Greenies

'We've been hit!' Mandall yelled. 'We have a hull breach in engineering!'

'Shit,' Brett said, flipping on the intercom. 'Engineering, report immediately!'

There was no answer at first and Brett had to hail two more times. Finally the voice of Mike Bellingraph, sounding frantic and scared, came on. 'We've got a hull rupture in engine room number two,' he said. 'The engine has been hit as well. Performing an emergency shutdown now. The doors are shut and some of my people are trapped in there!'

'I copy,' Brett responded. 'Get the engine shut down. Hopefully the crew was able to activate their suits. They'll be okay for now.'

'Understood,' he said.

'Is engine number one still online?'

'So far, but that blast came awfully close to the main propellant tanks. You'd better check them.'

'Checking now,' Brett said, looking at Mandall. 'How we looking there, helm?'

'I'm showing no loss of pressure,' she reported.

'Propellant tanks seem fine,' Brett told him. 'Get that engine shut down and see if we can salvage it. Report back as soon as you know something.'

'Right,' Bellingraph said. 'I'm on it.'

Brett took a deep breath, feeling like things were moving just a little too fast for him to keep up. 'Sugi,' he said, 'how are our jammers doing? Are they still active?'

'Still active,' he confirmed. 'They're still firing at us. That must've been a lucky hit instead of a burn through.'

'Good,' he said. 'Hammy? You still there?'

'Still here,' came his voice. 'Torp is now 3200 kilometers out. Engine is still burning. Impact in 36 seconds.'

The seconds ticked off one by one. On the display, the symbol representing the torpedo and the larger symbol representing the Seattle continued to close. Frantic flashes of light flared every second or so from the Seattle's position as the laser weapons pulsed out more energy, trying desperately to destroy both the onrushing weapon and the ship that had fired it. Just six seconds before the impact time, another one of the anti-ship lasers got through, striking the aft section of the ship a glancing blow. There was no shudder of impact this time, just another blaring of alarms from the panel.

'Another hit,' Bellingraph reported. 'Starboard exhaust port has been damaged. Unknown how severe just yet.'

Brett simply nodded, his eyes still glued to the display. If the torpedo didn't detonate in the next four or five seconds, it wouldn't really matter how bad the damage to the ship was. The two symbols closed to within a half a centimeter and then there was a sudden flash before they could merge.

'Detonation,' Sugi reported, obvious relief in his voice. 'Right on target. Sixty kilometers out.'

The displays went momentarily dark again as the electromagnetic pulse bombarded the ship and overwhelmed the sensors.

'Sugi,' Brett said, 'get the systems back on line as quickly as possible. We need to know if that Seattle was destroyed or just crippled or what.'

'Going through the restart now,' he said.

'Mandall, give me report on the laser damage.'

'There's been no hull breach this time,' she said. 'It doesn't look like it was a direct hit. There's some damage to the rear of the exhaust port but that's the engine that's been shut down from the first strike. I'm showing no venting of gas.'

Brett breathed a little easier. 'Thank God for small favors.'

It took nearly a minute before Sugi was able to get the display back up. It took another minute for him to process the signals that he was receiving and formulate a diagnosis of what was there.

'The ship is still there,' he said, 'but it's no longer firing, no longer under power. It's drifting on its last course. There are spot heat sources coming from all over it and some other strange readings in the low end.'

Brett unbuckled from his seat and walked over, moving carefully in the reduced gravity. He looked at the images for a moment, trying to make some sense out of them. 'They're venting,' he finally said. 'The hot spots are residual heat from the blast. The low end stuff is oxygen and hydrogen streaming out of a hull rupture.' He pointed at some of the other spectrums, which should have been active but were not. 'And look at this, no electromagnetic energy or engine heat from the aft section. Her engines are dead. She's just drifting, dead in space. It looks like she's slowly spinning around as well, probably because of thrust from the initial rupture.'

'So that's a kill then?' Sugi asked carefully.

'It's a kill,' he agreed. 'Obvious hull rupture in at least one place, a large volume of venting gas, no power or gravity generation. That ship is dead. There might be some of the crew still alive if they managed to get their suits active, but I don't think she's going to be much of a danger to us when she passes.'

'So we're safe then?' Hamilton asked hesitantly from her helm panel.

'Assuming that that was really the last ship in the armada, yes, we should be relatively safe. But just to be sure, let's not make ourselves so visible. Cut engine power on the remaining engine immediately. Bring us down to a tenth of a G.'

'Right,' she said, 'reducing the burn to point one zero.'

'And then start checking the thrusters one by one to make sure they weren't damaged by the hits. If they all check out, let's get a course change going.'

'What course?'

'I'll let you know when I find out how bad the damage is,' he told her. 'Sugi, get the jammers shut down and let's start looking at the ships again just to make sure that none of them can get into range of us.'

'Doing it now,' he said, watching as his targeting information began to pop back up on the display one by one.

Things settled down a little over the next few minutes as the crew began to realize that they really were safe. Sugi was able to track that two of the rear screen ships — a destroyer and another Seattle — had turned around and were decelerating at full power to allow the crippled Seattle to catch up to them. But there was no way that they could possibly slow down enough to become a danger to Mermaid in any way. And a check of the area to sunward also showed that no other ships were currently coming towards them. That didn't preclude the possibility that there might be a WestHem controlled Owl drifting out there of course — in fact Brett figured that there probably was one in the vicinity since trailing one was standard WestHem doctrine — but at least they were safe from direct attack.

In the engineering compartment it was revealed that the bulk of the damage to engine number two had been in the exhaust portion. The fusion reactor itself had been undamaged and was still capable of providing power for the electrical and environmental systems. Granted, it would take about a week of repairs at TNB before it could ever provide thrust again, but at least the fueling systems and the propellant tanks themselves were still functional.

It was discovered that four crewmembers had been killed in the engagement, all of them as a result of the first laser blast. Two had been killed by the blast itself, their bodies burned to ashes and bone fragments from the energy. The other two had been blown out of the ship by the hull rupture, hurled through the two-meter hole in the ship and into space by the escaping air and then vaporized by the exhaust plasma coming from the engines. Six other crewmembers were rescued from the decompressed room about twenty minutes later, two of them injured by flying debris, but all alive thanks to their emergency suits. The room itself was sealed shut after the rescue and would be unused for the rest of the trip.

On the display the bridge crew watched silently as the Seattle they had destroyed drifted over the top of them, still moving at 70 kilometers per second, it's front and rear turning end over end, gas still streaming out of it. No laser fire emitted from her weapons. No signs of life were noted at all. Mermaid's laser crews kept their weapons trained on it as it passed, knowing that a single shot would ignite the pocket of hydrogen and oxygen that enveloped the ship, but not firing.

The maneuvering thrusters on Mermaid were all undamaged by the blasts and they were engaged to turn the ship back towards Mars and to raise it a little more towards the planetary elliptic. They accelerated on their good engine at .05 G in order to clear the area where the engagement had taken place. Brett