The captain's eyebrows raised a centimeter. The flockers were arriving ahead of schedule.
"They're kicking, sir," Hobbes explained. Kick--the increase of a rate of acceleration. "Maybe they suspect what we're up to."
"Perhaps they simply smell blood, Hobbes. Can we have separation in time?"
Hobbes refocused her attention to the heated conversations among the engineers working below. They were attempting to eject the energy-sink's main generator, to separate the Lynx from its own defensive manifold, which was now glowing white-hot from the point-blank pounding of the frigate's four photon cannon. The manifold was designed to be ejected, of course; warships had to shed their energy-sinks when they grew too hot from enemy fire. But usually the generator remained on the ship while the manifold was discohered, allowed to fly apart in all directions. Captain Zai's plan, however, demanded that the manifold remain intact, retaining its huge shape as the Lynx pulled away from it.
Therefore, the gravity generator that held all the tiny energy-sink modules in place had to leave the frigate--in one piece and still functioning.
The engineers didn't sound happy.
"Slide that bulkhead nowl" the team leader ordered. It was Frick, the First Engineer. Godspite, Hobbes thought. There was still an exterior bulkhead between the generator and open space.
"We're not at vacuum yet," a voice complained. "We'll depressur-ize like hell."
"Then strap yourselves to something and depressurize the bitch!" Frick countered.
Hobbes checked the rank-codes on the voices: Frick of course was head of engineering; the team clearing the obstructing bulkhead came from Emergency Repairs, regular Navy filling in. A chain-of-command problem.
She cut into the argument.
"This is ExO Hobbes. Blow the damn bulkhead. I repeat: Don't bother matching the vacuum, don't waste time sliding--blow it."
Stunned disbelief silenced both sides of the argument for a moment.
"But Hobbes," Frick responded, his line now restricted to officers' ears only. "I've got unarmored ratings down there."
Damn, Hobbes thought. The ratings had been pulled from other sections: maintenance workers, low-gee trainers, cooks. They wouldn't have been assigned armored suits. Their pressure suits could stand hard vacuum, but weren't equipped to survive an explosion.
But there wasn't time. Not to get the ratings out of danger, not even to get the captain's confirmation.
"The flockers are kicking on a steep curve. Time's up. Blow it," she ordered, her voice dry. "Blow it now."
"Does the captain--" the other team leader began.
"Now!"
The situation beacon guttered magenta in her second sight--an explosion aboard ship. A fraction of a second later, the actual shock wave of the blast rippled through the bridge.
Hobbes closed her eyes, but cruel synesthesia didn't permit escape. She could see it: low on the engineering wedge of her crew organizational chart, a row of casualty lights turned yellow. One swiftly flickered to red.
"What was that?" Zai asked. "Separation in twenty seconds." Hobbes couldn't bring herself to say more.
"About time," Zai muttered. The captain ran far fewer diagnostic displays than his executive officer. He must not have seen the casualties yet.
The engineering teams said nothing as they completed their work. Only grunts of physical labor, the hard breathing of shock, and the background sounds of shrieking metal as the generator began to move.
When she was sure that there would be no more delays, Hobbes expended a moment to order a medical response team to the blown bulkhead. The ship would begin acceleration in a few seconds to pull itself away from the manifold, and the medtechs would have to struggle through the pitching corridors in pressure suits. The Lynx was about to run stealthy as well, shutting the artificial gravity and other nonessentials for the few seconds until danger passed. It would take the medtechs minutes to reach the stricken crewmen.
Another of the engineering casualty lights shifted to red. Two lives gone.
Hobbes forced her attention back to the bridge's main airscreen display. The long wedge of the Lynx's primary hull slid back from the radiant circle of the energy-sink manifold, pulling back to interpose the effulgent manifold between frigate and approaching flockers. To conceal the maneuver from the flockers' sharp-eyed sensors, they were running on cold jets, spraying water from the Lynx's waste tubes, using their own shit as reaction mass. The ship moved with painful slowness. The primary hull would be a mere two hundred meters out of position when the drones hit--barely its own girth.
At least Zai had his shield now, Hobbes thought somberly. Two dead, three grievously wounded, and a hull breach all before a single Rix weapon had struck the Lynx. But the blazing manifold now floated between the flockers and their target.
"We're ready, sir."
"Impact in ten seconds," the watch officer said.
"Well done, Hobbes."
Hobbes felt no flush of pride at the rare praise from her captain. She just hoped her sacrifice of the two young ratings would pay off.
flocker squadron The flocker democratic intelligence noticed a change in its target.
The enemy prime was close, a hair over three seconds from contact. Absolute time was moving very slowly, however, compared with the speed of the squadron's thought. The laser pulses with which the flockers exchanged data--the connections that formed their limited compound intellect--moved almost instantly up and down the tightly spaced formation. Squadrons were often spread out over thousands of cubic kilometers, distances which slowed the mechanics of decision 45 making. But this flocker group was so compact that thought moved at lightning speeds; the intellect had plenty of time to observe as the situation evolved over these final, luxurious seconds before impact.
Despite their quick intellect, the flockers couldn't see very well in this formation. The straight column lacked a parallax view, and the intense radiation from the enemy prime's energy-sink manifold had almost blinded the forward flockers, making the center of the manifold--where the prime must be--a dark patch against a vibrant sky.
But why was the manifold already expelling energy? Of the Rix fleet, only the battlecruiser itself could have delivered this much energy to the target, and it was more than eight million kilometers out of range. The flockers suspected that the enemy prime had fired upon its own sink. A bizarre occurrence, this early attempt at self-destruction, sufficiently strange that the squadron's hardwired tactical library offered no answers as to what it might mean.