The Course of Empire(167)

The collision came just seconds later. It was a perfect ram, too, the sub impacting bow-on against the side of the central pyramid. It was a former boomer, almost six hundred feet long and weighing in the vicinity of twenty thousand tons. Aguilera could only estimate the velocity. It wasn't high, by aerospace standards, since maneuvering inside the sun's photosphere was more akin to traveling in a fluid than empty space or even an atmosphere. Probably less than two hundred miles an hour, at a guess.



But it hardly mattered. The sub punched through the relatively thin hull of the Ekhat pyramid almost as easily as an awl penetrates thin leather. For a moment, Aguilera expected to see it punching out the other side.



But that was impossible, of course. At the last, the forcefields would probably have kept the crew from being killed by the sudden deceleration caused by the impact—most of them anyway, although certainly not the men in the surviving turrets. Still, the energies involved would have been enough to bring the sub to a stop somewhere inside that great central chamber.



Aguilera could envision it in his mind, from the nightmare scene Tully had described to him when he'd visited the Interdict ship. The dying submarine, nestled inside the huge enemy ship as if it had been swallowed.



But the relationship between predator and prey was reversed here. If the crew had survived, especially the men in the missile rooms . . .



They hadn't converted all the missile launchers to position tanks as jury-rigged gun turrets. They'd decided to leave four intact, just in case this very eventuality came to pass.



Rafe began softly reciting the Lord's Prayer. Yaut glanced at him, curiously, but said nothing.



Suddenly, a great bursting flare erupted from the wound in the side of the Ekhat ship caused by the sub's ramming. Within a second, the opening was torn wider still.



"That seems too mild for a nuclear explosion," said Yaut, his ears and whiskers indicating obvious puzzlement even to Aguilera's unpracticed eye.



"It's not one," Rafe replied. "That's the effects of the rocket fuel we're seeing. They must have fired at least one of the missiles. Those are three-stage rockets with graphite-epoxy hulls, loaded with propellant. The missiles probably would have impacted something even before the rockets ignited, just from the force of the compressed air launch. That would have been enough to rupture or shatter the hulls and spill burning fuel everywhere—and judging from the stink when I was aboard one, those ships are full of flammable compounds."



He added, sadly, "They did all they could, and that ship's probably dead anyway even if the warhead doesn't go off. Those warheads don't get armed immediately. They're on timed fuses for safety. If the fuses survived the impact, though—"



A sudden thought came to him. Even in the middle of the sun's photosphere, a thermonuclear explosion was nothing you wanted to be anywhere near. He started to turn toward Aille, to warn him, but saw that the young Pluthrak had already adjusted course. With another dazzling display of pilotry, he was positioning his sub to leave the one Ekhat ship as a shield against the other—and, Aguilera could now see, was going to be bringing them almost to a dead halt in the process. A slow walk, anyway.



Just as the rammed Ekhat ship had almost disappeared from view behind the first ship, the granular cells were roiled still further—not much, of course. But the blaze of light was nothing to sneer at, not even here. The fuses had survived—one of them, at least—and several hundred kilotons was enough to completely destroy even an Ekhat behemoth.



"Deliver us from evil," Rafe whispered. "Amen."



Standing at his side, Yaut's look of puzzlement vanished, replaced by a posture which Aguilera recognized. Gratified-respect, the same posture he had bestowed upon Kralik, when Kralik had predicted there would be more than enough volunteers for the ships. Honoring the courage of the men and Jao who had just destroyed an Ekhat vessel at the cost of their own lives—but not surprised that they had done so.



Aille was now bringing them alongside the surviving Ekhat ship. The enemy vessel had been set slowly spinning by the collision that had doomed the sub. So, Aille was staying perhaps half a mile outside the sweep of those outer lattice-beams, lest one of them smash into his sub. Instead of threading his way through the lattice as he'd done before, to bring them into point blank range, this engagement would have to take place at a considerably greater distance. On the other hand, he'd almost brought the sub to a standstill relative to the enemy—and, spinning the way it was, the guns would be able to riddle it on every side.



"It's all yours, General," Rafe said into the throat mike. "Tear that bastard apart for us, would you please?"