Kris Longknife's Replacement: Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  “I am not excited,” Mimzy said, very primly.

  “Study your targets, Mimzy. They’re bound to come up with something new.”

  They aliens did. The next salvo only got one cruiser.

  “What happened, Mimzy?” Sandy asked, sourly.

  “They cut their acceleration at fifteen seconds, then some of them went back to 3.5 gees, others cut back some more.”

  “Again,” Sandy muttered to herself, “we are too predictable.

  She had used two of her five minutes of free shooting and had only cut the alien force down to nineteen. At this rate, she’d be playing dodge the cruiser with the survivors at way too high a speed.

  “They go back to their maximum boost?” Sandy asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mimzy answered.

  “Comm, send to squadron. “Dial the lasers back to half power. Next salvo will be five quick bursts. Then wait two seconds, assess the movement of your target, and fire again.”

  “Acknowledged,” Comm reported immediately.

  “Now we see,” Sandy whispered softly.

  Mimzy seemed to have led her target just right. Still, only one cruiser died in the salvo.

  After the lasers fell silent, the aliens went back to their permanent course, 3.5 gee acceleration right at Sandy’s squadron.

  There was still some jinksing, but nothing like a few seconds ago.

  Two seconds later, the squadron lit up eight alien cruiser. Four exploded, two bent in the middle and broke in two and the last two went dead in space. No more jinksing. No acceleration. A few seconds later, they exploded as their skippers switched off the reactor’s containment system.

  Ten alien cruisers went to maximum jinksing while they juggled their acceleration from 3.5 gees to as low as .85.

  The next two half-salvos missed entirely.

  “Squadron, fire by pairs. Gunnery, coordinate between ships.”

  They got two cruisers that time. Was it a coincidence that the two pairs that had Mimzy and Chesty were the two that scored hits?

  With the next double salvo, the computers got their ships again. A third one died under the fire of an unaided pair.

  Only five to go.

  Of course, the aliens were closing the range to where they could do damage to the reactors and rocket engines on the vulnerable sterns Sandy had pointed directly at their lasers.

  Two cruisers died under the next staccato salvo. One to Mimzy, one to one of the other pairs.

  Chesty missed. Oh my.

  “Commence Evasion Plan 1,” Sandy ordered.

  The squadron began its own bouncing up and down, right and left. Their maneuvering jets were reinforced, as they needed to be, to fight Kris Longknife’s way.

  Sandy called it right. The three alien cruisers fired their bow guns. Their design being derived by the aliens from the human battlecruisers, they had only fore and aft lasers.

  The Birmingham took off on a hard-right turn, throwing Sandy against the side of her high gee station so hard that even it couldn’t save her from a sharp pain to her shoulder.

  The battlecruiser stayed in a hard turn through a full loop, then settled down on a wobbly course, that slowly edged around to return to the squadron’s main course, but at 3.4 gees.

  A few seconds later, the Birmingham was back up to 4.1 gees deceleration.

  “We took a hit on our port-most pair of engines,” Mimzy reported. “They’re pulled armor off the hull to reform the plasma conduit and replace the engines. We should be back to 4.5 gee deceleration in a minute.”

  That would be nice, but Sandy’s flagship was now tag in Charlie and likely to be the target for the next shoot, however long it took the aliens to reload.

  “Comm, advise the skipper of the Birmingham to go to Evasion Plan 3.”

  “Done ma’am.”

  Sandy found her four and a half times normal body being pressed to the left, then pushed up as the battlecruiser began its dance. Every time her right shoulder took the turn, pain laced through her body.

  Eight battlecruisers against three was stiff odds, but the cruises kept hurtling at them. Sandy split the squadron up. Three ships to target two, the Birmingham and Milan would target one.

  The first half of the salvo went wide as the aliens dodged, but the second salvo swept two of them. One crumbled, the other exploded. The last cruiser held on, but Mimzy had its number and there was an extra one second burst that had been pumped into the capacitors even as the lasers pulled the power out.

  That last shot nailed the final cruiser.

  It sailed on, seemingly unaffected by the hit for a long second.

  Then, it disintegrated in a cloud of roiling gas.

  For a long moment, the bridge crew around Sandy studied their boards, examined their gauges. They seemed shocked to find no more threats. No murderous aliens screaming at them with deadly intent.

  Sandy let a breath out, a long deep sigh, letting the oppressive weight of the 4.5 gees force ever cubic millimeter of air from her lungs. Expelling all the tension and fear she’d immersed herself in during the fight.

  Empty, she sucked in a breath so sweet with life, she hardly knew what to do with it.

  Around her, the bridge crew did. They let out a cheer.

  Sandy didn’t join the cheer. She had a command to handle.

  “Nav, if you will, what is the best course and deceleration that will slow us enough to make a refueling pass on that gas giant up ahead.”

  “One moment, Admiral,” and it was a very short moment. “We can go to 2.5 gees with a slight course correction, we’ll be down to 100,000 kilometers as we buzz the giant.”

  “Penny, that’s a might bit fast.”

  “No, ma’am. Kris Longknife did one at that speed. We can do it.”

  “Here on Alwa Station?”

  “You bet, ma’am.”

  “Then, comm, send course and deceleration to the squadron. Advise captains that they may dismiss half their crews to their quarters to clean up.’ Penny, you hold the fort here for a bit. Then you and Masao can have the next stand down.”

  Sandy planned to be back on the bridge in half an hour, but Penny had other plans for her boss. She’d heard Sandy cry out in pain when her shoulder was slammed during the Birmingham’s unscheduled full about turn. Before Sandy had managed to crawl out of the high gee station, a doc from sickbay was at her elbow, looking at the shoulder and doing medical mumbo jumbo. Sandy found herself with help in the shower and a doc taping up her shoulder just as soon as she got dressed.

  “Here are pills. You can take them and heal faster, or you can ignore me and feel that shoulder every time you order something faster than three gees for the rest of your life. You are not a kid anymore, Admiral.

  “So I am noticing,” Sandy growled. “I’ve got a watch to relieve. When I can stand down, I’ll take your damn pills. Okay?”

  “It’s your shoulder,” the doc said. She promptly packed her bag up and left.

  So, it was a little over two hours later before Sandy made it back to the bridge. She settled almost comfortable into her command chair and was very glad to have only two and a half times her weight to manage.

  Penny had put the time to good use. Around Sandy things were pretty close to normal. As normal as they ever were on Alwa Station.

  Chapter 39

  Three days later, Sandy had weaned herself off her strong painkillers and was using only what any woman used when her period didn’t go as pleasant as advertised. Now that she had a clear head, she needed to talk some things out.

  She summoned Mondi Ashigara, her operations chief and the skipper of the Birmingham to her day quarters, added Penny and Masao to the group and ordered up a pot of soothing tea from the galley.

  Her four chosen auditors eyed her curiously as she poured tea and handed each one of them a cup. Mimzy had ordered up a very fancy tea set and Sandy doubted anyone could tell these from a real porcelain tea set.

  Last, she served herself.

  Onc
e she settled back with her own cup of cooling aromatic delight, she said, “I image all of you are wondering why I called this meeting.”

  None of them questioned her. Like fine Navy officers, they waited alertly and watched their admiral to see which way the wind was blowing, or, more likely on Alwa Station, what they’d need to blow up next.

  “Okay. Let me pose a question. Do any of you have trouble sleeping nights, knowing that we have just launched the first nuclear strike in, well, forever?”

  Her subordinates looked at each other. It was Penny who first opened her mouth. “I assume that you don’t have any qualms about killing a whole lot of aliens that were itching to kill us, using nuclear weapons to change the battle from direct fire weapons to indirect?”

  “I’m not losing sleep over any dead aliens. They wanted to murder us. We got to them first. Dead aliens don’t count.”

  “You’ll excuse me, Admiral,” Sandy said, “but all life counts. The aliens don’t give us a chance to count them, but I’m sure that some merciful God somewhere counts every hair on their head.”

  “My God certainly will not,” the Birmingham’s skipper growled.

  “Let us save theology for a long night ashore with a whole lot more and stronger liquids than I can offer,” Sandy said. “No, my concern is that I just ordered the first atomic strike since a whole lot of human history got washed under the bridge. Are the cats a bad influence? Is this more of a reason to try to put them back in the bottle until they resolve their history themselves?”

  “Resolve their history,” Masao added, “by either finding a way for them to put the atomic kami back in the stone or reducing their world to radioactive rubble.”

  “I hate those two choices,” Sandy’s Ops chief added.

  Sandy was tired of this meeting going down rabbit holes she didn’t care much about. Still she was the one who ordered up the pot of what was supposed to be relaxing tea.

  “Again, folks,” she said, “the course of cat history is something I’ll leave to them. They’ll either succeed and maybe manage to become yet another species of aliens under our United Society flag or that won’t. It’s the temptation they dumped in my lap I would like to muse about with you before I get back to the fleet and we have to do something with our weapons load.”

  “Admiral Drago suggested we toss them into any sun we passed close to,” Penny muttered softly.

  “And if we did, there would be no need to develop any policy or doctrine,” the ops chief tossed out.

  “You can say what you want about those damn missiles,” Birmingham’s skipper said, “but they did just save our bacon. I, for one, would like to have that ace up my sleeve. I like aces up my sleeve.”

  “Remind me not to play poker with you,” bantered back the ops chief.

  “I don’t cheat at cards. I’m willing to cheat six ways to Sunday when I’m in a fight with those damn murderous bastards,” the skipper answered.

  “Do we have anything aboard,” Penny said, directing the critique back to where Sandy wanted it to go, “or even in our inventory that could have done what the cats’ atomics did. It seems to me that direct fire lasers have pretty much dominated the battle field for several hundred years. We have to be careful using missiles. I think Kris Longknife got some use out of them in the Battle of Wardhaven, but it took a swarm attack to overload their defenses.”

  “I don’t mean to tell the admiral how to suck eggs,” the Birmingham’s captain said, “she having been at Wardhaven for that fight and all, but the after action reports said the missiles that hit didn’t do much damage. A battleship’s armor is pretty thick and they just shrugged off the puny warheads the missiles carried.”

  “I was with Kris Longknife on her fast attack boat,” Penny said. “Most of the missiles we scrounged up were obsolete. If we’d had anti-matter armed missiles, we would have toasted those battlewagons a whole lot sooner and lost a lot fewer friends.” The young widow’s voice broke on the last few words. Silent, she swallowed hard. Masao reached over and squeezed her hand.

  Sandy gave her intel chief a few moments to recover. Sandy’s destroyer, the Halsey had assisted in the search for life among the wreckage of the fast attack squadron. There hadn’t been a whole lot.

  Kris Longknife had managed to save about half of her crew. Penny was in that half. Her husband of three days was in the other half.

  Sandy continued the conversation after a respectful pause. “Does anyone have any idea how missiles with anti-matter warheads would have fared?” She suspected she knew the answer, but it needed to be on the table.

  Her ops chief had a search going on his wrist unit. Sandy had forgotten that though Penny might be out of the meeting for the moment, her computer was not.

  “The average detonation value you can expect from an anti-matter warhead is approximately eighteen to twenty-one kilotons. The wide discrepancy is caused by how much the anti-matter particles hit when the containment field is dropped. While it can be solved with more research, no one has felt the need to do it.

  Mimzy paused, a practice that she’d learned let humans catch up with her thoughts that traveled close to the speed of light.

  “The thermonuclear bombs the cats’ gave us were certified to produce twenty megatons, plus or minus a megaton. We didn’t have any real way to evaluate the quality control of the warheads. May I point out that a 20 megaton bomb is approximately a thousand times more destructive than a twenty kiloton anti-matter warhead.”

  The ops chief whistled. “A thousand times bigger than our biggest.”

  “Yes,” Mimzy said and left it at that.

  The ops chief spent a long, quiet minute with his computer. “We only have four hundred missiles in our magazines.”

  “The cats really saved our necks,” the Birmingham’s skipper whispered.

  “With atomics you can pack a very large amount of explosive power into a reasonable small package,” Mimzy said.

  “Still,” Sandy said, “we don’t’ carry a lot of missiles around because lasers tend to wipe them out. We had a rather unique situation. By using indirect weapons and carpet bombing, I came across that old word while I was researching atomic usage, we were able to dodge under the radar, so to speak, and walk hell and destruction across that crater before they could react.”

  “If they had mounted a few anti-missile lasers on that ridge . . .,” the skipper of the Birmingham began, then seemed to run out of words.

  “Exactly,” Sandy said. “Did we have a unique set of circumstances that, having these atomics on hand, we were able to resolve favorable? Will we be facing circumstances like these very often? Often enough for us to keep these abominations in our magazines?”

  Those questions hung in the air.

  “We do have the neutron star weapon?” Masao said.

  “But we’ve had to be very careful with their use,” Penny said, rejoining the meeting. “When Kris Longknife used three to take down a alien mother ship, we had to damage the thing enough to cut down on its protective fire power. When it was hurting bad, we slipped the three of them in among a wave of fifty or so anti-matter warheads. Even then, one of the neutron bombs got winged and didn’t explode as big as the others.”

  “She has a point,” the Birmingham’s captain said, “Lasers are the king of battle. Missiles need a whole lot of luck, or special circumstances to survive in a laser heavy environment.”

  Sandy took in a deep breath, and let it out as a sigh. “This meeting is going around in circles. You’re pretty much saying what I’ve been thinking. Indirect weapons need a permissive environment to survive on the modern battlefield. Bang for buck, the cats’ atomics are the deadliest warheads we could want. The problem is, they come with a huge price. It’s much easier to blow a city away than it is to blow away an alien base ship. Is the temptation that some mad man will get his hands on them and use them on highly-populated, soft targets too great for us to risk.”

  The battlecruiser leaned forward and put his
empty tea cup down on the table.

  “Like all battlecruisers, the Birmingham can carry a load of one or two neutron bombs. I’ve never carried one, but I’ve heard one of them turns a fast ship into a pig, and you are no better than a merchant freighter with two of them, and you’d better be careful and slow with what you do. Now, I’m not going to complain about higher ups giving us only a few of those big bastards. Now, take that bomb strike we launched. Twenty megatons of unshirted hell taking off at twenty gees acceleration. Admiral, I know humanity banned those damn things, but we’re out here at the end of nowhere fighting a bunch of murderous bastards. If I promise to never take one of those home to human space, not that I’m expecting to go home any time soon, I sure would like to have a dozen or twenty of those puppies tucked away in my magazine to use against these murderous bastards in case of an emergency.”

  “What’s the risk that someone might detonate one aboard?” Sandy asked. “We’ve got cats. Human’s go around the bend. I’m told not every bird likes us. Can you keep them safe?

  “If I can get the experts to field strip those things down to their parts, I’d lock all of that up in a magazine that’s Smart Metal matrix is controlled by a cipher that would take a month for the best computer aboard to crack.”

  Sandy noticed that Mimzy kept quiet. It was just as well, the captain was saying pretty much what Sandy had come to. Keep them away from human space. Keep them under the tightest controls we humans could develop. But keep them available. The enemy was just too damn adamant about whipping us out as a species. Worse, they were learning from us and growing smarter each fight.

  Sandy would have this discussion again, likely with Admiral Kitano and her fleet bosses. Admiral Benson, too. Maybe that bunch would find a way out that had eluded their boss.

  “Thank you, everyone, it’s been a most enlightening talk. God willing, we’ll figure out a way to walk this sharp edge without getting sliced to pieces.”

  Her staff dismissed themselves leaving Sandy staring at the bulkhead.

  Things are different on Alwa Station.