Fearless lurched. The entire ship bucked like a terrified thing, alarms howled, and Killian's head jerked up.
"Forward impellers down!" he barked.
Dominica Santos's face went white in Central Damage Control as the focused blast of X rays slashed into Fearless's bows. Alarms shrieked at her, screaming like damned souls until Lieutenant Manning stabbed the button that killed them.
"Forward hold open to space. Mooring Tractor One's gone. Heavy casualties in Fusion One," Manning snapped. "Oh, Jesus! We've lost Alpha Two, Ma'am!"
"Shit!" Santos pounded on her keyboard, querying the central computers, and swore again as a scarlet-daubed schematic of the forward impeller nodes flashed before her. She studied the damage for just a moment, dark eyes bitter, then hit her intercom key.
"Bridge. Captain," a cool soprano, barely frayed about the edges, said in her ear.
"Skipper, this is Santos. The whole forward drive segment's gone into automatic shutdown. We've lost Number Two Alpha node, and it looks like Beta Three went with it."
"Can you restore them?" There was urgency in the captain's voice, and Santos closed her eyes in furious thought.
"No way, Ma'am," she said through gritted teeth. Her eyes popped back open, and she traced the blinking schematic with a fingertip while her mind raced. Then she nodded to herself. "The main ring's broken at Alpha Two and Beta Three. I think we've got some more damage at Beta Four, but the rest of the ring looks okay," she said. "I can probably route around the wrecked nodes, then run up Beta Two and Fourassuming Four's still with usto compensate in the impeller wedge, but it's going to take time."
"How long?"
"Ten, maybe fifteen minutes, Ma'am. At best."
"Very well, Dominica. Get on it as quickly as you can."
"I'm on it, Skipper!" Santos unlocked her shock frame and jerked up out of her chair. "Allen, I'm going forward. You're damage control officer till I get back."
"But what about Fusion One?" Manning demanded. "It's open to space and we've lost two-thirds of the forward power watch!"
"Oh, shit! " Santos bent over his panel, studying the readouts, and her face tightened. Not only were most of her people dead, but there was already an imbalance in the fusion bottle temperature. She stabbed keys and grunted in relief as the data readouts changed.
"The bottle's holding steady," she said quickly. "Cut the reactor out of the circuit to be safeFusion Two can handle the loadand keep an eye on that temperature. If it starts climbing any faster than it is, let me know."
"Yes, Ma'am." Manning bent back over his console, and Santos headed for the hatch at a run.
"Direct hit, Sir!" Lieutenant Commander Jamal announced, and Coglin nodded in sharp approval. At last! And about damned time, too; they'd been firing at Fearless for over seventeen minutes.
"Her acceleration's falling, Sir." Jamal's voice was sharp with excitement, and he grinned hugely. "We must have taken out her forward impellers!"
"Good, Jamal. Very good! Now do it again," Coglin growled.
"Aye, aye, Sir!"
Honor bit her lip so hard she tasted blood, but somehow she kept the sickness from her face. Fearless had just dropped to half power, which was bad enough, but the loss of the alpha node could be disaster. Despite the loss in acceleration, she was continuing to close the range on Sirius, if more slowly, for her velocity was almost fifteen hundred KPS higher than the Q-ship's. But Sirius was now out-accelerating her by almost 1.5 KPS. Unless Santos could restore the forward nodes, the range would begin to open again in less than seventeen minutes.
Yet that was the least of Honor's worries. She stared into the visual display, watching it sparkle and flash as Fearless's over-strained point defense beat aside the missiles coming in at shorter and shorter intervals, and fought her despair.
Without the alpha node, Fearless couldn't reconfigure her forward impellers for Warshawski sail. If Sirius broke through into hyper space and reached the Tellerman, she would run away from Fearless at over ten times the cruiser's maximum acceleration . . . and Honor couldn't follow her into the wave on impellers alone, anyway.
She had forty-three minutes to destroy the Q-ship; otherwise, it had all been for nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Surgeon Lieutenant Montoya didn't even look up as the sickbay hatch hissed open yet again. Three crewmen stumbled through it, white-faced and pale and carrying another survivor from Fusion One. They fought to protect their moaning burden from bumps or jars, but the sudden, wrenching impact of a second hit threw them off balance just as they entered sick bay. They staggered against a bulkhead, and the woman they carried shrieked in agony as her shattered legs took the shock.
Montoya looked up at that. His face was blank of all expression, driven into non-feeling by the horror about him, and his eyes were flat as they darted to the injured woman. Her scream died into a sobbing gasp of hurt, and he grunted as he identified her condition as one which was not immediately life-threatening. He lowered his head once more, flipping it to drop his magnifiers back down off his forehead as his wet, scarlet-gloved hands moved in the shattered wreckage which had once been a power room tech's torso.
A harried sick berth attendantthe only one he could spare from emergency surgery to triage the woundedhurried over to the newcomers, and Montoya's hands flew as he fought to save the fading life before him.
He failed.
The flat, harsh buzz of the monitors told its tale, and he stepped back from the corpse, already stripping off his gloves to re-glove for the next. A fresh, limp body was lifted into position, a woman who'd lost one arm already and was about to lose another, and Montoya moved like a machine as he jammed his hands into the fresh gloves and bent over the table once more. He leaned forward into its sterile field with a face of stone . . . and the hatch hissed open behind him yet again.
"Not therehere! " Dominica Santos snapped. "Get your ass over here and heave, goddamn it!"
Huge, blue-white sparks spat and glared about her, silent in the vacuum of the shattered drive compartment, and Boatswain MacBride grabbed one of her suited repair party and literally dragged the man into position.
"Get your back into it, Porter!" the bosun snarled at the electronicist, and stepped up close beside him.
There was neither time nor space for them to reach into the conduit with tools, and the two of them wrapped their gauntleted hands about the half-molten, fire-fountaining cable run. Bright, savage discharges rippled up their arms and haloed their shoulders, and the harsh, straining grunt of their effort echoed over Santos's suit com. One end of the cable harness ripped loose, the sparks died, and Santos stepped in with a laser cutter. She stood ankle-deep in burned out circuit boards and bits of bulkhead blown away by battle damage or chopped frantically aside by her damage control party. Wreckage slid and shifted about her feet, and she gasped in triumph as she got the cutter in and slashed away the end of the damaged cable.
MacBride and Porter staggered backward, crashing into the compartment's rear bulkhead, and the engineer waved savagely at the work party behind her.
"Get that replacement cable in here now. Move, damn you!"
Johan Coglin flinched involuntarily as yet another of Fearless's missiles punched through Jamal's defenses. It detonated, and the deadly rapiers of its clustered lasers clawed at his ship. One of them hit, punching through the radiation shielding inside the wedge as if it were tissue paper, and a fresh boil of atmosphere gushed from Sirius's side.