Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (47 page)

“Yes, Kris.”

“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Penny asked.

“Why not? Nelly, the next ten minutes, we concentrate on the wayward detachment. Give them one-sixteenth pellets. They’re far enough out that any damage is better than none. Then, once the original storm is on its way, they get one shot in five. That leaves seven shots in ten for our friends out Admiral Kitano’s way. By the way, Nelly, advise Kitano of both our plans to dodge the cruisers and the bullets we’ve sent at those who skipped out on her. We need to keep her in the loop.”

“Done, Kris.”

Kris glanced around her flag plot. A few minutes ago it looked like a funeral. Now it was more like the early stages of a victory party. Kris knew this could change, but it felt good for now.

She rubbed her belly and felt baby settle down with her to wait.

She hadn’t long.

65

The
aliens didn’t wait for Admiral Kitano’s battlecruisers to attack them. Instead, they wore away from them and invited Kitano to try the deadly space they’d been in.

Kitano declined the honor, instead leading her ships up and over the clouds of racing neutron fragments.

Kris studied the situation and decided it was too ambiguous for her long-range fire. She ordered the beam ships to slow fire, one round every minute, and send three out to the far force headed for the jump and one at the cruisers. Again, Kris advised Kitano of developments and that she’d have clean space to fight five hours from now.

Before her, cruisers died. What would happen to the far-flung forces would be a long time coming.

Jack took Kris out for a candlelit dinner at an Italian restaurant. Kris was again struck by a surreal feeling as the waiters went about their business and off-duty workers sat at tables, chatting as normally as any day while ships did battle and people died only a few Astronomical Units away. Of course, those units were measured in millions of kilometers. Still, in Kris’s flag plot, they fought a battle.

Here, they dined on veal parmigiana and a truly unique and very fresh Caesar salad.

“We grow the lettuce aboard ship, Your Highness,” the waiter said as he set the plate before her.

“This is not relaxing,” Kris told Jack after the wine waiter retreated with no order.

“I know, but imagine the report these other diners will take to their shipmates. ‘I ate with the princess at Luigi’s. It can’t be all that bad.’”

Kris winced. “Is that the message we want?”

“When all hell breaks loose, it will be soon enough to worry. For now, everyone does their job, and things will work out,” Jack said, saluting Kris with a water goblet.

Kris saluted back. “Leave tomorrow’s evil to tomorrow, huh?”

“Unless you can send some neutron slag at it, yes,” Jack answered.

Kris left half her delicious meal on the plate. Between baby taking up so much room and the nervousness that she could not shed, her stomach had little interest.

They walked, hand in hand, back to flag plot. “Anything pop while we were at supper?” Jack asked as soon as they stepped through the door.

“Just the usual,” Penny reported. “Is Luigi’s as good as they say?”

“Very good,” Kris said, “assuming you don’t have a baby shoving your stomach up into your throat.”

“Mind if Masao and I take a break?” Penny asked. “I’m a bit hungry.”

“With gratitude for watching the store while we did,” Kris said, and sent her friends on their way.

With Admiral Furzah, she studied the boards.

“Is it as strange for you as it is for me to watch this slow-motion battle?” Admiral Furzah asked. “In our histories, there are stories of sieges that lasted for years, but this. This is strange.”

“The time for terror will come.”

“Hmm. I think the time of terror is coming to your Fast Fleets,” she said.

Kris had noticed that. While she’d dined with Jack, the neutron darts launched hours ago had been racing through the empty space that both the aliens and Admiral Kitano were carefully avoiding. Soon, their battlefield would be clear; Kitano was already edging closer to the aliens.

They had spread out, loosening their dishes to let ships dodge. Many hadn’t. “Nelly, what’s the count on alien warships?”

“We’ve destroyed a hundred and twenty-three. There are six hundred and ninety-seven left, Kris. Oh, and while you were out, Lorna Do’s
Churchill
didn’t quite dodge. A dart
winged her. She’s still holding out space, but her crystal armor got knocked off, and her lasers are questionable. She’s trailing the fleet.”

“We knew the risk when we laid on this battle,” Kris whispered.

The battle began to develop. The aliens were in a diamond array, each corner made up of six dishes of roughly thirty warships each. Here Kris got to see the difference between the Enlightened Ones. One array was an open, six-pointed star. The next was two columns of three. The third was a pentagon with one dish in the middle. The last was more a swarm with six loose formations that constantly changed shape.

“That’s got to be a bitch to control,” Jack said.

“Are you sure it is controlled?” Admiral Furzah asked. “It looks like no one commands there.”

“She may be right,” Kris said. “I think Kitano will try that one first.”

Kitano’s four fleets were in a diamond formation of their own. Admiral Drago’s Fourth Fleet held a bit back, facing three of the alien dishes as Kitano slipped the other three down to engage the loosely formed enemy.

That alien commander must have seen what was coming. Either he gave the order to charge, or his skippers got it into their own heads to do so. However it happened, nearly two hundred warships flipped over, aimed themselves at the approaching battlecruisers, and charged. They’d been maintaining 2.5 gees for days. They had a lot of energy on every ship, all headed for Kris. Now they bent their course with anywhere from 2.6 to 3.1 gees straight at the battlecruisers.

Kitano saw it coming. She slowly pulled back, not letting the aliens get too much of an advantage in acceleration, then she gave them a blast from the forward batteries, flipped, and took off at three gees, giving them a taste of the aft batteries.

Now the aliens gave chase, doing everything they could to catch the battlecruisers. The humans reloaded their aft batteries every five to seven seconds, depending on whether they were the new ships with eight guns aft or the upgraded battlecruisers with four.

Once, Kitano ordered a flip and let them have it with the
forward batteries, six or twelve for a full five seconds, then flipped over again.

The alien charge was mad, wild . . . and erratic. The faster ships were the first to die as Kitano concentrated on them. Then the next wave and the next. Warships might be five hundred thousand tons of anger coated with slabs of granite and basalt, but they were mortal, and could only take so much from 22-inch lasers.

“The battlecruisers are concentrating two or three lasers on the same point,” Nelly reported. “Five seconds worth of that from 22-inch lasers will burn a hole in anything.”

And it did. Kris had to remind herself that what she saw was hours old. Warships surged ahead and died in fiery explosions as lasers slashed them. Some battlecruisers took hits; they glowed their response.

Battlecruisers glowed and cooled as alien warships burned and vaporized.

“When will they learn this is suicide?” Penny whispered.

“They know it is,” Kris said. “That Enlightened One is willing to send them to their deaths. Why?”

The aliens played the suicide card again. Smaller boats launched from the larger warships, aimed for the nearest human ship. Secondary batteries slapped them down. Big warships burned, and little suicide ships sparkled in death. Smaller explosions lit up.

“That rocket-launcher defense is working,” Jack said.

“Did we mount any rocket launchers on this big target?” Kris asked Jack.

“No, this huge target has no secondary armament. No defense at all.”

Kris’s eyes grew wide.

“And yes, I’ve had all the Marine rocket launchers we brought aboard mounted on the hull. They’ll have to be operated by Marines on line of sight. The huge sensor suite this tub has is all aimed at targets way out there. Nothing for right at your elbow.”

“Nelly, can you do anything about that?”

“No, Kris. Jack already raised this with Sal. My kids are smart, Kris, but we need something to work with. These sensors can’t track anything as close as a million klicks.”

“Oh, brilliant,” Kris said. “I should have spent a week crawling over this monster, getting a feel for what they’d given us.”

“You were rather busy, my loving Admiral,” Jack said, “and we did have to dock these monsters two hundred clicks ahead of the station to make sure ships didn’t run into them. There wasn’t time.”

“No, we couldn’t delay this attack,” Kris agreed.

“Let’s just pray they don’t get near us,” Penny said.

“Prayer is not a strategy,” Admiral Furzah said. “At least, not a winning strategy.”

Kris said a hearty amen to that.

The battle of the first array resolved itself while they talked. While one corner died, the others did not sit idle. The three remaining arrays, in their different formations, closed on Admiral Drago’s Fourth Fleet, trying to get in range of him and do to him what the rest of the fleets were doing for their brothers.

Drago backstepped slowly, giving ground while burning the closest warships under concentrated volleys. They burned, but one of his was caught by an atomic explosion. The
Vigilant
was Alwa-made and had a green crew. They must have missed something. It cost them dearly.

Now ships were coming in from three different directions: warships, suicide boats, and a few fast cruisers that the one surviving mother ship had apparently saved back. Drago’s ships were hard-pressed. The
Bismarck
followed the
Vigilant
into an expanding radioactive ball.

Drago turned fleet and began a serious retrograde.

Kitano brought the three other fleets through the wreckage of the alien dishes and took one alien array on the flank.

Drago had held the bridge long enough for Kitano to eradicate one-quarter of the alien force. Now she was back on the battlefield, taking large chunks out of the alien commander who’d arranged his ships in a pentagon.

“That’s got to hurt,” Jack said, as the two outer dishes of the pentagon vanished in little more than a blink.

What was left of that array became chaos as it fell apart and sought to merge itself to the other two. All except one. The center dish charged straight into Kitano’s fleet, blossoming like a flower with suicide boats and smaller craft.

Thirty against 150 were lousy odds. Kris had fought them and knew it for a fact. The alien ignored that, and died too quickly to obtain enlightenment. His warships died, then secondaries mopped up the smaller stuff.

The alien attack failed, but it had taken another battlecruiser out. The newly arrived
Maawaska
from Tillamook let a suicide boat with an atomic get too close.

Whoever commanded the two remaining arrays took in what they’d seen and appeared to learn a lesson. At least they tried.

The remaining fifteen dishes rearranged themselves. Two dishes higher, three dishes next, five in the middle, then three and two to the bottom. The middle dishes advanced on Kitano’s ships slowly, the upper and lower ones faster.

“Finally, they are using their superior numbers to engulf us,” Admiral Furzah purred. “They can learn.”

“But so can we,” Kris pointed out.

Kitano’s fleets spread out, leaving a hole in the middle facing the enemy’s refused center. Then the fleets dashed up and out, each one taking on all or parts of two wing dishes, thirty-plus battlecruisers against fifty to sixty huge alien warships.

It was not a fair fight.

Again, the long-range lasers galled the stone-clad warships. Again, the warships broke into ragged charges, desperate to close with the humans. Once more, the alien dishes gushed forth a flood of vicious little boats, some tipped with atomics, all striving to get close enough to kill.

The aliens fought, and the aliens died.

But while eight dishes were engaged, seven were free to get into mischief. An alien commander saw it and put it to good use.

Now the center put on acceleration, swept forward and down, trying to take Miyoshi’s Second Fleet on its flank. Five dishes strove to slam into his exposed flank even as the two dishes he was attacking charged in as well.

Miyoshi was sandwiched. His ships began to glow, then burn, even as more aliens exploded into vapor.

Drago’s fleet was on the other side of Miyoshi. Suddenly, he found his targets falling back as fast as they could. He pursued.

As Kris and Drago had learned, a pursuit through recently vacated space was dangerous. Still, Miyoshi was suffering, so Drago plunged in, secondaries sweeping the space in front of him.

Poor
Hotspur
, second of that name to serve under Kris, stumbled onto a suicide boat with an atomic on board and vanished away to dust. The newly arrived
Te Mana
suffered a near-similar fate. It must have winged the attacker at the last minute. The battlecruiser from Woolomurra managed to hold together and fall out of line to lick its wounds.

The other fleets closed in as fast as they could dispose of the warships in front of them, in pursuit as Miyoshi’s ships gave ground grudgingly. The
Asahi
from Yamato paid the full price as six warships got her range. They burned through her crystal armor to the reactors inside. She exploded.

The
Roger Young
from Alwa suffered the same fate, as did the
Essen
from New Birmingham and the
Tone
from Musashi. Other ships glowed but fought back, blowing their assailants into vacuum.

First Fleet closed on the alien formation, fighting its way up from the bottom through space seeded with suiciders in both boats and smaller getabouts. The
Daemon
from New Eden took an atomic and vanished. The
Resolute
from Wardhaven took a near miss and limped out of the line. Wardhaven’s new
Formidable
didn’t see the suicider who got her and blew up, leaving only a few survival pods to show where she’d been.