by A. D. Bloom
The light of the violently expanding nebula created by the first salvo hung in the diamond-pane windows of Absalom's bridge. To Hank's left, between OPS and the chair, Captain Morey of the Marquis Blanc and his XO seemed to pale by that light as if it was their own bodies being burned away.
"She's compensating," said Morey over bridge comms as the hauler vectored thrust on autopilot to keep her heavier-plated keelside directly at the five approaching sloops. "Working off the batteries, she's got a couple more little bursts in her like that one, but without the reactor lit, that's all we'll have. At this speed, the gas jets won't matter."
A glance at the projection over Kik Sin's tactical station was enough to see that the massive bulk of the hauler hadn't even begun to come apart yet and all of their ships were still safely tucked in behind it. To port, Ariadne dared to close the distance to the hauler's hull by another hundred meters or so in an effort to maintain the rouse for as long as possible. Further down the hauler, away from the reactor section that would soon be a target, Ketok, Split Aces, and her two junks made themselves as small as possible while the 67 Shediri raiders flew in a tight swarm close behind. The 27-meter, semi-stealthy, chitin-hulled craft would make their move any second.
Mr. Kik called out the range. "66,000 Ks...13 seconds to impact. Two more torpedo salvos before impact. Expect sustained railgun fire inside 20,000 Ks until impact."
"She'll make it through," said the Marquis' XO. "She'll get the job done."
"Proxies say Voracious is now moving on maneuvering thrusters along with one of the disabled gunboats. The five gunboats sent to meet us are still coming fast. They'll be in range in six seconds."
"60,000 Ks......12 seconds to surface impact, 8 seconds to maneuver."
"NAV," said Hank. "Hold for my order. We go to starboard and starboard only. Mr. Millet, ready with those tubes. You have a target. Give them everything at once." He saw Millet glace once more at the data from the proxies that showed three of Randall's gunboats on course for a close flyby to finish the Marquis off. He locked on the one closest to the hauler's bow.
"5 seconds..."
The swarm of Shediri raiders behind them juiced their coils and accelerated to meet the enemy on both sides of the hauler. They flew past Absalom in a thick, war-painted blur. In another second, he saw them all lit with the rosy light of another set of fusion dets on the Marquis' hull. The bugs launched their first missiles and spiraled out of view while the next set of dets vaped craters another 20 meters into the ship and rippled the freighter's skin until it tore jetting flame out the wounds.
That time, when the maneuvering thrusters fired to right her, the ship's spine snapped. Bow and stern twisted in different directions and began to fold the hull into a shallow arrowhead pointed at Randall's ships holding station low over Mesperyian.
The railgun sabot from Randall's gunboats arrived and tore through the heart of the Marquis, blowing jets of burning metal up off her hull that ripped past Absalom like conical geysers of molten metal. He knew Voracious herself had landed a salvo with her big-bore guns when the whole center and port side of the engineering section set near the stern of the hauler shielding them swelled outwards, fractured, melted and hurled itself at them.
"Two seconds...one....NAV! To starboard!" There was just enough time to marvel at the 40-meter-wide, molten-edged hole Voracious had blown clean through the burning Marquis' before Hank's pilot rocketed Absalom to starboard and exposed them to the enemy.
He noted the ship's speed in the visor of his helmet as he saw Randall's fat sloop and its blazing guns appear over their bow at the same time Millet launched eight Shediri-made copies of the Mk5 warspite fusion-tipped torpedoes. They'd been going 5138 Ks per second when Absalom, Ketok, Ariadne, Split Aces and her junks all blasted away from the dying Marquis and put themselves face to face with Randall's five forward sloops with just over 5600 Ks distance between them. All that speed got added to the launching torps making them nearly impossible to stop.
The dozens and dozens of 6x140 autocannon turrets strung down the hulls of Randall's gunboats all lit up and stitched high-explosive, range detonating shells in frantic streams that reached out desperately and poured bright vermillion clouds into the vacuum.
Hank spotted a school of cold-burning chemical-propelled missiles fired by the Shediri raiders. Their salvo of 60+ low-yield fission missiles flew around the blossoming defensive fire and hurled themselves at Randall's forward sloops with the torps.
Absalom's bridge windows flashed with clawing licks of flame in the half heartbeat it took to fly through the still-expanding det clouds. Shrapnel pecked and stung at the hull and the bridge windows, and as they emerged, he saw the Shediri swarm veering away as their torpedoes and the raiders' missiles covered the very last meters to target.
Thermonuclear flashes lit off less than 2000 Ks out as they flew past. In the half-second he took to look before he shouted for Absalom's railgun batteries to open fire on the disabled ships over the planetoid, he glimpsed the projection over Mr. Kik's tactical console as it parsed the incoming data from the LiDAR and radar arrays. It showed the hellish rain of warheads vaping out thirty-meter-wide concavities and rippling the hull and decks of Randall's gunboats with shockwaves just like they'd done to Marquis Blanc. Fancy Randall's sloops had some additional plate-welded armor, but nothing that could shrug off a nuke let alone the six to ten that hit each of them simultaneously.
Where the force of the expanding plasma couldn't be contained blasted gunboat hulls swelled and burst. Two cooked off from ordnance or their own reactors. Three more burned and drifted in their wake as Devlin's Privateers and the burning wreck of the Marquis Blanc continued towards Voracious without slowing.
"9,000Ks to the surface!"
Mesperyian threw herself at them, and he glimpsed Voracious and her guns firing in pinprick flashes from the shadows over the lost planetoid. "Fire all railgun batteries! Fire! Fire!" The chair shuddered under him three times fast, and the sabot streaked out towards their targets. He called out to his pilot, "Starboard! Starboard!"
The bug didn't need to be told that they were about to crash into a planetoid at over 5000 Ks a second and a maneuver was required. The rocky surface spun away from the bow windows and settled to port as the bug fired bow and stern maneuvering thrusters in opposition to spin Absalom to port while punching her Newtonian mains hard. The inertial gees created by that maneuver well-exceeded the artificial gees Absalom's pinch could throw to compensate. As Hank and the rest of his crew sat pinned, half-crushed, and breathless in their seats, he looked to port in horror to see the Ketok and Ariadne even closer to the surface than he was and struggling to blast themselves on a new line before they augured in to vaporize.
Grunting with the gees to keep consciousness, Hank saw the flash when what was left of the Marquis Blanc finally landed. It hit the darkened surface and impacted like a warhead some fifteen Ks below and behind the wounded Voracious and her surviving escorts. Salvos of railgun sabot pocked the planet below and beside Randall's ships before the falling curtain of fire walked across them.
More missiles from the Shediri swarm fell on Randall's ships as the privateers shot past only a few Ks over the surface, but he couldn't see the damage once Mesperyian blocked line of sight with Fancy Randall's ships. After that, his father ordered them to spin their main engines into their line of travel for a turn and burn braking maneuver.
While he sucked up the gees and the tiny vessels burst in his eyeballs, Hank thought about how they could now come over the horizon from any angle to attack gimped Voracious and escape over the planetoid's limb again. Hank wondered if Fancy Randall was clever enough to realize he'd already lost.
Chapter 8
Voracious
"Damage control party says they can't stop the fire in the forward section of the engineering section."
"It's bloody vented!"
"Bug fission missiles ate their way in and lit the bulkheads on fire. They're burning from i
nside...off the oxygen in the metal."
"Tell them to use explosives on the leading edge of the fires. Do you hear me?"
"I still can't raise port or starboard torpedo bays."
"They're dead," said Randall. "Get me a report from my Chief."
2nd officer Belcher looked to his projection of the ship over the OPS console. "The armor held under those midships hits. I've got no malfunctions, no fires in that section. How the hell can they be dead?"
"The shock waves from the dets traveled through the frame of the ship. Didn't you see it roll the armor like a wave before it hit the command tower? If they were touching the deck or a bulkhead, all that force threw 'em against the ceiling or a bulkhead hard enough to break every bone in 'em."
"You should have vented atmo!"
"I had no bloody time, Mr. Belcher." But I'll have time for you, Randall thought.
Belcher said no more and went back to minding the damage control parties and the projection of the Voracious in front of him.
"How many guns did we lose?"
"We've got all but three turrets working fully," said Ho, "but we lost a dozen crew to close warhead dets. We're down to our reserve gun crews and captains on the port and keel sides."
"Then stay low and hope they don't attack us from port. See if we can get some gunners from Golden Ass." Fancy Randall didn't have to ask about his leading ships. In the last seconds before they'd sealed his doom, he'd spotted the IR trails from the ships hidden behind that accursed hauler and ordered his forward ships to break away, to cease closing range. Blind to the threat, they'd ignored him until the swarm of bug fighter/bombers appeared with the privateers and by then it was too late.
His five sloops were taken by torpedoes moving faster than they could counter. Their burning shells hung overhead where the roasting racks of HE for the small guns cooked off in sparking spurts. All five were lost. Not a single lifeboat or longboat had been launched to escape those infernos.
Voracious had managed to move 12 Ks out of the way of the Marquis Blanc's impacting wreckage. The 600-meter hauler's reactor had been shut down, but so much of the original mass remained in the blasted and crumpled, sabot perforated hull that when it struck Mesperyian at such speed, the force released was greater than if her reactor had cooked.
Island-sized pieces of ammonia ice and the planetoid's highly friable excuse for rock had hurtled up and outwards in all directions. The little planet's gravity wasn't enough to even begin to contain the spinning, half-molten masses that rocketed upwards. It hit the keelside of two ships. He still didn't have comms with Warborn and Sweet, but he could see the side that got hit. Their add-on turrets big and small had been stripped by the impacts leaving only the remains of the emplacements. One of the wounded gunboats hadn't been able to move on anything but a tow line. It disappeared in the initial flash when the Marquis made landfall.
Belcher said, "I've got the Chief on hard comms. The reactor is fine. We can still power the guns."
The chatter across the bridge of the Voracious all seemed to pause at the same moment as if Belcher's words had knocked them all off track. They looked at each other and then looked at him to see if their captain's eyes would tell them whether or not they could possibly fight and win now.
Randall looked out the front windows of his bridge, over the line between day and night on that ammonia-covered world. "Devlin's ships are waiting just over the horizon in five directions. They can duck and feint and probably avoid our guns for long enough to put more torpedoes in us. They might even get lucky and penetrate a blast-weakened spot with a small-bore sabot. We've got nothing but maneuvering thrusters. We're in no condition to battle."
He noted that Belcher was the only one of his bridge crew that didn't nod at least once. Belcher just worked his console. Randall said, "If I'm right, then Devlin's going to send up a surveillance proxy so he can reestablish a line-of-sight and use it as a relay to deliver us his terms."
"You mean for surrender?" Ho said it without any surprise in his voice, as if he agreed with the idea.
"We surrender only the Voracious. We'd be smart to take our longboats and make for the shipping lanes now, but it may be difficult to convince the crew to abandon ship."
He couldn't be sure without watching the man more directly, but he swore Belcher was covertly communicating with someone through his console. It made Fancy Randall want to reach for his gun until Mr. Ho directed his attention away from his 2nd officer and to the incoming transmission from Devlin's ship, the Ariadne.
"Ariadne to Voracious. You there, Randall? This is Ram Devlin."
"I know." He thumped the button with his fist to project a holographic image of himself and the bridge surrounding him to the Ariadne. "You've made quite a mess, Devlin. But our armor is still intact."
"If it really is then both of us know that won't last. I have four sets of guns and torps and a swarm of Shediri raiders prowling just over the limb of the planetoid in all directions. You can't move fast enough to dodge railgun fire at this distance and you can't shoot down every torpedo and missile we have."
"Yes, yes, you want the ship, don't you? You want Voracious." The line hung silent for longer than he'd expected. "Devlin?"
"I want it."
"Will you guarantee myself and my crew safe passage in our longboats?" As he spoke the words, Belcher's frenzied command input to his console gave Randall the only concrete warning he managed to discern before 2nd officer Belcher drew a snub-nosed hand-cannon from his thigh pocket and pointed it at the command chair.
"We're not following you to the end of a rope. There isn't going to be any surrender today."
There was barely time to call out to his new bodyguard."Mr. St. John!"
Both sets of lift doors to the bridge unlocked and opened simultaneously as per Belcher's instructions to the OPS console.
Randall didn't see it when St. John fired the first rounds into the starboard lift and the armed men inside. He only felt the whumping sound the railgun on auto made in his stomach. The screams of the dying and the staccato cracks of the rapid-fired sabot punching metal made Belcher flinch. The barrel of the hand-cannon raised up then and that's when Fancy Randal dove from the chair to the deck. More than one ricochet caromed off the bulkhead and zipped overhead as he reached for the maser in his thigh pocket.
He hadn't meant to fire it, at least not until he'd aimed it properly, but the vaporizing dust motes beyond its lens told him he had. They drew a sparking cone from its tip that showed just how widely-lensed the beam was. Even poorly aimed, the bottom of the discharge cone caught the top of Belcher's head.
The skin and hair burned in a flash as he knew it would. The top half of Belcher's face turned to ash and what was inside blew out the thinnest places in his skull before the whole thing popped. The top and side of his skull blew off as if he'd been explosively trepanned.
The air tasted rusty as Fancy Randal ducked and spun again to aim around the command chair at the doors of the bridge's aft lift. He saw St. John then with a plasma blade in his belly while five men held him to the bulkhead and a sixth pressed the weapon in deep. St. John's face twisted and paled before his eyes opened wide and he pushed four of the five men back into the lift with the rifle. They bounced against the bulkhead as Mr. Ho and Ricardo and Koont fired fat soft bullets that bloomed inside and painted bulkheads as they exited.
St. John killed the last two himself with the MA-48's x-ray laser, coring their heads and chests before he fell to his knees. He looked at the half-cauterized hole in his vest and the blood pouring out where the magnetically shaped plasma had vaporized his flesh in a wound that burned through muscles and arteries and bones until it exited out the back. Koont reached him first. "Sit down. Down." He leaned St. John back against the bulkhead. "Gimme a can!"
"Voracious, this is Ariadne. What the hell is going on over there? Voracious, come in Voracious!"
"Mr. Ricardo, take Mr. Belcher's station and lock down all access to the bridge, please
. Button us up tight."
Mr. Ho was to the medical kit in the bulkhead quickly, but opened it upside down so that everything not strapped in fell out, including the cans. "There!" Randall pointed at the red and white can with the wide nozzle.
"I know! I know!" Ho picked it up and slapped it in Koont's hand after stripping the nozzle, and the kid practically stabbed St. John again in the belly, working the nozzle in deep before he pulled the trigger. "This is going to hurt."
St. John screamed like everyone screams when you fill their wounds with cauterizing foam. His belly swelled out when it expanded, but after the pinkish foam spurted out the wound, the bleeding stopped. "I do good?" he finally said while the beads of sweat rolled over his shaved head.
"You did very well," said Ho, only shaking his head to express the patient's probable negative prognosis once St. John had closed his eyes.
Randall said, "I'm very sorry, Mr. St. John. I didn't expect your new position to be quite so dangerous quite so soon."
"Voracious!"
"As you can no doubt see from the holo-projection I'm sending, we're rather busy at the moment."
"I can't see a damn thing except blood all over you."
"There's been a mutiny attempt. We'll send the bodies back down in the lifts including Mr. Belcher just to let the conspirators know that their effort has failed, but this does not bode well for our surrender agreement. I've been forced to lock myself on my bridge."
"If you disable the ship's weapons and open a hatch, then we can board Voracious and take her."
"This isn't a Staas Company ship; we don't have secret command codes to lock each other out of the ship's critical systems. No. I command this ship, but others man her. I will order them not to fire, of course. I doubt they'll listen. They think we'll never escape in longboats. 'We won't follow you to the end of a rope,' is what my second officer said before I shot him. He wasn't the only one of that mind. I very much doubt I can offer you a ship today, Mr. Devlin. It's a pity."
