"Ah, perhaps she waits for the last torpedo," the Bear suggested.
"She'll be too late in a few seconds," Waldo hissed from clenched teeth.
Defiant abruptly changed course again.
At the last possible moment. Obstinate launched her decoy. The three torpedoes visibly wavered as their logic systems debated between two tempting targets.
After an eternity in Brim's reckoning, they chose the decoy-which disappeared when all three missiles exploded harmlessly in the destroyer's throbbing wake.
"You ought to watch how they do it, Alpern," someone commented from the systems consoles. "It's a lot better when we can fly around the explosion, don't you think?"
"I'll take that under advisement," the ECW Officer grumped good-naturedly.
Ursis continued to watch, wiggling his long rumpled whiskers in perplexed interest. "Last ship continues on torpedo run, would you believe?" he said, scratching delicately below the band of his peaked hat. "A puzzlement...."
"The torpedo must have hung up in her launcher," Brim said.
"Ah, that might be so!"
"Voot's beard, Obstinate, shoot!" Brim urged uselessly. So did a chorus of shouts from other parts of the bridge.
"Get him!"
"Fire, for xaxt's sake!"
At length, Obstinate did shoot, effectively concentrating her fire at short range and promptly reduced the bow and bridge of the fourth Leaguer to a fused, glowing mass of energy and radiation flame. In moments, the ship and her remaining torpedoes exploded in a giant, whirling fireball that engulfed both assailant and intended victim.
"Voof," Ursis ejaculated quietly. "It is all over now, Voot take it."
When Obstinate emerged from the fireball, cries of horror echoed everywhere among the consoles. Her bridge was completely gone, with a glowing section of the enemy's Drive chamber embedded in its place. The old destroyer slewed off as a solid mass of radiation flame suddenly vomited from her opened hull. She swiftly fell behind and was soon lost in the darkness, Perillan maneuvering wildly to avoid the glowing wreckage as she drove past to fill in the gap.
Following the next change of course, Defiant passed two more burning wrecks-cargo starships-as the remaining attackers lined up in the distance to start their next run. One of the cripples blew up a few moments later in a tremendous explosion, accompanied by flashes nearly as bright as the enemy flares.
"Poor bastards," Brim mused, more to himself than to anybody else, "they never even got a chance to fight back." Then he scratched his head in puzzlement. "Funny," he said to Ursis, "she looked like there wasn't that much wrong with her when we passed."
"Strange indeed," Ursis replied. "Almost as if there was another Leaguer out here we didn't notice."
"Looks like it's our turn next," Waldo interrupted.
"Perhaps," Ursis said, peering out a side Hyperscreen, "but I mink not. 'Caves and ice grottoes hold neither winter nor spring,' as they say,"
"Is true, Nikolai Yanuarievich," Provodrdk agreed.
Brim raised his eyes to the Hyperscreens. As if by some visible sign, the remaining Leaguer starships were turning tail and losing themselves in the starry distance at high speed. Soon afterward, a whole squadron of heavy Drive plumes arrowed obliquely past the convoy and extended rapidly in the direction of the enemy ships. Indistinct in the dying light of the enemy flares, titanic silhouettes of cascading bridges, wide-shouldered hulls, and monstrous disruptor arrays proceeded the two thickest wakes.
"Did you see those?" Brim exclaimed in excitement. "Capital ships...."
"Did I see?" Ursis repeated with a weary smile. "But how could I miss? Battlecruisers, one guesses-I had been expecting them. A little late for poor Obstinate and her crew, perhaps, but 'Old wolves often die alone beneath the trees,' as they say." Then he shrugged and shook his great furry head in sadness. "The war goes on," he rumbled to no one in particular, "and on and on and on...."
Convoy C'Y/98 fetched the great star Hador within the next eighteen metacycles, making landfall at watery Haelic's sprawling Fleet base of Atalanta without further incident. Fleet battlecruisers appeared to nave a dampening effect on the Leaguers' heroism.
At gravity pool 997/A/12, Wilf Brim stood atop Defiant's bridge and shaded his eyes against the pitless sunlight. Aft past her curving deck was the great expanse of gravity pools and serpentine canals that made up the Empire's ancient Fleet base at Atalanta. Beyond, the deep blue of Grand Harbor ended in a distant horizon of brown haze that supported a dome of pure, blistering light streaming from the star Hador, presently at its zenith.
To port, the three neighboring gravity pools had been reduced to a single oblong crater with a filthy lake of stagnant water and accumulated wreckage at its bottom. Frequent attacks from League raiders had turned many sections of the great naval base into enamel houses of concrete and twisted hullmetal. The hot wind smelled constantly of burned paint and scorched metal-no matter from what direction it blew.
Directly aft, a blackened, twisted KA'PPA mast protruded from the debris-strewn feeder canaclass="underline" what was left of S.S. Eu'lull from the distant Rogell Cluster. On her last journey she'd carried a critical cargo of gravity generators for the shipyard, and almost completed the voyage unscathed. Raiding Leaguers caught her only a few yards short of the gravity pool on which Defiant now rested.... Afterward, dockyard workers unloaded the desperately needed cargo from the bottom of the canal. Orange buoys now marked the extremes of the ship's torn hull.
It had been like that all the way in from the landing vector at Grand Harbor: wreck after burned-out wreck. S.S. indigo, a goods ship from LORA'L-91 that crashed and broke her back across a generating station (the big machines were now running under temporary wooden sheds making a terrible racket, even in the middle of the busy afternoon); I.F.S.
Gallant, a small escort that had fought her last battle on the surface-and lost; S.S. Vicronn Enterprise, an old Niolanian starship with a cargo of murderous disruptor flash chambers that threatened to destroy the whole harbor during the week she burned in the center channel of the main canal.
There were too many more....
Defiant, with her lustrous hullmetal, thundering auxiliary generators, and decks full of bustling activity, stood in vivid contrast to the areas of blasted, cratered desolation everywhere around her. On her port side, a frowning, angular Sodeskayan transport, S.S. Pyech V. Bezapanost, noisily readied for a return to space. The big ship's generous expanses of deck swarmed with a confusion of hurrying Bears in colorful native dress dogging down access hatches and stowing portside gear even while final pallets of Drive crystals and gravity generators were lifted from her cargo holds.
Haelic's great Fleet base at Atalanta was miraculously still in full operation-but the price paid to maintain it had so far been utterly gigantic.
Forward, Defiant's bow pointed inland across a further maze of canals toward weathered concrete walls and stone bastions that led upward in ever-distant terraces to the top of a great crag-capped hill. Every square iral of the slopes appeared to be totally covered by a most haphazard and fanciful collection of sunbaked structures-some with flat roofs, some with spires and minarets, others topped by gleaming domes, dazzling turrets, and colonnades of every conceivable shape and form. Surmounting this, the imposing Gradgroat-Norchelite monastery with its awesome, flame-shaped spire dominated everything below. Brim watched a tiny ferry lift in a cloud of dust from the ancient campus and claw its way upward toward one of the thirteen ancient forts still orbiting Haelic that The Order had constructed during a previous, paramilitary existence.