ABOVE ST. LAWRENCE
Day 319
Oriflamme's guns were run out to starboard. Stampfer was amidships with the fire director, but the Long Tom's six-man crew stood close about their massive gun.
Gaiters did a halfhearted job of sealing the gun tube to the inner bulkhead. The pleated barriers kept the cabin air pressure high enough to scatter light and even carry sound, but we were breathing bottled air behind lowered faceshields.
The Keys to the Kingdom hung on Guillermo's display. It wasn't a real-time image. We viewed one frozen aspect of the spherical vessel, and even portions of that had the glossiness of an electronic construct rather than the rough, tarnished surfaces of physical reality.
There was nothing for scale in the image, but "800 tonnes" meant something to me now as it had not at the start of this voyage. It meant the Keys was significantly larger than Our Lady of Montreal; and unlike the Montreal, she was first and foremost a warship.
God knew, so was the Oriflamme, and we of her crew were men of war.
The Keys' bridge, indicated by sensor and antenna concentrations, was in the usual place at the top deck. The generally globular design was flattened on the underside so that the thrusters could be grouped in the same plane.
Ramps on the deck above the thrusters served for loading and unloading the vessel on the ground. Because the Keys was so large, she was also configured to load in orbit through large rectangular hatches at her horizontal centerline. Her gun decks, indicated by a line of ports that were still closed when our optics drew the image on display, were above and below the central deck.
About twenty guns, Lacaille had said. They'd be smaller than ours and less efficient; but. . twenty guns.
The usual digital information filled Salomon's screen. I glanced at Piet's display and found, to my surprise, that I understood its analogue data to a degree.
The gray central ball was St. Lawrence. The bead on the slightly elliptical green line circling the planet was the Keys to the Kingdom in orbit, while we were the indigo-to-blue line arcing up the surface. The difference in color indicated relative velocities: the Keys, in her higher orbit, moved slower than we did as we circled toward the Feds from below under power.
The image on Guillermo's display suddenly shifted into motion, as though a paused recording had been switched back on. We'd come out of the planet's shadow; our sensors were getting direct images of the Keys to the Kingdom again.
Our approach was from the Keys' underside. Her twenty-four thruster nozzles were arranged four/six/four/six/four. A faint glow still illuminated their heavy-metal casings.
I put my helmet against Stephen's and said, "Don't they see us?"
Plasma flooded from the Keys' thrusters. The cloud expanded to hundreds of times the volume of the starship from which it sprang. A moment later, attitude jets spurted lesser quantities of gas which swiftly dissipated. The sphere shuddered and began to rotate so that its main engines weren't exposed to our fire.
"Now they see us!" Stephen replied. Even thinned by conduction through his helmet and mine, his voice was starkly gleeful.
The bubble of exhaust separated from the Keys to the Kingdom. It drifted away, cooling and still expanding until it was only a faint shimmer across the starscape. The Fed commander was putting his ship in a posture of defense, because he'd realized that he couldn't escape us. Even on seven thrusters, the Oriflamme had a much higher power-to-mass ratio than the huge Keys did. We could literally run circles around the Feds in the sidereal universe. If they attempted to transit, we would jump with them: two AIs with identical parameters would always pick the same "best" solution.
And that would be the end of the Keys to the Kingdom. Piet would bring us up beneath the Feds at point-blank range-and Stampfer would blow the Keys' thrusters out, leaving the vessel to drift powerless in interstellar space.
The need to protect our thrusters was behind Piet's decision to disable the Fed landing boats before we lifted. The Oriflamme's hull could take a considerable battering from heavy guns and still be repaired. Laser bolts or light plasma cannon could destroy our main engines, however. We couldn't risk being encircled by three hostile vessels, even if two of them were small by comparison with the Oriflamme.
Piet shut off our engines. I grasped a stanchion with my left gauntlet as I started to drift up from the deck. The bead that was the Oriflamme drove silently across the main display on a course that would intersect the Keys to the Kingdom in two minutes, or at most three. The arc marking our past course was now turquoise.
The carriage of the 17-cm gun crawled slowly sideways, making the deck tremble. The fire director was keeping the muzzle pointed at the target Stampfer had chosen.
"All weapons bear on the enemy, sir!" the master gunner announced over the radio intercom. Motors in the gun training apparatus crackled across Stampfer's voice, but so long as the main engines were shut down the whole crew could hear him over the helmet radios.
"Thank you, Mister Stampfer," Piet said in a tone that was so calm he sounded bored. "I trust your aim, but I think we'll close further so that the charges will dissipate less."
Static roared on the intercom. My hair stood on end from a jolt of static, and the hull beside me rocked to a white-hot hammerblow.
There was enough atmosphere at this altitude to light the tracks of the Keys' plasma bolts across our optical screen. The Feds had salvoed ten guns. Only one round had hit squarely. It was powerful enough to shatter our tough outer hull and craze the inner one in a meter-diameter circle between the gunport and the navigation consoles.
The Oriflamme rocked with the impact of ions moving at light speed. Attitude jets snorted, returning us to our former alignment. The Long Tom's gear motors tracked and tracked back, holding a calculated point of impact.
The Keys to the Kingdom filled Guillermo's screen. Our green bead and the chartreuse bead of the Federation vessel were on the verge of contact on the analogue display.
"Fire as you bear, Mist-" Piet's voice ordered before static and the ringing CRASH! of five heavy guns recoiling blotted out all other sound.
Two of the directed thermonuclear explosions struck the Keys' upper gun deck, two struck the mid-line deck, and the last ripped a collop out of the lower gun deck in a grazing blow. Eight cargo hatches blew out along the centerline. Our plasma charges expanded the deck's atmosphere explosively, pistoning the Fed vessel open from the inside.
Bolts that hit the Keys' gun decks ripped huge, glowing ulcers in the hull plating. White-hot metal blew inward, mixed with the residual atmosphere, and burned in secondary pulses. The initial impacts wracked the Keys' internal subdivisions. These follow-up blasts penetrated deep into the vessel, spreading pain and panic among those who'd thought themselves out of immediate danger.
Attitude jets puffed, rotating the Oriflamme on her axis so that our spine rather than our starboard was presented to our enemy. We'd taken one hit and were likely to take others. Piet was adjusting our aspect so that the Feds couldn't concentrate on the weakened portion of our hull.