DUSTMAN DOWN

A Racetrack Chronicles one-shot

Simon J. Dodd

The first salvo struck the Dustman a little aft of amidships, almost directly below where her protruding superstructure merged into her forward Raptor pad. Six inches of hull plating boiled away in an instant, and the compartment beyond vented into space.

The Buse-type Destroyer DE-610, known affectionately to her crew as the Flying Dustman, kept Caprica City time. By that clock, it was 7 AM, and an hour into the Morning Watch, the on-duty crew had drunk second cups of coffee and made jokes, and glanced listlessly over the tactical plot (unchanged), the reactor-plant and life-support systems status (unchanged), the weapons-systems (unchanged), and started on a third cup of coffee, and checked on overnight comm traffic from the flagship and her other escorts… And had settled in for several hours of boring routine as unchanging and adamantine as a Jovian temple-service. Meanwhile, the Midwatch duty crew had had time to grab some chow and settle into racks between the CIC amidships and the engineering sections astern, and for the officers, cramped staterooms below. Hatches that should have been closed were closed; or they weren't. The battlestar-group to which the Dustman belonged was not on maneuvers, and the Colonial Fleet had not seen the enemy, let alone action, in decades.

There was little warning and no time to act. The tactical officer barely had time to comprehend the DRADIS alert-chime and frown at the multiple contacts suddenly filling his screen before an explosion invaded the familiar warp and weft of life in the fleet. Letters, photographs, loose papers, treasured mementos, and sundry reminders of far-away homes rushed toward the hole as relentless, pitiless hard-vacuum lunged into the ship's inner spaces, grasping at everything it found.

It was 7:01 AM, and almost a quarter of the crew was already dead.

Frantic orders from the CIC to bring the Dustman's engine to flanking speed and her guns to bear stopped when a second Raider fired a fusillade of bullets through the ragged hole torn by its wingman's missiles. The hatch between the middle compartment and the enlisted racks gave way; no one had had time to seal the CIC hatches. The Textbook of Operations required that they be sealed only at condition one or two.

Not that it would have mattered. Seconds later, there was no one left alive in the engineering section to respond, as more bullets tore through the reactor that heated and powered the Dustman, flooding the compartment with radiation and rupturing three fuel tanks. Miraculously, the fuel did not ignite; a half-mile aft, the Cerberus was less lucky, an immense fireball erupting out of its engineering section. No one on the Dustman saw that, but a petty-officer on the bridge, frantically and futilely trying to raise the CIC, dropped the phone to stare in dumbfounded horror as, a half-mile ahead, the battlestar Mercury died in a blinding supernova.

If auxiliary fire-control had been manned, there might have been time to arm the point-defense turrets and launch at least one of the four ship-to-ship torpedos carried by the Buse-type. There was little left for the turrets to defend, and the torpedoes were unlikely to be able to track the Raiders—but one of the baseships that had killed the Mercury? Those could be targeted. Even that possibility ended when one last, sustained salvo from the Raiders ripped through the fo'ard magazine and an explosion wrenched the ship's bow from her superstructure.

The only bit of fight out of the Dustman came from Lieutenant Gillian Chard. Destroyers carried at least one Raptor, usually (and here) with the Assault package installed; Chard happened to be working in the cockpit, and by nothing more than happenstance, had landed her Raptor on the aft pad and so escaped the initial blast. As the deck pitched upward from the explosion in the forward magazine, Chard had the presence of mind to disengage the magnetic locks holding her plane to the pad, and as the Raptor was hurled away from the Dustman's carcass, she was able to obtain a firing-solution on one of the Raiders that had killed her ship and loose the entire package of ordinance at their enemy.

There were very, very few successful returns of fire that morning. Chard could at least have said that she drew blood. But that did not save her from the Raider's wingman, who shot her down almost as soon as she saw her missiles take out their target.

It was 7:03 on the morning of April 15, 2,000 years after the exodus; forty years after the end of the Cylon war.

(Inspired by, and in grateful acknowledgement of, Ed Offley, Scorpion Down (2008).)