"Steady as she goes," Brim seconded. Starfury was now scudding through a hellish cross fire of disruptor fire from both the fort and the battleship, and all he could do was grind his teeth, keep on course—and wait....
"Torpedoes armed..." Barbousse announced.
Another near miss blasted Starfury's nose high. Brim fought the controls to another standstill.
"Steady as she goes, Skipper...."
"Steady...."
By now, Queen Elidean had grown huge in the Hyperscreens. Chief, Brim thought, are you planning to ram her?
"Launcher circuits energized," the big rating reported as Brim's second set of eight indicators changed from red to green. "Keep 'er steady, Cap'm...."
The cross fire was so terrible now that Brim had to fight the controls with all his concentration to keep Starfury on any semblance of his intended track. The director stabilizing mechanism could make some allowances for tracking inconsistencies, but...
"Ten," Barbousse announced grimly. "Nine... eight... seven..."
By now, it seemed as if they were riding through a single drawn-out explosion. Only Voot's own luck would bring them through a fire storm like this. Come on, Barbousse!
"Four... three... two... one... Torpedoes running, Cap'm!"
In the wink of an eye, eight dark spindles—each trailing a coruscating beam of ruby red light—flashed out from beneath Starfury's bridge and headed squarely for the battleship. Instantly Brim threw in full military power, pulled the nose up and rolled out into a violent jink. But he was moments too late. With unbelievable concussion and sound, the whole forward tip of Starfury's starboard pontoon—including A turret—disappeared in a tremendous blast of radiant energy that must have carried away the KA'PPA antenna as well, for the display winked out. Great sparks of molten hullmetal trailed into the starship's wake, while Starfury reared up and to the right like a wounded Careandellian riding lizard. Her hull jumped and quivered for a long moment and the generators skipped a beat as Brim fought to bring the skewed ship back under control.
Then, without warning, they were again blasted off course—this time by an even more stupendous explosion. The whole Universe seemed to light up from aft by the birth of some hellacious new star.
"Sweet thraggling Voot!" someone cried aloud. "Look at the Queen!"
Suddenly the bridge was alive with startled cries of alarm. And dismay.
"Universe!" Tissaurd cried aloud as she stared into an aft-view display. "She's gone. The Queen's just... thraggling... disappeared!"
Brim had no time for displays or the Queen, no matter. Starfury was hurt herself. He cranked the cruiser to port and then to starboard testing the controls. She was trailing clouds of glittering radiation haze and definitely more sluggish to starboard—but controllable and still very much in the fight.
"A turret's... gone," Reedwich reported presently from a station near the damaged area. In the background, Brim could see two battlesuited cooks working desperately at a pile of wreckage that appeared to have pinned a disrupter technician to the deck. The man was screaming weakly over the voice circuits. Two more figures sprawled in awkward positions on the deck nearby—motionless. One lay facedown in a huge puddle of blood that was vacuum boiling to dried solids even as it leaked from a huge gash in the helmet. While he watched, a medical team jogged into view.
"Stand fast!" one of the medics yelled at the cooks. "Don't move that man yet!" He bent over the groaning, half-buried figure and prepared a SuperHypo that would safely penetrate a battlesuit.
"How many casualties?" Brim asked, jinking desperately as he searched for his other two ships among the tremendous blasts pouring from the fort.
"Three dead, six wounded, Captain," he answered, "And, of course, the whole A-turret crew."
"Take care of things the best you can, Reedwich," Brim ordered, his mind already switched over to the problem of joining Starfury with her surviving consorts—and then getting back to the business at hand: silencing the fort.
And once again, space came alive with a welter of powerful explosions. The CIGAs might be gone, but the Leaguers were very much alive in their space citadel.
Meesha's gunners fired off a welter of long-range shots at the receding fort as Brim searched for his two consorts. In the midst of a crowded starship bridge, he suddenly felt very much alone. War had a way of doing that, he remembered. With death perched grinning on the back of your recliner, it was xaxtdamned easy to feel alone.
The firing had stopped now that they had outflown the fort's disrupters, and Brim watched Starterror and Starspirit as they hove into view and rolled into formation on Starfury's starboard flank.
Then he gasped as he turned in his seat to glance back toward the fort. Even in dissolution, what remained of the old battleship was magnificent. Barbousse was perhaps the greatest torpedo marksman in the known Universe, and all eight of his powerful missiles had unquestionably found their mark in vulnerable locations. Her once-proud hull was a blazing mass of radiation fire from stem to stern, clear evidence that at least one of the powerful weapons must have burst among the colossal power chambers.
A shiver climbed his back like an icy spider. Queen Elidean had been destroyed as much by avarice and cowardice as by the torpedoes themselves. He bit his lip. As Ursis was fond of saying, "Life is never necessarily fair—just ongoing." In the distance, he watched another swarm of explosions erupt on the face of the fort as Moulding's four cruisers shot past, their disrupters flashing to meet the hail of return fire. And suddenly two great puffs of radiation fire blazed into incandescent life. Brim gasped and bit his lip. In that instant, he knew that two more Starfuries had been destroyed—and judging from the size of the fireballs, there would be no survivors.
"Owen," Brim ordered, "get me a secure channel to Moulding... or whoever's in charge now over there."
"Aye, Captain," Morris replied. After a significant stretch of clicks, Moulding's haggard visage filled a display on Brim's console. "Bloody bad out here, Wilf, old chap," he said. "I assume you saw what just happened to Starswift and Starduke."
"I saw," Brim answered grimly. "Any survivors?"
"Hardly."
"What shape's the fort in after your last run?"
"We've certainly hurt it," Moulding replied. "But it's far from being out of commission—as I assume you can also see."
"Hard to miss that," Brim agreed. "We lost MacAlda a while back, although he may make it home."
"What do you think, Wilf?" Moulding growled with his lopsided grin. "Will the fort buckle under to those radiation fires or will we run out of Starfuries first?"
"It's a toss-up," Brim said, "The only thing for certain is that we do still have a chance—so we've got to try." He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Listen, Toby, here's what we're going to do...."
"Captain Brim!" a COMM rating interrupted from a second global display. "There's a message comin' in for you from the fort."
"From the what?"
"The fort, Captain. It's a woman, askin' for you... um... personally. I'm puttin' 'er on channel two—receive only. She says it can't wait, an' I believe 'er." Instantly the rating was replaced by the image of...
"Margot!" Brim exclaimed.
"Margot?" Moulding demanded incredulously from his display, "What in the name of Voot's greasy beard does Margot have to do with any of this?"