Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  Sandy was left shaking her head.

  “Damn,” she said. “Jacques better be making this worth my while.”

  The evening report from Jacques showed progress. They were in the tunnel, moving slowly and carefully. The new grouting they’d sprayed seemed to be holding the walls in place; the Smart MetalTM enclosure was preventing contact with the walls. Most troops moved up and down the tunnel with soft, barefoot steps.

  They were through to the huge cavern now, but it presented an entirely new set of problems.

  Normally, they’d drill in some pitons, belay lines through them and rappel down the face of the cliff. Problem was, no one wanted to hammer or even drill into the face of the rock for fear of bringing down the entire side of the cavern. Sonar studies said the cliff was likely strong, but there were seams running through it. Clearly, it hadn’t moved in a hundred thousand years or so.

  But then, it hadn’t been touched in all that time.

  “Oh, there’s one thing that you may find interesting as a fighter. We’re finding evidence of bullet holes in the tunnel. Right now, all the Smart Metal is transparent, so we can see the walls. They are pockmarked with what your Marines says sure look like ricochet hits. Whatever those tunnel diggers did to these walls back then, they made them really tough. The engineers would love a sample of the stuff, but they know we’d swat their hands off at the neck if they dare touch the tunnels right now.”

  Sandy read Jacques’s report in her day quarters, then allowed herself to stare off into space.

  Should I have cut and run when the second set of battleships first showed up?

  Likely, that was the last time she really could have folded her tent and slipped quietly away. Since then, she’d just been reacting to one alien surprise after another.

  If I ran then, we’d have been abandoning that huge potential alien find.

  Of course, that assumed that these bones were from before the enslavement of the people of this planet and that the other aliens had actually messed with these aliens’s DNA. That they had somehow reprogrammed it to reinforce things like keeping their language unchanged, blind obedience to authority and absolute commitment to something which had somehow mutated into a driving force to making the galaxy safe for them alone.

  Sandy shook her head.

  What might have beens was a fool game. I’ve got a fight coming. Whether I like it or not, I am going to have to fight my way out of this situation.

  After dinner that night, she spent the rest of the day going through options for assaulting through a defended gate. They tried one, then another of the ones in the book. Then they tossed away the book and started writing their own.

  Having Mimzy there was both helpful and educational. Her ability to analyze a situation with lightning speed helped them move quickly from one option and assessment to the next without a lot of delay.

  Sandy went to bed that night with a whole lot of different ideas spinning around in her brain and spent the night fighting aliens. Sometimes they won. Sometimes she won. Sometimes huge space monsters appeared and ate them both.

  Her night was not very restful.

  37

  Next morning Sandy’s battle squadrons joined the task force guarding the jump just in time to shoot up six alien cruisers as they shot through the jump. All died, and the Voodoo got the last shot off as the final cruiser through the jump tried to send something back through. A warning, likely.

  Whatever it was, the aliens didn’t get it.

  With the observation section withdrawn to this side of the jump, Admiral Shoalter’s Phantom deployed a small drone to stand guard at the jump. As ordered, it slipped a periscope through the jump. At present, with the approaching cruiser fleet still well out, a visual survey of the jump was useless. The one it deployed observed the electromagnetic noise off the reactors and other gear aboard the ships. It even picked up communications between the ships. The aliens were talking in the clear, apparently sure they had nothing to fear.

  Mimzy managed to pick up and translate maybe every third word. The language of a cruiser fleet was not at all likely to be covered by the vocabulary of a band of hunter-gathers.

  “They are going to stop on the other side of the jump,” Mimzy said. “I think the Enlightened One is issuing orders for the defensive deployment, but I can’t pick up enough of the orders to make sense of them.”

  “That’s fine, Mimzy,” Sandy said. “That’s enough for now.”

  So the two forces arrayed themselves for battle, one that neither one of them intended to give the other.

  Sandy’s battlecruisers were a mixed force. One BatRon still had 20-inch lasers. The other two had the newer 22-inch ones. Two of the BatRons were veterans of earlier battles. The second 22-inch squadron had come out with Sandy and was facing its first fight. All told, Sandy had eight armed with the smaller laser and sixteen, including the Victory with the more powerful weapon.

  The 20-inch lasers would determine how close she deployed to the jump.

  Sandy chose to anchor her task force 150,000 kilometers out from the jump. Fifteen of the larger ships moored themselves in trios and formed a cross 2,000 klicks from each other.

  To the right and left of them, Sandy deployed what was left. Two of them formed carefully balanced trios with one 22-inch battlecruiser and two of the smaller ships. The final four smaller ships anchored in pairs.

  Sandy doubted the aliens would try to force the jump, but if they did, the first ship though would face a twenty megaton mine just five hundred klicks from the jump. Six more warheads of forbidden atomics, similar in magnitude, waited 10,000 klicks away on missiles ready to accelerate themselves at 12 gees into the maelstrom.

  This waiting hell had swallowed an entire wolf pack’s battle fleet before. These cruisers would not have a chance against it.

  The periscope quickly reported they were not interested in chancing the jump. One hundred and thirty-two cruisers slowed to a halt ten thousand klicks from the jump and deployed into five dishes, each of twenty-six or twenty-seven cruisers. They formed a cross with each wing separated from the center one by three thousand klicks.

  The periscope scanning the electromagnetic scale caught no evidence of a ship coming forward to deploy mines. The visual spectrum also sighted nothing.

  “They are mighty close to the jump,” Van noted.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Sandy asked.

  “We baseball players would call it a brush back,” Mondi said.

  “Have a plan ready for me in four hours,” the admiral ordered.

  Mondi grinned and left to do as commanded.

  38

  Two battlecruisers slipped from the moorings and two trios switched to pairs as the Steadfast and Dreadnought accelerated at one gee, then decelerated at the same until they came to a dead stop 25,000 kilometers from the jump.

  These two ships were the only ones with atomic warheads aboard. Mimzy had dug up a designation from the bloody Twentieth Century: Special Weapons Ships.

  What they carried was a special kind of horror.

  Now drifting in place, they each deployed six packets of missiles. Most of them carried the standard anti-matter warhead, but hidden in each cluster was one missile with one of the cat’s gifts – a warhead with the destructive power of twenty million tons of TNT.

  The periscope through the jump had been keeping track of communications between the alien cruisers. The chatter between ships was now at a low point. Sandy and Penny agreed the enemy was likely in a sleep cycle.

  The periscope withdrew from the jump and drifted laterally a few hundred meters.

  Recently arrived from human space, Dreadnought had been given the task of unleashing hell by the second. Sandy considered that rather poetic.

  At slightly more than one second intervals, at orders from the Dreadnought, each of the packets of rockets came to life and accelerated at a brutal 12 gees toward the jump.

  Not quite seven minutes later, the missile cluste
rs were in a perfect line, headed into the jump at 49,440 kilometers an hour at a perfect interval of exactly 1500 meters.

  No sooner had they shot through the jump, then the periscope was maneuvered back into place. Fifteen seconds after the first missile cluster passed through the jump, Sandy was once more tracking what was happening on the other side.

  Mimzy, alone, however, was able to follow it in real time, if a bit less than a second later.

  Fifteen seconds after the first missile had exited the jump, the aliens had yet to fire their first shot in defense of themselves.

  The attacking missiles had exited the jump, traveling at 13.7 klicks per second. In that fifteen seconds, the lead missiles were already nearly 220 klicks closer to the alien cruisers, still accelerating at 120 meters per second, per second. The six missiles had separated in the first half second and were unfolding, very much like a flower. Behind the first wave, at one second intervals, six more missiles shot through the jump and separated in carefully spaced intervals so that one laser beam could not take out two of them with one shot.

  In twelve seconds a blossom of seventy-two missiles, hiding among them twelve visions of hell, shot toward the five alien battle dishes. Accelerating at 12 gees, the missiles would be traveling at close to 100,000 kilometers an hour by the time they reached their target. They could be there in slightly less than seven minutes.

  Four hundred and twenty seconds was the time the aliens had to defend themselves from the missiles.

  They wasted the first twenty seconds.

  At 21 seconds the first ship shot a laser beam at the missiles racing toward it.

  It missed.

  Over the next twenty seconds, a smattering of lasers came to life, usually only one or two from the forward battery of six lasers that each cruiser had.

  They also failed to hit a missile.

  Only as the attack approached the minute mark did the aliens begin to fire full salvos from all six of their forward lasers.

  They continued to miss their targets.

  The attacking missiles were not making the aliens’ defensive firing solutions easy for them. Mimzy had programmed them with evasion plans that her mother and siblings had been refining now for several years.

  Still, when a missile is traveling at almost seventeen kilometers per second, it’s not easy to even slightly change where it is going. However, between maneuvering thrusters on the bow and a near infinitesimal swiveling of the rocket engine itself, the missile could aim itself each second to be a few meters to the right or left, up or down, of the place it would have been a moment ago.

  The missiles closed on their targets doing a spiraling dance that confused the alien fire control. Mimzy’s analysis of the enemy’s firing pattern found what appeared to be a five second delay from the fire control sensed the missile, it calculated where it would be soon, and then aimed and firing the lasers.

  Time after time, the 15-inch or 14-inch or 16-inch laser . . . no one was sure precisely what the exact caliber of the alien lasers were and they seemed to use different ones . . . passed through the space that would have been occupied by the ten meters long missile if it had held its course of five seconds ago.

  For a second minute, the missiles closed the distance to their targets without a single loss to alien laser fire.

  The aliens struggled to get better. It took them about twenty seconds to reload their bow guns. Most cruisers stayed bow on to the attack during that time. A few flipped and gave their stern chasers a shot at the attackers.

  As the attack passed its three minute mark, with the missiles nearly halfway to their targets, the aliens had come fully alive. More ships were firing their bow guns, flipping, then firing their stern lasers, then flipping when the bow lasers were reloaded.

  Many of them were starting to get under way.

  The Enlightened One had chosen to leave his ships and their crews floating in space with at least a hundred kilometers between each one in their dishes. Now their rocket engines came to life. Some ships headed off to the right, left, up, down, moving anyway they could to offer less of a target. Others flipped to present their rear lasers and took off, increasing the distance between them and the incoming missiles. In most cases they were accelerating at ten or fifteen meters per second. It was hardly a race between them and the missiles that had already accelerated to twenty kilometers per second and upped it relentlessly by 120 meters every second.

  Before the start of the fourth minute, two missiles died. One got nipped, took off for nowhere on a steady course and got slammed by a fusillade of lasers. The other zigged right into a laser bolt and was vaporized.

  The Enlightened One must have noticed that sixteen of the missiles were coming right at the center dish. Likely that was where his flagship hung in space. He ordered every ship in the fleet to concentrate on those fifteen. One had already been blown to bits.

  Now, with all lasers aimed for those remaining fifteen, four were blotted out in the next twenty seconds. One ship flipped and began to accelerate away from that dish at three gees. It did not flip back to fire its forward battery.

  This kind of action drew the attention of the missiles.

  Most had only a narrow focus. Initially, they could only see the dish they were targeted at. They were programmed to pick out a ship and aim for close to it, but not directly at it. A straight up-the-kilt shot was a perfect gift for defensive fire control. Even a slight deflection could throw off the calculations of WAS, IS, WILL BE that the fire control computers were making.

  The exception to this limited view were the twelve atomic tipped missiles. They had a larger computer, made possible by the smaller, though vastly more deadly warhead. Eleven of them spotted the ship in the middle of the central dish that began running away the fastest. They observed and adjusted their target selection for that one.

  Now the vast majority of the aliens found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. They could obey their Enlightened One, always fire in obedience to his orders, and shoot down the missiles seeking to kill him. Or they could take out the missiles seeking to kill themselves.

  In developing this plan of attack, Sandy had foreseen that this terrible horned beast might get in among her enemy . . . and she was very much looking forward to what happened next.

  The alien fire plan concentrated totally on the ten remaining lasers targeting their leader. Apparently, it took them quite a while to notice that eleven more missiles were seeking out the boss.

  In the next forty seconds while five more missiles died, the ordered fire plan held. Then, as the battle entered its fifth minute, with the missiles hurtling toward the dishes at blazing speed, the aliens began to think about their own possible future.

  Some ships fired their forward battery in defense of the Enlightened One and their smaller, aft lasers for their own survival. Others made the opposite choice, firing the six forward lasers for themselves.

  A handful, but one that steadily grew larger, fired all ten lasers in their own defense.

  When Sandy reviewed the battle in extra slow time, she found this part of it interesting. Discounting the twenty-six ships in the center dish, the number of ships firing according to the fire plan slid over one minute from near one hundred percent to start with to barely twenty percent at the end of the minute.

  Someone felt free to issue orders to protect his own hide. Others were feeling less and less loyalty to that hide.

  Maybe the nature that the DNA was forcing wasn’t quite as absolute as some thought it was.

  Or maybe those with ambition who make it to the top played by a different set of rules. Was back-stabbing a national sport among the alien commanders?

  Missiles were now closing fast on their targets. It was harder and harder for them to deviate from their crash course. Sixteen more were blown away before the sixth minute started.

  The penultimate minute was destructive for the onrushing attacking missiles.

  The anti-matter warheads had to be close aboard their
target before the containment vessel was dropped and the shaped explosion initiated. The warhead was made of Smart MetalTM. When the proximity fuse identified a target in range, most of the warhead would flow around to face it. The explosion would then hurl fragments at the targets. These fragments would shape themselves into super-hardened darts. What they hit, they would pierce right through. The hull of the targeted ship would be turned to Swiss cheese. To have that Swiss impact, however, the warhead needed to be within a hundred meters.

  Atomic warheads didn’t have to get that cozy with the ship they doomed. A kilometer or two would likely be enough to burn any thin-skinned cruiser.

  As the sixth minute rolled around to seven, one of the atomic warheads took a laser hit.

  Sandy had chosen to protect these twelve warheads the cats had given her. Each missile was clad in 50 mm of crystal armor. The overall missile was too small to get a lot of benefit from this kind of protection, but it might be enough to let a missile be grazed by a laser, or survive the scorching light if its course took it immediately out of the beam.

  This missile took a direct hit.

  Its armor held the warhead together just long enough for it to begin ignition. One moment it was there, then there was light followed by a blinding flash and a roiling gas ball that quickly spent itself on nothing.

  It did, however, let the aliens know that this was an atomic battlefield.

  The screaming of the Enlightened One, demanding protection did not bring him all that much additional protection. Now captains got busy. Ships took off at three gees, maybe more, fleeing the coming onslaught. When they fired, or turned to fire, they aimed for the missiles coming at them. One ship exploded as their reactor’s containment system failed under the stress of the sudden overload.

  The flight of the entire fleet quickly turned into a rout as it became every ship for itself.

  Sandy, studying this in real time, quickly realizing that her battle plan was completely falling apart. Only this time, it was falling apart in a good way.