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  “What the hell?” he said.

  “Yes, and welcome to it,” Don replied. He shoved away a panhandler who stuck a hand in his face and mumbled something incoherent. “Better get moving. Remember, this is a diz.”

  “Diz?”

  “That’s what we call these enclaves, like Baltimore.”

  “Why diz?”

  “Some Old Earth name for an artificial environment. Dizzy-land, I think they called them.” He stepped out into the empty street and walked down the middle, as far away from the denizens of the cityscape as possible. Straker stayed close, trying to watch everywhere at once.

  They rounded a corner and nearly walked into a full-blown riot. Dozens of uniformed police were beating civilians with batons while other civilians threw rocks and bottles at them. Chemical smoke stung Straker’s eyes. An officer took out his slugthrower—a slugthrower, not a stunner!—and fired, hitting one of the rock-throwers in the neck. She fell and began to bleed profusely.

  “What the hell is this place?” Straker asked as Myrmidon drew him back into an alley, out of the way. “Why are they rioting?”

  “Who knows? Food shortages, police brutality, their sports team lost or won, it doesn’t matter. All our human Facets have to go through Baltimore.”

  “Ah… like an amusement park, right? A diz,” Straker chuckled, understanding. “It’s an exercise. Special effects, fake blood…”

  Don shook his head. “No, it’s not an exercise. Not the way you mean. It’s artificial, but there’s nothing fake about it.”

  Straker stepped out to look again at the woman lying in the street, the red pool expanding on the pavement. “You mean she’s really been shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit.” Straker sprinted to her and threw himself to the ground. The woman looked up at him with glassy eyes and gasped. “You’re gonna be all right,” he said. He reached beneath his tunic and ripped off part of his undershirt, tried to stanch the bleeding.

  A blow on the back of his head surprised him, and his combat reflexes took over. He rolled to his feet and found himself facing an officer with a baton.

  “Back off, scumbag,” the cop said. “You’re interfering with police business.”

  Straker snatched the club from the officer’s hands and threw it away. The man clawed for his holster, and Straker took that weapon away from him as well. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Call an ambulance! You’re a police officer. Do your job!”

  The man backed up and, with one eye on Straker, ran for two of his fellows. Don grabbed Straker’s elbow and pulled. “Stop it, Derek. You’re interfering with the diz.” He dragged at Straker’s arm. “We need to go.”

  “But that woman’s dying!”

  “That’s an appropriate response, trainee,” Don said loudly, “but you’re here so you can get used to the barbaric human callousness and brutality you’ll see in the field.” He shoved Straker away. “There’s nothing you can do. Do you want to be sent back to the pods for recycling? You have to purge yourself of your morality. Remember, you’re supposed to have been through Baltimore.”

  Straker was about to push Don aside and go back to the woman when he saw that the pump of her arterial blood had stopped and her eyes were open and staring. Five cops approached with drawn slugthrowers, and one more had a heavy stunner. Reluctantly, Straker ran with Don around a corner, reminding himself he was deep in enemy territory.

  Three turns of the ways later, Don led them into a blind alley with a door at the end that was marked with an abstract graphic symbol. Perhaps it was alien writing. Don placed his hand against a sensor pad and it opened. They passed into a featureless corridor.

  “That woman really died,” Straker said.

  “That Facet did, yes.” Don gazed dispassionately at Straker. “She was a slug anyway.”

  “Slug?”

  “A new humanoid Facet, barely adult. Just enough education to make her fit for a diz like this. She was probably about two years old, with a lifespan of six or less, to make sure she didn’t grow beyond her assigned limits.”

  Straker stared back at Myrmidon with disgust. “You’re breeding sentient beings just to kill them? That’s evil.”

  Don shrugged. “Welcome to the diz.”

  Chapter 7

  Two weeks after Admiral Engels’ council of war, Calypso System

  Admiral Engels brooded on Indomitable’s arena-shaped bridge. Clever use of gravplating made it possible to walk along the inside of the bowl without difficulty, and each section had a clear line of sight to every other. The only obstruction was the hologram that hung in the center, displaying the tactical and strategic situation in the area.

  Right now, Engels had it scaled to show the entire Calypso System out to flatspace, its star and Felicity Station tiny near its center. For the last three days, the battleship and a force of every capital ship scraped up from this side of the Republic had waited, hidden deep inside the glowing ball of gas that surrounded the planet designated C1.

  Hiding even a ship of Indomitable’s size was easy. The gas was opaque to sensors beyond a hundred kilometers, and even that close, the dense swirls mixed with thousands of rocks and captured asteroids to make detection and targeting problematic.

  A perfect place for an ambush.

  Her strategic feed came via hundreds of encrypted relay drones from stealthy passive sensors, seeded in stellar orbits all across the system. In other words, Engels could see out, but the Hundred Worlds fleet couldn’t see in.

  Assuming they showed.

  With its valuable fuel processing station, Calypso was the next logical place for the Huns to strike. The star system was now on the front lines of their methodical advance, and Engels had worked very hard to sweep for the enemy spy drones that would naturally be sent to reconnoiter. She’d also brought the ambush force in under emission-control, or EMCON, using impellers only to eliminate all energy signatures.

  Standing by had Engels on edge. She paced and she sat. She inspected sections of the battleship. She went over the plan with her captains.

  She’d already gone over it exhaustively with Commodore Dexon, who commanded the outsystem task force—the one that would play the role of bush-beaters to her waiting group of hunter-killers. Dexon’s fleet of fast ships lurked far out in flatspace among Calypso’s comet cloud, the millions of balls of ice that circled slowly around the star.

  A third force, composed of twelve relatively slow but tough heavy cruisers, plus Captain Zholin’s SDN Stuttgart, hung conspicuously in space near C1. The group was anchored by the local defense monitor, one that dwarfed the cruisers as a whale dwarfed dolphins.

  Unfortunately, there were no orbital fortresses at C1. Lacking mobility and obstructed by the gas cloud, they would have been pointless to build—so they never had been.

  “Transit detected,” said Lieutenant Tixban, her officer at Sensors. The Ruxin fed the data to the hologram and a new icon flashed. “Far from the optimum sidespace emergence point.”

  “They’re being cagey,” Engels muttered, standing to approach the holo. “It won’t matter, though. How many contacts?”

  “Nine so far, but they’re still appearing.” Tixban swiveled an eye toward her. “It will be approximately half an hour until I have an accurate estimate.”

  “I know, I know. For now, take a guess and run the battle sim from their actual position.”

  The half-hour fled as Engels watched the computer prediction of how the battle should play out—or at least, its first half. No machine-mind, not even Trinity’s, could foresee what would happen within the gas cloud, at C1 and Felicity Station. There were far too many variables—and too many ways for things to go wrong.

  “So?” Engels said to Tixban after the half hour.

  “As we expected. It is their Tenth Fleet, commanded by Admiral Braga.”

  “Admiral Braga?” Engels swung her head back and forth between the holo and Tixban. “Lucas Braga?”

  “Correct.”r />
  “Then he survived the Battle of Corinth. I should be glad… but I’m not glad it’s him I’m facing.”

  “He was your commanding officer?”

  “He was. And a good man. This…”

  Tixban’s tentacles communicated tentativeness. “Sucks? Is that the right word?”

  Engels shook her head ruefully. “Right. It sucks. But it won’t change anything.”

  “It does not bother you that you will be fighting against your former comrades from the Hundred Worlds for the first time?”

  “Of course it bothers me, but this is war. We tried to talk to them. Today, the Hundred Worlds military gets to pay the price for their politicians’ greed for more territory. They’ve shown no mercy, so we can’t pull our punches.” She took a deep breath, trying to feel as confident and stoic as she sounded. In reality, she felt like she had dagger in her gut. Admiral Braga… he’d almost held Corinth, where she was captured and her life changed so radically. She wished it were that idiot Admiral Downey she faced instead, the fool who’d blown it for Braga.

  “This changes nothing,” she repeated more loudly. “We stick to the plan.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” the bridge crew replied in unison.

  “Fleet composition?”

  Tixban zoomed in on the enemy. “Eight SDNs, eight DNs, sixteen battlecruisers, sixteen heavy cruisers, thirty-six lights, fifty-six assorted escorts… and two fleet carriers.”

  “Carriers?” Engels leaned in. “They’re pulling out all the stops.” Carriers were generally considered outmoded as fleet assets, too slow to keep up with escorts or their own attack wings, too lightly armored to stand and fight, and the whole arrangement too complex for the cost. Mostly they were used as auxiliaries and motherships, to carry attack ships and landing craft from system to system, usually brought in well after an area was secured, not as primary combatants.

  “The range is too long to be sure,” Tixban said, “but I suspect they are being used as supply ships, to allow their fleets to operate farther from their bases for a longer period of time, and also to carry garrison forces for their conquests.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” The carriers might make good prizes, then, if they could be captured instead of destroyed.

  Four hours later, after leisurely scouting and maneuvering, Braga’s Tenth Fleet turned to cruise inward and cross the edge that marked the bubble of curved space that surrounded the star, Calypso. From then on, they couldn’t flee via sidespace—not unless they ran back across that line.

  Eight hours after that, Engels had returned from a meal, a shower and a nap to watch as Commodore Dexon’s ships made the short sidespace transit from the comet cloud into a position directly behind the enemy. In fact, they’d jumped into Braga’s own arrival position, more or less, and now they turned en masse and began pursuing the Hun ships at full speed.

  Engels imagined Braga’s consternation as he realized he couldn’t retreat the way he came. He would believe Dexon’s fleet was a relieving force, just arrived from deeper in Republic territory after several days in sidespace, rather than a fleet that had been lurking, waiting.

  However, Braga shouldn’t be too perturbed—yet. The way ahead toward his target—Felicity Station orbiting above C1 inside the gas cloud—would seem clear, except for Zholin’s inferior fleet consisting of the monitor Triceratops, the SDN Stuttgart and a dozen heavy cruisers.

  As Braga’s fleet outgunned C1’s only apparent defenders by at least ten to one, his logical move was…

  “There you go,” Engels said as Tixban reported the Tenth Fleet had increased acceleration toward their target. Rather than cruise in at their leisure, now Braga’s ships would hurry in, flip over to decelerate, and enter the gas cloud at a speed slow enough to see where they were going. They’d then have to spread out and search for Felicity Station, as Engels had made sure that the fuel factory was also under full EMCON.

  Afterward, Braga would plan to run for the other side of the system, his mission accomplished. Or perhaps he expected to turn to fight, if he managed to figure out that all of Dexon’s “capital ships” were actually light cruisers with Trinity-designed false-signature emitters, the better to drive the enemy into Engels’ trap.

  Engels bared her teeth at the thought that the Tenth Fleet wouldn’t get to exercise either option.

  Two hours later, Braga’s powerful fleet flipped over for its deceleration burn. Dexon’s ships continued to hurry inward, appearing to maintain flank acceleration for dreadnoughts. Actually the fast escorts merely loafed along, under no strain, decoy emitters transmitting at full power.

  Engels was glad Benota had managed to scrape so many light units up from all the surrounding systems, and doubly glad she hadn’t had to give them a frontline mission. An easy victory under these circumstances would do a lot for the escort corps’ morale.

  Engels paced, checked and rechecked everything, and bit her nails to the quick as the enemy approached the enormous gas cloud. With its glowing streamer reaching millions of kilometers in a grand curve back to the star, it was a sight to behold. She hoped Braga would be lulled into a false sense of security. Perhaps surprise and shock would minimize casualties on both sides.

  Zholin’s force began firing railguns at extreme range. With the enemy’s sterns presented, a lucky shot might go straight into an unprotected fusion drive port and wreak havoc—but the odds were slim indeed. They got slimmer as Braga’s ships began varying their aspects slightly and spread out their formations.

  One battlecruiser took a blow from a lucky hit, and her drive stuttered, and then winked out. That was the only damage done, though—until they came within effective beam range.

  First, the monitor Triceratops’ centerline particle accelerator blazed. Nothing Braga had could match it, but he’d already anticipated the attack and launched missiles. Skirmish warheads burst between the fleets, specially designed to fill the engagement zone with gas, dust and crystalline sand. At the same time, his ships increased their evasive maneuvers, even while continuing to decelerate.

  Engels muttered to herself. “Come on, come on.” She couldn’t help it. Even though this phase didn’t matter much—it was really just a diversion, designed to show Braga the resistance he expected—she rooted for Zholin’s success. Every ship he damaged on the way in was one less to fight during the ambush.

  But Braga’s countermeasures held. The particle beam no doubt brushed a few targets, but none of the drives died. The eventual addition of Stuttgart and the cruisers’ fire accomplished nothing in the face of the Huns’ profligate use of skirmish warheads. Engels envied their resources. No doubt they thought they would be able to burn through their loadouts, and then replenish from the carrier stocks.

  Now, over a thousand shipkiller missiles from Zholin’s task force sprang forth in fleet strike mode. This was an all-or-nothing tactic, a full launch whereby earlier weapons were soft-launched and later weapons caught up with them, all controlled to form one attack. Given that Braga couldn’t do any fancy maneuvering—every minute he delayed was a minute for Dexon’s “dreadnoughts” to catch up to him—this meant he’d have to fight his way through.

  Braga launched a mix of antimissiles and defensive shipkillers, trying to trade warhead for warhead to thin out the fleet strike. Of course, only a percentage intercepted the attacking missiles as they spiraled and dodged in random patterns. ECM drones mixed in blanketed the area with confusing transmissions to allow the attackers to slip through. At the same time, Zholin continued to fire beams, further confusing the battlefield between the rapidly converging fleets.

  At the last moment before the fleet strike, Braga’s ships flipped over as one, a beautifully executed maneuver that put their armored noses forward and brought their full weapons suites into play. Beams blazed and railguns sprayed, utterly shredding the fleet strike. There were simply too many ships, too many point-defense weapons, for the Republic missiles to get through to the capital ships. A few of the screenin
g escorts were heavily damaged by proximity blasts or bomb-pumped laser warheads, but that was poor return for the expenditure of the missiles.

  Or it would have been poor return if the whole maneuver weren’t an exercise to lull Braga into overconfidence.

  Now Zholin’s fleet backed up on impellers, as if their commander had made the perfectly rational decision not to sacrifice his force. Engels hoped Braga didn’t wonder too deeply that the defenders didn’t take the even more rational course, which would have been to back up into the gas cloud and fight from inside. Doing so would theoretically favor the defenders, limiting the attackers’ ability to coordinate fire.

  But it shouldn’t be a stretch for Braga to believe that the defense commander simply wasn’t going to fight stubbornly in the face of such overwhelming odds. Furthermore, Braga would expect an attempt at an exit ambush, when he would leave the gas cloud and be briefly vulnerable to the waiting task force’s concentrated fire.

  As she hoped, with the force in front of him out of the way and under pressure from the pursuing “dreadnoughts,” Braga plowed straight into the strange nebula, confident in his power.

  “Expand,” she said, and Tixban changed the scale. Now the gas cloud filled the hologram above the bridge, and then it faded as the software removed the distracting plasma. A network of stealthy sensor drones ensured she had good eyes on every ship of the enemy.

  Braga’s fleet spread out and fired probes of its own. Escorts formed a loose shell to recon as much of the area as possible, but they pulled back when they began to encounter a thickly laid minefield.

  But not too thick. Engels could have made the enemy pay more heavily, but she didn’t want to risk turning them back. If the Huns had shown up with a smaller force, that might have been a problem.

  As it was, however, the escorts reformed in minesweeper mode, firing specialized probes and detonating any mines they found. They efficiently cleared the explosives with only moderate damage to a few ships, and the Tenth Fleet advanced toward the planet C1.