A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [174]
Tasia changed course to avoid a burning hulk and a large cluster of outlying rocks from the rings. In spite of the obstacles all around, she increased to almost reckless speed. She had no choice. Half of her control systems were dark and dead. One of the engines was entirely off-line.
“Come on, come on!” Tasia worked the navigation controls herself, slapping her palm down on the grid. “This thing handles like an Ildiran skymine in a storm.”
She saw the sparking, blackened hulks of four Mantas, unable to restart their engines to escape from the planetary battlefield. Only one still transmitted a fading distress signal. As Tasia watched in angry horror, three warglobes clustered around the doomed cruiser and opened fire, ripping it into glowing shrapnel.
Another stray hydrogue blast punched a hole in her own Manta’s belly. Atmosphere spurted from a hull breach in two lower decks, killing an unknown number of crewmen. Automatic bulkheads slammed into place, sealing the enclosed spaces to mitigate the damage. A handful of indicator lights on the ship-status grid went completely dark. Tasia felt the wound to her already-battered cruiser like a personal injury.
“Zizu, get to your station! Drop a spread of fracture-pulse drones. Detonate them as soon as we’re far enough away and hope the shock wave messes up the warglobes.” Tasia scanned her screens, searching for the best escape route from the flurry of battle.
The security chief replaced the volunteer hammering ineffectually at the weapons controls. “We’ve only got seven fraks left, Commander!”
“Then hit them with all seven! No sense in saving them for a rainy day. And throw in any slammers we still have in the banks. They may not be enough to crack open the warglobes, but they just might give the drogues a headache!”
The wounded Manta continued to climb, and the thunderous hammer of fracture-pulse drones struck the crystalline spheres. Tasia was thrown against her console by the dissipating shock wave. Behind her, she saw a snowflake of cracks on the nearest warglobe. Maybe the new weapons had had some effect after all.
Reeling, the damaged hydrogue lanced out with more blue lightning. The fringe of another deflected strike sent a surge through the Manta’s functional engines, dropping their energy flux by half. “We need more power than this!” she shouted. “We’ve got to move faster.”
The systems engineer worked with the control panels, yanking off access plates and staring at the confusing mess. “The engines are damaged, Commander. The normal power linkage can’t provide enough flow, and I can’t reroute from secondary systems.”
“We don’t have any secondary systems left!” Lieutenant Elly Ramirez shouted. “It’ll take us a month just to get out of the orbital plane.”
“Shizz, then think outside the box,” Tasia snapped. “Only losers let themselves be limited by the impossible.” She hurried over to the systems engineer, stumbling as a faint shot caromed off their hull. Tasia couldn’t pay attention to the impact at the moment. “Reroute from life-support systems. Dump every scrap of power into our engines—and do it yesterday, if not sooner.”
“But without the life support, Commander, we’ll—”
“Take shallower breaths and put on a sweater for the next hour. This is about surviving. And if we don’t get away from these warglobes, we’ll all be part of a nice war memorial in the rings of Osquivel.” She shouldered the engineer aside and began yanking and rerouting cables and controls. “If you’re gonna serve aboard my ship, you’d better know how the systems work. And be prepared to make them work no matter what the circumstances.”
She heard a distress call from Patrick Fitzpatrick’s cruiser, begging for reinforcements, but he was deep among the hydrogues, and not many functional EDF ships remained. Especially not down there. He called simultaneously for his weapons officers to open fire and for the rest of the crew to abandon ship.
Tasia had no firepower to assist Fitzpatrick. Part of her wanted to go back and help him fight free just so she could give him a black eye later,