Ричард Бейкер - Valiant Dust

Because Hector had turned to hit Panther with her torpedoes, her stern faced Streitaxt when the destroyer’s own torpedo spread exploded just behind the hull. The sternmost section of the ship contained few vital control stations or engineering spaces; those were protected in the center of mass, guarded by the heaviest armor Hector carried. But the drive plates for the ship’s induction engines and the retracted warp ring were located at the aft end of the hull, and Streitaxt ’s salvo vaporized large portions of Hector ’s drive system. Hull plates exploded into vapor, kicking Hector forward so suddenly that Sikander suffered more than a little bit of whiplash—as did something like two-thirds of the cruiser’s crew—before the inertial compensators could react. Sensors, power generators, and control systems were knocked off-line by the jarring hits. Most came back on almost at once, but not the drive plates shattered by the torpedo bursts. In one savage moment, Hector ’s legs were slashed out from under her, leaving her in a tumbling, out-of-control spin.

Alarms flashed and wailed throughout the bridge, and half the screens went dark. But weapons controls were especially well hardened against shock, and Sikander could observe the effect of his previous salvo on Streitaxt. As before, five-sixths of his K-cannon shots sailed past the destroyer with little effect, although one rod grazed the hull and left a fifty-meter scoring of molten metal only a few centimeters deep. But the sixth round hit dead center in the destroyer’s bow, still facing directly at Hector. While it was the most heavily armored part of the hull, no destroyer in any fleet could stand up to a direct hit from a cruiser’s K-cannon. The blast incinerated Streitaxt ’s forward torpedo room, and touched off a wave of secondary explosions as the bursting charges in the weapons stored in the torpedo tubes detonated. The first fifty meters of Streitaxt simply ceased to exist as a recognizable hull, blasted into streamers of incandescent metal and shattered armor plates spinning off in all directions.

Larkin let out a whoop of exhilaration. “Hits on Panther !” she called out.

“Hit on Streitaxt !” said Sikander. He risked a quick glance away from his display to look at Larkin’s console. “Good work, Ms. Larkin.”

“Well done!” Captain Markham answered, raising her voice to be heard over the din of screeching alarms and confused reports. “Engineering, what’s our status?”

“Acceleration effectively zero, Captain!” Magda answered. Sikander could hear the strain in her voice and a din of shouts and alarms from the engineering control room, carrying over her link to the command circuit. “We can’t maneuver!”

“Helm doesn’t answer, Captain,” Chief Holtz announced from the pilot station. “Attitude control only, and not too much of that.”

“Get me a working drive plate, Ms. Juarez,” Markham ordered. “Mr. North, what’s our main battery—”

“Oh, fuck me,” Hiram Randall said laconically, interrupting the captain. He stared at the tactical console. “ Panther is firing, Captain. We can’t evade.”

23

CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit

Sikander had time to briefly lock eyes with Elise Markham as they both absorbed the import of Randall’s announcement. Then Panther ’s ragged salvo arrived. Though badly damaged, the Dremish cruiser still had power for some of her main battery, and Hector could no longer actively dodge. She was merely a target moving in a ballistic arc, although her three-axis tumbling motion made her a somewhat complicated one, and the Dremish fire-control systems assumed that Hector could still perform evasive maneuvers and therefore did not aim exactly at where she was. Several rounds missed, fooled by the unexpected motion. Others did not.

One of Panther ’s K-rounds punched into Hector ’s port side, a brilliant lance of tungsten alloy. In the space of an instant, a spray of molten metal and jets of gas erupted from the bulkhead on the left side of the bridge. The wall crumpled inward and the deck buckled; a deafening roar blasted the room. Sikander’s visor slammed shut; he felt himself picked up and thrown down again, although his seat restraints held and he was not flung from his battle couch. Everything went dark; he heard and saw nothing.

When he could see again, he blinked and looked around. There was a large, jagged hole in the port side of the bridge compartment; a fiery orange glow gleamed through. Vapor streamed out of the bridge through the hole, the unmistakable sign of a hull breach. He wondered what compartment was between the bridge and the port-side outer hull and what was left of it, but at the moment his ability to picture the details of Hector ’s internal arrangement wasn’t quite up to the task. Shattered control consoles and vidscreens dangled and sparked fitfully on that side of the room. There had been a couple of manned consoles on that side of the bridge, but they were simply gone. Only twisted, hot metal and torn scraps of armored suit remained.

Bridge hit, he realized. A bad one, although he’d been lucky. The weapon-control stations were at the aft end of the compartment, so he and the other Gunnery Department officers seemed to still be in one piece. His ears buzzed and crackled, and he was sore all over, but his arms and legs moved when he wanted them to and his suit remained intact. Already he could see Girard shaking himself and punching at his console, while Larkin—how had she been knocked out of her seat?—picked herself up off the deck and returned to her station. He looked over to Captain Markham to see if she was all right.

She was not.

Molten shrapnel from the hit that had breached the hull had cut through her battle station like a white-hot scythe. She’d been thrown against the far bulkhead in the wreckage of her restraints. A thick, charred line as deep as Sikander’s fist snaked across her back, her shoulders, her head. Her suit was torn open … but he doubted very much that Elise Markham had lived long enough to die of decompression.

Hiram Randall was luckier. He hadn’t been hit directly by the shrapnel, but he’d been struck by what was left of the port-side bridge displays, dislodged by the explosion. He slumped in his battle station, motionless. Whether alive or dead, Sikander could not say.

“Bridge! Bridge! Is anybody up there? Respond!”

Sikander shook his head, and realized that the buzzing he heard in his ears was what remained of the command circuit. Commander Chatburn shouted at him over and over again from his position in the auxiliary bridge. “Bridge, report!”

“This is Lieutenant North,” Sikander said. His tongue felt thick and clumsy, but as he spoke he began to rally; the ringing in his ears faded a bit and he felt his wits coming back into focus. “We took a bad hit on the bridge. Captain Markham is dead, and Mr. Randall appears unconscious. I’m the senior officer remaining here.”

“Good God,” Chatburn replied. There was a long silence. “What’s going on? Do you still have sensors and weapons? We’ve got a power outage here, we can’t see anything.”

“Heavy damage on both Panther and Streitaxt. Us, too, I guess. I don’t know what we have left, XO.”

“You’re certain about the captain?”

“Yes, sir.” Sikander couldn’t even bring himself to look in her direction. He turned his attention to the bridge crew, and keyed the all-bridge circuit. “Dolan, Reese!” he said to two of the hands manning the tactical displays. “Get a patch on the port bulkhead, we’ll need atmosphere in here as soon as we can get it!” Armored suits could stave off the effects of exposure to vacuum as long as the suit wasn’t breached in the wrong spot, but treating the injured would be next to impossible in a compartment open to space.