Their gushing ions rebounded from the soil, some of it curling back in through the corvette’s open hatches. Daniel’s faceshield protected his eyes, but the skin of his throat and the backs of his hands tingled. It’d be worse on the lower decks, but he very much doubted that the spacers there cared any more than he did.
Hydraulic jacks rammed the Sissie’s hatches closed as quickly as possible, but that still took time. An Alliance spacer fired his handheld weapon, without orders or possibly against them. Slugs rang kling/kling/kling against the forward hull before a single ricochet moaned through an opening and across a compartment. Somebody cried out, but perhaps that was surprise rather than pain.
The Princess Cecile shivered in balance: her bow a yard above the ground, her stern six inches lower. Daniel slid the vessel toward the river, using his manual controls because he didn’t trust the software on a task with so many variables.
The lower two-thirds of Daniel’s display mapped the terrain in the corvette’s direction of travel with sidebars for his gauges, but the top portion showed the Goldenfels in realtime. She’d unmasked both starboard lateral turrets, each mounting twin 15-cm guns as Daniel had surmised. They and the dorsal 10-cm cannon were aimed straight at the Princess Cecile’s midpoint. A salvo would turn the corvette into a fireball visible from Morzanga’s distant moon.
The guns didn’t fire. Half the Goldenfels’ crew had rushed from her hatches in the fifteen seconds before Daniel lit his plasma thrusters. To avoid the Sissie’s rainbow exhaust, members of the would-be assault party had thrown themselves down on the burned-over sward or turned hesitantly back toward their own vessel.
Side-scatter from plasma cannon fired so close-by in an atmosphere would incinerate scores, perhaps hundreds, of unprotected Alliance spacers. Captain Bertram wouldn’t sacrifice so many personnel just to stop a fleeing foe, if only because he knew the survivors would lynch him if he did.
The assault force had left the Goldenfels by sliding down chutes of sheet plastic from access ports on the upper decks as well as from the main hatch, but they could return only by the regular boarding ramp. All the curses and threats from their officers couldn’t get hundreds of weapon-burdened spacers up a single two-meter ramp quickly.
The Princess Cecile slid into the slough where she’d first landed. The terrain between here and the clearing was regular, but there was enough variation that the Goldenfels was no longer in direct sight: the Sissie would be safe from plasma bolts so long as the two ships remained in the same relation to one another. Dorst had tacked a surveillance camera to a tree at the edge of the clearing before the Goldenfels landed; it continued to provide visuals for the top of Daniel’s display.
Daniel kept the Sissie just above the surface, her forward speed no more than a fast walk. She roared in a blanket of steam over the mouth of the slough to the river proper, which was nearly a mile wide at the confluence. The last of the assault party was boarding the Goldenfels; the Alliance vessel was closed up save for her main hatch.
“Signals Officer,” Daniel ordered, his hands busy with controlling his own ship. “Let the whole ship watch the visuals from the Goldenfels, out.”
An icon flickered, indicating that Adele had obeyed; she hadn’t remembered to verbally acknowledge the command. RCN Signals School would have made Adele more conversant with military proprieties, but it wouldn’t have taught her to do what she’d learned as a librarian—and those were the things on which the Princess Cecile and her crew depended.
“Captain Bertram has just announced he’s lighting his thrusters,” Adele said over the ship’s general channel.
There was a rippling flash like chain lightning beneath the Goldenfels. The Alliance freighter lurched over on its side. Steam rose; for a few moments a stutter of matter/antimatter winked like a devil’s eye. All twelve High Drive motors had devoured themselves, taking with them divots from the vessel’s belly plates.
Daniel brought the Princess Cecile to a standstill, hovering over the broad river in a ball of steam. Normally he wouldn’t lift into orbit until he’d lowered his vessel to the surface, but that itself would be tricky under the present conditions.