In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 24: The Consequences Of Hubris

Tyrone could watch everything in the windshield display as the corvette's cargo bay disintegrated into chaos. Joseph's initial point of fire was the starboard end of the cargo bay door. Explosive shells silently shattered pieces of the corvette's hull into shrapnel. Lethal wounds sprang into being on the bodies of the pirates standing nearby. One was blasted out of the cargo bay and drifted toward the Comet, flailing.

Joseph walked his fire along the upper and lower edges of the bay's mouth, cracking apart the docking equipment housed there or twisting it beyond recognition. The debris either tumbled into space or whirled into the cargo bay, collecting the occasional pirate in its path. Their artificial gravity was still on, and man after man fell to the deck.

The two starmen had never determined the design of the corvette, but whatever its origins Tyrone could see they didn't build their hulls as well as the Tetonites. Long cracks running deeper into the ship began to form only a couple of seconds into their attack. Joseph destroyed enough of the mounting points for the upper half of the clamshell door that the starboard end of it was starting to sag.

Their angle of approach meant that they would only be able to fire straight into the cargo bay for a short time, but they could fire on both ends of the door for most of the distance. Joseph turned his attention to the port side and blasted apart the remaining docking equipment. In the process he destroyed the remaining mounts for the upper door. It crashed to the deck, crushing a pirate who had taken refuge by the port end of the door. It surely would have made a terrific noise if there was anything to carry the sound to where Tyrone could hear it.

The magnitude of damage they were doing to the corvette seemed to increase the longer they fired. More twisted space junk and shredded remnants of the flexbible tube that extended to make airtight passages to other ships floated out of the cargo bay. Some of the cracks that started around the mouth of the bay ran together, causing several large sections of hull to split off. They floated gently away from the corvette, some drifting toward the freighter.

Finally they were positioned to see head on down the cargo bay. Joseph's idea to use the lead rounds had been a good one. As the back of the ship came into view, Tyrone could spot large dents and more than a few large holes torn in things by the simple solid slugs. He watched carefully as his partner fired at the opposing ship's engineering section and tried to make out what they were hitting.

He was standing by to highlight the location of the FTL drive if he could spot it, but he never did. They could see straight through to the engineering section, and there was plenty of equipment there to damage, along with pirates who'd fled into the bay to escape the attack. The designs of those systems were far different from their equivalents on Garden Variety Animal as well, and Tyrone couldn't identify most of it. Hopefully they were destroying important things.

Once they passed through the narrow window they had to shoot into the engineering section, Joseph turned his fire back on the clamshell door. There wasn't a lot left of the area, but it was their intended target. The explosive rounds blasted off another large splinter of the hull, and the lower half of the door began twisting off its mounts as the upper portion had.

Finally the shock wore off for someone on the corvette, and one of the ship's guns began firing at them. They had just reached the end of their intended firing window, and the guns stopped hammering for a moment. Joseph must have noticed the attack as well, because as soon as Tyrone highlighted the turret's location on the tactical display, Joseph opened fire again. The corvette's shields were still down, and the turret was instantly destroyed.

"We need to change course before more of them start." Tyrone recalled Captain Friedrich's report that there were a dozen turrets on the corvette. Only Joseph's quick response had saved them a hit from that one. The gunner would have adjusted his aim with another second or two.