This Corner of the Universe (22 page)

The
young weapons officer watched in horror as her gunners’ weapons reticules
jerked spasmodically on their way over to the twelfth salvo.  Struggling to
keep Thomas’ targeting system focused on vampire X-ray, Vernay urged it onward
as the computer chugged through the aiming procedures.  From the corner of her
eye, she saw Pruette’s assignment, vampire Whiskey, sharply deviate from its
collision course with
Anelace
to head toward an electronic phantom. 
Thomas’ first shot missed but Vernay held the weapons lock while his laser
recycled.  Vampire X-ray met its fate on the second shot, vaporized at 3
ls
from
the corvette.

With
but one volley remaining, Vernay glanced away from her point defense controls
to the tactical plot. 
Anelace
would be in mass driver range in twenty-four
seconds.  As much as she wanted to help Thomas fight off vampire Zulu, she knew
she had to transfer her console over to mass driver control to begin its
targeting procedures.  They had come a long way for these shots and if she
missed, all of this would have been for nothing.  She wished her gunners good
luck over the comm and switched to mass driver control.

Pruette
had accepted that he was living on borrowed time.  His last target, vampire
Whiskey, would have easily slipped past his defenses had it not been for the
ECM.  His targeting computer was truly defunct by now and besides the
increasingly delayed response from his control stick inputs, his console had
developed a stutter.  Using more guesswork and instinct than Brevic naval point
defense procedures, he coaxed his targeting reticule to the general vicinity of
vampire Yankee.  Strangely, he was calm. 
It’s pretty much out of my hands
now
. 
Poor Thomas must be having fits in his turret
, he thought. 
His console screen blinked at him and he saw his reticule was suddenly 2
ls
behind
Yankee.  With an almost casual resignation, he bounced his input to a spot
where he guessed the missile would be when his reticule eventually staggered
over to the location. 
This was so not covered at gunnery school
.  He
grinned as his reticule moved closer still to Yankee. 
I should write a
paper on the calculus of point defense in an austere environment using voodoo
and indifference
.  Pruette laughed aloud as he gained a hard lock on the
missile.  So focused on his goal to attain a lock, he had actually not fired when
Yankee entered range.  The missile was now 4
ls
from
Anelace
but
he still held his fire
.  I’ll probably lose the lock after I fire anyway, so
let’s give the old gal time to think things through.  Come on, Ana!
 
Pruette watched the range drop from 4
ls
to 3
ls
.  As the missile
cut inside 2
ls
, he input the fire command and charged bursts of energy
reached out to swat the missile from space.  Pruette’s elation at achieving the
impossible was cut short as
Anelace
shook violently; Vampire Zulu had detonated
six hundred meters over her.

The
shock front rained down over
Anelace
.  The crest of the wave hit her
fifty meters behind her bow, in between her sixth and seventh frame.  Her first
line of defense, the AIPS screen, had fully recharged, thanks to PO Deveraux’s
valiant efforts inside the AIPS control room and the screen deflected seventy-eight
percent of the energy.  The concussive wave slammed against
Anelace’s
topside hull but with greatly reduced force.  Located forty-five meters from
the bow, the sixth frame had the additional support of the internal bulkhead
separating the first port and starboard laser turret rooms from Damage Control
Station One.  The shock front pounded against the hull, opening several
breaches in each compartment, but the actual structural braces weathered the
force warping nineteen centimeters without breaking.

The
port laser control rooms and DC-One, which had already been destroyed, were
pulverized further.  Pruette and Thomas on the starboard side experienced the
thrill of decompression as their compartments opened to space, although each
had already sealed their shocksuits when vampire Foxtrot had rattled
Anelace
earlier.  The blast knocked Pruette around in his shockseat so hard it blurred
his vision.  Blinking furiously, he saw through teary eyes that his control
panel was dying.  Just as he thought his vision was getting better, his
compartment lights began a slow fade to black.  Reaching out feebly to switch
his computer to an alternate power source, he saw his hand was fading out too
and then realized the lights were fine, it was he that was fading out.  His last
thought before losing consciousness was his fervent hope that there was still
power running to the mass driver.

As
Pruette and Thomas were beaten inside their compartments, the shock front dealt
its deathblow further aft. 
Anelace’s
seventh frame, already broken by an
earlier near miss, could provide no more support.  The hull buckled and crushed
inward from the AIPS control room through the officer living quarters,
collapsing everything but the two aft-most officer quarters and Damage Control
Station Three.  Even if Deveraux had not been deafened from an earlier blast,
he would not have had time to hear the cacophony of disintegrating bulkheads
around him as the shock front broke his body before it was crushed by the
crumpling ceiling.

Every
person on the bridge was jolted violently in their seats.  Ensign Selvaggio
cried out in pain as her lower right leg slammed into the bottom of her
navigation console.  A shower of sparks flew from Truesworth’s sensor station followed
by thick, opaque smoke.  Heskan thought he heard Riedel cry out a warning about
a fire on the bridge.  The bridge crew, in near unison, locked their visors
down, anticipating imminent decompression of the bridge, except for Lieutenant
Vernay.  Oblivious to the destruction around her, both hands remained glued to
her weapon controls as she fought against the blast to keep her mass driver
pointed at
Blackheart
.

Riedel
was once again screaming about the fire while quickly removing the restraints
of his shockseat.  Truesworth had turned to face Heskan and was saying sensors
were inoperable.  Meanwhile, Selvaggio was reflexively holding her right leg in
a desperate attempt to stop the pain.  Heskan knew that he had lost control of
the situation on the bridge and needed to get it back.  They had rode
Anelace
hard and she had taken them to the threshold of mass driver range but she had
nothing left.  Now, her crew would have to return the favor and carry her if
they wanted to finish the job.

“Mike,
put out that fire!” Heskan screamed over the turmoil.  “Chief, vent the smoke
from the bridge…Stacy can’t shoot if she can’t see!”  He looked at his bridge
officers.  “Diane, let go of your leg and get us pointed toward Ketch One while
Ana still answers the helm.”  His voice sounded cruel but he no longer cared.  “Jack,
either bring sensors back online or transfer control to the main sensor room.” 
He savagely punched commands into his console as he snarled at his weapons
officer, “Stacy, I’ll handle the reloads, you focus on shooting and don’t you
dare miss!”

Anelace
entered her mass driver’s range
of 10
ls
just as
Blackheart
fired her fourteenth missile volley. 
The missiles broke free from the schooner and activated their drives less than
a second later.  Even though
Anelace
was now inside the Interceptor-B’s
standard engagement envelope, both missiles locked onto
Anelace
immediately
via the targeting information
Blackheart
provided at launch.  As was the
norm, each missile was propelled slightly off course by the actual launch from its
missile tubes and from the incredible torque experienced as its drive touched
off.  Normally each missile’s internal guidance computer corrected the
deviations easily over several seconds of flight time.

After
suffering
Blackheart’s
withering missile barrage for eight minutes and
fifteen seconds,
Anelace
fired her first shot in anger.  From an
internal weapons camera feed, Heskan watched the first round flash from the
barrel and began to manually guide the ailing weapon system through the reload
procedure.  First, each barrel’s temperature and curvature were measured and
compared to the acceptable limits of variance immediately after a shot was fired
from the mass driver.  Next, the breech retracted and an iridium 0.762 meter projectile
was placed into the main barrel.  As it seated, it too was analyzed a final
time to ensure its shape and integrity would hold up under the tremendous
stress of accelerating from 0
c
to .66
c
in under a second.  The
push pulse barrels energized as the breech slid shut.  Each barrel’s
temperature and curvature were now measured continuously as the system waited
for all readings to reach tolerance levels before
Anelace’s
weapons
computer blinked the status light from red to green.  Heskan guided
Anelace
through each step, even bypassing automatic control when it balked at closing
the breech.  Waiting for the mass driver safeties to confirm the barrel was
ready for fire, he looked over the driver’s targeting suite.  Incredibly,
Vernay had maintained a lock on
Blackheart
despite the bone-jarring impact
on
Anelace
five seconds earlier.  The first mass driver round had fired
true and was hurtling toward the schooner.  Heskan’s peripheral vision caught
the status light change color as he watched the first mass driver dot symbol on
the tactical plot shoot by the incoming inverted “v” symbols of
Blackheart’s
fourteenth missile salvo.

“Up!”
Heskan cried and Vernay’s hopeful “On the way” responded like an echo.

Had
Vernay the time to scan her point defense screen, she would have seen
Anelace
label the latest incoming missile salvo as vampires Alpha and Bravo.  They had
rolled through the alphabet and had come full circle.  Both missiles were
already inside point defense range and screaming toward the battered corvette. 
Both of her GP turrets remained silent as each gunner lay motionless in his shockseat. 
The vampires turned over sixty G’s, accelerating to .45
c
while
simultaneously trying to make their course corrections in the extremely limited
distance they had left until impact.

As
Heskan repeated the loading procedure and Vernay concentrated on keeping the
mass driver aimed at her adversary, Riedel fought the fire with a handheld
extinguisher from the small damage control locker on the bridge.  The electrical
fire had lost its vigor after Brown had cut the power to the panel but the last
of the stubborn flames died only after Riedel sprayed it down with smothering,
non-conductive foam.  “Fire’s out,” he reported behind Heskan and began to move
back to his station.

Heskan
waved an acknowledgment to Riedel without looking as he roared “Up!” a second
time.  Vernay’s gentle keystroke of the command-accept-execute button was a
stark contrast with her fierce reply, “On the way!”  The third mass driver
round spit forth from
Anelace’s
Kruger and an instant later, sensors
along each barrel began their examination of shape and temperature once again.

On
Blackheart
,
the captain had just watched the light from his twenty-sixth missile detonate
over
Anelace
but knew nothing could now prevent that demon-spawned ship
from closing to mass driver range.  He heard a high-pitched voice scream for
evasive action and realized it was his own.  He no longer cared about the boost
in reputation destroying a true naval ship would bring him.  The processing
operation in Skathi no longer mattered to him either.  That damned corvette
could have the Euphoria refinement facility and she could have
Merciless
too; all he wanted was to survive the next fifteen seconds.

By
the time vampire Bravo had corrected its course,
Anelace
had slipped
inside the missile’s turn radius, causing it to streak past the ship
harmlessly.  Alpha, which had a truer path to
Anelace
, had just enough
maneuverability to cut the corner to the corvette.  It had started well
underneath the fast ship but arced up in an incredible seventy-three G twist to
strike
Anelace’s
bow like a boxer’s uppercut.  The violent maneuver
crushed most of the missile’s circuitry, including its proximity detonator, but
the missile’s impact detonator functioned properly.  The missile tore through
the bottom of
Anelace’s
bow and exploded inside the already shattered mass
driver control room.

The
bulkhead between the mass driver control room and the ship’s mess ran parallel with
Anelace’s
second frame, adding considerable strength to the front of the
ship.  Still, the blast tore apart the bulkhead and snapped the frame like a
toothpick. 
Anelace’s
bow, already weakened, folded completely and
sheared in two inside the ship’s mess.  As the concussive force blew off the
first twenty meters of the ship,
the conical bow summersaulted away,
shedding tonnes of debris as it spun.  The mass driver attached to it crackled
with the residual power in the pulse barrels charging for what was to have been
its fourth shot.

The
ship’s mess changed in an instant from the frozen quiet of space into a hellish
furnace as the explosion ripped the room into two halves.  Behind the mess,
DC-Two became an unnavigable twisted labyrinth of shredded metal, circuitry and
conduit.  The containment field inside the ship’s small gym failed and
Anelace
once again gushed atmosphere.  Her third frame warped upward one and a half
meters grotesquely as the room came apart under the stress.  The quarters of
the enlisted crew closest to the gym rattled, causing their secured furniture
to break free from their moorings and toss violently about inside the tiny
rooms.  The containment fields along the enlisted living spaces flickered and
failed up to
Anelace’s
fourth frame but held at the fifth, massive
frame.  Nearly the entire front half of
Anelace’s
lower deck was either
missing or had been opened to space.  Just seven meters aft of the fifth frame,
Spaceman Gables was thrown across the room but luckily onto one of the quarter’s
beds.  Her useless helmet crashed against a wall, smashing a mounted
holo-picture.  Gables bounced off the bed and landed with a hard thump on the
floor.  She righted herself and stared at the door in mute frustration.  The
room was a death trap but she knew she could not leave since the vacuum of
space waited on the other side of that door.