“Nelly, could you and your kids improve the Iteeche high gee couches some more? Allow for .1 or .2 more gees?”
“Yes, Kris.”
“Start doing it. I know it will take you a while,” Kris redirected her call. “Tosan, if we jack up the acceleration to 3.5 gees for all our ships, how often could we flip and fire our forward batteries?”
KRIS, I COULD HAVE ANSWERED THAT.
YES, NELLY, BUT WE HUMANS SOMETIMES LIKE TO HAVE A HAND IN OUR OWN FATE.
I WILL DOUBLE-CHECK TOSAN.
I FIGURED YOU WOULD.
“I expect that we could flip every other time we fire the aft battery,” the chief of staff replied.
“We would want to avoid doing it on a regular schedule,” Kris said, half to herself.
“I think we can allow for that. Do you want to flip as a fleet, wing, or flotilla?”
“Let’s start by fleet. That will have the greater shock. Comm, send to fleet. “Go to 3.5 gees acceleration on my order.”
It took less than seven seconds for the board to show all ships ready.
“Execute,” Kris said, and felt herself gain a few more pounds.
Grand Admiral Longknife waited until the distance between the two forces began to edge up. “Comm, send to fleet. Prepare to flip ships and fire the forward battery at the rebels.”
Ten seconds later, all ships reported ready.
“Comm, advise the fleet we will flip before we fire the next stern salvo.”
The time to the reload of the aft eight lasers reached eleven seconds.
“Flip ship. Fire!”
As one, the fleet flipped and over eight thousand 24-inch lasers reached out for a target.
The rebel crews had been taking a beating from their radical maneuvering. The hard jinking also tended to throw off their own fire solutions. Some ships had taken sailing a more relaxed course, then dodging hard just before their prey had time to reload their aft battery. This made it a bit easier on them for ten or fifteen seconds, including while they were firing.
Kris chose just that moment for her surprise.
Her ships had just finished presenting their well armored noses to the enemy when both fleets fired simultaneously.
Not every Iteeche battlecruiser skipper had gotten sloppy. Still, enough had.
One hundred and twelve rebel 24-inch battlecruisers blew up or were holed so badly their acceleration began to fall off.
Kris lost two dozen more ships in the exchange. Half of them were 22-inch battlecruisers. The rebels still couldn’t tell the difference between the two.
Good.
The enemy had also blasted away another fifty foxers. Kris had started the fight with some forty-four hundred target drones. At the moment, she had a bit fewer than four thousand foxers left. Still, that was four hundred of her own ships that hadn’t been hit.
Good.
“This is good,” Admiral Donn growled as his staff officer number three showed him the results of a sensor sweep. They had destroyed five hundred loyal Imperial battlecruisers!
Still, the results of sensor sweeps over the wrecks showed something that made his stomach go sour. One out of six showed wreckage. Ships blew up. Ships were slashed apart. There were tombstones to all the dead sailors.
Only there weren’t for five out of six of the ships they’d fired upon and hit.
“M’Lord Admiral,” his intelligence staff officer said, “We are searching the wreckage around the area where we think we have blown up ships, and we find nothing. We have searched with radar and lasers the space between us and found this,” he said, and handed his admiral a picture flimsy.
Admiral Donn scowled at the thing. It looked like a ship. Its stern was nearly cut away, but there was no evidence that the reactors had ripped the ship to pieces.
“What is this and why are you wasting my time in a battle with this?” Admiral Donn demanded.
“Here is another picture,” his advisor said, and shoved another photo into his hands.
Donn eyed it. It looked like someone had peeled foil off of a frozen fish, a delight for a hot day. Before he could snap at the staff officer, the man spoke urgently.
“We think these are target drones, made up to look like a full battlecruiser, complete with rocket motors and leaking reaction mass. Optically, they look just like a battlecruiser until they’re hit and then they fail differently than a real ship.”
“And this would be why a fleet of two thousand ships was suddenly six thousand.”
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral.”
The admiral threw the flimsies across his flag bridge. “If two out of three ships across from us is a fake, find a way to tell them apart!” he bellowed.
The staff officer rolled himself back to his station on the bridge and began talking to the sensor specialists and senior technicians.
So that was what the Longknife human had done to the ships sent to intercept her. Fooled them with model boats! The humans were sly like an otter, but they were still mud lovers. He rode a shark. Their blood would perfume the entire ocean.
49
Kris’s battle fell into a routine. Every fifty-two seconds, the aft batteries would fire twice. Sometime during that short minute, the fleet would flip ship for six seconds and the forward battery would slam the pursuing ships. As the ships got more erratic in the jitterbugging, the number of kills slumped for both sides.
This began to change as the flotillas commanders on both sides took to coordinating the fire of their ships. A ship might bounce around hard, but if a dozen ships concentrated on filling that space around them with lasers, some would have to get lucky.
The ticker keeping track of destroyed and damaged rebel ships began to unwind at a brisker pace. So did the count of loyalist ships no longer with Kris. Even one of the human ships got caught in a concentrated salvo. It burned, but survived only by the grace of its crystal armor.
“Kris, I think we have a problem,” Nelly said.
“What’s up?”
“The number of foxers being hit has been going down. It started in the central wing and is spreading out from there.”
“Any idea how they could be telling them apart?”
“I suspect so, Kris. There was no way the engines on a three-hundred-ton target drone could burn as hot as the real rocket engines on a 75,000-ton battlecruiser. Infrared isn’t a standard part of an Iteeche targeting sensor suite, but one can be knocked together quickly.”
“So, they’re smart,” Kris said, doing her best to take it as a reality, but really wishing just this once they could have been a bit slower on the uptake.
“Can you do anything to jack up the heat on the foxers?”
“No, Kris. The anti-matter engines on the drones are only so powerful. We’ve got them using the same number of rocket motors as a battlecruiser but that was just for optical tracking.”
“Okay,” Kris said then leaned back in her high gee station and muttered, “Okay, you bastard. You win this one.”
“Very good, staff officer number three. Very well done. You have won this one, and maybe the battle. Do all of our ships now know which of the targets is false?”
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral. All ships now have the heat sensors and can tell which are true battlecruisers and which are there to make us waste our fire.”
“Good, good,” Admiral Donn said, but he did not feel like it was good. The humans were trading him six salvos for four. His ships were now taking fire from twenty-eight guns every fifty-two seconds to the mere twenty-four that they were firing. Yes, he still had more than two big battlecruisers for every one she had, but hers were more concentrated. They were peeling ships out of his flotillas like a dinner peeled tails off of shrimp.
As much as it pained him, the satraps that had begun to concentrate the fire of many of their ships around just a few of the human stooges were having more success than those that left it to ship captains to choose their targets.
“Staff officer number one,” he said.
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral,” his senior staff officer said, turning his head carefully on the couch next to Admiral Donn.
“Reformat the message from the Admiral commanding the Golden Flying Fish satrap and sent it to all our wings. Concentrate fire by flotillas on one or two ships.”
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral. That will fry them in oil.”
“Let us hope so.”
50
The battle was passing from brutal to savage. Whatever tricks it took to kill your enemy, both sides were now doing.
The rebels concentrated all the 24-inch battlecruisers in a flotilla and aimed them at a single ship in the opposing flotilla. That usually put the fire from a dozen or less ships around a single target. Few of Kris’s ships survived those salvos without moderate or worse damage.
For their own part, Coth had his flotilla commanders directing the twenty to twenty-two big battlecruisers in the loyal fleet to fire at three, or four, sometimes five of the ships pursuing them.
Ships were blowing up or limping out of the line or, in the case of Kris’s ships, if they could still make 3.5 gees, racing to get out of range. Kris was losing one for every two or three her opponent lost.
The exceptions were Kris’s own battlecruisers and the vanguard.
The human battlecruisers were putting together firing solutions with one of Nelly’s kids looking over their shoulder. Knowing which enemy ships chasing them were actually firing allowed the humans to target just the ship they wanted. A salvo, maybe two, from the human flotilla and a rebel flotilla no longer had any large battlecruisers in their ranks.
The human warships would sweep on to the next flotilla, then the next, then next again, like a scythe reaping wheat. The vanguard of the rebel wing was seriously weakened. While a thousand 22-inch battlecruisers stood untouched, they had to watch as some five hundred large battlecruisers blew up or were smashed and sent reeling from the line.
Kris’s Iteeche allies in her wing had lost almost sixty ships. Half of them, however, were the smaller 22-inch 50,000-ton warships.
Odds that had started at nearly three to one against Kris were now two to one in her favor.
It was not going that well in the other four wings. On average, the six hundred large battlecruisers across from them were down to three hundred. However, the two hundred and twenty friendly big warships had shrunk to less than a hundred and seventy.
This looked good until Nelly counted the smaller battlecruisers. The rebels were blowing up our own. We had left the smaller rebel ships untouched.
If the five thousand rebel 22-inch battlecruisers ever got in the fight, the loyalists would be slaughtered.
Kris let her wing swap six more salvos for four, saw the number of large rebel battlecruisers fall even lower, then gave Commodore Tosan orders to implement the second phase of her battle plan.
“What sort of misbegotten unchoosable freak is that?” Admiral Donn said, half coming up from his couch. He felt a twinge of something in his back that got worse even as he fell back into his couch, but he had no time for himself now.
On the screen in front of him, the enemy vanguard was moving upward, clearly intent on adding its firepower to the battle of the top wing. For one or two more salvos, they would continue to rake his vanguard.
“How many 24-inch battlecruisers do we have left in the vanguard,” he growled as the pain in his back grew worse.
“Two hundred, M’Lord Admiral,” his number two staff officer said, "but the smaller battlecruisers are untouched.
“That horrible?”
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral,” his number one staff officer agreed.
“How could they possibly know which of our ships are shooting and which are still out of range?”
“Could they just be lucky?” number three staff officer said.
Admiral Donn scowled, but did not risk moving his head. The pain was becoming intense. He tried to relax into his high gee couch, but he felt as if he was laying on a bed of concrete. The cushion was just not working this close to four gees.
“Sensors,” he bellowed.
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral.”
“Find a way to tell which battlecruisers are shooting at us and which are silent.”
“Yes, M’Lord Admiral.”
“M’Lord Admiral,” said number 3 staff officer, “the new battlecruisers have 75,000 tons of mass. The older ones only 50,000 tons. Can our sensors not tell the difference in what the maskers show for the ships?”
“Sensors?” Admiral Donn said through a gritted beak. There has to be something for this pain.
“Regretfully, M’Lord Admiral, that is not so. The mass that the maskers throw is never the exact same amount as the ship. Some is larger, some smaller. Worse, it changes as the ship moves. The more radical the move, the more rapid and wider the range. The way those ships are moving, there is no way to determine what we face.”
“I am sorry, M’Lord Admiral,” number three staff officer said.
“Yes,” Admiral Donn managed to bite out through a gritted beak.
“M’Lord Admiral,” number one staff officer said, “please note how far we have driven the human scum and their running dogs. If we were to turn a portion of our ships toward the jump, she would have to let us slip through into the capital system or charge after us.”
“And if she has to pursue us,” the admiral muttered, “she would have to charge right into range of our 22-inch battlecruisers.” He felt a smile slide in to compete with the grimace of pain that had contorted his beak.
“Order four flotillas from each of the wings, including the vanguard. Four of the least damaged flotillas. Let’s head them for the jump and see how the Longknife two-eyes likes jumping to our tune.”
51
Kris watched as the human battlecruiser fleet fired its first salvos at the top wing. They fired their aft batteries dry, then flipped and emptied their bow guns. By the time they were done and flipped back to their base course, away from the pursuit, twenty-seven of the rebel 24-inch battle cruisers were gone or struggling to avoid destruction as they fell back to one or two gees.
Her allies took a solid bite out of the enemy force. Another twenty-four, scattered among the other wings, took critical hits that left them a ball of gas in space with bits and pieces to mark where a ship and a thousand Iteeche had been.
The alien admiral had brought three thousand of the newest battlecruisers to this fight. He had less than a thousand left. Of the eleven hundred big ships Kris had started with, some nine hundred were still shooting, although another two hundred of the small ships had been knocked out as well. Kris still faced five thousand of the untouched rebel 22-inch battlecruisers.
Hopefully, after Kris had finished cherry-picking the bigger ships out of their formation, the smaller battlecruisers would surrender rather than be annihilated by Kris’s ships, executing them from well beyond their own range.
If casualties continued to be traded five of them for every one of hers, Kris knew who would win.
“Kris, there is a change in the rebel formation.”
“What are they up to, Nelly?”
“Four flotillas have dropped out of all the wings except the vanguard. I don’t know what their intent is.”
“Could they be moving to reinforce the vanguard?” Jack asked.
“It looks like it,” Kris agreed.
All the big war wagons of Kris’s vanguard were now in range of the top wing. Their second set of volleys did major damage to its big battlecruiser inventory. Approximately thirty exploded, lost their way, and fell back, fighting for their lives. Kris was stripping it of its best ships while it fought back, but gave much less than it took.
Twice more, the loyalist vanguard slammed the top wing, adding their hellfire to what their own top wing was doing. In only a few minutes, the top wing saw its big battlecruiser strength fall to a quarter of what they’d started the battle with.
Another few salvoes and Kris’s vanguard would turn its fir
e upon the center. Somewhere in there was likely her opposite number. If she nailed his flagship, would he call it quits?
“Kris, we have a major problem,” Nelly said, cutting in on Kris’s thought.
“Talk to me, gal.”
“Kris, those sixteen flotillas that fell back from the line have been joined by the remnants of the four strongest flotillas from the Vanguard. They are making for the jump into the Imperial System.”
“Twenty flotillas?” Kris said, trying to wrap her brain around this change. “That’s over six hundred ships.”
“Closer to four hundred after casualties, but yes. A major force,” Nelly said.
“Can we make it back to the jump?” Kris asked.
“Only if we start reaching for it very soon. They have almost driven us out of the window for that jump, even at 3.5 gees.”
“So, if we want to defend the jump, we have to chase after those four hundred ships,” Jack said.
“There are a huge number of ships in the Capitol System,” Nelly pointed out.
“There were a huge number of ships here, before the rebels started shooting up the pier- side ships,” Jack countered.
“We can’t let them make the jump,” Kris said, with finality.
“So, your fleet will have to come to close quarters with the rebels. They’ll slaughter us once we get within 22-inch laser range,” Jack pointed out.
“So, we stay out of their range for as long as we can and risk as few ships as we can,” Kris said, then added, “Comm, get me Coth.”
“My Admiral,” he said a moment later.
“The rebels are trying to put a force through the jump. I’ve got to take the vanguard on a wild ride to block that jump. You must command here. I am sure the rebels will try to flank me. You may have to slide toward the front when I leave.
“I understand, My Admiral. I wondered what those ships were doing when they fell behind the main battle line. I agree they must be stopped. Good speed and good hunting.”
Kris Longknife - Admiral Page 30
