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Chapter Twenty-Three
"Very well, Lieutenant Hearns." The same attack release order from Hexapuma glowed on Captain Einarsson's com display aboard Wolverine , and the Nuncian wasn't waiting for Abigail to formally relay it to him. Despite possible reservations about female officers, he obviously had no more interest in wasting precious time than she did. "It looks like it's up to your people. Good luck, Einarsson clear."
"Thank you, Sir," Abigail acknowledged, then glanced at Ragnhild. Abigail was an excellent pilot, but she knew she wasn't in Ragnhild's league when it came to natural ability, and she was perfectly prepared to let the midshipwoman have the stick.
"Separate now," she said quietly.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. Separating now," Ragnhild replied crisply, and Abigail felt the shudder as the tractors released and the maneuvering reaction thrusters began pushing them away from Wolverine .
She left that part of the operation to Ragnhild and punched the cha
"Hawk— Papa-Three, this is Hawk-Papa-Two. We are cleared for attack. I repeat, we are cleared for attack. Separate now. I repeat, separate now and engage your wedge as soon as you clear your safety zone. Papa-Two has the alpha target: Papa-Three has the beta target. Confirm targeting and stand by to engage."
"Hawk— Papa-Two, Papa-Three is separating," Aikawa Kagiyama's voice came back through her earbug. "Confirm targets. Papa-Two will take the alpha target; Papa-Three will take the beta target."
"Very well, Papa-Three," Abigail said, and her eyes never wavered from the targeting display in front of her.
The two pi
Fortunately, the engineers who designed the RMN's small craft had grasped the point that emergencies sometimes happened and built the Navy's pi
It squeezed like the hand of an angry archangel. Abigail's harsh grunt was driven from her lungs, but she'd known it was coming, and her skinsuit tightened about her limbs and torso to force blood back into her brain. She ignored the physical discomfort while the pi
The Dromedary sat rock steady on the display. It wasn't an actual optical image of the freighter, although it was now less than seventy thousand kilometers away. The pi
She felt a deep, visceral urge to take the shot herself. To squeeze the stud on her control column when the countdown reached zero. But that was the primitive warrior part of her. The shot had already been locked into the computers, and the inhuman precision of emotionless cybernetics was far better suited than an acceleration-hammered human brain to a maneuver like this. The window was too tight for anything else.
The thrusters burned for seven endless seconds. Then, abruptly, between one labored breath and the next, the thunderous vibration ceased as the pi
She had another thirty-three seconds to envision it and wonder if the stu
But then again, if Hexapuma's ID on One and Two is right, maybe "pirates" isn't exactly the right noun after all, she thought, and then the countdown window reached zero.
The pi
A proper warship's sidewalls would have brushed the best efforts of those weapons contemptuously aside, and if its sidewalls had been down, its armor would have absorbed the hits with little more than superficial damage. But warship armor was a carefully designed, multilayered combination of ablative and kinetic armors-complex metallic-ceramic alloys of almost inconceivable toughness-laid over a hull framed and ski
Bogey Three was a merchantship. Her hull was unarmored, and formed not out of battle steel, but out of old-fashioned, titanium-based alloys, and when those lasers hit, the results were spectacular.
Despite the misconceptions which civilians, accustomed only to medical and commercial laser applications, somehow still managed to cling to, weapons grade lasers were not fusing weapons. The energy transfer was too sudden, too huge, for that. Plating struck by an incoming laser shattered, and that was precisely what happened to Bogey Three.
Atmosphere belched from the ragged wounds smashed with brutal sudde
But the human carnage was secondary, just a side effect. Those precisely targeted stilettos of energy had other objectives, and Abigail's fire smashed deep into Bogey Three's hyper generator compartment. She couldn't tell how much damage she'd actually inflicted, but the pi
Hawk— Papa-Three's shot went in effectively simultaneously, but much further aft, and its target was not Bogey Three's ability to enter or leave hyper, but rather its ability to maneuver in normal-space.
Commercial impeller wedges were unlike military ones. A warship generated a double stress band above and below its hull; a merchant vessel generated only a single band. The difference reflected the fact that it was theoretically possible for an enemy to analyze an impeller wedge sufficiently to adjust for the gravity differential's distorting effect on sensors. If he could do that, then he could "see" through it, which no one thought was a good idea applied to his own navy. Using a double wedge, in which the outer protected the i
But one of the consequences of the difference in design was that whereas a warship, like a pi
Which was why Hawk-Papa-Three's shot inflicted such horrific damage.
The laser's entry wound itself was no more than a pinprick, a tiny puncture, against the vast dimensions of its target. Any one of the beta nodes in Bogey Three's after impeller ring massed dozens of times more than the attacking pi