Alarm of War v-1

by Kennedy Hudner

  “All ahead at two percent standard on my mark. Three! Two! One! Mark!”

  Chapter 47

  On Board H.M.S. Yorkshire,

  In the Gilead Sector

  There had been three more krait attacks. The crew of the Yorkshire had fought them off, but at a price paid in blood. The last of the Savak corpses had been jettisoned into space. In the midst of one of the attacks, the destroyer Rutland had lost way and staggered off on a Long Walk, leaving behind a dozen escape pods. By the time they had realized Rutland was missing, she was nowhere in sight. The Kent was still there, twenty miles off the port bow, but it had suffered as well.

  Grant Skiffington sat on his bunk, drinking from a bottle of brandy he took from one of the Marines. His face was bloodstained, his clothing torn and dirty. He was now the only functioning officer on the Yorkshire. Commander Peled was in the sick bay, where the ship’s medic had put him into a medically induced coma until they could reach a hospital and remove the pellet lodged in his skull.

  They had probed the entire area around them with active sensors and were as sure as they could be that there were no more Tilleke transporter craft near them. Now it was time to mend their wounds and make the perilous journey home to Victoria.

  But first Grant intended to get drunk.

  He was just taking another swig when his door opened and Cookie came in. She was dressed in filthy fatigue pants and a torn T-shirt that clung to her body. She was sweat-stained and dirty and there was a red splotch of blood on her neck. She looked earthy and sensual in a way Grant couldn’t define, but felt deep in his groin.

  Without speaking, she crossed the little room and straddled him, sitting across the tops of his thighs and facing him. Her face was inches from his, her beasts softly pressed against his chest. Without conscious thought, he dropped the bottle and reached up to caress her.

  She gave him a stiff fingered jab in the stomach.

  “Oomph,” he gasped.

  “I’m not here for that,” she said coolly. She grasped his chin in a hard grip. “Don’t move your face, got it? This will hurt a little, but don’t move.”

  She took a needle and a small jar of something, dipped the needle into it, then carefully poked the needle into his face, just below his left eye. He winced.

  “Don’t be a baby,” she said. That was when he noticed the red tattoo of a teardrop on Cookie’s face. A Blood Tear.

  “Badge of honor,” he said.

  She snorted without humor. “Badge of a cluster fuck, is what it is. The Almighty bring us through this, She surely got somethin’ She want us to do. Now shut up, I’m a little drunk and if you move, I’m gonna stick you in the eye with this needle.”

  It took a while, but when she was done, she dabbed the blood from his face and looked critically at the tattoo. “You look in the mirror and see that, for the rest of your sorry life, you remember the people who died fighting with you on this ship.”

  Grant leaned back against the bulkhead. Cookie, still straddling him, looked hard at him. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then let it out in a long shuddering sigh. She reached over her shoulder and pulled off her T-shirt, unfastened her bra and then leaned forward and kissed him fervently. Grant began to touch her, nuzzle her and bent forward to kiss her breasts, but Cookie suddenly pulled him up painfully by his ears.

  “Ouch! Cookie, what-”

  “One thing,” she said fiercely. “I’m doin’ this because I need it, I need it or I’m gonna start crying and I don’t think I’ll be able to stop. But you never, never tell Hiram about this, understand?”

  Grant understood.

  They had been through five krait attacks in two days. The Savak were the stuff of nightmares. They just kept coming at you without mercy or fear until you put them down like you would a rabid animal. So many people had died right in front of him, screaming in pain and anguish and fear and utter frustration that they could not kill the Savak butchers before they died themselves. And now his mind yearned for release, for comfort, for a few blessed moments of respite before it all started over again.

  Grant understood.

  He nodded and touched her face. She sighed again, then took his hand and guided it to her breast. She closed her eyes. “Okay then,” she whispered. She drew him to her. “Okay then.”

  Chapter 48

  On the Atlas Space Station, in Victorian Space

  In the privacy of her stateroom, Queen Anne sipped coffee and stared bleakly at a hologram of the Victorian Sector. “No one will come to our aid, will they?”

  Sir Henry wondered if he should give his new queen some false hope, then dismissed the idea. “No, Majesty. There is no time for them to mobilize.” He sighed. “And in any event, there is no one who will risk it this early. Cape Breton is involved somehow with the Dominion. Sybil Head and the Sultenic Empire will wait to see who is the likely victor, and then put their support behind them. The Light does not have a deep space navy. Arcadia is probably under attack by the Tilleke as we speak. And Refuge is hopefully getting ready to receive us. But their navy is small. They will not be able to fortify their wormhole entrance and send out a fleet to aid us at the same time.”

  “So to save ourselves, to have any hope of fighting back, we have to abandon our home world and all our colonies,” she said bitterly. “My first official act as Victoria’s new queen!”

  “If you remain behind, the Dominion will kill you,” he replied bluntly. “You are now the heart and soul of Victoria, Majesty. If you die, Victoria dies with you.”

  “You always have the pretty words, don’t you?” she spat.

  Sir Henry, a long-time survivor of royal mood swings, remained silent.

  “I will do whatever I have to,” she said finally. Her faced clouded and her brow creased. “But sometimes I have to catch myself from just sitting in the corner and screaming that this can’t really be happening.”

  Sir Henry laughed bitterly. “Your Majesty, forty eight hours ago, my biggest concern was that a rogue Victorian Admiral might pose a threat to you and your mother. Now Victoria has been defeated by the Dominion and we’re running for our lives. I’d say that begs credulity.”

  Anne smiled. It was a dreadful smile, a cold, bleak smile that promised a long winter and terrible storms. “The Dominion has miscalculated, Sir Henry. I will do whatever I have to to save Victoria. And when I’m done, the Dominion will rue the day I was born.”

  Chapter 49

  H.M.S. Lionheart, in Victorian Space

  Admiral Douthat scowled at the status board. The longer she looked at it, the worse their situation seemed. Battleships were the fleet’s heavy hitters, carrying forty missile tubes and up to twenty energy beams, a simply awesome amount of fire power. A single battleship was a significant force in any battle. Two battleships working together or with five cruisers were a force of nature, overwhelming and destructive. First Fleet had had three battleships, but two of them had been destroyed by the Dominion ambush, leaving her with only Lionheart.

  But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

  Most of the Home Fleet’s admirals had died at the Palace, which meant that most of her ship captains were gone. Normally a battleship would be the flagship for its battle group, but now she was going to assign that task to cruisers and assign new captains to all but one of her cruisers and a couple of destroyers. The frigate captains, too junior in rank to have been invited to the Palace, were mostly intact. So if she moved the frigate captains up to the destroyers…hmmm, but that meant moving the cruiser XOs up to captain the cruisers and some of the XOs simply weren’t up to it. If she was honest, she’d admit that despite rank, some of the frigate captains would make better cruiser captains than the current cruiser XOs. Maybe some of the XOs could be made frigate captains — She shook her head; no matter what she did, most of her ships were going to have new captains, and captains who had not worked with that ship’s crew.

  But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

  The tug boa
t captain, Murphy, had reported in that in order to keep the stresses tolerable for Atlas as they towed it to Refuge, they would have to accelerate slowly. Now instead of it being a three day flight to the Refuge wormhole, it was going to be at least five days, maybe six. Six days for the Dominion to find them and attack them, six days in which the Dominion could bring sheer numbers into play and grind them into dust.

  But that wasn’t her biggest problem.

  Her biggest problem was that stiff-necked, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, mulish and goddamed willful child who was now the Queen of all Victoria refused to board the destroyer Repulse and be taken to safety in Refuge. “I think not, Admiral,” she had said.

  And that was that. Now Queen Anne was on the Atlas Space Station, the single object the entire Dominion navy was intent on capturing. Or destroying.

  So for the next six days, Atlas would be in harm’s way.

  “Bugger me,” she snarled, and thought, not for the first time, that when this was over she would welcome the court martial that was sure to follow.

  If they lived.

  Chapter 50

  Victorian Space

  Battleship H.M.S. Lionheart

  “Here is the situation in a nutshell,” Admiral Douthat told the others on the conference. “The enemy will reach Cornwall in fifteen hours, so sometime short of that they will realize that Atlas is gone. By that time we will be six hours away. The geometry looks like this.” She put a simple map up on the screen. “The good news is that since we are taking Atlas with us, we have an almost limitless supply of missiles and mines and quick access to emergency repairs.

  “The bad news is that with Atlas in tow, we can’t accelerate very fast. Also, the inertia compensators on Atlas are not as robust as on our ships, so our top speed will be limited. The enemy will overtake us. They outnumber us two to one in war ships and probably more than that in throw weight.”

  “Can we expect help from Second Fleet?” someone asked.

  “No,” Douthat replied shortly. “Second Fleet will not be coming to help us. Nor Third Fleet.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence as they digested that. Admiral Douthat plowed ahead, acutely aware that time was in short supply.

  “Thanks to the attack on the Palace, we have huge gaps in our command structure. With the loss of Invincible and Isle of Man, I am appointing Captain Grey in the cruiser New Zealand to be commander of the Coldstream Guards and Captain Hamid of the cruiser Norfolk to take command of the Black Watch. Admiral Eder of the battleship Lionheart will remain in command of the Queen’s Own Guard. The Queen’s Own will stay with Atlas. Black Watch is my reserve, but is likely to be used to block the Dominion force we’ve labeled as ‘Bogey Two.’

  “The task of the Coldstream Guards is to buy us time! Captain Grey, your battle group will do whatever it can to confuse, delay and weaken Bogey One, which will reach us several hours before Bogey Two.”

  Captain Grey studied the plot. “What resources do I have?”

  ““You have your entire battle group and anything you need from Atlas’s stores. I am also giving you one of the colliers for resupply. I want you ready to depart in ninety minutes.”

  “What about Prometheus?” Captain Hamid asked. “We can’t just leave it for the Dominion.”

  “Good question. Captain Grey, add that to your task list. By now it has been evacuated. I want you to destroy Prometheus.”

  Grey nodded. Thanks to Lieutenant Tuttle’s recent tactical exercises, she had some ideas on how that best might be done.

  After the conference, Julie Grey absently spun her chair back and forth, a habit she had picked up in second grade to help her think. She had nineteen ships: five cruisers, ten destroyers and four frigates, plus the collier. Normally a Battle Group had four squadrons, but this was not going to be normal combat, this was going to be an elaborate game of fox and hounds. And more, none of her other cruiser captains had survived the attack on the Palace. Each had been an aide to some admiral. All dead now.

  She had the vague outlines of an idea of what she wanted to do, but wanted to think out loud with someone. She stabbed the intercom. “Rudd!”

  “Captain?”

  “Alex, who are the two sneakiest, dirtiest, most obnoxious people you’ve fought against in the training modules?” she asked briskly.

  “Home Fleet or just the Coldstream Guards?”

  “Just the Guards, Alex.”

  “Including that miserable, wretched Grey woman, or other than her?”

  Grey smiled. Trust Rudd to find some humor and get in a dig.

  “Excluding her, and you are getting on very thin ice, Mister,” she said, but she couldn’t stop the hint of laughter from betraying her.

  Rudd paused, thinking. “Well, Tuttle for one. She’s got balls, imagination and a nice touch of ruthlessness. For the second, Andrew Lord. He doesn’t think as many moves ahead as Tuttle, but he’s got a good sense of what the enemy is going to do and has a real knack for spoiling attacks.”

  Grey nodded to herself. “Get them both and come in here now, Alex.”

  Ten minutes later, the four of them sat in the Captain’s day room. Grey outlined her orders, then: “In a few hours, we are going to be in a shooting war. It’s up to us to distract Bogey One and keep them as far away from Atlas as we can. And to stay alive while we do it. I need ideas.”

  “Captain, do we have any minelayers?” Lord asked, thinking they could try to saturate the trade route Bogey One was traveling on.

  Grey shook her head. “The Admiral is keeping all the minelayers with Atlas and the rest of the Fleet. I’ve commandeered three freighters and they are being stuffed full of laser mines, but that’s all. Also — “ she shot a glance at Emily — “I have ordered that the Prometheus space station be mined. The Dominion will have a little surprise waiting when they try to board it.”

  “What about decoy drones?”

  “We have dozens of them, hundreds, actually.” Grey smiled wryly. “It doesn’t add to our throw weight, but it might fool the Ducks into thinking we’re bigger and badder than we really are.”

  Emily struggled to control her excitement and her fear, her thoughts darting like larks before a storm. Treat this as just another training exercise, she told herself, conscious that her hands were sweating. What weakness does the enemy have? How do we exploit it? Answer the questions one by one. She closed her eyes, forcing her mind to settle. Bogey One had come through the Cape Breton wormhole, but it was made up of Dominion ships. So that meant that the Dominion ships had probably taken the old trade route through the Sultenic Empire, then on to Sybil Head and Cape Breton. Five months of flying time, maybe six if they stayed away from the main routes. They’d have to carry all their supplies and munitions with them. All their supplies…

  She opened her eyes, suddenly aware that the room had gone quiet and everyone was staring at her.

  Rudd made a ‘come on’ gesture. “Come back to the world of the living, Emily. What have you got?”

  She told them.

  The smiles died away. Captain Grey looked at Rudd, who nodded grimly. “It could work,” he said cautiously. “But to make it work we’re going to have to position ourselves behind Bogey One.” He grimaced. “The Dominion Fleet will be between us and the rest of Home Fleet. If we fail, we’ll be cut off from any hope of support.”

  “Then we mustn’t fail,” Captain Grey said.

  Chapter 51

  H.M.S. Yorkshire, in Gilead Space,

  Approaching the Victorian Wormhole

  Grant Skiffington was collecting survivors, and doing his best to kill all the rest.

  “We’ll be in close missile range in ten minutes, Captain,” the Sensors Officer announced. “Still no sign they’ve seen us.”

  Grant Skiffington shook his head. They had started to call him “Captain” right after they lost Commander Peled, but it still jarred him to hear it. He smiled wryly. His father would have told him to shut up and enjoy the promotion.
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  “Thank you, Livy,” he told the rating at Sensors. The original Sensors Officer — Grant couldn’t remember his name — had been killed in the first attack by the Tilleke commandos.

  This was the third Victorian ship they approached from dead astern, where a ship’s sensors are weakest. The Yorkshire was under full stealth. Their target, the destroyer H.M.S. Galway, had its navigation lights blinking and was cruising slowly toward the wormhole that would take it from Gilead to Victoria. But had the Galway been captured by the Tilleke? Or, like the Yorkshire, was it still in Victorian hands and playing possum in the hope of sneaking back to Victoria undetected?

  Finding out was pretty damn tricky.

  If they cruised up behind a ship and announced themselves as Victorians, and it turned out the ship was controlled by the Tillekes, Yorkshire had to be able to take them out very, very quickly or risk a close-encounter shooting match. On the other hand, they couldn’t just kill the ship without at least trying to discover if it was still controlled by friendlies.

  The first three ships had not responded with the right answer to their hail, so Yorkshire and Kent had destroyed them. Only one had been able to get off any missiles, but Skiffington couldn’t count on always being so lucky.

  He was still haunted by the fear that the ships had not responded just because of confusion, not because they were Tilleke, and that he had personally massacred thousands of Victorian sailors.

  “Mr. Kauder, make sure everyone is at battle stations and open a link to the Kent. Whisker laser, if you please, Mr. Kauder. I want no radio transmissions.”

  “Yes, sir.” The display screen changed from a map of all known ships to the face of Junior Lieutenant Lisa Stein. Stein was not the senior officer on the Kent, but was the only one still walking. One arm was in a sling and her wound was obviously uncomfortable, which did nothing to improve her mood. The Kent was a Cruiser (E), which meant she carried twelve heavy lasers, but only fifteen missile tubes instead of the usually twenty. The Kent needed the extra space for an additional power plant to charge the lasers. Four of the lasers were mounted in turrets, two on top of the Kent and two below. They could swivel 360 degrees, but required a crew of four to operate each turret. With half her crew dead, Stein had had to abandon one turret up and down in order to be able to man the rest. On top of that, four of her missile tubes were damaged and couldn’t be used.