WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(124)
He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. "What the fuck's going on?" Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.
"It's like this," Hogg said to the sailors. "The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there."
He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.
"Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they're all the same sort, I don't give a fuck what color uniform they wear," Hogg continued. "That wouldn't be doing my job. Besides, you can't trust them even if they do happen to tell the truth."
"Too fucking right," said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, "You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance."
Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.
"Yes," she said. "Perhaps you'd do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel."
"The APC's approaching at speed!" Domenico said. The bosun's console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.
"Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico," Daniel ordered without looking around. "Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we're out of the system and in one piece."
A computer-generated model of the Aglaia was at the center of Daniel's display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the Aglaia's sensors and transmitted to the Princess Cecile.
The Aglaia launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.
The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it'd been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.
The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the Aglaia's flank; water pressure hadn't had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun's corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.
Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.
But the missile weighed thirty tons.
It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.
The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile's own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.
The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor's surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you'd use to shim a bearing.
The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.
Daniel split his main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the Aglaia was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.
The Bremse orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma's surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.
Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, "Commonwealth ship Princess Cecile to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!"
The Aglaia had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls . . .