152
William H. Keith, Jr.
to bear on the target. "Firing," I announce, and the Hellbore looses its full-throated output in a flash that momentarily blinds and deafens my own sensors.
Within the neutron dense-packed casing of the Hellbore's breech, fifty grams of metallic deuterium is abruptly collapsed within a constricting magnetic bottle, as powerful magnetic fields accelerate the DP-jacketed sliver to relativistic velocities; at the same moment, the weapon's guide lasers fire, providing target-lock feedback for my tracking arrays, and incidentally tunneling a momentary vacuum up through the planetary atmosphere, clearing the way for the Hellbore bolt to follow.
Extreme acceleration and mag bottle cottapse together initiate deuterium fusion 3.2 x 1Q~8 second later, just before the plasma erupts from the ten-meter barrel of my Number One Hellbore at sixty percent of the speed of light. At the instant of firing, the target's range is 48658.7 kilometers.
At .6c, Hellbore bolt time to target is .27032 second, a long time to wait by Full Combat Awareness standards.
When the Hellbore fired, Dieter was standing atop a barren, rock-knobbled hillock, gripping a metal bar wrenched from the mechanism of a dismembered! *! *! machine. He'd been staring west across the dig and out to the squat black island of the Bolo resting in the middle of the harbor as the victorious slaves around him cheered and screamed and shouted. The light pulsing from the Bolo's forward Hellbore turret seared the eyes, leaving a dazzling, violet afterimage; spreading out across the water as fast as the eye could follow, the shock wave reached him almost four seconds later, a cracking, booming detonation assaulting the ears, numbing the senses.
Dieter dropped to his knees, hands clutched over
BOLO RISING
153
his ears, his nose suddenly bleeding. All around him, other former slaves had been tumbled to the ground by the thunder of the Hellbore discharge.
Involuntarily, he glanced up into an empty sky. Whatever Hector was shooting at couldn't be seen and was probably somewhere out in space; the big questions were whether the target was shooting back ... and whether Hector would be firing again.
"Get to the crater!" Dieter screamed as loud as he could when the second blast faded. He didn't know how many heard him, how many could hear him now, deafened by that ear-numbing blast, but he shouted and waved and led the way, starting a panicked migration up the slope of the crater rim a few hundred meters further to the east. The water-filled depths of the crater left by the meteor strike that had leveled Celeste might offer some shelter from the savage onslaught of the Bolo's Hellbores.
CHAPTER TEN
Spectrographic and laser targeting and tracking data indicate that my initial shot has gone wide. Atmospheric aberration, the twinkling effect caused by essentially chaotic motion, expansion, and contraction of the air, was sufficient to offset my targeting lock by as much as plus or minus 0.02 degree. My first shot missed the oncoming meteor by an estimated three meters.
By comparing the images taken'at optical wavelengths with those drawn from longer frequencies, including microwave and long-wave radar imaging, I can estimate the degree of aberration and attempt to compensate. Reloading my Number One turret, I recheck the target's vector and fire a second time. Fortunately, the target is moving almost directly toward my position on what is very nearly a straight-line trajectory, and there is very little apparent drift in what is for all practical purposes a stationary target. Its extremely high velocity dopplers my ranging pulses, however, and I must be careful to correct for velocity-induced spectrum shifts.
The second pulse of fusing, high-speed plasma strikes Projectile Alpha with the equivalent of some six megatons of highly focused directional energy, the rough equivalent in terms of joules and vaporization
154
BOLO RISING
155
points of catching an ice cube in the blast from a plasma welder. My spectroscopic scans detect the characteristic absorption lines of nickel, iron, cobalt, and various trace elements in the expanding puff of metallic vapor. Radar and ladar returns detect no fragment larger than several hundred microns in diameter; I immediately shift to the next target, designated Projectile Bravo.
With compensation for atmospheric aberration locked in, I bring my Number Two turret into play. Number Three is inoperative, with major faults to the bearing ring and alt-azimuth controls. Two turrets should be enough, however, given my sharply limited reserves of Hettbore ammunition. At 1.05 second intervals I trigger shot after shot, laying down a heavy, rapid barrage against the incoming projectiles. I score another hit, vaporizing Projectile Bravo .. . and another a moment later against Charlie.. . then miss Delta completely as atmospheric bloomfrom a previous discharge distorts the laser sighting target lock by .05 degree.
I recalculate and adjust; the atmosphere above my position is becoming turbulent, as superheated air expands rapidly in a huge bubble that distorts my line of sight. Another miss . . . then a hit, though an incomplete hit that leaves a 100-kiloeram chunk of meteoric debris and a large amount of gravel still on a vector which wUl impact in my general vicinity within the next 1.75 minutes.
Worse, I detect new launches from att three of the Enemy battler/fortresses, and I am down now to fourteen DP-jacketed slivers of metallic cryo-H^
If the Enemy continues launching new projectiles, my defenses will be very rapidly overwhelmed.
