"Clicks, Number One," Brim replied, his heart in his mouth. "We just took a hit in power chamber eight. If she can count all the way to thirty, the N rays will have damped any radiation fires and we probably won't blow up."
"... Twenty-one crag volves... twenty-two crag volves... twenty-three crag volves..."
"Power's out to the main disruptors, Skipper!" Ulfilas warned.
"Very well," Brim said between clenched teeth. He careened to port again. The ship now felt heavy and difficult to maneuver, as if a delay had been thrust into her normally supple reactions to his control inputs. And the Dampiers were catching up quickly. Clearly, the only hope was to get the main battery going again—if Starfury didn't first blow them all to kingdom come.
"... Twenty-six crag volves... twenty-seven crag volves... twenty-eight crag volves..."
Brim held his breath....
"Thirty crag volves! VOOF!"
There was an immediate and simultaneous exhalation from all over the bridge. Now, they needed disrupters!
And so the battle went on: a few turns and then a flat-out run for it, some more turns and then another bout of straightaway. They lost two of the Dampiers, but the other three hung on tenaciously, sensing that Starfury was somehow disabled. As soon as Brim sensed they were about to open fire, he had to start turning again. Occasionally Meesha got in a burst with the secondary armament, but the 127-mmi disruptors were more a gesture than a determined attack.
After what seemed like an age, but was in fact only five or so cycles after the Toronders first spotted Starfury, the red lights on Brim's power panel suddenly went out.
"We've got power to the disruptors," Meesha whooped triumphantly.
Brim nearly shouted for joy. They'd made it! He let the Dampiers catch up, and approximately three clicks later, all twelve of Starfury's 406s lashed out at her pursuers. By the fourth salvo, two of the Toronders were reduced to space refuse and the third had limped off with fierce radiation fires blazing in at least three locations along her hull.
Brim glanced back at the burning Dampier with a sense of relief. So far, so good. Now, however, he had to set his own damaged starship down as quickly as he could. The overworked plasma generators that remained operable would only run her gravs against the planet's gravity for a short time.
Already they were overheating. Working quickly, Omar Powderham, Starfury's navigator, expeditiously located a remote Fluvannian base: R.F.F. Station Calshot on frigid Lake Solent—near Ordu's Boreal pole, and Tissaurd radioed ahead for permission to set up a straight-in approach, direct from space. Not surprisingly, they were immediately granted permission. Now, all he had to do was set thirty-four thousand milstons of hullmetal and assorted, more-or-less sentient crew members down on the surface of the planet gently enough so that nobody got hurt. He ground his teeth. It wasn't going to be as easy as he liked to make things appear....
After what seemed like at least a Standard Year, Starfury was finally beneath the confused layers of dirty clouds, descending in a graceful glide despite her flagging gravs. A mottled landscape passed rapidly beneath the ship's nose: snow in every direction Brim looked, lighted in patches by thin, wintery sunlight. Everywhere else were shades of white and gray, broken only by occasional green expanses of dense conifer forest. He checked his readouts for the ten-thousandth time—the power quadrant was edging back into the red. Starfury's lift would last for only a few more cycles now. And although her glide ratio was better than a rock—it was only slightly so. Hunching his back to stop the knot that was forming in the middle of his shoulders, he frowned. The next few cycles might well challenge his worth as a Helmsman.
Ahead, sunlight glinted momentarily from ice covering a slender lake, foreshortened by the angle of their descent. A ruby landing vector shone steadily from the left-hand shore, directly centered on a boiling strip of water melted in the frozen surface.
"Fleet K5054: Calshot Tower clears for one nine right landing approach; wind zero nine zero at fifteen, gusts to forty-five."
"Fleet K054," Brim replied absently, totally absorbed with landing the stricken cruiser. "One nine right. Thank you, ma'am," he grunted. The wind didn't much matter. One way or another, he was coming in. Period.
He was no more than five c'lenyts from touchdown when Voot's Law struck—as somehow he knew it might. Without warning, the generators stammered... thundered on for a moment... then abruptly quit altogether as his instruments indicated zero thrust!
The bridge went deadly silent, except for the slipstream howling past the Hyperscreens. At this altitude, there was no escape from the hull; everyone knew his life was entirely in Brim's hands—and whatever deities he might personally accredit.
With the determination and nerve that had brought him through a thousand metacycles of mortal danger, the Carescrian guided the big cruiser toward a dead-stick landing on momentum alone. A tiny shore-side village disappeared beneath the bow as Brim willed Starfury's nose a few degrees high.
Nearly there....
"HANG ON!" Brim gasped into the blower. "We're going in!"
Less than a click too late, he spotted the small hill of ice shards that caught his right pontoon and violently slewed the big machine around to the right. Loose equipment cascaded across the bridge in a cacophony of shattered cvceese' mugs and tumbling equipment. More by instinct than anything else, he kicked hard left rudder just as the cruiser smashed through the ice in a cloud of spray and was thrown in the air again. This time, she swung badly to port, and, rolling dangerously, fell heavily to the melted landing strip with a resounding thud on the left pontoon—but pointed the proper direction. He sensed the tail coming up as the tips of the pontoons plunged into the waves, but miraculously, the starship righted itself and glided to a stop, her overheated plasma generators pinging and crackling throughout the main hull. Moments later he glimpsed what appeared to be a squadron of land tractors racing over the ice toward him. The ship might be touching the water, with all the mischief that promised, but she was down. And safe....
"Voot's beard," Tissaurd said in a shaky voice, opening her helmet in mock disgust, "you'd think there was a war on, or somethin'!"
CHAPTER 9
Strike Force
Clearly, Starfury was not the first ship to have crashlanded on Lake Solent. Calshot Station was much too practiced in rescue/salvage operations for such an event to be any sort of rarity. Even before Starfury surged to a halt, eight big traction engines were thundering along each side of the melted landing vector, smartly projecting mooring beams to salvage points in the hull as they traveled. At a prearranged signal, they stopped to tension the beams; moments later Starfury was firmly moored at sixteen points, stable, although floating helplessly in the water.
"HoloPhone signal from the Base, Skipper," a communications technician reported from Brim's display panel.
Brim nodded and peered out the forward Hyperscreens toward a tall, uniformed man and a slim woman wearing an ankle-length cape who were standing beside a staff skimmer parked at the edge of the ice. "Very well," he said. "I'll take it here."
Presently, the technician was replaced by an angular face with high hollow cheeks, thinning hair, a long nose, and the sensible, intelligent eyes of a born Engineer. "Commodore Atcherly, here, Commander," the man said. "If you're talking from the bridge, I'm over here by the staff skimmer," he said with a little smile.