constant acceleration value-and its corkscrewing mass "wagged" the ship astern like a dog's tail, turning it into an even more impossible target. A cyber-synth might have been able to duplicate that maneuver and still hold to its desired base course, though it would have been far less efficient; nothing else could.

The drive was no shield against SLAMs coming in from astern or the side, but the ship's unpredictable "swerves" gave the coup de grace to the forts' fire control. SLAM after SLAM slashed harmlessly past or vanished against the drive field, and Alicia felt herself relaxing despite the nerve-racking tension of the continuous attack.

Bets on how many they're willing to waste? the AI asked brightly.

"Governor, we're wasting our time."

Treadwell shot Admiral Horth a venemous glance, and she shrugged.

"If you wish, I will of course continue," she told them, "but we've already fired twenty percent of our total SLAM armament. That's four months' production, and there's no sign we've even come close to a hit."

Treadwell's jaw clenched and he started to reply sharply, then shook himself and relaxed with a sigh.

"You're right," he admitted, and glared at the fleeing dot. He didn't have a single ship, not even a corvette, in position to intercept it, and nothing he had could kill it. He turned away from the plot with forced calm.

"Lord Jurawski will be displeased enough when I inform him we've … mislaid an alpha-synth without my adding that I've stripped Franconia of its defenses. Abort engagement, Admiral Horth."

"Yes, Sir." Horth managed to keep the relief out of her voice, but Treadwell heard its absence, and his eyes glittered with bitter amusement.

"And after that, Admiral, you and I and Admiral Marat-and, of course, my dear friend Sir Arthur-will sit down to discuss precisely how this fiasco came to occur. I'm sure-" the governor showed his teeth in what might charitably have been called a smile "-the final report will be fascinating."

Sir Arthur Keita slumped in his chair, watching a repeater of Jefferson Field's gravitic plot on his com screen. His eyes ached, and he hadn't moved in almost seven hours, yet he couldn't look away.

The stolen ship had passed the outer forts four and a half hours ago. Freed of the star's inhibition, it had gone to full power at last; now it was just under three light-hours from the system primary, traveling at over .98 C. He watched in real-time as the alpha-synth ship raced ahead under stupendous acceleration, increasing its already enormous velocity by more than twenty-two kilometers per second with every second.

Eight and a half seconds later, the ship hit the critical threshold of ninety-nine percent of light-speed and vanished in the kaleidoscope flash of wormhole transition. It disappeared into its own private universe, no longer part of Einstein's orderly existence as it sprang to an effective velocity of over five hundred times light-speed … and continued to accelerate.

The gravitic scanners could still track it, but not on a display as small as the one he was watching, and he moved at last, reaching out to switch off the screen. Just for a moment, he looked like the old, old man he was as he rubbed his eyes, wondering anew what he might have done differently to avert this insanity and the catastrophe certain to follow in its wake.

Tannis Cateau stood beside him, face drawn and eyes bright with unshed tears, and neither of them looked over their shoulders to see Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem throw an ironic salute to the blank-faced screen … and smile.

My remotes could do that a lot faster.

"I know they could, Megaira." Alicia had developed the habit of speaking aloud to her electronic half-and Tisiphone-more often than not. Not because she had to, but because the sound of even her own voice, was a welcome anodyne against the silence. She wasn't precisely lonely with two other people to "talk" to, yet too much quiet left an eerie, empty sensation in her bones. "But I prefer to do this myself, if I'm going to be wearing it."

Indeed, Tisiphone put in, I have never known a warrior who truly cared to have another tend to his personal weapons.

I know that, the AI huffed, but they're my personal weapons, too, in a sense. And I want to know they're in perfect shape if she needs them.

"Which is why you're watching me like a hawk, dear," Alicia said, grinning at the interplay while she concentrated on her battle armor.

The AI and the Fury had come to a far better mutual understanding than she'd originally hoped-indeed, it was Tisiphone who'd suggested the perfect (and, she thought, inevitable, under the circumstances) name for the AI-but there was a tartness at its heart. Megaira remained wary of the Fury, mindful of the way she'd imposed control on Alicia during their escape and suspicious of her ultimate plans, and Tisiphone knew it. Knew it and was wise enough to accept it, if a bit resentfully. Fortunately, prolonged exposure to a human personality had waked something approaching a genuine sense of humor in the compulsive Fury. She wasn't immune to the irony of the situation, and Alicia more than suspected that both of them rather enjoyed sniping at one another-and she knew each was jealous of the other's relationship with her.

And it's a good thing I am watching you, Alley. You're overloading that tank. You'll jam the ammo chute if you put in that many rounds.

"I was doing this before you were a gleam in your programmer's eyes, Megaira. Watch."

Long fingers manipulated the belt of three-millimeter caseless with effortless familiarity, tucking it up into the ammunition tank behind her battle armor's right pauldron. She wasn't surprised by Megaira's warning-she'd heard it from every recruit she'd ever checked out on field maintenance. Like the computer, they were fresh from total submersion in The Book and hadn't learned the tricks only experience could teach. Now she doubled the linkless belt neatly and cheated the last few centimeters into place with an adroit twist of the wrist and a peculiar little lifting motion that slid it up into the void created by a few minutes' work with a cutting torch.