By the time they were eighty thousand kilometres out, things were looking very bad for us. Even the Cockatrice must have been nervous of what would happen if the port spar gave way, since they’d begun to concentrate their efforts on our midsection instead. Reluctantly, I crawled back along the starboard spar and confronted the engine settings again. I was faced with two equally numbing possibilities. I could turn the dials even further into the orange, making the engines run harder still. Even if the engines held, the ship wouldn’t, but at least we’d go out in a flash when the spar collapsed and the two engines drifted apart. Or I could return the dials to blue-green and let the Cockatrice catch us up without risk of further failure. One option might ensure the future survival of the passengers. Neither looked very attractive from the crew’s standpoint.
Van Ness knew it, too. He’d begun to go around the rest of the crew, all two dozen of us, ordering those who weren’t actively involved in the current crisis to choose an empty casket in the passenger hold and try to pass themselves off as cargo. Van Ness was wise enough not to push the point when no one took him up on his offer.
At fifty thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice was in range of our own weapons. We let her slip a little closer and then rotated our hull through forty-five degrees to give her a full broadside, all eleven working slug-cannons discharging at once, followed by a burst from the lasers. The recoil from the slugs was enough to generate further warnings of structural failure in a dozen critical nodes. But we held, somehow, and thirty per cent of that initial salvo hit the Cockatrice square-on. By then the lasers had already struck her, vaporising thousands of tonnes of ablative ice from her prow in a scalding white flash. When the steam had fallen astern of the still-accelerating ship, we got our first good look at the damage.
It wasn’t enough. We’d hurt her, but barely, and I knew we couldn’t sustain more than three further bursts of fire before the Cockatrice’s own short-range weapons found their lock and returned the assault. As it was, we only got off another two salvos before the slug-cannons suffered a targeting failure. The lasers continued to fire for another minute, but once they’d burned off the Cockatrice’s ice (which she could easily replenish from our own shield, once we’d been taken) they could inflict little further damage.
By twenty thousand kilometres, all our weapons were inoperable. Fear of breakup had forced me to throttle our engines back down to zero thrust, leaving only our in-system fusion motors running. At ten thousand kilometres, the Cockatrice released a squadron of pirates, each of whom would be carrying hull-penetrating gear and shipboard weapons, in addition to their thruster packs and armour. They must have been confident that we had nothing else to throw at them.
We knew then it was over.
It was, too: but for the Cockatrice, not us. What took place happened too quickly for the human eye to see. It was only later, when we had the benefit of footage from the hull cameras, that we were able to piece together what had occurred.
One instant, the Cockatrice was creeping closer to us, her engines doused to a whisper now to match our own feeble rate of acceleration. The next instant, she was still there, but everything about her had changed. The engines were shut down completely and the hull had begun to come apart, flaking away in a long lateral line that ran the entire four kilometres from bow to stern. The Cockatrice began to crab, losing axial stabilisation. Pieces of her were drifting away. Vapour was jetting from a dozen apertures along her length. Where the hull had scabbed away, the brassy orange glow of internal fire was visible. One engine spar was seriously buckled.
We didn’t know it at the time — didn’t know it until much later, when we’d actually boarded her — but the Cockatrice had fallen victim to the oldest hazard in space: collision with debris. There isn’t a lot of it out there, but when it hits… at a quarter of the speed of light, it doesn’t take much to inflict crippling damage. The impactor might only have been the size of a fist, or a fat thumb, but it had rammed its way right through the ship like a bullet, and the momentum transfer had almost ripped the engines off.
It was bad luck for the crew of the Cockatrice. For us, it was the most appalling piece of good luck imaginable. Except it wasn’t even luck, really. Every now and then, ships will encounter something like that. Deep-look radar will identify an incoming shard and send an emergency steer command to the engines. Or the radar will direct anti-collision lasers to vaporise the object before it hits. Even if it does hit, most of its kinetic energy will be soaked up by the ablation ice. Ships don’t carry all that deadweight for nothing.
But the Cockatrice had lost her ice under our lasers. She’d have replaced it sooner or later, but without it she was horribly vulnerable. And her own anti-collision system was preoccupied dealing with our short-range weapons. One little impactor was all it took to remove her from the battle.
It gave us enough of a handhold to start fighting back. With the Cockatrice out of the fight, our own crew were able to leave the protection of the ship without fear of being fried or pulverised. Van Ness was the first out of the airlock, with me not far behind him. Within five minutes there were twenty-three of us outside, our suits bulked out with armour and antiquated weapons. There were at least thirty incoming pirates from the Cockatrice, and they had better gear. But they’d lost the support of their mother ship, and all of them must have been aware that the situation had undergone a drastic adjustment. Perhaps it made them fight even more fiercely, given that ours was now the only halfway-intact ship. They’d been planning to steal our cargo before, and strip the Petronel for useful parts; now they needed to take the Petronel and claim her as her own. But they didn’t have back-up from the Cockatrice and — judging by the way the battle proceeded — they seemed handicapped by more than just the lack of covering fire. They fought as well as they could, which was with a terrible individual determination, but no overall coordination. Afterwards, we concluded that their suit-to-suit communications, even their spatial-orientation systems, must have been reliant on signals routed through their ship. Without her they were deaf and blind.
We still lost good crew. It took six hours to mop up the last resistance from the pirates, by which point we’d taken eleven fatalities, with another three seriously wounded. But by then the pirates were all dead, and we were in no mood to take prisoners.
But we were in a mood to take what we needed from the Cockatrice.
If we’d expected to encounter serious resistance aboard the damaged ship, we were wrong. As Van Ness led our boarding party through the drifting wreck, the scope of the damage became chillingly clear. The ship had been gutted from the inside out, with almost no intact pressure-bearing structures left anywhere inside her main hull. For most of the crew left aboard when the impactor hit, the end would have come with merciful swiftness. Only a few had survived the initial collision, and most of them must have died shortly afterwards, as the ship bled through its wounds. We found no sign that the Cockatrice had been carrying frozen passengers, although — since entire internal bays had been blasted out of existence, leaving only an interlinked chain of charred, blackened caverns — we probably wouldn’t ever know for sure. Of the few survivors we did encounter, none attempted surrender or requested parley. That made it easier for us. If they stood still, we shot them. If they fled, we still shot them.