Kris Longknife Stalwart

by Mike Shepherd

  75

  Admiral Zom stared at the list of ships under his command. It was organized by wing. Before he entered this second engagement, he'd already lost 1,300 of the 3,500 in his two vanguard wings.

  Now, as his fleet returned to its base course and acceleration of 1.5 gees, the names of more and more of his ships vanished from the list.

  "Computer, tally our losses," he ordered.

  He watched as the missing spaces in the five wings presently engaging the enemy lit up as ships were being counted. The order to reload the bow guns came before the count finished.

  Zom's ships were already pointed at the Longknife Human's fleet. As soon as the forward battery finished reloading, they fired.

  The enemy did the same, and more blank spaces opened up on his main screen. The computer could not count their casualties in the time it took to reload and for more casualties to start appearing on his board.

  "The tally was nine hundred and three ships destroyed," the computer answered. "I am starting the count again."

  "Do," Admiral Zom snapped. He was pretty sure that another thousand of his ships would miss the next roll call.

  "Number One, have your battle board count the enemy battlecruisers destroyed."

  "There is something wrong with my board, Admiral. It is only showing a count of less than a hundred. It must be in failure mode."

  "No. The problem isn't with the board, it is with our shooting. Six thousand of her ships fired, and a thousand of our ships are destroyed. Seven thousand of our ships fired, and a hundred of hers exploded. This is not an exchange rate we can bear. Order the fleet to maximum dodging effort."

  "The order is sent."

  It would not help the thousand ships that the Longknife woman blew away during this exchange of salvos, but it would help the remainder of his force.

  "Reduce acceleration to 1.0 gee," the admiral snapped, then snarled, "Order the gunboats to 3.5 gees. Let's see what the survivors can do."

  The third salvo in hardly more than a minute showed the impact of the change. His fleet reduced its losses to only 284, however, they destroyed only 22 more of the enemy.

  "Admiral, reports are coming in that our ships cannot get a good firing solution when they are dancing so wildly."

  "Then how does that Longknife woman keep killing us? Her ships are jiggling about like terrified fingerlings. Still, they hit our ships."

  "They hit less," Number One pointed out.

  "Flip the ships and go to 3.5 gees acceleration," Admiral Zom ordered and Number One obeyed.

  The range began to open up. Zom breathed a sigh of relief as his ships fell farther behind the enemy fleet and crossed the invisible line that was the maximum range of the 24-inch lasers. It was still possible to reach out with those massive guns; it was just less likely that they could do any significant damage.

  Zom would have to decide whether to give his ships time to recover or return to the fight. Meanwhile, the gunboats charged into the space between the fleets. He still had 7,500 of the heavy gunboats. Of the lightly equipped vessels, 5,000 frigates that didn't blow up were joined by another 3,000 of questionable reactor status: they had captains who had risked reactor failure in order to stay in the fight.

  Admiral Zom would have to mention those courageous men in his report and recommend that they be first in line for battlecruisers.

  For now, all the gunboat skippers showed tremendous courage and élan as they charged into the empty space between the two fleets of combatants.

  Admiral Zom leaned forward in his high gee couch to rest his front elbows on his battle board. How would the Longknife woman respond? Would she run from the gunboats or ignore them and also hit the brakes on her deceleration so that she could keep shooting up his battlecruisers?

  He had not long to wait.

  Admiral Kris Longknife immediately knew the battle had changed. The ranging report on her battle board suddenly began to climb again. Even as she watched, the enemy fleet slipped out of range.

  "Somebody can't stand the heat," Jack muttered beside her.

  "Yeah," she said, "but he's aimed an entirely new bonfire at us. Look at those little boys charging at us."

  "Hard not to notice. So, do you run away from them, and let the battlecruisers wander off unsupervised? Idle hands are the devil's workshop."

  "Or do I charge in to catch up with the battlecruisers and ignore these mischief makers?"

  "Some of those little boys as you call them, dear Admiral, carry 22-inch lasers."

  "And 20-inch and 18-inch lasers. Yes, dear General, I have not forgotten."

  Kris eyed her board. She'd have to make her call quickly. She was fleeing them at an effective vector of 1.25 gees while they put on 3.5 gees in pursuit.

  "Admiral Tong," Kris said.

  "Yes, My Admiral," he immediately answered.

  "I want you to please target the small ships charging us. However, I don't want to let the battlecruisers get too far behind us. Let's pursue the rebel battlecruisers while we wipe out these nuisances."

  "I fear they may be more of a nuisance than you want, My Admiral."

  "Ruin my day," Kris told her Iteeche subordinate.

  "We have only one fire control system on each battlecruiser. There are other systems to support the small secondary batteries, but they don't have the range for these targets. Thus, our ships are capable of targeting only one of the small ships at a time."

  "Then we better start as soon as we can," Kris snapped.

  "To hear is to make it so, My Admiral," and the Iteeche closed the call.

  In a few moments, the fleet accelerated to 3.5 gees, Iteeche. Three gees pursued the enemy battlecruisers while the other 0.5 gee vector still slowed down their rush toward the planet ahead of them.

  The onrushing cruisers began to vanish.

  The battlecruisers brought their forward batteries to bear. Kris had Nelly follow the action of the Princess Royal.

  Kris's flag fired only four lasers at her first target. Each one put out a quick staccato of six one-second bursts over nine seconds. Twenty-four massive bursts of power sped downrange at the speed of light.

  In a moment, a 15,000-ton cruiser exploded. It had no armor, just its ability to zig and zag. However, with 24 laser blasts filling the space ahead of it, it was inevitable that she collided with one of them.

  One hit was enough.

  Another ten seconds later, the next four lasers in the forward battery fired, and another rebel cruiser died.

  "What's taking so long?" Kris asked Nelly.

  "The fire control computer can have a solution in two seconds and fire in three," her computer said, "however, it's more likely to miss than if the sensors track the ship for an extra seven seconds so it can better calculate how hard it is jinking and how radically it is changing course."

  "How are the other ships handling this shoot?" Jack asked.

  "The Iteeche battlecruisers are firing six of their forward lasers, so there are thirty-six laser bursts reaching for a particular cruiser. By the time they fire the second half, the first half are recharged and they have a new firing solution ready.”

  "How's our shooting?" Jack asked.

  "About fifty-fifty," Nelly said, "These cruisers are pretty small targets and they're evading hard. Still, every twenty seconds, somewhere between two and three thousand of them die.”

  Kris winced at the slaughter. What did the rebel admiral expect to get from this?

  She found out before the fourth salvo of short blasts headed for the surviving 9,000 cruisers.

  The rebel admiral had brought his battlecruisers back into the battle. At 3.5 gees, they were jinking mildly. They got off their first salvo while Kris's ships were still fixated on the cruisers.

  A snap order from Admiral Tong ordered the fleet to Evasion Plan 6. This not only got the ships jitterbugging wildly, but presented their loaded bow lasers and bow armor to the enemy.

  Unfortunately, 300 of Kris's ships were slow to go into evasi
on. In the blink of an eye, loyal Iteeche ships took four or five laser blasts on their bows. Some broke through the laser ports and slashed into the capacitors. They blossomed as horrid flowers of red, gold, and yellow before vanishing away to just an expanding ball of hot gas.

  The Princess Royal's skipper had not needed the order start jinking. He had his own range-to-target report on his board. Two range-to-target windows were prominent on his forward screen. One tracked the rapidly closing cruisers, the other tracked the fleeing battlecruisers.

  The skipper might not have spotted the sudden change in range before Kris and Nelly, but he wasn't far behind. He had the P. Royal flipping before Admiral Tong's order got out of his mouth.

  That was a good thing. They took a hit square on the bow on the rapidly rotating skin. The crystal armor slowed down the light and spread it over most of the hull where it harmlessly radiated back into space. It operated on the same theory as quantum computers, only at a much larger scale.

  Sadly, only the Human battlecruisers had this protection. Back in Human space, the various governments still refused to make it available to the Iteeche Empire. At last report, several Iteeche and Human spies had been convicted of espionage. The debate was whether to bury them deep on a penal planet or bring back the firing squad.

  Kris ignored that bit of news.

  What it meant at this moment was that three hundred of her Iteeche allies’ battlecruisers blew up and none of the Human battlecruisers did.

  "Target the battlecruisers," Kris ordered on net. She probably should have waited for Admiral Tong to take a breath, but she wasn't about to.

  However, her order had no effect immediately. The same seven seconds was needed to track a target, whether it be a battlecruiser or a thin-skinned cruiser. Ten unbearable seconds later, her fleet responded in a ragged series of salvos.

  This did bring her fleet a minor bit of luck. The rebels had flipped ship and were bringing their stern lasers to bear as Kris's ships fired.

  The rebels presented vulnerable sterns with unarmored reactors to their enemy. Over 1,200 hundred ships were blown to gas or wreckage in one rolling crescendo of destruction.

  Throughout Kris's fleet, over 1,600 divisions of Iteeche aimed for the same ship. The Human battle cruisers fired in pairs, 112 of them. Of the nearly 1,800 groups, 1,200 had found a rebel battlecruiser's reactors.

  It was fantastic shooting.

  "Admiral Tong, I suggest we keep our bow to the rebels."

  "I totally agree, Admiral. I will make it so."

  Now her fleet was prepared for the next salvo. Thick nose armor on, Kris's fleet advancing on the charging rebels at 1.5 gees Iteeche, 1.3 s Human. The Emperor's battlecruisers had plenty of weight on to zig and zag according to their most energetic evasion plan.

  While Kris's fleet was reorganizing, the rebels finished firing their aft batteries of lasers and flipped back over, bow on, as they rushed at her at 3.5 gees. Now they went to their own most evasive pattern of dodging and bobbing.

  It did not help them a lot.

  Nelly had kept an eye on them when they were last at their wildest dodging plan; she and her kids had begun to spot a pattern. Not much of one, but something that she thought might help reduce the chances of the rebel battlecruisers dancing out of the incoming salvos.

  Nelly and her kids fed their assessment to all the fire control computers in the fleet, now reduced to about 5,500 warships. Again, Kris's battlecruisers fired their forward batteries for a full six seconds. This time, some 500 rebel ships vanished or crumbled.

  The rebels return volley destroyed only 23 Imperial battlecruisers.

  The exchange rate was again brutal.

  Still, the rebel commander kept up the charge. Eight thousand cruisers continued to close at 3.5 gees as did some 12,000 battlecruisers. If Kris didn't do something quickly, she would have some 20, 000 rebel ships sitting right on her lap.

  "Admiral Tong?" she said.

  "Yes, My Admiral."

  "I think it would be a good idea if we opened the range a bit."

  "If we set a course thirty degrees off the rebel's base course, they likely would not be able to get a direct hit on our reactors."

  "Let's go to 3.5 gees Iteeche, on that course and see what our aft batteries can do. We can wear ship left and right each time they fire themselves dry."

  "I will make it so, My Admiral." Half a minute later, the Princess Royal was on a new course and Kris weighed three times what she saw every morning when she checked the scales.

  The next salvo, from the Imperial force used only the aft battery. Still, it destroyed nearly 300 hundred rebel ships with only 27 lost.

  Kris's fleet was keeping up the ten-to-one exchange rate, even if it was slower.

  Thus the battle proceeded. The rebels accelerated after the Imperials at 3.5 gees, Iteeche. Kris's fleet ran ahead of them, also at 3.5 gees. Only this time, their vector was only slightly divided. Now, little went to slow her toward the planet they were fighting over. Most of her vector pushed her ahead of the warships bent on their destruction.

  Slowly, the rebels closed the range on her ships, but not nearly fast enough in the face of this murderous exchange rate.

  Then one of the larger cruisers got Kris's attention.

  It had managed to get in range and release three 22-inch lasers. It was close enough to nip a battlecruiser's rocket motor bell. That set the loyalist ship spinning out of formation. It, however, quickly recovered and repaired the damage.

  "Target the larger cruisers," Kris told Admiral Tong.

  "Yes, I think we should," he agreed.

  While her fleet dodged the next salvo from the rebel battlecruisers, they themselves took aim with their aft batteries for the remaining large cruisers with hand-me-down battleship lasers.

  Few of the large cruisers survived the next salvo from the aft batteries of Kris's ships. What was left was vaporized ten seconds later.

  The remaining cruisers chasing after Kris's fleet were ships of less than 10,000 tons with powerful lasers that had a range of only 80,000 kilometers.

  It would take them a long time to close to that range.

  While the Imperial ships had been annihilating the large cruisers with the cast-off cannons, the rebel battlecruisers had continued their own campaign against Kris's fleet. She lost 47 battlecruisers to their two pairs of salvos.

  Now the Imperial fleet turned its attention totally on the remaining rebel battlecruisers. The attention was brutal. In 67 seconds, three salvos left both the forward and aft batteries of 5,400 loyalist ships.

  By the time the aft batteries fell silent after the third salvo, the rebels were missing another 1,300 battlecruisers and had only the destruction of 72 Imperial ships to show for it.

  The exchange rate was getting worse, not better.

  Kris wondered how long her opposite number could stand the heat.

  Then everything changed.

  A wing of battlecruisers at the end of the forward line, flipped ship and kept to 3.5 gees. Now, however, all the gees were spent opening the range between that wing and the Imperials.

  "What the hell?" Kris muttered.

  76

  "Get back in the battle line, you no-name, last-chosen piece of slime!" Admiral Zom shouted.

  "My pedigree is as long and ancient as yours Zom. My clan entrusted these ships to me and I will not have them wasted in your vain attempt to win a battle that is lost already. I'm not the only one who has had it with you and your mindless orders. There is no honor in standing up to be slaughtered and cut into chum," an admiral commanding a lower vanguard wing cried.

  To Zom's dismay, the much-hammered vanguard wing at the bottom of the line joined the top wing in turning to flee. The remnants of the forward vanguard were not long in joining the flight.

  The next Imperial salvos were aimed solely at the ships in the four wings still in the battle line. A thousand of them vanished like water on a hot skillet.

  The two rear wings bro
ke. They did an uncoordinated flip and went 3.5 gees away from the Imperials. Immediately, as Zom watched in shock, the other four wings did a ragged flip and took off running as well.

  Even his own flagship had turned with the rest of the middle wing and was running.

  Beside his admiral, Number One staff officer offered no thought on how to avert this disaster.

  Zom reclined, smoldering with anger as the Imperial commander Admiral Kris Longknife flipped her ships and took off in a 3.5 gee pursuit of those fleeing her guns.

  Zom would have shaken his head at the folly, but 3.5 gees did not recommend such activity. His traitorous subordinates were fleeing, but without the brains destiny gave a sand gnat. Every ship in the rebel fleet was accelerating as much as it could on a single vector – directly away from the enemy ships that were even now blowing several hundred of them into dust.

  "If you must run, scatter," Zom shouted on net. "Go to thirty or forty degrees from our base course. Break up into single ships or pairs and run for your lives. Maybe some of you will escape but none of you will if you stay clumped together like a dumb school of lollarm."

  Zom felt his flagship swerve as it changed its course to head for the depths of the outer system. Maybe it could refuel at one of the major gas giants and sneak through a jump and get out of here.

  It would likely take time, and they'd be on short rations of bitter yams by the time they straggled home. Still, they might survive this disaster.

  "Oh, monsters from the deepest, darkest abyss," he heard his number one mutter. "Look."

  Zom looked at his board. His fleet, indeed, had no hope. The Longknife Admiral separated her wings into smaller groups and sent them after his dispersing fleet.

  "Regroup, regroup!" the rebel admiral screamed, but the panic had caught hold of every heart. No one was listening to him. His former command fled as fast as they could. Some even put on 3.6 or 3.7 gees as they strove to outdistance their pursuers.

  They had no chance, but they ran because there was nothing else to do.