Implacable: Vicky Peterwald, #5

by Mike Shepherd

  About the time Vicky accepted the circumstances of her brother's dead, she had come to accept that the Peterwalds was a family crime syndicate, just one that was down on its luck at the moment . . . one that that go legit with her and the next generation.

  Okay. Never mind all that. I've got a battle to win.

  "Very good, Admiral Bolesław. Have all the high gee stations checked and double-checked. We will depart the station in," she glanced at the timing on the screen, "Approximately one hour."

  "I will personally see that your own high gee station is double checked."

  "No need for you to tie yourself up on my account. Have one of your most respected chiefs oversee the work and that should be enough."

  "Aye, aye, Your Grace," the admiral said, and hurried away.

  Vicky suspected that that "Aye, aye," didn't mean what other ones did. No doubt, Alis would see to it that her high gee station was safe. If he didn't, she might as well slit her throat and save everyone the time and trouble.

  My, aren't you in a bad mood, today?

  She went back to studying her board. "Maggie, what if he takes off at three gees as soon as he sees us running?"

  There, she'd said the word. She would be running away from a battle. Running, or turning this into a running gun battle, with her running and him out of range to go gunning for her.

  However, she could decide just how far ahead of him she wanted to run.

  If she chose, she could pull ahead and just take her time cutting him to ribbons with her longer-ranged 460 mm lasers. That was what the book said: 410 mm lasers were good out to 100,000 klicks. The Victorious' 460 mm lasers were good for an extra 40,000 klicks.

  The battle should be an easy victory if she went by the book.

  But.

  There was always a but.

  In this battle, it was her running. She could only use her aft battery, so her gunnery was reduced by half. Then there was always that extra distance. A laser lost its official effectiveness at its listed maximum range. However, energy was energy, and the gunk in space wasn't always the same. A slight variance from normal vacuum could make the difference from adding or subtracting just that little bit of energy from the laser beam.

  It was that bit of difference that could make a very major difference. Vicky was running away from this fight. She'd be showing this bastard her vulnerable stern with its rocket motors. Ice armor could easily absorb laser beams that were past their sell-by date. How well could rocket motors or their superconducting electronic gear that maintained control over the superheated plasma shooting out of them survive spent laser beams?

  Vicky wondered if anyone knew the answer to that question. No doubt, in a few more hours, she would.

  44

  "Sortie the squadron," Vicky ordered.

  No doubt Admiral Bolesław could have said the words just as well as she, but some wag at Bu Per had seen that her promotion to full admiral was signed a few seconds before his.

  It didn't really matter. They both agreed now was the moment to go. The ship captains knew their duty and the crews were standing by, waiting upon their orders.

  The sortie order was being given early. Late in the last watch, the enemy squadron had reduced its deceleration all the way down to just a single gee. It would be doing nearly two hundred thousand klicks when it whizzed by Oryol.

  It was time to hit him with her own surprise.

  The destroyers sailed first. They would spread out, swing low, then climb high up where they could pump chaff into the space above the cruisers. This would give Vicky's strike group cover and keep the enemy in the dark about her intentions for a few extra minutes.

  Minutes that could mean the difference between life and death.

  After the destroyers had performed their mission, they were to go to maximum acceleration and scatter. There was no chance the little boys could get into a position to launch missiles, not with secondary batteries having the long range they had now.

  The light cruisers Rostock and Emden went next, followed by the heavy cruiser Sachsen. Last in the line, and positioned to be closest to the enemy battleships, was the Victorious.

  All four detached from the station smoothly and decelerated hard to drop themselves down so close as to skim the top of the atmosphere. Then as they headed into a high orbit, they went to 2.75 gees and accelerated away from both Oryol and the incoming battleships.

  By the time the Victorious did that, Vicky was "relaxing" in her high gee station, waiting for word from Sensors. She and Admiral Bolesław had a bet between them.

  Vicky was the pessimist. She'd accepted that the sly fox would spot this ruse in less than fifteen minutes and order his ships to close them. The admiral figured they were good for fifteen minutes or longer. He counted on the destroyer’s cloud of chaff to hide them. That should give them time to accelerate and be well on their way before his academy classmate, whatever his name was, knew the new game and made his own move.

  A space station in geosynchronous orbit stays over the same place on the planet. It never moves. That meant that Vicky's ships spent a bit more than three and a half hours of each day behind Oryol, blocked from view of the incoming fleet. Sensors in orbit told her what he was doing, but he knew nothing about what she was doing when she was around back of the planet.

  The station was about to complete one of those brief periods when Vicky's squadron detached and launched themselves back into the planet's shadow and began a hard deceleration burn.

  The destroyers had been launching for some time, deploying chaff to block radar, bedazzlers to send lasers ranging beams off in all directions, and vacuum type WP to confuse infrared sensors. Vicky needed them well ahead of her main task force, covering her course with gunk when she swung out from around the planet, well below the destroyers.

  Of course, being on the wrong side of all that space gunk meant that the Victorious' sensors were of no more use to Vicky and Admiral Bolesław than her enemies were to him. However, Vicky had a trick up her sleeve.

  The destroyer Oxalate had been outfitted as a squadron leader. During its last refit, its sensors had been jacked up to be a cut above the average tin can. The squadron commander on the Oxalate was tight beaming the raw feed from his sensors straight to the Victorious.

  Between Captain Blue's team and Maggie, they were squeezing every bit of information from the data that they could.

  They were getting quite a lot.

  Thus it was that Vicky admitted defeat and promised to pay Admiral Bolesław one hundred Imperial marks as soon as she got out of the clutches of this contraption that held her tight and kept her from feeling nearly three times her normal weight.

  The Victorious was accelerating away from Oryol at 2.75 gees before the incoming battleships began to adjust their course. The two big boys immediately honked their engines around to add a vector along the same course as Vicky's Victorious. It took them five minutes to go from 1.3 gees to two. It took even more time to go to 2.5 gees.

  By the time the entire formation was blasting on a course to pursue Vicky, the four heavy cruisers were spread out, having increased their acceleration at different times and along different power curves.

  The two battleships were also out of their previously rock-solid formation. One had changed course and added acceleration at a smooth rate. The other had botched the course change and taken much more time to put on the extra acceleration. That put it well below and behind the first one and falling more out of position as it struggled to get up to 2.5 gees.

  Vicky's fleet had gone to three gees smoothly. They were still in a column ahead, with Victorious holding steady the last place in line.

  Now the enemy realized that Vicky running put him in a mess. While he might be adding vectors on his ship to chase after the Victorious, he still had a strong energy vector directed toward Oryol's orbit. If he didn't reduce that vector, he would whiz by Vicky's ships with hardly enough time in range to fire.

  The not-so-sly fox had to or
der his ships to go to three gees and split their vectors between pursuit and deceleration. He'd gotten himself into a fix of his own making. He expected Vicky to do something like Kris Longknife.

  Kris had met incoming attacks by going into a high elliptical orbit that put her way above the planet she was protecting, but able to get on a parallel course for a running gun fight. That left both Kris's forces and the opposing ships decelerating toward the target planet, both firing lustily away at each other.

  Kris usually fired first and longest. So far, no one had beaten the Wardhaven Princess at that move.

  Admiral, Her Grace Victoria, the Imperial Grand Duchess of the Greenfeld Empire, was doing something quite different, thanks to the advice of her admiral.

  This fight would follow a different play book. Victoria would add her own chapter to the book Kris Longknife was writing.

  Vicky smiled at the thought. She'd have her own victorious battle to brag about when next the two gals met to dig the dirt.

  Well, she would if she managed to survive and win this battle.

  Yeah, girl, save the celebration for when we've got those two ships in the bag.

  Vicky eyed the board as the guy who wanted her dead tried to recover from an assumption that had just made an ass of him. Her grin would fit nicely on the lips of a hungry tiger.

  45

  Vicky watched as the lead battleship chasing her edged into range of the Victorious' aft battery.

  The physics of this battle were not doing either side much good.

  The space station was in a geostationary orbit. That meant that it orbited the planet once a day. Its energy vector went one way. Vicky had launched her fleet the other way. Oryol had been kind enough to give her a slingshot orbit in the opposite direction, but to a great extent, the deorbiting burns had been expended to reduce the Victorious' vector in the wrong direction.

  Now, accelerating at 2.75 gees, she was extending a vector away from the hostiles.

  Her enemy had a similar problem.

  All his vectors were aimed at the space station. He had no energy on his battleship in the direction Vicky was accelerating. He was also starting from zero as he tried to chase her down.

  However, his situation was worse. He still had the other vectors on his ships and the velocity with which he approached Oryol was threatening to drive him across Vicky's course in an astonishingly short amount of time.

  The battleship closest to Vicky edged its reactors up to 3.5 gees acceleration. Part of that energy was aimed to reduce the vector at which he was approaching Oryol. Most of it went to increase the vector he needed to chase Vicky.

  It very much looked like he'd cut across her stern at a speed slightly less than 150,000 klicks per hour, headed toward the star, while he still struggling to shorten the range on the Victorious.

  Vicky would have him in range at 140,000 klicks. He would have her in range for 100,000 klicks. Maggie was still working on adjusting the Victorious' danger time as well as that of the lead battleship.

  No question, he would be in danger a whole lot longer than her.

  "You thinking about matching his 3.5 gees?" Admiral Bolesław asked from his high gee station.

  "Nope," Vicky said. "Maybe once we get him in our firing range, but before he gets us in his range. Admiral, how good is the Victorious at jinking?

  "We don't have the oversized directional jets that Kris Longknife has on her battlecruisers, but the Victorious has some of the most powerful station-keeping jets of any battleship. You thinking we'd better be ready to dip and dodge?"

  "I'd rather know that if that bastard gets in range of our engines that we can make his fire control solution hash."

  "I would prefer goulash for my own appetite, but I get your meaning."

  "Would you please have all the ships of our little fleet test their directional rockets. I want to know if anyone is weak."

  "We did serious maintenance to every system before we departed the station, but we haven't had a chance to test them. Aye, aye, Your Grace."

  Admiral Bolesław was quickly on his commlink. A moment later, Vicky's inner ear told her the Victorious was doing a bit of a dance. Likely not enough for her pursuer to notice, but enough to check out the system.

  "Victorious reports all directional steering jets as optimal. Sachsen reports same. Rostock, same. Emden reports trouble with its right forward steering rocket. Her skipper requests that we go right as often as we can." The grim, tight-lipped look on Admiral Bolesław face showed no humor for the attempted joke.

  "Maggie, your mom developed a lot of jinking patterns for Kris. Do you have any of them?"

  "I have several of them. Actually, I have the algorithms Mom used to make them. I can tailor three to fit the less-than-energetic systems we have, and which will let us avoid collision with the Emden when it can't go to the left as fast as we can."

  "Do it Maggie, and transfer the jinking programs to all the ships."

  "One moment," Maggie said.

  Vicky had enough time for two breaths before Maggie was back. "Three jinking programs loaded to all four ships' computers. I have advised the skippers and bridge watch of their availability and that you may be ordering we initiate any one of them at any time."

  "Very good, Maggie," Vicky said.

  "Now, Admiral, please advise the Emden to go to 2.9 gees. Do it in a ragged power curve. I want it to look like she's scared and running away."

  "She's not going to like that, Your Grace."

  "Admiral Bolesław, I don't want to run any risk of these bastards getting even one of my ships. This also gives us a chance to send a message to that wise fool of a classmate of yours. The rest of us can't do any better than our 2.75 gees. Let's sucker him into keeping up this chase. In a bit, I may even shave a hundredth of a gee or so off our acceleration."

  The admiral grinned. "I serve a sly Grand Duchess."

  Immediately, he was on his commlink. From the sound of it, he got some back talk from one disappointed light cruise skipper, but, very quickly, he received obedience.

  Vicky reviewed her situation.

  She had actually won the struggle to get her ships away from the station and on their course. Her enemy had been slow to discover her direction of flight and even slower to bring his ships up to 3.0, now a struggling 3.5 gee acceleration.

  She was pulling away from him.

  However, his high speed dive toward the planet meant he would cut across behind her and be in range of her for a solid minute. He'd pay heavily for that minute. Vicky would have him in range for five minutes before, and close to five after.

  After that, it was anybody's guess where he'd be off to. There were no planets between him and the star Oryol orbited. He'd have to burn a lot of reaction mass to go anywhere.

  Of course, so would Vicky.

  "Order the aft battery to stand by to open fire," Vicky said.

  Admiral Bolesław passed the order along and reported, "The fire directory team have a solid solution on that battlewagon."

  "Good."

  The countdown clock on the main screen showed fifteen seconds before they could open fire.

  That was when everything changed.

  The enemy battleship fired its right forward thrusters and its aft left thrusters. Suddenly, it took off to the left. Five seconds later, it did the same and nudged itself up. Five seconds later, it went more to the left and higher still.

  "Adjust our ranging fire," Vicky snapped. "Fire looser ranging salvos."

  "Done," Maggie snapped back

  The sixteen after 460 mm lasers spoke for three seconds, then fell silent.

  "One just grazed the bulge of the hull," Admiral Bolesław reported. "No significant damage."

  "So, he's not only a sly fox, but a smart one. I guess he's read Kris Longknife's battle reports."

  "It would appear so. I really wished we could have had a fire in the archives of State Security," Admiral Bolesław muttered. "I imagine someone in the Bowlingames’ employ did
enjoy reading Kris Longknife's file."

  "Yes," Vicky agreed. She thought for a moment, then said, "Admiral Bolesław, do you think you could arrange with the Victorious' skipper to let me and Maggie take over the helm, fire control computations, directing the lasers, and firing them? Kris and Nelly often do that."

  "I've been expecting something like this since your Maggie became as sentient as her mother," the admiral said.

  He spoke into his commlink for a moment, got a reply and advised Vicky. "Your Grace, you have the conn. You are Guns for the Victorious."

  "Let's hope that we haven't all just made a horrible mistake," Vicky muttered. "Admiral, I know the book says it takes thirty seconds to reload 46 mm lasers. By any chance did you manage to cut down on that time during all your drilling?"

  "As a matter of fact, you can expect to be reloaded in twenty-five seconds. We started reloading one capacitor as we shot the other empty."

  Vicky studied her board. "It seems our opposite number does not like bouncing around so much. He quit jinking right after we fired. I think we may have a surprise for him."

  As the twenty-five second count approached the end, Vicky's trigger finger itched to get the SOB. Maggie had a rock-solid fire control solution.

  "He recommenced jinking!" Maggie exclaimed.

  "Fire," Vicky ordered.

  Again, the wide spread of the salvos winged the other battleship once.

  "Don't you hate it when the other side starts acting smart?" Admiral Bolesław drawled ruefully.

  "It's going to be a long battle if we can't hit him harder," Vicky growled. "Maggie, next time, we fire two salvos. The first from one gun in each turret. Wait five seconds, then fire the second."

  "Sly as a fox yourself," Admiral Bolesław said, a smile on his face even if it did weigh three times normal.

  As expected, the enemy battleship went back to jinking two seconds before the Victorious' guns were loaded and ready. Vicky waited for the next dip and dodge. He went down and to the right. Four seconds later, he went up and to the right.