The Princess Cecile’s second missile clipped the battleship’s stern and converted itself and a thousand tonnes of its target into white fire. The corvette had exited the Matrix at .1 C; her missiles added that to the kinetic energy of their own acceleration when they struck.
The Princess Cecile was through the squadron, dismasted and with half her High Drive nozzles unserviceable. She was going nearly directly away from Der Grosser Karl and should have been an easy, low-deflection, target for the battleship’s cannon.
Der Grosser Karl had stopped firing.
And now you’re lyin’ dead on my barroom floor!
Daniel switched his display to the Plot Position Indicator. The Princess Cecile was already off her programmed course. A glance at the systems sidebar showed why: red dots for nine of the sixteen High Drive nozzles, red circles for three more. The four nozzles which the sleet of ions had spared weren’t sufficient to warp the corvette around the curve of Getica and out of line with Der Grosser Karl.
The rumbling of missiles within the corvette’s belly had stopped. Daniel knew unconsciously there was something wrong. His own mind hadn’t put a cause to it till a heartbeat later when Betts leaped up from his console and shouted over the general channel, “The fucking outer doors are fucking welded shut! All fucking missile personnel to the fucking tubes! We’ll draw the fucking ready rounds and blow the fucking doors open!”
The Chief Missileer disappeared down the forward companionway. His lips were still moving, but his words no longer filled the general channel. Either he’d switched his helmet to his unit push or—more likely—Adele had switched it for him.
Either way, both Missiles and Signals were in good shape; at any rate, as good as human effort could make them. As for the rig . . .
The battleship hadn’t resumed firing, and the remainder of the Alliance squadron was too distant for plasma weapons to be a serious threat. There was still risk; but then, there was always risk.
“Riggers topside!” Daniel ordered. “Woetjans, do what you can—I’m not expecting much. Break. Engineering, send as many techs topside as you can spare. I want the three nozzles with minor damage repaired soonest, and if it’s possible to replace any of the others, that too. Captain out!”
Daniel doubted replacement would be possible. The rosette of nozzles must have taken a direct hit. Pasternak had shown himself to be a good man in milder conditions; now he’d have a chance to test his mettle against battle damage.
Sun was twisted around in his chair, staring at Daniel in anguish. He said on the command channel, “Sir, I could’ve raped her sails, raped them! I can still hurt her bad, sir.”
Daniel looked at his gunner. “Could you have done Der Grosser Karl a tenth the harm she did herself trying to claw us? You know you couldn’t. And I know that if we need your cannon, I won’t want their bores shot out from playing games.”
More gently Daniel added, “We’ve almost got maneuvering way, Sun. Luck and your guns are the only things that’re going to keep us alive for the next hour.”
Sun bit his lip and nodded. “Sir,” he muttered, turning back to his console.
There was nothing fatal about Der Grosser Karl’s injuries, though she’d be a year in dock repairing them or Daniel hadn’t learned anything in the time he’d spent hanging around the premises of Bergen and Associates. He understood why the battleship’s crew was wholly concerned with its own problems instead of acting to finish off the crippled corvette. What he didn’t understand was why Chastelaine—or the acting squadron commander if Chastelaine was a casualty—hadn’t detailed a pair of destroyers to that task.
Unless—
Daniel shrank the scale of his PPI to encompass a sphere nearly a million miles in diameter. There should have been six ships in that volume besides the central pip of the Princess Cecile herself. Instead there were nine: the Alliance squadron, and three vessels more at the outer edge of the coverage area. They had their identification transponders switched off, but Daniel knew who they were as surely as the Alliance commander must.