She had just opened her mouth to explain her plan to Arly when the lights darkened, and theZaid-Dayan seemed to stumble on something, as if space itself had turned solid. Red lights flared around the bridge: power outage. Before anyone could react, a flare of light burned out the port exterior visuals, and a gravity flux turned Sass’s stomach. A simple grab for the console turned into a wild flailing of arms, and then a thump as normal-G returned. Someone hit the floor, hard, and stifled a cry; voices burst into a wild gabble of alarm.
Sassinak took a deep breath and bellowed through the noise. Silence returned. The lights flickered, then steadied. An ominous block of red telltales glowed from Helm’s console, red lights blinked on others. The main screen was down, blank and dark, but to one side a starboard exterior visual showed some kind of beam weapon flickering harmlessly against the shields.
“Report,” said Sass, more calmly than she expected. Her mind raced: another act of sabotage? But what, and how, and why hadn’t the ship blown? She couldn’t tell anything by the expressions of those around her. They all looked shaken and unnatural.
“Ssli…” came the speech synthesiser, from the Ssli’s biolink. Sassinak frowned. The Ssli usually communicated by screen or console, not by speech. For one frantic instant she feared the Ssli might lie her unknown saboteur - and the cruiser depended, absolutely, on its Ssli - but its words reassured her. “Pardon, captain, for that unwarned maneuver. The enemy ship went into FTL, to catch the transport - no time to explain. Used full power to extend tractor, and grab enemy. This lost power to the shields, and enemy shot blew the portside pods.” From relief she fell into instant rage: how dared the Ssli act without orders, or warning, and put her ship in danger. She fought that down, and managed a tight-lipped question.
“The transport?”
“Safe for now.”
“The escort?” This time, instead of speech, the graphics came up on her monitor: the escort had decelerated, braking away from its original course to attempt to match their course. Well - she’d wanted the transport safe, and she’d hoped to get the escort into a one-to-one with theZaid-Dayan. However unorthodox its means, the Ssli had accomplished that… and she was hardly the person to complain of unorthodoxy in tactical matters. If it worked. Her temper passed as quickly as it had risen. Sassinak glanced up at the worried faces on the bridge, and grinned. “Shirty devils… they think they can take us hand-to-hand!” An uncertain chuckle followed that. “Never mind: they won’t. Thanks to our Ssli, they didn’t get the transport, and they aren’t going to get us, either. Now, let’s hear the rest: report.”
Section by section, the report came in. Portside pods out - probably repairable, but it could take days. Most of their stealth systems were still operative - fortunate, since they couldn’t get into FTL flight without at least half the portside pods. Internal damage was minimaclass="underline" minor injuries from the gravity flux, and loss of the portside visual monitors. All their weapons systems were functional, but detection and tracking units mounted on the pods were blown.
And where, Sassinak wondered, do I find a nice, quiet little place to sit tight and do repairs? She listened to the final reports with half her mind, the other half busy on the larger problem. Then it came to her. Unorthodox, yes, and even outrageous, but it would certainly keep all the enemy occupied, their minds off that transport.
Everyone looked startled when she gave the orders, but as she explained further, they started grinning. With a click and a buzz, the main monitor warmed again and showed where they were going - boosting toward the course Sassinak had originally plotted for the escort.
TheZaid-Dayan had lost considerable maneuvering ability with the portside pods, but Sassinak had insisted that they make her disability look worse than it was. Having lost the transport, surely the escort would go after the “crippled” cruiser - and what a prize, could it only capture one! As if the cruiser could not detect the escort, now nearly in its path, it wallowed on. Such damage would have blinded any ship without a Ssli on board… and apparently the escort didn’t suspect anything. Sassinak watched as the escort corrected its own course, adjusting to the cruiser’s new one. They would think she was trying to hide behind the moonlet… and they would be right, but not completely.
Comm picked up transmissions from the escort to the planet’s single communications satellite, and routed them to her station. Sassinak didn’t know the language, but she could guess the content. “Come on up and help us capture a cruiser!” they’d be saying.
If they were smart, they’d go for the crippled side: try to blow the portside docking bay. So far they’d been smart enough; she hoped they’d find the approach just obvious enough. Would they know that was normally a troophold bay? Probably not, although it shouldn’t matter if they did. Handy for the marines, thought Sass.
“ETA twenty-four point six minutes,” said Bures, Navigation Chief. Sassinak nodded.
“Everyone into armor,” she said. That made it official, and obvious. Bridge crew never wore EVA and armor, except during drills - but this was no drill. The enemy would be on their ship - on board the cruiser itself - and might penetrate this far. If they were unlucky. If they were extremely unlucky. The marines, already clustering near the troop docking bay below, were of course already in battle armor, and had been for hours. Sassinak clambered into her own white plasmesh suit, hooking up its various tubes and wires. Once the helmet was locked, her crew would know her by the suit itself - the only all-white suit, the four yellow rings on each arm. But for now, she laid the helmet aside, having checked that all the electronic links to communications and computers worked.
The one advantage of suits was that you didn’t have to find a closet when you needed one; the suit could handle that, and much more. She saw by the relaxation on several faces that hers hadn’t been the only full bladder. Minutes lurched past in uneven procession - time seemed to crawl, then leap, then crawl again. From the Ssli’s input, they knew that the escort was sliding in on their supposedly blind side. If it had external visuals, Sassinak thought, it probably had a good view of the damage - and blown pods would look impressively damaged. She’d seen one once, like the seedpod of some plant that expels its seeds with a wrenching destruction of the once-protective covering.
Closer it came, and closer. Sassinak had given all the necessary orders: now there was nothing to do but wait. The Ssli reported contact an instant before Sassinak felt a very faint jar in her bootsoles. She nodded to Arly, who poured all remaining power to their tractor field. Whatever happened now, the escort and cruiser were not coming apart until one of them was overpowered. With any luck the escort wouldn’t notice the tractor field, since it wasn’t trying to escape right now anyway.
Interior visuals showed the docking bay where she expected the attack to come. Sure enough, the exterior bay lock blew in, a cloud of fragments obscuring the view for a moment, and then clearing as the vacuum outside sucked them free. A tracked assault pod straight out of her childhood nightmare bounced crazily from the escort’s docking bay and its artificial gravity, to the cruiser’s, landing so hard that Sassinak winced in sympathy with its contents, enemies though they were.
“Bad grav match,” said Helm thoughtfully. ‘That’ll shake ‘em up.”
“More coming,” Arly pointed out. She was hunched over her console, clearly itching to do something, although none of her weaponry functioned inside the ship. Sassinak watched as two more assault pods came out of the escort to jounce heavily on the cruiser’s docking bay deck. How many more? She wanted them all, but the docking bay was getting crowded: they’d have to move on soon. A thin voice - someone’s suit radio - came over the intercom at her ear.