He shook his head numbly. Surely this was impossible. It had to be impossible! He still had no idea at all who those people were or where they had come from, but they’d taken barely forty minutes to overrun the most critical sectors of the base. The garrison was cut off from its heavy weapons—for that matter, the attackers were using its own weapons against it!—and simple numbers meant very little against someone who controlled the air and had all the heavy firepower.

But as long as the shuttle stayed occupied down there, it wasn’t bothering Proxmire. And as long as he was free to go summon help, it didn’t really matter whether or not the enemy—whoever the hell he was—managed to overrun the base.

“Impellers in thirty-five seconds, Skipper!” his harassed second engineer reported, and he smiled thinly.

“There she is, Gerry,” Lieutenant Commander DuChene murmured as the courier boat’s icon appeared in her HUD.

“Got it,” Metcalf acknowledged, adjusting her heading slightly. “Gianna?”

“I’ve got her, Ma’am,” Master Chief Ascher replied, “but these sensors are pure crap.” She sniffed disdainfully, and despite her own tension, Metcalf grinned. She and Ascher had worked together aboard Prince Adrian for almost two T-years, and she knew how proud the master chief had been of the people and equipment aboard her lost ship.

“Just tell me what you can, Gianna,” she said.

“I can’t—” Ascher began, then stopped dead. There was a moment of silence, and her voice was flat when she spoke again. “Her impellers are hot, Ma’am. She’s already underway.”

“Shit!” Metcalf breathed, and looked at DuChene. “Have you got a shot, Sarah?”

“Not a good one,” DuChene replied tensely.

“Talk to me about accel curves, Gianna!” Metcalf commanded.

“We’ve got the velocity advantage now, but she’s got a deeper compensator sump and a hell of a lot more brute power than us, Ma’am. She can pull about five hundred and thirty gees to our four hundred, but our present velocity is about four thousand KPH—make it sixty-seven KPS—and hers is only about twenty-seven KPS. Current range is one-three-point-three-five k-klicks, and she’ll match our velocity in a little over thirty-one seconds, so we’ll equalize at range one-two-point-seven-two k-klicks. After that, she’ll pull away from us at one and a quarter KPS-squared.”

“Sarah?” Metcalf looked back at DuChene, and the lieutenant commander chewed her lip for a moment, then sighed unhappily.

“These birds weren’t designed to kill starships—not even small ones,” she said, and Metcalf nodded impatiently. She was a tactical officer herself. But she was also a better pilot than DuChene, and the missiles were DuChene’s responsibility. “I can take her out, but it’ll be an awful long-range shot for our weapons at this range, especially if she knows they’re coming and takes evasive action. But if we’re only going to close the range by six hundred klicks…”

She paused, and Metcalf nodded in grim understanding while her thoughts flickered like lightning, considering options and outcomes, weighing and discarding alternatives.