Personnel shouted on the bridge and over the commo net. The crew wasn’t worked up on this vessel, and because of the missing officers there was a degree of confusion that wouldn’t normally have occurred with veterans like these.
A part of Daniel’s mind was aware of what was going on around him, but the chaos touched only the surface. The core of him was the Princess Cecile, feeling her skin grow hotter as the Bremse lashed her with plasma cannon.
It was almost unheard of for a starship to use its secondary batteries as offensive weapons in space. Even now, though the Bremse and Princess Cecile were too close and slow for missiles to be really effective, the distance between vessels orbiting at different heights and orientations was beyond the range at which plasma cannon were a serious threat.
A sensor suite amidships degraded thirteen percent at the stroke of the Bremse’s directed ions. For the moment Daniel ignored the problem. The Princess Cecile’s processors could compensate for the loss. If he needed greater precision, he’d rotate a replacement suite into place.
Conformal sensors in a ship’s outer hull always suffered mechanical wear when a ship was in service. Alliance cannon had done nothing that a week cruising in the solar wind from Kostroma’s Type O sun wouldn’t have equaled.
Daniel’s braking thrust meant the Princess Cecile in effect dived toward the planet, spiraling around Kostroma in an increasingly tight orbit. As the corvette approached the surface, Kostroma and the extended volume of the Kostroman atmosphere subtended a greater portion of the Bremse’s orbit.
The Princess Cecile passed into Kostroma’s shadow. The Bremse’s cannonfire ceased; a better commander would have ended the vain process long before. Shooting at the Princess Cecile degraded the cruiser/minelayer’s own sensors and eroded the bores of weapons meant for the Bremse’s defense.
Of course the Bremse’s captain probably didn’t think he had much to fear from the Princess Cecile’s low-acceleration missiles. He might well be correct.
Chief Baylor launched a single round. Daniel’s control inputs went to the Attack Board and were automatically figured into the launch commands. What the Attack Officer had to do was to calculate, with the help of his sensors and AI, where the target would be when his missile arrived.
This was a relatively simple—”relatively” being the key word—process when the vessels were at normal engagement speeds and ranges. A ship moving at a significant fraction of light speed, attacked by a missile at its terminal velocity of .6 c, had no time to maneuver.
Since the missile’s course was based on sensor data that was several minutes old, the chances were very high that the target had done something in the interim that would cause the attack to fail. You didn’t have to worry about the target reacting to your missile, however, except with point-blank slugs of ions in an attempt to decelerate the projectile by converting its substance to gas and forward thrust.
At these cislunar ranges, the target could see a missile in realtime from the instant of launch. The Princess Cecile’s low-acceleration weapons weren’t a serious threat to the Bremse unless the cruiser/minelayer’s entire bridge crew was asleep; even then the automatic avoidance system, meant for maneuvering in the constricted space over a major harbor, would probably get them out of the way.
The Bremse’s missiles, though . . .
“Blue vessel is launching!” Dorfman said. Daniel was already aware of the dot separating from the icon highlighted blue, the traditional hostile designator in Cinnabar service. “Defensive batteries are live!”
Daniel released a control key, reducing the Princess Cecile’s thrust by a fraction. Three more dots appeared at ten-second intervals, the shortest period at which missiles could be launched without the exhaust of preceding weapons damaging those that followed.
The missiles accelerated at a full twelve gees, but the corvette would be a thousand miles away when they reached the calculated impact point. The Princess Cecile handled beautifully, and with Daniel Leary at her controls she was safe until she was too close to Kostroma to continue maneuvering.
The trick wasn’t merely to stay alive till then, however. Daniel was trying to pilot two vessels, his own and the Bremse. He was dragging the cruiser/minelayer behind him like a dog on a leash. If the corvette was here, the Alliance captain would strive to put his vessel there.