“Damn it!” Angela Larkin snarled, and punched at her console in frustration. “We just lost tubes one and two, sir!”
“Destroyed or off-line?” Sikander asked.
“Off-line, looks like we lost the capacitor for the upper launch tubes.” She twisted in her couch to look up at him. “Sir, those were the two good Phantoms.”
All that work to figure out what was wrong with the torpedoes, and the only two good ones we have on board are dead in their tubes! Sikander grimaced. Torpedoes in dead launch tubes were not going to be very useful, and right now Hector needed all the firepower she could get. “Tell Chief Maroth to rig a jumper cable from the other tubes,” he told Larkin. The crewmen manning the torpedo room were probably already working on it, but maybe they’d be able to get tubes one and two operational by cross-connecting the power feeds from tubes three and four.
“Aye, sir,” Larkin replied. She turned back to her console.
“Weapons, I need that torpedo spread,” Randall called back to Sikander. “The range looks good to me!”
“Torpedoes off-line, Mr. Randall,” Sikander said. “We lost power to the launch tubes. No ETA on repairs.”
Randall swore under his breath. “Very well,” he replied. “Keep it up with the main battery, then.”
“Aye, sir!” Sikander returned his attention to Streitaxt, now well within his engagement envelope. At twenty thousand kilometers, he opened up on her. “Salvo starboard!” he called, and hit the firing keys. It was perhaps a little long for shooting at a destroyer, but it wouldn’t hurt to force Streitaxt’s crew to start thinking about taking evasive action. He quickly tuned out the chatter of reports and commands not directed at him, concentrating on directing his share of Hector’s main battery. Minutes crawled by as Hector began taking fire from both sides, and the pace of the battle threatened to overwhelm the bridge crew altogether. More hits rocked the cruiser, setting off a chorus of alarms.
“Damage report!” Magdalena Juarez barked over Hector’s command circuit. “We’ve lost generator three, effective power ouput now at sixty-five percent capacity! Drive plate two is off-line, estimated time to repair ten minutes! Hull breaches in the mess deck, personnel office, Auxiliary Engine Room One!”
Sikander winced at the growing list of things that no longer worked on board Hector. He could smell burning insulation nearby, although it was not yet so toxic that he needed to close his visor. Red lights blinked on a dozen consoles around the bridge, and not a few of them flashed on his own weapons display. Two of Hector’s main-battery turrets had been knocked out, and a third was power-starved until the gunner’s mates stationed there could rig a jumper cable big enough to take the energy load needed to fire one of the Mark V K-cannons. The ship’s inertial compensation no longer worked at full effect, either; every jink and swerve from the helm threw Sikander from side to side in his battle couch, and the hull shuddered and groaned under each new impact. Like tired boxers, the two cruisers continued to wear each other down, but neither had yet scored a knockout punch.
“Acknowledged!” Captain Markham replied. “Can you get generator three back on-line, Ms. Juarez? We need the power.”
“It’s destroyed, Captain,” the chief engineer replied. “Half the casing is gone, looks like primary impact from a heavy K-cannon. I can redline the remaining units and give you a little more, but it’s dangerous.”
“Do so,” Markham ordered. “We no longer have the luxury of safety margins.” Her voice remained admirably calm, but her fingers clenched the arms of her couch with fierce strength. Sikander swallowed the words of warning that came to his lips. It wasn’t his job to second-guess the captain on damage management, and for all he knew, she might be exactly correct in her decision.
“Salvo port!” called Michael Girard. So far it seemed like the ensign was doing well with his half of Hector’s main guns: Half a dozen major hits scored and pocked Panther’s hull, and she appeared to be sluggish at the helm. Sikander hadn’t yet landed a good hit on Streitaxt, but he’d grazed her twice, and the destroyer danced wildly at the edge of its own effective range to dodge his fire.
“Tactical, tubes three and four are ready to launch,” Angela Larkin called out. “We have good solutions on Target Alpha!”
Sikander looked up in alarm. “Those are bad torpedoes, Ms. Larkin!”
“They’ll work, sir! I set up a new attack program that won’t trigger the reset.”
“Weapons, do we have torpedoes or not?” Randall demanded from the tactical console.
Sikander realized that while he’d been absorbed in the task of trying to hit Streitaxt, Larkin had stayed focused on her job. The older torpedoes faulted out in the standard attack program, so she’d punched in custom settings for the weapons that were in functional tubes rather than wait for power to be restored to the off-line weapons—and she’d managed it in ten minutes. A month ago I asked her what would happen if we had to fire torpedoes in anger, he remembered. Now we find out.
“Tactical, the torps are good. We can take the shot,” he told Randall. Maybe the effort to isolate the torpedo failure hadn’t been wasted, after all. Trusting Larkin to execute the attack, he focused on Streitaxt again and resumed fire.
“Helm, torpedo attack,” Hiram Randall ordered. “Target Alpha, two torps! As weapons bear … fire!”
“Firing!” Larkin’s console briefly assumed control of Hector’s maneuvers. Expertly she spun the ship on its vertical axis, bringing Hector’s bow-mounted torpedo tubes to face Panther, and punched the keys to fire two Phantoms. These were not practice torpedoes—these were war shots, fitted with deadly fusion warheads. The ship shuddered as the tubes ejected the heavy missiles; they streaked away from their launch tubes, and vanished into warp bubbles.
“Streitaxt firing torpedoes!” Sublieutenant Keane shouted from the sensor station. On Sikander’s display, the Dremish destroyer suddenly wheeled to point her bow at Hector and release her own spread. For an instant, she couldn’t dodge—and his K-cannons were ready.
“Evade torpedoes!” Randall shouted.
Sikander hit his firing keys just before Chief Holtz at the helm wrenched Hector into an emergency torpedo-evasion maneuver. “Salvo starboard!” Sikander called out. Hector rocked and hummed with the magnetic recoil of the big Mark V K-cannons hurling their lethal shot at the oncoming Dremish destroyer. And then several things happened almost at once.
Hector’s torpedo spread arrived at Panther, the weapons dropping their warp bubbles and twisting through terminal maneuvers in the fraction of a second between returning to normal space and detonation. Each Phantom carried a rugged fusion bomb of almost half a megaton. In direct contact they would vaporize a battleship, but warp torpedoes weren’t fused for impact—they were proximity weapons, designed to detonate as soon as they were sufficiently close to the target to cause crippling damage. Larkin set up her attack as a one-two punch; the first Phantom dove in and burst a few hundred meters from Panther’s waist, boiling off the outer skin with the fusion blast just before the second torpedo appeared out of nowhere and detonated even closer, wrecking the cruiser’s main power rooms and sending a wave of impulsive shock racing through her structure. Panther’s armored hull protected the crew from lethal radiation, but shock and spalling fragments wrecked vulnerable control stations and vital systems throughout the Dremish ship.