The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set

by Owen R O'Neill

  At last, she did mean to take the hanger deck—but from the inside. Taking out the weapons control spaces would shut down the missiles and the main batteries, but not the light guns, so she wanted to preserve as many of the monitor’s small craft as possible. When it came time to make a quick getaway, the IFF on the monitor’s own craft would prevent its guns from locking, which would greatly increase their chances of getting clear. That was the kids’ assignment, once Anders and Tallmadge let them in.

  If it all sounded a little desperate, recited here in the space where she’d lost that low-gee racquetball game to Kell three and a half weeks ago, it might be said to have the advantage of risking only half their remaining force. Not that everyone saw it that way, though. Captain Kristoff in particular did not like it—any aspect of it. It didn’t help that he was Kerr’s man. She knew he resented PrenTalien relieving Kerr and shared the young colonel’s view of their prospects. But Kristoff also objected to being left out and he probably didn’t like that his heavy weapons platoon leader, Lieutenant Randall Barnett, who was going, was known to be closer to her than to Kristoff himself. None of that bothered Min unduly, as long as Kristoff had the good sense to keep his mouth shut for the time being.

  He did, and Min swiftly completed the briefing. Straightening, she detailed their assignments.

  “Barnett, you’re with Anders. Gomez, give your pick of sections to Lieutenant Tallmadge—the heavier the better. Drake, Henderson, you’re with me, except your second team, Matt—they go with Anders.” That Color Sergeant Ulloa and his section would accompany her went without saying.

  Her gaze swept across the now mostly solemn group. “Any questions?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Gomez unexpectedly spoke up. “If I may, what’s a Nelson’s Patent Bridge?” She was referring to the facetious-sounding title Min had given her op-plan: Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding Enemy Monitors.

  Min showed a smile and recited: “During the Battle of Cape St. Vincent—Valentine’s Day of the year 1797 by the old reckoning—Commodore Horatio Nelson of the Royal Navy in HMS Captain, a third rate of seventy-four guns, was engaged with the Spanish eighty-gun San Nicolas and some other ships. When Captain’s foretopmast went over leaving her unmanageable, Nelson ordered his ship to fire a last broadside into the Spanish ships and then put her helm over, hooking her port side to the starboard quarter of San Nicolás.

  “Leaping across and climbing through a quarter-galley window, Nelson led his men in storming San Nicolás and forcing her surrender. He then took his party across the deck of San Nicolas onto the deck of San Jakob, a Spanish First rate of one hundred and twelve guns that had come to aid San Nicolas, and captured her as well. The maneuver gained the Royal Navy a famous victory and was known thereafter as Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding Enemy First Rates.”

  Lieutenant Gomez blinked and looked impressively blank. “Thank you, ma’am.” Then she compressed her full lips. “But—what’s a quarter-galley, ma’am?”

  “The captain’s personal head.”

  Gomez blinked some more, big-eyed, and Min saw a few of her other officers hiding their smiles. Attempting to control her own, she said, “Now if there are no more—”

  “Captain?” Anders broke in. “We ain’t really going in through the heads again, are we? I just had my kit cleaned.”

  “No, Mr. Anders—just you.” Open laughter now and the tension in the group evaporated.

  “Okay, people,” Lewis said when the laughter died down. “Enough history for one day. Let’s amp it up and go make some of our own.”

  Anders came over as the marines loaded up by sections, a wry expression on his face. “So Captain, not only are we mounting the Great Junk Offensive, but we’re gonna take over a monitor with just our company and a few dozen of these kids who just got rototilled?”

  Min fixed him with a droll look of her own. “Remember the Bard, Troy. ‘If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss. And if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.’”

  Sterling incomprehension. “Whatever you say, Captain.”

  Her grin spread wider. “That’s why I can’t stand you, Anders—you got no fuckin’ education.”

  * * *

  Captain Coward checked his bridge screens as Fury broke high to assume her station, clearing the way for Shannon and Vanguard to engage. The whole ship was singing with tension, from the white sweating face of the junior signals officer on his left, to the grim delighted chuckling of his TAO in CIC as he reviewed their remaining inventory of death and destruction, and directed those munitions to their targets; to the low whistling of the damage-control officer, fumbling through an old sitcom parody tune called Sausages & Tea. But it was all perfectly orderly, his people going about their jobs with smooth precision, no wasteful hurry and no hesitation—and when his G-helmsman murmured, “Good lord, how she fights,” Coward directed his attention to the main display forward.

  There was Orlan, at the center of perfect storm of firepower: Shannon was alongside, 8-inch railguns hammering her with inconceivable savagery while Vanguard, standing further off, launched salvo after salvo of missiles that were increasingly striking home as Orlan’s defense net faltered. The ships of DESRON 5 were darting about the giant, firing everything they had, closing with wild recklessness.

  The huge ship fought back with desperate fury, returning almost shot for shot, missile for missile. The frigate Ixion was already out of the fight—she had gotten too close when launching her torpedoes and was reeling away, shattered by the Orlan’s 16-inch guns. The destroyers Ethalion and Alecto were dying before their eyes—Alecto, that old, proud, little ship making a last suicidal charge. Argo was limping but still game and Shannon was taking a brutal pounding and must soon shear off.

  But here were the fast, sleek, powerful shapes of Sambre and Falklands ranging along the far side, pouring out salvos of missiles and 12-inch railgun fire—an irresistible torrent of hypervelocity metal—and Orlan, taken between two fires, could not even interpose her invulnerable keel . . .

  “Sir,” his TAO broke in on the terrible spectacle, “We’ve got another destroyer to starboard and light cruiser coming up in support.”

  Captain Coward glanced over at the bridge TAC console and saw that it was so. “Very good, Mr. Porter. Lock forward tubes on that cruiser—fire as soon as you have a solution. Tickle up that nosy tin can with a missile barrage, please. If she doesn’t take the hint, lay alongside with guns. We gotta discourage this sorta thing.”

  * * *

  As the shuttle pilots and gunners ran through their prelaunch checks, and the embarked sections finished securing themselves, calling off by the numbers with Anders acknowledging, Captain McKenzie broke in on Min’s privileged command link.

  “Min, are you seeing this?”

  “Yep.” Lewis had also gotten the new TACREP and she popped up the schematic on her xel. Wallace was heavily engaged on the far left and hammering them in fine style but Adenauer was shifting a destroyer squadron and two heavy cruisers down towards the monitor anyway . . .

  Goddammit.

  She recomputed the trajectories and engagement envelopes. Glowing time ticks distributed themselves across the plot even as Kell put the implications into words. “When you get there, you’ll have half an hour before those ships close. Call it twenty minutes, if you're gonna get clear. Min, do you wanna rethink this?”

  “No, I don’t wanna fuckin’ rethink this”—grinding the words between her teeth. Half an hour might do. Twenty minutes—not so much.

  “Lemme at least call Belvoir. Maybe she can throw a scare into ’em. Buy you—”

  “Kell—”

  “Wait one. New data . . .” Kell’s voice, still urgent, now had a different undertone. It sounded like . . . excitement? “Min, DESRON 6 broke through on the far left—Shannon and Vanguard following with DESRON 5. They’ve doubled up ’em up!”

  Two destroyer squadrons and a couple of cruisers inside the Halith posi
tion? That might collapse Adenauer’s whole position on that flank—

  “Wallace has committed Sambre and Falklands—DESRON 8 engaging—God damn, how they’re laying it into them! Adenauer’s detached Jena and VanScheer. I think we—Oh my God!”

  Silence. Min loaded the new data and waited for her display to refresh.

  When it did, she saw the pulsing red icon at the center of Adenauer’s right-flank division; heard Kell’s awed voice, not much above a whisper: “Orlan’s blown up.” Adenauer’s most powerful ship after Marshall Nedelin—two thousand people suddenly turned into charred meat and light.

  “Okay, Kell—” Min sucked back the breath that had just left her in a rush. With Orlan gone and his flank crumbling, Adenauer would have to divert those ships or Wallace could cut them off and kill them. “That’s our prompt to get this party started. Let’s go make this baby our bitch.”

  McKenzie nodded. “Very good, Captain. Boost in one.” Then Kell gave her a private look, still pale. “But I have to say, Min, if this isn’t the goddamndest most harebrained op I’ve ever heard of, it’s close. Even for you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Kell.” Min smiled fondly at the other woman. “Just do what you can for ten minutes. Once we blow their hatches, it’ll be all over but the shouting.”

  “You got it, sister. Good hunting. And don’t forget there’s a massage you still owe me.”

  “I won’t. See you on the other side, Kell—if not on this one.”

  Chapter Four: The Hour of Reckoning

  Z-Day +7 (0821)

  LSS Trafalgar, forward deployed;

  Gamma Hydras, Hydra Border Zone

  Wave after wave of Halith fighters streamed in. Time after time, the outnumbered pilots of TF 34 rose to meet them. Watching the relentless struggle from Trafalgar’s CIC, his gut churning, Huron clenched his jaw every time a light winked off the Boards—another companion lost—and found himself breathing hard after each Dom sortie was repulsed. They were doing themselves proud, racking up an exchange ratio of five to one or better, but they were doing it at prohibitive cost. His people, his friends, going down in flames out there while he stood here, taking up space, using up oxygen, contributing nothing.

  They’d been at it for two hours now, without a pause. Losses were at twenty percent and mounting. The Dom task force was creeping in, slowly but inexorably, and sooner or later, they’d figure out how little actually stood in their way. Huron figured it would be sooner. Once losses climbed to between twenty-five and thirty percent, they wouldn’t be able to cover all the sectors adequately and the exchange ratio would start to shift in the Doms’ favor. At around thirty percent casualties, their sortie rate would drop, and if it got much worse than that, the entire situation would start to collapse.

  The way things were going, Huron calculated that point was not above an hour away. Shariati’s battlecruiser squadron, lurking off their flank like a pack of wolves, might tear the Doms up some but they’d never stop them, and once the Doms discovered the “tanker fleet” they were after was a phantasm, Outbound would be wide open.

  He checked the Boards again. Concordia’s wing was fully engaged. Trafalgar’s hanger was empty except for half a dozen birds, including his, and N’Komo’s squadron, which had just landed and was being hastily rearmed and refueled—all nine of them. Ensign Dance was flying with them now, and even Lieutenant Tole was out there, despite not having been officially requalified.

  Glancing around CIC, he observed the highly ordered, frenetic activity. Harmon was in deep with her team of fighter directors, managing the battle like she was conducting an orchestra. N’Komo was reporting the ready status on his surviving birds. The commodore was currently on the bridge—and enough was fucking enough. He unfurled his xel and tapped up his crew chief, WO Moreno.

  “Angel,” he said when Moreno’s sweating face appeared, his voice low but savagely clear, “get my bird hot and on the line in five minutes.”

  “But, sir,” Moreno protested, mopping the side of his sturdy neck, “I was told—”

  “Do it.” Huron snapped his xel shut and, without another word, strode from the compartment.

  Leaving his squadron’s ready room, Huron was half way to the flight deck when the fighter boss paged him. He answered with a frown but kept his tone just on the right side of gross insubordination.

  “Not you, Huron,” Commander Harmon told him with a scowl. “The commodore wants you in CIC.”

  Swearing inwardly, Huron acknowledged, turned and made his way back to the ready room to get out of his flight gear and back into uniform. As he entered, he found Kris putting on her flight suit with painful deliberation.

  “What are you up to?” he asked, unsealing his gloves.

  “They just called all pilots,” Kris replied tersely, wincing as she fought on a boot. At that moment, the address system blared out another fleet-wide call for all remaining flight officers to man their fighters, repeated once and punctuated with a short pause followed by: IMMEDIATELY.

  “See what I mean?” she said with a hint of a smile.

  “I do,” Huron said, and resealed the glove he’d been about to take off.

  * * *

  Huron and Kris boosted clear of Trafalgar, Huron’s fighter shy almost quarter of its nominal fuel load. He’d ordered Marino to cut it short when he walked up—he wasn’t about to take the chance Harmon (or worse, Shariati) would notice what he was up to and stop him with a direct order.

  Easing back to eighty-percent thrust, he activated his sensors and scanned the battlespace. The action was all down and to their right. Even now, N’Komo’s skeleton squadron, which had launched just ahead of them, was arcing over to join in. The Doms had been hammering away on that axis for an hour now. Huron didn’t like it. They were bunching up in a narrow zone, where TF 34 could more effectively concentrate its defense. If you wanted to sucker punch someone, that would be exactly what you’d do: hit repeatedly on the same place until you trained the response into your opponent. Harmon might have thought of that, but what options did she have? If they let up to go look around for more trouble, the Doms wouldn’t need to land a sucker punch—their knockout blow was right there.

  God damn it. He throttled back to two-thirds.

  Kris pinged him on the burst link. “What’s up, sir? The hotspot’s over there.”

  “I think maybe we have some claim-jumpers lurking out here, Kris. Cool it down and swing out wide left. I’d guess ’em to be dead ahead, but maybe I’m just getting paranoid. Go take a look.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  Veering off to the right to give them the best aspect possible, he started to tune his ESM suite. All it showed was dark and quiet.

  Maybe a little too dark and quiet?

  “Sir?” Kris’s voice came over the burst link, making him grin. She was always polite at the start of a mission. Pretty soon it’d be just “Huron” and when things got really hot, she tended to slip into less complimentary forms of address.

  “Whatcha got, Ensign?”—playing along.

  “Train over to two-six-nine. Use convolve kilo-five. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  He did. He grin broadened. “They have a flock of drones running phase-conjugate cancelers. My-my-my.” Those drones would also screen them from whoever they were shielding—as long as he and Kris were careful. It took him less than a minute to work out an approach. He keyed up Kris.

  “What’dya say, Ensign? Shall we go peek under their skirts?”

  Kris, looking over the approach he’d linked to her, laughed. “You gotta dirty mind, sir.”

  “It’s a gift. Close up and let’s go have some fun.”

  Eight minutes later, they were coasting above the enemy formation and Kris pinged him again.

  “Huron, is this your idea of fun?”

  “What?”—his tone cheerfully innocent.

  “I count about forty of the fuckers down there.”

  “More like fifty-odd, I think.”
>
  “Oh great. You did notice it’s just us out here, right?”

  “No one else to get in our way then.”

  Kris muttered something he couldn’t make out over the link (maybe a good thing, he reflected).

  “C’mon, Kris. I thought you were hungry.”

  “Starving. Just wanna make sure you weren’t completely AWOL here.”

  “Alright then.” He set his T-Synth to designate a flight that was trailing the main formation. “See those three guys at the back? Shitty formation discipline. Let’s show ’em the error of their ways. Then we can go raid the buffet.”

  “Roger that!” He could actually hear the grin in her voice. Bunched as tight as they were behind their covering drones, the Doms had almost no shot at seeing two lone fighters coming up in their drive cones.

  “First kill leads? Guns only.”

  “You’re on!”

  They broke hard right, stooping as one on the unsuspecting targets. Flattening out behind them, their cannon opened up at short range, and two Doms disappeared in smears of light—Kris’s first by the shadow of a hair. The third flared into a ball of plasma moments later—no telling who got him.

  “Hey, no fair!” Kris snickered. “You lemme win that!”

  He loved to hear her happy. “Never look a gift horse in the mouth, Kris. Check that flight at 4 o’clock low—wanna tag-team those guys?”