Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [44]
There was no response from the target as Gorath closed on it, moving to within a hundred meters of the opening amidships. At that distance, the great bulk of the vessel—more than five times the length and three times the diameter of the Prakith light cruiser—filled every viewscreen and gunner’s port.
“Captain!” called the sensor master. “Something odd—at this distance, with a ship that size, the reading from the magnetic anomaly detector should be nearly off the scale. But by the reading I’m getting, I would have said nothing larger than a pinnace was out there.”
Dokrett nodded. “Look at the way she burned,” he said. “Look at the way she’s built. That’s not durasteel or matrix armor. Whatever it is, we’ve never seen its kind before. What do you show for power generation?”
The sensor master waved his hands, frowning in puzzlement. “Field strength is negligible.”
“Very well,” said Dokrett, much pleased by the answer. “Open the ports. Away all pods.”
In the moment between the opening of the ports and the launching of the first breaching pod, something shot out from the intruder and slammed into the hull of Gorath with such force that it knocked Dokrett to his knees. Alarms began to sound all over the bridge as the impact of a second projectile again made the cruiser shake from bow to stern.
“Fire! Fire!” Dokrett screamed as he dragged himself to his feet. A few scattered batteries were already engaged, though their efforts seemed undirected. “Gunnery master! Destroy those launchers!”
“We’re trying. But the angle—we can’t bring the mains to bear from here—”
Movement on the starboard viewer caught Dokrett’s eye, and he glimpsed the third projectile as it leaped across the gap between the two ships—it seemed to be ball-shaped, trailing a thick cable extending back to the intruder. Gorath groaned under the impact.
“What’s happening?” Dokrett demanded. “I want to see what’s happening.”
“I have something,” the sensor master shouted. One pod had cleared its stowage bay, and the relay from its viewers showed that all three projectiles had buried themselves in the cruiser’s hull. Gorath was now anchored to the vagabond by three slender, undulating tethers at bow, stern, and amidships.
“Navigation!” Dokrett called, wheeling around. “Break us free! Thrusters full! Stand by, main engines!”
At that moment, two more projectiles erupted from two different points along the hull of the intruder. These were slender and spiked, and they drove themselves deep into Gorath’s hull.
There was fear in Dokrett’s eyes as he started across the deck toward the navigation master. “Full ahead, now!” he screamed.
But before the captain had covered half the distance to his beleaguered underling, every bridge station exploded in a shower of sparks. Every metal structure of the ship suddenly became part of the path for an enormously powerful electrical current coursing through the tethers from the alien vessel. The current leaped across isolation blocks and vaporized insulators, vaulted across the open air and skipped over the face of the bulkheads, coursed up the legs of crew members and grounded through their faces and hands. In little more than a second, most of the cruiser’s systems were slag.
Just as quickly, most of the crew was dead, and those not yet dead were dying—of massive burns, paralyzed hearts, and scrambled neural systems. On the bridge, the gunnery master and his chair were fused into a single carbonized sculpture. Captain Dokrett was immolated by a lightning spike that used him as a shortcut from a fire-control vent head above his head to the decking under his feet.
By the time the attacking current ceased, small fires were burning in a hundred places throughout the ship, providing the only relief to the darkness that had abruptly fallen inside Gorath’s spaces. But when those fires had consumed the available oxygen, the smoke-filled ship became as black, still, and silent