fuel-saving it for what? For a short run like that, the fusion drive could hit four g’s easy, get them out of the area faster. Why only two g’s?”
There was silence on the bridge for a moment as his question sank in, and then Bevins broke it, with a grim statement. “There are still people on board,” he said. “Someone’s running her manually.”
“Jesus,” Wolford hissed.
“Enough chatter,” Lee snapped, trying to sound tough, but Franks could see the pain in her eyes, hear the catch in her throat. “Just take us to that intercept.”
On the screen, the blue halo moved almost imperceptibly away from the shuttles. Franks watched it, wishing he could somehow make it disappear…
“What’s the range on the sensors?” He asked suddenly. Wolford looked at him blankly. “The modified sensor beams we used to destabilize their drive fields… it’s gotta’ have a longer range that conventional beam weapons. It’s travelling FTL for Christ’s sake!”
A light came on in Wolford’s eyes and he hit the intercom control. “Commander Infante!” he nearly shouted into the audio pickup. “What’s the effective range of the sensor mods to destabilize an Eysselink field?”
There was a long silence and for a moment, Franks thought that Infante hadn’t heard the transmission, but then the Engineer replied, her voice slow and hesitant. “I can’t say for sure, Lt. Wolford,” she said. “It depends on the strength and size of the field you’re targeting and…”
“Give me your best Goddamned guess, Commander!” Lee interjected with an impatient snarl.
“Perhaps… 100,000 kilometers at the power levels we’re using,” the Engineer estimated, a bit of pique in her voice at Lee’s tone.
Franks glanced to Lee and she shot him a fierce grin. “The hell with McKay and Stark, Lieutenant,” she said. “You’re doing all right yourself.” She turned to Bevins and Wolford. “Tactical, I need a firing solution for that ramship! Range is 100,000 kilometers! Helm, get us there in time!”
Larry Gianeto squeezed through the lifepod hatch and the narrow docking umbilical, into the pressurized cockpit of the shuttle. The cabin was crowded with a dozen crewmembers, two more than it was supposed to be able to hold safely, and two dozen more were crammed into the lifepods in its unpressurized cargo hold. Larry moved through the press, coming up to the back of the pilot’s seat.
“Commander Irvine,” he spoke loudly to be heard over the hubbub in the crowded cockpit. “Do we have all the lifepods secured in the shuttles?”
Irvine turned back to him, sweat beading on his dark-skinned, hawk-lean face from the heat of the massed bodies in the small cabin. “They’re just closing the cargo bay doors on the last one, Commander Gianeto,” he reported, strain in his voice. “The
“I want every shuttle in a full-power burn in the opposite direction now,” Gianeto ordered. Irvine glanced at him dubiously, not least because they were both the same rank, but then nodded and turned to relay the order.
“Everyone strap in!” Irvine yelled back into the cabin. “One g burn in ten seconds!”
Gianeto glanced around, heartbeat quickening as he saw that every acceleration couch was occupied, but then Irvine’s co-pilot jerked a thumb back to a fold-down seat next to the airlock. Gianeto scrambled back to pull it down into position and barely managed to get the harness around him before the shuttle’s engines flared to life. He was pushed back into his seat by a familiar 80 kilograms as the shuttle’s small, onboard particle-bed reactor heated up the liquid hydrogen reaction mass and expelled it at hypersonic velocities.
Gianeto felt his heart rate increasing and fought to stay calm. There were dozens of crewmembers in the shuttles, and yet his attention kept drifting back to the
“Which lifepod is the Captain on?” Irvine asked him, as if reading his expression.
“She’s not in a lifepod,” Gianeto told the pilot. “The navigation computers were fried by the feedback from the field collision. Captain Minishimi is in the Engineering bay of the
Irvine’s head snapped around, his mouth dropping open and he wasn’t the only one. It seemed to Gianeto that everyone in the cabin was staring at him aghast. A sour taste was in his mouth and he felt like a coward. “I tried to make her let me do it,” he said, shaking his head. “She said it was her duty as Captain.” He felt a surge of anger and put it in his voice. “She ordered me to look after the crew and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
Irvine nodded, acceptance reluctantly entering his eyes. He paused, closing his eyes and whispering a prayer under his breath, then crossed himself; Gianeto saw a few others join him. He wasn’t Catholic, or much of anything, but for a moment he wished he were: right now, it would be very comforting to believe in an afterlife.
“We’re two minutes from effective range, Captain,” Wolford reported, the glowing light of his holographic display playing over the worry lines in his face. “The enemy ship’s drive field will impact the
Franks hissed involuntarily, watching the two computer-simulated avatars coming closer together on the main screen. That wasn’t a hell of a lot of room for error.
“Even if we can take out the ramship’s field,” he said, “she might still ram right into the
Then he blinked as the fusion flare at the rear of the
“The
“What are they doing?” Bevins muttered.
“I read a lifepod ejecting near the Engineering section,” Wolford said. His head snapped up, looking to Captain Lee. “Whoever was on board has abandoned ship, ma’am!”
“They can’t know we’re going to be able to stop the ramship,” Franks observed. “Why are they ejecting?”
“Hope, perhaps,” Lee murmured a speculation. “Let’s make sure it’s not false hope. Are we in range, Lt. Wolford?”
“Ten seconds, ma’am,” Wolford told her, “assuming Commander Infante’s estimate was correct. I have control of the emitters.”
“It was a rough estimate,” Lee mused. “Bevins, take us down to one gravity. Wolford, open fire now… let’s see what the outer envelope is on this thing.”
“Aye, Captain,” Wolford said with eagerness in his voice-or perhaps it was relief at the extra weight on his chest disappearing. “Activating emitters now, three second burst.”
The sensor display froze as the gravimetic emitters switched function from analysis to offense, and then the images were in motion again… and the blue halo of the ramship’s Eysselink drive field was intact. Franks bit back a curse.
“Their drive field destabilized slightly,” Wolford said, looking at his readouts, “but not critically. We have less than thirty seconds till the drive field intersects the lifepod’s course.”
“Fire again!” Lee snapped. “Longer this time! Get that field down!”
“Ten second burst,” Wolford said, adjusting the controls. “Firing.”
This time the sensor display went completely dark and Franks thought the lighting on the ship flickered and dimmed as well, but that could have been the displays flickering on and off. His hands were clenched on the arms of the acceleration couch and he found himself holding his breath.
“Emitters off,” Wolford said, hitting the control. He shook his head. “It’s going to take a few seconds to get the sensors back up and calibrated.”
Franks forced himself to breath, forced his fingers to relax as the seconds dragged on, interminably long and he saw acting Captain Lee begin to open her mouth, as if she were about to ask how long it was going to take. Then the main viewscreen and the Tactical display both snapped to life and the images of the two ships began to form once again, hazily at first, flitting back and forth like ghosts until they came into sharp relief… and merged in a glowing ball of star-white plasma.
“What just happened?” Franks demanded, leaning forward against his restraints despite the acceleration
