The stalker flew through the immediate aftermath of two absorbic storms, finding potential hazards in the turbulence and realizing that the vessel might be overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of absorbic bursts without accompanying antimatter detonations. In such instances a pursuit ship was always at a disadvantage. Reconstructing events of the second attack wave, and trying to project them into strategies for the third, it became immediately apparent that using decoys was a failed tactic. So the Intruders dispatched a cluster of twenty antimatter torpedoes.

Then another twenty.

And another.

And another.

In the control room, Anjin was relieved to find that the radar still worked; and on the very stem, one of the repair robots was even bringing the telescope back on line. He could see the six hundred absorbics rushing down the tunnel. In the space beyond, he observed the stalker dispatching clusters of antimatter bombs—and decoys, presumably.

“Tam?” He turned and saw the Captain securing Susan to a railing.

“We do nothing. We’ve no thrusters left and we’re too sluggish even if we did. And we’ve no absorbics to spare. We’ve done all we can. Now we just watch.”

Anjin saw another cluster of twenty bright objects separate from the stalker and accelerate toward him. So here we sit, he thought, in the middle of an immovable target waiting for our crust to be blasted away clear to the Bardo shield probably. Then a long, long spiral toward the center of the Sim, with little material left for building new thrusters or absorbics.

Just when he thought the situation could not get any worse, the radar fluttered and died. He shouted commands to his pad but was left with only a very weak signal in the visible wavelengths of light.

“Wonderful,” he said, turning to Tam. “First you tell me there’s nothing we can do but watch. And now we can’t even watch. So tell me, Skipper, what can happen next?”

As the two robotic armadas approached each other, thrusters fired wildly to keep them within the tunnel and on target. The stalker-bound absorbics were essentially decelerating, relative to the Sun, and had to fight the increasing influence of the Sun’s gravity. For the Sargenti-Peterson-bound antimatter torpedoes, the overwhelming temptation was to swing up to a higher orbit. As they accelerated relative to their targets, the absorbics were forced to press upward, and the antimatter torpedoes had to press down.

About midway between the two ships they began clashing head-on; and it was here that Tam’s act of desperation, if not near panic, turned the tide against the stalker’s calm, calculated attack, as a cluster of twenty antimatter torpedoes vanished without incident.

Then another twenty.

And another.

And another.

And one more.

During the last thirty seconds of battle, five hundred absorbic bombs had broken through the antimatter offensive and were lining up dead center on the stalker’s prow. There was no option left to the stalker except to make the absorbics detonate as far away as possible. The nearest of Anjin’s bombs was still four hundred klicks from impact when the stalker shut down the assault tunnel and let the Sun’s chromosphere spill in.