She thought no more on that, as if she’d slammed a door on it in her mind. Now she turned her gaze forward to what was to come.
Over the next two hours, the squadron continued to decelerate at a gentle 1.25 gees. The aliens decelerated at 3.2 gees. The time passed when they would have changed their course or adjusted their plan to fit the new reality Sandy and the cats’ atomics had created.
A half hour later, Penny, looking quite chipper and, munching on her own sandwich, eyed the board with Sandy. “They’re holding their course and deceleration,” she said.
“I’d have thought they would have adjusted course and gone back to aiming for the next jump,” Sandy said.
“Maybe there’s nothing out there for them.”
“I thought these murderous nuts were all over the galaxy? Scattered few and far between, but all over.”
“They are,” Penny said, taking a sip of coffee. “But ships belong to wolf packs. It’s still an open question as to how well they get along with each other. Even at the Battle of System X, their warships and cruisers formed up by wolf pack.”
“You’re my chief alien intell honcho,” Sandy said. “What do you think they’ll do next?”
“I would have thought they’d run. Force us to chase them, maybe lead us into another trap.”
“It doesn’t look like that’s happening.”
Penny took a deep breath. “Then I think they’ll try a suicide charge.”
“A full on Banzai charge, huh?”
“Yep, unless they change course pretty soon for the jump, I think the guy in charge there considered himself and his ships expended from the moment he got the assignment to be bait. That was what he was, orbiting that gas bag in a system we use to slow down in to get into Sasquan. Now that the trap has failed, I doubt if he wants to go home and face the music. Nope, what we’re up against is a face-saving charge with no hold barred. To him, he and all the crews with him are already dead. He, and they, want to take a few of us with them.”
“Even though no one will ever know what he does here.”
“I’m just guessing, but I’d say yes. All our research has failed to identify anything like hope in an afterlife. Faced with oblivion and the fact they haven’t had a lot of luck killing us. I expect he’ll try to do his damnedest to kill some of us.”
Sandy pulled a battle board out of the deck. It showed the space between the gas giant and where BatRon 18 was a present. In a moment, it added the force vectors each of the task forces was generating. Sandy’s ships 1.25 gees deceleration vector was a lot shorter than the 3.2 gee vector on the alien ships.
“Project course twelve hours ahead,” Sandy ordered. The aliens were just reaching the gas bag. “Project course for six hours more.”
The aliens rounded the gas giant and headed off into space.
“Assume the aliens use a maximum vector toward us.”
Even with a vector aimed at Sandy’s squadron, the alien could not reach them.
“How much additional braking would they need as they passed the gas giant,” Penny asked as she popped the last of her sandwich into her mouth.
The vector around the huge planet grew longer and the trajectory of the alien ships bent to meet Sandy’s ships.
Penny bent close to the board. “Close to four gees it says.”
“Could the aliens make four gees?”
Penny shook her head. “At 3.5 gees their reactors have a tendency to overheat. They can’t seem to develop a cooling system to handle more heat.”
“But if they deployed some rude form of air brakes and took their dive deeper into the planets upper-most atmosphere,” Mimzy put in.
“They’d risk burning up the entire ship,” Sandy pointed out.
“Admiral, I’ve seen these folks open their ships to the vacuum of space when faced with defeat. The first ship Kris Longknife ran into was crewed by a multi-generational family. When its attack on us failed, they blew themselves up. The grandfather blew up his entire family of nearly a hundred. When faced with defeat, suicide is their first and last option.”
Penny paused to shake her head. “No, ma’am. Sweating out a close pass is nothing. Even if half of the ships over-heat and fall apart, it will be enough for them that the other half get a chance to rip our guts out.”
“Bastards, huh.”
“Paranoid xenophobic bastards with ‘Murder or Die,’ tattooed on their chests from birth.
“And if we don’t let them have a punch at us?” Sandy asked.
“They’ll kill themselves.”
For the next hour, Penny and Sandy ran through scenarios.
Chapter 37
After considering all her options, the gas bag turned out to be the deciding factor.
“If we wear away from them,” Penny pointed out, “we can avoid combat. They’ll likely self-destruct, and we can go on our way.”
“Go on our way, where?” turned out to be the real question.
If they dodged the alien charge, they’d be headed for the jump. While the nav computer could give them several options with that jump and their speed, there was no data on any of the systems of the stars they might jump to. They would still have a lot of energy on their boats and they’d need to slow down soon and refuel.
“We make too many jumps and there’s always a chance we’ll run into more aliens and there might be a lot more of them,” Penny pointed out.
Sandy grimaced at that thought. “And there’s always Alwa waiting and the cats that need support. We don’t have time to waste playing games with these nut cases.”
She thought for a few more moments, then turned back to her battle board. “Assuming they manage to slow down by diving too damn close to the gas giant, where will we fight them?”
“Likely somewhere between here and there,” Penny said waiving vaguely at the battle board. “There are just too many unknowns right now.”
Sandy pulled the fuel status of her ships. Most were well past the half empty mark, “Whatever we do, it’s got to include a refueling pass on a gas giant.”
“We’ll need to slow down for that,” Penny said. “And I don’t think we want to be going any faster than we have to when we meet those cruisers.”
“The faster we go, the fewer chances they have to get shots off at us,” Sandy pointed out.
“Yes, ma’am, but the faster they come at us, the fewer shots we get before they can ram us.”
“Ram us! You’ve got to be kidding. Space is way too big for two ships to run into each other in the vastness of space.”
“Still, they’ll be doing their level best to do it. How much do you want to bet that one of them doesn’t get lucky?”
Sandy examined her options. Her squadron had won its battle. Still, her people could die, and would if the aliens were as implacable as her intel officer said they were. Sandy knew the decision she had to make. “We slow the squadron down.”
“That’s what I would recommend, ma’am.”
Sandy sighed. “Comm, send to squadron. We go to 4.1 gees deceleration and set Condition Zed in two minutes.”
“Sent.”
With serious regrets, Sandy called up her high gee station and did a hurried strip, as did all those around her. She settled into her egg with a fervent prayer that this would be a much shorter stay. On the tick, she gave the order to go to 4.1 gee and felt the oppressive weight force her back deep into the station’s cushions. The station might save her from being crushed, but it didn’t do anything about the weight of her own flesh on her own body.
Around her, the flag bridge shrunk as the ship concentrated itself down to being the smallest possible killing machine humans had ever created.
As the human squadron decelerated hard, the alien cruisers made a very close pass to the gas giant. They came out glowing bright red on the infrared scanners. Several of them still had some sort of surfaces sprouting out from the hulls. As the ships shot back toward Sandy’s ships, the last remaining air brakes fell away.
There were fewer cruisers, however. Sensors counted thirty-one with two out of formation and spinning and what might be three clouds of wreckage headed off in different directions.
For two enemy ships, something had clearly gone wrong. One couldn’t seem to hold a steady course, the other’s acceleration dropped off and it fell behind. For five minutes or so, the crews of the two ships struggled to correct their problem. Both ships gave up the effort within half a minute of each other. Where they had been were only two expanding super-heated gas clouds.
To Sandy’s wide-eyed non-question, Penny answered, “They closed down the magnetic containment field around their reactors and let the plasm eat them. We see a lot of that after a fight with them. As I mentioned before, it’s victory or death with these folks.”
Sandy could only shake her head slowly. In her head, her heart, her very guts, she struggled to accept the raw facts her eyes presented to her. Someone hated her beyond reason and would risk anything to make her dead.
She’d been in the Navy for a long time, but most of that had been during the long peace. Except for the Battle of Wardhaven, she’d never really had to face the raw fact that death was a part of her job, something she might have to do to others. Something that others might do to her.
It had taken her a while to recover from the shock of the Battle of Wardhaven, but really, she’d gone back to her live and let live beliefs.
Now you better face it, kid. You fight them. You kill them. You win or you and a whole bunch of people the King made your responsibility will die.
Sandy planted that seed, watered it and watched it grow as the hours passed.
With brutal inevitability, the battle hurtled toward Sandy and her command. The alien cruisers reformed themselves into three lines of eight, eight and seven ships each, spaced at five thousand kilometers’ intervals. Sandy accepted the challenge and formed her eight ships into a single line with the same interval.
For now, the aliens were decelerating, their sterns aimed away from Sandy’s ships. BatRon 18 was likewise decelerating, their sterns pointed toward the alien cruisers.
It was funny way to charge into battle. They were both blasting away from each other even as their inertia hurtled them toward each other at a closing speed of over 700,000 kilometers an hour.
Sandy did the math and approved of the results. Her squadron’s 22-inch lasers would have the alien cruisers in range for a good eighteen minutes. None would survive crossing the killing ground.
The alien must have spotted that fact about then, too.
The cruisers flipped ship and began accelerating at 3.2 gees toward the humans.
The battle board quickly adjusted to show Sandy’s 22-inch lasers would have eleven minutes to cut the aliens to ribbons. Of course, the aliens would have five minutes to use their lasers as the two forces crossed the final expanse of empty space between them.
The alien commander ordered his cruisers up to 3.5 gees.
Sandy considered taking the squadron up to 4.5 gees; none of these aliens would survive to tell any tale. Still her battlecruisers had been pushing their reactors and cooling pumps hard. The official engineering reports on all the ships showed the powerplants functioning well into the yellow. Most were slightly above the mid-range of yellow. The Yawata was edging a bit higher.
The aliens might not be able to manage a collision with one of her ships, but a catastrophic engineering casualty could still kill a lot of her people. Sandy nodded to herself and let the two forces stay steady on their present course and acceleration.
She did narrow the killing ground and shave another minute off her firing time.
Chapter 38
As the alien ship crossed the 200,000 kilometer mark, the maximum range of Sandy’s 22-inch lasers, she knew she had five minutes to destroy them before they got close enough to use their own lasers. She had five more minutes before they could try to ram her ships.
That assumed Sandy maintained a steady 4.1 gee deceleration.
“Comm, send to squadron. ‘On my mark, go to 4.5 gees deceleration.’” She paused for only a moment to get acknowledgments, then added. “Mark.”
In her high gee station, Sandy’s body felt every extra ounce that pressed down upon it.
“Comm, send to squadron, ‘We will use only aft batteries. For the moment, I do not propose to flip ship and use the forward guns. Advise engineering to make maximum effort to reload the stern chasers.’”
She was limiting herself to only the eight aft lasers of her eight ships: sixty-four. To bring the twelve lasers forward into action she’d have to cut deceleration, flip ship, fire, then flip again and resume deceleration.
Through that entire maneuver, the aliens could be closing on her.
The aft battery should be enough. Sandy estimated she’d get twelve to sixteen salvos from them before the aliens came in range. All that fire from eight battlecruisers should easily destroy thirty-one thin-skinned cruisers.
With luck, they could split their eight-gun salvos between two cruisers
It was such a nice plan.
Then the aliens showed Sandy that they’d learned a thing or two from Kris Longknife.
Just as the cruisers came in extreme range, they started jinksing. They’d zig right, then zag left. They’d rise up or slip down, using their directional rockets to vacate the place they’d been before.
With the first salvo eight human battlecruisers aimed for sixteen alien cruisers. In the second it took the lasers to reach their target, the aliens managed to avoid the space the human fire control computers had calculated they would fill. Sandy’s squadron got exactly one alien cruiser. It might have gotten away, too, but it zigged right into the laser beam.
“Somebody has been talking out of school,” Penny said. “It looks like the word got out about the way we dodge and weave. Now we’ve got some of them trying the same trick on us.”
“Yeah,” Sandy drawled, doing her best to not let the sick feeling growing in her gut impact her commands. “Have Mimzy and Chesty analyze their jitterbugging. How much of a problem can it be if we concentrate eight lasers in the general space around where one cruiser is likely to be.”
“The alien cruisers appear to have a beam of twenty-five meters,” Mimzy reported. “They can accelerate at twenty meters per second, per second which, at face value gives us a manageable target. However, if they continue their displacing acceleration, it rapidly becomes forty or sixty meters per second. They gain displacement while becoming predictable. They can apply different vectors, up, down, sideways to complicate our firing solutions.”
“Penny,” Sandy demanded through clinched teeth, “have your computer feed some sort of firing solution to the guns. We’re coming up on reloads. ‘Comm to squadron. Concentrate on one ship at a time.’”
The reply was so quick, Sandy suspected she was telling skippers to do what they’d already decided to do.
This time their eight-gun salvos were concentrated on a single bit of space. They bagged two cruisers.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Mimzy ask, ever polite.
“I’m open to anything? was the answer Sandy snapped back.
“I would recommend that I place myself in the targeting sensors, fire control feedback loop. I think I can predict more accurately where the target will be. I could tighten our salvos. Random chance is not working.”
“Do it. Have Chesty do the same for the Essen.”
“Done, Admiral.”
Fifteen seconds later, three alien cruisers died
Twenty-six to go and only three minutes.
Then the aliens got smarter – again.
The next salvo hit only one of the eight cruisers the squadron targeted.
“They have changed their evasion plan,” Mimzy reported. “Rather than just using their guidance rockets, they are skewing their ships using the main propulsion. They’re honking their nose over one way, and their tails over another, and using their 3.5 gee acceleration to get them out of th
e target envelope we came up with.”
“Expand the spread of the salvoes,” Sandy ordered. “We don’t need to hose these cruisers down with five or six seconds of solid laser energy. Fire a one second burst, then nudge the laser right, left, up, down. Like a machine gun.”
“Comm, send to squadron . . .”
“I sent it while you were talking ma’am. You can court martial me later.”
“I’ll give you a medal.”
The squadron fired another salvo from their aft batteries.
Three aliens died.
Again, the battlecruisers waited through the long fifteen seconds as empty capacitors were filled up by the reactors.
They fired again.
No cruisers died!
“They outguessed us again,” Mimzy said. “The bastards went to half power. One even cut acceleration entirely. With the ships zigging and zagging now, we missed ahead of all of them.”
“Adjust your targeting,” Sandy ordered.
She leaned forward in her high gee station.
Maybe I’m becoming too predictable.
“Comm, ‘Send to squadron, you fire on my mark.’”
“Acknowledged.”
“Mimzy, track those bastards,” Sandy ordered, while somewhere in the back of her brain she found herself giggling that even a computer had taken to calling the aliens that.
The aliens had resumed their 3.5 gee acceleration as soon as the lasers fell silent. As the fifteen seconds from the last salvo counted down, the aliens switched their zigs to zags and vice versa. At fifteen seconds, they cut their acceleration.
“Course changes identified,” Mimzy shouted.
“Fire,” Sandy commanded.
Sixty-four lasers stuttered out five one second bursts.
Five cruisers exploded.
“Take that, you bastards,” Mimzy blasted out from Penny’s collarbone.
“Penny,” Sandy said through a broad grin, “control your computer. I think she’s getting overexcited.”
Kris Longknife's Replacement: Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 18
