Then, suddenly, the alien flipped ship and presented its bow, bristling with lasers.
Surprise, surprise. Well, Kris had her own surprise ready.
“Flip ship,” Kris ordered as the alien crossed to within 120,000 klicks. Theory said the 20-inch lasers could do damage at that range and the alien lasers would still be out of range of the Wasp.
Kris fired Laser 1. It reached out, hit, and the alien ship became a blur.
“What the heck?” Captain Drago growled.
“Rock, sir,” Senior Chief Beni, ret., reported from Sensors. “Our lasers are hitting pumice. Volcanic rock. They’ve coated their bow with blocks of rock, sir, for armor.”
“Sneaky little bastards learned a lesson,” Kris said, as she fired Lasers 2 and 3 while beginning to recharge 1. The target shed more dust but seemed otherwise unaffected by the hits.
Kris switched to Lasers 4 and 5 and added the other two empty lasers to her recharge list.
More dust.
Laser 6 stirred more dust, then suddenly there was a flare, and something blew up.
“Maybe they needed more armor than they put on,” Kris said. “Flip ship again.” The Wasp turned its vulnerable stern to the alien. But the Wasp’s stern had four stingers. Now Kris fired all four of them at once, carefully aiming them for different sections of the bulbous alien bow filling her sights.
These sparked explosions as alien lasers and rockets blew up.
As soon as the lasers were exhausted, Kris put them in line to recharge.
“Flip ship, begin retrofire on my mark,” Captain Drago ordered. The burn would be short and carefully calculated. Instead of blazing past the planet below, the Wasp would risk the heat of the upper atmosphere, shooting through it at 110 klicks altitude.
It was going to get hot.
Behind them, the alien had again flipped ship and slammed on 2.5 gees deceleration, aiming to make orbit right behind the Wasp, where her lasers could overwhelm and destroy the human ship. But the huge alien ship dared not follow the Wasp, now tiny and tight, its outer hull cooled by its own reaction mass.
The alien reduced its deceleration and fell behind, disappearing below the horizon.
Kris watched as the lasers slowly reloaded. Second after slow second ticked by. Laser 1 showed fully charged after thirteen seconds. The other forward lasers took a full fifteen. This was the price of putting six 20-inch lasers on the bow of a ship whose power plant was designed for four 18-inchers. As the forward battery finished charging, the aft battery began to suck up the electricity. It was twenty-two seconds before all ten of the Wasp’s lasers showed red again.
For the moment, it didn’t matter. The Wasp was diving down, hastened by gravity, slowed by friction. Exactly what its speed would be coming out of this orbit change was anybody’s guess.
Where the alien would be was also a guess. How close would it follow? If it risked following them too close, what would the atmosphere do to his damaged bow? Questions piled up, but with ionized atmosphere blanketing the few sensors that the Wasp risked using, there were no answers in sight.
They blazed their way across the night of the planet below. Did the monsters look up and wonder at what the strange lights were in the sky? Would they care?
The outer hull of the Wasp heated up. Defense thickened the bow, changing the depth of the honeycombed armor from one to two, then three meters. The firing ports of the lasers were covered over.
Isn’t this new and fancier Smart Metal fantastic?
They vented cool reaction mass from the bow. It boiled away but protected the surface beneath.
The Wasp shot out into deeper space, and the hull began to cool. Quickly, they deployed their sensors, visuals, radar, and lasers.
There was the alien, right behind them. Its bow glowed red. Flaming chunks of it fell away. The alien captain had risked the low pass.
Kris could only wonder what price his crew paid for his desperate effort, but it was paying off for her. The alien was closing fast on a hundred thousand klicks.
“Prepare to flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered, ready for the Wasp to charge the alien.
But Kris was busy using the four aft lasers while she still had them aimed at the target. Short, split-second bursts speared at the already flaming ship, first here, then there. Explosion followed on explosion.
NELLY, ANALYZE THE ENEMY BOW. IS THERE ANYPLACE NOT BURNING? ANY LASER POD NOT HIT.
Nelly took the controls and applied the last two short bursts from each laser. Then she got out an even shorter burst. The reactors had already started to recharge them, and Nelly got every little bit available.
“If there’s anything alive and shooting in that hell, I can’t make it out,” Kris’s computer reported, as the lasers went silent and the reloading began.
The alien was staggered by the hits. Its acceleration out from the low pass faltered, coming not in a steady curve but with stutters and spurts. It was hurt.
“Flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered. Still at 3.5 gees acceleration, the Wasp turned to charge the alien. With any luck, it was blind, its sensors burned out.
Not quite, nor was the damage as complete as Kris had wished. First one, then several lasers reached out from the ruined bow to try to catch the Wasp. Most failed, their fire control unable to track the charging human ship, which now went into one of Nelly’s jinking patterns.
There were still enough lasers left in the mangled bow to crisscross the space the Wasp must pass through. Two connected. The Wasp rang with hits.
But the Wasp was committed to a course that crossed above the alien, pinning it between the planet below and the Wasp’s forward batteries. As they flashed by, Kris swung the bow of the Wasp to bear. Four lasers reached out to slice through the stern of the alien, separating its rockets obliquely from the ship it had powered. The engineering spaces with the reactors slid off, diving planetward, while they drove the rest of the alien ship into a spin as they left.
Kris had other targets to roast and took them under fire with the last two forward lasers. Two reactors showed along the central core of the ship. Those powered the forward batteries of lasers. If allowed to go critical, they’d blow the forward section to atoms.
Nelly had gotten the locations of those two reactors from Senior Chief Beni’s sensors. Now, as Kris sliced the aft reactors off, Nelly took a stab at disabling the amidships reactors.
It might work. It might not. Kris had explained to her computer beforehand that no one had ever succeeded in disabling a reactor. They had no idea where the controls were or what would vent the plasma directly to space without taking the rest of the ship with it.
Nelly had seemed to understand that this was not something she could approach with any hope of precision. Still, the computer had accepted the assignment. Now playing staccato notes on the two last lasers like musical instruments, she poked blasts of coherent light at the area around the reactors for fractions of a second.
First, she jabbed at where the forward reactors’ controls might be. Next, she slid her stabs aft, sending a few through the heart of the plasma. That might open up vents to either side for the superhot demons to flee through. Nelly aimed her final thrusts at the possible control spaces aft of the reactor.
Flaming plasma spewed from the sides of the alien ship, sending it spinning. Even in their death throes, amidship lasers tried to light up the Wasp. The wild gyrations of their ship made it impossible to aim, however, and their power quickly bled away.