David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

But then again, if Hexapuma's ID on One and Two is right, maybe "pirates" isn't exactly the right noun after all, she thought, and then the countdown window reached zero.

The pinnaces had moved over thirty-eight hundred kilometers closer to Bogey Three in the thirty-nine seconds they'd spent under power, but the range was still just a shade over sixty-four thousand kilometers when the lasers fired. Hexapuma was one of the first ships to receive the new Mark 30 Condor -class pinnaces, and the Condors ' sensor suites, EW, and fire control had all been improved in tandem with their upgraded compensators, while the previously standard nose-mounted two-centimeter laser had been upgraded to a five-centimeter weapon, with significantly improved gravitic lensing.

A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage. But warship armor was a carefully designed, multilayered combination of ablative and kinetic armors-complex metallic-ceramic alloys of almost inconceivable toughness-laid over a hull framed and skinned in battle steel.

Bogey Three was a merchantship. Her hull was unarmored, and formed not out of battle steel, but out of old-fashioned, titanium-based alloys, and when those lasers hit, the results were spectacular.

Despite the misconceptions which civilians, accustomed only to medical and commercial laser applications, somehow still managed to cling to, weapons grade lasers were not fusing weapons. The energy transfer was too sudden, too huge, for that. Plating struck by an incoming laser shattered, and that was precisely what happened to Bogey Three.

Atmosphere belched from the ragged wounds smashed with brutal suddenness through the freighter's skin. Small breaches, compared to those a full-sized warship's weapons would have torn, but the people on the other sides of those breaches had been given absolutely no warning. One instant, they were going about their normal routines in the normal, shirt-sleeve environment of a starship; the next, a shrieking demon of coherent energy exploded into their very midst. Splinters of their own ship slashed into them like buzz saws, and even as the wounded screamed, the atmosphere about them went howling into the voracious vacuum. Automated emergency systems slammed blast doors shut, sealing off the breached compartments… and denying those damned souls trapped in destruction's path any possibility of escape.

But the human carnage was secondary, just a side effect. Those precisely targeted stilettos of energy had other objectives, and Abigail's fire smashed deep into Bogey Three's hyper generator compartment. She couldn't tell how much damage she'd actually inflicted, but the pinnace's tactical computers estimated a seventy-two percent chance that it was sufficient to cripple the generator beyond immediate repair. In fact, the computers were pessimistic; what was left of that generator would have been useful only for raw materials.

Hawk- Papa-Three's shot went in effectively simultaneously, but much further aft, and its target was not Bogey Three's ability to enter or leave hyper, but rather its ability to maneuver in normal-space.

Commercial impeller wedges were unlike military ones. A warship generated a double stress band above and below its hull; a merchant vessel generated only a single band. The difference reflected the fact that it was theoretically possible for an enemy to analyze an impeller wedge sufficiently to adjust for the gravity differential's distorting effect on sensors. If he could do that, then he could "see" through it, which no one thought was a good idea applied to his own navy. Using a double wedge, in which the outer protected the inner from analysis, thwarted any such effort. And, of course, naval designers, by their very nature, worshiped the concept of redundancy as the way to survive battle damage. But merchant designers had other priorities, and civilian-grade impellers were fifty to sixty percent less massive, on a node-for-node basis, than military-grade installations. The military-grade systems were commensurately more expensive, and their design lifetimes were substantially shorter, all of which was highly undesirable from the viewpoint of designing a durable, low-maintenance, low-cost freight-hauling vessel.

But one of the consequences of the difference in design was that whereas a warship, like a pinnace, could generate a functioning impeller wedge with only one impeller ring, a freighter required both. And another consequence was that whereas warship impeller rooms were subdivided into mutiple armored, individually powered and manned compartments, a civilian impeller room was one large, open space, completely unarmored and without the multiply redundant power and control circuits-and -manpower-of a military design.

Which was why Hawk-Papa-Three's shot inflicted such horrific damage.

The laser's entry wound itself was no more than a pinprick, a tiny puncture, against the vast dimensions of its target. Any one of the beta nodes in Bogey Three's after impeller ring massed dozens of times more than the attacking pinnace did. But size, as size, meant nothing. The laser blasted straight through the impeller room's thin skin and directly into Beta Twenty-Eight's primary generator. The generator exploded, throwing bits and pieces of its housing into the surrounding jungle of superconductor capacitors and control systems, and a brutal power spike blew back from it to Beta Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Nine. Without the internal armored bulkheads and cofferdams, the separate, parallel control runs, and redundant circuit breakers of military design, there was little to stop the train wreck of induced component failures, and a chain reaction of shorting, arcing superconductor rings raced through the compartment. The trapped lightning bolts crashed back and forth with the ferocity of enraged demons, taking one node after another completely off-line with catastrophic damage, and more frantic alarms screamed on the freighter's bridge.

Unlike the damage to the hyper generator, the effect of Hawk-Papa-Three's fire was immediately evident as the entire after impeller ring went from standby power to complete shutdown in less than two seconds. It had to be actual battle damage-no human's reaction time was fast enough to cut power that quickly. But, again, it was impossible for Abigail's sensors to confirm the extent of the damage in the flashing seconds her pinnaces took to scud past at over 17,600 KPS.

The fleet little vessels turned, keeping their noses aligned on Bogey Three, and went to maximum power, decelerating at six hundred gravities. Astern of them, the Nuncian LACs had also made turnover, but their deceleration rate was a hundred gravities lower than the pinnaces', and the range between the allied components of the small attack force opened quickly.

"Hawk- Papa-Two, this is Einarsson," Abigail's earbug said ninety seconds later. "Do you have a damage estimate, Lieutenant?"

"Not a definitive one, Sir." Part of Abigail wanted to add "of course," to that, but she reminded herself that even her pinnace's sensor capabilities must seem almost magical to the Nuncians. And at least Einarsson had waited until she'd had a chance to examine the available data before he asked the question.

"From what we could see during the firing pass," she continued, "we scored good hits on her after impeller room, at least. The ring's down, and a commercial design doesn't have much ability to come back from that kind of damage without outside assistance. Obviously, there's no way we can be certain that's the case here, but it seems likely.

"It's a lot more difficult to estimate what kind of damage we may have done to her hyper generator. It wasn't on-line to begin with, so we didn't have a standby power load to monitor or see go down. From the observed atmospheric venting, it looks like we definitely got deep enough to get a piece of the generator, and the computers estimate a seventy percent chance it was big enough. But we won't know for certain until we're actually aboard her."