He flung his arms and legs out to stop his spin and fired. The ship spun, answering, and the two side and forward projectile cannons each ignited its chemical load and blasted it out as plasma with a timed explosive core. At short ranges the weapon could be deadly effective if you got a hit. The problem was that in vacuum and microgravity the projectile's trajectory was perfectly flat, as much so as if it had been a laser or light beam itself, and it could bend no more than they could. This meant taking "windage" with every shot, using what data the computer could glean from the local situation to have the shot turn up where your target would turn up in the next second or so. Once there the plasma cartridge underwent its deadly secondary ignition and blew the hell out of anything with which it had come into contact. This time the computer hadn't had time to construct an effective enough firing solution. Both projectiles missed and all three ships, now past Gabriel, arced around hard for another pass, all firing together. He could feel Enda slipping the cloak of space around her now as she settled into the number two seat. The hull moaned again, more loudly this time, as the three ships swept past and lasered the Sunshine in several spots. Again no result, he heard Enda "say" into the program, the "artificial telepathy" feature of the software making it sound as if the words were originating inside his head where noise or the lack of it could not interfere. But I think they may have something better. Could be. But so do we. Not yet, Gabriel!
Of course not. The ships were coming in close together, much closer than they should have and still firing. Gabriel picked one, let the computer know it, gave it a good couple of seconds for calculation purposes, and just as the front guns' lights went ready again the computer found an interim solution. Gabriel fired again. The projectiles leaped out, the tracks of plasma blinding even in virtual experience. They streaked away, briefly blotting out even the tactical image of the attacking craft-then bloomed into fire. Metal shattered outward, air sprayed silvery into space and froze. Then it was all dark again.
The two other craft immediately broke right and left, one high, one low. The left one, said Enda as she fired.
The right-hand craft fired as well, and this time not just a laser. He's got canister too, Gabriel said, as the program spread all kinds of warnings over his field of vision. Solution says the cargo bay. He felt Enda nod. There was nothing they could do about it. The augmented shielding back there might do some good or it might not. Wham!-and the whole ship shook, the hull screaming in their ears through the program. Holed, Gabriel said. Shit, shit, shit!
Enda said, It is a nuisance; that was a particularly good price on the modular shielding. She fired at the left-hand ship as it swept near and past her.
The computer yelled with delight at the look of what seemed a perfect solution. The projectile screamed away, hit it--and blew it spectacularly. Gabriel was twitching, though, at the sight of the third ship coming around, coming hard, and Sunshine 's hull began to scream again, even more loudly than when it had been holed. Things started to shake hard-
What is that, Gabriel muttered, some kind of mass reaction inducer? The only thing he felt sure of was that it was about to shake the ship apart, and he didn't have a e-suit on, and though Enda might survive such a situation, he certainly wouldn't. He reached around "behind" him, over his shoulder, knowing what the computer would make of the gesture, and came up with the antique weapon that to him best evoked the way the rail cannon worked: a "shotgun."
The other ship dived closer. The shaking was getting very bad. The connection with the computer was beginning to suffer. Gabriel cocked the shotgun, "felt" the shell rack into the barrel- then took careful aim, for he was sure he would not get another chance. The computer text in the tank was breaking up. It had no solution for him. Never mind that. At this range, barely half a klick and closing fast, Gabriel had the only solution that was going to make a difference.
He fired. The rail cannon came alive and shot several rounds straight at the incoming craft. Gabriel was no good at computing other ship's speed by eye yet, but one thing he did know, as the dark little bullet streaked toward the incoming ship. Vectors add...
The tortured screams of the hull became deafening. The hurtling masses in front of Sunshine collided, their vectors added, and the larger of the enemy craft fairly turned itself inside out in a splash of air and liquid, various gases that froze instantly to iridescent microscopic snow as they splashed and drifted away from the source of the explosion. The terrible shuddering of Sunshine's outer shell stopped. Everything grew very quiet.
Gabriel let the ship just hang there for a few moments while he scanned all around him. Beside him, in the software, he could see Enda doing the same.
Nothing. Nothing anywhere. Exactly what had been there before all this started. They hung in the midst of much drifting wreckage in the dark with the stars burning all around and Thalaassa way off in the distance, pale as a tiny moon.
After a long silence in which she completed her own scanning, Enda said, "That was interesting." Gabriel had noticed the fraal fondness for understatement some time back and would occasionally rise to the bait. Now he just made a face and said, "Who were those people?" "Let us see if we can find out."
Gabriel nodded and slowly nudged Sunshine forward, not wanting to disturb the debris field too much. For this work, visual assessment was better than the computer program, so Gabriel instructed the computer to lift the "drape" for the moment, but to have it ready again immediately if he wanted it. They both peered through the cockpit windows into the darkness as Sunshine slipped slowly among the wreckage. There was a lot of frozen liquid, a lot of torn metal and plastic, not much else. Out of consideration for Enda, Gabriel would not have come right out and said what he was looking for-body parts- but Enda, leaning forward in her seat, said, "We must shoot a little more carefully next time, Gabriel, or less carefully. We have not left big enough pieces of whoever started the fight." "After what that last ship was using on us," Gabriel muttered, "no piece of that stuff out there is small enough for me." He turned to the far right of the control panel and touched the control that would start the ship doing its own sequence of diagnostics. It had sensors buried in all the important circuitry and every square meter of hull and would report in about an hour on where it felt "sick." Gabriel was sure that, after that, it had to feel sick somewhere. "No sign of anybody else," he said to Enda. "No closer than Eraklion, no," she said.
"Then that wasn't an accident. Someone was lying in wait for us." "It does seem likely."
"That does it," Gabriel said and reached into the tank again for the drive controls. "The hell with the drive plan. I'm going to-"
Then he stopped. No more than a few kilometers in front of him, he saw something he had been expecting even less than a little pod of ships attacking him. It was a starrise.
He sat there frozen with astonishment as the light sleeted all around the shape that was dropping out of drivespace not far from them. Completely astonished, Gabriel moved his hand away from the stardrive controls that he had been about to activate. Instead he brought up the sensor displays again. There right in front of them was the ship, the colors of its present starfall still leaking away into space around it. It was huge. It was a sickly green hue; Gabriel could not discern if it was metallic or some other substance. The body of the craft was sleeker than a lot of human-built ships would have tended to be, but there were still some structures about it that had that "bolted-on" look so dearly beloved of human engineers, what Gabriel could always remember Hal referring to as "chunky and exciting detail."