David Drake - The Reaches

Stampfer was at a mobile fire director plugged into jacks on the gun deck, not at the position provided for him here on the bridge. He wanted-needed-to be in position to aim his cannon by eye if the fire-direction optronics failed in action. Stephen had seen Stampfer running from tube to tube in the past, his crews poised to act exactly as their master gunner ordered. If all the ships in the present fleet hit as hard and as accurately as Stampfer's guns had done in those less sophisticated days, the Feds were in for a long day and a short war.

The main display before Piet was a maze of colored jack-straws-the courses, past and calculated, of all vessels in both fleets. Each ship was a different hue, though with over a hundred and fifty individuals to track some variations were extremely slight. Simms' screen was a mass of alphanumeric data, while Guillermo viewed the fleets as beads rather than vectors and had a numeric sidebar.

None of the navigation displays meant a lot to Stephen, but he could see through the transparent blast wall to the gunnery console. Though the position was unmanned, its screen was slaved to the mobile director Stampfer was using on the gun deck.

A spherical Federation warship swelled on the display, rotating slowly around its axis of motion. Stephen had no certain scale to judge by, but the ship's nine full decks implied it was large-probably upward of a 1,000 tonnes' burden.

The Fed vessel's gunports were open and the guns already run out. She carried more than thirty tubes, but as the image grew Stephen saw to his amazement that the weapons on the midline weren't plasma cannon. The Feds had welded projectile weapons on ground carriages to the deck of the hold.

Given the speeds at which starships traveled, projectiles fired at only a thousand meters per second were unlikely to hit any target that wasn't matching velocities alongside. Projectile cannon had some use in a boarding battle, but not enough to justify their weight and bulk. The Feds must be desperately short of naval ordnance if they were arming vessels with ground weapons.

For safety, the Wrath 's ports opened to receive the guns only moments before the weapons fired. A bolt that struck the warship's thick hull might not penetrate, but even a small slug of plasma lucky enough to enter through an open port could wreak terrible damage in the interior.

"Fire as you bear!" Piet ordered.

The Wrath shuddered as hydraulic rams slid her ten starboard guns to battery. Internal pressure dropped noticeably. Stephen slapped his faceshield down.

The 20-cm cannon fired a rippling salvo at the Fed a kilometer distant. The gun across the blast wall from Stephen recoiled violently in a haze of plasma. The muzzle and the whole bore glowed white as the gunner's mate opened the breech. The six men of the crew sprang out the rear hatch of their splinter shield, ran around the end of the blast wall, and took their station at the port-side gun.

The shock of the discharges vibrated through the warship's fabric for thirty seconds before it finally damped to a mere lively trembling. Piet gripped a T-handled lever with his left hand, drew it to its lower stop, and then centered it again. A third of the Wrath 's attitude jets fired. Another third fired seconds later to balance the initial impulse. The ship rotated 180° on its long axis, bringing its port battery toward the enemy.

The image on the gunnery display didn't change during the Wrath 's maneuvers. Four and maybe a fifth of Stampfer's bolts had slammed the Fed's hull. Vaporized metal streamed back like spindrift. Because the Fed was rotating at a meter per second at its midline, no two of the Wrath 's bolts struck exactly the same point. One round nonetheless pierced the Fed's hull. A plume of air vented a large compartment.

Sparks flashed across the image; Fed guns recoiled into their ports. They were firing also, but Stephen didn't feel an impact. The spinning vessel was difficult to damage, but it made an almost impossible aiming platform for its own gunners.

"Fire as you bear!" Piet ordered. The port-side guns skreeled forward, blasted back from their ports at one-second intervals bow to stern, and stood in a mist of glowing ions as their crews scampered to the starboard battery again.

Three bolts from the second broadside struck the Federation vessel. One blew gas and fragments in a perfect circle from the midline deck where the shell guns were mounted. The vessel was a converted merchantman. The central hold, intended for easy cargo operations in orbit, was completely open. The 20-cm bolt had struck the deck at a flat angle, disintegrating the partition walls the Feds had erected to subdivide the hold.

The Wrath 's shooting had been remarkably accurate, causing casualties and discomfort aboard one of the Feds' larger vessels. Despite that, the damage wasn't serious. Stephen, balancing the hits against the Wrath 's load of twenty-five shells per 20-cm gun at the start of the action, didn't believe Stampfer could do serious damage to the Fed ship at this rate.

The Fed vanished from the targeting display. Stephen turned-at the waist, because the gorget locked his helmet to his thorax armor-and saw that the entire Federation fleet had transited. Most of the vectors calculated on Piet's display were truncated at point of transit, though the predicted courses of Venerian ships still wove wildly across the screen. The attack had been as uncoordinated as that of bees swarming at a hive robber.

The Wrath transited, a sickening lurch from reality that bothered Stephen less than it would have if he'd been expecting it. Navigational parameters were so extraordinarily complex that there was effectively only one solution to a given problem. The Wrath 's AI and the artificial intelligences of the other Venerian ships reached the same navigational result as their Federation prey by virtue of knowing the precise instant at which the Fed fleet transited.

Flop. Back to the sidereal universe, a microsecond of ship's time after exit and untold light-years distant from the previous location. The Fed formation hung on the display, distorted like a smoke ring starting to drift. The Feds were gone and the Wrath was gone, plunged into a bubble universe with no light or life or existence in human terms, then-

Flop. Stephen's soul turning inside out, but it wasn't really so very terrible, not as bad as it usually was for him. There was an enemy in sight, and it if wasn't a target for the flashgun slung from his right shoulder-that would come. That would surely come.

The Fed formation looked like a melon rupturing at the impact of a high-velocity bullet. Some ships had scattered a considerable distance from the defensive array while others clumped too closely together for safety.

Transit in to gray Hell. Moments alone with only the past, with only the dead, and in a blaze of white light Sal with her hand outstretched and a smile.

Flop. The Fed fleet straggled like froth on a beer mug. The captain of the bridge gun crew sprayed the bore of his gun with compressed gas to allow convection cooling. The loader waited with the chunky near-sphere of the shell in his hands, ready to ease it into the breech on command.

Stephen's guts tightened for another transit. The Feds remained in normal space. Had Pleyal's forces not been under pressure by the Venerian fleet, they might have extended the series farther, but already the outlying ships were in danger of being enveloped by their enemy.

A large vessel could accept a great deal of hull damage and remain a fighting unit, but a bolt or two in the thruster nozzles would leave it helpless. The Feds had to reform their defensive array, or the more maneuverable Venerian ships would attack from "below" and disable them one by one.