She could outrun them, of course. There was nothing in the universe that matched a transition drive . . . or, if there was, he did not want to know about it. Transitions were bad enough, to be frank about it.

Running wouldn’t accomplish the mission, however, so he knew that Eric Weston wasn’t actually going to run.

That made the job of the Heroics all the more important. They had to thin the swarm as much as they could. It was unlikely in the extreme that they could give the Odysseus a real fighting chance, but damn it all to hell they were going to try.

“Stand by for artillery assault in two minutes,” he ordered.

“Aye sir. Clock started at two minutes.”

Sirens whined all across the New Mexican field. Men rushed all over the place like angry ants stirred from their nest. All around them the air felt still and dead as if the world itself had held its breath.

All of the activity was centered around a distant part of the facility, one that was locked off by layers and layers of gates, guard towers, and patrols. At the center of all that lay several large hangars that had been hastily converted into something resembling a cross between a mountaintop telescope and a 1950s science-fiction laser cannon.

The latter was actually the closer of the two comparisons, but only a small handful of people in the area actually knew that.

One of those was the army general in charge of the facility, Ethan Thomas, and he was not in a mood to be trifled with as the clock was counting down far faster than he liked.

“General, I’m telling you, this is incredibly risky,” the civilian supervisor was telling him for the twentieth time. “There are too many variables here that we can’t account for. The magnetic field alone is driving all of our simulations completely off any sense of predictability.”

“Mr. Tanning, all I need to know is can you fire them?” Thomas demanded simply.

“Can we fire them? Of course we can fire them! It’s what happens after that I’m concerned with.”

“Can you hit a target with them then?”

Tanning sighed. “Yes. Assuming we can account for magnetic flux, we can hit a target. The question is whether we turn this entire facility into a crater in the process or not.”

Thomas snorted, looking around calmly. Finally he glanced back. “Begin firing preparations.”

Tanning stared as the general walked away, then numbly staggered back to his control room.

“Sir? What are we doing?”

Tanning stared at his colleague, hoping that he didn’t look too horrified by what he was about to say, and finally willed his mouth to move.

“Stand by to fire.”