David Weber - Path of the Fury

"Are you sure about that? She's got less firepower than the forts."

"Sure, but her dreadnoughts all have cyber synths and the legs to stay in range of us for a long time- maybe as long as ten or twelve hours if they hit their interception solution just right. I don't have enough data on her fire control to guarantee I could outsmart that many AIs long enough to pull away from her, but I've got all the specs on the forts' fire control. They're overdue to refit with new generation cyber synths, too, which means their present AIs are a lot dumber than a dreadnought's. They won't even see us."

"And even if they hit us," Tisiphone observed, "they will find us most difficult to injure, will they not, Machine?"

"I'm getting kinda tired of that "Machine" business, but, yeah. They don't have anything smaller than a SLAM that could stop me, Alley. Trust me."

"I don't have much choice. But-"

"Whups! Pardon me, people-and I use the term lightly for one of you-but I'm going to be a little busy for the next few minutes."

The pursuing cruisers had spread out to bring their batteries to bear past the blind spots created by their own Fasset drives, and the first fire spat after the fleeing alpha synth. The percentage of hits should have been high at such absurdly low range, but the attackers were hopelessly outclassed. Nothing smaller than a battle-cruiser mounted a cyber synth, and even a cyber synth AI would have been out of its league against an alpha synth. Alicia's other half could play evasion games a mere synth link couldn't even imagine, far less emulate, and its battle screen was incomparably more powerful than anything else its size.

Its other defenses were on the same scale, and it deployed decoys while jammers hashed the cruisers' fire control sensors. Lasers and particle beams splattered all about them, but less than two percent scored hits, and the ship's screen shrugged them aside contemptuously. Energy torpedoes followed the beams, packets of plasma scorching in at near light-speed, and the range was low enough the attackers could overload the normal parameters of their torpedoes' electro-magnetic "envelopes," more than doubling their nominal effect. Not even the AI had time to track weapons moving at that speed, but it could detect the peaking power emissions just before they launched, and unlike missiles, they were direct fire weapons, with no ability to home or evade. The alpha synth's defenses were designed to handle such attacks from capital ships; cruisers simply didn't mount the generators for more than a very few launchers each, and stern-mounted autocannon spat out brief, precise bursts as each torpedo blossomed. It didn't take much of a solid object to rupture the skin of an energy torpedo traveling at ninety-eight percent of light-speed, and the alpha synth's ever mounting velocity left the resultant explosions harmlessly astern.

Missiles were another story.

Every attempt to adapt the Hauptman effect to manned vessels had come up against two insurmountable difficulties: an active Hauptman coil poured out a torrent of radiation instantly fatal to all known forms of life, and unlike the Fasset drive, it played fair with Newton. Despite their prodigious rates of acceleration, Fasset drive ships were, in effect, in a perpetual state of free-fall "into" their black holes, and while artificial gravity could produce a comfortable sense of up and down aboard a normal starship, no counter-grav system yet had been able to cope with the thirty-thousand-plus gravities' acceleration of the Hauptman effect.

But warheads cared little for radiation or acceleration, and now Hauptman-effect weapons came tearing in pursuit. They needed six seconds to burn out their coils and reach maximum velocity, but that took almost two light-seconds, and the present range was far less than that. Which meant they came in much more slowly … but that their drives were still capable of evasive and homing maneuvers as they attacked.

Proximity-fused counter missiles sped to meet them, and Alicia watched in awe as space burned behind her. The counter missiles were far smaller than their attackers, and the alpha synth carried an enormous number of them, but its magazines were far from unlimited. Yet not a single warhead got through, for no one aboard it-with the possible exception of Tisiphone-had any interest in counter-attacking. That meant all of its energy weapons were available for point defense, and no missile had the onboard ECM to evade an alpha synth AI in full cry. There were far too few of them to saturate its defenses, and nothing short of a saturation attack could break them.

Captain Morales glared at his display as his cruiser led the pursuit. HMS Implacable and her sisters were losing ground steadily, but their target was in ideal range … and they were accomplishing exactly nothing.

The entire operation was insane. No one could steal an alpha synth-only a trained alpha synth pilot could even get aboard one! But someone had stolen this one, and precisely how Admiral Marat expected a cruiser flotilla to stop it passed Morales's understanding. The forts might have a chance, but his ships didn't. The damned thing was laughing at them!

Another useless missile salvo vanished far short of target, and the captain swore under his breath.

"Somebody get my bloody darts!" he snarled. "Maybe they can stop it!"

"You're kidding me!" Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen.

"The hell I am." There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. "We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell."

"Jesus," Horth muttered, and looked up as Governor General Treadwell hurried into PriCon. Given the governor's lifelong dislike for planets, he preferred to make his home aboard the HQ fortress. Now he leaned forward into the field of Horth's pickup and stabbed Marat with a glower that boded ill for the port admiral's future.

"And just what," he asked coldly, "is going on here?"

"I knew this was a formidable vessel, Little One, but it surpasses even my expectations. What might Odysseus have accomplished with its like?"

"With me in his corner, he'd've owned the damned planet," the AI put in during an interval between salvos, and the Fury laughed silently.

"Indeed, Little One, I believe the machine speaks truth. It would seem we chose well."

"Yeah? Well, next time let's discuss things before you come all over larcenous, okay?"

"Very well." Tisiphone's mental voice was uncharacteristically chastened, though Alicia had little hope it would last. "But-"

"Hang on, Alley," the AI interrupted. "The forts just came on-line."

"Very well, Admiral Marat. I believe I now understand the situation." Governor Treadwell turned to Horth and frowned as the alpha synth crossed the inner fortress ring and continued to accelerate. "Do you have firing lock?

"I'm afraid not, sir." Horth looked as unhappy as she felt. "We seem to be even more affected by its jammers than the cruisers are."

"Indeed?" Treadwell's frown was distinctly displeased, but Marat came to his colleague's defense via the com link.

"I'm afraid it won't get any better, Governor. The alpha synth has full specs on your fire control in its files, and it's designed to defeat any sensor system it can read. It's only going to get worse as the range opens."

"I see. Treadwell tapped his fingers gently together. "We shall have to have a little talk about just what goes into such units' memories in future, Admiral Marat. In the meantime, we can't simply let it go-certainly not with an insane woman at its controls. Admiral Horth, engage with SLAMs."