The ExO had heard.
Frick threw the suddenly weightless man out of danger, the ensign spinning toward safety. But he had pushed too hard, he realized. The Second Law put Frick himself in motion, hurtling back under the shielding. His grabby boots left the floor, and he found himself helpless in the air.
The free piece of shielding floated inexorably toward him. The First Law now: It retained momentum from when it had been falling. With the engines and artificial gravity cut, the shielding was weightless. . . .
But it was still massive.
' It floated slowly toward him, no faster than a feather falling, less than a meter away. Frick's hands clawed at the deck behind him, but the metal slipped under his fingers.
Why wasn't he wearing grabby gloves? There simply hadn't been time to suit up properly as he'd rushed to prepare this operation. No gloves! Frick had demoted ratings for this sort of idiocy. Well, justice would be served. The first engineer was about to be worse than demoted.
The shielding moved toward him, as slow and buoyant as some huge water craft gliding to bump ponderously against a dock.
Ratings' hands reached for him. They'd all be crushed. "Clear off!" he shouted.
"Engineer?" came Hobbes' voice. "What's--"
"Give me one-twentieth-gee accel, flush starboard for one second!" he screamed as the giant fist of metal closed upon him.
He hoped his numbers--arrived at by pure instinct--were correct. He hoped Hobbes wouldn't ask what he was screaming about. In the time it took to say ten words, he would be flattened.
The huge vise closed on him. Without logic, Frick pressed against it, all his strength against five thousand kilograms. He saw his crew's hands grip futilely at the metal's edges. The tons of hullalloy pressed relentlessly against him.
A cracking sound came from Frick's chest, but then the slight bump of acceleration struck.
The shielding's course fluidly reversed, as if some affectionate but massive metal creature had hugged him too tightly.
"Thank you, Hobbes," he muttered. The shielding moved away, only a hair faster than it had closed on Frick. Half a meter of space opened up, and hands--grabby-gloved hands, he noted ruefully--reached underneath to pull him out.
He took a deep, painful breath. Something popped in his chest. A few ribs had succumbed to the shielding's tight embrace. A small price to pay for an idiot's mistake.
"Hobbes," he managed.
"What the devil's going on down there?"
The shielding was still floating back toward the generator. Slowly, but still inexorably. They had to get it stopped.
"Loose metal," he said, measuring the shielding's speed with his engineer's handheld and calculating. "One more acceleration. Opposite direction, at point-oh-two gees."
Hobbes sighed with exasperation. She and the captain must be livid. They were supposed to be fleeing a Rix warship at eighteen gees, not nudging around the Lynx with tiny squirts of coldjet.
But the bump came, Frick's grabby boots holding him firm. The metal edged to a near-halt in midair. He smiled at his calculations. Not bad for an old man.
"Hold in zero-gee," he said. They couldn't resume acceleration with the heavy shielding floating about. "We have loose tons."
"Loose tons?" Hobbes exclaimed.
"Yes, ma'am," Frick answered, holding his throbbing side. "Definitely tons."
"All right, Frick, get that metal into the bow," she said. "We'll be within range of the Rix primaries in four hundred seconds. And thanks to cutting our engines for you, we'll be at barely half a light-second range."
Damn, the first engineer thought. The loose shielding had cost them two minutes of acceleration. Damn those flockers! How had he missed the damage?
He just hoped the armor would be worth the lost distance from the Rix gravity cannon.
"Crew, we are going dark early," came the captain's voice. The old man didn't sound pleased.
"Ten seconds," Hobbes began the count. "All right!" Frick shouted to his crew. "We're doing this in the dark: no second sight, no com, no gravity!"
"Five . . ."
"Cut all the pieces out. But we'll be in microgravity once the cold-jets start," he shouted. "You and you, get this piece of tin moving toward the bow. And watch out. I happen to know it's heavy."
A few of the crew laughed as they sprang to their work. But the boisterous sound dropped off as the ship went dark.
The heads-up status displays, the hovering symbols that marked equipment, the chatter of ship noise and expert software, everything in second sight and hearing disappeared. The ship was left dim and lifeless around them, a mere hunk of metal. All they had to see by was unaugmented work lights, making the generator area a shadowy, red-tinged twilight zone.
Then the coldjets started, pushing the Lynx to orient it bow-first toward the Rix battlecruiser. The microgravity shifted the loose plates of shielding again, but by now the crew had attached handholds and stronglines to them, and they soon had the beasts under control. But in the dim light and swaying microgravity, it felt like the below decks of some ancient warship on a pitching sea.
Frick looked reflexively for a time stamp, but his second sight held nothing. The fields that created synesthesia were highly penetrative and persistent--the Rix would be looking for them in their hunt for the Lynx. Second audio was out of the question as well; only hardwired compoints were to be used. He'd gone over this with Hobbes, but it hadn't seemed real before now.
Frick damned himself for not thinking to bring a mechanical chronometer. Had there even been time to fabricate such an exotic device?
"You," he said, pointing to a rating. "Start counting."
"Counting, sir?"
"Yes. Counting out loud is your job now. Backwards from . . . three hundred eighty. Count slow, in seconds."
A look of understanding crossed the rating's face. She started in a low voice.
"Three hundred eighty, three hundred seventy-nine . . ."
Frick shook his head at the sound. He was using a highly trained crewman as a clock, for god's sake. They would be running handwritten notes next.
His angry eyes scanned the dimness of the generator area. Everywhere, huge and unwieldy pieces of metal were beginning to move with agonizing slowness. Each was supported by a web of strong-lines. The cables were packed with stored kinetic energy, windup carbon that would contract when keyed. This purely mechanical motive force was invisible to the Rix sensors, but it was capable of pulling the weightless if massive sections of hullalloy through the ship.