No surprise, the targets shed rock and droplets of steel. Some shot off steam as ice burned away to gas. The targets got fuzzy but showed no serious damage.
Kris flipped ships, paused for a second or two for the gunk to fall behind, then hit them with the aft batteries.
The targets fizzed as ice and rock armor ablated away under the lasers’ probing, but again, no explosions.
Kris brought her squadron back on course and returned to a deceleration burn as her lasers recharged.
Twenty seconds later, she repeated the double volley.
Twenty seconds after that, she did it again.
This time, the closest enemy squadron showed damage from the pounding. One blew up, and two staggered out of line, their engines firing in directions they weren’t intended to.
The other four turned bow on to Kris’s squadron and charged.
Above and below those surviving four, the other two lines of ships did the same. Their commander was now much less concerned with making orbit than getting in range of Kris’s ships and slamming them with their main battery of more lasers than Kris had ever had a chance to count.
Maybe whoever was giving the orders didn’t care if they made orbit so long as they destroyed Kris’s ships.
Who’s your Enlightened One?
Kris ignored the question and ordered her ships to flip. They began jinking and danced away.
Now Kris was between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, the moon she’d been using to swing above now was coming up fast below her. The enemy, desperate to get in range to use their own huge battery of lasers, were coming up nearly as fast behind her.
Kris’s ships emptied their now-recharged aft batteries. One more ship blew up, but the surviving close-in three absorbed their hits and kept coming.
The Hornet at one end and the Bulwark at the other end of Kris’s line took on the new ships coming in range. They fired . . . and got only fuzz to show for their shooting.
Kris flipped ships again. Her middle three ships finished off the first squadron they’d attacked. Two ships blew, and the last lost all acceleration and just drifted in space.
However, the other two squadrons had closed the range as Kris’s ships exterminated their fellows. Enemy lasers began to crisscross the space around her ships. In her flag plot, boards began to slip from green to yellow as ships reported their armor taking hits.
Reaction mass and water bled out of the damage into space to disrupt the lasers just as the enemy’s rock, ice, and steel armor had splayed out Kris’s lasers.
It was the same for both sides, except that while the aliens’ gunk quickly fell behind the decelerating ships, Kris’s bleed of ice and hydrogen fouled the middle ground between them for a few critical moments more.
Now, fifteen alien ships charged in to narrow the range for their four to five hundred tons of angry, suicidal commitment to Kris’s doom.
“Kris, we will miss the moon,” Nelly reported, “But if we keep this up, we’ll have trouble making a good orbit around the planet.”
“We’ll worry about that later, Nelly.”
Kris studied her boards. Now her ships were slugging it out as best as they could, dancing the crazy jig that never kept them on a straight course for more than two seconds. A dance that dodged the aimed enemy fire.
The enemy’s fifteen ships were huge and overweight. They were too heavy on their feet to dance like Kris’s, but what they lacked in finesse, they more than made up for with their huge batteries.
Kris’s ships fired and reloaded. The aliens fired and fired and fired; never for a moment were they silent. Worse, most of Kris’s ships now faced two of them. Only at the head of the line was the Endeavor able to fight a single alien, applying her limited battery of six 18-inch lasers as best she could.
The big war wagons, the Hornet, Constellation, Royal, Wasp, Congress, Intrepid, and Bulwark, each divided its attention between two ships, firing bow batteries at one, aft batteries at the other. This kept each of the enemy ships shedding bow armor; rock, steel, and steam spread down the hull, dispersing their own lasers and occasionally causing damage.
That was good. The bad news was that her ships weren’t hammering through the alien armor to smash reactors inside.
The worst news was Kris’s ships were taking hits; damage was accumulating.
Kris could lose this battle if she kept fighting it this way.
“Wasp. Congress. Intrepid. Concentrate on one ship opposite you and kill it,” she ordered bluntly.
Seconds seemed to take forever, and minutes vanished in a blink. The battle went on with her ships firing, flipping, firing, recharging, then doing it over and over again.
The enemy fire hammered them. The Constellation suffered damage to a rocket motor and zigged out of her place in the line. Unfortunately, she also steadied on a course for more than two seconds.
The luckless Connie took more hits.
The Royal changed fire from the two she faced to slice at the one that had the Connie’s number. It worked . . . for a second. The enemy ship’s fire faltered and the Connie got her engines under control.
But Royal paid for saving her shipmate as her own two targets got off scot-free for a few seconds. Now her armor showed bright red on Kris’s boards.
Across from the Wasp, the enemy ship rocked as a laser slashed through its bow and cut deep inside. It hit a reactor and freed the demons inside. Gouts of plasma shot out its sides, but its huge batteries kept shooting.
Kris watched the readout on her board as the Wasp’s armor went from yellow to red.
The Wasp flipped, and the bow lasers fired. There must have been nothing left of the aliens’ bow. Six lasers cut through it and deep into its guts.
More fire blossomed within the shattered hull. But angry lasers still reached out, cutting through the thin vapor of the space around the ship. Even as the reactors lost containment and the plasma demons gobbled up the ship, it was still spitting death at the Wasp.
“Captain Drago, engage one of the ships fighting the Royal.”
“On it, Admiral.” The Wasp didn’t miss a beat as it flipped ship and began slicing into the ship that Royal had been splitting its fire with.
“Royal, the Wasp has the ship closest to it. You concentrate on the other one,” Kris ordered.
“Great, an even fight,” Royal’s skipper said, and laid into the one target.
The Intrepid did not finish off its ship in quite as spectacular fashion as the Wasp. Its target ended up rolling in space, a silenced hulk with fires gutting it from stem to stern.
Kris ordered Intrepid to turn its attention to the ships attacking the Bulwark. She did it none too soon.
The poor Endeavor was in trouble. She only had six 18-inch lasers, and her armor had been thin to begin with. She was hurting.
The Bulwark switched fire to engage the Endeavor’s ship. The forward end of Kris’s line was still two ships against four, with the Endeavor giving all that it could.
In front of Kris, her boards showed way too much red.
Suddenly, two alien ships blossomed into gas, and there were no ships facing the Royal and the Wasp.
“Royal, help the Connie. Wasp, help the Intrepid.”
Now there were four fair fights. The gallant Hornet was still being hammered by two, as was the Bulwark, but the enemy ships must have been hit just as hard as Kris’s.
The end came quickly, but none too soon. Enemy ships began to burn and explode even as the Connie, Hornet, and Bulwark limped out of the fight, reactors dead, overheated, or redlined.
When the enemy saw that the day was lost, all the ships that had fallen by the wayside began exploding, as containment fields were dropped and plasma was intentionally let loose to finish what the fight had begun.
“Not one surrender,” Kris groaned.
“They never do,” Jack agreed.
48
The battle was won, but the squadron was still in dire straits.
“Kris, di
d you know that many of the French and Spanish ships the British captured at the great Battle of Trafalgar were lost when a storm came up and blew them all onto the rocky shore?”
“Yes, Nelly, I seem to remember reading that somewhere.”
“We’re in danger of smashing ourselves onto the planet below.”
“Yes, I noticed, Nelly. Now shut up.”
Kris motored her high-gee station onto Captain Drago’s bridge. “Can the Wasp make orbit?”
“Yes. We’ve got one reactor off-line, but we can make it. I can’t say the same thing for the Hornet, Constellation, and Bulwark. They’re both down to a single reactor, and none of them are in good shape.”
“Could we loan them a pinnace?”
“If I do, I’m none too sure the Wasp will make orbit.”
“Penny,” Kris said, turning to her only staff officer, who had spent the battle on the Wasp’s defensive station shuttling Smart MetalTM around to cover for hits on the armor.
“Yes.”
“Can you merge the Hornet onto the Wasp? Say something like a pinnace.”
Penny was already shaking her head before Kris finished. “No, Kris. The pinnace is a subsystem of the ship. The programming to generate it is there. Remember, the hull is a special program with all sorts of security overrides. You can’t just slide it all away from, say, one beam to let another hull merge with it.”
Kris said a most unprincesslike word. But then she was an admiral today, and she’d been told that Sailors cussed.
“We’ve got ships that aren’t going to make orbit if we don’t do something. Get me a fix, not back talk.”
“Maybe we could adjust the two ship’s hulls so they could come alongside and kind of dock together.”
“Make it happen, Penny. Find a good chief and do what you have to do. Otherwise, some of our ships are going to burn up on reentry. That’s bad for our people but worse for the people on the planet we’re supposed to be saving.”
“I’m on it,” Penny said with a huge sigh her late husband’s Irish grandma would have been proud of.
Whether it was Penny, or, more likely, a lot of good chiefs on the Wasp and Hornet, the two ships did end up docking hard but docking enough that between the Wasp’s two good reactors, and the one they could keep running on the Hornet, they made orbit.
Once Penny and the chiefs had shown it could be done, the Constellation and the Royal got cozy, and the Bulwark sidled up and not quite rammed her bow into the Congress.
Captain O’dell asked permission to try the same with the Intrepid. One of the Endeavor’s reactors was out, and the other two were none too reliable.
Eight ships had gone out to face the aliens. Four of sorts succeeded in reaching orbit again.
On the ground, you could easily see fireworks and great rejoicing. In Kris’s day quarters, there was little to celebrate.
She had the butcher’s bill to read.
The frigates were crewed by four hundred men and women; two hundred and fifty boffins and fifty Marines topped them out at seven hundred. The Wasp tipped in at some nine hundred, what with extra Marines and scientists.
Her squadron had avoided the catastrophic failure of a reactor that consigned all aboard to a fiery grave. Still, the enemy lasers had cut deep.
Kris read the list: 612 dead, 1,452 wounded with some still likely to die despite all that modern medicine could do. The Hornet, Connie, and Bulwark were hardest hit, although the Endeavor’s smaller crew had suffered heavier casualties in proportion.
What had shown up on Kris’s boards as bright red for damaged armor, lasers, and engineering had been real men and women dying as lasers slashed hard into their ships and defensive stations juggled armor around desperately to keep disaster at bay.
Kris leaned back in her chair, stared at the overhead, and found she could fervently pray. “Please, dear God, may I never fight another one like this.”
But there was more to do than mourn the dead. The living needed to eat, and they needed to celebrate that they’d once again faced death, looked it in the eye, and walked away from its hungry scythe.
“Kris, do you have a moment?” Captain Drago said after knocking on the doorsill.
“Talk to me,” Kris said, putting down the report of blood and loss.
“Cookie tells me that he’s got a deal on meat. Cheap. As in free. All we have to do is go down and get it.”
“Can we afford the reaction mass?”
“When our longboats go down for chow, they’ll be bringing back water as well. That’s one way to feed the reactor and feed the crew.”
“Free meat. Are you sure we can eat it?”
“The boffins are pretty sure. The meat offer came with a full scientific analysis of what goes into the local’s digestion. A certain President Almar wanted you to know that they were providing the full details on their physiology. To make sure, I’ll be sending down a doc to make the necessary tests, but I’d rather try it than not.”
“If Cookie says he can make it taste good, go for it. And the water. We aren’t bone dry on reaction mass, but we’ll need to refuel before we leave here.”
Captain Drago stepped in and closed the door. “Let me guess. You want to refuel from the gas giant on the other side of the system. The one where the aliens set up a base.”
Kris made a sour face. “I’d like to wipe this system clean, but these damage reports,” she said, waving her hands at her boards.
“Yeah. It would be nice if we had a repair ship to tie up to, but we have a lot of good ship maintainers, and we can do a lot with this Smart Metal.”
“We’ve done a lot.”
“I’ve got some folks working on figuring out if we can drain the Smart Metal from our two wrecked ships. Maybe move the reactors out of them and into a ship that still has some fight in it. I’ll have that report cycled through to you as soon as they’re done.”
“Do,” Kris said.
She ended up studying reports for the rest of the evening. Jack brought her a meal from the wardroom, and Kris ate it at her desk.
It was quite late when Jack finally hauled her off to bed.
When she ignored the wonderful things he was doing to her breasts, he rolled her over like a log and began doing even more wonderful things to her back.
“Am I distracting you, yet?” he asked.
“Well, you are definitely attracting my attention,” Kris admitted. She stretched and found it made a lot of her feel very good.
“Good, because I am not stopping, young lady.”
“Persistent, huh,” she said into her pillow as he did something wonderful to the lower part of her back. And then went lower.
“You fought your fight. You won. I’d like to celebrate that I’m alive if you don’t mind.”
“And you want to celebrate it with me?”
“Most definitely.”
She rolled over and smiled at her persistent husband. “Then I guess I’d better let you celebrate.”
So he did. Then she did. Then they both did until they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
49
The ship’s moaning around them woke Kris in time for breakfast. They quickly showered. Jack kissed her very black-and-blue spots where she’d been shot, then found some cream to put on them.
It seemed he now had a supply of medical ointments and drugs for all the particulars that ailed her.
Husbands were nice.
They made it to the wardroom while the officers were still eating.
“What’s with the racket?” Jack asked, as they found a space at Captain Drago’s table.
“We’re pulling the Smart Metal out of the Hornet and re-
spinning it into the Wasp. The Hornet’s hull was barely holding out the vacuum by the time the shooting stopped. Their wardroom and mess, along with most everything else, got smashed up pretty bad, so you may notice some new faces at our tables.”
Captain Phil Taussig of the Hornet arrived as he spoke. He had a bandage over
one eye and an arm in a sling, but he was balancing a plate full of eggs and bacon with great aplomb.
“Welcome aboard,” Kris said.
“I can’t tell you how glad I am to be aboard. I seem to be making a habit of this. Coming aboard your flag in a roughed-up state. I’ll try to avoid it in the future.”
“If you need a port, we’ll provide the storm,” Nelly said.
“That was a joke,” Kris said.
“Of course.”
Phil took a bite of his bacon and made a face. “I’m not complaining, but this is a bit on the strange side.”
“Locally grown,” Drago said. “Just arrived last night.”
Phil took another bite. “Not bad. Will it mess up my gut anything like the last local rations I had to share?”
“I have it on the best of confidences,” Captain Drago said, “that this chow is as good for you as any you got from your mama’s breast.”
“I was a bottle baby,” Phil said, “much to my wife’s delight in my adult fixations. So, we have ourselves some locals that are really glad for something our princess did. Isn’t that unusual.”
“No doubt, and totally,” Captain Drago agreed. “But there is no accounting for tastes, and we are enjoying their, no doubt, short-lived appreciation.”
“Don’t I ever get credit where it’s due?” Kris asked the overhead.
“No,” “Nope,” and “Not likely” seemed to be the table’s consensus. At least it was from the general and captains. There were a few lowly lieutenants at the foot of the table who kept their own counsel, and, no doubt, tried not to be shocked by the carrying-on of their seniors.
“How’s the reaction mass coming along?” Kris asked.
“Much better than I expected,” Captain Drago said. “Thank heavens for Smart Metal, again. We’ve rerigged several of our longboats into water tenders. They drop down and pick up as much freshwater as their antimatter engines can lift. By late today, we should have enough aboard to allow us to motor quite stately out to that other gas giant you were interested in. By tomorrow morning, I expect to have enough for a safety margin that will warm the cockles of even an old nanny such as myself.”
Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Page 29
