The Princess Cecile was a warship with frames and bulkheads stressed to endure harder braking than any freighter could match. The Goldenfels had started its descent a few seconds earlier than the corvette, but there was no possibility that the Alliance vessel would reach the surface first.
On the other hand, the freighter weighed some eight thousand tons empty. If her captain was serious about bringing her down on top of the Sissie—and he certainly sounded serious—then something needed to be done quickly.
“Mr. Sun, lock the dorsal turret onto the Goldenfels’ port quarter,” Daniel ordered, expanding the gunnery screen to forty percent of his display. He was using the ship’s common channel instead of the command push so that everybody aboard knew what was happening. “On the order I want you to walk your burst stern to bow along the line of her port thruster nozzles. Wait for the order! Over.”
On the display the Alliance freighter was a slender dark mass above the twenty bright flares of its plasma thrusters. The Princess Cecile was already twelve thousand feet below and to the east—up-orbit—of the Goldenfels. Sun shifted his pulsing orange crosshairs back and outward from the center of her belly, saying, “Aye aye, sir.”
“Adele,” Daniel said as his fingers danced. “Transmit the image from our gunnery board to the Goldenfels. Break. Goldenfels, this is Daniel Leary of Bantry. If your vessel comes within a half mile of mine when we get below fifty thousand feet, I’m going to shoot away your offside thrusters. If you’re very good, you’ll be able to catch your pig of a ship before she turns turtle and augers in. Leary out!”
Daniel shrank the gunnery screen back to the bottom of his display and breathed deeply. He was trying to get his muscles to relax so that they wouldn’t cramp if he had to move quickly . . . as he very likely would.
“Ship, this is Six,” he said as red and blue tracks on the PPI marked the courses of the two descending vessels. “For those of you who don’t have gunnery training—”
By which he meant particularly the Klimovs, who had a right to be both furious and terrified at the way things were going.
“—let me explain that the Goldenfels cannot use any ventral guns that might bear on us—”
Daniel didn’t know with certainty that the Alliance freighter was armed, but it’d be a common-sense precaution for any ship trading in the Galactic North.
“—while her thrusters are in operation. Plasma from her own exhaust would distort her bolts if it didn’t do worse. If the Alliance captain shuts off power this deep into his descent, he’ll almost certainly crash regardless of what we do. Six out.”
Daniel licked his lips. A line of sweat had gathered at the brow of his helmet. He’d have liked to wipe it away before a drop fell into his eye, but he was afraid that’d send the wrong signal to those of the crew who were watching a feed of their captain’s face.
Beaded lines continued the astrogation computer’s prediction of where the two ships would be in the next few minutes if one or the other didn’t make a change. Both courses ended together in San Juan Harbor, though the scale was too small to identify slip A-12 precisely. The freighter’s image swelled on the gunnery display, a distorted spindle half-hidden beneath an opalescent haze of charged particles.
The gunnery display went almost white as the freighter’s plasma thrusters increased power. For a moment the image flared there; then it shrank, seeming to draw upward. In fact it was the Sissie dropping away while the Goldenfels braked and shifted course minusculely. The Alliance captain was heading for slip D-73, Daniel supposed. At any rate, Daniel wouldn’t want to be the officer who tried to lift a ship back to orbit after so rapid a descent.
“Ship, this is Six,” he said. He lifted his helmet and mopped his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic. “Prepare for touchdown, spacers. And welcome to Todos Santos!”
CHAPTER 11
Adele’s taxi clanked to a halt in front of a building larger though no better kept than the rest of those on the twisting street. The driver switched off the turbine of her little tractor; it slowed with a ringing sound that might’ve been normal and with an unpleasant keen of rubbing metal that probably wasn’t.