Read Online Ship's Boy by Phil Geusz - Free Book Online

time to get ready, I borrowed a portable console from the marines so that we could at least watch the action as it unfolded.
    The cruiser began firing as predicted almost down the second; while her engines might’ve been badly damaged by whatever accident had befallen her, the vessel’s guns still worked just fine. She was equipped with eight medium-caliber naval blasters that vastly outranged our little popguns, and their crews belted out salvo after salvo in beautiful synchronization. The range was long and Hummingbird both small and agile— the odds were overwhelmingly against the enemy so much as scorching our paintwork. I’d just finished explaining this to Pedro for perhaps the seventh time when suddenly our ship staggered violently, then shook herself like a wet dog. The enemy had gotten lucky after all!
    “I knew we’d be hit!” my nominal supervisor declared, his eyes wide with terror. “We’ll all be killed!”
    “Everything’s fine,” James replied, his voice low and soothing. Pedro, we’d already learned, accepted reassurance far more willingly from a human than he did me. Especially a noble-born human. Meanwhile I fiddled with the console. It didn’t have anything like the level of access we’d enjoyed in the captain’s cabin, but I was still able to call up generalized damage reports. “They hit us in the engine room,” I reported once I was certain. “Did some damage, too.”
    “Really?” James asked, keeping his voice level and calm for Pedro’s sake.
    I nodded. “The number nine warp coil is down entirely now. So are three, four, and six. One and two are warming up fast.”
    James raised his eyebrows eloquently, but said nothing. 
    “We’re slowing down,” I explained.  “A lot. Because we have to. Now they’ll have a lot more time to shoot at an easier target.”
    We rode on in silence after that for a while; once a slight shudder marked a grazing impact that didn’t do any further harm so far as I could see. “We’re almost to the Jump point,” I reported at long last, finally breathing a bit easier. “Translation in three, two, one-“
    Then, just as everything began to gray out for the Jump, another blast struck home square in our center of mass and penetrated deep into Hummingbird’ s guts.
     

15
    I’d never been in a ship struck squarely by a naval-caliber blaster before, and I rather fervently hoped I never would be again, either. Unlike the earlier hits, this one ripped through our weakened Field as it were tissue paper, and the result was rather akin to taking a hard right to the jaw even buried so far down in the ships’ innards. Plus the lights flickered and died, the gravity cut out for a moment, and huge electrical arcs flashed and flickered about like lightning as Hummingbird equalized all her potentials.  And all of this was on top of the warp translation effect, which was more than a little stupefying in and of itself. Engineering held together just long enough to complete the Jump, then everything on my little monitor flatlined.  The only systems left working seemed to be the backup lighting and the gravity, though the latter was only at about a quarter power.
    “Damn!” James swore as he and I climbed out of our acceleration couches, though neither of us had the faintest idea of where to go or why. “We’re in for it now!”
    I couldn’t help but agree as I toggled through the ships’ systems over and over again. Engineering must be little more than a scrapheap; all we had left was battery power. Even worse, we were floating powerless directly in front of the Jump point, helpless prey for the next enemy to come through. Which would be in less than two hours, according to the last estimate I’d made. We didn’t even have any pre-existing vector to work with—Field-based drives operated under an inertialess effect, so that once a ship’s drive ceased to function it’s pre-existing inertia reasserted itself. In our case, that meant we stopped