The Course of Empire(165)

When it was alone, the Critic changed the view to display the craft's exterior. Already, it saw, the craft was plunging down one of the granular currents. Soon, with no Lead to guide the way, it would be swept into one of the supergranular cells; and, soon thereafter, would be completed long before it reached the radiation zone.



That was a pity. The Critic would have found solace, even ecstasy, in the music of death-in-creation. But there would be nothing, beyond the increasing discordance of a craft being shattered by crude convection.



The Critic completed itself. Not without difficulty; being forced to strike four times, very awkwardly, until the forehand-blade found the thoracic ganglion.

* * *



"Until this moment, I did not really believe," Yaut said softly, almost whispering. "That ship is out of control. Thrown out of control, by your guns. It is doomed. Truly, I did not believe it could be done, until now."



Aguilera glanced at him, startled by the fraghta's tone of voice. Yaut's mood usually ranged from unflappable to caustic. This was the first time Rafe had ever seen him shaken by anything.



He and Yaut were standing in the center of the sub's control room, just behind Aille in the pilot's seat. By the time he looked back at the holo tank, the Ekhat ship had vanished into the solar fog. Fighting a battle in the sun's photosphere was like a dog fight in heavy overcast, except these clouds were fiery bright. An ambient temperature of six thousand degrees—and more turbulent than any storm cells in Earth's atmosphere. Were it not for the forcefields, the submarine would have been ripped apart by the shear stresses even before it melted and vaporized. What made the experience even more disconcerting was that the sub's artificial gravity field kept those in it from feeling any of the vessel's sudden and sharp movements. There was a complete disconnect between someone's tactile perceptions and sense of balance and what they could see in the holo tank.



Aguilera winced. He had suddenly realized that one of the dangers they faced, which he simply hadn't thought about, was the very real possibility of two submarines colliding with each other. There was no way to maintain electronic communication in the photosphere. For all that Jao comm technology was more highly advanced than human, it still depended on electromagnetic signals. Here, trying to send or receive such signals would be like trying to talk in the middle of a waterfall.



About the only thing they could still do was detect other ships by their faint magnetic disturbances, until they drew close enough for visual spotting. But those magnetic signals were fuzzy. Just enough to give the sub pilots a sense of where another ship was located—which they then tried to zero in on as best as possible. Given that the solar turbulence made "steering" here more akin to white water rafting than what Aguilera normally thought of as piloting . . .



It was a grim thought. Two or more submarines, targeting the same Ekhat ship, might easily be thrown into each other by sudden shifts in the currents.



But, since there was nothing Aguilera could do about it, he pushed the worries aside. He had other concerns, anyway, and more predictable ones.



"What's the turret environmental status?" he asked the human tech monitoring those readings. Kenny Wong, that was.



"Pretty good," he replied, "except for Turret Six. Their environment's degrading faster than the others, and by a big margin. I think there's a leak somewhere. A material leak, I mean." Wong glanced at the screens in front of a woman seated next to him, which monitored the forcefields. "Jeri's the expert, but those readings look okay to me."



Jeri Swanson grunted sourly. "Okay to you, maybe. To me they look like my mother's wedding gown when they hauled it out of the trunk for me to wear the first time I got married. Can we say 'tattered and moth-eaten'?"



She glanced up at Aguilera. Seeing the look of alarm on his face, she grunted again, even more sourly. "What? You were expecting something else? We're in a fricking sun, Rafe." Jeri went back to studying her monitors. "Relax. We're still a ways off from a field collapse."



Aguilera swallowed. He'd been so busy and preoccupied getting the tanks converted to turrets that he had only a dim awareness of other aspects of what faced them. "Will you have any warning, if the fields are about to fail?"



Grunting was Swanson's stock in trade. "Some. Few seconds. Enough to tell you to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. Stop pestering me, Rafe. There's nothing you or me or anyone can do about it, so why waste time worrying? It'll happen or it won't."



"What the hell happened to military protocol, anyway?" grumbled Aguilera.