On impact, Brim's veteran Starfury smashed down with all its twenty-seven thousand milstons displacement. At first, there was a terrific shock. The huge machine bounced up, hurtling him painfully against his restraints and the side of his recliner. A great expanse of hullmetal tore off the bow and passed within daggers of the top Hyperscreens. The pontoon separated with a deafening, shrieking pandemonium. Instinctively, he crossed his arms in front of his faceplate. A second terrific scraping screech and the whole Universe outside disappeared behind towering walls of water. Then came a jolt of such violence that he broke through his restraints, thumbing his own battlesuit to minimum freedom even as he smashed headlong into the instrument panel. The Universe dissolved into a sheet of red pockmarked with glittering points of light.
Then silence. Sudden—stunning—silence that lasted as long as the initial shock. After that, the voice circuits again filled with cries of pain and terror. Through the cracked Hyperscreens, Brim could see that the Starfury had come to rest nose down and canted steeply to port. He pushed his way out of his recliner and carefully stood with one foot on the arm and the other on the deck, peering around in the dim light of the ship's emergency lighting system. Many of the bridge crew were already making their way aft toward the companionway hatch, but a number of still forms remained slumped at their consoles.
Opening his visor for a moment, he could smell the ship burning somewhere, and a bright flickering light was already reflecting from the water—only a few irals below the port Hyperscreens. Not that there was much to burn on a Starfury, but as the collapsium-96 hullmetal "uncollapsed" in the presence of oxygen, the terrific heat generated tended to set everything around it ablaze, too. He shut his visor and began to follow the others aft toward the companionway over and around the consoles that only a few metacycles ago seemed to have been so cleverly placed. He stopped at a number of "occupied" consoles, but managed to rouse only one other soul, whom he pushed groggily before him.
Abruptly, the companionway hatch burst open, and at least ten figures in battlesuits burst into the ruined bridge in front of a white-hot brightness. Trapped by the fire! In the lurid flickering, he could see that the last one through the hatch was Barbousse—who immediately slammed it shut and dogged it tight.
"Cap'm Brim," he shouted—silencing the clamor that now filled the voice circuits, "is that you?"
"It is, Chief," Brim growled from his headset. "Looks like the companionway isn't an option anymore."
"Right you are, sir," Barbousse replied. "An' this bridge won't be in a couple o' cycles, either. Fire's really spreadin' back there—fast."
Brim turned, started retracing his path to the forward end of the bridge. "Gotta take out a Hyperscreen panel," he said, looking around for something—anything—to use as a truncheon. A globular display had come loose on impact and lay smashed against the forward bulkhead near his feet. Grasping its heavy metal base, he climbed back into his dizzily canted seat and began to smash against the quarter panel. Its thick crystal was cracked in a number of places, but it stubbornly resisted his blows. Again he hit it. And again. Abruptly, a lurid brilliance filled the bridge—the radiation fire had claimed the aft bulkhead. Desperately, he smashed at the Hyperscreen again. There were only a few moments until they all fried in their battlesuits.
"Cap'm," Barbousse said. "Can I try?"
Shaking from his efforts, Brim climbed out of the seat. "Give it a go, Chief," he panted.
"Aye, sir," Barbousse said. Raising the blast pike he'd been carrying, he effortlessly blasted the crystal from its frame in a midst of glittering shards. Then with the butt of the powerful weapon, he carefully smoothed off the jagged edges that remained in the frame. "A little noisy," he observed, ushering the survivors out and into the water, "but there's nothin' better than a blast pike for openin'
Hyperscreens."
Brim had to chuckle in spite of himself. "You make quite a point there," he said, waiting until the big rating had exited before he took one last look around the bridge—the radiation fire was now only a few irals away. He scrambled out onto the deck and jumped into the flame-lit water. As his battlesuit bobbed him to the surface, he took one last look at the Starfury, towering over him—a smoking, crumpling skeleton that blazed gruesomely from stem to stern. Then he swam as quickly as possible to the slimy stone breakwater of the turning basin where eager hands reached out and dragged him onto dry land.
Around him, the great city of Avalon was also in flames. Acrid smoke assaulted his nostrils as soon as he opened his helmet while huge, pear-shaped bursts of flame rose up above the horizon of blazing goods houses that surrounded the turning basin. Thunderous, deafening explosions erupted from nearby disrupter hits and the heat on his face felt as though he were standing in an oven. He looked at the pitifully small garnering around him while debris pattered and clicked to the pavement around him.
"What're we going to do?" someone asked shakily on the voice circuits.
Someone else was sobbing in his helmet. "This is awful," another groaned.
"Quit grumbling and feel thankful you've got battlesuits to wear," Brim growled. "The Chief and I are going to use ours to see if we can help people who don't have them. I suggest the rest of you split up into pairs and do the same. We'll meet back here..." He checked the cheap timepiece he'd purchased to replace the good one he'd lost in Effer'wyck. It was broken already. "At dawn," he finished. "Now get snapping. All of you! The Fleet isn't paying us to lollygag around watching fires. Got that?"
"Aye, Skipper..."
"Got that, Captain."
"See you at dawn, Captain."
In moments, they were gone. Grimly, Brim nodded to Barbousse. "All right, Chief," he said, "let's see what we can do." With that he began jogging along a street that was a better vision of Hell than the worst apparition that had ever slithered from the nightmares of a religious zealot. The final raider departed nearly sixteen metacycles after the attacks began, and for the remainder of his life, Brim's dreams were haunted by the images of that lurid night filled with horror...
As dawn came to Avalon City on that first anniversary of the Imperial declaration of war, the sky remained nearly dark with heavy layers of smoke. Everything still appeared to be blazing, and it seemed as if the valiant, all-night efforts of the Imperial fire brigades had amounted to nothing at all. As Brim and Barbousse wearily returned to the ship with singed and blackened battlesuits, they watched men, women, and children begin to emerge from their holes into the gray, smoke-filled morning. Nothing seemed to have escaped the Leaguers' fury.
They were the last to reach the crash site, though it was inarguably clear that the other members of the crew had likewise spent the night assisting the stricken city in any way they could. Three were missing, two of whom had seemingly disappeared from the face of the planet. The third was last seen entering a burning building moments before it collapsed. The ship itself had been reduced to a pile of twisted wreckage protruding awkwardly from the turning basin some two hundred irals from the seawall.
Brim led the battered little group on foot nearly ten c'lenyts to the Lake Mersin Fleet Base, where he immediately checked in with FleetPort 30 and set up return transportation for himself and his crew.
The Leaguers would surely return—as soon as they possibly could. And after he saw what kind of damage they could cause, he was anxious to get back behind the helm of a Starfury again. He had a number of personal accounts to settle, and he wasn't at all selective about which Leaguers began to pay.