Almost.
The missiles were a streak on the Bremse’s sensors. They passed within a mile of the cruiser/minelayer; one of them might have been closer yet.
The missiles hit the Kostroman atmosphere and mushroomed into fireballs that ignited the sky above an entire hemisphere. The same conversion of mass and velocity into thermal energy would have turned the Bremse into a ball of gas.
If.
Baylor’s console was still out. The missileer had an access plate off and was shouting into a communicator he’d laid on the floor to free his hands as he worked. There was only one missile left in the corvette’s magazines, so the temporary lack of an Attack Officer wasn’t serious.
Dorfman still had his electronics, but the gunner’s mate had already burned out his guntubes. That section of Daniel’s status display was red and pulsing, warning of catastrophic failure if the weapons were used again.
Dorfman stabbed his keyboard with blunt fingers, removing the software interlocks that would prevent the guns from firing. A plasma cannon exploding when its barrel split would do damage to the ship, but not as much damage as a hit by an Alliance missile.
In their present condition the four guns would provide very little protection, but you do what you can. Everyone aboard the Princess Cecile was pulling his weight in the best tradition of the RCN.
Daniel replaced his Attack Screen with the Plot Position Indicator. The near misses had rattled the Bremse’s captain: the Alliance vessel was accelerating at over two gravities on a course skewed from any she’d been following to that point.
In a minute or two the Alliance commander would realize those missiles had been a one-off chance which the Princess Cecile couldn’t repeat. The cruiser/minelayer would turn onto a following course and run down a quarry which could no longer use the planet as a shield.
Daniel rotated the corvette and increased thrust, climbing up from Kostroma’s gravity well. They’d head out of the system for as long as they could. He felt his cheeks sag under acceleration. A fifteen percent chance of success had really been pretty good, given the odds he and his crew were facing.
They had no chance at all now.
Adele ran the system architecture a third time, searching for the lockout that protected the Bremse from its own mines. She was sure that the safety device was a separate chip, not software within the main command and control unit.
She was sure of that, but she couldn’t find any place within the design for the chip to reside. And the lockout wasn’t in the software either!
The living guards were bound with wire and floating in the middle of the concourse. One had bandages on his arm and forehead; the other’s broken limb was taped to his chest. The technicians from Willoughby were unharmed but as silent as the two drifting corpses.
The four Cinnabar sailors clustered around a programming alcove which they’d set to display the planetary environs. Adele glanced toward them out of frustration. She was doing something wrong. She hadn’t been sure she could remove the lockout, but she hadn’t expected any difficulty in locating it.
Woetjans looked grim in stark contrast to her ready cheerfulness as the cutter approached the control node. All the sailors looked grim.
“Mistress?” the petty officer said as she caught Adele’s eye. “Is there anything we can do to help Mr. Leary? They’re going for the high jump if we don’t.”
“If you can find the damned lockout chip that prevents the mines from engaging the ship that laid them, then we can do something,” Adele said in a voice so savage that she wouldn’t have recognized it herself.
“Mistress?” said the eldest of the programmers. “That’s part of the sensor receiver, not the control system. It’s in the third chassis slot and has a blue band across it.”
“Where?” said Woetjans.
Another programmer turned to the console beside him. “This one!” he said.
The cover panel had quick-release fittings. The programmer was fumbling with them when Lamsoe, Barnes and Dasi arrived together. The sailors brushed him out of the way with as little concern as Woetjans showed for the floating corpse with which she collided on her way to the unit.