Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (36 page)

They died, but they kept Kris from getting a single shot off at their base ship. The behemoth waddled by them, doing a good 1.35-gee acceleration away from the gas giant while Kris decelerated toward it.

They shot past each other with neither side attempting to communicate.

Maybe a few humans thumbed their noses at the aliens. What they did back at the humans was anybody’s guess.

Once the Fourth Fleet was out of range, Kris checked with Nelly. “We will make orbit, won’t we?”

“You can drop deceleration to 1.5 gees and let folks have a break. We’ll need to check for things like mines left in orbit around the gas giant, but space is huge. Do you want to refuel?”

“We might as well. A stern chase is a long chase. Tell the fleet to prepare to deploy pinnaces for a quick refueling run as we swing by.”

“Order passed and acknowledged.”

Kris eyed the now-departing aliens. They’d actually cut their acceleration to .5 gee. Did they want her to chase them? That was her intent, but if it was what they wanted, maybe she should rethink her strategy.

Then again, 1.34-gee acceleration was the most Kris had ever seen a mother ship do. Maybe they needed time to mend and fix. They were aliens. There was no telling what they thought.

Kris took a deep breath and assigned herself a five-minute break.

NELLY, CAN YOU MAKE THIS EGG A BIT BIGGER? I’D LIKE A FEW MINUTES WITH MY LITTLE ONE, IF I COULD.

CERTAINLY, KRIS.

Kris’s egg took on a clear baby bump and she found her hands free to rub her belly and pat baby on the head . . . or rump . . . she still had trouble figuring out which end was up.

I brought you safely through this, and I’ll keep you safe from all the bogeymen.

When her serious side tried to raise doubts, Kris mentally shut it down.

I will keep you safe. I will. That’s what mommies do. And when this is over, I will find you a safe place were Mommy and Daddy can do regular jobs and come home to baby like regular parents. I will. Somehow, I will.

When Kris came out of herself, she found the battle timer had advanced eight minutes. She gave baby one last pat, let her hands make one last loving circle of her swollen belly, then thought, NELLY, TIGHTEN UP THE EGG. IT’S TIME TO WORK.

YES, KRIS.

“What have our erstwhile friends been up to?” she asked.

“Not a lot,” Penny answered. “They’re going away from us at a slower acceleration. The warships and little boats shut down entirely, and the mother ship has overtaken them.”

“So the warships are between us and the base ship,” Kris said.

“The warships and the suicide boats,” Jack corrected.

“Admiral Furzah, does your history include a situation where one side had an advantage in projectile weapons over the other and could select the range?”

“Yes. The only solution that ever worked was to invent a better projectile weapon. That, or come up with, ah, something to ride that could cover the killing ground faster than the throwing weapon could kill you.”

“Heavy cavalry charging archers,” Penny offered.

“Oh, so you had them, too.”

“The solutions to the problems we give ourselves while trying to kill each other seem to have the same answers no matter what world you’re on.”

“Yes.” The feline’s grin showed lots of teeth . . . and no regret for her bloody history.

“We have the range, and we have the speed,” Kris said.

“So they die,” the feline admiral said with finality.

“How can they either close the range faster against us or get greater range from their weapons?” Kris asked.

“I imagine several Enlightened Ones and their Black Hats are gnawing at that problem for all they’re worth,” Jack said.

“Yes, I imagine they are.”

52

Kris’s
Fourth Fleet swung around the gas giant. It had over a dozen moons and something of a ring. A dozen suicide boats shot out from one moon. More hid among the rings.

Their reactors gave them away. They died long before they could do anything.

Several packages with radioactive signatures were shot out of space before any frigate came close.

“Which begs the question,” Jack mused. “Were they expecting to defend this supply depot, or are they starting to leave these kind of calling cards wherever they hang out?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Kris said.

When they swung out from behind the gas giant, sensors took the measure of the alien battle array.

“They’ve set a course for the nearest jump point,” Nelly reported, “but they’ll need days to reach it, assuming they follow a sensible course of accelerate, decelerate, and approach the jump at dead slow.”

“But if they’re desperate to get away and don’t care where in space they end up?” Jack asked.

Kris nodded. “No bet, but for now, the base ship is plodding along at .55 gees with all the surviving warships and little boats trailing behind. I know a hopeless situation, and they’ve got hopeless stamped all over them.”

“But cornered rats can fight without hope and with nothing held back,” Admiral Furzah said.

“Exactly.”

“Necessity being the mother of invention, I think we can count on these folks to be real mothers,” Penny said.

“May I point out,” Masao said, “that we do not want any of
them to survive to report how a human fleet appeared out of nowhere in their space.”

“Point well taken,” Kris said. “Let us get about the execution of those poor damned souls.”

Kris’s fleet accelerated away from the gas giant at three gees; they’d decelerate to approach the enemy fleet at a decent closing rate. The mother ship pulled up her skirts and put on a full 1.34 gees. She held it only a few hours, then began to slow: 1.31, 1.27, 1.21. She was losing acceleration fast as Kris came up on the rear dish.

The alien suicide boats had also slowed. The first one Kris’s fleet came up on suddenly went pedal to the metal and tried to ram the lead frigate.

Tenacious
shot it out of space at fifty thousand klicks using her 5-inch lasers.

Space came alive with a killing rage.

It wasn’t just dormant suicide boats, but smaller stuff, like Kris had faced on the expedition to take out the first suicide base ship. There were small craft with space for only one or two men. Some had matter-antimatter drives that gave off a signature the sensor suites could track, but others were ancient chemical rockets that drifted quiet as a rock before suddenly coming as fury incarnate.

A surprising number had atomic warheads. The tiny leak of radiation gave them away.

It got worse as they closed on the defending warships. The space between Kris’s fleet and the diminished dish was littered with all kinds of junk.

Some of it was just rocks.

Too much of it was space-suited aliens with small maneuvering units and explosive packs. The
Steadfast
took a hit from one. It didn’t do a lot of damage, but if the fellow had had an atomic . . . ?

“We need more close-in defense,” Jack said. “If you can order up some firing slots on the hull, I’ll have my Marines man them.”

“I’ve got a better idea. How many of those twenty-five-millimeter automatic grenade launchers does each ship’s company have?”

“Half a dozen,” Jack said. “We try to have one in each fire team.”

“Get them to the hull. Nelly, I need a fire control system and a cradle to slave those launchers to the ship’s defense.”

“The Army has something like that to take down air vehicles,” Nelly said. “I’m passing this along to the fleet.”

The hasty installation came none too soon. A single-man unit that did have an atomic package got winged close to the
Stonewall
. He caused minor damage when he blew himself up.

Kris reduced acceleration. She had the enemy; it was only a matter of time. If they wanted to turn their execution into a slow one, desperately resisted, Kris could live with that.

Live with it was the key term. They were going to die. Kris would not lose any more of her crews in this fight.

The fleet plowed its way through the wreck and ruin of men, tiny rockets, and small suicide boats.

Slowly the aliens gave ground as they died by the hundreds. By the thousands.

Soon enough, they’d be dying by the tens of billions.

Tenacious
got a bit ahead of the fleet. One alien warship went to almost three gees, aiming itself at Commander Kaeyat’s flagship. She did the smart thing, firing her forward batteries, then held steady as her squadron mates came to her aid, pinning the charging warship with their fire until it gave itself up to the ravages of its runaway reactors.

Only then did the
Tenacious
flip ship and zip back to the cover of the rest of the squadron. They held in place as three more of the alien warships tried to emulate their mate, only to meet the same immolation.

Carefully, in ones and twos, the alien warships died. Slowly, by the twos and threes and fives, the suicide boats burned.

By the tens and scores and hundreds, individual drifters tried to blow holes in frigates with their own deaths but died as Marine rockets blew them to bits.

The fleet was meticulous and slow as it went about this, not as a fight between two equals but rather as an execution where one would die while the other would definitely go out for a beer when all this was over.

In the end, the mother ship was left without defenders. All the warships were dust; all the suicide boats had failed and gone to whatever reward they had been promised.

Or not.

Now the fleet began the measured slaughter of a ship nearly as big as a moon.

Killing something of that size did not go quickly, not without Hellburners.

The Enlightened One tried to dodge his fate, sending his ship first in one direction, then another. As it waddled back and forth, it shot lasers at the nearest frigates and spewed small craft and space-suited figures into the void.

For a moment, Kris thought some of the suits might seek to live. Then sensors brought up a solid picture of four of them: suit, tiny propulsion system, and a big pack of explosives.

“Shoot anything that gets close,” Kris ordered.

The circling frigates did not get close. The mother ship’s lasers were dangerous out to 100,000 kilometers. They might do some damage at 120,000. Kris held the fleet at 140,000.

At that range, the 22-inch lasers hacked into the base ship. They slashed rocket motors, sending the moon-size structure shooting off in unintended directions, with the hull spinning and twisting in ways never intended.

Lasers carved the structure of the gigantic craft, weakened main strength girders that caved in as the ship did its own destructive dance.

Here and there, a laser struck a reactor, shutting down the magnetic containment field and letting loose plasma that splattered metal and flesh with the temperature of the sun, incinerating the lucky and leaving fire in its wake for those condemned to a slower death.

The frigates fired, flipped, fired, recharged, and flipped again. Their 5-inch secondaries cut down anything that got near, and what they missed, the Marines bagged.

In Kris’s flag plot, Penny watched the butchery and shook her head. “Not one message. Not one word. They are helpless, but they will not beg for life. What kind of insanity are we fighting?”

Then she turned to Kris. “What kind of insane will we
become before we either annihilate them or finally beat them to a pulp that will talk to us?”

“I don’t know, Penny,” was all Kris could say.

Penny and Masao left flag plot.

“You don’t have to stay for the end of this slaughter,” Jack offered. “I can see it through and call you if anything comes up.”

Kris shook her head. “I will watch what I have ordered.”

In the end, the reactors did more to the ship than Kris’s lasers ever could. Plasma got loose, leaping from one reactor to the next, until fire ate the ship from the inside. Hatches popped open as people chose the cold kiss of space to the burning fire they had lost mastery of. Men and women, some with children in tow, pushed themselves out into the vacuum.

Kris fought not to vomit.

“It is done,” Nelly finally said. “There is no sign of life on the mother ship. I guess we could check it out, but I don’t think you want to waste the time.”

“No,” Kris said. “Even if there are a few hidden away behind a bulkhead that still holds, they won’t have air for long. Nelly, give me the fastest course for Alwa.”

“We can go back the way we came.”

“Make it so, Nelly. I’ll be in my quarters if you can keep the acceleration down to one gee for a while. I need a shower.”

“I think we can arrange for one hour of one-gee acceleration. We’ll need to go to four after that.”

“Then advise the fleet we have one hour to catch our breath. Jack, are you with me?”

“Always.”

Four days later, Kris found out just how close she had cut it.

53

“I’m
glad you’re back,” came from Admiral Benson even before Kris got back to the Alwa system. “We got trouble.”

Kris’s Fourth Fleet was decelerating in the next system out, planning on hitting the jump into Alwa at a good fifty thousand klicks. She listened as Benson explained.

The aliens were getting smarter. With three wolf packs meeting opposition on different approaches to System X, they did what any human commander would do.

They concentrated their forces on a single weak point.

Admiral Miyoshi’s Third Fleet was holding the pass against Beulah, the middle wolf pack. To defend a three-jump system, he’d split his ships, assigning ten or eleven to each jump. It had worked. He’d beaten back attacks on all three jumps, destroying scores of warships.

Suddenly, the jump periscopes at all three reported a base ship with a full escort of nearly two hundred warships bearing down on each jump!

He did what anyone would. He sent off couriers hollering for help and backpedaled.

Worse, the aliens had a new weapon. Among the warships rushing across the system at 2.5 gees were three strange-looking ships. Miyoshi found them different enough that he ventured a frigate through to get a good signature on the things.