Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(87)
“Negative, Regulus. Get out of the way and make the best of what comes after. It’s been an honor serving with you all. Take care to pick up the escape pods we left behind, please. Campbell out.”
There’s a blip on the display, coming in from the opposite end of the screen from the Lanky intruder, who is now fifty thousand kilometers out and driving on undeterred.
“All units, cease fire! Weapons hold! Weapons hold!”
Indy is moving at full burn, and judging by her insane speed, she must have been burning her main engines at full power for a while. The little OCS is nowhere near as heavy or as fast as the freighter we used to destroy the Lanky ship in the Fomalhaut system, however. I’m not an ace in physics, but even I can do the math involved. Our last-ditch freighter missile at Fomalhaut needed days of constant acceleration to get up to Lanky-killing speed. Indy has had only a few hours to accelerate, and there’s no way she’s going fast enough to destroy a seed ship by ramming it. Colonel Campbell is about to throw Indy against the Lanky ship for nothing, and there’s not a thing we can do about it. The orbital combat ship has turned itself into a guided kinetic missile that is hurling itself into the jaws of the shark at tens of thousands of meters per second. She crosses our sensor threshold and streaks across it in mere seconds.
I want to close my eyes. I don’t want to be witness to the death of Indy and however many of her crew that decided to forsake the escape pods and steer the ship toward its target. But I can’t tear my eyes away from the display.
Then there’s a small new sun hanging in the blackness of space fifty kilometers away.
“Indy is—Jesus, Indy has hit the Lanky. At fifty K per second.”
For just a moment, the universe freezes in place.
Then, through the white-hot bloom of the impact, the Lanky reappears.
“Goddammit,” I shout, and pound the dashboard of the Dragonfly with my bandaged hand, an action I instantly regret.
“Lanky ship now at forty-eight thousand, three-five-two by positive zero-zero-one,” Regulus’s tactical officer sends, and it sounds like he’s reading the names off a headstone.
“Aspect change, aspect change on the Lanky,” someone else says. “He’s ejecting something. Second contact, same bearing.”
Something breaks loose from the Lanky ship and gets flung aside into its own trajectory at hundreds of meters per second. Then another object follows, and then it’s a constant stream, things of irregular shapes and sizes leaving the ship and forming a trail behind the approaching ship.
“He’s damaged. Holy shit, the Lanky is damaged. Indy took a piece out of him.”
The hull of the approaching ship is no longer the smooth, organic-looking solid thing I’m used to seeing. Instead, the front end of the Lanky ship has a huge chunk missing from it, a scar that extends from the bow of the thing halfway down one side. As I train the camera on it at maximum magnification, I can see matter tearing loose from the wound and tumbling off into space. The hole in the Lanky ship has a strange, fibrous appearance.
“All units, weapons free. Aim for the hole in that hull. Whatever you have left, let the son of a bitch have it.”
A dozen ships open up with their rail guns. The barrage fire peppers the undamaged portion of the Lanky’s hull without effect, but the hole in the hull seems to absorb the cannon fire instead of deflecting it. Some of the ships have missiles left, and they add them to the shooting-range frenzy that has seized the gunnery officers on every task force vessel.
“Nuclear fire mission,” Regulus announces. “Firing tubes one through eight. All units, prepare for impact effects.”
Eight more missile trails streak toward the Lanky, now forty thousand kilometers out and closing rapidly.
“Get clear! All units, evasive action. Get out of his way!”
There’s a mad scramble as a dozen ships go in a dozen different directions to avoid colliding with the kilometers-long behemoth hurtling toward the battle group. The first of Regulus’s nukes goes wide and streaks past the Lanky. The second shatters against the undamaged front section and expends itself in a short-lived fission bloom. Then the rest arrive and seemingly hit the hull all at once. At least three of Regulus’s nukes disappear into the wound on the side of the Lanky ship.
The side of the Lanky seed ship bows out like the gills of a breathing shark. Then a much bigger section of the hull blows off the Lanky and disintegrates, and this time there is blindingly bright nuclear fire behind it. The seed ship shudders from bow to stern.
“Multiple direct hits! Multiple hits with secondaries!”
“Got you, you son of a bitch,” Halley shouts next to me.
The Lanky ship’s flight path becomes unstable. The long cigar shape from hell starts to wobble on its trajectory, like an oscillating tuning fork. The stern starts swinging out of line, and the Lanky careens sideways, still on the same bearing but with the bow pointing forty-five degrees off course. The battle group’s rail guns and ship-to-ship missiles keep raking the massive hull. Much of the ordnance bounces off the undamaged hull the way it always has, but almost as much is pouring into the open flank of the seed ship.
Our formation is in disarray, each ship evading the Lanky and firing its weapons as fast as it can bring them to bear. It’s a brutal short-ranged exchange, and even though the seed ship is clearly mortally wounded, it’s not dead yet. From the undamaged side of the hull, penetrator rods spray into space, blindly but in large numbers. We are not in the line of fire, but two of the task force ships are less lucky. Tripoli takes a broadside that tears her up all the way from bow to stern, and she starts spinning out of control, bleeding frozen air and shrapnel. One of the smaller corvettes that joined us at the last minute simply blows apart under the hits, shattered alloy and steel hurtling in all directions. Then the Lanky is past the task force, hurtling toward Earth sideways and shedding enormous pieces of itself.