"This son-of-a-bitch is good, Skipper," the tac officer said.
"Yeah, and it's my fault for screwing around with him this way!" Stellingetti snarled. She could make that admission, since People's Commissioner Reidel, who, in Stellingettis considered opinion, was an unmitigated asshole, was away on Achmed for a conference with Citizen Commodore Jurgens. Which meant she could at least fight her ship without worrying about being second-guessed... and that she could be honest with her officers.
Citizen Commander Edwards only grunted from his station at Tactical, but they both knew she was right. Their much heavier laser heads had scored at least three times on the enemy destroyer, despite her preposterously efficient point defense, and her falling acceleration indicated serious impeller damage. But missile duels with Manticorans usually worked out in the Manties' favor. Stellingetti knew that, yet she'd hoped to pick this one off without closing to energy range where a single lucky hit could have catastrophic consequences.
It wasn't working out that way. Kerebin was still winning, she was so much bigger and tougher that any other outcome was inconceivable, but while she crushed the Manty, the Manty was shooting big, nasty holes in her. And, Stellingetti conceded angrily, the damned merchies were running like hell. It wouldn't save them in the end, probably, but they were scattering in all directions while their tiny escort fought its desperate, hopeless battle to cover their flight. Against a single raider, their rapidly diverging vectors would have given at least three of them an excellent chance of escaping.
But Kerebin wasn't alone. Her two nearest neighbors were already closing in, summoned by Stellingetti's initial sighting report, and they'd undoubtedly passed the word to their neighbors, as well. The pickets were spread so wide it would take even the closest another hour to get here, but particle densities were low (for hyper-space) in the Selker Rift, and that wouldn't be long enough for the merchies to disappear from Kerebin's gravitics before help arrived. Or that was true for three of them, anyway. The one Tactical had originally assumed was a battlecruiser might just pull it off. She was generating delta vee at an amazing rate for a merchie, and Stellingetti wondered what the hell she was. She certainly wasn't the warship CIC had initially called her. No Manty battlecruiser would run away, leaving a single destroyer to cover her flight. No, that had to be a merchant ship, and Stellingetti felt a cold chill as a thought occurred to her. Whatever it was, it mounted excellent point defense as well as a military-grade drive, and she was abruptly glad it did. The entire picket line had been coasting towards Silesia under total EmCon at barely 40,000 KPS to allow other traffic, traveling at the maximum 44,000 KPS local conditions imposed, to overtake, when the small convoy strayed into Kerebin's sights, and Stellingetti had thrown her entire opening salvo at the "battlecruiser" on the assumption that it was her most dangerous foe. Its defenses had stopped a lot of her birds, despite its surprise, yet she'd scored at least three direct hits. If it hadn't mounted point defense, she would have blown it right out of space, and if it was what she suddenly suspected it was...
"All right, John," she told Edwards grimly. "No more screwing around. Rapid fire on all tubes." She hated burning through ammunition that way with the task force so far from resupply, but unless she swamped the destroyer's active defenses, this would take all damned day.
"Aye, Skipper. Going to rapid fire now."
"Helm, come to two-six-oh, maximum accel. Close the range."
"Coming to two-six-oh, maximum accel, aye."
Kerebin swerved towards her maddeningly effective opponent, and Stellingetti watched her plot for a moment, then commed the Combat Information Center direct.
"CIC, Citizen Commander Herrick."
"Jake, this is the skipper. Have someone compare target One's emission signature to our data on the Manties' Atlas-class passenger liners."
"Pass..." Herrick broke off. "Christ, Skipper! If that's an Atlas, she could have up to five thousand passengers on board, and we hit her clean at least three times!"
"Tell me about it," Stellingetti said grimly, watching her intensifying fire tear at the destroyer even as another pair of bomb-pumped lasers chewed into her own ship. "I'll be back to you, Jake. Things are getting a little hectic up here."
Margaret Fuchien slammed her fists together, eyes burning with shame as she glared down at Annabelle Ward's tactical display. Artemis' missiles might have made the difference between death and survival for Hawkwing ... if she'd been allowed to fire them. But Commander Usher's harsh orders had been unequivocal, and he'd been right. If Artemis fired on the Peep, the Peep would certainly, and justifiably, return fire, and the unarmored liner's weapons were intended to deal with pirates of cruiser size or smaller. No one in her worst nightmares had ever anticipated her going toe-to-toe with a Peep battlecruiser. Even if Artemis and Hawkwing won, the liner would be hammered to scrap, and she had almost three thousand passengers on board. Fuchien couldn't endanger those passengers by trying to help Hawkwing, and so she was running at her best acceleration while the destroyer died to cover her flight. Her earbug buzzed with a priority message. She punched to accept it, and her engineer's harsh voice burned in her ear.
"I've reached Main Hyper, Skipper," he said grimly. "It's a mess down here. Half the power runs are out, we've lost pressure, and we've got fourteen dead."
Fuchien closed her eyes in anguish. The Peep's initial broadside had taken all of them by surprise. She couldn't imagine what an enemy battlecruiser had been doing lying absolutely doggo here in the middle of the Rift, but it had paid off for the bastards. With their impellers and active sensors down, there'd been no emissions signature to warn Hawkwing, or Artemis, until they launched, and they'd obviously misread Artemis for a battlecruiser. That was all that had prevented Hawkwing's instant destruction, and Ward had done almost impossibly well to stop seventy-five percent of the incoming fire. Fuchien knew that, but the five bomb-pumped lasers which had gotten through had done grievous damage. By God's mercy none of her passengers had been killed, but thirty of her crew were confirmed dead, she'd lost three beta nodes and two of her outsized lifeboats, and one of the hits had burned straight into Main Hyper.
"The generator?" Fuchien asked harshly, refusing to let herself think about her dead.
"Not good, Skip." Commander Cheney's voice was flat. "We lost both upper-stage governors; their molycircs fried when the power runs went. The basic system's intact, but if we try to go higher than the delta bands, the harmonics'll rip us apart."
"Damn," Fuchien whispered. She opened her eyes and stabbed another look at Ward's plot. The Peep was charging the destroyer now, bearing down on her at maximum acceleration, and Hawkwing was too lamed to hold the range open. She might last another fifteen minutes; every second beyond that would require a special miracle. When she was gone, the Peeps would be coming after Artemis, and if Fuchien couldn't climb higher than the delta bands, there was no way in hell she could outrun them. She could match them kilometer for kilometer in actual velocity, but she'd been caught in the delta bands because the accompanying freighters could go no higher. From Cheney's report, she couldn't either, now, and that was going to be fatal. Unlike her, the Peeps could still pop up into the epsilon or zeta bands, overfly her easily, then drop back down into the deltas right on top of her.