With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  And of course she needed to survive to reach Cinnabar. Daniel wasn’t concerned about that ultimate result now, because every thread of his being was focused on the actions that would make it possible.

  Personnel shouted on the bridge and over the commo net. The crew wasn’t worked up on this vessel, and because of the missing officers there was a degree of confusion that wouldn’t normally have occurred with veterans like these.

  A part of Daniel’s mind was aware of what was going on around him, but the chaos touched only the surface. The core of him was the Princess Cecile, feeling her skin grow hotter as the Bremse lashed her with plasma cannon.

  It was almost unheard of for a starship to use its secondary batteries as offensive weapons in space. Even now, though the Bremse and Princess Cecile were too close and slow for missiles to be really effective, the distance between vessels orbiting at different heights and orientations was beyond the range at which plasma cannon were a serious threat.

  A sensor suite amidships degraded thirteen percent at the stroke of the Bremse’s directed ions. For the moment Daniel ignored the problem. The Princess Cecile’s processors could compensate for the loss. If he needed greater precision, he’d rotate a replacement suite into place.

  Conformal sensors in a ship’s outer hull always suffered mechanical wear when a ship was in service. Alliance cannon had done nothing that a week cruising in the solar wind from Kostroma’s Type O sun wouldn’t have equaled.

  Daniel’s braking thrust meant the Princess Cecile in effect dived toward the planet, spiraling around Kostroma in an increasingly tight orbit. As the corvette approached the surface, Kostroma and the extended volume of the Kostroman atmosphere subtended a greater portion of the Bremse’s orbit.

  The Princess Cecile passed into Kostroma’s shadow. The Bremse’s cannonfire ceased; a better commander would have ended the vain process long before. Shooting at the Princess Cecile degraded the cruiser/minelayer’s own sensors and eroded the bores of weapons meant for the Bremse’s defense.

  Of course the Bremse’s captain probably didn’t think he had much to fear from the Princess Cecile’s low-acceleration missiles. He might well be correct.

  Chief Baylor launched a single round. Daniel’s control inputs went to the Attack Board and were automatically figured into the launch commands. What the Attack Officer had to do was to calculate, with the help of his sensors and AI, where the target would be when his missile arrived.

  This was a relatively simple—“relatively” being the key word—process when the vessels were at normal engagement speeds and ranges. A ship moving at a significant fraction of light speed, attacked by a missile at its terminal velocity of .6 c, had no time to maneuver.

  Since the missile’s course was based on sensor data that was several minutes old, the chances were very high that the target had done something in the interim that would cause the attack to fail. You didn’t have to worry about the target reacting to your missile, however, except with point-blank slugs of ions in an attempt to decelerate the projectile by converting its substance to gas and forward thrust.

  At these cislunar ranges, the target could see a missile in realtime from the instant of launch. The Princess Cecile’s low-acceleration weapons weren’t a serious threat to the Bremse unless the cruiser/minelayer’s entire bridge crew was asleep; even then the automatic avoidance system, meant for maneuvering in the constricted space over a major harbor, would probably get them out of the way.

  The Bremse’s missiles, though …

  “Blue vessel is launching!” Dorfman said. Daniel was already aware of the dot separating from the icon highlighted blue, the traditional hostile designator in Cinnabar service. “Defensive batteries are live!”

  Daniel released a control key, reducing the Princess Cecile’s thrust by a fraction. Three more dots appeared at ten-second intervals, the shortest period at which missiles could be launched without the exhaust of preceding weapons damaging those that followed.

  The missiles accelerated at a full twelve gees, but the corvette would be a thousand miles away when they reached the calculated impact point. The Princess Cecile handled beautifully, and with Daniel Leary at her controls she was safe until she was too close to Kostroma to continue maneuvering.

  The trick wasn’t merely to stay alive till then, however. Daniel was trying to pilot two vessels, his own and the Bremse. He was dragging the cruiser/minelayer behind him like a dog on a leash. If the corvette was here, the Alliance captain would strive to put his vessel there.

  The process would continue in infinite sequence until there was a point Daniel had calculated before the Princess Cecile lifted from Kostroma; or until the Princess Cecile and her Cinnabar crew disintegrated in a gush of molten metal because her young captain had cut things a little too close.

  * * *

  “You’re not authorized to be here,” said the older female soldier who seemed to be in charge of the guard detail. “This place is top security!”

  “We were just lifting off to launch a message cell,” Adele said. “The ship blew up and damaged us, so we had to dock here. We need to contact the Bremse so they can send down aid to the surface.”

  She picked at the cuffs of her gauntlets. She couldn’t see them clearly because of the way the sleeve ballooned, and she hadn’t paid any attention to the method of closure when Woetjans sealed them for her.

  “Somebody help me off with these damned gloves,” Adele said peevishly. She held her hands out to Dasi, ignoring the guns pointed at her and her fellows. The node was weightless, but everyone aboard it was floating within thirty degrees of the hatch’s alignment.

  “How did you get here?” asked a technician; a man in his sixties, at least twice the age of the other Willoughbies. “Only the supply vessels are supposed to be able to dock without being destroyed by the defenses.”

  Willoughby was a center of electronic manufacturing and had provided a haven for disaffected Alliance citizens. The latter had been both a thorn in the side of Guarantor Porra and the key to the recent Alliance capture of the planet: feigned refugees had subverted Willoughby’s automatic defense array when the Alliance fleet arrived.

  “Of course we weren’t destroyed!” Adele snapped as Dasi drew her gloves off. The sailors were keeping silent, waiting for her to tell them what to do. “We’re the Katlinburg’s cutter, I told you.”

  Another Willoughby opened her mouth to speak. The senior technician shushed her with a quick gesture.

  The technicians understood that friendly or not, the cutter shouldn’t have been able to approach the command node without setting off the close-in defenses mounted on wands projecting from the node’s hull. These would blast a hail of faceted tungsten pellets in the direction of any object that tried to approach without the proper codes. Only the cutters bringing supplies from the Bremse should have had those codes.

  Dasi removed the right gauntlet and started on the other. The Bremse sent not only supplies but changes of guard: Adele could see that by the relatively good health of the soldiers compared to the sallow puffiness of the technicians.

  The cruiser/minelayer maintained gravity by constant acceleration. Its High Drive used water molecules for conversion. A ship in station above Kostroma could replenish its tanks by dipping down to the surface for an hour every few days.

  The command node was a satellite with only maneuvering jets. Those aboard her would feel the effects of weightlessness within days; the technicians had been in this high-technology prison for the full two weeks since the Alliance invasion.

  “Paltes, call the ship and see what the fuck we’re supposed to do about this,” the Alliance noncom said. “You lot—”

  She waggled her submachine gun toward the Cinnabars and drifted slightly back in reaction. Unlike the sailors, the Alliance guards weren’t used to weightlessness.

  “—get into the airlock again till they tell us what to do. I shouldn’t have let you in.”

  Dasi removed the other gaun
tlet. He was between Adele and the guards. She reached into the pouch on her equipment belt with her left hand. “All right,” she said calmly to the noncom, “but you’re going to be in trouble—”

  As Adele’s hand came clear of the pouch, she shot the noncom through the bridge of the nose. Recoil—even the pistol’s slight recoil—spun Adele sideways. She fired twice more as she rotated.

  The guard whose right forearm Adele had shattered with a pellet meant for his upper chest jerked the trigger. His gun pointed toward the far wall. Pellets raked a programming alcove. Faint gray smoke drifted from holes punched in the structural plastic.

  Adele bounced off the airlock. She turned desperately to see what was happening. Barnes and Dasi had the uninjured guard between them; Dasi was bending the man’s gun arm over his knee to break it. Woetjans held the guard who’d fired by the throat with one hand as she hit him an unnecessary second time with the wrench in the other hand.

  There was no need to worry about the noncom, nor for the soldier whose blood spurted one final time before his heart stopped for lack of fluid to pump. When a pellet hit the soft tissue of a human throat, the wound it tore looked more like a bomb crater.

  Adele returned the pistol to her tool pouch. She pushed herself carefully toward a programming station. She reached a different alcove than the one she’d intended but that didn’t matter, they were all the same.

  Her leg, red with the globe of body fluids she’d brushed on the way, couldn’t be allowed to matter either.

  * * *

  The Princess Cecile’s quartet of plasma cannon roared like a swarm of bees. They were four-inch high-output weapons with a hundred times the flux density of a thruster nozzle. The corvette’s maneuvering jets fought to keep the vessel in alignment. Dorfman had his finger on the armament override, keeping the weapons on continuous fire even though he was burning their throats out.

  There wasn’t any point in saving the cannon for further use if the ship itself was a shower of meteors hitting the Kostroman atmosphere.

  A space battle at these short ranges was a dance in which either party moved in conscious relation to her opponent. Computers determined the maneuvers; two battle computers given the same data would come to the same “best” result.

  Daniel was poised over the controls. Before the battle started he’d directed the Princess Cecile’s AI to follow an extremely complex set of parameters. The corvette continued on a ballistic course for three long seconds despite the oncoming missiles. She had to hold the setting in order to lead the Bremse to where Daniel wanted the cruiser to be.

  The parameters were beyond computation to a greater than fifteen percent probability of success, but that was a much greater chance of survival than Daniel saw in any other course. Next time perhaps Fate would hand him a cruiser to hunt down some poor bastards in a second-class corvette.

  He laughed, to the amazement of the other bridge personnel. An Alliance missile grazed the Princess Cecile.

  The impact may not have been the missile itself but rather the ball of vaporized metal surrounding its ion-pitted head. It slapped the corvette, flexing the hull and shutting down all the vessel’s electronics for a momentary self-check. The hull whipped three times more before it came to stasis, and even then nerves as trained as Daniel’s could feel the tingle of harmonics which took longer to damp.

  Emergency lighting went on; at least part of it did. That seemed to be an area where the Kostromans had skimped maintenance. Daniel’s console came up again. A ship status display filled the main screen; the PPI had shrunk to a sidebar.

  The Princess Cecile was tumbling faster than the maneuvering jets could handle. Daniel fed in thruster input more by feel than in response to his readouts.

  They’d lost atmosphere and were losing more, but the leak wasn’t serious and the rate was decreasing. There was severe damage to the port quarter between frames 79 and 92, but the inner hull wasn’t penetrated and Daniel suspected, felt, that the outer hull might not be either. Plating had crumpled and the whipping had opened hull seams. That was where the air loss was occurring.

  Domenico’s emergency team had already started rerouting a severed data trunk amidships. Two ratings lugged a cannister of sealant up the bridge corridor and thrust the nozzle against a deck joint. The High Drive was running hot, but that was because the Princess Cecile was getting into the fringes of the Kostroman atmosphere. Have to make a decision soon, but first—

  Daniel switched his display to the Attack Screen. The two missiles he’d launched at the start of the action were on it, heading back at terminal velocity.

  Daniel had programmed the missiles to rotate three minutes into their flight, brake to stasis, and return to a target above Kostroma. The course reversal wasted fuel, but single-thruster missiles had the same conversion mass as their high-acceleration cousins and only half the rate of usage. Because of the additional distance this pair of projectiles had travelled, they were at .6 c when they crossed the point where the Bremse might have been and almost was.

  Almost.

  The missiles were a streak on the Bremse’s sensors. They passed within a mile of the cruiser/minelayer; one of them might have been closer yet.

  The missiles hit the Kostroman atmosphere and mushroomed into fireballs that ignited the sky above an entire hemisphere. The same conversion of mass and velocity into thermal energy would have turned the Bremse into a ball of gas.

  If.

  Baylor’s console was still out. The missileer had an access plate off and was shouting into a communicator he’d laid on the floor to free his hands as he worked. There was only one missile left in the corvette’s magazines, so the temporary lack of an Attack Officer wasn’t serious.

  Dorfman still had his electronics, but the gunner’s mate had already burned out his guntubes. That section of Daniel’s status display was red and pulsing, warning of catastrophic failure if the weapons were used again.

  Dorfman stabbed his keyboard with blunt fingers, removing the software interlocks that would prevent the guns from firing. A plasma cannon exploding when its barrel split would do damage to the ship, but not as much damage as a hit by an Alliance missile.

  In their present condition the four guns would provide very little protection, but you do what you can. Everyone aboard the Princess Cecile was pulling his weight in the best tradition of the RCN.

  Daniel replaced his Attack Screen with the Plot Position Indicator. The near misses had rattled the Bremse’s captain: the Alliance vessel was accelerating at over two gravities on a course skewed from any she’d been following to that point.

  In a minute or two the Alliance commander would realize those missiles had been a one-off chance which the Princess Cecile couldn’t repeat. The cruiser/minelayer would turn onto a following course and run down a quarry which could no longer use the planet as a shield.

  Daniel rotated the corvette and increased thrust, climbing up from Kostroma’s gravity well. They’d head out of the system for as long as they could. He felt his cheeks sag under acceleration. A fifteen percent chance of success had really been pretty good, given the odds he and his crew were facing.

  They had no chance at all now.

  * * *

  Adele ran the system architecture a third time, searching for the lockout that protected the Bremse from its own mines. She was sure that the safety device was a separate chip, not software within the main command and control unit.

  She was sure of that, but she couldn’t find any place within the design for the chip to reside. And the lockout wasn’t in the software either!

  The living guards were bound with wire and floating in the middle of the concourse. One had bandages on his arm and forehead; the other’s broken limb was taped to his chest. The technicians from Willoughby were unharmed but as silent as the two drifting corpses.

  The four Cinnabar sailors clustered around a programming alcove which they’d set to display the planetary environs. Adele glanced toward them out of frustration
. She was doing something wrong. She hadn’t been sure she could remove the lockout, but she hadn’t expected any difficulty in locating it.

  Woetjans looked grim in stark contrast to her ready cheerfulness as the cutter approached the control node. All the sailors looked grim.

  “Mistress?” the petty officer said as she caught Adele’s eye. “Is there anything we can do to help Mr. Leary? They’re going for the high jump if we don’t.”

  “If you can find the damned lockout chip that prevents the mines from engaging the ship that laid them, then we can do something,” Adele said in a voice so savage that she wouldn’t have recognized it herself.

  “Mistress?” said the eldest of the programmers. “That’s part of the sensor receiver, not the control system. It’s in the third chassis slot and has a blue band across it.”

  “Where?” said Woetjans.

  Another programmer turned to the console beside him. “This one!” he said.

  The cover panel had quick-release fittings. The programmer was fumbling with them when Lamsoe, Barnes and Dasi arrived together. The sailors brushed him out of the way with as little concern as Woetjans showed for the floating corpse with which she collided on her way to the unit.

  Lamsoe stuck his prybar beneath the edge of the cover. He twisted. The plate lifted enough for Barnes and Dasi to reach under it. The plate flew up, accompanied by fragments of broken fasteners.

  Adele checked her own work. If the lockout was eliminated, she shouldn’t have to do anything more. But because she was who she was, Adele entered the main database for a schematic of the sensor control system.

  Woetjans reached over the shoulders of her subordinates. Her hand came up with a component from which the locking screws dangled, along with bits of chassis.

  A relay clicked somewhere within Adele’s console. Two icons vanished—one minusculely before the second—on the display the sailors had been watching.