There was no need to worry about the noncom, nor for the soldier whose blood spurted one final time before his heart stopped for lack of fluid to pump. When a pellet hit the soft tissue of a human throat, the wound it tore looked more like a bomb crater.
Adele returned the pistol to her tool pouch. She pushed herself carefully toward a programming station. She reached a different alcove than the one she’d intended but that didn’t matter, they were all the same.
Her leg, red with the globe of body fluids she’d brushed on the way, couldn’t be allowed to matter either.
* * ** * *
The Princess Cecile’s quartet of plasma cannon roared like a swarm of bees. They were four-inch high-output weapons with a hundred times the flux density of a thruster nozzle. The corvette’s maneuvering jets fought to keep the vessel in alignment. Dorfman had his finger on the armament override, keeping the weapons on continuous fire even though he was burning their throats out.
There wasn’t any point in saving the cannon for further use if the ship itself was a shower of meteors hitting the Kostroman atmosphere.
A space battle at these short ranges was a dance in which either party moved in conscious relation to her opponent. Computers determined the maneuvers; two battle computers given the same data would come to the same “best” result.
Daniel was poised over the controls. Before the battle started he’d directed the Princess Cecile’s AI to follow an extremely complex set of parameters. The corvette continued on a ballistic course for three long seconds despite the oncoming missiles. She had to hold the setting in order to lead the Bremse to where Daniel wanted the cruiser to be.
The parameters were beyond computation to a greater than fifteen percent probability of success, but that was a much greater chance of survival than Daniel saw in any other course. Next time perhaps Fate would hand him a cruiser to hunt down some poor bastards in a second-class corvette.
He laughed, to the amazement of the other bridge personnel. An Alliance missile grazed the Princess Cecile.
The impact may not have been the missile itself but rather the ball of vaporized metal surrounding its ion-pitted head. It slapped the corvette, flexing the hull and shutting down all the vessel’s electronics for a momentary self-check. The hull whipped three times more before it came to stasis, and even then nerves as trained as Daniel’s could feel the tingle of harmonics which took longer to damp.
Emergency lighting went on; at least part of it did. That seemed to be an area where the Kostromans had skimped maintenance. Daniel’s console came up again. A ship status display filled the main screen; the PPI had shrunk to a sidebar.
The Princess Cecile was tumbling faster than the maneuvering jets could handle. Daniel fed in thruster input more by feel than in response to his readouts.
They’d lost atmosphere and were losing more, but the leak wasn’t serious and the rate was decreasing. There was severe damage to the port quarter between frames 79 and 92, but the inner hull wasn’t penetrated and Daniel suspected, felt, that the outer hull might not be either. Plating had crumpled and the whipping had opened hull seams. That was where the air loss was occurring.
Domenico’s emergency team had already started rerouting a severed data trunk amidships. Two ratings lugged a cannister of sealant up the bridge corridor and thrust the nozzle against a deck joint. The High Drive was running hot, but that was because the Princess Cecile was getting into the fringes of the Kostroman atmosphere. Have to make a decision soon, but first—
Daniel switched his display to the Attack Screen. The two missiles he’d launched at the start of the action were on it, heading back at terminal velocity.
Daniel had programmed the missiles to rotate three minutes into their flight, brake to stasis, and return to a target above Kostroma. The course reversal wasted fuel, but single-thruster missiles had the same conversion mass as their high-acceleration cousins and only half the rate of usage. Because of the additional distance this pair of projectiles had travelled, they were at .6 c when they crossed the point where the Bremse might have been and almost was.