When the message confirming this arrived—no more than a few bald, official phrases—General Corhaine could spare them no more than a glance. The remaining Dom cruisers, now to the east of the formation, still presented a serious threat. Tapping up her signal lieutenant, she requested a strike on them. Their only intact force, Cloak—the light cruiser Tanith, the destroyers Pallas and Melanthe, and the frigate Iphigenia—immediately responded. Tanith and Pallas singled out IHS Riga, while Melanthe went for IHS Tonnerre. Coming in gun range, the two ships began trading furious salvos. Then, in a shocking maneuver, IHS Tonnerre placed herself between Melanthe and Pallas where she could use both banks of railguns. To relieve Pallas, now taken between two fires, Melanthe crowded in close—too close—and received a devastating broadside that sent her reeling away, out of control.
Disengaging from her fight with IHS Tonnerre, Tanith bore down on a light cruiser shelling the helpless Melanthe, drove it off, then closed on IHS Kolyma and fired steadily for nine minutes, punishing the heavy cruiser until she withdrew, badly damaged. Pallas and Riga continued to hammer at each other until IHS Riga, seeing IHS Kolyma withdraw, decided to follow her.
In the midst of this swirling close-quarters melee, Iphigenia found herself within rat-pack range of the light cruiser IHS Auslan for several minutes before the cruiser’s 8-inch guns scored a direct hit on Iphigenia’s bridge, killing both helmsman and her conning officer, and wounding her captain. The next salvo dismounted three of the frigate’s eight starboard guns. Her TAO turned her keel up and shot away under full emergency power into the concealing ice.
As these reports filtered in, Penthesileia’s conning officer popped up on Corhaine’s display. “New contacts—DDs in two columns—coming out of grid ref ocean-eleven and closing fast.”
The omnisynth updated as he spoke, showing the incoming Halith destroyers. They had abandoned their screen and were sprinting back to assist the beleaguered cruisers.
“Thank you, Vance,” Corhaine answered her conning officer. “Lay in an intercept course and don’t spare the bottles. Jeri”—this to her Signal Lieutenant—“ask Aurora to conform, five megs astern. She can pick up the pieces. Terry”—turning now to her TAO—“I’d prefer to conserve our remaining missiles.”
“You want to see their running lights first, ma’am?”
“Perhaps we might start the ball a bit before that, Major. But I’ll leave it to you.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Her TAO returned to his plots with a disturbing chuckle. Closing to within seven megs, Corhaine heard him again, his voice barely above a murmur now, “Forward mounts, fire as soon as you have good range.”
Seconds later, they felt the subtle tremor of the three long twelve’s opening a careful, deliberate long-range fire. Five shots went home into the lead destroyer, IHS Atalante, before it veered off. Shifting fire to the next in line, IHS Koenigsberg, Penthesileia scored six hits before the Dom destroyer also turned keel up. Yawing smoothly to bring her main guns to bear on the second column, IHS Talisman, evidently appalled by Penthesileia’s shockingly accurate fire, went keel up as well and now the whole squadron followed IHS Atalante in her westward turn.
Astonished looks, open amazement, and then howls of laughter from Penthesileia’s crew. They’d barely died out fifteen minutes later when the Halith group reformed and was retreating northeast to rejoin the main body.
General Corhaine rose from her chair, stretched until her joints popped, and spoke to the still open window on her console.
“Jeri? Signal all commands: Secure from general quarters. Set Condition II-Easy throughout the fleet. Add: Nice shooting, everyone.”
“Aye aye,” Lieutenant Reed said, coding the order and dispatching it.
Her gaze flicked down to the chrono: one hundred twenty-four minutes since the first gun fired. It felt like an age. It always felt like an age. And in truth it was: the end of an age for so many; the beginning and the end for those who’d survived this one just past.
And what of the next? For there would be a next. They were not done here.
No. Not by a damn sight.
How long? How long until those people over there regrouped and tried again?
Long enough to have dinner? Maybe. Hopefully. A last supper?
Unbidden, a gentle voice, mystic strains of memory from yet another age, this one long past, recited:
Thinking of you
the fireflies of this fen
seem like sparks
rising
from my body's longing.
It would console me
to see you again
even for the length of a flash—
seen and then gone—
of lightning in the dusk
Her mother’s favorite poem. The poet’s name escaped her.
The length of a lightning flash at dusk. Was anyone promised more than that?
I think not.
Stifling a yawn, she watched the less-critical personnel, freed from their action stations, file out of the compartment, to grab a bite or a few minutes in their rack. She’d follow in a moment.
But not to rest. There was a lot still to do.
Before dusk.
~ ~ ~
Day 233 (1517)
Corvette “Calvin”, on-station
Deep Six, Apollyon Gates
“I don’t see nothing.” Very Young Peter looked up from the console on which he’d been monitoring the three huge harbor sections, spinning idly about 50,000 klicks away. Since he’d jettisoned the contents of that crate on Penrith’s order—two hours and eleven minutes ago—he’d been watching. The senior warrant officer, who’d been bent over his console all this time, muttering and chuckling, hadn’t yet enlightened him on exactly what he was watching for.
“Curb your instant gratification monster, son.” Penrith kept his eyes hard on the display, his big callous fingers tapping out another string of code. “That’s the problem with you kids. No patience. Miss things going on right under your nose.”
Mouth twisted down, Peter awaited enlightenment.
“Angular velocity,” Penrith said, glancing over at last. “Take the second derivative.”
Peter did so. His eyebrows elevated. Penrith gave him a self-satisfied smile.
“See the knee in that there curve? Keep an eye on it. Should be less than twenty minutes now.”
He did and within a few minutes, lazy rotation of the harbor sections was visibly less lazy. Indeed, it was increasing. Increasing, he saw, exponentially. He knew the devices he’d dumped out were sprites: small spheres, eight centimeters in diameter, that Penrith told him operated on the target’s star sensors.
He’d assumed it was to disorient and confuse the sections to keep them from assembling. They were designed to mate automatically once all three core units were present. The outer works would then attach themselves, and finally crews would board to complete the process and take the harbors operational. Thus, disorienting the harbor sections, so his theory ran, would force them to be assembled manually, causing considerable delay—enough, hopefully, to derail the whole operation.
Now he understood that delay was not their object, and Penrith took the “breaking” part of his title both seriously and literally. What he’d been doing with all his muttering, chuckling and code tapping, was using the sprites to tweak the section’s attitude-control systems via the star sensors. Instead of damping the section’s moderate exit spin, as the ACS meant to do, Penrith had been subtly accelerating it.
The ACS used the star sensors to maintain calibration of its accelerometers, and as Peter watched the telemetry, the systems crossed the threshold into concluding things were going quite wrong. To correct their spin, they fired attitude-control thrusters with increasing vigor but, captured by Penrith’s use of the sprites, always in the wrong direction. The sections spun faster and faster, the ACS grew more and more frantic, and as the prophetic 20-minute mark approached, the huge structures were whirling at a truly astounding rate.
“See there?” Penrith chortled and pointed. “Ain’t that pretty?”
Peter, eyes wide with amazed admiration, allowed that it was.
Penrith handed him his xel, with a big red button lit on the interface. “Here, son. You do the honors.”
Peter tapped the button. The sections’ boost motors fired. They weren’t powerful motors, being incapable of constant accelerations greater than 2 gees. Nevertheless, the huge sections, spinning madly, met together a minute later, traveling at a shade over a kilometer per second.
“Wow,” uttered Very Young Peter as the innumerable fragments ricocheted off into the cosmos.
“That youngster, is why you don’t ever trust automation.” Penrith stood and gestured. “Now take a seat. There’s more in the pipe and once Moe and Curly have had their fun, you’ll get your shot.”
Six: Dies Illa
“Pray for us . . . at the hour of our death.”
—Ave Maria
Day 233 (1530)
IHS Bolimov, engaged
Tango Sector, Apollyon Gates
Observing the battered formation return on the bulkhead screens in Admiral Caneris’ day cabin, Captain Hoffman shook his large bullet-shaped head, the closed-cropped hair early grizzled, and looked sideways at the much shorter man. “Well, sir. We’ve had the devil’s own time of it.”
They had, as the preliminary report Caneris held in his hand set out: four of six heavy cruisers lost or battered past all use; one of two light cruisers out of action; three destroyers damaged, one that could not be made operational again without a full-up airdock.
And Orion, his fastest battlecruiser. Added to yesterday’s losses, the whole made for painful reading. Not that Caneris had any need to read it. He’d tallied the numbers as the battle progressed; the report was merely a punctuation mark to his mental register.
“So we have”—setting the useless paper aside. “Send the causalities to AG-XI. I believe we may detach destroyer division six”—their slowest units—“to provide all necessary aid.”
“Certainly. It shall be taken in hand directly. Is there more?” They both knew there was more—a great deal more—but Hoffman would wait for the admiral to open his mind regarding it.
Caneris intended to do just that, but at present he had a mind divided. Worse than the losses was the fact he still did not know to his satisfaction what he was up against, either in kind or number. Contact reports contradicted one another and few of the opposing ships’ signatures matched anything in his databases. Clearly they were Ionian, but either they had escaped classification or some new technology was confusing his sensors. Current events made that seem altogether too likely.
Nor was he satisfied he’d succeeded in flushing the whole of his opponent’s force. The encounters had left him with a vague, uneasy feeling of being managed that he did not relish at all. He sensed things that were hid from sight, that he must grope after, half-blind, while his opponent operated on a different plane entirety. He’d inflicted losses—considerable ones, though here again, the reports did not agree—but those were almost beside the point.
The crux—the core—the heart of matter was not what. It was who.
Of all the admirals he knew, only Lo Gai Sabr would fight with such unmatched ferocity. Leaving aside that it could not be that diminutive piratical genius, he doubted even Sabr could handle a fleet so deftly, could anticipate the time so exactly, knowing just when and where to strike with unfailing precision. Sensing the rhythms of battle—the entwined currents and countercurrents always obscured by friction and fog—was an art. Great admirals were great artists and he was up against a virtuoso, the like of which recent history offered no living parallel.
Be that as it may, of one thing he remained convinced: he still had an advantage in mass of metal, probably a substantial one. And that presented him with an essentially digital choice. He could concentrate his remaining ships into a formation optimized for defense, with Bolimov at its center, and forge ahead. Even though such a formation would be tied to rate of its slowest member, it would still get through in time, unless—and this he could not rule out—his adversary was yet capable of a massed attack, especially on more than one axis.
Or—and Caneris found he could not rule out this, either—if he resorted to suicide tactics. A large tight defensive formation would be horribly vulnerable to such an attack, for a man who wants to die, who is making every effort to die, must in seven cases out of ten kill a man who still harbors some inclination to live. Considering the manner in which his opponent fought, this possibility bulked large in his consciousness. Even if it did not threaten outright destruction, it could easily slow him not much above a crawl, which amounts to much the same thing. They had lost two harbors already. To lose a third would place the invasion in jeopardy; losing a fourth would be fatal.
Alternately, he could disperse his fleet in tightly-knit groups that would be faster and more flexible than a single large formation. One, possibly two, might be lost, but the others would almost certainly get through in time. Once at Deep Six, all the advantages of defense would accrue to him. He had Bolimov and Condorcet, and the three battlecruisers he retained. The number struck him as slightly prophetic.
That hardened his supposition and he looked over at Hoffman with a mind united.
Hoffman knew the look and inclined his head. “Your orders, Admiral?”
Caneris raised a hand, the outstretched forefinger pointed toward Deep Six. “Execute Quincunx.”
~ ~ ~
Day 233 (1717)
LSS Polidor, engaged
Foxtrot Sector, Apollyon Gates
Holy shit. Another “victory” like that and we’ve had it.
Alone in her quarters, Kris closed the last of the condition reports her captains had sent in. Only Thalestris had been lost, but Melanthe would join her as soon as they stripped the rest of her usable equipment. Whether Iphigenia or Orithyia could be salvaged was doubtful. Of the survivors, Tisiphone was in the worst shape and couldn’t be considered operational. More than half the remainder were no longer hypercapable, although for the frigates that was only an issue with reaction mass—the repeated jumps had depleted their stores to critical levels. The state of their ordnance brought her earlier crack about fighting until they were down to rat-pack and bad language forcefully to mind.
She’d sent Tisiphone, Iphigenia and Pallas off to AG-IV with Commander Yanazuka’s squadron to join Orithyia. Pallas still had most of her teeth in case Caneris sent someone to investigate; enough to deliver a sting and buy time to scuttle the other ships, if it came to that. Commander Yanazuka was returning to Iona and taking the worst casualties with her.
Kris knew she would have preferred to stay and send just two of her ships back with the wounded. But Kestrel had been roughed up some and so had Raven, rendering both of them less than ideally stealth-capable. Tiercel and Peregrine remained unscathed, so it they’d decided to send them back to Eltanin. Clearly someone had to go and since that meant transiting through Nicobar and the Acheron, they were the only ships with a chance of making it. That stuck Kestrel and Raven with exercising the “better” part of valor. She and the others would take the other part.
Jeremy Dalton and Drake Jeffers, Polidor’s chief engineer, had labored like champions along with the whole engineering section to get the cruiser’s drives back in shape. More worrisome was the state of her hull. She was an old ship and never designed for the hectic shallow jumps Kris had subjected her to. Those 14-inch rounds from Orion had done more damage to her frame than was first apparent and with the state of her stasis field generators it was extremely doubtful she could exit the Gates.
If she couldn’t jump that deep, she could still fight—once her drives were back. The short-hop strategy no longer applied in any case, and she’d cut loose “The Lamb”. It drifted in an especially desolate region now, contemplating gawd-knows-what, until someone came by for it. Kris could privately admit (very privately) she’d miss i
t—once she had time for that. If she had time for that.
A ping from Dalton roused her from her reverie.
“What is it?”
“Seeing some action across the way. They’re up to something—can’t say just what yet.”
“On it.” She loaded the update onto her system—stared hard. What the hell was Caneris up to? It appeared he was dispersing his fleet on purpose. She hailed Penthesileia over the dedicated link.
“I just saw it,” Corhaine said as soon as the link locked.
“What’s he doing?” Worry sharpened Kris’s question.
“The arithmetic,” the general answered, her expression forbidding. “They call it a quincunx. You might think of it as analogous to infantry forming squares. Once upon a time, they did it when a fleet CO couldn’t exercise coordinated control of his units: the tighter defense might preserve them. Nowadays, it’s mostly an invitation to be defeated in detail.”
That’s certainly what it appeared to be to Kris. “So why’s he doin’ it?”
“He worked out that in a quincunx we can’t maul enough of his units to prevent the rest from reaching Deep Six, and we’ll take heavy losses in the attempt. He might get to Deep Six with only half his force, but we won’t have a ship left intact. That’s the arithmetic.”
“Unless Huron get here first.”
“True. If his task force arrives before we’re all plasma, Caneris will find himself over a bottle. He can’t reform fast enough and he will be defeated in detail. But that’s a big if. It’s all a matter of time.”
By her calcs, they couldn’t expect him for at least six hours. Or about two hours too late, if the numbers she’d just pulled from her astrogation module were to be believed. Which they were.
“Then shouldn’t we make the time?”
Corhaine cocked an eyebrow. “What do you have in mind?”
“A quincunx still has a heart, doesn’t it? Cut out the heart and it falls apart, right?”
The general’s lips bent upwards in appreciation. “I like the way you think.”
* * *
“You’re the expert,” Kris addressed Min across Polidor’s wardroom table. “Can we do this?”
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 57
