Even so the shock of doubled power rang through the Goldenfels as though Daniel had driven her into the ground. Because they were coming in at a slant, the added thrust overcame forward inertia without being instantly sufficient to lift the vessel against the moon’s gravity. Their angled course became vertical; the Goldenfels dropped toward the surface short of the crater’s rim instead of inside it.
“Goldenfels to Base!” he shouted, hoping the adrenaline in his voice suggested panic instead of the blazing triumph he really felt. It was going to work, by God it was! “We have a problem! We have a problem!”
Heaven only knew what Lorenz Control thought when the incoming spy ship lurched toward the ground in a gush of expanding plasma. Their optical pickups would’ve shown the damage to the Goldenfels’ underside, even through the mist of exhaust as she began braking toward them. The burp of rainbow fire was so great that it’d be natural to assume that her thrusters had exploded, but the very suddenness would make it hard for the base personnel to think anything.
The Goldenfels was configured as a spy ship and raider. Her gun armament was as powerful as that of a heavy cruiser of several times her displacement. She was intended to approach other vessels in sidereal space, posing as a merchantman. When she was close enough she’d unmask her batteries and blast away the other vessels’ antennas and rigging, leaving them crippled.
The Goldenfels wasn’t, however, expected to engage other warships in a normal action at long range. She had only two missile tubes, aligned to port and starboard, and the twenty missiles in her magazines were no more than the Princess Cecile, much smaller but a true warship, carried in RCN service. The missiles were for last-ditch defense when the raider was being run to ground; there was little chance that they would destroy an enemy, but they might force a more powerful adversary to maneuver violently and by so doing allow the Goldenfels to escape into the Matrix.
If Adele hadn’t disabled the Planetary Defense Array, one of the mines would’ve ripped a sleet of ions into the Goldenfels as soon as she deviated from the preset course. The jet would vaporize a ten-foot hole in the ship, and if it passed through the Power Room the fusion bottle would go critical to finish the job.
The mines didn’t detonate. Given time, somebody in Lorenz Control would begin wondering why they hadn’t. Daniel had no intention of giving them that much time.
“Vesey, hold us in a hover!” he ordered, using the midshipman as though she were an extra pair of hands. “And on your life keep us below the rim of the crater! Break, Sun, clear your 15-cm guns and program them to take out the defensive installations when we rise above the rim again.”
The turrets holding the 10-cm plasma cannon were extended to provide more space in the ship’s interior. That was normal operating procedure; the guns were only retracted during entry into an atmosphere. The raider’s four lateral twin installations were concealed, however. Approaching a secret base with those guns ready to fire would arouse comment and very likely a volley from the base defenses.
“Adele,” Daniel continued, “send Sun a targeting template. Sun, keep the 4-inch guns—”
They were actually 10-cm guns, Fleet standard instead of RCN, but the distinction wasn’t important just now.
“—under your control for targets of opportunity. Especially that destroyer! Out!”
As Daniel spoke, his fingers hammered the virtual keyboard to bring up the attack screen and to input data. This was going to be tricky, but with a little luck . . .
The shutters concealing the paired 15-cm guns shrieked open. The Goldenfels’ hull had warped when the High Drive blew the vessel over on her side. Woetjans and her riggers had straightened the trackways as best they could with jacks and sledge hammers, but they hadn’t even tried to do more than a quick and dirty job.
“Template transferred,” Adele said crisply. An icon at the top of Daniel’s display pulsed to call attention to itself. As it did so, he realized that it’d been waiting for his notice for the past several minutes.