Daniel’s console didn’t have a subordinate station, so Hogg shared the couch with Tovera. He held a stocked impeller and locked his feet around the cantilevered support strut.
Adele couldn’t imagine any present use for Hogg’s big shoulder weapon, but it was his business if he wanted to hold it. Adele glimpsed his face occasionally between cascades of holographic data; his expression was alert and unconcerned. Tovera, as usual, looked like a smiling death mask.
The Goldenfels was either maneuvering violently or they’d been hit and were out of control. That wasn’t Adele’s business so she didn’t bother learning which. She split her display, making the bottom half a visual of the base with radio emitters careted. There was a multi-frequency mast on the highest of the surrounding peaks which Adele hoped Sun would leave untouched: it was her point of entry into the systems of Lorenz Base.
Three figures ran across the crater floor, jabbering on FM. Just jabbering, not really to one another or to any purpose. They were airsuited survivors from the spluttering wreck of the destroyer, perhaps the only survivors, trying to get to cover in case their vessel’s fusion bottle failed. They didn’t matter. But—
The living rock into which the hangars were dug and the thick doors that closed them were completely impervious to RF radiation. The fact that Adele was getting strong signals from SW5 meant that the door was sliding open.
The Goldenfels launched another missile. The freighter was recrossing the base on the opposite heading; Daniel must be using the tube that hadn’t been damaged earlier. He’d aimed it at SW4, the next target on his list. It was closed and therefore harmless, but SW5 was neither.
“Target!” Adele shouted. Here was where a better grasp of RCN communications etiquette would have been useful. She traced a scarlet highlight over the hangar door. At the small scale of her display she couldn’t see a gap between the twin valves, but the radio signal couldn’t lie. “Daniel, Sun, the hangar’s open—”
For want of anything better to shoot at as the destroyer melted, Sun had been working over a maintenance bay on the crater floor between the southwest and southeast groups of hangars. He began slewing his guns as soon as Adele threw up the caret, but the sheer mass of the armored batteries took time to move even on frictionless magnetic gimbals. A 13-cm plasma bolt spat from within the hangar to strike the Goldenfels’ dorsal turret squarely.
Adele thought the flash had blinded her, but that was just the effect of the bridge’s thin remaining atmosphere fluorescing. Normal lighting returned, but a sphere of ball lightning hung between Adele and the back of Daniel’s console. A mask of translucent blue flicked off and on over its sullen yellow presence. Sizzling, it rose at a walking pace till it vanished through the ceiling.
The bolt’s impact buckled the plating and frames beneath the vaporized gun turret. The bridge hatch, closed at the start of action, flew open as the bulkhead crumpled around it. The corridor’s emergency lighting looked flat because there was no atmosphere to scatter it. Four Sissies ran toward the rupture with a roll of sail fabric and adhesive guns to tack it over the damage; returning air pressure would squeeze the film into place until a longer-term fix was possible.
Which would require that the Goldenfels survive a while longer, of course.
Adele had inset the command display onto a corner of her screen to be able to anticipate Daniel’s requests. As a result she knew that he’d shifted to a gunnery board and taken manual control of the guns in the side emplacements. They’d been silent since they’d destroyed the targets Sun had set them. She could see what Daniel had done, but for the life of her Adele couldn’t imagine how he’d shifted mental and physical gears so quickly. It was like watching Tovera shoot. . . .
The second bolt from the warship within the hangar missed high by no more than the distance that the first had slammed the Goldenfels toward the ground. The turret, converted into a fireball of steel and iridium, had shoved the bow down. There wasn’t a third bolt because Daniel was firing the guns on the Goldenfels’ starboard side. They punished the ship herself, but when their bolts hit inside the hangar—