The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [143]
“One of the midshipmen—”
“Mr. Renner, get back aboard MacArthur’s cutter. Staley, you have your orders.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Renner departed, seething.
Three midshipmen and a dozen Marines hung from crash webbing in the main cabin of Lenin’s cutter. The civilians and regular crew were gone, and the boat moved away from Lenin’s black bulk.
“All right, Lafferty,” Staley said. “Take us to MacArthur’s starboard side. If nothing attacks us, you will ram, aiming for the tankage complex aft of bulkhead 185.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Lafferty did not react noticeably. He was a big-boned man, a plainsman from Tabletop. His hair was ash-blond and very short, and his face was all planes and angles.
The crash webbing was designed for high impacts. The midshipmen hung like flies in some monstrous spider web. Staley glanced at Whitbread. Whitbread looked at Potter.
Both looked away from the Marines behind them. “OK. Go,” Staley ordered. The drive roared.
The real defensive hull of any warship is the Langston Field. No material object could withstand the searing heat of fusion bombs and high energy lasers. Since anything that can get past the Field and the ship’s defensive fire will evaporate anything below, the hull of a warship is a relatively thin skin. It is, however, only relatively thin. A ship must be rigid enough to withstand high acceleration and jolt.
Some compartments and tanks, however, are big, and in theory can be crushed by enough impact momentum. In practice nobody had ever taken a combat party aboard a ship that way as far as Staley’s frantically searching memory could tell him. It was in the Book, though. You could get aboard a crippled ship with her Field intact by ramming. Staley wondered what damn fool had first tried it.
The long black blob that enclosed MacArthur became a solid black wall without visible motion. Then the shovel blade reentry shield went up. Horst watched blackness grow on the forward view screen as he peered over Lafferty’s shoulder.
The cutter surged backward. An instant of cold as they passed through the Field, then the screaming of grinding metal. They stopped.
Staley unclasped his crash webbing. “Get moving,” he ordered. “Kelley, cut our way through those tanks.”
“Yes, sir.” The Marines swept past. Two aimed a large cutting laser at the buckled metal that had once been the interior wall of a hydrogen tank. Cables stretched from the weapon back into the mangled cutter.
The tank wall collapsed, a section blown outward and narrowly missing the Marines. More air whistled out, and dead miniature Moties blew about like autumn leaves.
The corridor walls were gone. Where there had been a number of compartments there was a heap of ruins, cutoff bulkheads, surrealistic machinery, and everywhere dead miniatures. None seemed to have had pressure suits.
“Christ Almighty,” Staley muttered. “OK, Kelley, get moving with those suits. Let’s go.” He charged forward across the ruins to the next airtight compartment door. “Shows pressure on the other side,” he said. He reached into the communications box on the bulkhead and plugged in his suit mike. “Anybody there?”
“Corporal Hasner here, sir,” a voice answered promptly. “Be careful back there, that area’s full of miniatures.”
“Not now,” Staley answered. “What’s your status in there?”
“Nine civilians without no suits in here, sir. Three Marines left alive. We don’t know how to get them scientist people out without suits.”
“We’ve got suits,” Staley said grimly. “Can you protect the civilians until we can get through this door? We’re in vacuum.”
“Lord, yes, sir. Wait a minute.” Something whirred. Instruments showed the pressure falling beyond the