Nathan reached out and made another selection. The ship’s bland feminine voice then sounded from every speaker. “All hands, brace for maneuvers. Acceleration may change without further warning while engaged in gunfire evolutions.”
“From this point, aiming and fire is automatic,” Nathan said. “There’s no way an operator could ever effectively aim these shots over the ranges we’re talking, so whoever you assign to gunnery will only have to manually select targets and monitor performance, or else he can program in his own target selection doctrine and let the computer do everything.
Torrance grunted. “If it works anything like Navy weapons doctrine, we’ll be shooting at every Gemini urine bag and discarded Russian satellite the radar can track.”
Nathan grinned and nodded. “Well, I never said it was perfect. I’m still a big believer in man-in-the-loop, myself. So, now that I’ve manually designated all my targets, I back it up with auto laser handoff. Any chunks or secondary debris that makes it past the gunfire will then get targeted by the lasers to be burned away.”
Kris looked up from her preps. “And that’s it. Easy, squeezee: your basic cone of impenetrable destruction. These rocks won’t know what hit ‘em, and neither will the Deltans. We’re ready on my end, babe.”
“Thanks, Kris. Firing … now.” Nathan caught Colonel Henson’s gaze and firmly pressed the blinking icon on his own panel. The screen chimed and the ship immediately shook. Then again, and again, and again, once every two seconds, as the railgun fired its way through the target list. A distant thumping ring sounded with every bump, transmitted through the hull by the violent electromagnetic pressures building and releasing up in the bow.
Outside the ship, white light flashed with every round, a soundless bolt of lightning and plasma jetting forth on the heels of each shot. Over time, the plasma boiling away from the twin rails of the railgun would begin to degrade their surface treatments, preventing the shell armatures from firing effectively, but that moment was thousands of shots away. For now, the system worked flawlessly, sending blinding shot after blinding shot straight out into the void, directly down the gun line.
Having serviced the targets inside its firing cutouts already, the railgun began to guide the ship to new targets. The Sword of Liberty started to jerk erratically, dodging from vector to vector to bring its massive gun to bear, her pylon thrusters firing at seemingly random intervals.
Kris started to feel queasy.
Downrange, the massive tons of meteors met the irresistible forces of the railgun rounds. Unitary rounds—slender sabots of hardened tungsten alloy—struck the largest boulders, converting their enormous kinetic energy into heat, light, and shattering force. The meteors cracked up into hundreds of smaller pieces, and each one was tracked in turn and added to the firing queue.
Flechette rounds deposited their momentum and kinetic energy in a different way, breaking up into a cloud of diamond hard slivers before striking their medium size targets. The dozens of smaller sabots worked in concert to pulverize these rocks into dust and pebbles, sizes which could be more reasonably handled by the ship’s point defense and armor.
The smallest targets—man-sized chunks of rock and tight formations of rock and debris—received the attention of the explosive rounds. These larger railgun shots were directional blast fragmentary rounds, cylinders of scored steel plate sandwiched with sheets of octaazacubane (N8) explosive. Striking and detonating with the combined kinetic energy and explosive force of thousand pound bombs, their targets were obliterated and dispersed into relatively harmless detritus.
Aboard the ship, the crew watched as the darkened storm of incoming meteors blossomed into clouds of light and gas, coloring the infinite black with violently hued destruction. Henson shook his head. It was impressive, even graceful, but he shuddered to think about what would happen if such a weapon was turned upon something more significant than asteroidal debris. From its high perch in orbit, the Sword of Liberty could potentially devastate any city with impunity.
In its own way, it was even more terrifying than the sudden apocalypse of the nuclear warheads. That mind-boggling terror had been over in a literal flash. This was enduring, relentless, chewing away at chunks of solar history like some voracious colony of insects.
He looked over at Nathan. The former sailor was a decorated veteran, a hero and a patriot, but Secretary Sykes had warned him that he was also driven by an almost religious need for the ship to be a success. Such an intimately profound sense of motivation could easily turn and twist into something darker. Nathan Kelley had been nothing but helpful to the new crew, but he was also bitterly disappointed in the current state of affairs. Henson suddenly realized how glad he was that this would be the first and last time Nathan would be handling the ship.
He cleared his throat and said to Nathan, “Well it certainly looks impressive. How is it working?”
Nathan shrugged. “It’s working pretty much as planned, breaking up and dispersing all the incoming, but the debris front is still moving toward us. We’ll have to see how we weather the storm.”
Kelley spoke up. “Targets reaching point defense boundary at 150 km. Lasers are cycling to auto.”
Henson nodded. “Very well.”
While the ship continued to jerk and swing, and the railgun continued to thump and fire away, the diode laser banks on each of the six emplacements began to track and fire. There was little sound from these weapons, only the repeated snap and hum of continuously charging and discharging capacitors. The railgun power supply made similar sounds, but that was lost next to the awesome crack of a shot ablating down the rails.
Invisible beams sought out chunks of rock, starting with the nearest and the largest inbound threats and working out from there. Though the beams were not apparent, their effect was unmistakable, as hurtling meteors flared bright, turned to vapor and slag by the energy of the beams. Where a meteor was too large to be burned away completely, the section of it that was burning would outgas, pushing the chunk onto a new vector away from the ship.
It was a success. All the weapons worked. What had begun as a mountain floating in space, an ancient leftover from the birth of the solar system billions of years before, was now a continuously expanding sphere of rocks and meteors—and one side of that expansion had been further reduced, pummeled and vaporized into harmless pebbles and dust. Nathan sat back and smiled, letting the system wrap things up for him.
Flawless, he thought.
Kris’s voice cried out suddenly, strident and fearful. “Leaker! I’ve got a track on a collision course, no weapons pairing!”
They all looked at her and then at the main screen. Highlighted on it was a single track: a two meter wide, irregular mass of iron streaked through the gunnery sector without an engagement and broached the self-defense line without a laser reacting to it. It stayed on a constant bearing, its range ticking quickly down on a collision course with the ship.
The system failed to react and there was no time to engage it manually. Nathan’s eyes widened and he shot out a hand, striking a control on the emergency panel between his and the XO’s seats.
The strident beep of a collision alarm sounded. At the same time, the ship’s voice cried out, “Brace for shock!”
The destroyer lurched to one side, jerking them badly in their seats. The lights flickered, then died, returning a moment later on half-lit battery backups. Static washed over their control screens and the gun and laser emplacements were silent.
They all set dazed for a moment, until Colonel Henson shook his head and looked at the four others. “What the hell was that? All right, SITREP. Find out what’s up, what’s down, and where we are in terms of that blast front. XO, get comms re-established and get us a head count.”