The Princess Cecile’s missiles hit: one grazing the Hammer’s stern and then rupturing the tank of reaction mass into a gush of steam the size of a planetoid, the other taking the guardship squarely in the bow. The missiles weren’t anywhere close to their potential velocity when they struck the Hammer, but the impact of thirty tons accelerating at twelve gees was enough to smash through the cruiser’s hull and out the other side.
The second missile’s exit plume was brightly coruscant. Particles of uncombined antimatter from the exhaust raged merrily in the Hammer’s interior. The ship’s bow canted at an angle to the remainder of the hull, on the verge of separating.
Reentry, and never was the wrenching disorientation more welcome. The guardship’s rockets had become a flurry of sparks swelling in the final image on Daniel’s display as the corvette departed sidereal space.
Spacers cheered. Betts blubbered with joy; beside him Sun pounded the gunnery console with both hands. Daniel hadn’t allowed the gunner’s mate to rake the target with his plasma cannon for fear the bolts would interfere with the Princess Cecile’s missiles, so he was wild with a combination of frustration and triumph.
Daniel checked his status screen. Dorst was already shouting hoarsely over the intercom, “All green! All green! No damage!”
“That,” said Daniel aloud, “was very close; but then, it had to be.”
He wasn’t speaking to anyone except the part of his mind that analyzed his actions after the fact. It was with surprise that Daniel realized Adele was watching him through the curtain of his holographic display, and that she was nodding in agreement.
He grinned and keyed the PA system. “Prepare to enter normal space in one minute,” he ordered, hearing the electronic echo of his voice filling the whole of the vessel. “Prepare for action. Captain out.”
Daniel engaged the reentry sequence, set up like the previous two before the Princess Cecile left Dalbriggan. Their exit after launching missiles should have moved them ten thousand miles out from Falassa with zero motion proper to the planet. If they’d sustained damage during the attack, he and Mon would have had to modify the plan; but there’d been no damage.
While the PA system chimed and the crew continued cheering, Daniel allowed himself for the first time to think about the maneuvers he’d just directed. He’d learned the art of precise astrogation from his uncle Stacey, true enough, but it hadn’t been Stacey Bergen who’d showed Daniel how to pick an opponent’s weak point and then to press home his attack regardless of consequences.
It was possible that Corder Leary would also be proud of what his son had just achieved.
* * *
Adele grimaced as the Princess Cecile’s thunderous plasma thrusters cut in. The High Drive’s keening vibration was even more unpleasant in its way, but Adele had found that while working she could tune it out the way she did hunger pangs. The thrusters’ thumping bass and the atmospheric buffeting which inevitably accompanied the pulses were impossible to ignore.
Besides, when the ions of the exhaust changed state and recombined, they created omniband interference. Even the commo suite’s sophisticated software couldn’t sharpen more than a fraction of the transmissions into intelligible form.
Adele continued listening to intership signals, of course; it was just harder.
The last of the riggers were stripping their suits off with cheerful animation. Twenty feet farther down the corridor, their quicker fellows were catching the impellers and submachine guns which Gansevoort tossed them from the arms room.
Woetjans, with an impeller in her hand and a submachine gun slung across her chest, pushed her way onto the bridge and stood behind Adele’s console. “Mistress?” the bosun said. “Can you transmit the show of the cruiser getting it in the neck to the starboard watch’s helmets? We were in the airlock and couldn’t see squat.”
Adele looked up, ready to snarl that she was busy. She looked at Woetjans, who’d spent the critical moments of the attack in a steel box tighter than a coffin—and a coffin indeed if anything had gone wrong. Woetjans, whose present concern was that her riggers get a taste of the Princess Cecile’s victory before they went out with small arms to further risk their lives.