Young Miles - Lois McMaster Bujold [75]
"My God! Look!" cried the communications officer.
The RG 132, torpid, massive, was rolling away from the docking station. Its normal space drives blared at full power, giving it the usual acceleration of an elephant swimming in molasses.
Auson dropped, unheeded, from Miles's attention. "The RG 132, loaded, has four times the mass of that pocket dreadnought," he breathed.
"Which is why it flies like a pig and costs a fortune in fuel to move!" yelled Auson. "That pilot officer of yours is crazy if he thinks he can outrun Tung—"
"Go, Arde!" cried Miles, jumping up and down. "Perfect! You'll pin him right up against that smelting unit—"
"He's not—" began Auson. "Son-of-a-bitch! He is!"
Tung, like Auson, was apparently late in divining the bulk freighter's true intentions. Verniers began to flare, to rotate the warship into position to thrust toward open space. The dreadnought got one shot off, which was absorbed with little visible effect in the freighter's cargo area.
Then, almost in slow motion, with a kind of crazy majesty, the RG 132 lumbered into the warship—and kept going. The dreadnought was nudged into the huge smeltery. Projecting equipment and surface housings snapped and spun off in all directions.
Action calling for reaction, after an aching moment the smeltery heaved back. A wave of motion passed down its adjoining structures, like a giant's game of crack-the-whip. Smashed edges of the dreadnought were caught up on the smeltery, thoroughly entangled. Gaudy chemical fires gouted here and there into the vacuum.
The RG 132 drifted off. Miles stood before the tactics room screen and stared in stunned fascination as half the freighter's outer hull delaminated and peeled into space.
* * *
The RG 132 was the final detail to be mopped up in the capture of the metals refinery. Thorne's commandos smoked the last of the Oserans out of their crippled ship, and cleared the outlying structures of resisters and refugees. The wounded were sorted from the dead, prisoners taken under guard, booby traps detected and deactivated, atmosphere restored in key areas. Then, at last, the manpower and shuttles could be spared to warp the old freighter into the docking station.
A smudged figure in a pressure suit stumbled out of the flex tube into the loading bay.
"They're bent! They're bent!" cried Mayhew to Miles, pulling off his helmet. His hair stuck out in all directions, plastered by dried sweat.
Baz and Elena strode up to him, looking, with their helmets off, like a pair of dark knights after the tournament. Elena's hug pulled the pilot off his feet; from Mayhew's suffused look, Miles guessed she was still having a little trouble with her servos. "It was great, Arde!" she laughed.
"Congratulations," added Baz. "That was the most remarkable tactical maneuver I've ever seen. Beautifully calculated trajectory—your impact point was perfect. You hung him up royally, but without structural damage—I've just been over it—with a few repairs, we've captured ourselves a working dreadnought!"
"Beautiful?" said Mayhew. "Calculated? You're as crazy as he is—" He pointed at Miles. "As for damage—look at it!" He waved over his shoulder in the direction of the RG 132.
"Baz says they have the equipment to rig some sort of hull repairs at this station," Miles soothed. "It'll delay us here for a few more weeks, which I don't like any more than you do, but it can be done. God help us if anybody asks us to pay for it, of course, but with luck I should be able to commandeer—"
"You don't understand!" Mayhew waved his arms in the air. "They're bent. The Necklin rods."
The body of the jump drive, as the pilot and his viral control circuitry was its nervous system, was the pair of Necklin field generator rods that ran from one end of the ship to the other. They were manufactured, Miles recalled, to tolerances of better than one part in a million.
"Are you sure?" said Baz. "The housings—"
"You can stand in the housings and look up the rods and see the warp. Actually see it! They look like skis!" Mayhew wailed.
Baz