WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(134)

The four Cinnabar sailors clustered around a programming alcove which they'd set to display the planetary environs. Adele glanced toward them out of frustration. She was doing something wrong. She hadn't been sure she could remove the lockout, but she hadn't expected any difficulty in locating it.

Woetjans looked grim in stark contrast to her ready cheerfulness as the cutter approached the control node. All the sailors looked grim.

"Mistress?" the petty officer said as she caught Adele's eye. "Is there anything we can do to help Mr. Leary? They're going for the high jump if we don't."

"If you can find the damned lockout chip that prevents the mines from engaging the ship that laid them, then we can do something," Adele said in a voice so savage that she wouldn't have recognized it herself.

"Mistress?" said the eldest of the programmers. "That's part of the sensor receiver, not the control system. It's in the third chassis slot and has a blue band across it."

"Where?" said Woetjans.

Another programmer turned to the console beside him. "This one!" he said.

The cover panel had quick-release fittings. The programmer was fumbling with them when Lamsoe, Barnes and Dasi arrived together. The sailors brushed him out of the way with as little concern as Woetjans showed for the floating corpse with which she collided on her way to the unit.

Lamsoe stuck his prybar beneath the edge of the cover. He twisted. The plate lifted enough for Barnes and Dasi to reach under it. The plate flew up, accompanied by fragments of broken fasteners.

Adele checked her own work. If the lockout was eliminated, she shouldn't have to do anything more. But because she was who she was, Adele entered the main database for a schematic of the sensor control system.

Woetjans reached over the shoulders of her subordinates. Her hand came up with a component from which the locking screws dangled, along with bits of chassis.

A relay clicked somewhere within Adele's console. Two icons vanished—one minusculely before the second—on the display the sailors had been watching.

Adele wouldn't have been sure what had happened if Woetjans and the others hadn't begun to cheer.



Daniel's first thought was that a fault in the system caused the change in the Plot Position Indicator. It was too good to be true.

He still switched to a direct imagery of the cruiser/minelayer and scrolled back five seconds before the event. There wasn't a great deal he could do that was more useful, after all.

The Bremse was a blunt-nosed cylinder of eighteen thousand tons or so loaded. Her present attitude toward the Princess Cecile was three-quarters on, so foreshortening made her look tubby. Had he wished Daniel could have rotated the image on his display to show the Alliance vessel's full 780-foot length, but he didn't need a schematic.

At the five-second mark the cruiser/minelayer expanded on a line intersecting the vessel's long axis. A sleet of atomic nuclei had just ripped through her at light speed.

Plasma weapons weren't effective against starships because the bolts lost definition in the vastness of astronomical distance. A charge that could be safely generated on one vessel was unlikely to harm a similar ship across tens of thousands of miles.

A mine was under no such restriction as to the size of the charge. Its external structure only had to survive the first microsecond of the thermonuclear explosion in its heart so that its magnetic lens could direct the force of the blast toward the target.

In practice, lens efficiency was on the order of sixty percent. Sixty percent of a thee-kiloton explosion, even attenuated somewhat by distance, was enough to gut a dreadnought.

It opened the Bremse like a bullet through a melon. The forty or so mines still undeployed in the cruiser/minelayer's hold went off in a series of low-order explosions that turned the wreck into a gas cloud, but that was an unnecessary refinement.

Daniel cut thrust to one gravity, then hit the alert button. "All hands!" he said. "All hands! The Bremse has blown up! I repeat, the cruiser chasing us is gone!"

He thought for a moment about the five hundred human lives lost with the starship. There was no triumph in the thought, but there was no pity either. They'd died in the service of their state as Daniel Leary expected someday to die in the service of Cinnabar. So be it.

Dorfman had stood to hug the rating who held the sealant cannister. Baylor's console was live again, but the missileer gaped instead at Daniel's display. By now the image was only a haze that would soon be indistinguishable from any other volume of cislunar space. Voices elsewhere cheered, but some shouted doubtful questions. Not everybody aboard the Princess Cecile could believe they were alive and likely to remain that way for the immediate future.

Come to think, if there was a heaven it would be a lot like this. At least for Daniel Leary . . .