Aguilera could envision it in his mind, from the nightmare scene Tully had described to him when he’d visited the Interdict ship. The dying submarine, nestled inside the huge enemy ship as if it had been swallowed.
But the relationship between predator and prey was reversed here. If the crew had survived, especially the men in the missile rooms . . .
They hadn’t converted all the missile launchers to position tanks as jury-rigged gun turrets. They’d decided to leave four intact, just in case this very eventuality came to pass.
Rafe began softly reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Yaut glanced at him, curiously, but said nothing.
Suddenly, a great bursting flare erupted from the wound in the side of the Ekhat ship caused by the sub’s ramming. Within a second, the opening was torn wider still.
“That seems too mild for a nuclear explosion,” said Yaut, his ears and whiskers indicating obvious puzzlement even to Aguilera’s unpracticed eye.
“It’s not one,” Rafe replied. “That’s the effects of the rocket fuel we’re seeing. They must have fired at least one of the missiles. Those are three-stage rockets with graphite-epoxy hulls, loaded with propellant. The missiles probably would have impacted something even before the rockets ignited, just from the force of the compressed air launch. That would have been enough to rupture or shatter the hulls and spill burning fuel everywhere—and judging from the stink when I was aboard one, those ships are full of flammable compounds.”
He added, sadly, “They did all they could, and that ship’s probably dead anyway even if the warhead doesn’t go off. Those warheads don’t get armed immediately. They’re on timed fuses for safety. If the fuses survived the impact, though—”
A sudden thought came to him. Even in the middle of the sun’s photosphere, a thermonuclear explosion was nothing you wanted to be anywhere near. He started to turn toward Aille, to warn him, but saw that the young Pluthrak had already adjusted course. With another dazzling display of pilotry, he was positioning his sub to leave the one Ekhat ship as a shield against the other—and, Aguilera could now see, was going to be bringing them almost to a dead halt in the process. A slow walk, anyway.
Just as the rammed Ekhat ship had almost disappeared from view behind the first ship, the granular cells were roiled still further—not much, of course. But the blaze of light was nothing to sneer at, not even here. The fuses had survived—one of them, at least—and several hundred kilotons was enough to completely destroy even an Ekhat behemoth.
“Deliver us from evil,” Rafe whispered. “Amen.”
Standing at his side, Yaut’s look of puzzlement vanished, replaced by a posture which Aguilera recognized. Gratified-respect, the same posture he had bestowed upon Kralik, when Kralik had predicted there would be more than enough volunteers for the ships. Honoring the courage of the men and Jao who had just destroyed an Ekhat vessel at the cost of their own lives—but not surprised that they had done so.
Aille was now bringing them alongside the surviving Ekhat ship. The enemy vessel had been set slowly spinning by the collision that had doomed the sub. So, Aille was staying perhaps half a mile outside the sweep of those outer lattice-beams, lest one of them smash into his sub. Instead of threading his way through the lattice as he’d done before, to bring them into point blank range, this engagement would have to take place at a considerably greater distance. On the other hand, he’d almost brought the sub to a standstill relative to the enemy—and, spinning the way it was, the guns would be able to riddle it on every side.
“It’s all yours, General,” Rafe said into the throat mike. “Tear that bastard apart for us, would you please?”
* * *
Kralik and his gunners did, even though the heat in the turrets was now so intense that they’d stripped to the waist and were trying to see and work through pouring sweat. The environmental conditions in the turrets were now so bad that they’d have to be evacuated after this engagement. Fortunately, Turret Six was on the opposite side and thus out of action, so Aguilera was able to persuade the crew to abandon it before they died. It took him exactly fifty-eight seconds to do so.