The radar now showed 120 absorbic bursts, fifty-three of them without accompanying antimattermatter detonations. What the radar did not show, could not show, was the briefly spreading darkness thirty-six hundred kilometers aft. The walls of the valley bent and bulged there, caught in an expanding subzero storm that was soon swallowed by the chromosphere, as a raindrop is swallowed by an ocean.

Anjin’s equipment did not register the darkness and the plunging temperatures, but it did show the walls buckling. Tam guessed what had almost occurred and seized on an idea. “Anjin, prepare six hundred absorbics to fire.”

“But that’s almost all we can spare,” objected Second Officer Skurla.

“Then we’ll have to build replacements more quickly.”

“Six hundred—” Susan Skurla pounded her fist on the bulkhead. “There’ll be barely enough left to keep us cool, much less to continue the battle!”

“We either win the next round or all the cooling equipment you can imagine won’t make any difference. Six hundred absorbics, Anjin. Do it!”

“Six hundred, aye.” Anjin sent the orders through his pad, then watched the three incoming breakthroughs close with his ten outgoing stragglers. The odds were that at least one and possibly two of the breakthroughs were decoys and that none of the stragglers were duds. There was a chance to take the offensive by sending only half his tiny fleet after the breakthroughs, and then hurling the remaining five after the alien ship.

But Tam and Anjin were taking no chances and ordered all ten to stay on collision course with the enemy torpedoes. The field buckled again, and the next moments were for Anjin a mix of confusion and calm resignation. There was nothing on his pad that specifically signaled alarm; there was only his intuitive realization that the intercept had not gone exactly as planned, and that something was coming in fast.

Looking over his shoulder, Tam saw a subtle trail of secondary radiation so faint that her conscious mind did not take notice until well after her swift subconscious had connected the dots and sent up a warning. Realization and adrenaline struck at the same instant.

Streams of muons had emerged from the antimatter-matter-absorbic storm. After traveling only a few microseconds, they decayed into positrons and electrons—which reached Sargenti-Peterson at near-light speed, but were shunted aside by the comet’s magnetic field and produced nothing more alarming than an aurora of gamma rays. They were then deposited as heat in the comet’s surface and were easily cooled by absorbic bombs.

The real danger, barely perceptible to human eyes, lay in a more sluggish product of the storm. One tiny stream of antihydrogen, supercooled and unreacted, was jetting down the tunnel toward them.

“We’re going to be hit,” Anjin said.

“I know it,” Tam said more calmly than she felt.

“Six hundred absorbics away—now!”

“Fire six hundred!” Anjin shouted.

The central stem shuddered as the charges ejected and the comet accelerated ever so slightly from the recoil. At that exact instant, the unspent antihydrogen, hardly more massive than a green pea and cutting through space at eighty-three klicks per second, struck a glancing blow aft of midships on the starboard side. It embedded in forty centimeters of rock and exploded one ten-millionth of a second later.