Extremis
motion. “We have nothing more than that, McGee. But Jennifer was the only one of the twenty-three abducted artists who was pregnant.” Then Van Felsen opened her eyes and smiled. “And something tells me the Baldies don’t need our help birthing their own babies.”
    Van Felsen had handled a lot of unexpected situations in her years as a pint-sized Marine officer, but she had no experience with, was untrained for, and quite frankly baffled at being snatched up by an immense Marine sergeant into a joyous, smothering bear hug.

1
    Undeceived
    We are never deceived: we deceive ourselves.—Goethe
    RFNS Gallipoli , Main Body, Further Rim Fleet, Raiden System
    “Here they come,” breathed Vice Admiral Erica Krishmahnta of the Rim Federation. She leaned forward to get a better look as the first enemy ship made its appearance.
    However, Krishmahnta was not looking out a viewport of her flagship, the RFNS Gallipoli , but into a hot tub–sized holotank display snugged into a dip at the foot of the captain’s chair. There, tiny green arrow points were clustered about a purple circle that floated upright like the hoop of a lion tamer: the green icons depicted her fleet’s current deployment around the purple-coded warp point, a hole in space-time that—if entered properly—led to and from the Jason system. As she watched, she felt Captain Yoshi Watanabe leaning over her shoulder for a better look of his own.
    The first enemy craft—signified by a bright red mote—blinked into existence, seemingly spat out by the purple ring like a drop of blood. An arterial gush of further enemy contacts was sure to follow.
    Krishmahnta leaned sharply forward. “Sensor Ops, what kind of—?”
    But before Erica could voice the question, the red icon was gone—and with it went two of the eighty nearly invisible cyan latticeworks that indicated the minefields Krishmahnta had laid down to defend the warp point.
    “What the hell?” Watanabe’s surprise diminished into an angry hiss.
    “It wasn’t an anti-mine missile.” Helmsman Ensign Witeski’s voice cracked, but he sounded sure of himself nonetheless. ”It’s too big. You could fit ten, maybe twenty of our own into it. So it’s not a standard AMBAMM.”
    “Maybe not,” said Captain Velasquez from the Engineering console, where he was hurrying his computer through its analysis of the sensor data, “but the first EM-spectrum results say that some pretty big antimatter warheads went off—bigger than the ones on our HBM ship-killer missiles.”
    Krishmahnta drummed her fingers. “So what was it?”
    “We, uh…we don’t know, sir. It was gone too quickly for us to get any good data on it.”
    “Not even images?”
    Velasquez shrugged. “Sir, this warp point is pretty big, and from what we can tell, that ship was pretty small. We’d need at least a hundred dedicated imagers running in fast-capture mode if we wanted to get a picture—”
    “Then get a hundred imagers aimed at the warp point, running in fast-capture mode, and do it now ! Captain, if—no, when —another of those ships appears, I want to learn as much as we can about it.”
    “Yes, sir!”
    Krishmahnta waited for more enemy arrowheads to emerge. None did. But then, after a few moments, a swarm of much smaller red motes danced through the purple hole. “Let me guess—recon drones.”
    “Dead-on, sir,” confirmed Commander La Mar at the Tactical station. “Dozens of ’em. We’re burning them down.”
    And Krishmahnta’s first line of ships did just that—but two of the bright scarlet gnats seemed to think the better of suicide. They spun about and dove back into the purple circle, which swallowed them.
    She leaned back. “Well, they got a look at us, and at the effect of their AMBAMM equivalent. Fine. We were expecting them to probe us before attacking anyhow. La Mar, reconfigure the fleet into intercept formation Myrmidon. Make it a phased redeployment. I don’t want to be caught in the air
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