The spin—coupled with the high acceleration, and a renewed, if lesser, jerking from evasive maneuvers—threatened to overcome even Nathan’s anti-nausea doping. He spared a glance at the crew status, and saw that several people showed amber, unconscious or otherwise unresponsive as they all tried to endure Weston’s efforts to keep them alive. Nathan’s lips were peeled back in an acceleration induced rictus, but he felt his attempt to smile as he saw that Kris’s icon was still a strong, vibrant green.
Back on the tactical view, the four missiles launched at the Cathedral reached terminal and separated into 24 maneuvering warheads. The lasers inundating the Sword were joined by additional beams seeking out these smaller targets, but before they could take any of them out, small explosions peppered the hull of the alien ship. Railgun rounds rained down upon the Cathedral, unseen and unopposed as they lacked the brilliance of the destroyer’s or the missiles’ active drives, and since the Deltans did not seem to use any form of radar.
It would take more rounds than the Sword of Liberty could carry to destroy the Cathedral with the small projectiles, but the ploy worked. The much-deadlier warheads closed a great deal further than previous salvoes had, and they began to lase at their optimal range.
Flaring out in white light, the fusion blasts cast tightly collimated beams of energy into the Cathedral. Slag and incandescent gas boiled away from the ship’s hull. It was a more rugged construction than the Junkyard, but it was by no means rugged enough. Lasers abandoned the destroyer and again shifted their focus onto the encroaching warheads, but they were now too close and too numerous to take out completely.
A pair of warheads came near enough to switch modes. Fusion fire blossomed close aboard and engulfed whole sections of the Cathedral, blasting arches flat and setting its stones ablaze. More importantly, its lasers abruptly stopped as something critical within broke. The ship appeared defenseless, and Nathan cheered inside his head.
Before the last few warheads could administer the coup de gras, though, the Cathedral suddenly swung out of position. The warheads flew harmlessly through the space she had just occupied, their explosions wasted upon an empty void. Nathan jerked in shock and expanded his tactical view.
The Control Ship swept up over the drive’s horizon, pulling the Cathedral and the Polyp around it until they were arrayed to its north and south rather than along the equatorial plane. The Cathedral was burned and pummeled, and the Polyp was little better, its organic curves and intricate, tattooed designs marred by x-ray laser gouges and blackened sections of hull. The Control Ship’s overlapping, lobster-like metallic plates were also gouged and burned, but to a lesser degree. She looked battle hardened rather than battle bled.
Nathan tapped in an order and the Sword broke northward and made for a higher orbit, seeking salvation through distance and greater maneuvering room. The Control Ship would have none of that, however. A dozen lasers blazed from its hull, each striking the destroyer and burning glowing paths along her hull. Now, not only the forward mission hull was at risk, but the radiators and the propulsion module were attacked as well.
The propulsion module, built of the same materials as the mission hull, fared as well as it had under the onslaught from the Cathedral. The radiator spine, however, was unarmored and relatively fragile by necessity. Radiator plates shattered and slagged, spinning away from the rapidly maneuvering ship. Torrents of coolant evaporated from broken lines and heat loads rose threateningly on all the ship’s systems.
The radiator had always been their Achilles Heel. Vital to the thermodynamic heat engines throughout the ship, it was their chief vulnerability, and they could not fight or survive without it.
Nathan winced at the options available to him. They were much closer to the Control Ship than he ever intended. He could either turn the Sword completely away from the their enemy, and hope they could gain sufficient maneuvering distance before the drive was irreparably damaged—or he could point directly at their enemy and close to knife-fighting range. Either way, he had to interpose the armored portions of the hull between the incoming fire and the radiator, or they were doomed.
Nathan tapped his order in and groaned as the ship swung around. The nose of the destroyer pointed straight at the incoming fire. All four thrust pylons lit up with nearly random jets of light as the ship leapt back and forth along a suicidal closing vector, dodging away from the enemy lasers as much as possible, even as their range fell away to make the beams steadily more effective.
At his order, missiles shot outward from the port and starboard cells, one after another. The railgun fired continuously, targeting each individual laser battery aboard the Control Ship. The Sword of Liberty’s laser batteries fired as well, still too far out to cause any damage, but hopefully enough to blind any targeting sensors coming after them.
Damaged beyond capacity, the radiators were no longer able to discard the ever rising heat produced by all the systems running on the ship. Coolant diverted instead to internal heat sinks, blocks of ice nearby every major system on the ship. The blocks absorbed the waste heat, melting, and then boiling away to relieve the crippling temps each system produced. Steam erupted from vents all around the Sword of Liberty.
Seen from the distant re-trans pod, the destroyer was a valkyrie afire, a shooting star pouring the most devastating forces the Earth could muster at an enemy that still remained unexplained, mysterious. It was awesome to behold.
And ultimately futile.
Responding to the 32 missiles and then 192 warheads released from the Sword, the Control Ship shifted its depressingly effective laser fire away from the destroyer to the individually targeted weapons. Too many flared out into the flames of failure, rather than the brilliant flashes of lasing fusion. Too few closed enough to do real damage with their beams. And the destroyer was still not spared. Now the Control Ship’s silvery beam reached out.
The beam of particles struck the spinning, maneuvering destroyer on the dorsal surface first, and then inscribed a tight spiral around the mission hull. Unlike the lasers, though, the damage here was not lessened by the spin. Wherever the strange beam struck, the hull wavered, becoming indistinct and collapsing into dust. If anything, their defensive spin spread the damage around more than if they had remained steady.
Nathan cursed to himself, even as he praised the increasingly accurate fire from the railgun and the lasers. The warheads were mostly expended now, and though the damage they had dealt was impressive, it did not seem to be having nearly enough effect on the Control Ship. The better aimed railgun and laser fire, on the other hand, at least made a few “mission kills”—several laser emplacements aboard the alien ship had gone dark. But soon, those that remained would again turn on the Sword.
That assumed they would still be a viable target, though. Whatever the silvery beam did, it appeared frightening in its effectiveness. Silvery dust streamed away from the hull as plates were eaten away. And the damage lingered, growing outward from the stricken areas of the hull even after the beam had passed by. If the rate his hull was eaten continued, it would be through the armor plates and into the pressure hull within a couple of minutes.
A text popped up in his vision. It was from Kris. “NANOTECH. PARTICLE BEAM IS ASSEMBLOR CARRIER. HAVE IDEA. DROP TO LOW ACCEL. MUST EXIT POD TO TRY.” Nathan was confused, barely registering what she was trying to say, but he did as she asked, texting the order to Weston at the Helm.