by David Drake
The thermonuclear explosion had heated the gun's ceramic bore to a throbbing white glow. In the absence of an atmosphere, cooling had to be by radiation rather than convection, but even so an open tube would return to safe temperature much sooner than closed-breech weapons of the sort the Feds used. A few wisps of plasma twinkled within the bore like forlorn will-o'-the-wisps.
I caught a momentary glimpse of a sunlit object through the gunport: the Keys to the Kingdom. In astronomical terms, we and our enemies were almost touching, but the human reality was that kilometers separated our vessels. The Fed warship was a glint, not a shape.
A four-man damage-control team covered the crazed portion of our hull with a flexible patch. The men moved smoothly, despite weightlessness and their hard suits. Glue kept the patch in place, though positive internal air pressure would be a more important factor when we really needed it. The refractory fabric didn't provide structural strength, but it would block the influx of friction-heated atmosphere during a fast reentry.
Our thrusters roared for twenty seconds to kick us into a diverging orbit. The Federation vessel rotated slowly on Guillermo's screen. All the Keys' mid-line cargo hatches were gone.
Additional gunports swung to bear on us. I expected the Feds to fire, but for now they held their peace. Prothero realized that we could reload faster than his gunners dared to. If the Feds fired their ready guns now, they would have no response if we closed to point-blank range and raked them again.
A figure anonymous in his hard suit came from the midships compartment and pushed by me with as little concern as if I'd been the stanchion I held. I thought it was someone bringing Piet a message that couldn't be trusted to the intercom. Instead the man stooped to view the bore of the Long Tom.
The ceramic was yellow-orange at the breech end. Its color faded through red to a gray at the muzzle which only wriggled slightly to indicate it was still radiating heat.
I saw the man's face as he rose: Stampfer, personally checking the condition of his guns rather than trusting the assessment to men he had trained.
"Sir," he said over the intercom, "the broadside guns are ready any time you want them. The big boy here forward, he'll be another three minutes, I'm sorry but there it fucking is."
"Thank you, Mister Stampfer," Piet said. I watched his hands engage a preset program on his console. He still sounded like he was checking the dinner menu. "We'll hit them with four, I think. Load your guns."
Stampfer swooped through the internal hatch in a single movement, touching nothing in the crowded forward compartment. Our attitude jets burped; I locked my left leg to keep from swinging around the stanchion. The main thrusters fired another short, hammering pulse. The curve our course had drawn across that of the Keys to the Kingdom began to reconverge.
Stampfer was a lucky man to have a job to do. The cutting bar trembled vainly in my gauntleted hand.
The Federation vessel grew on Guillermo's screen. Black rectangles where the hatches were missing crossed her mid-line like a belt. Apart from that, her appearance was identical to that of the ship we'd first engaged: the damage we'd done, like the guns that had fired on us, was turned away.
We were already closer than we'd been when the Keys loosed her opening broadside. This time she held her fire.
"Come on," somebody muttered over the intercom. "Come on, come—"
Guillermo's left hand depressed a switch, cutting off general access to the net. His six digits moved together, reconnecting certain channels—Stampfer, Winger, Dole; the navigation consoles. I could have done that . . .
"It would make our job easier if Commodore Prothero was stupid as well as the brute I'm told he is," Piet announced calmly, "but we'll work with the material the Lord has given us. Mister Stampfer, we'll roll at two degrees per second. Fire when you bear."
Thump of the jets, the torque of my armored body trying to retain its attitude as my grip on the stanchion forces it instead to the ship's rotation . . .
Chaos. The 15-cm guns firing amidships and—so sudden it seemed to be a part of the broadside—the smashing impacts of two, maybe three Federation bolts.
Residual air within the Oriflamme's hull fluoresced a momentary pink. The normal interior lights went out; the constant tremble of pumps and drive motors through the ship's fabric stilled.
The navigation consoles were still lighted. Salomon lifted himself in his couch to look back. Piet did not. His armored fingers touched switches in a precise series, looking for the pattern that would restore control.
The Oriflamme's axial rotation continued, modified by the recoil of our broadside guns and the hits the Feds had scored. What size guns did the Keys mount: 10-cm? Perhaps bigger; that last impact rang through our hull as if the Oriflamme had been dropped ten meters to the ground.
The attitude jets fired, then fired again in a different sequence. Piet damped first the planned component of our rotation, then brought the plasma-induced yaw under control.
Red emergency lights came on. Because there wasn't enough atmosphere to diffuse their illumination normally, they merely marked points on the inner hull.
A man bowled forward from amidships: Stampfer again. He snatched a spherical shell from Long Tom's ready magazine and settled it into the weapon's breech, using his fingertips rather than the alignment tool shaped like a long-handled cookie-cutter.
The Keys to the Kingdom was turning slowly on at least two axes. Our broadside had struck in a concentrated pattern on the huge vessel's lower gun deck and the deck immediately below that. Three of the bolts had burned a single glowing crater that could have passed a featherboat sideways. The fourth was a close satellite to the merged trio. Vapor spurted from it, indicating that we'd holed either an air or a water tank.
A crewman swung the Long Tom's breech shut and turned the locking wheel. Bracing themselves against the steps cut into the deck for the purpose, the men ran their weapon out. Emergency power wasn't sufficient to operate the hydraulics, but Stampfer's crew knew its job.
The master gunner himself crouched beside the individual gunsight set into the Long Tom's trunnion. He had to edge sideways as his men shifted the gun to battery. The fire director must have gone out. At least one of the Fed bolts hit us amidships. We might have lost a gun or even all the broadside guns.
A team ran cable sternward from a manhole in the deck behind me. The auxiliary power unit was amidships, in the bulkhead between our fore and aft cargo holds. These men were tapping one of the main thrusters for power.
"Steady, Captain!" Stampfer's voice demanded. He sounded like he was trying to pull a planet out of its orbit. Up to now, he'd been speaking on a net limited to his gunners. "Stead—"
The Long Tom flashed its horrid rainbow glare as it recoiled into the compartment. There was no air to compress, but the massive cannon drove back with a crushing psychic ambience.
The 17-cm bolt pierced the blurred crater the triplet of broadside guns had melted in the Federation vessel's hull. Because the Keys was slowly rotating, the angle of the impact was different. More important, this bolt released all its energy within the spherical hull instead of on the exterior plating.
Silvery vapor geysered from the Keys' lower gun deck: metal heated to gas. It slammed outward at a velocity that chemical explosives couldn't have imparted. In the shock wave tumbled shredded bulkheads, dismounted cannon, and the bodies of personnel stationed on the deck our guns had ravaged.
Our internal lights came on; I felt vibration through the stanchion I held as the great pumps begin to tremble again. Stampfer moved amidships, toward his broadside guns. The Long Tom's bore was a cylinder of hellish white, breech to muzzle.
"Holy Jesus preserve us," Salomon said. I looked around. The digital information on his screen meant nothing to me, but I could understand the third track rising from the planetary surface on Piet's display.
Guillermo split his optical screen, setting the Keys' image to the right. On the left half was the Hercules, rising to higher orb
it to join the battle.
The freighter's hatch was open. The 5-cm plasma cannon we'd left the Southerns was mounted on a swivel in the center of the hatchway. Our optics and the software enhancing them were so good that I could make out at least a dozen armored figures within the freighter's hold.
The Southern refugees didn't have hard suits. The Hercules was crewed by survivors from the Keys' landing party, and perhaps by prisoners released from 17 Abraxis as well.
The two Federation ships were the jaws of a nutcracker, and the Oriflamme was their nut. One hit, even by the swivel gun, on our thrusters and we would no longer be able to maneuver with the Keys to the Kingdom. One hit . . .
"Piet," Stephen said, "bring us in tight to the Keys. I'll take a party aboard and we'll clear her."
"Prothero's holding his fire," Piet replied. I didn't know whether Guillermo had included me in the command channel, or if the whole crew was hearing the debate. "He'll salvo into our hold if we come within boarding distance. That's what he wants!"
I couldn't command, I couldn't even talk. I trembled in my hard suit. There was a red haze over my vision and I wanted to kill someone, I wanted to kill more than I'd ever before in my life wanted anything . . .
"Jesus Christ will you bring us close?" Stephen shouted. "Will you have those whoresons peck us to death and no answer? Bring us close, damn you, bring us close!"
It wasn't anger in his tone. It was white fluorescent rage, and I knew because the same need surged through me, ruling me, would I never swing my arm and see faces dissolve in blood again?
"We—" Piet shouted.
The Hercules was on an intersecting but not parallel path to the paired orbits of the Keys and the Oriflamme. Cinpeda had told us—and would tell anybody at gunpoint—that the reticle of the Hercules' laser communicator wasn't aligned properly. The Federation crew had to make a close approach to the Keys in order to coordinate their attack on us.
I knew that. Until the Keys to the Kingdom fired all her loaded guns into the Hercules, it didn't occur to me that Commodore Prothero knew nothing of the sort.
The freighter burst into a ball of opalescent vapor. Her own thrusters ruptured, adding their ionized fury to the directed jolts of the Federation cannon. The Hercules' light-alloy hull couldn't contain or even slow the cataclysm.
"All personnel except those with immediate gunnery or engineering tasks, assemble in the holds," Piet ordered in a voice as thin as a child's. "Starboard watch to the forward hold, port watch aft. Over."
I followed Stephen toward the compartment bulkhead. Because we hadn't yet loaded the 17 Abraxis' cutter to replace the one we'd lost on Riel, there was room in both holds for boarding parties.
I noticed that the Long Tom's crew was headed aft with us. They'd apparently interpreted "immediate tasks" to mean tasks more immediate than the six to eight minutes the 17-cm gun would take to cool for the next shot.
The midships compartment looked like the remains of a lobster dinner. Fragments of flesh and ceramic armor floated in the air. Much of the blood had spread across the bulkheads in viscous blotches. Sufficient droplets, wobbling as they tried to remain spherical, still floated in the compartment to paint the suits of us coming from the bow.
The bolt had entered through Number Two gunport at a severe angle, taking an oval bite from the coaming. The main charge had struck Number Three gun, vaporizing the left side of the carriage, much of the gun tube behind the second reinforce, and parts of—
Three men, maybe five. It was hard to say. There were so many body parts drifting in the compartment, rebounding from the bulkheads in slow curves, that my first reaction was that everyone amidships was dead.
Rakoscy was working on an armless man in a transparent cocoon meant as emergency shelter if the ship lost its atmosphere. The bubble was a tight fit for two men wearing most of their hard suits. Another crewman, anonymous in his armor, stood over the cocoon to illuminate Rakoscy's work with a handlight. There wasn't room for an aide within the distended fabric.
It didn't look to me as if the victim had a prayer. I don't suppose Rakoscy could afford to let himself think that way, though.
The forward hold was crowded. Stephen pushed to the front. A Fed bolt had struck near the cross-bulkhead. It hadn't penetrated, but the upper aft corner of the hatch was fractured in a conchoidal pattern. I wondered if Winger would be able to bring the APU back on line . . .
Dole, his helmet marked with three fluorescent bars, stood beside the hatch controls. Lightbody and Maher were at the arms locker beside the bosun. They gave us room as they recognized Stephen, Stephen and me.
"I'll take the line, Mister Dole," Stephen announced, reaching for the magnetic grapnel in the bosun's left hand. "Gentlemen to the front."
"Yessir," Dole said, giving up the grapnel. "If you'd really rather."
Lightbody hooked the line onto one of Stephen's equipment studs. The grapnel had permanent magnets on its gripping surface, but unless something went wrong, its electromagnets would be powered through the line itself.
There was also an adhesive pad to grip nonferrous surfaces. From the way the Keys to the Kingdom had resisted our plasma bolts, there was no doubt that her hull was steel, and thick steel besides.
"I'm next," I said to Lightbody. There was movement in the hold, men entering and shifting position. My eyes were focused on the back of Stephen's helmet, and I wasn't seeing even that.
"Sir, will you take a rifle?" a voice said.
The intercom worked with only the usual amount of static. Neither we nor the Feds were burning thrusters. Occasionally an attitude jet fired. For the most part, being weightless in a windowless hold had the feeling of being motionless.
Someone jogged my left hand. Maher was looking at me, offering a falling-block rifle. The side lever was deliberately oversized so that it was easier for a man wearing gauntlets to work.
"What?" I said. I shook my head. I wasn't sure he could see me behind the reflection from my faceplate. "No. no. I have to get closer to do any good."
I blinked, trying to remember things. "You can give me another bar," I said. "Hang it on my suit opposite the line."
I felt clicks against my hard suit. The suit wasn't trapping me this time. My mind was in a much straiter prison than that of my ceramic armor.
"Prepare to board," a voice ordered. Salomon or Guillermo, I couldn't tell which; not Piet.
Dole turned the control wheel and stepped out of my range of sight as he moved to take his own place on the boarding line. Six of our attitude jets fired together in a ten-second pulse, braking the Oriflamme's momentum with perfect delicacy.
The hatch unlocked and began to lower. The fractured corner in front of me flaked off in a slow-motion snowstorm. Shards glittered as their complex surfaces caught the sunlight.
The Keys to the Kingdom hung twenty meters away, filling the sky.
The Oriflamme wasn't aligned on quite the same horizontal axis as the Federation vessel. I was staring straight into the Keys' upper gun deck, but men at the rear of our aft hold would enter through the Feds' centerline if they boarded directly.
The hatch cammed itself down with gear-driven certainty. Stephen gathered himself to jump. One of our plasma bolts had ripped the Keys' hull open between two gunports. The compartment beyond was dark, save for the glint of armored shadows.
Fed gunners thrust main battery guns from the ports to either side of the large hole. The muzzles glowed red; their breeches must be yellow-white. The Fed gunners had taken the desperate chance of reloading their weapons while the barrels still shimmered with the heat of previous discharges; taken the chance and succeeded.
The bore of the gun trained on me looked large enough to swallow a man whole, as the plasma it gouted would surely do.
White light with overtones of green and purple blazed through every opening in the Keys' gun deck. The shell in the gun aimed at me had cooked off before it could be triggered in proper sequence. The deuterium pellet fused into h
elium and a gush of misdirected energy, blowing the cannon's stellite breech across its crew and the Fed personnel nearby.
The second cannon fired normally. The bolt hit the forward edge of our hatch. Dense ceramic shattered in fragments ranging in size from dust motes to glassy spearpoints a meter long. One of the latter gutted the man to my right.
I felt the shock through my boots; a film of grit and ions slapped my armor. Stephen leaped. I leaped behind him.
If the Fed gunners had waited another second or two, their plasma bolt would have loosed its devastation in the packed hold instead of shattering the ramp as it lowered. The slug of ions would have killed a dozen of us, maybe more. That wouldn't have slowed the survivors, nor the men still climbing into the hold to join the boarding party.
Stephen sailed forward, his body as rigid as a statue. I twisted slowly around the line clockwise. In one sense it didn't matter, since the Keys wasn't under way. We'd be operating without any formal up or down. I couldn't judge where I was going to land, though.
A group of Feds wrestled a multibarreled weapon on the Keys' open cargo deck to bear. The human leader was in metal armor. His five Molt crewmen wore transparent helmets and suits of shiny fabric stiffened at intervals by metal rings.
A jet of plasma from one of our midships ports struck the gun carriage. The bolt was small by the standards of the broadside guns firing moments before, but it and the Feds' own munitions blew the weapon and crew apart.
I'd forgotten about the swivel gun Stampfer took from 17 Abraxis. Stampfer hadn't forgotten.
Stephen bent as he approached the Keys to the Kingdom. He held the grapnel forward in his left hand. His arm compressed, taking the shock.
My left boot struck flat on the hull; my right speared through the crater our guns had torn. Swaths of rust and recrystallized steel vapor overlaid the Keys' plating. The light was too flat to wake colors, but reflection gave the surfaces different textures.