He strained his eyes to see if the beam was having any effect on the approaching ship. We can’t miss him, not at this range, George thought. Yet nothing seemed to be happening. The attacking ship bored in closer. Suddenly it jerked sideways and down.
“He’s maneuvering!” Nodon stated the obvious.
“Shut down the laser,” George commanded. To Fuchs, up on the bridge, he yelled, “Turn us, dammit! How’m I gonna hit him if we can’t keep the fookin’ laser pointin’ at him?”
Another string of red lights sprang up across Harbin’s control panel. The propellant tanks. He’s sawing away at them.
He was in his spacesuit now. Once he’d realized that Star-power was shooting back at him he’d put on the suit before bringing Shanidar back into the battle.
His steering program was going crazy. The swine had hit a nearly-full tank, and propellant spurting from the rip in it was acting as a thruster jet, pushing him sideways and down from the direction he wanted to go. He had to override the unwanted thrust manually; no time to reprogram the steering to compensate for it. Besides, by the time he could reprogram the stupid computer, the tank would be empty and there’d be no more thrust to override.
In a way, though, the escaping propellant helped. It jinked Shanidar in an unexpected burst, making it difficult for the enemy to keep their laser trained on him.
But I can’t afford to lose propellant! Harbin raged silently. They’re killing me.
The amphetamines he sometimes took before going into battle were of no use to him now. He was keyed up enough, stimulated to a knife-edge of excitement. What he needed was something to calm him down a little, stretch out time without dulling his reflexes. He had a store of such medications aboard his ship. But inside his spacesuit, his cache of drugs was out of reach, useless to him.
I don’t need drugs, he told himself. I can beat them on my own.
He called up the highest magnification his optical sensors could give and focused on the area where he’d briefly seen the red telltale light of their guide laser. That’s where the danger is. If I can see the beam of their aiming laser, they can hit me with the infrared cutter.
Swiftly, he came to a plan of action. Fire the thrusters so that I jet up and across their field of view. As soon as I see the light of their guide laser I fire at them. I can get off a pulse and then be up past their field of view before they can fire back. Once I’ve disabled their laser I can chop them to pieces at my leisure.
With the semicircle of display screens curving around him, Fuchs saw the attacking spacecraft spurt down and away from them, a ghostly issue of gas glinting wanly in the light of the distant Sun. He could see a long thin slit slashed across one of the ship’s bulbous propellant tanks.
“You’ve hit him, George!” Fuchs said into his helmet microphone. “I can see it!”
George’s reply sounded testy. “So swing us around so’s I can hit ‘im again!”
Fuchs tapped at the control keyboard, wishing he was more adept at maneuvering a spacecraft. Starpower was not built for graceful turns. Pancho was right, he remembered. We turn slow and ugly.
In the cargo bay, George stared out at emptiness.
“Where the fook is he?” he wailed.
“Still below your line of sight,” came Fuchs’s answer in his earphones.
“So turn us toward him!”
Nodon said, “The cooling system needs more time to recover. We have inadequate coolant flow.”
“Just need a few seconds, mate,” said George, “once we get ‘im back in our sights.”
He stepped up to the lip of the cargo hatch and looked down in the direction he had last seen the attacking vessel.
“There he is!” George saw. “Comin’ our way again.”
The attacker was zooming up swiftly. George turned back toward the laser. “Fire her up!” he yelled to Nodon.
“Firing!” Nodon shouted back.
A blinding flash of light stunned George. He felt himself toppling head over heels and then something slammed into him so hard it spun him like an unbalanced gyroscope. Through blurry, tear-filled eyes he saw a spacesuited arm fly past, geysering blood where it had been severed, just above the elbow, rotating over and over as it dwindled out of his view. He heard someone bellowing in pain and rage and realized it was himself.