Jack sat, composed himself, and watched the carrier wave on the tight beam between High Wardhaven and their boat, between Kris’s fleet and their boat. Nothing.
Kris watched as Milna slid between them and the intruders. With the moon’s solid bulk blocking observation, it was time to act. “Task Force Custer, may I suggest you edge further into the lead, say ten or fifteen thousand klicks ahead of us, tossing rockets up his rear at his vulnerable motors. Any discussion?” Kris offered as she finished.
“It’ll be harder to keep them in sparkles,” Sandy said.
“I think we’ve kept them in the dark as long as we can,” van Horn answered. “We’re forty-eight minutes from Task Group Reno doing its thing. Once they do, I doubt there will be all that much question that some of us are playing the missile arsenal role. I concur with Princess Longknife’s orders. We’ll do a quick burn, take a lower orbit, and come out ahead of you two.”
“Singh, follow Custer. I want you offset when we start.”
“Understood. We stay with Custer. Use him as our kick-off point. Has Nelly included this in our plan of approach?”
YES, I HAVE, Nelly answered.
“She has. If you are too far off, we will make adjustments.”
I INCLUDED OPTIONS FOR THEM TO BE AS FAR AS 150,000 KLICKS.
THANK YOU, GIRL. AND THANK YOU FOR KEEPING IT JUST BETWEEN US GIRLS.
YOU ARE WELCOME.
“Horatio, stay behind Custer and keep faking it as a gun line as long as possible. I will launch the Light Brigade’s attack ten minutes after the Reno attacks. I want Divisions 4, 5, and 6 to hold at the line of departure and stay with Horatio.”
“Why?” came from an unidentified boat, but Kris suspected it was being asked on every one of them.
“Because I still don’t know enough about these battleships. If the Reno attack tells us something, I may give you different orders at the last minute, but just now, I want to save you for the final attack as they’re coming up on the station.”
“I thought you wanted to have this settled before the station guns started shooting at all of us?”
“I wanted a lot of things,” Kris snapped. She paused. The song on net was coming up on “Follow orders as your told, / Make Their Yellow Blood Run Cold.” “What part of following orders don’t you understand? Division 7 didn’t follow orders. What’s about to happen to them is going to be ugly. You going to do what you’re told, or you want to get out and start walking back? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got this battle to manage.”
“Horatio, Custer, Squadron 8 will do a loop around Wardhaven after our attack. That’ll have me coming back at the battleships at a steep angle. You see a problem with that?”
“It should make it easier for the tugs to capture you,” van Horn said. “And for you to make a lunar orbit after your second attack. With you attacking earlier, it’ll work better that way.”
“Fine,” Kris said. NELLY, ORGANIZE THE ORDERS FOR THE TUGS, SEND THEM TIGHT BEAM TO JACK, AND LET ME KNOW WHEN HE ACKNOWLEDGES SENDING THEM ON TO HIGH WARDHAVEN.
There was a pause. JACK ACKNOWLEDGES THEM. More of a pause. JACK SAYS THE TUGS HAVE THEM AND WILL COMPLY. JACK SAYS BE CAREFUL.
HE DOES, DOES HE? TELL HIM TO BE CAREFUL HIMSELF.
HE SAYS HIS ONLY RISK IS KILLING ONE REPORTER.
TELL HIM THAT’S NO RISK, IT’S A NATIONAL SERVICE.
HE SAYS YOU DO YOUR JOB, HE WILL DO HIS JOB. OUT.
Kris leaned back in her chair as the ships around her accelerated in obedience to her orders. She’d placed her bets on some pretty slim data. Hunches really. She tried not to grit her teeth. She did her best to look loose, confident to those around her on the bridge. She had committed every ship that Wardhaven had in its defense. Every last one. Had Grampa Ray ever done anything so outlandish? Betting the entire future of Wardhaven on a single throw of a very small pair of dice.
Suddenly Kris knew what it must have been like to confront President Urm with nothing but a briefcase bomb. Or face an entire Iteeche fleet inbound for a planet and your defense forces outnumbered four to one. Or to know at that final battle that all of human existence hung on what you’d done last week, would do in the next few moments, and it might not be enough.
How had Grampa faced those burdens and stayed sane? One thing Kris did know. He had. And if he could, so could she. She tightened her belt . . . again. They were coming out from around the moon, accelerating at a full g . . . again. The battleships were there . . . again, on her board.
“Anything new?” she asked.
“The same old same old,” Penny answered.
“They’re showing the same noise they were,” Moose said.
“Let’s see if we can teach them something new,” Kris said.
The Admiral studied his battle board. The enemy was coming out from behind the moon in a different formation from the one it had been in when it entered.
“The six in the rear now lead,” the Duty Lieutenant told the Admiral what his eyes already saw, “but we can not tell you anything more about them. The eight now trailing them still seem to be led by the Halsey. While behind the moon, they did send a tight beam message to the single runabout trailing them. It relayed it to High Wardhaven. We do not know the content of the message, but based on it, a dozen tugs got under way and are going into orbit now. Intel identifies them as rescue and salvage.”
“Good, good,” the future governor chortled. “Let them keep the space around Wardhaven clear for our trade vessels. Don’t want too much mess, now do we.”
The Admiral slammed his fist down on the battle board. “I’m not worried about scrap iron in orbit. I am worried about those ships. Can’t anyone tell me something about them?”
The Duty Lieutenant worried his lower lip. “When they did their flip over on the way to the moon, there was an anomaly. Intel didn’t report anything on it, but my technicians identified it. It was a fusion reactor ship. Small, yacht size, sir. Hiding in the shadow of the fleet ships.”
“Why didn’t you mention that?” the Chief of Staff demanded.
The Duty Lieutenant stiffened. “I was waiting for intel to report it, sir. I kept waiting.”
“And they never did because it didn’t fit their picture,” the Admiral said. “And they do like a nice, complete picture. Right up to when it falls apart.” He tapped his board, where the two freighters made their way toward him, toward Jump Point Barbie. “Sing to me,” but all he got was silence. He sat back. Soon enough he would have plenty of noise. Then he would make his decisions. God help him if he decided wrong.
17
Kris blanched, fighting the flashback. The memory of going for ice cream for her and Eddy. Two men walked past her; they smiled. They had signs hung around their necks that said Kidnapper, but a ten-year-old Kris smiled and waved at them. They waved back. She kept skipping toward the ice cream stand.
When she came back to the duck pond with the ice cream, Nanna was dead, and Eddy was gone.
That was when Kris usually woke up screaming. It happened every night until Kris learned to sneak out to Mother’s wine cabinet, Father’s wet bar. The dreams came back after Grampa Trouble started her drying out. Judith, a miracle of a psychologist, had helped Kris go back to that day, relive it in all its horror . . . and recognize that there was no one there with signs around their necks. No one that even looked like the men who stole her brother, and with him her childhood.
Strange. Kris had attended parts of the trial. She’d even attended their hanging. Father had almost lost his chance to replace Grampa Al as Prime Minister by the tactics he used to keep capital punishment on Wardhaven’s books long enough for those three to swing. Only with Judith holding Kris’s hand had she been able to take the dream men’s images back to that day and realize she had never seen them in the park.
There was nothing she could have done to save Eddy.
Kris bit her lip, willing away the old pain. Helplessness was the least of her problems today. With Judith, Kris had written t
he final page of her personal history of that horrible day. Nothing she could have done would have saved Eddy.
When the historians wrote about today, Kris’s actions would be all over everything. She shrugged; the difference between ten and twenty-three. Between being the Prime Minister’s bratty granddaughter and Princess Longknife.
The difference between me losing a brother to Peterwald and Peterwald losing a battle fleet to me. Kris grinned.
The worry time was over. Now was the time to do. On her board, two freighters went to maximum acceleration—charging the battleships. Around them, three runabouts joined in.
The freighters exploded in a cloud of rockets launched.
“Blast the freighters,” the Admiral ordered.
“The orders are out, sir. We’re trying, sir,” the Duty Lieutenant said.
“Then why aren’t they gone?”
“Too may targets, sir. There are rockets all over the place, sir, and the central defense command hasn’t sorted them out and allotted priorities yet, sir.”
The Admiral shook his head. Every laser was slaved to the central defensive computer on his flagship to assure that the best use was made of all defensive guns . . . and that they didn’t engage each other in fratricidal firing. A great idea, which was not working under the pressure of a sudden massive attack.
The Admiral mashed his commlink. “All ships, engage incoming rockets on your own. Revenge will engage the large enemy ship closest to Wardhaven. Ravager will engage the one close to the jump point. The rest may have the small runabouts. Now shoot the damn things.” Acknowledgments came in.
Killing the attackers was easily ordered. Not so easily done. The freighters were smaller than they appeared, just a long spine with bits of hull and structure here and there. The engine rooms aft seemed to be the largest target, and the Admiral assumed his ship’s gunners would aim for them.
But the damn merchant ships would not hold still to be swatted properly. The triple turrets of the Revenge shot out, but the freighter had done some kind of rolling loop. In the meantime, it had launched more rockets in a growing cloud of metal headed toward the Admiral’s command along several courses, some straight, some elliptical, some in spirals that changed with each loop. “What are those things?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the Duty Lieutenant said. “They do not fit any of the naval weapons in our database, sir.”
“Try Army weapons.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
A short pause. “Most of them are not showing up, sir.”
Out in space, the first freighter had been hit, but the 18-inch Naval laser seemed to have gone through it without fazing it in the slightest. The other ship had been winged in one engine, but that was only making it a more erratic target. And its wild gyrations did not seem to slow its additions to the growing cloud of missiles. A runabout launched a volley of four rockets.
“Those are Wardhaven Army AGM 832s, intel says,” the Duty Lieutenant reported. “Obsolete, of little military value.”
“And the other ones?”
“Nothing from intel, sir, but my technicians identify some of them as even more obsolete Army designs, sir.”
“And if you tell intel to dig deep into its references of ancient Wardhaven Army rockets, I suspect they can identify even more of those out-of-date and worthless weapons headed at us. Maybe they can even tell us how to destroy them.”
“Yes, sir,” the Lieutenant said and spoke into his commlink.
The lights flickered and dimmed in flag plot as the primary and secondary lasers drew on the energy of the ship’s reactors. The Admiral tightened his seat belt. Saris spotted his action and did the same. The future governor of Wardhaven continued to pace about flag plot. The cloud of incoming missiles expanded, reached out for his ships. It was only a matter of seconds.
“Admiral, the two enemy freighters say they are abandoning ship and ask that you cease firing at them.”
“Have they quit firing at us? Are they on a course for us?”
“They don’t seem to be firing anymore. They are not headed toward us. The Captain of the Revenge awaits your orders. There are escape pods exiting the ships, though they are not squawking on emergency channels, sir.”
“I wouldn’t squawk if I were them either,” Saris muttered.
“Keep blasting them,” the future governor demanded.
The Admiral raised an eyebrow to Saris. “Mr. Governor,” his Chief of Staff said, “that would not be advisable. We need to conserve our power to shoot the incoming missiles, not crewmen drifting in life pods.”
“So power up some more reactors,” the governor demanded.
“Order the Captain of the Revenge and Ravager to concentrate on the incoming missiles and ignore the life pods. And tell those other ships to get those damn runabouts,” the Admiral snapped. Another one of them launched a volley of missiles.
“Also, tell the fleet to stand by to maneuver. On my signal we will reverse course, slow to one-tenth-g acceleration, and begin evasion plan 4.”
“The order is given.”
“Execute.”
“Done, sir.”
The future governor of Wardhaven spun in place to face the Admiral, then kept on spinning, bounced off the Lieutenant’s chair, and hit the overhead. “What’s happening?”
“We are evading missiles, Mr. Governor,” the Chief of Staff said, reaching for the governor’s leg. He missed. The Revenge twisted in space, sending the governor toward the port bulkhead and down. The Admiral caught his hand as he went by.
“Here, let me get you into a chair,” the Admiral said.
“Why didn’t someone warn me?” the governor shouted, rubbing his head with one hand, his knee with another, and needing help to buckle himself into a chair at the battle board.
“Sir, the ship has been at Battle Condition Bravo for the last hour,” the Chief of Staff said, his voice carefully even. “All Navy personnel are trained to stay within reach of a handhold or belted into their high-g stations. It was in the briefing book you were given when you came aboard.”
“You expected me to read everything you left in my suite?”
“Only if you wanted to avoid circumstances like this. Now, sir, the Admiral is not giving orders to our ships to initialize their two cold reactors just now. Starting reactors drains plasma from the hot reactors to mix with cold reaction mass and heat it up to plasma temperatures. While that is happening, you actually get less power out of your reactors. If one of our captains feels he can start a reactor, that is his business. The Admiral does not believe it is his place, in the middle of a battle, to tell a Captain how to sail his ship.”
“You ordered them to slow down, bounce me off the ceiling.”
“That was part of fighting the enemy attack, Mr. Governor,” the Admiral cut in, content now to explain himself. “That is me fighting my battle, not me fighting a Captain’s ship. Old Naval tradition.” The civilian’s frown showed he still did not get the difference, but then micromanagement was not an illness the Admiral had observed isolated solely to civilians.
He glanced at his battle board. Only two of the runabouts were still attacking, and one of them vanished as he watched. By turning his squadron nose on to the incoming missiles, he’d protected his vulnerable motors. Most of his captains had taken his intent if not his exact order and turned a bit more to get their engines pointed away from the incoming threat axis. That did have them boosting along vectors that would have to be canceled once this problem was resolved.
“What kind of damage can those missiles do to a battleship with our armor?” the governor grumbled.
The Revenge shook slightly. “I do not know, but I suspect Captain Trontsom will have an answer for us soon.” There were other cracks and rattles as the cloud of missiles passed over the fleet. The last runabout was retreating when it was cut in half.
“Send to Avenger. ‘Miserable shooting. I expect you will do better next time or paint over your gunnery E.’ Are we out of
this missile shower?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Send order to squadron, ‘Reverse course. Resume 1.05-g deceleration toward High Wardhaven.’ Lieutenant, have the flag navigator plot us a course correction and pass it along to the Revenge. Also have the Chief you relieved report back on duty. Then tell me what you can about these missiles. Chief of Staff, what’s our squadron’s condition?”
“Minor damage, sir. Reports are coming in. Some antennas, mainly. I would guess that some of the warheads were homing on emitters, infrared, as well as our general form.”
“Lieutenant?”
“They were old missiles, some of them twenty, thirty years old, sir. They must be the scrapings of Wardhaven’s armory. The Chief of Staff is correct. They had several kinds of guidance systems as well as warheads: home on jam, home on emitters, home on heat, home on movement, and home on specific images. None of them were ever intended for use in space. The fact that they could be used here, cover the distances that they did . . .”
“Yes, I know, Lieutenant, intel is very surprised.” The Admiral eyed his board. “Saris, how bad is our heat problem?”
“The lasers generated a lot of heat, sir. Since we’re only decelerating at one g, we aren’t burning much reaction mass, and we can’t work off all that much preheating reaction mass before we shoot it into the reactor. We’ve sunk about as much of it as we can into the fuel tanks, but they’re starting to vent. Do you think we could stream the radiators?”
“Not with what I see coming, Saris,” the Admiral said, tapping what his battle board now had labeled Enemy 1 and Enemy 2. “Not unless we want to see our radiators blown to bits.”
Kris swallowed rage and helplessness as she watched Division 7 die. They’d failed what she never intended for them to try.
How would the other volunteers take this slaughter? She mashed her commlink. “Do you understand now why the armed yachts and runabouts attack after the fast patrol boats have cut them down to size?” she transmitted in between, “Use your shield and use your head, / Fight till Every One is Dead.”
Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant Page 33
