But the missile weighed thirty tons.
It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.
The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile’s own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.
The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor’s surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you’d use to shim a bearing.
The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.
Daniel split his main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the Aglaia was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.
The Bremse orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma’s surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.
Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, “Commonwealth ship Princess Cecile to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!”
The Aglaia had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls . . .
But humans do have souls, and humans who depended on Daniel Leary would die unless he focused on the next step of the road to safety. He opened his mouth to blurt another dollop of simulated panic to justify the Princess Cecile lifting. Before he could speak, a voice from the console demanded in a guttural accent, “AFS Bremse to Princess Cecile. What is going on down there? Over.”
“Emergency!” Daniel repeated. He heard a bustle beside him, figures moving at the right-hand console. “Ships are blowing up, Bremse! We must lift to save ourselves. All ships on the surface must lift!”
“Bremse to Princess,” the harsh voice spat back. “Negative on lifting, Princess Cecile. Stay where you are and provide a full imagery link on commo channel twelve, no encryption. Over.”
“Emer—” Daniel said. An amber bar slashed across the green telltale on his display, indicating that the channel was locked to him. He turned his head in surprise.
Adele sat at the console to his right. Her uniform was splotched with blood, brick dust, and substances Daniel couldn’t even hazard a guess at.
He’d thought his own was the master unit and couldn’t be overridden. That wasn’t true, at least with Adele working in the same system.
“Princess Cecile to Bremse,” Adele said. Her voice was perfectly calm. Anyone who’d had experience with people reacting to crises would assume she was in shock. “We are transmitting data now as we lift off. I repeat—”
She pointed a bandaged left hand to Daniel. He nodded; he was already initiating take-off sequence. Domenico had sealed the Princess Cecile as soon as the palace detachment boarded, so it was just a matter of bringing up pressure to the plasma motor feeds and unlocking the outriggers so they could be brought in as soon as the vessel left the water.
“—we are lifting off for safety. Princess Cecile out.”