The alien ship was ten kilometers long. Its hull was elliptical, some five kilometers around at its widest point. Its skin was marked irregularly by lumps and bumps that did not proclaim their usage.
Admiral Krätz played his part superbly.
“Who are you?” he announced on the radio, pumping plenty of surprise into his voice. “And what are you doing here? Unknown ship that just jumped into this system, identify yourself,” he demanded in perfect admiral mode.
His battle line also poured on the coal and went from decelerating at half a gee toward the jump point to accelerating at three gees away from the newly arrived alien ship. There was very little way on the ships, so they started opening the range between them and the alien ship in a matter of seconds. The impact on the crew must have been brutal, but they were battleship sailors and supposed to have hair on their chests.
And they’d been warned to prepare for just that.
The corvette crews weren’t the only ones waiting in their high-gee stations for the fight to start.
The alien ship said nothing. It sent no signal at all. It did goose its engines enough to push it away from the immediate area of the jump. A half minute later, Kris saw why.
A second ship, just as huge, popped into view.
It also gave itself a bit of a power boost and was joined thirty seconds later by a third ship. While there had been utter silence from the alien ships so far, now the first ship fired off a ten-second message.
At that, the newest-arrived ship did a 180-degree flip. Which left Kris wondering again what it must be like to be crowded into one of those huge ships while it did maneuvers that knocked around the crew of ships as small as the Wasp.
Nose to the jump, the ship accelerated and disappeared back into the jump.
For the long minute while all this happened, the battle line did its best to make contact. The Greenfeld ships continued to demand communications with the stranger. The Musashi flagship sent a sequence of dots signifying the numbers from one to ten, as well as tonal sounds built around middle C. The Helvetica ships sent pi.
The aliens returned them all a disdainful silence.
Meanwhile, the battleships increased the distance between them and the aliens. They also spread out to give themselves plenty of room to maneuver if it came to a fight. The Greenfeld ships, now in the rear, began to stream ice particles and flakes of aluminum. These defensive measures were meant to throw off ranging lasers and radars as well as cause main battery lasers to bloom and weaken.
Kris hoped the signal was clear: We want to talk. But we’re not defenseless.
Nothing continued to be the main thing happening.
The lead alien ship emitted a single radio signal.
And all hell broke loose.
Scores of lasers reached out from the nodes on the alien ships. Other bumps launched wave after wave of rockets.
Krätz’s flag had been leading the squadron toward the jump. Now it was the last in line and closest to the alien ship. Scores of lasers reached out for it, found it, and slashed into it.
The Fury never had a chance. It exploded in a ball of fire that quickly vanished into the void of space.
LAUNCH TORPEDOES, Kris ordered Nelly, even as she also began to fire the Wasp’s lasers.
Faster than Kris could think, Nelly did what the two of them had planned. Eight antimatter torpedoes launched, accelerating at ten gees. Fast as they were, Nelly had taught them to jink, adjusting their spin and speed just enough to throw off a defensive-fire computer that wasn’t as smart as Nelly.
It also helped that the Wasp lay in ambush only twelve thousand klicks from the vulnerable engines of the aliens.
Nelly also brought the Wasp’s four 24-inch pulse lasers to bear on the aliens’ weapons nodes. After the laser and missile fire from the outpost, Kris had expected a dual attack, lasers and missiles. Nelly now aimed the lasers at ten-percent power, first at a laser node, then at a missile bay. Two lasers for one ship, the other two for the other.
At ten-percent power, the lasers could do a lot of destruction before their charge gave out. If the hostile ships were armored, Nelly was prepared to up the power.
They weren’t protected. Nelly’s shots wreaked havoc.
The hostiles were still fixated on the battleships. Their lasers reached out even as the surviving seven began to dodge and weave, making radical adjustments to their acceleration. Decoys and more ice, as well as the wreckage of the Fury made it harder for the aliens to aim their lasers.
Still, they were firing a lot of them. Several of the battleships took hits, but their ice armor did its job.
And the battleships were shooting back. Their 16- and 18-inch lasers slashed into the alien ships, doing their own slaughter against unarmored hulls.
Kris and Nelly had aimed four antimatter torpedoes at each of the aliens. Two each for the engines, and two others along the length of the hulls.
The aliens got one. The other seven slammed home almost in the exact same microsecond.
The alien ships blew apart like ripe melons slammed by kids with baseball bats.
One second they were there. The next moment there was little more than hot gas where they had been.
“What just happened?” Captain Drago said, his mouth hanging open.
“They can dish it out, but they can’t take it,” Kris said cautiously.
“That was just two of them. There are a lot more where they came from,” Sulwan said, and got grunts of agreement from around the bridge.
“PatRon 10, you did good, staying to your cover,” Kris said. The three ships with the Hellburners were in reserve for the mother ship. They’d sat out the fight per their orders. Still, Kris knew the temptation must have been great.
As she expected, Navy discipline held.
“Battle line, report,” Kris said next.
“Kōta here. We got some of our tail feathers singed, but we’re ready for the mother ship.”
“Feel free to select your range,” Kris told Kōta. “When the mother ship comes through, there will be no effort to establish communications. For the record, they fired first and without provocation. We will attack them immediately. PatRon 10 will launch Hellburners on sight. Expect no further orders. Longknife out.”
Again, Kris spoke to ghosts.
Now they waited.
The clock ticked off minute after minute while nothing happened.
“Does it take longer to run a four- or five-thousandkilometer-long ship through a jump point than it does to run a battleship?” the chief asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sulwan said. “What we don’t know about jump points would fill an encyclopedia. What we do know you could write on the head of a pin.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for one of their victorious ships to come back and tell them everything is fine here,” Jack suggested on net.
“They’ll be waiting a long time for that,” Penny said.
“Stay sharp, folks,” Captain Drago announced to all hands. “This boredom could end any second now.”
The Weapons Division reported that eight more antimatter torpedoes had been loaded. “These are the ones with four times the usual charge. Use them well, Commodore,” reported the leading chief of the division.
Admiral Kōta reported a strange thing about one of the rockets launched at the battle line.
“One of them seems to have been a fusion bomb,” he said. “We’re getting reports of radiation from the Terror. The captain thinks some of his men may be coming down with radiation poisoning.”
“We knew they had them,” Kris said. “Alert your secondary laser batteries that the rocket they shoot down could save the ship.”
“Already did so, Commodore. You be careful, too.”
“We’re doing our best,” Kris said.
The dull and boring lasted for not quite four more minutes.
Suddenly, in less than a blink, there was a five-thousandkilometer-long ship looming before them.
/> 42
Before Kris even had time to think Fire, the alien fired off a barrage of hundreds of lasers. Maybe thousands.
A large chunk of the barrage was aimed at the battleships. Their location apparently had been reported by the ship that returned. Dodging made no difference when the whole sector of the sky was laced with laser fire.
Three battleships exploded in the first few seconds of the battle.
Rockets were going off in rippling salvoes, most of them headed for the battle line as well, but not all. Several volleys were directed aft.
Three smashed into the poor little Hermes and left her shattered, drifting in space. A moment later, the reactor went when its magnetic containment either failed or was deliberately turned off.
In a flash, the plucky little courier and her crew were no more than a bubble of hot gas.
The Wasp had recently had two 5-inchers added for her own defense, and they kept her bit of space clear. One laser did clip the Wasp’s shield, but it held. The other corvettes fared well, except for the luckless Fearless, which took three lasers, one of which got past her shields.
The squadron hurt, but the squadron also dished it out.
The three Hellburners took off at a rapidly increasing acceleration, following the same corkscrew flight path Nelly had worked out for the Wasp’s first set of antimatter torpedoes. Two were aimed at the aft engines of the mother ship. The third would hit about a thousand klicks farther in.
All four corvettes also salvoed their eight antimatter torpedoes. They were smaller, but they were definitely incoming as far as any defensive fire net was concerned. Coming in faster, they also had to be higher up a defensive decision tree for assigning final defensive fire.
At least, that was what Kris devoutly hoped.
To add to the aliens’ complicated fire solution, twelve 24-inch pulse lasers were reaching out for the nodes that held the lasers. One of the corvettes targeted four of the huge rocket motors. They cut past the rocket motors and into the reactors behind them. Even before the torpedoes hit, the fantail of the huge mother ship was exploding.
Twenty-nine antimatter torpedoes hit first, blasting gaping holes in the engines. Several of the reactors began venting to space, adding a slight wiggle to the huge mother ship’s movement and throwing off the aim of the lasers.
Then the first two Hellburners hit.
The entire stern of the huge ship disintegrated. One second it was there, looming over them . . . burning here, exploding there . . . but still very much there.
The next second it was a gigantic ball of gas, bulging with secondary explosions as this or that reactor lost integrity and blew. Jets of hot gases vented in all directions, knocking the ship around and bending the gigantic hull in places that weren’t meant to bend.
Here and there, the smaller ships, double or triple the size of a battleship, were sent hurling off into space like children’s jackstraws.
Many collided. Several exploded.
The third Hellburner seemed to have taken a laser hit. The exact content of the visual record would long be debated. If it was hit, the finely spun-out chip of a neutron star didn’t seem to mind being warmed up before it blew.
The last Hellburner dived into the edge of the glowing cloud and slashed its way deep into the wreckage before it added its own destruction.
By the time it finished, pretty close to half of the mother ship was blown to glowing gas or left as burning and twisted metal.
Which didn’t cause the ship to hesitate one second.
Reduced to a drifting, spinning hulk, the mother ship kept right on firing its huge battery of lasers. Even unaimed, that much firepower could be devastating if it connected with something.
Another battleship blossomed into a ball of glowing gas. A quick glance showed Kris the battle line was gone. Two lonely ships had made it out of range of the aliens’ wild fire.
“We can’t hold here,” Admiral Channing said on net. “We’re running, Commodore. Get your little boys out of here any way you can. We can’t help you.”
“That big mother just launched three of her little monsters,” Chief Beni shouted.
“Dive for the jump point,” Kris ordered.
“The jump point!” Captain Drago yelped.
“You know a faster way out of here?” Kris yelled. “Blast us into the jump point the alien just came out of.”
“Sulwan, jump,” he ordered. “Kris, are there any hostiles left in the other system?”
“We’ll find out. PatRon 10, the rally point is in the system the aliens just left. Follow me through the jump point if you can.”
Sulwan slammed the Wasp into three gees with no warning.
The Wasp’s shields took another hit. This one was not all that well focused; it had bloomed badly as it shot through the cloud from the destroyed aft end of the mother ship.
For a horrible moment, the huge wreck loomed wide in front of the Wasp, ready to fold it into its own destruction.
Then the jump point took them, and the space ahead of them was a void.
43
The system was blessedly empty, Chief Beni reported immediately.
“Keep up the acceleration,” Captain Drago ordered his navigator. “Aim us for the nearest jump point. I don’t care what our speed is when we hit it.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Chief, tell me who makes it through after us,” Kris said.
“The Hornet just got here. She’s doing 2.75 gees and still accelerating,” he replied.
“Sulwan, let’s give him plenty of room,” the skipper ordered.
“I’m taking her up to 3.75 gees, sir.”
“Good girl.”
“The Intrepid just arrived, sir. She’s also accelerating like a bat out of hell with its tail on fire.”
“Fine, Chief. We’ve all got our tails singed,” Kris said.
“The Fearless just came through, sir. She’s decelerating!”
“Fearless, state your condition and intent,” Kris snapped.
“We’re here. We can fight, but we can’t run, Commodore,” Fearless said evenly.
Kris found herself struggling for words. “How fast can you run?”
“Not fast enough,” she said. “That first hit clobbered my hull integrity. Anything above two gees, and she’ll fold like a house of cards.”
“We can come back for you.”
“And all get killed,” she said. “Bad idea, Commodore. Besides, I’ve always wanted to see what it was like to be Horatio at the bridge. Here’s my chance.”
What do you say to that kind of courage? “Thank you, Fearless.”
“Godspeed to the rest of you. Be sure one of you gets home to let them know what we did here,” Fearless said as she swung her corvette around to behind the jump point.
“We will,” Kris said. She had no right to believe that any of them would make it home. Not now. But at that moment, she swore to any listening god that one of them would.
The first enemy ship came through at that moment, lasers firing wildly. The Wasp’s shield got nipped by a near miss before the Fearless put two torpedoes into the rear of the ship and it blew to pieces.
There was a minute pause before the next ship shot through the jump point. It withheld fire for a moment until it could establish situational awareness.
Bad idea. The Fearless hit one of its engines with a laser burst. It was already exploding when two torpedoes finished it off.
By now, the three fast-moving ships of PatRon 10 were reaching extreme laser range. A long two minutes passed while nothing happened.
Three more ships popped out of the jump point in rapid succession. The Fearless lasered the first one’s engines. It blew.
The second one got the same treatment.
The third one immediately began to rotate ship and fired its lasers into the area behind it.
Fearless’s shields took the first hit, which gave it time enough to fire two full laser blasts at the smart skipper and his dead
ly ship. Torpedoes arrived at the same time. Of four launched, two hit the rotating ship and it blew to gas.
But the Fearless’s shields were gone, and one of the enemy ships had clipped the Fearless good.
Kris wanted to turn the sensors off, give the Fearless the privacy to die in peace, but she couldn’t. She owed the ship and its captain and crew. The coin she would use to pay that debt would be to bear witness to their courage.
Bear witness before all humanity. All intelligent species of the galaxy.
That, Kris’s tiny fleet deserved.
The next enemy ship backed through the jump point. He flipped ship on the other side of the jump after putting acceleration on. He also came through with lasers blazing.
His wild shooting got the Fearless with three hits. The shattered corvette hung there, drifting in space for a moment, then blew herself to gas.
“Somebody shut down the reactor’s containment field,” Drago whispered. “They won’t get anything from examining that wreckage. May I have the courage to do the same when my time comes.”
But the Fearless hadn’t just rolled over and died. She’d hit the alien with at least one laser blast . . . and a final torpedo salvo that smashed into it even as the Fearless was blowing herself to hot vapor.
The alien wasn’t destroyed, but it wasn’t under control, either. It careened into a chunk of damaged hull from one of the earlier arrivals at the brawl. It drifted there, surrounded by the wreckage of a battle won at a terrible cost.
And when the next ship came shooting out of the jump point, it plowed into that wreckage. The collision ended with both of them in a slowly growing explosion.
The next ship came through slowly and tiptoed through the mess before it put two gees on and gave chase to the survivors of PatRon 10.
There were over fifty ships strung out in pursuit of them by the time the Wasp approached the closest jump.
“What are your intentions, Commodore?” Captain Drago asked Kris.
“To get as far away from here as possible,” she quickly answered him. “Preferably in the opposite direction from Earth.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Drago said. The Wasp was doing over two hundred thousand klicks an hour. Much more than it had for any of the jumps during their voyage of discovery.
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