“Jesus shit! Kids? How old? How many gees?”

“One girl was about three. There were a couple of five-year-olds as well.”

“Fuck it!”

“What is it?” Sarha asked, real concern darkening her sea-green eyes for the first time since they’d entered the Lalonde system.

“We’re not going to make it.”

The fifth solo combat wasp appeared from behind Aethra. Seven of the Lady Mac ’s submunition drones detonated their nuclear explosives in immediate response. Joshua launched two more.

“Even if we jump without an alignment trajectory, from here, it’ll take us fifteen seconds to retract the sensors and prime the nodes,” he said. “We’ll be blind for ten seconds. It’s not long enough.”

“So run,” Sarha said. “Fire every last combat wasp at them and go. Lady Mac can make eight gees even with tube one down. Maranta can’t make more than four gees. We can get clear.”

“That vector’s already loaded. But we’ve got kids on board. Shit! Shit! Shit!” He saw the last Edenist being yanked out of the airlock tube by Warlow. The flight computer was shutting the hatch before his feet were fully clear.

Do something, and do it now, Joshua Calvert, he told himself. Because you’re going to be dead in twenty seconds if you don’t.

His mind ordered the flight computer to start the fusion tube ignition sequence.

Another whole two seconds to think in.

There was nothing in the tactics programs, even Dad had never dug himself a hole this deep in the shit.

Can’t run, can’t fight, can’t jump out, can’t hide . . .

“Oh yes I can!” he whooped.

The fusion drives came on, and the Lady Mac accelerated down the vector plot that sprang from Joshua’s mind even as the idea unrolled. Three gees, heading straight in towards the gas giant.

“Joshua!” Dahybi complained. “We can’t jump if you take us inward.”

“Shut up.”

Dahybi settled back and started into a recital of a scripture he remembered from his youth. “Yes, Captain.”

“Warlow, activate the three zero-tau pods we’ve got in capsule C, and cram the children in. You’ve got four minutes maximum before we start accelerating properly.”

“Right, Joshua.”

The sensors reported that four combat wasps were pursuing them. Joshua fired an answering salvo of five. He could hear Dahybi muttering something that sounded like a prayer, it had the right dirge-like resonance.

“They’re coming after us,” Melvyn said a minute later.

Maranta and its cohort were accelerating away from Aethra.

“That’s the Gramine ,” Sarha said after studying the image. “Look at the angle its drive is deflected through. There isn’t another starship that can do that. Wissler was always boasting about their combat agility.”

“Just wonderful, Sarha, thanks,” Joshua proclaimed. “You got any other morale boosters for us?”

Warlow climbed the ladder into the lounge deck, boosted muscles lifting him easily against the heavy gravity. Carbon composite rungs creaked in dismay under his tripled weight. There were Edenists packed solid across the lounge floor, none of the acceleration couches had been activated—not that there were enough anyway. They didn’t have neural nanonics, the cosmonik realized. And because of it their children whimpered and snivelled in wretched distress without any cushioning below them.

He walked over to the smallest girl, who was lying wide-eyed and terribly pale beside her mother. “I’m putting her into zero-tau,” he announced shortly, and bent down. He had plugged a pair of cargo-handling arms into his elbow sockets before coming up the ladder, they had wide metal manipulator forks which would act as a good cradle. The girl started crying again. “There will be none of this acceleration in the pod. Explain to her. She must not squirm when I pick her up. Her spine will break.”

Be brave,tiya told her daughter. He will take you to a safe place where you won’t hurt so.

He’s horrible,gatje replied as the metal prongs slid underneath her.

You will be all right,gaura said, reinforcing the pacific mental subliminal Tiya was radiating.

Warlow took care to keep Gatje’s spine level, supporting her head with one set of forks while the other three arms were positioned under her torso and legs. He lifted gingerly.

“Can I help?” Gaura asked, levering himself onto his elbows. His neck felt as though it was being slowly compressed in a hydraulic vice.

“No. You are too weak.” Warlow clumped out of the lounge, an outlandish faerie-legend figure walking amongst the prone hurting bodies with a grace completely at variance with his cumbersome appearance.

There were seven children under ten years old. It took him nearly five minutes to shift them from the lounge to the zero-tau pods. His neural nanonics monitored their flight on a secondary level. The attacking starships were matching Lady Mac ’s three-gee acceleration. Combat-wasp submunitions produced a continual astral fire of plasma between them.

Lady Mac swept over the fringes of the ring, two thousand kilometres above the ecliptic as Warlow lowered the last child into the zero-tau pod.

“Thank Christ for that,” Joshua said when the pod was enveloped by the black field. “OK, people, stand by for high acceleration.”

Lady Mac ’s thrust increased to seven gees, tormenting the Edenists in the lounge still further. For all the stamina of their geneered bodies they had never been supplemented to withstand the onerous burden of combat spaceflight.

Maranta and Gramine began to fall behind. Sensors showed three more combat wasps eating up the distance.

“Jesus, how many of the fucking things have they got left?” Joshua asked as he launched four of the Lady Mac ’s remaining six drones in response.

“I estimate ten,” Melvyn datavised. “Possibly more.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua angled the Lady Mac down sharply towards the rings.

The slow moving pack of dusty ice chunks reflected an unaccustomed radiance as the three starships streaked past. After millennia of stasis, stirred only by the slow heartbeat of the gas giant’s magnetosphere, the ring’s micrometre dust was becoming aroused by the backwash of electromagnetic pulses from the fusion bombs exploding above it. Dark snowflake-crystal patterns rippled elegantly over its surface. The temperature rose by several fractions of a degree, breaking up the unique and fantastically delicate valency bonds between disparate atoms which free fall and frigidity had established. Behind the starships, the rings quivered like a choppy sea before the storm was unleashed.

Those on board the Lady Macbeth able to receive the sensor images watched with numbed fascination as the ring particles grew larger, changing from a grainy mist to a solid plain of drifting mud-yellow boulders. It took up half of the image; they were close enough now to make it seem like the floor of the universe.

The penultimate combat wasp darted out of the Lady Macbeth ’s launch-tubes. Submunitions ejected almost at once, scattering like a shoal of startled fish. A hundred kilometres behind her, twenty-seven fusion bombs arrayed in an ammonite maculation detonated simultaneously, throwing up a temporary visual and electronic barrier. She turned, unseen by her pursuers, triple drive exhausts scoring vast arcs across the stars. Then the three barbs of superenergized helium were searing into the ice and rock of the ring. No physical structure was capable of withstanding that starcore temperature. The agitated surface cratered and geysered as though a depth charge had been set off far below.

Lady Macbeth dived straight into the rings, decelerating at eleven gees.