pointer.
“Turn it around, and slip the business end between your index and middle fingers,” the captain said quietly.
“Ah, like a fork almost,” Hobbes replied.
“Five,” said the ensign. “Four…”
Hobbes made a few marks. There was a certain pleasure in the pen’s incision of the paper. Unlike air drawing, the friction of pen against paper had a reassuring physicality. She sketched a diagram of the bridge.
Not bad. But writing? She crossed two parallel lines to make a crude H. Then formed a circle for the O.
“Zero,” said the ensign. “We are in range of the enemy prime’s capital weapons.”
Hobbes tried the other letters of her name, but they dissolved into scribbles.
The chief sensor officer, leaned over a headsdown display, spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if addressing an audience from a theatrical stage.
“She’s firing. Standard photon cannon. Looks to be targeting along our last known vector.”
Hobbes nodded. The Rix would have tracked the
Lynx
until 450 seconds ago, when they’d dropped into darkmode. But the coldjets had pushed the
Lynx
onto a new vector.
The captain had taken a risk with that. The coldjets used waste water and other recyclables for reaction mass, and Zai had shot half the frigate’s water supply, and even a good chunk of the emergency oxygen that was kept frozen on the hull. The ship had gotten an additional bit of kick from ejecting the reflective bow armor with high explosives. They were now thousands of kilometers from where the Rix thought they were, but they had almost no recyclables to spare. If they lost their main drive to enemy fire, it would be almost a year before the low-acceleration rescue craft available on Legis could make it out to repair and resupply them. A single breakdown in the recycling chain—bacterial failure, equipment malfunction, the slightest nano mutation—would doom them all.
And despite herself, Hobbes wondered if the Navy would prioritize rescuing the
Lynx
. With a war on, there’d be plenty of excuses to delay chasing down a stricken warship that was flying toward Rix space at two thousand klicks per second. Laurent Zai was still an embarrassment to the Emperor. They would all make good martyrs.
“Short bursts: one, two, three,” the sensor officer counted. “Low power lasers now; they’re looking for reflections.”
“What are their assumptions?” the captain asked.
Ensign Tyre, who had been moved up to the bridge from Data Analysis, struggled with the limited processor power and her heads-down’s unfamiliar physical controls. The silent-running passive sensor array was basically a host of fiber optics running from the hull to the same small, shielded computer the pilots had been complaining about.
“From where they’re shooting, they seem to think we’ve doubled back on them … at high acceleration.”
“High acceleration?” Hobbes murmured. “But we obviously aren’t under main drive.”
“They’re being cautious,” Zai said quietly. “They think we may have developed a stealthy drive in the last eighty years, and that we’re still bent on ramming them.”
Of course, Hobbes thought. Just as the Rix evolved from one war to the next, so did the Imperials. And the
Lynx
was a new class of warship, only ten absolute years old. It had nothing as exotic as full-power stealthy acceleration, but the Rix didn’t know that.
Katherie Hobbes turned the page of the captain’s writing tablet, giving herself a clean piece of paper. With a few long strokes, she drew a vector line of the
Lynx
‘s passage through the battlecruiser’s gravity-cannon perimeter. Writing letters was difficult, but her fingers seemed to know instinctively the curves of gunnery and acceleration.
Over her career, she’d traced the courses of a thousand battles, imagined or historical, on airscreen displays. Her tactical reflexes seemed to guide the pen, rendering the Rix firing pattern as the sensor officer called it.
The two
“Turn it around, and slip the business end between your index and middle fingers,” the captain said quietly.
“Ah, like a fork almost,” Hobbes replied.
“Five,” said the ensign. “Four…”
Hobbes made a few marks. There was a certain pleasure in the pen’s incision of the paper. Unlike air drawing, the friction of pen against paper had a reassuring physicality. She sketched a diagram of the bridge.
Not bad. But writing? She crossed two parallel lines to make a crude H. Then formed a circle for the O.
“Zero,” said the ensign. “We are in range of the enemy prime’s capital weapons.”
Hobbes tried the other letters of her name, but they dissolved into scribbles.
The chief sensor officer, leaned over a headsdown display, spoke in a loud, clear voice, as if addressing an audience from a theatrical stage.
“She’s firing. Standard photon cannon. Looks to be targeting along our last known vector.”
Hobbes nodded. The Rix would have tracked the
Lynx
until 450 seconds ago, when they’d dropped into darkmode. But the coldjets had pushed the
Lynx
onto a new vector.
The captain had taken a risk with that. The coldjets used waste water and other recyclables for reaction mass, and Zai had shot half the frigate’s water supply, and even a good chunk of the emergency oxygen that was kept frozen on the hull. The ship had gotten an additional bit of kick from ejecting the reflective bow armor with high explosives. They were now thousands of kilometers from where the Rix thought they were, but they had almost no recyclables to spare. If they lost their main drive to enemy fire, it would be almost a year before the low-acceleration rescue craft available on Legis could make it out to repair and resupply them. A single breakdown in the recycling chain—bacterial failure, equipment malfunction, the slightest nano mutation—would doom them all.
And despite herself, Hobbes wondered if the Navy would prioritize rescuing the
Lynx
. With a war on, there’d be plenty of excuses to delay chasing down a stricken warship that was flying toward Rix space at two thousand klicks per second. Laurent Zai was still an embarrassment to the Emperor. They would all make good martyrs.
“Short bursts: one, two, three,” the sensor officer counted. “Low power lasers now; they’re looking for reflections.”
“What are their assumptions?” the captain asked.
Ensign Tyre, who had been moved up to the bridge from Data Analysis, struggled with the limited processor power and her heads-down’s unfamiliar physical controls. The silent-running passive sensor array was basically a host of fiber optics running from the hull to the same small, shielded computer the pilots had been complaining about.
“From where they’re shooting, they seem to think we’ve doubled back on them … at high acceleration.”
“High acceleration?” Hobbes murmured. “But we obviously aren’t under main drive.”
“They’re being cautious,” Zai said quietly. “They think we may have developed a stealthy drive in the last eighty years, and that we’re still bent on ramming them.”
Of course, Hobbes thought. Just as the Rix evolved from one war to the next, so did the Imperials. And the
Lynx
was a new class of warship, only ten absolute years old. It had nothing as exotic as full-power stealthy acceleration, but the Rix didn’t know that.
Katherie Hobbes turned the page of the captain’s writing tablet, giving herself a clean piece of paper. With a few long strokes, she drew a vector line of the
Lynx
‘s passage through the battlecruiser’s gravity-cannon perimeter. Writing letters was difficult, but her fingers seemed to know instinctively the curves of gunnery and acceleration.
Over her career, she’d traced the courses of a thousand battles, imagined or historical, on airscreen displays. Her tactical reflexes seemed to guide the pen, rendering the Rix firing pattern as the sensor officer called it.
The two
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