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

by Mike Shepherd

  Many of them were alert now. Just about all of them got at least one salvo off but not a second. Before thirty seconds was past, thirty-six of them were history. Just clouds of cooling gas.

  Then Mimzy did something that left both Sandy and Penny smiling softly to themselves.

  The Victory’s guns fell silent.

  By now all three battle squadrons were through the jump. All twenty-three ships were eagerly joining in the fight. Just as Mimzy had left the last eleven targets in the middle line to the other battlecruisers, now she left the last ten hostiles to the other ships.

  Under the human battlecruiser’s combined firepower, they vanished quickly away.

  The quite jovial commodore of BatRon 5 was happy to declare on line. “You did leave us some targets. Thanks a lot, amigos.”

  “We certainly did,” Sandy muttered through a heavy grin. No doubt, every ship would put in a claim for at least one ship, maybe two. Since Mimzy had left them only twenty or so, the claims would clearly exceed the targets.

  Sandy made herself a promise to endorse all kill claims. Her squadrons certainly deserved credit for a good fight.

  Sandy left it to her Chief of Staff to get the fleet turned around and headed back into the other system. He quickly allowed the fleet to go back to Condition Able. Most personnel found their discarded clothes right next to their high gee stations as they passed through Condition Baker and most of the crew dressed at their battle station. The joy of survival was not to be denied. There was some ass slapping and the yeoman squealed when her boyfriend twisted a more delicate bit of her anatomy.

  A thunderous frown from a chief put a stop to that before it went where it clearly was headed.

  Sandy allowed herself a maternal smile and ignored the hijinks.

  “Comm, as soon as we’re on the other side of the jump, send Admiral Miyoshi a full report on this battle. Advise him that he may want to try something like this himself.”

  That done, Sandy dismissed herself to her quarters. Her ship suit was soaked through. It had been such a quick battle, she had no idea what had wrung so much sweat out of her.

  In the shower, she got the worst case of the shakes she’d had in a very long time. She rested her arms on the back of the shower and let the sting of the warm water hammer her for a long minute. She felt the water more as a living caress. A proof that she was alive. That she had walked through the valley of death and come out the other side whole.

  She knew that around her was the wreckage of ships. Ships that intended to do her harm. Now their crews hung, frozen in death or were nothing but gas. They had died. She now lived.

  Sandy took several deep breaths, letting them out slowly, letting them leach from her the tension and, yes, fear. She’d been so intent on the battle that she hadn’t allowed herself to feel fear. Now, she felt it as she breathed it out.

  She smiled as she mentally waved good-bye to it and sent it down the road.

  Clean and dressed in crisp whites . . . they always made her feel good . . . she checked in on the bridge. She found that two battle squadrons were anchoring at their previous place, but BatRon 17 with the Victory were making a comfortable one gee passage for the planet.

  Satisfied, she headed for the wardroom for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. The menu for tonight’s victory dinner to be steaks with all the trimmings. For the moment, Sandy was content to find herself a table and sit quietly.

  Of course, absent a KEEP OUT sign, admirals don’t get to sit quietly, or maybe she had a TALK TO ME sign on her table. Whatever it was, Van, Mondi, Penny and her quiet cat shadow quickly settled in around her.

  “I had no idea a computer directed ship could be so deadly,” Van finally said to Penny, breaking the long silence.

  “We think in minutes,” Penny said. “Seconds if we have to. They think in nanoseconds.”

  “I was only doing what you had decided I should do,” Mimzy said, sounding almost meek.

  “You did damn good, gal. Damn good,” Mondi told the computer.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Well done. Very well done,” Sandy said, adding the Navy’s highest accolade. She sipped her coffee for a moment then added. “I’ll have to keep you close at hand, Mimzy, though I’ll have to be careful not to expect every battle to be a slam dunk like that one.”

  Van nodded. “They were thin skinned targets. A fleet of alien battleships might not have been so easy.”

  “Their command structure was in complete disarray,” Sandy added, turning to Penny. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  Penny shook her head. “I’ve been curious about how brittle the chain of command might be. Tyranny, like what they practice, often has a weak underbelly. Now we’ve seen it. Under pressure, they cracked.”

  “But would the alien fleet have broken into such a rout?” Admiral Perswah said softly, breaking her silence, “if the alien commander had not turned tail and run, showing a, you would call it ‘a yellow streak a mile wide’?”

  That got thoughtful nods.

  It was Mimzy that broke the pleasant quiet. “Admiral, a message is coming in from Jacques. He’s very excited. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Please,” Sandy said. The people around her had as much right as any to see what their battle had bought for humanity.

  Mimzy projected a 2D view of Jacques. The backdrop was clearly the inside of the cavern. Even at this bandwidth, it looked spectacular, colorful, and lovely.

  “We’ve got the entire collection of bones, plastic, weapons and clothes. Even boots survived in the anaerobic water,” the anthropologist crowed. “We’ve also found more evidence of a fire fight. A hundred thousand years plus makes it hard to do a post mortem, but we’ve found a lot of bullet marks on the walls and even evidence of grenade fragments and explosive shells. Any remains of flesh and bone or of man-made objects are long gone, but all of us agree, the evidence we can find shows that this place was assaulted. One of the leg bones we pulled out of that deep well has a bullet nick on it. The ammo for the rifles we pulled out with the bones would very likely leave a trail like that one.”

  He paused to look around him. People were moving purposefully in the background.

  “We’re pulling out just as fast as we can, Sandy. I know you folks are sweating blood to keep those bastards off our back, or away from our throats. Thanks. I think we’ve got enough to study here that it will keep a whole lot of people busy for a very long time. Thank you. Thank all of you. Jacques out.”

  Only when the view vanished did Sandy realize that half the wardroom was watching the report with her. The room had fallen so quiet that the other half had clearly heard it.

  Sandy stood and switched to her command voice. “Our boffins think they’ve found alien remains from at least a hundred thousand years ago. Maybe a hundred and ten thousand. We may have samples of the aliens’s DNA from before it was messed with, or proof that it wasn’t messed with. This information is critical to us understanding our enemy and finding a way to negotiate an end to their madness.”

  Sandy looked around the wardroom. Every eye was on her. Every eye shown bright with pride. “You, standing here, bought the time for those scientists to get at those bones. You have blown away a roadblock on our path home. Well done. A very well done to all of you.”

  If she’d been talking to Sailors, a cheer might have followed those words. She, however, was talking to officers. They gave her proud, tight smiles or comfortable nods. She had given them the well-earned praise they deserved and they were content.

  “Admiral,” Van said. “May I suggest that we pass along that message from the boffin to all hands? If you could do that speech again, I think it would go well with it.”

  “Oh nuts,” Sandy said. “I have no idea what I said.”

  “I recorded your entire soliloquy,” Mimzy said, “Video as well as audio. I could form the two into a package and distribute it to the fleet. Do you want a copy to be sent to Admiral Miyoshi’s task force?”


  Sandy eyed Van and Mondi.

  “I think it will send morale sky high,” Van said.

  “Do it,” Sandy ordered.

  Having one of Nelly’s kids around could be very helpful.

  42

  About the time the Victory achieved orbit around the alien world, a message from Admiral Miyoshi arrived.

  Even before the news of Sandy’s victory got to him, he had gotten tired of waiting at his rat hole – and had gone after the rat.

  His battle plan was very similar to Sandy’s. However, as someone who had fought with Kris Longknife in every battle since the First Battle of Alwa, he’d gone at it better than his superior.

  Like her enemy, the alien battleships were hugging the jump. All were deployed right up close, only ten thousand kilometers out, in five small dishes drifting in zero gee. The alien Enlightened One was ready to hit any ship coming through the jump with every one of their ten thousand lasers.

  It would be a hot time for the first few ships though that jump.

  So Miyoshi had chosen to release some mice among those ponderous pachyderms.

  He had sent clusters of six missiles through the jump at one second intervals, twenty of them. The hundred and twenty missiles, forty of them atomic tipped, were all through the jump before a laser fired.

  There were, of course, a lot of lasers aimed at the jump. However, like Sandy, he had chosen the middle of their night. The missiles were well disbursed before serious defensive fire began to respond. The attackers flew a course that sent them arching away from the direct line between the battleships and the jump before serious defensive fire began to respond.

  Three minutes into the fight, the first atomic warhead exploded. Thirty seconds later, the battleships began to displace to the rear, in ones and twos, then fives and sixes.

  It was at exactly six minutes, thirty seconds that Admiral Miyoshi’s battle experience showed the perfect correction to Sandy’s battle plan.

  At 10,000 kilometers an hour, the Haruna led twenty-three battlecruisers into the alien’s disrupted anchorage. However, the Haruna did not lead the way alone. Bound together by Smart MetalTM at the molecular level, the Haruna came through with the entire First Division of BatRon 3. In one tight cluster, the Haruna, Chikuma, Atago and the Tone made the jump.

  Cautious Admiral Miyoshi had chosen the slower speed to give himself choices right up to the last second. Had the missile attack not developed to his satisfaction, he would have aborted the mission and redirected his ships slightly to the right of the jump.

  However, the missile attack was going much better than his most optimistic planner thought possible. The missiles were on their final dive at the alien battleships, pouring every last bit of fuel into a final acceleration, pushing themselves past thirteen gees, some even toward fourteen.

  Every alien gunner was desperately fighting for his life and that of his ship.

  At that moment of maximum danger, a blob shot through the jump, broke apart and, at 3.5 gees, performed a perfect fleur de lis and took off, racing away from the jump. That jump proceeded to cough up another cluster of battlecruisers every two seconds that did the exact same flower burst, but offset to avoid becoming predictable.

  Within ten seconds, twenty-four human battlecruisers were through the jump and dialing in their lasers on their assigned targets.

  While alien gunners were still focusing desperately on the close in enemy, the enemy ten thousand kilometers away reached out and burned them.

  Each battlecruiser had been assigned a target. In five seconds, each battlecruiser acquired its target, slave its forward lasers to a revised fire control solution and let loose with twelve 22-inch lasers.

  This first salvo, Admiral Miyoshi went for burn through. Four lasers concentrated on the exact same spot on their target. With only ten thousand kilometers between them, it was not that hard to do, and each laser brought full power to the spot. Each target suddenly had three sections of its hull taking heat, burning and blasting glowing magma away in huge, burning gobs.

  Twenty-four distracted battleships took hits. Unprepared for a gun fight, the alien ships were not rotating. Worse, under the threat of the attacking missiles, many of them were withdrawing, presenting their vulnerable sterns to Miyoshi’s battlecruisers. Hits kept jamming heat into the same rock, ice, steel and flesh at an astounding rate. Some of the alien battleships were opened to space by at least two burn-throughs. A few suffered three.

  Others found twenty-two inch laser beams penetrated directly into engineering spaces. On an alien battleship, there were a lot of spaces assigned to engineering. Aft were the usual propulsion systems fed in most cases by twenty reactors. Scattered along the hull, to feed the massive numbers of lasers, were twenty more reactors.

  It was hard to pierce an alien battleship’s hull without hitting a reactor.

  Eighteen or more reactors suffered catastrophic failure. Eighteen battleships found plasma a cancer in their gut. In hardly more than a blink of an eye, eighteen battleships with millions on board were reduced to nothing but expanding, cooling, clouds of gas.

  Six lucky battleships had their hulls open to the vacuum of space. Their crews struggled to control damage even as fractured capacitors spat fire and death. Few of them would count themselves lucky.

  These rolling salvos were spread out in time. It took five seconds for each battlecruiser’s fire control system to acquire a target. That time was spread down the line in two second intervals to ships that had arrived in the battle last, a good ten seconds into the fight.

  Then, for six seconds, lasers sent blistering heat at three specific spots on the battleship they had been assigned.

  Battleships began to explode eleven seconds after the first battle cruiser made its jump. For the next ten seconds, one after another, human laser fire set loose their own ship’s demons and the aliens suffered the consequences.

  Eighteen alien battleships out of eighty-eight were gone.

  Then the battlecruisers flipped ship. Now they risked taking fire on their vulnerable rear with its reactors, but they also opened the distance from the enemy while bringing the aft battery to bear. It had only eight 22-inch lasers. Some skippers concentrated all eight into two tight beams. Others chose to divide them into three, three and two.

  Twenty-four different battleships came under attack. The five second salvos reduced twelve of them to a loose collection of atoms. The other twelve found themselves broken and burning as their crews fought for their lives.

  All this time, the alien battleships had yet to recognize this new threat and take it under fire. Still, they swatted at the missiles diving madly at them, closing as relentlessly as a devil’s curse.

  The human battlecruisers now flipped ship again in a rolling wave over ten seconds as each ship exhausted its aft battery and turned its armored bow to the enemy.

  Thirty seconds into this new attack, the alien battle line was just beginning to notice the true threat it faced. Most central fire control systems on the battleships were still desperately plotting the path of missiles hurtling at them at over twenty kilometers a second

  Five seconds later, the forward batteries of the first division were recharged. The targets for this second set of salvos had been assigned, but Admiral Miyoshi expected there to be some confusion by now among the enemy, and thus, some confusion in the fire plan.

  There was definitely confusion among the alien battleships. Under the threat of the attacking missiles, some withdrew from the battle line at different angles and different accelerations. One had slammed itself into two gees for flight only to have its engines stutter and its acceleration fall below one gee.

  Some of the battleships were trying to dodge and maneuver. However, the aliens in their poor high gee accommodations were badly treated as they were thrown about in less radical maneuvers than the human battlecruisers were doing. Also, huge half million ton ships did not jitterbug, even to save their life.

  The first missiles b
egan to hit. The anti-matter warheads seemed to hardly make a dent in a battleship’s armor. Some started a fire or two in laser batteries, but they didn’t really shake up the ship.

  Atomic warheads were different.

  Almost instantaneously, two battleships blossomed into roiling balls of gas as atomic warheads connected. Then a third.

  A fourth managed to wing the missile, causing it to explode itself. Still, it was close enough aboard to stove in one side of the hull and turn its rock armor into molten fire. Spinning off in space, it must have been hell inside that ship. It fired no more salvos.

  With four battleships now added to the list of dead ships and others no longer anywhere close to where they had been before, the second salvo only engaged twenty-one alien ships. Another ten of them vanished in balls of hot gas.

  Now, some of the aliens began to recognize their true danger.

  How the aliens managed it, there was no way for human logic to comprehend, but five of the remaining battleships concentrated their fire on the Topaz from Hekate. Maybe it was because she was the last through the jump. Under the heat of five hundred or more lasers, the crystal armor glowed bright, then failed and the battlecruiser joined the alien battleships as a ball of superheated gas.

  The other battleships had only a fraction of their broadside charged and ready to take Miyoshi’s ships under fire. On their own, the battlecruiser skippers went to Evasion Plan six and presented their sterns, aiming for most of the remaining battleships. Nineteen were hit, some by two battlecruisers.

  Too many of the alien battleships were running by now. Twelve vanished under the lightening bolts from the eight 22-inch stern chasers as the fewer lasers slashed into the unprotected sterns of the fleeing battleships.

  The alien battleships still had a lot of fight in them. Most were firing wild partial salvos at the dancing battlecruisers. The human ships took in the hits on their spinning surface. Both the spin and the crystal armor helped to spread the heat around the hull. Ships glowed, but only two burned.

  The Idzumo was pouring its aft lasers into a battleship when her vulnerable stern took an enemy salvo right into the engineering spaces. She blossomed into colorful globe of expanding gas and was no more.