The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  The raider's 15-cm guns were meant to be effective on targets thousands of miles distant. Now at barely knife-range, their bolts turned the base defenses, their shields, and tons of nearby rock into geysers of charged gas. If the discharges shook the Goldenfels to bits, well, that was a trade-off Daniel was willing to make.

  The Goldenfels' tubes launched their first pair of missiles, shaking the vessel even more violently than the big guns did. Ships which carried missiles internally—some light vessels hung them on outside brackets—had to expel them from the hull before the High Drive ignited. The Goldenfels used the usual system of heating water in a containment vessel, then voiding it into the missile tube as superheated steam to hurl the missile from the ship. The violence required to accelerate a multi-ton missile also had a significant impact on the 4,000-ton ship on the other side of the equation.

  Judging from the footprint of the powered track, the doors of these hangars were more than a meter thick. Plasma bolts couldn't penetrate them. The missile from the Goldenfels' starboard tube lit a few yards outboard and curved toward Hangar E1 ahead of a line of dazzling corruscance, the signature of matter/antimatter annihilation.

  The angle on Daniel's display made him momentarily concerned that the missile's course would take it through the paired fire from Sun's dorsal and ventral turrets, raking the Alliance destroyer. It didn't, streaking on untouched till it slammed the hangar as a huge sledge.

  The door, a sandwich of concrete within steel, buckled inward. Portions of the powdered core puffed out. Air jetted from the interior, touched the friction-heated facing metal, and exploded in a blaze as hot as an arc light.

  The missile penetrated the hangar's interior. The remainder of the door valve hid the destruction it did within, but sparks from the hole sprayed hundreds of feet out onto the crater floor. Heaven knew what had been inside—probably the utility vessel the base used as a hack—but it wouldn't be of much use to the Alliance in the future.

  The missile launched from the port tube dropped almost three hundred feet in splutters of radiance before its motor reached full output; one or both the High Drive feed lines had been clogged. Again, that wouldn't have been a problem at astronomical ranges, but here it meant that the missile didn't stabilize in time. It traced a sine curve fifty feet in amplitude until it struck the crater wall just above the door to Hangar SW1.

  Rock shattered as the missile sprayed itself across the door and the face of the cliff. Antimatter still in the converter made a black flash which left behind a ragged pockmark.

  The guns continued to hammer. The jolts from the 10-cm turrets were scarcely perceptible but the 15-cm weapons made the Goldenfels shudder violently. Missiles were rolling from the magazine toward both launchers, but only the port tube bore on occupied hangars.

  Reloading took a maddening seventy-five seconds, but there was no help for it. Missiles were massive items, dense as well as heavy, and they simply couldn't be flung around like footballs.

  The Goldenfels slithered above the crater like a snake, twisted by the recoil of her lateral turrets. Her wreck and recovery at Morzanga had warped her frame, probably beyond even a major dockyard's ability to correct, but the pounding of these plasma cannon was beyond anything she'd have been able to take for long on the day she came from her builders. A belly plate fell off, winking with the reflection of the big guns.

  Air-loss alarms were sounding; the crew already wore the light vacuum suits that were standard for emergency use, but Daniel knew from past experience that now some of the spacers would be locking down their faceplates. He didn't have time for that himself, nor was there need—yet.

  The port-tube icon glowed green, then launched its missile automatically because Daniel hadn't countermanded the pre-programmed attack sequence. This round lit instantly, so close to the tube that Daniel could feel the bacon-frying sizzle of antimatter in the exhaust slaking its fury against the Goldenfels' hull.

  The missile's course curved so slightly that it looked like a straight line on Daniel's display. It struck squarely in the center of the door to SW3, punching through. For an instant there was nothing more; then a blast blew the hangar door into the crater and a second blast spewed fire and debris as far as the wreck of the destroyer Sun was working over.

  A wave of gas and plasma made the Goldenfels yaw to starboard. The 15-cm guns couldn't correct quickly enough and ripped bursts high and low, gouging the crater floor to starboard and the top of the cliffs to port. Daniel's harness caught him; the shock would otherwise have flung him out of the console.

  Icons pulsed across the top of the command display like a tiara of rubies. A dozen compartments were open to vacuum. Daniel slammed down his faceshield; some of the air-tight doors had dropped into place but others were jammed in their tracks. You couldn't blame them. . . . The portside 15-cm turrets had stopped firing, and the channel carrying the reload missile to the port launcher had kinked when the missile leaped from its track and fell back.

  "Belknap, get Launcher One reloaded!" Daniel ordered. "Woetjans, give him all the help he needs. I don't care what it takes to do it—rip a hole in the hull plating if you have to, but get me missiles again!"

  Belknap, a Missileer 2d Class, was the highest ranking member of his specialty aboard the Goldenfels. It was his duty to handle the mechanics of the missiles while Daniel himself programmed their courses. Belknap had a pair of Missileer Threes under him, but what clearing the trackway required was brute force. The riggers were temporarily off duty, and they were very familiar with brute force.

  Vesey'd fought the freighter steady again, then readjusted the course to the 349 degrees as Daniel had ordered—the blast had skewed them well to starboard. You don't expect a gust of wind on an airless satellite, particularly a white-hot squall sparkling with the hellfire of its creation.

  They were three-quarters of the way across the broad crater, holding at 18 feet per second. That would've been perfect to finish the destruction of Lorenz Base in one pass if things had gone the way they were supposed to—

  But they hadn't. Well, that wasn't a new experience in the RCN, and it wasn't an excuse for doing half what was required and running.

  "Mistress Vesey," Daniel ordered, "bring us around if you will. We'll proceed on a reciprocal and finish the job."

  Then, beaming a smile beneath his faceshield, Daniel added, "By God, Sissies, they'll talk about this one for as long as there's an RCN—and there'll be an RCN for as long as it can recruit spacers like you!"

  * * *

  They won't talk about us unless somebody survives to tell them! Adele thought tartly, but it wasn't her place to say that.

  Besides, it wasn't true. There'd be Alliance survivors, and they'd tell the story. They'd use words like "fools" and "lucky," but it wasn't a story that could be hidden.

  In truth, there hadn't been much luck involved in the business. Adele wasn't disposed to quarrel with "fools," though. Not that it mattered to her.

  Everybody was jabbering on the intercom; Adele ignored the chatter except to make sure that none of the empty nonsense was getting to Daniel. She set the feeds so that all the crew could watch the external visuals if they had the time. They probably didn't—damage control should occupy everyone who wasn't directly involved in the battle—but it was part of her job.

  Adele had access to all the traffic within Lorenz Base, because she'd used the Goldenfels' signals suite to convince Base Control that the ship's computer was its back-up installation. That pretty piece of work had given her a degree of satisfaction, but it wasn't as useful as she'd initially hoped. The Alliance personnel were babbling the same sort of inanities as the Sissies were, though theirs were tinged with panic.

  Sun was shooting with both turrets, but thank goodness the guns on the sides were silent. When they'd begun to fire, Adele had thought the Goldenfels was blowing up. When two or more of the cannon discharged simultaneously, her display lost resolution for an instant; each time it happened, she'd feared that
her console itself would fail instead of just the hologram projectors losing alignment.

  Adele wasn't afraid to die, but she was terrified of failing Daniel and the others who depended on her. Without access to her computer, she would fail.

  She smiled coldly. There were other consoles, of course. And worst case, she could probably link her handheld unit to the ship's main transceiver and do a respectable job of providing the Goldenfels' officers with signals intelligence.

  Tovera sat on the couch of the console coupled back-to-back with Adele's; it was meant for a junior to emulate the officer at the main unit. The junior would take over in event of battle damage to the electronics or the officer, either one.

  Tovera hadn't brought the console live; she was simply using the couch as a seat while she waited for something that suited her talents. Those would be few and far between in an action of this sort, but she'd stepped over to snap a mask down over Adele's face when something massive hit the ship.

  Daniel's console didn't have a subordinate station, so Hogg shared the couch with Tovera. He held a stocked impeller and locked his feet around the cantilevered support strut.

  Adele couldn't imagine any present use for Hogg's big shoulder weapon, but it was his business if he wanted to hold it. Adele glimpsed his face occasionally between cascades of holographic data; his expression was alert and unconcerned. Tovera, as usual, looked like a smiling death mask.

  The Goldenfels was either maneuvering violently or they'd been hit and were out of control. That wasn't Adele's business so she didn't bother learning which. She split her display, making the bottom half a visual of the base with radio emitters careted. There was a multi-frequency mast on the highest of the surrounding peaks which Adele hoped Sun would leave untouched: it was her point of entry into the systems of Lorenz Base.

  Three figures ran across the crater floor, jabbering on FM. Just jabbering, not really to one another or to any purpose. They were airsuited survivors from the spluttering wreck of the destroyer, perhaps the only survivors, trying to get to cover in case their vessel's fusion bottle failed. They didn't matter. But—

  The living rock into which the hangars were dug and the thick doors that closed them were completely impervious to RF radiation. The fact that Adele was getting strong signals from SW5 meant that the door was sliding open.

  The Goldenfels launched another missile. The freighter was recrossing the base on the opposite heading; Daniel must be using the tube that hadn't been damaged earlier. He'd aimed it at SW4, the next target on his list. It was closed and therefore harmless, but SW5 was neither.

  "Target!" Adele shouted. Here was where a better grasp of RCN communications etiquette would have been useful. She traced a scarlet highlight over the hangar door. At the small scale of her display she couldn't see a gap between the twin valves, but the radio signal couldn't lie. "Daniel, Sun, the hangar's open—"

  For want of anything better to shoot at as the destroyer melted, Sun had been working over a maintenance bay on the crater floor between the southwest and southeast groups of hangars. He began slewing his guns as soon as Adele threw up the caret, but the sheer mass of the armored batteries took time to move even on frictionless magnetic gimbals. A 13-cm plasma bolt spat from within the hangar to strike the Goldenfels' dorsal turret squarely.

  Adele thought the flash had blinded her, but that was just the effect of the bridge's thin remaining atmosphere fluorescing. Normal lighting returned, but a sphere of ball lightning hung between Adele and the back of Daniel's console. A mask of translucent blue flicked off and on over its sullen yellow presence. Sizzling, it rose at a walking pace till it vanished through the ceiling.

  The bolt's impact buckled the plating and frames beneath the vaporized gun turret. The bridge hatch, closed at the start of action, flew open as the bulkhead crumpled around it. The corridor's emergency lighting looked flat because there was no atmosphere to scatter it. Four Sissies ran toward the rupture with a roll of sail fabric and adhesive guns to tack it over the damage; returning air pressure would squeeze the film into place until a longer-term fix was possible.

  Which would require that the Goldenfels survive a while longer, of course.

  Adele had inset the command display onto a corner of her screen to be able to anticipate Daniel's requests. As a result she knew that he'd shifted to a gunnery board and taken manual control of the guns in the side emplacements. They'd been silent since they'd destroyed the targets Sun had set them. She could see what Daniel had done, but for the life of her Adele couldn't imagine how he'd shifted mental and physical gears so quickly. It was like watching Tovera shoot. . . .

  The second bolt from the warship within the hangar missed high by no more than the distance that the first had slammed the Goldenfels toward the ground. The turret, converted into a fireball of steel and iridium, had shoved the bow down. There wasn't a third bolt because Daniel was firing the guns on the Goldenfels' starboard side. They punished the ship herself, but when their bolts hit inside the hangar—

  Adele's equipment told her that the radio transmissions were coming from three Alliance destroyers, the Max Schultze, Richard Beitzen, and Paul Jacobi. The information appeared automatically, in the sense that she'd set the system to provide names and schematic data whenever it correlated an identification transponder with a particular unit of the Alliance Fleet. Her console echoed the readout to Daniel and the Battle Direction Center.

  It didn't have any effect on the battle, however, because of the arcing destruction the first two 15-cm bolts loosed within the hangar. The six that followed before forward motion carried the Goldenfels past the narrow opening were probably a waste of ammunition, since at least one fusion bottle had ruptured almost instantly.

  A gush of radiance, ionized vapor instead of light, flashed from the hangar. This time it didn't blow the doors off. Instead the cliff face bulged upward, shot through by glowing gases, and shuddered down toward the crater floor. As it did so, the missile struck home in the center of SW 4. The explosions inside that hangar were just getting started when the avalanche flowed over the doors of both in a dance of rock and dust and the sparkling highlights of plasma that leaked through the cascade.

  "Launcher One's reloaded, sir!" rasped a voice on the command channel, Woetjans speaking instead of Belknap. The rumble of the heavy missiles usually shook the ship unmistakably, but Adele hadn't noticed it this time.

  "Thank you, Woetjans," Daniel replied in a hoarse, breathy voice. "Sun, cease fire. All personnel who don't have Power Room duties, put yourself under the bosun. Woetjans will take charge of damage control."

  He paused, sucking in air with a gasp that his helmet microphone took for speech and transmitted. "Mistress Vesey," Daniel resumed, "get us out of here as quickly as you can, please. I'll plot us a course into the Matrix, but I'm not ready to do that right now."

  The Goldenfels was accelerating hard, pushing Adele down on her couch. She remembered her first view of the raider, a halo of plasma thrusters blazing above the Princess Cecile. That was the view the survivors of Lorenz Base had of her now.

  She glanced toward the command console. Daniel caught her eye, grinned, and raised a thumb in greeting.

  His face sobered slightly and he resumed, "Ship, this is Six. Spacers, an hour ago an Alliance squadron of two battleships, a heavy cruiser, and eight destroyers ruled the whole Galactic North. Because of your skill and courage, the elements of that squadron are either destroyed or so damaged that it'll take a year to dig out and refit the survivors. If the RCN can't get a proper force out here in a year to finish the job, then by God! you and I will come back and do it for them!"

  Daniel paused for the laughter he knew was sounding. Adele smiled faintly, wondering if she ought to cut Daniel back into the intercom channel so he could hear his crew's enthusiastic congratulations. On balance, no; he had more work to do, he'd said, plotting a course.

  "Fellow spacers," Daniel said, "Fellow Sissies—God bless you, and God bless the RCN!
"

  "Sir!" Vesey announced unexpectedly. "A ship has just returned to normal space 400,000 miles out. They're querying Lorenz Base in code, over."

  Adele's face lost expression as she raised her couch upright to make her work easier. They'd be switching shortly to the High Drive, which in its present jury-rigged state couldn't manage much more than one gravity's acceleration anyway. Her wands quivered.

  Sun, Belknap, Vesey and Pasternak were all speaking on the command channel. Daniel was not: he'd brought up the navigation screen. The Plot Position Indicator was inset into it.

  Instead of speaking, Adele flashed a text message at the bottom of every active display:

  The ship which has just appeared is the Alliance heavy cruiser Bluecher, which is returning to Lorenz Base after a short workup cruise.

  She didn't add any commentary to the flat statement. It seemed obvious to her that though it'd take the Bluecher's commander, Captain-of-Space Rafael Semmes, a while to realize what had happened at the base and to begin pursuing the Goldenfels, it would be only a little while.

  Daniel must have thought the same thing, because he was working with the concentration of a demon on plotting their escape into the Matrix.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Goldenfels was rigged for landing, her sails furled and her antennas telescoped and folded. Daniel's first thought was to drop into the Matrix immediately and set the sails there; many astrogators couldn't track another ship after it left sidereal space, and some wouldn't even try.

  The Alliance had more than its share of able captains, however. If the Bluecher was commanded by one of them, the heavy cruiser would appear within seconds of when the Goldenfels shifted back into normal space the first time. Daniel found it wise to assume that his enemy was just as competent as he was.