The Goldenfels porpoised as Vesey struggled to bring her under control. Daniel had dumped the thrusters back to 60% power as he handed over the ship, but it was already starting to rise. It continued to upward on momentum for several seconds; as it did so, Vesey almost inevitably overcorrected.
In response the Goldenfels plunged toward the surface, yo-yoing a thousand feet before the midshipman caught herself and the vessel. At last Vesey damped the drop into a slow shuddering climb while she cut thrust by one-percent increments.
“Target programming complete!” Sun reported. “Sir, we’re ready to go! We’re ready!”
“Mistress Vesey,” Daniel ordered, “take us over the base at a thousand feet above the crater floor—”
The rim averaged 800 feet above the floor, but there were spikes sticking up 150 feet higher.
“—on a heading of three-four-nine degrees true, speed over ground eighteen feet per second. Over.”
“Roger,” Vesey said. The Goldenfels had retained a slight forward motion from her earlier wobbling. Now she began to accelerate and slant upward. The outer rim of the crater had been a mile ahead of them. It swelled in the realtime display at the bottom of Daniel’s attack board, itself a cat’s cradle of vectors on which time was indicated by color coding.
The Goldenfels would cross the crater in a very nearly south-to-north direction. Daniel didn’t have a choice because of the unusual lateral alignment of his missile tubes, but the situation was far from ideal. The direction the missile was pointing when it left the launcher didn’t matter at the multi-thousand mile ranges of a space battle, but the Goldenfels would be firing her missiles point blank. They’d hit before they were able to course correct.
“Ship, we’re crossing the rim in five seconds,” Vesey warned. “Now!”
Sun had a clear line of sight with the forward 10-cm guns momentarily before any of the other weapons bore. He sent six plasma bolts into the dorsal 13-cm turret of the Alliance destroyer on the crater floor, preparing to lift off. His cannon syncopated one another, each firing as the other cooled for an instant. Then the loading mechanism injected another pellet of deuterium in a cradle that positioned it for the surrounding laser array. When the lasers tripped, they fused the deuterium and directed the blast down the bore as a slug of ions moving at the speed of light.
Gehenna had no atmosphere to disperse the bolts. They struck with full force, blasting holes in the steel and welding the remainder of the turret to the ring on which it turned. Blast-proof hatches aboard the destroyer would be closing automatically, preventing an explosive loss of pressure throughout the ship but also disrupting communication and traffic from one compartment to the next.
An instant later the forward 15-cm guns cleared the crater rim and opened fire according to the program Sun had set. The blasts jolted the Goldenfels, whipping her noticeably. Bloody Hell! These guns were way too heavy for the ship!
The Goldenfels was good sized, but her frames were those of a freighter, not a warship. Seams started at every shot, and when the rear turrets began to fire the ship rattled like a tambourine.
But below where the bolts were hitting, flashes and volcanic secondary eruptions brought down slabs of the crater walls. Lorenz Base was defended by both plasma and kinetic weapons—hypervelocity rockets and electromagnetic guns which accelerated slugs of a kilogram and more. A starship could use its sails as one-time protection against plasma bolts, but a heavy osmium slug would pass through the molecule-thin fabric on its way to punching similar holes in and out of a hull of any conceivable thickness.
The raider’s 15-cm guns were meant to be effective on targets thousands of miles distant. Now at barely knife-range, their bolts turned the base defenses, their shields, and tons of nearby rock into geysers of charged gas. If the discharges shook the Goldenfels to bits, well, that was a trade-off Daniel was willing to make.
The Goldenfels’ tubes launched their first pair of missiles, shaking the vessel even more violently than the big guns did. Ships which carried missiles internally—some light vessels hung them on outside brackets—had to expel them from the hull before the High Drive ignited. The Goldenfels used the usual system of heating water in a containment vessel, then voiding it into the missile tube as superheated steam to hurl the missile from the ship. The violence required to accelerate a multi-ton missile also had a significant impact on the 4,000-ton ship on the other side of the equation.