He reloaded the turn-bolt single-shot and fired again. The Fed skidded facedown on the concrete.
The Fed warship near the east berm, six hundred meters from the Holy Office, fired a pair of light plasma cannon. One of the bolts struck the stern of the Holy Office. Three 17-cm guns answered it, their crackling discharges ringing at four-second intervals through the fabric of the captured warship. Stampfer must have laid all the guns himself. Common sailors couldn't have hammered the same point with such precision.
The flash of the first bolt hitting was white and prismatic; superheated hull metal blazed in the atmosphere. The second bolt, striking an instant after the initial fireball had lifted from a basin-sized hole in the hull, spent its energy inside the vessel. Flames-red, orange, and streaked with plumes of white smoke at high pressure-engulfed the warship's second deck level.
If the Feds had had the time and the inclination to set up their vessel's internal compartmentalization, the third round wouldn't have added anything to the damage the immediately previous bolt had caused. People act hastily in crises. Not all the companionway hatches were dogged shut, and few of the floor-to-ceiling baffles had been raised to prevent an explosion from involving an entire deck.
Plasma from the third round blew flaming gas and debris into every chamber of the Federation vessel. Gunports flapped outward, spewing black smoke and occasionally parts of Fed crewmen. A ready-use magazine of plasma shells went off on the midline deck. Iridescent flame gouged away the sides of the openings through which it streamed. The vessel settled slightly as white-hot structural members lost strength.
"Abandon ship!" Piet's voice ordered. "Abandon ship! All Wraths out of the military port now!"
A fourth running figure. Stephen killed him. It was a Molt and unarmed when the hot fog cleared momentarily about the body an instant after the shot. Stephen stepped back from the hatch to draw another cartridge from the ammo belt.
He and Piet were the only Venerians still in the control room. The Fed officer and the three Molts-upright now but motionless-stood against the port bulkhead. Stephen glanced through the passageway aft. As far as he could tell, Stampfer and the rest of the assault force had abandoned ship as ordered.
The thrusters roared at full output, though the flared nozzles spread the ions in a billowing sheet across the ground instead of lifting the Holy Office. Exhaust puffed through the open airlock, blinding Stephen momentarily with its brilliance. He backed another step from the hatch.
Piet keyed in a complex series of commands, then rose from the console and drew on his gauntlets. The port airlock started to open, forcing two of the Molts to move.
"Stephen!" Piet said in surprise. "Come on, we've got to get out before the ship lifts. I programmed it to crash into the freighters on the west berm!"
"And them?" Stephen said, waving to the prisoners who hadn't fled aft with their fellows.
"Get out!" Piet shouted. "We're going to crash!"
The three Molts turned and leaped into the sea of radiance, one at a time. Though they jumped as far as they could, they were well within the bath of ions when they hit the ground. The bodies shriveled and burned like figures of straw.
"I'll follow you, Piet," Stephen said. He dropped the rifle and grabbed the Fed officer around the waist.
Piet looked momentarily doubtful, but he latched down his visor and jumped from the hatch. The Holy Office shook itself like a dog just risen from the water. The nozzle irises were closing, restricting the flow to boost thrust.
Stephen, clasping the screaming officer tightly, took three running steps and leaped from the lip of the outer hatch. Exhaust pulsed around him. His boots hit the concrete two meters below. He skidded but kept his footing, thrusting the Fed out as a balance weight. He kept running until he hit the inner face of the berm.
The Fed's uniform smoldered and his exposed skin was already beginning to blister, but he was alive. For the moment, he was alive.
Which was the most anyone could say, after all.
WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH
April 16, Year 27
0453 hours, Venus time
Sal grasped a wrist-thick tree growing between a pair of the concrete slabs covering the berm. She reached down to take Brantling's good hand, his left, while Tom Harrigan pushed the injured sailor from below.
The berm sloped at 45°, a steeper climb than Brantling could handle at the moment. There was a flight of broad steps fifty meters away, but they were crowded with exhausted men in hard suits carrying their weapons and their casualties. Sal and her flight crew would have risked jostling and worse if they'd tried to leave the military port by that route. The assault force had expended too much physical and emotional energy in its brief fight to be careful now.
"Thanks, Cap'n Blythe," Brantling muttered as Sal half helped, half dragged him past her to get a grip and then a foothold on the tree. Her breath rasped. Four meters of 1:1 slope didn't seem especially difficult until you tried to climb it when you were wrung-out emotionally.
Guillermo perched like a gargoyle on the berm's broad top. He took Brantling's hand for what help he could offer.
The flight crew had been forgotten as soon as the Moll Dane landed. Nobody informed them of what was happening, nobody even thought about Sal and her men aboard the crumpled freighter. The assault preparations had been sudden and ad hoc. Even Sal hadn't thought about what she was supposed to do when and if she survived landing.
Sal had never before felt so completely abandoned.
The note of the Holy Office's thrusters changed, sharpened. Sal looked over her shoulder as the vessel lifted minusculely from the concrete. The nozzle irises were tightening down. An armored figure leaped from the cockpit airlock, stumbled in the iridescent hellfire, and trotted out of the exhaust corona. A second, heavier figure followed. The Holy Office began to skitter forward like a chunk of sodium dropped on a still pond.
"I've got it," Harrigan said, ignoring Sal's offered hand to zigzag leftward instead. His toes had found purchase between two of the facing slabs. Sal got a foot against the tree trunk and flopped belly-down on top of the berm.
The Holy Office gained speed gradually as it crossed the military port in hops of ten, twenty, fifty meters. Each time the unmanned vessel tilted enough to lose ground effect, the skid on the lower side brushed sparklingly along the concrete. The ship lifted again, tacking slightly toward that contact, and touched on the opposite skid. Sarah Blythe had no false modesty regarding her own piloting skills, but she could never have programmed an artificial intelligence to carry out the maneuver she was watching.
Harrigan, thinking the same thing, said, "There's somebody at the controls."
"Captain Ricimer was at the controls, Mister Harrigan," Guillermo responded with quiet pride.
Three great spherical freighters from the Reaches trade stood three hundred meters apart along the west edge of the port. The Holy Office struck the nearest, an 800-tonner, a glancing blow low on the starboard side. The shrieking contact continued deafeningly for several seconds. The warship caromed off the larger merchantman and swapped ends twice before it smashed broadside into the 1,200-tonne giant north of the initial target.
This time the noise was like that of planets colliding. Both the Holy Office and the merchantman had thick hulls, but the kinetic energy of the impact was of astronomical level. The surfaces of nickel-steel plates vaporized and the frame members behind them compressed like putty.