He boosted thrust from the High Drive. The Sissie was far more nimble, now; even the half-magazine of missiles she’d carried on this voyage weighed in aggregate a quarter of the corvette’s empty weight. The six missiles the Bluecher’d just launched blindly at them weren’t a serious threat. The cruiser’s missileer would’ve been smarter to direct the entire salvo at the battleship for which he had full course and speed information.
Daniel brought the Princess Cecile out from behind Radiance, adjusting their course to a line nearly reciprocal to that of the Bluecher. He touched a port-side plasma thruster, then countered the thrust instantly with a blip from starboard, rolling the ship 30 degrees on her axis so that her dorsal and ventral turrets both bore on the cruiser.
“Sun,” he ordered, “dust ’em up! I want to give them something to think about besides their proper jobs!”
“Roger, roger!” the gunner said delightedly, swinging his guns to take advantage of the unexpected target. There was no practical reason to fire 4-inch plasma cannon at a cruiser over a quarter million miles away; the Bluecher’s own 15-cm weapons couldn’t have done serious harm to the corvette at this distance. The psychological effect of plasma bolts—though only sprays at this range—flash-heating the cruiser’s hull might cause somebody to make a mistake, though, the way the Commonwealth rocket salvoes had distracted a gunnery officer who should’ve been worrying about an incoming missile.
The ventral turret rubbed hard enough to send a squeal trembling through the whole vessel. It was supposed to be free-floating above the turret ring on magnetic repulsion. Given the strains the corvette had been taking Daniel supposed they ought to be thankful it rotated at all.
The Princess Cecile could probably escape while the cruiser was occupied with its new enemy, but the possibility barely crossed Daniel’s mind like the chance of landing on Radiance. Neither was a real option: the latter because the corvette wasn’t rigged for landing, the former because Daniel Leary was an RCN officer and the RCN didn’t run from fights. Even mutineers remembered that, apparently, once they’d had a chance to reflect.
The Aristoxenos’ antennas were extended with sails spread on many of them. O’Quinn hadn’t taken the time—or perhaps had the crew—to clear the ship for action before entering sidereal space for what must’ve been meant as an attack on Lorenz Base. The Aristoxenos could’ve made a quick pass from outside the Planetary Defense Array, launched a salvo of missiles at the hangars, and then—if things worked out—escaped back into the Matrix before the Alliance survivors could respond.
It was a perfectly good plan, basically what Daniel had intended when he went to Todos Santos; though if the expatriate spacers had agreed then, they’d have had Adele’s signals skill to make the task easier and a great deal more safe.
Daniel had to admit that it’d taken the Aristoxenos over a month to reach the Radiance system, though. Were it not for the Sissie’s earlier attack, that would probably have been too late.
Not that he was complaining at the way matters had developed. Neither “easy” nor “safe” was a watchword of the RCN; victory, however, was.
As the Bluecher’s half-salvo neared the Aristoxenos, the battleship’s 8-inch plasma cannon began to fire from two turrets which the ship’s own rigging didn’t mask. A double-pulse caught one of the missiles before it’d separated into segments, converting it into a sphere of glowing gas spreading at the rate of a nuclear explosion. Other bolts vaporized segments with such violence that their destruction buffeted the remaining parts of their clusters off course.
An 8-inch turret blew up with a white flash. A portion of the laser array that compressed the tritium pellet hadn’t tripped, but the other lenses were sufficient to detonate the charge with only the gun’s iridium breech to confine it. The blast sculpted a divot from the battleship’s belly and sheared off two antennas of the ventral row.
That cleared a line for the other belly turret, which immediately began to fire. Battleships had independent targeting, and the turret captains were apparently tracking even though they couldn’t fire until the targets appeared beyond the ship’s rigging. None of the cruiser’s missiles made it through the sledging defensive fire, though one segment vaporized close enough to its target that a pair of topgallants ripped away when the Aristoxenos slid through the still-expanding cloud.