“Firing one-thirty.” Anjin’s radar showed the interceptors accelerating aft, changing course within the tunnel, each taking aim at a specific torpedo.

Ten absorbic bombs lagged behind, in accordance with Anjin’s anticipation that there might be one or two duds among the interceptors. The stragglers readied to form a defensive wall that would take aim and detonate against anything that got past the duds.

The exchange was similar, superficially, to submarine warfare during the Plague Years. Everything seemed to be taking place with excruciating slowness, and if anyone wavered and succumbedto fear, there would be plenty of time for a long, long scream. But here, Tam realized, the similarities ended. Both ships relied on magnetic fields to shunt plasma away from themselves; and to judge from the behavior of the stalkers, Tam guessed that no matter how many centuries of technological advance were applied to the problem, the ability to guide and project magnetic fields would always require equipment no smaller and no less cumbersome than the alien ship’s wings. As a consequence, neither side possessed torpedoes with magnetic shunts and projectors of their own, so the only way to get at each other was to fire down a long valley carved through the plasma.

This left little room for the sorts of dive plane and rudder maneuvers that had made history in the South China and Tasman seas. Only the torpedoes and interceptors possessed maneuverability. If the plasma-free corridor moved, the projectiles would have to move with it or detonate prematurely. And if the enemy was to be engaged without directly ramming him, a corridor must always be maintained between the two ships. For these reasons, the battle within the Sun was more akin to a battle between antimissile-equipped silos than between submarines.

All well and good, Tam told herself, realizing that she was distracting herself with details. No, not distracting, she corrected herself, but engaging herself with the task at hand, with subtleties that were part of this new environment in which she had to survive— in which they all had to survive by grasping critical possibilities and making them into weapons. There was some small satisfaction in that thought, even if it might be her last.

“Okay, reading sixty-seven antimatter-absorbic bursts thirty-six hundred kilometers aft,” Anjin said.

Tam’s eyes locked on Anjin’s pad and saw three torpedoes coming through the absorbic wall.

“My God,” said Second Officer Skurla. “Only sixty-seven bursts? Does that mean more than fifty got through, with only ten of ours left to stop them?”

“No,” said Tam. “We hit them head-on. All but three. They’re throwing decoys at us. Getting us to waste our absorbics.”

“That could be a mistake for them,” Anjin said. “Do you know what happens when an absorbic bomb detonates without an accompanying nuclear explosion? I’ll wager they’ve never seen anything like this before!”

A small voice in the left side of Tam’s brain began reciting conversion formulae, and her right brain began running motion pictures of an absorbic bomb exploding near her home town on Earth. For twenty kilometers in every direction, she pictured the inverse of a nuclear explosion … a dark wing instead of a burst of light cutting across the sky as the temperature plunged to absolute zero and the air crystallized instantly … houses, trees, cars, and the people inside frozen to the rigidity of a child’s sand castle, and about to be scattered just as easily … a massive implosion instead of an explosion as air from the surrounding countryside rushed in to fill the vacuum …