bogie, they began to decelerate, and with Turmoil’s drive-to-weight ratio they decelerated much faster than the bogie, which meant the Syndonese were rapidly overtaking them.
“We’re at thirty lights, sir . . . twenty . . . ten. He’s just approaching thirty.”
“Remember, hold on to as much sublight velocity as you can. And fire control, launch without my command as soon as you have a targeting solution.”
“Five lights, sir, and she’s getting unstable. And here comes that bogie.”
Charlie’s stomach churned as a gravity wave washed through Turmoil. Then the bogie roared past them, and as her transition wake flooded the ship it slammed them into down-transition.
“All stop,” Charlie shouted. “Rig for silent running.”
“There she goes, sir.”
The bogie down-transited, and almost simultaneously Roacka growled, “Targeted. Torpedo away.”
Turmoil’s hull thrummed with the characteristic sound of a transition launch. Then only a second later Charlie’s navigational screens went blank as the warhead detonated, the power plant readings dropped off scale, lights dimmed, and shipboard gravity disappeared as all noncritical systems shut down.
“Seth,” Charlie said. “What have you got?”
“Detonation was exactly on target, sir, two hundred meters off their bow. They’ve cut drive and are coasting, don’t appear to be taking any action, don’t appear to have noticed us. We’re coasting at point-nine lights. They’re coasting at point-two. I think it worked, sir.”
The entire crew breathed a collective sigh of relief. Then someone let out a whoop, and a contagious round of backslapping and cheering followed. It had worked, at least so far. They’d gotten their transition velocity as close to one light as they could before down-transiting, and they’d retained almost one light of sublight velocity, all of which helped minimize their transition flare. They’d also down-transited close to the bogie, and at almost the same moment, so the bogie’s much greater flare masked their own. It also masked the launch of the torpedo. Any ships in the vicinity, or any station or planet based monitoring systems, might spot what appeared to be a faint echo of the larger ship’s flare. But that wasn’t uncommon, and would in all probability raise no concerns. Now, Charlie would have to wait to see if the second part of his plan worked.
Turmoil was coasting at point-nine lights into the gravitational well of the Istannan system, and since Turmoil wasn’t supposed to exist, they were going to coast right through the system and out the other side before powering back up. During such routine hours Charlie spent a lot of time thinking about Starfall and the overlord key. He’d even visited Finalsa recently, to speak to his bankers there, in hopes that they might have a package for him from Cesare. Sague, Aziz, and Ethallan all regularly funneled funds into the same numbered investment account on Finalsa, though none of them had access to those funds or even information on the state of the account. Charlie learned that the money had been carefully invested. There was enough there for him to build a few more hunter-killers, but that was it. Perhaps, now that Andyne-Borregga was coming online, he could expand the shipyard there to something more than repair-and-supply. But that would take months, and in any case, he still had to come up with a way of funding larger hulls if he wanted to oppose Goutain and Lucius with any kind of effectiveness.
The bankers on Finalsa did have a package for him: actually just a sealed envelope, with a chromosome lock keyed to his DNA. And it held the strangest gift of all, a signed document granting Cesare the right to select the husband of Lucius’s firstborn daughter, another document willing those rights to the de Lunis, and another certifying registry of both with the church. From the dates on the documents, Cesare had purchased those rights long before Delilah had even been conceived. And with canonical registry, the granting of such rights was a matter of public record. Anyone could dig them up, but only if one knew to look for them buried in the church archives more than thirty years ago. Winston told Charlie it was one of those times, shortly after Martino was born, when Lucius had squandered his personal assets and needed the money. And since he had a male heir, he had little concern for a girl not yet conceived and who might never be born. Charlie would bet that even Lucius, being Lucius, had forgotten this transaction.
To Charlie it was a useless document. He’d never exercise such an option. Nadama and Dieter