“Bridge! Report!”

“Enemy contacts closing range, sir! If they get a clear shot at our engines, we’re done for!” Lieutenant Austin replied. A bone-jarring impact wave pounded against the Dunkerque’s aft section.

“Maintain evasive action! Stand by to attenuate our drive field!” Commander DeMay shouted. “Weapons bay out!”

With the ship screaming in protest against the drive-field-absent acceleration and every piece of metal in the relatively cramped weapons bay rattling as if under a freight trestle, Toby DeMay worked quickly. The internals of the particular model of shipkiller missile he and the two other technicians were reprogramming were complicated, but thankfully easy to reach without specialized tools. They would have been considerably easier to modify if the work didn’t have to be done during the spaceflight equivalent of a typhoon, but Skywatch combat officers rarely got to pick the starting conditions for a fight.

Another explosion lifted the deck a good fifteen feet. Then it fell away. Everything crashed to the floor again. Tools flew in all directions. Pieces of molded composite broke into pieces and scattered all over the room.

Commander DeMay tried to regain his feet, but the dizziness and the painful impact of his shoulder and elbow against the rigid metal floor almost cost him his consciousness. It was a good thing the missiles they were working on were impact shielded. Otherwise the Dunkerque would be nothing more than a fast-moving debris field by now.

Finally the skipper managed to climb back to a position from which he could see inside the missile he was modifying. The display had switched over to indicate proximity arming. These were the kinds of modifications that would normally be made automatically from the bridge or manually from tactical control. But without sufficient crew, the Dunkerque’s skeleton crew had to do things the hard way.

“Missile two configured!” he shouted over the din. The other technician gave the thumbs-up sign and began to seal the access panel on his missile with his handheld power-bolting unit. DeMay finished his final preparations and signaled the bridge once more.

“Bridge, Austin!”

“Alright, lieutenant, we’ve got three weapons standing by! Prepare to activate ventral airlock three and shut down all ECM channels on my order!”

“Affirmative! Signals console is standing by!”

“Range to enemy spacecraft!”

“Tactical reports range now 140,000 miles and closing on an oblique pursuit!”

“Range to asteroid field?”

“We will hit the leading edge in forty-six seconds, sir!”

“Very well, bridge! Stand by to launch proximity weapons!”

DeMay gave the signal, and all three men trundled the first of the relatively light shipkillers into the lift mechanism. They locked the wheels of the transport into the lift’s floor mounts and cleared the platform. One of the technicians manned the airlock controls and waited for the deploy order. Commander DeMay watched carefully as the lead ship in the pursuit formation moved into position to target the Dunkerque’s engines.

“Activate airlock!”

The lift mechanism rotated on its long axis, turning the missile and its transport over and downward facing. It lowered itself into the outer access bay. Fast moving mechanical doors sealed the airlock chamber. Red lights blinked in sequence along the two doors’ edges, indicating both a mechanical and a magnetic lock.

“Hull systems report a total integrity seal, sir. Standing by!”

“Range to target, bridge!”

“One two zero kiloclicks! Optimum range!”

“Jettison one!”

The technician punched the release controls for ventral airlock three. The transport clamps blasted free and pieces of their mechanism tumbled into space just before the missile followed. The white cylindrical weapon casing began to tumble away from the fast-moving strike cruiser. Its internal systems went active, measuring range and relative speed with all other contacts. It locked on the lead pursuer and began broadcasting old-style RADAR signals in all directions.

“Weapon at half-range in five.. four.. three..”

DeMay waited patiently until Lieutenant Austin reported the missile had reached the halfway point between the two ships before turning the two keys on his console. “Sequences one and two active!”

“Affirmative, sir, arming the weapon! Sequence three active! We have a magnetic lock on the lead ship!”

The fast destroyer’s proximity alarms sounded, but the closure speed between it and the practically impossible to detect missile the Dunkerque had dropped in the road for it to run over was way too fast for any kind of evasive maneuvers. Its forward screens flared to life angrily an instant before a white-hot burst of gravitic, magnetic and thermal energy thumped into existence and then trailed behind. The ship staggered on its course as nearly all of its defensive systems overloaded themselves trying to absorb the fifteen megaton explosion their ship had just punctured.

It’s escort fired its heaviest beam weapons indiscriminately at the Dunkerque’s aft section. Each shot lit up space in all directions, but none of the weapons were able to make contact. With her drive field down, the Dunkerque had a considerably smaller EM profile, which made things very hard on enemy battle computers. Picking out something as relatively small as a spacecraft in a quarter million mile diameter sphere was a challenge under the best of conditions.

Small chunks of rock began to streak past the destroyers.

“Bridge! Keep that plot continuously updated! Report!” DeMay was busy helping the technician move missile two into the airlock.

“Barker’s Asteroid now at 800,000 miles and closing, sir! We have a proximity mine at point six!”

“Maintain operational transponder signals! Stand by to launch a second weapon!” DeMay knew if he didn’t get his ship’s drive field re-established, the whole trip could end rather abruptly with an asteroid impact. They had to launch their second weapon.

The destroyer escorts began to dodge and spiral through a roller-coaster-like course. Their battle screens smashed into the smaller debris while their pilots and navigators tried to avoid the larger objects. One mistake would pulverize their ship, even with its screens up and at full power.

“Missile two away!” The commander returned to his console and monitored the second missile’s location. He had made certain the warhead wouldn’t respond to any spectrometric signature other than a vessel hull. They only needed a few more seconds. A close detonation shook the weapons bay, but the captain held on to his console and didn’t take his eyes off the plot.

“Now! Arm weapon!”

This time the missile caught the escort ship’s location after it performed a desperate swerve to avoid an oncoming five-hundred-foot slab of ferrous iron and smooth rock. The missile changed course and hurtled towards the vessel’s port side. Its pilot performed a flawless starboard evasive maneuver, but was too close to the other destroyer to avoid its drive field. The two magnetic spheres briefly crackled against each other, draining away most of their power for just an instant.

Then the warhead detonated. Destroyer two rolled out of control directly into the path of destroyer one. Hulls clipped each other at nearly 4000 miles per second. The resulting spins nearly instantly tore the vessels to pieces. When their fusion bottles ruptured and reacted with what remained of their unstable drive fields, a superhot energy burst appeared momentarily, then faded. The metal remains of the two ships tumbled away into space and became permanent features of the asteroid field.

“We got ‘em sir!” Austin shouted. The sparse crew of the DSS Dunkerque cheered over the intraship.