But the human carnage was secondary, just a side effect. Those precisely targeted stilettos of energy had other objectives, and Abigail's fire smashed deep into Bogey Three's hyper generator compartment. She couldn't tell how much damage she'd actually inflicted, but the pinnace's tactical computers estimated a seventy-two percent chance that it was sufficient to cripple the generator beyond immediate repair. In fact, the computers were pessimistic; what was left of that generator would have been useful only for raw materials.
Hawk— Papa-Three's shot went in effectively simultaneously, but much further aft, and its target was not Bogey Three's ability to enter or leave hyper, but rather its ability to maneuver in normal-space.
Commercial impeller wedges were unlike military ones. A warship generated a double stress band above and below its hull; a merchant vessel generated only a single band. The difference reflected the fact that it was theoretically possible for an enemy to analyze an impeller wedge sufficiently to adjust for the gravity differential's distorting effect on sensors. If he could do that, then he could 'see' through it, which no one thought was a good idea applied to his own navy. Using a double wedge, in which the outer protected the inner from analysis, thwarted any such effort. And, of course, naval designers, by their very nature, worshiped the concept of redundancy as the way to survive battle damage. But merchant designers had other priorities, and civilian-grade impellers were fifty to sixty percent less massive, on a node-for-node basis, than military-grade installations. The military-grade systems were commensurately more expensive, and their design lifetimes were substantially shorter, all of which was highly undesirable from the viewpoint of designing a durable, low-maintenance, low-cost freight-hauling vessel.
But one of the consequences of the difference in design was that whereas a warship, like a pinnace, could generate a functioning impeller wedge with only one impeller ring, a freighter required both. And another consequence was that whereas warship impeller rooms were subdivided into mutiple armored, individually powered and manned compartments, a civilian impeller room was one large, open space, completely unarmored and without the multiply redundant power and control circuits-and -manpower-of a military design.
Which was why Hawk-Papa-Three's shot inflicted such horrific damage.
The laser's entry wound itself was no more than a pinprick, a tiny puncture, against the vast dimensions of its target. Any one of the beta nodes in Bogey Three's after impeller ring massed dozens of times more than the attacking pinnace did. But size, as size, meant nothing. The laser blasted straight through the impeller room's thin skin and directly into Beta Twenty-Eight's primary generator. The generator exploded, throwing bits and pieces of its housing into the surrounding jungle of superconductor capacitors and control systems, and a brutal power spike blew back from it to Beta Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Nine. Without the internal armored bulkheads and cofferdams, the separate, parallel control runs, and redundant circuit breakers of military design, there was little to stop the train wreck of induced component failures, and a chain reaction of shorting, arcing superconductor rings raced through the compartment. The trapped lightning bolts crashed back and forth with the ferocity of enraged demons, taking one node after another completely off-line with catastrophic damage, and more frantic alarms screamed on the freighter's bridge.
Unlike the damage to the hyper generator, the effect of Hawk-Papa-Three's fire was immediately evident as the entire after impeller ring went from standby power to complete shutdown in less than two seconds. It had to be actual battle damage-no human's reaction time was fast enough to cut power that quickly. But, again, it was impossible for Abigail's sensors to confirm the
The fleet little vessels turned, keeping their noses aligned on Bogey Three, and went to maximum power, decelerating at six hundred gravities. Astern of them, the Nuncian LACs had also made turnover, but their deceleration rate was a hundred gravities lower than the pinnaces', and the range between the allied components of the small attack force opened quickly.
'Hawk— Papa-Two, this is Einarsson,' Abigail's earbug said ninety seconds later. 'Do you have a damage estimate, Lieutenant?'
'Not a definitive one, Sir.' Part of Abigail wanted to add 'of course,' to that, but she reminded herself that even her pinnace's sensor capabilities must seem almost magical to the Nuncians. And at least Einarsson had waited until she'd had a chance to examine the available data before he asked the question.
'From what we could see during the firing pass,' she continued, 'we scored good hits on her after impeller room, at least. The ring's down, and a commercial design doesn't have much ability to come back from that kind of damage without outside assistance. Obviously, there's no way we can be certain that's the case here, but it seems likely.
'It's a lot more difficult to estimate what kind of damage we may have done to her hyper generator. It wasn't on-line to begin with, so we didn't have a standby power load to monitor or see go down. From the observed atmospheric venting, it looks like we definitely got deep enough to get a piece of the generator, and the computers estimate a seventy percent chance it was big enough. But we won't know for certain until we're actually aboard her.'
She didn't offer any estimate on personnel casualties... and Einarsson didn't ask for one.
'No, we won't know until then,' the Nuncian said, instead. 'But it sounds like you hit them hard enough to give us a chance to get aboard. Which, to be honest,' he admitted, 'is more than I really expected. Without your pinnaces, we wouldn't even have had a shot at pulling this off. Well done, Lieutenant Hearns. Please accept my compliments and pass them on to the rest of your people.'
'Thank you, Sir. I will,' she said.
'And after you do that,' Einarsson added grimly, 'go back there and kick those people's a-butts up between their ears.'
'Aye, aye, Sir,' Lieutenant Abigail Hearns said, without even a trace of amusement for his self-correction. 'I think you can count on that one.'
Hawk— Papa Flight continued decelerating hard. The pinnaces' velocity fell by almost six kilometers per second every second, slowing their headlong plunge towards the Nuncio System's Oort Cloud and the endless interstellar deeps beyond. Their sensors continued to hold Bogey Three, and Abigail's grimly satisfied estimate that the freighter had been successfully lamed hardened into virtual certainty as the freighter's position and emissions signature alike remained unchanged.
'Excuse me, Ma'am.'
She turned and looked at the midshipwoman in the pilot's seat. Ragnhild's expression was calm enough, but there was a shadow behind her blue eyes. Blue eyes which saw not merely her current mission commander or
'Yes, Ragnhild?' Abigail's tone was calm, unruffled, and she returned her own gaze to the console before her.
'May I ask a question?'
'Of course.'
'How many people do you think we just killed?' Ragnhild asked softly.
'I don't know,' Abigail replied, infusing just a hint of cool consideration into her tone. 'If there was a standard station-keeping watch in both compartments, there would have been two or three people in the hyper generator room, and four or five in the after impeller room. Call it eight.' She turned and looked the younger woman levelly in the eye. 'I don't imagine any of them survived.'
She held the midshipwoman's gaze for a three-count, then returned her attention once more to her displays.
'It's possible the number's higher than that,' she continued. 'That estimate assumed a station-keeping watch, but they may've had full watches in both compartments, especially if they were at standby for a quick escape. In that case, you can double the number. At least.'
Ragnhild said nothing more, and Abigail watched her unobtrusively from the corner of one eye. The midshipwoman looked unhappy, but not surprised. Sad, perhaps. Her expression, Abigail thought, was that of someone who had just realized that she'd come much more completely to grips with the possibility of her own death in combat than with the possibility that she might kill someone else. It was a moment Abigail herself remembered only too well, from a cold day on the planet Refuge, two T-years past. The moment she'd squeezed the trigger of a dead Marine's pulse rifle and seen not the sanitized electronic imagery of distant destruction but the spray patterns of blood from shredded human flesh and pulverized human bone.
