Aguilera brought his eyes back to the holo tank. Sure enough, another Ekhat ship was starting to take shape in the solar fog. No—two of them, close together. The second Ekhat vessel had been partially obscured because it was behind the first one.
Aille, as before, would try to bring them alongside rapidly and then slow their own sub’s velocity as much as possible to allow the tank crews to fire off multiple rounds. The piloting skill involved was phenomenal, but Aguilera had already seen Aille do it. Maybe he could again.
He spoke softly into his throat mike. “General Kralik, we’re coming up on another ship. It’ll be on your side again.”
“Roger. Any estimate on time and—Jesus Christ!”
Aguilera echoed Kralik’s startled outburst. In his case, with a low Mary, Mother of God. Another sub had suddenly loomed in the holo tank—close enough that Kralik had seen it in his own more limited turret screen—and Aille had barely managed to avoid a collision.
Aguilera watched, paralyzed, as the other sub veered out of control. The pilot of that sub had also maneuvered sharply to evade the collision, but apparently didn’t have Aille’s consummate skill. The sub was now yawing, speeding toward the first Ekhat ship.
It all happened in seconds. The other sub’s pilot managed to realign his vessel, but not in time to avoid colliding with the Ekhat ship. It was a glancing blow, yes, scraping the sub against one of the Ekhat ship’s fragile-looking exterior lattice-beams. But, as fragile as the thing looked, it still massed more than the sub. All the turrets on one side were stripped away—those men dead in an instant—and a great tearing wound inflicted on the hull of the vessel.
Whether there was more extensive structural damage or not, Aguilera couldn’t determine. But it made no difference. With that big a hole torn in the sub, it was doomed. In the cold vacuum of space, the crew might have been able to rig a forcefield to maintain the internal environment—much as Aille had done when the Interdict stripped away the airlock on his small vessel. But there would be no way to shield that large an opening, not with the heat and pressure inside the photosphere. Long before the sub could claw its way out of the sun, everyone aboard would be asphyxiated or cooked alive.
Aguilera couldn’t think of a worse way to die. Apparently, the sub’s pilot had reached the same conclusion. He might not have been as good a pilot as Aille, but he was damn good—and with all a Jao’s stoicism in the face of death. A moment later, the pilot had the wounded sub straight on a course toward the second Ekhat vessel.
He’s going to ram.
“Interesting,” said Aille. “We will see if it works. Watch, fraghta—you too, Aguilera. I will be too busy.”
Too busy, indeed. Aille was now trying to bring his own sub to as much of a dead halt as possible, in order to give his gunners maximum time on target. In their first encounter, Aguilera had been fascinated to watch the young Pluthrak’s skill. But now, he was almost oblivious to it, his eyes riveted on the sub speeding toward its collision with the other Ekhat ship.
The collision came just seconds later. It was a perfect ram, too, the sub impacting bow-on against the side of the central pyramid. It was a former boomer, almost six hundred feet long and weighing in the vicinity of twenty thousand tons. Aguilera could only estimate the velocity. It wasn’t high, by aerospace standards, since maneuvering inside the sun’s photosphere was more akin to traveling in a fluid than empty space or even an atmosphere. Probably less than two hundred miles an hour, at a guess.
But it hardly mattered. The sub punched through the relatively thin hull of the Ekhat pyramid almost as easily as an awl penetrates thin leather. For a moment, Aguilera expected to see it punching out the other side.
But that was impossible, of course. At the last, the forcefields would probably have kept the crew from being killed by the sudden deceleration caused by the impact—most of them anyway, although certainly not the men in the surviving turrets. Still, the energies involved would have been enough to bring the sub to a stop somewhere inside that great central chamber.