He had men at the controls at each engine; much of the central panel had blown after the first EMP. Lieutenant Callamy, calling down from CIC, was demanding cooler temperatures, so Banks’ men were practically running the engines by hand, easing back on the heat and cranking up the fuel flow rates to compensate.

Banks had enough central telltales left to organize the effort. “Mr. Howell!” he shouted to a warrant officer at the Number Seven engine. “Back her down!”

Howell nodded, spoke inaudibly to his subordinates, and then stepped up to the controls. Banks watched for a moment, looked at his indicators to see the temperature still rising, and jogged over. His acceleration chair scuttled after him.

“She won’t respond, sir!” Howell said.

Banks took stock of the panel. Howell had pulled the magnetic nozzle control to full-open. The fuel should have been gushing out the back of the engine barely lukewarm, but instead it was sticking in the plasma chamber, heating up still further.

“Pull the override and shut her down! We’ll deal with it later!” Banks shouted.

Howel flipped a heavy switch on the panel. “Nothing!”

One of Howell’s crew poked his head around the bulk of the engine and called, “It’s a short past the regulator circuit, sir!”

Banks’ eyes went wide, and he set off at a sprint toward the power control panel. Behind him, the temperature gauges flashed dangerous shades of red. “Cut the power to Number Seven’s pumps! She’s a run—”

The engine room was one of the best-protected places on the ship, nestled centerline in the midst of thickened bulkheads, but the sheer energy of Reprisal’s 38-centimeter shells at seven kilometers per second was simply too much for Warspite’s hull. Five meters ahead of Banks, there was a flash and a terrible noise, as a shell tore through the portside bulkhead, shot through the engine room in an eyeblink, and crashed out the far side. The detonation came a fractional moment later, and Banks picked himself up off the deck with little recollection of how he’d got there. His pressure helmet had begun to extrude itself from his collar, its petals fusing before his eyes. Crewmen ran past him, and he turned to see the Number Seven engine glowing orange. He took halting steps toward it, grimacing at the sharp pain in his gut. A catwalk circled the insulated fuel pipe that fed Number Seven, a ladder leading up to it. He took the rungs in hand and pulled himself upward. Frost from the chill of the fuel covered the manual override valve. Banks took it in hand.

From their handholds around the engine room, the crew waited for the engine to light her fuel line, and for the attendant explosion that would crack Warspite in half. It never came.

Banks gave the valve an extra twist, just to be certain, and stumbled back against the railing. He could feel the burns beneath his pressure suit, and could barely stand against the pain. Below him, though, the deck itself was turning from red to orange, and it was starting to sag. He forced his feet to move—

“Jump!” Howell screamed. “Lieutenant, jump!” He let go of his hold and ran at the Number Seven engine. Banks staggered to the edge of the catwalk, but before Howell’s eyes, the decking gave way. The engine dropped out of sight, Banks with it.

Warspite yawed visibly before coming under control, her Number Seven engine turning to vapor in the exhaust of the others as it fell out the back of the ship.

From Hermes’ vantage, two thousand kilometers away, the dull red sparks of Warspite’s and Reprisal’s radiators were practically invisible. Hermes herself was still and silent, but not cold. It was difficult to distinguish between a recently dead ship and one still able to fight. Heat had to flow along the ship’s conduits out to the radiators and then dissipate into space, and it was occasionally the case, in the confusion of battle, that an apparent corpse would prove to have a good deal of kick left. So it was with Hermes. Her engineers had restarted her reactor, and now she crept forward on maneuvering thrusters while her main kinetic charged.

The main kinetic, mounted centerline, was far and away the most dangerous weapon Hermes carried. For all practical purposes, it was the same weapon found in battleship turrets. It didn’t bother with explosive shells or any such nonsense as that. It simply fired a one-kilogram penetrator at something past seven hundred fifty kilometers per second. Even at this range, one could hardly miss.

In Hermes’ CIC, an indicator showed green. Maneuvering thrusters put the ship’s nose on target. There was a bright flash as she fired the kinetic, and then her engines lit, and at seven gravities she charged toward the battle.

Notice the new favicon at the top, courtesy of a friend of mine who is welcome to name himself in the comments if he wants. Oh, and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but my previous VPS provider shut down and I had to move the site. Fortunately, I get so little traffic it probably looked seamless. This new server does seem a bit slower to me, though. I may have to complain if it remains so.

In other news, I played Mass Effect 3, complained about the ending, moved on (but not without a measure of melancholy), started learning to play the hammered dulcimer, bought a Nook (the e-ink variety, not one of the tablets), discovered that Games Workshop does not release the Ciaphas Cain books in e-book form, decided to build a good-sized trebuchet this year (there may be pictures when it happens), bought rudder pedals and some other CH Products products to greatly enhance my flight simulation experience, developed a surprising fondness for children’s television show Phineas and Ferb, and probably did a lot of other stuff that didn’t make it over my threshold of easy recall.

Anyway, I hope to dive back into writing soon. It may well not be more of the fantasy series I started with, but in the end it’s my decision, so ha.

Warspite‘s R turret, foremost on the ship’s underside, was one of her baby turrets, mounting a single twenty-centimeter impeller Mark VIII and well-suited to a junior officer’s command. Gunnery Sublieutenant Erich Ostertag had been an ensign in Weatherby’s first command, and the captain had spent a favor or two to get him aboard Warspite a few years later. Now he had eleven men answering to him, counting the four in the gunhouse further outboard, past the bulkhead off to his right.

As Warspite‘s acceleration slackened, R turret’s crew clambered out of their chairs. Ostertag pushed the bits of cloth in his ears deeper against the clatter of the upper shell hoist, which ran side to side to the center of the inboard bulkhead. The hoist carriage came to rest at the junction ring with the lower hoist, the one that came up from the magazine, and the fighting platform on which Ostertag and his men stood shifted on its rails as the turret turned on target. Green lights showed on the status board, and Ostertag gave his two gunners the thumbs-up.

The gun gave its customary heart-stopping crump, the first of four to come over the next quarter-minute from the ready magazine in the gunhouse, while Ostertag watched his hoist operators coordinate the transfer of four shells and propellant charges from the lower hoist to the upper. The gun had sounded twice more before the hydraulic rams and shell carriages finished their interlocking dance. Motors whirred up to speed, and the hoist trundled along its rails out to the gun.

The lower hoist carriage in turn vanished through the inboard bulkhead, and Ostertag surveyed his command. He’d have more to do soon.

A dearth of things to do was not high on Ship Subcommander Athelney Jones’ list of problems. Command would fall to him were the bridge to take a hit, God forbid, so his battle station was well away from it, in the damage control center aft of midships and centerline. The plan view of the ship on the screen before him flashed red in places, while the petty officer and the two sailors at the comms panel— the ship’s largest— behind him dispatched damage control parties around the ship.

That blasted EMP had done a number on Warspite, Jones thought, certainly more of one than he’d have liked. His teams were still tied up replacing compute modules while Reprisal‘s gunners were finding the range. He heard a shearing sound, and moments later another patch of radiator went red on his display. “Mr. Mulrain, be sure Mr. Callamy knows to be cautious with his thermals,” he said to the petty officer.

Jones had a second display mirroring the bridge plotting table, and it chimed softly. He looked up at it to see more of Reprisal‘s shells incoming. Warspite lurched beneath him, and he felt the shell go off through the decking. His screens flashed angrily, showing a deep gash into Warspite‘s starboard shoulder.

“Pull your teams from the port side,” he said, as a telltale caught his eye. He spun, grabbed the annunciator microphone from the comms panel, and spoke into it. “Fire in B ring starboard side, frames six and eight. Damage control to your fire stations.”

They would be sealing additional airtight doors and preparing to pump the atmosphere out of those compartments. The leaks from the shell hit would tke care of the rest. Jones looked back down at his board and took a moment to revel in the quiet efficiency of his men.

Rather than force myself to finish this monster of an entry, I’m going to split it up into bits of about this length as I said I would only start doing after We Sail Off To War was finished. I already have Friday’s nearly done. It needs another paragraph or three and some editing, and that’s all.

It’s interesting to note that this story was originally supposed to be eight entries long. Ha. I know, silly of me, right?

For the tiniest fraction of a moment, Winston saw the lights in CIC glow brighter. Then they shut off, and the crew stations and repeater screens flickered out an instant later. The darkness lingered for more than the second or so it should have, and over the ring of a sound-powered phone, Weatherby said, “Mr. Callamy?”

“Very good, Lieutenant,” said Callamy, and then there was a click Winston identified as the phone going back in its cradle. “It was the sentry circuit, sir, burned out,” Callamy reported. “The reactor is fine. We’ll have power in fifteen seconds.”

Winston counted to thirteen before the lights came back on. Warspite, like all warships, was best employed with her electronics intact, even if at their best they were designed for durability rather than flashiness. Hardening couldn’t protect everything, however, and like all warships, Warspite could be run essentially on vacuum tubes, though that was a contingency best avoided. A damage control party clattered through the inboard hatch in mobile acceleration chairs like Winston’s, the chairs’ articulated legs engaging the toeholds on the deck.

The crew stations came back to life, running self-diagnostics. The bridge watch opened access panels to remove damaged components, and the sailors of the damage control party passed out modular replacements. Less than thirty seconds had passed since Reprisal’s missile hit, but that was far longer than was preferable. Winston drummed his fingers nervously, noticing some similar sign of anxiety from nearly every one of the junior officers present.

There was a burst of chatter as systems came online. Rawlins spun his chair to face Weatherby. “Signal from Hermes,” he said. At the same time, a sensor operator called, “Reprisal’s bow on to us, accelerating— two gravities, two five, three… three two.”

“Helmsman, put her on our after quarter, three seven five by zero. Engines ahead full,” said Weatherby. “The message, Mr. Rawlins?”

Winston felt himself settle into his acceleration chair as Warspite’s engine note grew more insistent. The helmsman repeated the order, and Rawlins spoke over him. “Just a moment, sir, it’s blink code… ah. Reactor safety shutdown at missile second pulse stop restart in progress stop need ten minutes stop.” He watched his display, and then looked up. “Message repeats, sir.”

Weatherby rubbed at the back of his neck, a gesture Winston thought must have been very deeply ingrained to turn up under three gee. “Belay that last, helmsman,” he said, and the slight pressure of Warspite’s turn eased. “Bow onto Reprisal, Mr. Rawlins. Take us across her stern. Mr. Leighton, engage with masers as they bear, and stand ready the missiles.”

“Sir, we—” Winston blurted out.

“—cannot give Reprisal a clear run at Hermes, Mr. Hughes,” Weatherby snapped, “and I’ll thank you to limit contributions such as that in the midst of an engagement.”

“Yessir,” Winston replied automatically, but Weatherby’s attention was already elsewhere.

“Range two thousand closure ten, bearing two zero five by up one hundred,” Petty Officer Preble said, from his place by the sensor stations. “She’s not turning.”

“Ahead flank, Mr. Rawlins. Give me a low velocity delta as we cross her,” said Weatherby, “and I needn’t tell you not to show her our stern.”

Warspite turned end for end and poured on more steam. Winston’s chair reclined further, almost horizontal now, and a great weight settled on Winston’s chest. He concentrated on his breathing for a few heartbeats, recalling long sessions in the centrifuges before his deployment began, and shortly found his five-gravity rhythm. He turned his eyes to his chair display. Warspite was angled off the straight course to Reprisal, keeping her engines and their vulnerable hydrogen plumbing well clear of Reprisal’s guns. Rawlins would use a bit more thrust and a bit more fuel to make a great loop at Reprisal rather than driving directly in.

“Range one thousand, closure four.”

“Mr. Leighton, two volleys from the forward tubes to arrive simultaneously, and stand ready the guns,” Weatherby said. “Volley one at seven fifty.”

Preble turned his chair toward the plotting board and said, “She’s coming about, sir.”

“Good,” said Weatherby, smiling tightly. “Match velocities, Mr. Rawlins. Five hundred kilometers, if you can.”

“Match velocities, five hundred kilometers, aye.”

Weatherby shifted his head on his chair’s rest. “Gentlemen,” he said flatly, “we are going to take a pounding.” The bridge talker, quick on the switch, had put Weatherby over the annunciator, and his voice echoed in compartments and corridors through the whole of the ship. “Likely this will be as hard a fight as any of us will ever face.” Leighton spoke softly, and the guns rumbled through the frame as Weatherby continued. “We fight today for our honor, and for the honor of our flag. We fight for a victory— not ours, but Hermes’ also. We need not defeat Reprisal ourselves. We need only last.” He took a breath. “So stand by your guns, men, and be about your damage control with stout hearts and all haste. Hold fast, and Godspeed.”

“Guns are a miss. Missiles in five,” Leighton reported in the silence that followed. Winston called up the plotting board repeater on his chair display, and saw eight blips making their final runs at Reprisal. There was no finesse to them, which told Winston they carried anti-radiator shrapnel heads. They would be set up to detonate the moment a maser found them, showering whatever was before them with a cloud of high-speed debris. The dots winked out in quick succession, and Leighton said, “Hits.”

At the same time, Preble shouted, “Incoming!”

Impact alarms hooted, and before Weatherby could order it, Rawlins called rapid-fire orders to the helmsman. Winston felt Warspite’s acceleration shift as side thrusters kicked in.

“Another volley,” said Preble.

“Range?” Weatherby asked.

“Six one eight.”

“Mr. Rawlins, if you have an opening, get us to five hundred.”

“Five hundred, sir,” Rawlins replied, finding a moment to slip something coherent into a stream of navigational orders Winston had long since lost track of.

“Reprisal’s first volley in ten,” said Preble. “Her next in nineteen. She’s fired another, sir.”

“Mr. Rawlins?” Weatherby said. Rawlins spared him a nod to say that he’d avoid the first volley, and Winston relaxed. He had fifteen seconds or so to watch the shells trace their way across the radar repeater screen. Between that and the plotting board, he could build a reasonable tactical picture in his head and spend a moment appreciating the gunnery.

Hitting one spacecraft from another with an unguided projectile was, as his instructors had told him many times, a difficult problem. Shooting for your target straightaway was a recipe for miss after miss. Leighton was placing his shots to bracket Reprisal, giving her no place to go but away from Warspite or into at least one of Warspite’s shots. Reprisal’s gunnery lieutenant was doing the same thing, though, and Rawlins could not work miracles. Winston saw the radar echo of one of the thirty-eight-centimeter shells from Reprisal’s second volley on a line to intersect Warspite’s course, and that was the best possible outcome. Rawlins was cornered.

“Three, two, one,” Preble said.

Reprisal’s shell was an invisible dot against a diamond-on-velvet backdrop. It streaked in low on Warspite’s flank, striking her radiators just forward of her after ventral turret. The nose of the shell crumpled and spread, and then it exploded. Warspite’s radiators rippled from the shock—

It was a lie to say that there was no sound in space, Winston thought. He’d felt the impact as much as he’d heard it, a thump that Warspite’s bulk could not fully absorb. Now there was the screech of tearing hullmetal, a noise to set his teeth on edge.

Callamy shouted over it. “That’s the dorsal spar on the number three mast, captain! She’s coming free!”

“Next volley in eight! Reprisal is closing range!”

“Atmosphere leaks in A ring compartments starboard side, frames thirty-four to thirty-eight!”

Over the chaos, Weatherby spoke, his voice raised but his manner steely. “Mr. Leighton, fire at will. All weapons.”

Winston gripped the arms of his chair and steadied himself. The battle was on.

Here’s a taste of battle to fire you up for the next one in October. There will be more blathering later in a weekend open thread post.

The first and most obvious is that the theme has changed to something still more minimalist than before. This is a consequence of the second: Many Words is now self-hosted via virtual private server, which is a fantastically cool technology. The second-and-a-half thing is that I’m now much more familiar with the workings of the Internet, and I figure that’s probably a good thing.

The third and best part of all of this is that I have a great deal more latitude in terms of organizational ability. There are some obvious changes already: the front page now has writing and writing only, and the category pages linked from the Archives page now go from oldest to newest and have first-sentence excerpts. I have some other ideas about navigation (such as splitting the part of the site where I babble into its own WordPress instance, maybe), post templates (where I give writing posts navigational links that skip blather), and some other things, but I’ve spent enough time on this for the moment— I’ll be writing in my Many Words time for the next few weeks, instead of hacking on WordPress.

There is one not-so-great thing afoot, too: your RSS feed links no longer work, which you may not discover for some time due to my irregular update pace.

Winston grabbed his cap and headed for CIC.

As he arrived and strapped himself into his acceleration chair, the bridge talker sounded the microgravity alarm, and the rumble of Warspite‘s engines ceased. She would coast from here, the ten kilometers per second of closure she had left representing no more than five minutes at combat thrust.

Eighteen thousand kilometers. If this had been a fleet action, the space before Warspite would have been filled with volleys of missiles, timed and aimed to overwhelm a multi-ship point defense screen. As it was, odds were against the sort of volley one ship could fire sneaking past Hermes‘ and Warspite‘s combined defenses, and Weatherby was too cautious to throw away missiles of his own on such a long shot. Winston wouldn’t have been surprised to see the captains hold their fire until they were nearly in gunnery range.

Twelve thousand kilometers. Warspite‘s telescopes were showing more and more detail on Reprisal, and Winston studied the images on his acceleration chair’s armrest screen. She looked very ordinary, wrapped in a cocoon of radiators cut out for two turrets each dorsal and ventral. Doubles or triples, Winston thought, but the angle of the frame made it impossible to tell for sure. Even doubles would put her above Warspite‘s weight class, triples overwhelmingly so, but Hermes was along too and would hit nearly as hard as Warspite. Winston turned his attention to Reprisal‘s radiator rig. It was nothing extraordinary, besides what looked like rather heavy external bracing. That was a feature Warspite lacked, but Weatherby’s choice of rig was lighter than most, more efficient owing to its four radiator masts per side, but more prone to damage as well.

“Action stations,” Weatherby ordered. Alarms sounded throughout the ship.

Seventy-five hundred kilometers. Warspite was tensed for battle, and Winston realized he was drumming his fingers against his leg. Just a few more minutes, he told himself—

“Vampire, vampire, vampire!” called a sensor operator. All eyes turned to the sensor repeater screens. “I mark… fifty-eight seekers, sir.”

While Winston stared in shock, Weatherby wasted no time. “Mr. Leighton, engage at will, maneuvering as necessary,” he said, “and Godspeed.”

Recovering himself, Winston watched the missiles creep across the plotting board, two and a half minutes out. When he’d entered the service, Winston had thought very little of point defense— it was a task for the computers. Serving aboard Warspite had opened his eyes. It was an intricate dance, fought by the intuition of the officers as much as the raw response time of the computers. Reprisal‘s gunners would be watching Warspite, deactivating and reactivating missiles, redirecting them to overwhlem what Leighton could direct to stop them, and generally doing everything possible to hide the real thrust of their attack until the very last moment. It was Leighton’s task to outfox them, to discern which missiles the Exile gunners had bet on and remove them from play.

Leighton spoke in a continuous stream, rapid-fire strings of numbers as he handed out vectors to his subordinates, and added a bearing to the helm in the middle of it all. Warspite yawed to put her starboard bow to the barrage. And a barrage it was: sixty missiles was the sort of shot a battleship took, or the better part of a small task force; it was on the upper edge of what Warspite could shoot down.

Weatherby said nothing over Leighton’s litany of orders. Silence descended over CIC while the engagement clock counted down. Twenty seconds later, power indicators above the engineering consoles spiked as dozens of masers stabbed out from Warspite, slewing to lock on to missiles in twos and threes. The missiles writhed as their primary computers shut down under the electromagnetic interference and more hardened secondaries came up to replace them.

The dance began. Gunners called out missile track numbers as they ceased maneuvering or spiralled out of the barrage, and Leighton and Weatherby replied with orders to ignore or re-engage them according to some formula Winston could not puzzle out. It seemed effective enough, though; by the time the missiles reached gun range, only a handful more than thirty remained.

Warspite, fitted out for point defense as Weatherby liked her, mounted sixty-four hybrid impeller autocannon in the 3.7-centimeter caliber, firing proximity-fused fragmentation shells at velocities in the tens of kilometers per second. Even so, missiles on an evasive approach made the problem of actually shooting them down very difficult. Most warships couldn’t waste ammunition on improbable long shots. Warspite was not ‘most warships’; fleet point defense was her intended role, and she carried ammunition enough to make the notion of wasting ammunition essentially meaningless.

Winston felt an irregular chatter in the deckplates as Warspite‘s point defense guns fired a barrage. Reprisal‘s gunners spread their dwindling missile swarm out, and Leighton ordered another burst. Unbidden, the words of a lecturer in Tactics came to Winston’s mind: the point of point defense is to force the incoming missiles to run straight, whether by disabling them or forcing them to spend their fuel in maneuver. Leighton repeated his volleys every ten seconds or so, and again every time Reprisal‘s missiles fired thrusters to dodge. The swarm dwindled further each time, until ten actives remained on the plotting board.

Leighton showed signs of relaxing for the first time in one hundred thirty seconds. “Engage all actives on full-automatic mode,” he ordered. Warspite‘s gunners gave her point defense systems back to her computers, and the intermittent rattle became continuous for fifteen seconds. “All targets engaged and destroyed,” Leighton reported. Winston saw Hannah Welles’ hands shake as she moved them from her console to the arms of her acceleration chair.

“Handily done, Lieutenant,” Weatherby said. “Gentlemen, we’ve ducked her haymaker. I’m confident we can take—”

Above the plane of battle, a mechanical timer clicked to zero. The missile enclosing it powered back on, and the missile’s guidance computer checked its position. It saw the two Confederate ships in formation, the nearest one not more than fifty kilometers away, and once its two siblings verified its conclusion, all three sent a signal to the fire control computer, which was well and truly fried. Undeterred, the guidance computers tried a backup, each sending a much stronger pulse along a heavy wire—

The backup detonator was little more than a series of logic gates to guarantee that the guidance computers agreed and a solenoid to flip a heavy switch. The switch flipped—

The missile vanished in a flash of light.

Yes, you have met Hannah Welles before. Go back to No. 3.

Not long ago did Many Words’ one-year anniversary pass us by. So far I’ve put 40,000 words up here, which is the sum total of the recreational writing I’ve been able to generate since then. That represents a pace of about 100 words a day, which is not very impressive at all. I’d be pretty happy if I could get my pace back up to twice that.

If you’ll permit me an ugly segue, I plan to modify the way I post updates going forward. Of late (and particularly with We Sail Off To War) I’ve been putting up entries when I consider them done, which is to say that they might swell to (say) 1800 words before I put them up. It’s exhausting to keep that up week-to-week. What I’ll be doing in the future is trying to put up about 700 words twice a week, no matter how it divides entries. I’ll probably end up writing them in much larger chunks, which are the only things that will get titles. You’ll end up seeing something like this:

Random Chapter No. 1 – Random Title
Random Chapter No. 2
Random Chapter No. 3
Random Chapter No. 4 – Random Title

…for something that may have been compressed into two entries beforehand. This gives me a bit more freedom to tell stories the way I want to in a given chapter without overtaxing my already thinly-stretched free time.