At one percent light speed, being rammed was as good as being railgunned.
"Shit," Hobbes said.
It would take her days of careful reconstruction to determine exactly what happened over the next few seconds.
The first flocker in the pack had been melted into an irregular blob by the blazing energy-sink manifold. Having lost its penetration shape, it pancaked against the warship's hull, its diameter expanding to a half-meter as it punched through the three outer bulkheads. The force of its entry into Gunnery Hardpoint Four hit the crewmen there like a compression bomb, imploding their pressure suits, shattering every non-metal object into shards. The wide entry hole sucked out most of the air in the hardpoint before the sprays of sealant foam could do their work. Hardpoint Four housed a highly volatile meson-beam emitter, and was armored on all sides to protect the Lynx in case the weapon ever blew. The flocker, its momentum exhausted, flattened itself against the next bulkhead, never exiting the hardpoint.
Between the massive shock wave and decompression, none of the seven crew was suitable for reanimation.
The next flocker, which struck the Lynx four nanoseconds later, had maintained its bullet shape through the manifold. Its small entry hole was sealed without much decompression, and it plunged through lower decks twenty-six through -eight on a diagonal path. It destroyed several burn beds in a temporary sickbay, and cut through a section of synesthesia processing hardware, tearing out a fist-width of optical circuitry sixty meters long, drawing a geyser of powdered glass and phosphorus behind itself through a long vertical access hallway. The cloud of burning glass blinded four members of an emergency repair team and one data analyst, and caused lung damage to a dozen other crew scattered along the hallway. The drone emerged from the frigate's port dorsal sensor array.
The Lynx's sensors were not appreciably reduced, but the frigate's processors were cut by twenty percent. All its Al nodes became slower, its synesthesia grainier, its weapons dumber.
Three flockers in close tandem struck the turbine that powered the lynx's railguns. This dense coil of superconducting wire was sufficient to stop one of the drones cold, sending a deep shudder through the ship. The other two were deflected sternward, tumbling through a full magazine of minesweeper drones. The drones were armed with fragmentation canisters, and a chain reaction of explosions rocked the drone bay. The magazine was shielded to prevent such a calamity from spreading throughout the ship, but the two flockers passed out of the magazine and drew the explosions after them, severely damaging the drone launch rail.
They careened through the hullalloy-armored drone bay, and finally exited the Lynx through the frigate's open launch doors at a much reduced speed. They would have had sufficient reaction mass remaining to turn and attack the ship again, but neither had survived the pum-melingwith its intelligence intact.
Another flocker punched through the belly-side armor plate and entered the main damage control room, where Ensign Trevor San had just helped to eject the energy-sink manifold. She was watching as it began to discohere when the drone tore through her from foot to head, pulping her organs and robbing her of immortality. Her crew-mates were sprayed with blood, but it took them long seconds to realize which of them had been hit. Ensign San had practically disappeared. The drone then passed through several storage decks, destroying medical supplies and stowed personal effects, then drove straight into the core of the Lynx's singularity generator, which was running at high-active level. The pseudo black hole swallowed the flocker without so much as a tremor registering on its monitors.
Hobbes later calculated the chances of such a hit at several-thousand-to-one against, and noted that nothing so bizarrely exact had ever been recorded on an Imperial warship.
The last flocker passed through the belly-side waste tanks, which had been brought to high pressure to propel the Lynx silently out of harm's way. The pressure of the unrecycled water was over five hundred atmospheres, dense enough to slow the flocker considerably. But the drone's reaction drive was still active, and it managed to pass through the tanks, trailing a stream of waste water that filled the adjacent bacterial recycling chamber in ten seconds. The processing 55 chief, Samuel Vries, was knocked unconscious by the jet of water and drowned before rescue could come. The Lynx was left without a functional water-recycling system for days, and three decks smelled noticeably for a long time. Vries was eventually rewarded with immortality, and continued his researches into human/bacterial interactions in small closed environments, but at a far less practical level of application.
The much slowed flocker limped through a few more bulkheads, still pursued by dirty water, befouling a long column of crew cabins before it was stopped by the armored hull on the dorsal side. It was the only flocker to survive passage through the blazing manifold and the ship with its intelligence intact. After it came to a halt, the drone was still cogent enough to release a metal-eating virus into the Lynx's hull that went undetected for some time. Then, it attacked a marine private as he ran to foamseal shut the sudden geyser of waste water that marked its passage. The drone had only its weak signaling laser as a weapon, and went for his eyes. The man was in full battle armor, however, his face shielded by a reflective visor. He stared for a confused moment at the glittering drone, this tiny alien invader still valiantly attempting to trouble its enemies. Then he smashed the half-dead flocker with his servo-assisted fist, and it expired on the spot.
The Lynx had survived.
Data Analyst
Chaos struck the Data Analysis station without warning.
Ensign Amanda Tyre's vision had been far away, following the Progress of the foremost scout drone. The drone was one minute from its closest approach to the enemy battlecruiser. Master Pilot Marx Was in control, struggling to perform some wild maneuver, an indirect attack on the Rix warship that only he understood completely. Tyre had asked what he was up to, but he'd only grunted, too focused on piloting to answer.
She watched Marx's data stream--the images of the battlecruiser being gathered by his drone. It was the best intelligence they'd received so far on the enemy warship. Tyre searched for weaknesses, clues to its configuration, signs that anything the Lynx had thrown at it had managed to do any damage.
Damn. Marx was so close, yet the images were blurry, not much better than distant transluminal returns. Ensign Tyre wished he would go to active sensors. Of course, the scout wouldn't last long once he did. The battlecruiser's close-in defenses looked pretty solid.