“Incoming ordnance,” Agincourt sends. “Taking fire from the bogey.”
I can’t hear anything on the channel for a few seconds, and the camera resolution from Cincy is not good enough at this distance to see the clouds of penetrator rods shooting out from the flank of the seed ship and hurtling through the space between the two ships, or the impact blooms on the battleship, but I know they are getting peppered with superhard quills right now that can go completely through the hull of any capital ship in the task group. Agincourt and her sister are built to withstand this sort of kinetic attack, but they’ve obviously never been tested in battle until today. When Agincourt sends again, there are warning klaxons in the background of the transmission.
“We took multiple direct hits on the hull. Penetrations in three sections, but the armor plating kept most of it out. Propulsion unaffected. Alpha mount is still off-line. If Arkhangelsk has the shot, let her take it.”
“Lanky is changing course again,” the tactical officer cautions. “They’re closing the distance. I think they are going for a ramming kill.”
The Lanky seed ship, millions of tons in motion, will do to Agincourt what the battleship did to the other seed ship just a few minutes ago if the ships collide at their current speed. Armor plating or not, Agincourt will get smashed like an egg on a sidewalk.
“Ready to fire,” Arkhangelsk sends. “Agincourt, change course to relative zero by negative zero-nine-zero on my mark. We will fire a three-shot burst from the Alpha mount.”
“Copy course change to relative zero by negative nine-zero on your mark. Call it. And try not to miss,” Agincourt’s tactical officer replies.
I see what Arkhangelsk is trying to do. They want to scrape the Lanky seed ship off Agincourt’s back with a short burst that may not have the energy output to kill the Lanky outright, so Agincourt has a chance to clear the impact range without getting caught in the energy release. We are now calling tactical shots on the fly with weapons we’ve never used outside the gunnery range, with hundreds or thousands of lives riding on a guess.
“Reactor to pulse afterburner. Range twelve thousand kilometers. Target is locked. Agincourt, break away in three, two, one, mark.”
Agincourt’s helmsman lights off the dorsal-bow thrusters, and the ship ducks away from the Lanky behind it and goes through a ninety-degree rotation along its lateral axis far faster than I would have expected a ship of her size to be able to move. The angle of separation to the Lanky seed ship widens momentarily, and then the Lanky ship starts dipping its bow end to follow the battleship. On the plot, both icons are almost on top of each other. On the camera feed from Cincinnati, I can see that there are no more than ten kilometers of space between the ships.
“Alpha mount, three-round burst. Fire.”
The particle beam coming from Arkhangelsk’s main armament isn’t visible in space, but its effects on the seed ship are, and dramatically so. The short burst Arkhangelsk just fired doesn’t blot the seed ship out of space instantly like Agincourt did with her own target, but there’s a blinding flash of thermal radiation that once again triggers the filter on the camera lens, and the sudden and instant energy release shears the Lanky in half somewhere around the front third of its hull. The two parts of the Lanky ship continue their forward momentum, trailing streams of superheated plasma, huge chunks breaking away from both pieces of the broken hull. Some of the wreckage parts slam into Agincourt’s hull and bounce off the dorsal armor plating of the ship, but one piece of superheated hull fragment finds its way to the battleship’s stern and into Agincourt’s fusion-rocket engine pods. I see the bright plumes from her engines go out almost instantly. The Lanky, clearly broken, continues on the trajectory it had started when it tried to match the battleship’s evasive maneuver, but it’s clear that the seed ship is out of control. It yaws around its own lateral axis and then flips stern over bow, inert mass carried by its own momentum.
“Target disabled,” Arkhangelsk sends. “Alpha mount is recharging.”
“All units, Agincourt. We have lost main propulsion. Heavy impact damage to the fusion-rocket array. Reactors are safe, but we are coasting ballistic.”
Agincourt was counter-burning to negate the acceleration from her attack run when the Lanky intercepted her, but the burn wasn’t nearly enough to reverse her course. She’s drifting stern first, still moving at over a thousand meters per second, and the projected trajectory on the plot will carry her clear past Mars and into deep space. With a broken propulsion system, she’ll travel at that speed indefinitely, and there’s not a tug in the combined fleet that can catch up to a 150,000-ton warship going more than a kilometer per second and stop its momentum. The skipper of Agincourt really has only one choice if he wants to save his crew, and it doesn’t take him long to exercise it.
“All units, Agincourt. We are abandoning ship. I repeat, we are abandoning ship and releasing pods. Godspeed, and come collect us when you can. Agincourt Actual out.”
“Goddammit!” I shout into my helmet. Agincourt and Arkhangelsk did their jobs precisely as designed, and yet we’ve just lost an irreplaceable piece of hardware, one of only two ships in the entire fleet that can take on a Lanky head to head and destroy it. But there’s no other call to make for the skipper, and I’d do the same in his place. If they stay on the ship and then fail to repair the fusion engines, they’ll be out of reach of the rest of the fleet within hours, and then they’ll just coast through space until everyone on board starves or suffocates. Maybe they can catch up to the battleship after we’ve won Mars, and maybe there’ll be a way to repair or salvage her, but the crew needs to get off the ship while they’re still in range of friendly forces that can pluck the escape pods out of space.
“Alpha mount, ten-round burst, fire for effect.”
Arkhangelsk’s commander is leaving nothing to chance. The Lanky seed ship, clearly broken and now only a little more than half the size it was just a few minutes ago, disappears both from the plot and Cincinnati’s camera feed. On the plot, its icon merely winks out of existence. On the camera image, the broken seed ship disintegrates in a brilliant flash, leaving nothing behind but a glowing cloud of atomic debris that expands into a sphere and then begins to dissipate.