"Of course we weren't destroyed!" Adele snapped as Dasi drew her gloves off. The sailors were keeping silent, waiting for her to tell them what to do. "We're the Katlinburg's cutter, I told you."
Another Willoughby opened her mouth to speak. The senior technician shushed her with a quick gesture.
The technicians understood that friendly or not, the cutter shouldn't have been able to approach the command node without setting off the close-in defenses mounted on wands projecting from the node's hull. These would blast a hail of faceted tungsten pellets in the direction of any object that tried to approach without the proper codes. Only the cutters bringing supplies from the Bremse should have had those codes.
Dasi removed the right gauntlet and started on the other. The Bremse sent not only supplies but changes of guard: Adele could see that by the relatively good health of the soldiers compared to the sallow puffiness of the technicians.
The cruiser/minelayer maintained gravity by constant acceleration. Its High Drive used water molecules for conversion. A ship in station above Kostroma could replenish its tanks by dipping down to the surface for an hour every few days.
The command node was a satellite with only maneuvering jets. Those aboard her would feel the effects of weightlessness within days; the technicians had been in this high-technology prison for the full two weeks since the Alliance invasion.
"Paltes, call the ship and see what the fuck we're supposed to do about this," the Alliance noncom said. "You lot—"
She waggled her submachine gun toward the Cinnabars and drifted slightly back in reaction. Unlike the sailors, the Alliance guards weren't used to weightlessness.
"—get into the airlock again till they tell us what to do. I shouldn't have let you in."
Dasi removed the other gauntlet. He was between Adele and the guards. She reached into the pouch on her equipment belt with her left hand. "All right," she said calmly to the noncom, "but you're going to be in trouble—"
As Adele's hand came clear of the pouch, she shot the noncom through the bridge of the nose. Recoil—even the pistol's slight recoil—spun Adele sideways. She fired twice more as she rotated.
The guard whose right forearm Adele had shattered with a pellet meant for his upper chest jerked the trigger. His gun pointed toward the far wall. Pellets raked a programming alcove. Faint gray smoke drifted from holes punched in the structural plastic.
Adele bounced off the airlock. She turned desperately to see what was happening. Barnes and Dasi had the uninjured guard between them; Dasi was bending the man's gun arm over his knee to break it. Woetjans held the guard who'd fired by the throat with one hand as she hit him an unnecessary second time with the wrench in the other hand.
There was no need to worry about the noncom, nor for the soldier whose blood spurted one final time before his heart stopped for lack of fluid to pump. When a pellet hit the soft tissue of a human throat, the wound it tore looked more like a bomb crater.
Adele returned the pistol to her tool pouch. She pushed herself carefully toward a programming station. She reached a different alcove than the one she'd intended but that didn't matter, they were all the same.
Her leg, red with the globe of body fluids she'd brushed on the way, couldn't be allowed to matter either.
* * ** * *
The Princess Cecile's quartet of plasma cannon roared like a swarm of bees. They were four-inch high-output weapons with a hundred times the flux density of a thruster nozzle. The corvette's maneuvering jets fought to keep the vessel in alignment. Dorfman had his finger on the armament override, keeping the weapons on continuous fire even though he was burning their throats out.
There wasn't any point in saving the cannon for further use if the ship itself was a shower of meteors hitting the Kostroman atmosphere.
A space battle at these short ranges was a dance in which either party moved in conscious relation to her opponent. Computers determined the maneuvers; two battle computers given the same data would come to the same "best" result.
Daniel was poised over the controls. Before the battle started he'd directed the Princess Cecile's AI to follow an extremely complex set of parameters. The corvette continued on a ballistic course for three long seconds despite the oncoming missiles. She had to hold the setting in order to lead the Bremse to where Daniel wanted the cruiser to be.
The parameters were beyond computation to a greater than fifteen percent probability of success, but that was a much greater chance of survival than Daniel saw in any other course. Next time perhaps Fate would hand him a cruiser to hunt down some poor bastards in a second-class corvette.
He laughed, to the amazement of the other bridge personnel. An Alliance missile grazed the Princess Cecile.