Eric Flint - Threshold

Anthony and Horst burst into Anthony's cabin. Horst glanced around, looking for something to tend to Anthony's arm. Something about the window caught his eye. He drew in a shocked breath as he realized that he had not, in fact, imagined the deck quiver under his feet as the ship's orientation changed. As if to confirm his realization, another rumble passed through theOdin. "Oh, God," he breathed. "What is it, Horst?" Anthony followed his gaze. "Do you think…?" "Fitzgerald's going to fire onNebula Storm!" Leaving Anthony to search for his own bandage materials, Horst sat before the room's terminal and brought up his own access. "But does it matter?"

Anthony said painfully, starting to clean out the wounds with the cabin's first-aid kit. "You know how little they must move to avoid the projectiles." "Yes, I do. But Fitzgerald knows that, too." He brought up the work he'd begun weeks ago. Now that there was no more need for subtlety… "Time to disable the guns for good." But when he saw the results, he hissed. "That bastard has his own application suite!" "Yes, he would. Not taking chances with General Hohenheim locking him out." "It just means I'm having to improvise a bit more, and on a lower level, with the shutdown." Horst frowned in concentration, then began to grin. "But I think I will beat him. He's still loading the guns. Just a few more minutes."

Fitzgerald slammed the port shut, sealed it, and activated the loading cycle. "Now we're ready to go, my friends. A little gift from theOdin for you all. Actually, four little gifts, each with something extra." The coilguns-one on each of four support ribs-signaled readiness. Even as he pressed the final button that started the firing cycle, Richard's eyes registered that one of the status lights had just gone amber. But his finger was already in motion, and sluggish neural impulses could not be recalled. The first coilgun cycled, magnetic fields synchronizing in perfect timing, grabbing the shell and accelerating it outward with immense force, hurtling directly toward theNebula Storm at over fifteen kilometers per second. The next gun also cycled, neither A.J.'s Faerie Dust nor Horst's last-minute interventions quite able to affect it. The third would not have fired at all if Fitzgerald had relied on the original control suite, which was by now totally crippled by Horst and by the general, who had just locked the system down. As it was, one of the embedded controllers failed and the acceleration rings associated with it shut down. As the firing cycle had already begun, however, the following rings tried to compensate, mostly successfully. Now it was the fourth and final shell's turn, and it too began to accelerate at hundreds of gravities.

But there were now no fewer than three different agencies trying to control the coilgun, at levels ranging from parts of the hardware up, and the embedded controls were no longer receiving reliable signals.

Halfway down the acceleration ring, the field inverted, unstably reversing twice. The shell's own controller, minimally complex in order to survive the hellish environment, miscued and took the sudden deceleration and heat to be impact. And did what any good armed shell should do in that situation: it detonated. The explosion tore apart theOdin 's fourth mass-driver support rib like a firecracker on a straw, blasting shrapnel throughout the area. Some of that shrapnel was from the rib itself, but the rest was payload-high-density depleted-uranium pellets, coated to enhance penetration. The semi-smart shell had not had time to set for a directed blast, but at that short range theOdin still covered a huge fraction of the sky; there was no way to miss, and thousands of pellets did not. Like the blast of a monstrous shotgun, the storm of armor-piercing bullets ripped intoOdin, both the main body and the wide-flung habitat ring.

Never meant for atmospheric entry, Odin 's hull was strong enough to take micrometeorite impacts. It also had design contingencies, alarms, safety features, and emergency procedures meant to deal with one or two unexpected larger holes. But this was not just one or two holes, and the personnel who might normally have been in a position to respond were busy with a mutiny, on one side or another. The explosion and impact were puny compared to the mass of the huge ship. It did not reel under the blow, was not sent spinning and fracturing; it continued relentlessly on its way, outwardly almost unchanged. But the interior of theOdin had become a charnel house.

Chapter 37 "Almost…" A.J. suddenly sat up. "Oh, that's bad."

"What?" Jackie looked worried. A.J. ignored her for the moment. The status reports for the coilguns had stopped abruptly. The Faerie Dust was probably cycling, looking for more data, until it met another contingency to act on. But the last data he'd gotten… "Something bad's happened. I can't tell what, though. Ithink we've been fired on, but something went wrong with the fourth shot." "They got offthree shots?" Madeline said, in a tone of mild reproof. "You seem to be slipping, A.J." "Gimme a break," he muttered as he tried to redirect the motes onOdin to new assignments. The responses were not encouraging. "Fitzgerald had his own control protocols, as well as the original layer, and someone-I'll bet Horst-was trying to shut him down on their end. The combination was like having a four-way duel with blindfolds." "I got them on radar," Joe said. "The shots, that is.

They're pretty darn close for quick shots, but none of them are coming anywhere near us. Well, on a cosmic scale Fitzgerald was dead-on, but on a personal scale he's still way off." "How close?" Madeline asked.

"Kilometers off, all of them. We won't even have to dodge. My guess is that even though A.J. and Horst weren't able to stop the firing, whatever they were doing probably screwed up the targeting. Even just a little nudge would be enough." Some of the Dust finally responded with some data. And it looked like… "Larry, give us a close-up ofOdin," A.J. said, feeling a coldness begin to seep into his chest.

"Fast." "Second that." Joe's voice suddenly had no humor in it. "I'm picking up other targets nearOdin. Looks like debris." The screen blanked, then returned. At the current range, even with the highest-resolution imagers A.J. had been able to put inNebula Storm 's systems, the huge ship looked like a diatom. But they could make out enough detail to see that the perfect symmetry ofOdin was no longer perfect. "What happened, A.J.?" Jackie demanded. "Are they going to be okay over there?" "I can't be sure what happened, exactly," A.J. said.

"Not at this range. Not with all the other crap going on, when I'm having to get low-bandwidth answers to my questions. Something went badly wrong on the last shot. I'd guess that Fitzgerald's last shell blew up in the middle of firing, probably because we were all screwing around with the controls at the same time. Hell, it might not even have been the shell. If the magnetic drivers went wrong, they could probably have fired the shell the wrong way or something like that. I don't know the details. Everything that was going on shut down a lot of the Faerie Dust, too. I've lost a lot of it-I knew it'd happen with it being that close up to the firing, but still… Anyway, I'm trying to get more info. I'm really worried by the fact that they haven't reestablished communications. That means that whatever Fitzgerald set up wasn't just a temporary glitch." "You can't tap into their comm systems and get them working?" Helen asked. "I wish. I know I pull off a lot of crazy stunts sometimes, but there really are limits. It's not like TV and movies where the super hacker is really a magician who uses techno-jargon. Wish it was. I could just spout off some obfuscating phrases and hey, presto, I'm running all their systems. But all I have access to right now is Faerie Dust which isn't even in the right locations and that can't communicate anything to me except in short low-bandwidth pulses, and we're still far enough off that we've got fractions-of-a-second comm lag, though that's shrinking. I've given the Dust some instructions to concentrate in some of the other systems I know something about. But since the Dust doesn't come with jet engines or rockets, it's going to take a while for it to get there." "I see." Madeline's brow furrowed for a moment.