Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga) (35 page)

Abha found it hard to breathe, so great was the tension crushing down on her. She suddenly understood how Steve must have felt during the final seconds of his approach to
Blanco
. “They want to knock out the patrol craft before she has a chance to launch missiles herself. They obviously don’t know for sure what she is.”

“But isn’t Bravo
too far away to fire? De Bouff senior’s missiles had only about a million kilometers’ powered range. If theirs are the same sort of thing, they’re still further away from the patrol craft than that.”

“Sure, but they’re moving fast. You’ve got to add that closing speed to the missiles’ range. They’ll still be under power when they reach the patrol craft.”

“I get it – wait! What the…?” Dan pointed at the patrol craft’s icon on the display. It had suddenly sprouted a smaller icon below it, moving straight down. “What the
hell
are they doing?”

Abha laughed aloud, a vocal explosion of relief. “Whoever’s in command of that patrol craft has his head screwed on straight! He’s abandoned ship. That’s a lifeboat being ejected. He’s trying to keep his crew alive, even if he loses his ship. They’ll be hoping someone will be left alive to pick them up when this is over.”

“That was darn good thinking, if it works.”

“Yes. He’s made Bravo reveal herself long before she’d planned. I hope someone gives him a bloody great medal for –”

She fell silent as Target Bravo’s missile closed on the patrol craft. It didn’t carry a nuclear warhead – if they had any, the pirates were clearly reserving them for more important targets – but even its conventional warhead wasn’t needed. Bravo had been moving at one-tenth of light speed when the missile was launched, and its own drive had accelerated it further. It scored a head-on direct hit at a combined closing velocity of almost one-quarter of light speed, the kinetic energy of the impact unimaginably greater than the explosive power of its warhead. From close range it must have been a spectacular eruption of energy, utterly consuming both vehicles, but from over three million kilometers away the watchers in the assault shuttles saw the destruction only as a brief flicker of light through their viewscreens. The icons of the ship and missile disappeared from the display; but the radar emissions from Target Bravo did not cease, and were joined by a new signature.

“Bravo’s brought her gravitic drive online!”
Abha snapped.

“But why?”
Dan asked. “She can’t accelerate much at the speed she’s already doing.”

“They must want it
standing by in case there are any other surprises waiting for them.”

“Why don’t they turn away, to avoid a possible ambush, Sir?” the pilot asked beside them.

“They’re on a firing pass,” Dan pointed out. “Their present course takes them within half a million clicks of the mining ship and the accommodation vessel. If they turn towards them, the range might become short enough that missiles from shuttles based there could reach them. They won’t have forgotten how Johann de Bouff and his crew died. If they turn away, their short-legged missiles would be at extreme range – maybe even out of powered range altogether. Therefore, they’ll stay on course unless they’re forced to evade.”

The pilot nodded shakily. “
And they don’t know we’re out here, so they’re going to pass right beneath us.”

“Yes. They’ll be in range in about… eighty-three seconds from now. Our systems are tracking them passively
at present, using only Bravo’s own emissions. As soon as they’re close enough, our radars will illuminate them to get a firing solution. After that, it’s all up to the battle computers.”

“They won’t pick us up before then
, Sir?”

Abha replied, “I think our stealth features are good enough to mask us from their electromagnetic sensors, unless they’ve got much better equipment than
Blanco
had. If they had optical or infra-red sensors pointed in our direction, they might pick us up about a hundred thousand kilometers out if conditions were right; but by then our radars will be illuminating them anyway. Once they start transmitting, it’ll be like we lit a flashlight in a dark room – the pirates won’t be able to help noticing us.”

They fell silent, their tension rising to near unbearable levels as the icon representing Target Bravo streaked closer to them at breathtaking speed. The display on the WSO console shortened its scale steadily as the enemy approached.

Dan toggled his microphone. “Steady, everyone,” he said to the four pilots locked into the tight-beam communications circuit. He tried to speak as calmly as possible, but sitting beside him, Abha could hear the tremor of tension in his larynx. “No matter what happens, stay where you are. Do not, I say again,
do not
maneuver, even to take evasive action. I know that makes it more dangerous for us, but that’s what they pay us for. We daren’t add our own movement to the problems our targeting systems already face.”

~ ~ ~

Target Bravo, slicing through space at thirty thousand kilometers per second, came within nine hundred thousand kilometers of the waiting shuttles, thirty seconds before reaching them. The battle computers triggered the missiles beneath the stub wings of the line of assault shuttles; the outer two craft first, because their missiles had the furthest to travel, then the inner two. Sixteen gel-fueled missiles streaked away, their exhausts momentarily blinding those watching through the shuttles’ viewscreens. They were far slower than their gravitic-drive-propelled target, but they had relatively little distance to cover. The pirate vessel would neatly intersect their downward trajectories.

As Bravo came within two hundred and forty thousand kilometers of the shuttles, eight seconds before reaching them, the battle computers activated the shuttles’ electronically scanned radar arrays. A torrent of electromagnetic energy began to bathe Bravo from bow to stern, illuminating every point in line-of-sight on her hull – including the hump of her reactor compartment cover, three-quarters of the way down her spine. As Bravo drew nearer and the computers received more precise targeting information from the radars, they fed course corrections to the missiles in mid-flight, aiming them more accurately, telling their small, relatively simple terminal guidance systems what to look for and where to find it.
At the same time, the shuttles’ electronic warfare system jammed the frequency Bravo’s fire control radar had used to target the small patrol craft.

On Bravo’s bridge the missile launches hadn’t been noticed. They’d been outside effective radar range, and hadn’t used gravitic drives that emitted detectable signatures, while the shuttles had been invisible to radar thanks to their stealth features and electronic warfare systems. The sudden flood of radar signals therefore came as a complete surprise.
Alarms shrieked their atonal warning as pirates bent to their displays and consoles, trying to identify the new threats that had suddenly appeared so terrifyingly close to them.

The helmsman
reacted instinctively without waiting for orders. He reached over to the gravitic drive controls with his right hand, cut the gravitic shield and rammed the power handle through the gate to maximum, even as his left hand slammed the helm control hard to starboard. The full power of the drive began to nudge the ship away from the threat… but it had only a bare fraction of a second to do so before she entered the killing ground.

T
he pirate manning the weapons console slammed his fist down on the ‘Automatic’ function button, thereby instructing the fire control system to respond to the new threats based on whatever it calculated it could hit fastest, using whatever sensors were still working in the face of the jamming. The antiquated system’s job was simplified by the fact that only the two laser turrets on the lower outer edges of the ship’s hull could bear on the threats. It slewed each of them towards the shuttles on either end of the intercepting line, using the targets’ own emissions as aiming points.

A laser beam bloomed at light speed between Bravo and the assault shuttle on the starboard end of the line. It cut through the shuttle’s armored steel as if it didn’t exist, penetrating all the way to the fusion
micro-reactor compartment, blowing out its containing mag bottle. The reactor was tiny by spaceship standards, but that didn’t mean it was any less deadly when it let go. Everyone aboard the shuttle died instantly in the small-scale thermonuclear holocaust as the vehicle, its weapons and its passengers were reduced to their component atoms.

The shuttle to port of the intercepting line was luckier. The laser beam from Bravo’s second turret
ripped down its side. It burned out the phased array radar panels, sheared off the stub wing with its now-empty missile pylons and all the port-side reaction thrusters, and sent the craft tumbling out of control. The strike instantly shorted out the shuttle’s electrical systems and put its fusion micro-reactor into emergency shutdown… but its armor’s sandwiched layers of battle steel, ceramics and nanosynthetics protected those inside.

Bravo’s
turrets didn’t have time to realign. Even as they fired, the incoming missiles were dropping almost vertically towards her spine. Her sudden course change, embryonic though it was, meant that more than half of them missed her altogether – their chemical rockets couldn’t adjust their trajectory or velocity quickly enough. Those that missed wavered for a few moments, then self-destructed. The others hit all around the reactor dome. Much of the kinetic energy of their strikes was dissipated, Bravo’s sheer speed grinding the lightweight missiles to fragments against the hull as they landed, destroying some before their warheads could detonate. Even so, hull plating and structural members were blown off the ship as craters appeared in a ragged pattern around the reactor, and the entire vessel shook to the repeated blows.

The missile that struck closest to the reactor didn’t hit its protective dome, but it did the next best thing. Its nosecone struck right on the seam between the front of the dome and the spine. The kinetic energy unleashed by its arrival and the blast of its warhead ripped off the entire dome as if it were a flattened hemisphere of rind peeled whole and entire from the top of a grapefruit. More alarms screamed in
Bravo’s Engineering Department and on her bridge. The reactor vessel itself wasn’t penetrated, but the shock of the explosion and the loss of the upper stiffening layer of its supporting framework sent a massive tremor through it. Power levels aboard the ship fluctuated wildly as the reactor’s automated control systems initiated an emergency shutdown without waiting for operator intervention.

As the last missiles landed, Target Bravo entered the fire zone for the plasma cannon.
The radar spectrum was temporarily blinded by the explosion of the first shuttle in the line, but the surviving shuttles’ battle computers had already locked in their fire plan. They’d even been able to allow for Bravo’s fractional last-second course change. The barbettes swung wildly, motors whining, trying to keep their cannon on target as the pirate ship flashed past. The three barrels of each cannon spun in a frantic frenzy of firing, emptying their twenty-round magazines in a single second. Their breeches were an orgy of thermonuclear plasma conversion as each deuterium-tritium pellet was laser-ignited. Inside each shuttle the noise was a deafening roar, louder than any of their occupants had ever heard during training, a continuous ripping
BRAAAAAAP!
Abha, mind still reeling in shock at seeing their neighbor expunged in a two-kilometer-wide fireball, couldn’t help comparing the noise fleetingly to the slow, steady ‘blurt’ of spaced single shots that Steve had fired at
Blanco
some months before. She knew such rapid fire would burn out the cannons’ barrels – but that wasn’t important compared to stopping Bravo.

Like the missiles, the
plasma bolts arrived in a pattern around the reactor. About half missed the ship altogether, because the cannon barbettes were unable to traverse fast enough to stay on target as Bravo whipped past. All those that hit were off-target to a greater or lesser extent, but they struck hammer-blows to Bravo’s hull, destroying several compartments in and around the Engineering section and rocking the reactor vessel in its exposed and weakened framework. If its shutdown had not already been in progress, it might have lost containment; but the emergency procedure was far enough advanced to avoid an explosion.

One
plasma bolt smashed in below the reinforced spine, penetrating the much thinner hull plating just beneath it, and burst through an outer compartment into the reactor control room. The control panel, its operator and everything else inside vanished in a pulverizing flash of raw energy. It would be impossible to restart the reactor until emergency controls could be rigged and its structural supports repaired.

The final plasma bolt
to strike home ripped into the capacitor ring circling the hull behind the reactor control compartment. The blast destroyed three capacitors, ruptured four others, and severed the ring’s wiring harness and all its backups and fail-safes. Bravo was instantly deprived of its most important – and only immediately available – backup power source. Every one of the ship’s systems shut down instantaneously.

~ ~ ~

Dan cursed as he stabbed at his control panel. “That exploding shuttle reactor’s flooded the spectrum with noise! I can’t see a damned thing on the radar, and all radio frequencies are full of static. We won’t be able to communicate with the other shuttles or the mining ship until it passes.”