Authors: William H. Keith
Now Dev, once hero of the Empire, was committing treason, hijacking an Imperial destroyer to keep it from being used against rebel troops on the planet below.
I think you would’ve understood. Father.
For the first time in years, Dev wished his father was here to tell him what to do. He felt completely inadequate, jacked in as captain of a damaged ship, facing impossible odds. The original idea had simply been to keep the Imperials from using the
Tokitukaze
against the rebel defenders at Babel; now he was forced to take her into combat, shorthanded and with a hole in her side.
Imperial warships had large crews in part to provide frequent relief from duty, but particularly because more weapons links meant that greater numbers of teleoperated missiles, decoys, and sensor drones could be employed at one time. A jacker could only operate one missile at a time, and over typical ship combat ranges, that could tie up the operator through a large part of the battle. Dev had just nineteen men and women at his command, and nine of those were caring for the wounded or guarding prisoners or guarding the bridge. Four of those left were going to be busier than they could really manage handling the ship’s maneuvering thrusters engineering, while Simone communed with the ship’s AI and, perhaps most important now, kept watch on survivors of the Imperial crew who might now be burrowing into the destroyer’s vitals, looking for ways to sabotage them.
That left Dev and four others, Bondevik and Nicholson from the old Thorhammers, Schneider and DeVreis from the 4th Terran Rangers, to handle all of
Tokitukaze’s
weapons.
It wasn’t enough, not by a long shot.
Well, you always wanted to be a ship captain,
he told himself wryly.
Now that you got your chance…
In his mind, he shifted to Japanese, punning with the slippery word
kancho.
Perhaps you’re just an enema, and not a warship captain after all.
“Missile launch!” DeVreis warned. Dev saw it, a point of light bracketed in red by the ship’s combat AI.
“Here we go, boys and girls,” he said, his thoughts surprisingly steady. “Let’s see just how much hell we can raise.”
Chapter 32
When you try something on an adversary, if it doesn’t work the first time, you won’t get any benefit out of rushing to do it again. Change your tactics abruptly, doing something completely different. If that still doesn’t work, then try something else.
Thus the science of the art of war involves the presence of mind to “act as the sea when the enemy is like a mountain, and act as a mountain when the enemy is like a sea.”
This requires careful reflection.
—“Fire Scroll”
The Book of the Five Spheres
Miyamoto Musashi
Seventeenth century
B.C.E.
The Hegemony warstriders advanced up the hill, struggling to cross seven hundred meters of fire-swept ground, leaning forward into the storm of laser, cannon, and plasma gun rounds as though pressing ahead in the teeth of a gale. Katya picked as her first target one of the Warlords, a dangerous strider with heavy armor and twin Ishikawajima charged-particle cannons. Three direct hits, and the big machine was still advancing, smoke curling from a ragged scar on its dorsal armor where one of Katya’s shots had actually penetrated.
“Targeting!” Lipinski shouted warning. “On the left! Paint him!”
Katya snapped another laser bolt into the RS-64, then killed the pulse cutout, switching from hard-hitting punch to a diffuse beam. She kept the laser centered on the moving Warlord, tracking the vulnerable joints at thigh and hip. With a shuddering roar, the Ghostrider’s left-hand Kv-70 weapons pack loosed a rippling salvo of rockets, shaped-charge warheads with laser-homing and impact fuzes. Tracking the backscatter of reflected laser energy, they slammed one after another into the Warlord in a succession of eye-searing flashes. Chunks of armor were blown thirty meters behind the lurching machine, which staggered, pivoted to the left, and then collapsed in a tangle of twisted duralloy legs.
Almost before she’d registered that she’d scored a kill. Katya’s Ghostrider was slammed from the left, hard. Warning discretes flared across Katya’s vision…
fire in section five… power failure in the primary energizing coils… pressure failure in the core housing…
She dropped the LaG-42 into a crouch, twisting to the left to track her attacker. There… one of the Mantas, advancing up the slope. The KR-9 had just downloaded both 100-MW lasers into Katya’s hull, and the blast had nearly stripped the Ghostrider’s armor and holed the power plant.
Laser inoperative…
Weapons packs inoperative…
Recommend full power shutdown sequencing…
Override!
They weren’t dead yet! “Georg! Can you damp down that fire in section five?”
Fed by oxygen leaking from the life support reserves, that blaze could melt through to the main distributor circuits and maybe take out the AI logic as well.
“Working on it!”
“And bypass the secondary power feed to the Kv-70s!”
“You got it!”
A discrete flashed red to green. She had one missile launcher working again… and five M-490 rockets remaining in the left-side pack. Her chem-flamer was still fully charged, but that was a ten-meter weapon, knife-fighting range for a strider, and there were still friendly legger troops to Katya’s front.
“Targeting!” The Manta was nearer now, forty meters and coming closer with a grim, step-by-step determination. Rocket fire and explosive high-speed cannon rounds were slashing into that flat, round hull, but it shrugged the fire off like rain and kept on coming. The ground beneath its heavy, flanged feet had been ripped and torn and churned into tortured hellground. “Fire!”
With her laser out, there was no way to guide the volley, but at forty meters she scarcely needed a smart-guided launch. Four of the five rockets slammed home, twisting one of the laser “horns” on the Manta’s torso back and punching a hole in the glacis armor.
“Okay, boss! Fire’s out!”
The temperature in section five was dropping. Power levels came back for the laser, though it would take precious seconds to build to full charge. Thirty meters away, a Fastrider loped past the slow-slogging Manta and stepped across one of the hastily dug front-line infantry trenches. Katya could see armored men scattering to avoid the machine’s twelve-ton step.
Chin turret laser at seventy-five percent power…
It would have to do. Shifting her aim to the Fastrider, she locked in on the humped portion of armor that she knew shielded the pilot. The operator’s jacking slot was always the most heavily armored portion of any warstrider, but LaG-17s didn’t have that much armor to begin with. She tracked, slewing the Ghostrider’s chin turret, then triggered the shot.
Armor exploded from the Fastrider’s back, fist-sized chunks of shrapnel spinning across the slope. The strider took two more steps, hesitated… and then with a metal-rending groan it crumpled to the ground, burrowing its nose in churned-up earth. Katya swung back to loose another bolt at the Manta… and saw that it was withdrawing,
retreating…
and so were the other Hegemony striders. Eight of their machines lay scattered across the lower half of the slope, hulls ruptured, smoke billowing into the thin air and chasing its own shadows across the ground and into the forest.
“We got them on the run!” someone yelled, and several rebel striders started forward, firing into the retreating foe.
“Hold your ground!” Sinclair snapped. “Hold your position, damn it!” Let the government forces lure them into the jungle and the rebels would be cut to pieces. “All units, report! Who’d we lose?”
Three warstriders dead out of thirty-three. Two more badly damaged, but still fighting. Twenty-eight men KIA on the ground, all in exchange for eight kills, an unknown number of Hegleggers killed, plus several striders like that KR-9 hurt bad but still moving.
“Not bad, people,” Sinclair’s voice said, calming, reassuring. “We held ’em. We held ’em good!”
“I have movement on the front, range seven hundred…”
They were coming again, smashing out of the forest, some of them limping, some still trailing smoke from the last exchange, but all still coming.
Katya was already so tired she felt as though she was trembling, even though her LaG-42’s reactions and movements remained iceworld-cold and engineer-precise. She was out of rockets, though, which left her with only the laser and about twenty antiarmor grenades, short-range weapons better for fighting infantry than warstriders.
And it didn’t look as though the government forces were even thinking of letting up.
Gritting her mental teeth, Katya targeted a damaged Calliopede and downloaded her laser into its duralloy carapace.
“They’re decelerating… must be three Gs,” Bev Schneider warned. “They want to make it a stand-up fight.”
Dev rotated his mental view of the ship dispositions, which showed the
Tokitukaze,
both frigates, Eridu and the Tower of Babel, and the sweeping, slightly curved lines representing ship vectors and orbits. The enemy had loosed a small cloud of missiles, now dispersing across the narrowing gulf between them and their prey. By shifting his perspective, Dev was able to see past the missile salvo and study the frigates themselves. According to the navdata glowing next to the tiny ship-silhouette images, they’d flipped over to present their sterns and were decelerating hard on fierce-driven torrents of plasma from their main thrusters.
Bev was right. In ship-to-ship combat there were basically two alternatives: sweep past the enemy at high speed, doing as much damage to him on the way as possible; or match course and speed with him, in effect moving in close and coming to a relative halt, pounding away with beam weapons, plasma guns, and missiles until he was dead or surrendered. The Imperial squadron commander had evidently chosen the latter.
According to
Tokitukaze’s
warbook, a Kumano-class frigate had a crew of 130, plus twenty marines. Those marines were intended as armed shore parties and for shipboard security rather than for ship-to-ship boarding actions, but the rebels’ unconventional capture of the
Tokitukaze
would have alerted them to other possibilities, like crippling the captured destroyer and retaking her hand-to-hand. They’d probably been in touch with HEMILCOM and would know by now that there weren’t many rebels manning her. They might even have guessed that some of their compatriots were still aboard.
In any case, it would make a hell of a lot more sense from the Imperial point of view to try to recapture the destroyer than to transform her into radioactive gas. Dead, Dev and the others would be rebel martyrs; alive, they would be rebel prisoners… and their mission a clear failure.
Even more than that, perhaps, was the question of
kao,
of face. The Imperial Navy had lost face when the
Tokitukaze
had been captured so easily. Some of that face would be restored if she were destroyed; far more would be won if she were recaptured.
That, at least, appeared to be the frigates’ goal as they backed down at three Gs on columns of starcore-hot plasma. With the damage she had already suffered, and with only four men jacking her thrusters, the
Tokitukaze
was simply not a maneuverable vessel at the moment. A toe-to-toe slugging match was the best tactical approach Dev could hope for… and pray they weren’t using nukes and pray the destroyer could stand up to a hell of a pounding, because otherwise those frigates were going to get off without a scratch.
Dev ordered the
Tokitukaze
spun end-for-end, and, after warning those of his people not jacked in, he engaged the ship’s main thrusters. For long minutes, they decelerated at three Gs, slowing… slowing… and finally
Tokitukaze
began to accelerate again, heading back toward Eridu. He’d just made it a lot easier for them to match course and speed, an invitation saying “Come and get us.”
Which was exactly what they were doing. They still had far more speed than the destroyer and were closing rapidly.
“Orders, Captain?” Torolf sounded nervous.
“Let ’em come. We’re not going to outmaneuver them, that’s certain.”
“I’ve got an IFF decryption on them now, Captain,” Simone said. “Definitely Kumano-class frigates, the
Shusui
and the
Gekko.”
“The
Sword Stroke
and the
Moonlight,
eh?” Koenig said. “Pretty.”
“And dangerous,” Dev pointed out. “If they decide to bombard our people from orbit, Sinclair won’t have any defense.”
Then there was no more time for analysis. The missiles, twenty-seven of them, converged on the
Tokitukaze,
and Dev ordered the point defense lasers linked over to the ship’s AI. The Artificial Intelligence directing the ship’s systems could act and react faster than any human, and with far greater precision.
The first phase of the battle was on them and past almost before they realized it. Eight missiles were vaporized as soon as they entered the
Tokitukaze
’s point defense envelope. Eight more were vaporized half a second later… and then seven more as one PDL short-circuited and failed.
Four missiles remained, on radar-active homing, closing on the ship too quickly to perceive.
Tokitukaze’s
AI was jamming on all combat frequencies and one missed, but the other three all had locked on to the highly reflective returns of the tangled ruin portside and amidships, where the ascraft was still embedded in the ruin of
Tokitukaze’s
flank.
Three missiles slammed home and detonated, one after the other in the space of two seconds; fragments of hull and ascraft shuttle spun into darkness. Buried in his cocoon, Dev didn’t feel the shock, but the cascade of systems failures and alarms flashing in his consciousness told him quickly enough that they’d been hit, and hit hard.