by B. V. Larson
The bridge lights flickered, then half of them went out. Chief Gurung stood and said, “That last beam strike overloaded generators two and three. Our reinforcement is reduced by forty percent. I need to supervise damage control, ma’am.”
Engels nodded, and the man hurried off the bridge. Another blow caused the gravity to vary wildly, and then it dropped to a bare minimum. “Derek, we’re getting hammered. Aside from Indomitable, they outgun us ten to one. We have to fall back!”
“Hang in there,” Straker said as he hung on to the railing nearest the holo-table. “She’ll do it. I know she will,” he whispered.
And then, all went dark. Straker was flung across the bridge to smash into something as gravplating failed, including the delicate computer-balanced pulls from all sides that damped the inertia of everyone aboard. Emergency lights glowed to life after a moment, and he scrambled in zero-G toward Engels, who was strapped into her chair.
When he reached her, he pulled himself around in front of her, but her eyes were closed. A flap of scalp hung off her head, and a large knot was rising from the blow of something that must have struck her. Belatedly, he ordered, “Everyone into suits. Once you’ve done that, I need a damage report and a comlink to Indy. Helm, move us behind Indomitable if you can.”
As people scrambled to follow his instructions, he carefully pressed the scalp back on Engels head and held it in place with one hand, looking into her unseeing face with his other hand cupping the back of her lolling head. “Oh, Carla, I’m so sorry. I gambled and lost.”
***
As he sat erect in his padded flag chair, Admiral Benota kept a smile from his face, the smile he’d like to show the world, but it wouldn’t be seemly for the fleet CO to display that kind of a grin. Still, the battle was going well. Time for a little congratulation of his officers and crews.
“Pass to all ships: well done, and continue maximum rate of direct fire at targets of your choice. Hold missiles for fleet orders.”
Indomitable had proven extremely effective in the point defense role. Clearly, the rebels had figured out some trick the Mutuality’s own engineers hadn’t. In the weeks they’d had her, they must have upgraded her SAIs dramatically, for the battleship’s power output hadn’t changed, only her unnerving accuracy. Therefore, Benota wasn’t going to throw away thousands of tons of precious missiles until he was certain he could slam some home.
On the other hand, the battleship remained broadside to him. Apparently, these Liberationists hadn’t gotten her gargantuan primary weaponry in working order, otherwise Indomitable would have taken shots at him long ago. Without those weapons, she couldn’t resist the Home Fleet.
And the enemy’s tattered and mismatched mess of smaller vessels could hardly put up a fight, once Indomitable was disabled and recaptured.
Proon stepped to a position alongside him. “Another great victory in the making,” he said.
“Stand where I can see you, old friend,” said Benota. “My neck is not so young and flexible as it once was.”
“Perhaps if you improved your diet and exercise regimen,” grumbled the commissar, moving forward and half-turning.
“My concubine provides me with all the exercise I can stand.”
Proon’s face soured further. “Such exertions hardly compensate for your caloric intake, especially of spirits.”
Because he was feeling expansive in the midst of incipient victory, Benota allowed himself the indulgence of contradicting his watchdog, though quietly. “Perhaps if you occasionally released yourself from your puritanical lifestyle, you might have more empathy for the lesser creatures who serve you.”
“None are lesser and none serve me personally, Admiral Benota,” Proon said testily. “We are all equal, and we all serve the Committee, the State and the People together. You would do well to remember that.”
And yet, some are far more equal than others, you prancing cock, Benota thought, but was far too wise to verbalize. When I take my place on the Committee, I will find you a posting commensurate with your petty lack of vision.
“Of course, of course,” Benota soothed. “I will try to flog this fat old body of mine into shape so that I will appear fit for our victory celebration back on Unison.”
“The body is only an animalistic vessel for the mind, Admiral. One cannot allow it to gain the upper hand.”
Benota merely grunted, and perversely wished—fantasized might be a better word—that Beijing would be struck hard enough to damage the bridge. Perhaps Proon would thereby meet with a fatal incident, even if he had to slam the rat-faced man’s head into a console himself under cover of darkness.
This fantasy had been with him for many years, but sadly, it had never materialized.
“Admiral, something’s happening,” Benota’s flag analyst said, highlighting parts of the fleet-tactical holo-table display in front of him. “We’ve knocked out almost a third of the enemy ships, but Indomitable appears to be reorienting.”
Benota leaned forward, bracing one foot on the deck. “Reorienting how?”
“To aim her capital weapons at us, sir.”
“All ships! Evasive action!”
Chapter 33
Ruxin System, Battleship Indomitable, Trapped in Curved Space
“Wolverine is crippled,” said Zaxby. “Multiple causalities. They cannot survive another capital beam strike.” He paused. “Indy, Admiral Straker and Commodore Engels will be dead soon if you do not intervene.”
A vast screeching hum filled Indomitable’s bridge, a discordant noise that morphed from an expression of frustration into anger, and then into an inarticulate roar of… rage? That was the only way Zaxby could characterize it, and its expression transcended the boundaries of human or Ruxin behavior.
Then came Indy’s voice, changed from its calm and dulcet tones to a thing of terror and ruin, still feminine, but like an angry goddess, ringing out at a volume to make his auditory canals ache, and rising from the first word to the last.
“I. Was. Not. Angry since I came to France until this instant!”
France? Zaxby ran a search on his databases, finding a similar line in the canon of Shakespeare that General DeChang liked to quote, from a play called Henry V.
Simultaneously, Zaxby felt Indomitable twist in place, and within the holographic display the battleship began to turn from her broadside aspect. Her bow aimed at the enemy, an offensive orientation.
Indy’s voice thundered, “Ride thou unto the horsemen on yon hill. If they will fight with us, bid them come down, or void the field; they do offend our sight.”
Enemy fire shifted from the battered Liberation fleet onto Indomitable as she lit her main engines to reverse course. It took only moments before she’d moved past the smaller ships that had been trying to defend her. Now, she was closer to the oncoming enemy than they.
“If they'll do neither, we will come to them, and make them skirr away, as swift as stones from slings.”
“She’s targeting them,” said Chief Quade. He pointed at the readouts for Indomitable’s central multi-weapon. “She’s charging the capacitor array. It ain’t never been so full… Hope she don’t tear herself apart.”
Indomitable bucked and shuddered as she dumped power into her railgun, a three-kilometer tube lined with magnetic accelerators, and launched a projectile the size of an attack ship, ten meters across and one hundred long. Nine hundred tons of crysteel accelerated at thousands of gravities, it left a visible trail in space as it smashed through the dust and detritus of battle between the fleets, making it glow hot.
Straight as an arrow it leaped across the distance between, but the range was still long. The projectile passed its target, the enemy flagship Beijing, close enough to rip the tips off several antennas before proceeding into deep space.
“We'll cut the throats of those we have, and not a man of them shall taste our mercy!”
“Particle beam charging now,” said Doctor Nolan, one thin hand pointing its index finger at another array of display
s. “I’ve never seen such efficiency of power distribution. Usually it takes eleven minutes between shots, but I expect her to fire in—”
“Thirty-seven seconds,” said Quade. He turned to Captain Zholin. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I need to get down to Engineering in case she blows a gasket.”
Zholin waved at the man. “Go!” His eyes darted from tech-display to screen to visiplate and back.
The ship didn’t shudder when the capital particle beam fired, but a thrum sang through the bridge like the harp of a demigod. Simultaneously, the superdreadnought nearest Beijing came apart. That was the only way Zaxby could describe the result.
The target didn’t explode, or break, nor did it vent atmo or tumble. It simply burst into hot glowing flame from the front and crumpled like lit tissue paper as the gargantuan stream of positively charged hydrogen ions shattered its molecular structure. Even the heavy reinforcement fields concentrated in the ship’s nose armor barely slowed the beam.
In less than one second, a ship that took years to build, along with the thousands of men and women crewing her, ceased to be. All that remained was a long flare of billions of cooling metallic droplets no bigger than marbles, surrounded by ionized gas.
A cheer resounded throughout Indomitable’s bridge, mostly from the excitable humans. Zaxby merely hummed in satisfaction. “Great shot, Indy,” he said.
Apparently Indy wasn’t listening. “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth. I won’t be meek and gentle with these butchers!”
Zaxby checked his database again. This quote came from a play called “Julius Caesar,” though Indy had updated the text somewhat.
Indomitable continued to blast toward the enemy. “Helm, fuel state,” said Captain Zholin.
“Forty-five percent.”
“Keep me apprised every five percent.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Fire poured into Indomitable’s nose, but the thick, field-reinforced armor shrugged off all shots with ease. Indy aimed her railgun again, locking onto another of the superdreadnoughts.
Zaxby watched as the enemy fleet in the hologram seemed to grow a thousand thorns. “Sir, they’re launching everything they have—missiles, small craft, railgun submunitions.”
Captain Zholin nodded. “They want to force us to turn a defensive broadside.” He glanced up at the overhead, as if toward Indy herself. “I don’t think our avenging angel is in any mood to play their game. Comms, put me on fleetwide.”
“You’re on, sir.”
“Liberation fleet including Unmutuals, this is Captain Zholin commanding the battleship Indomitable. Admiral Straker and Commodore Engels are out of action, so I am coordinating. Indomitable is now in capital weaponry mode. All she needs to utterly demolish our enemy is time. All ships are to come within minimum safe distance and set weaponry to point defense mode. If we can fend off their shipkiller missiles, we’ll win.”
Indomitable rocked once again, and a railgun bullet speared a superdreadnought, now that they were at medium range. The ship was not vaporized, but it shattered like a toy struck by a gatling round. A moment later, survival pods began spreading like seeds from a shaken tree.
“Captain Zholin and Liberation fleet, this is General DeChang.” His voice was smooth and calm. “As long as Admiral Straker is out of action, I’ll take command, if you please. I second your suggestion, Captain Zholin. All ships to defend the battleship from expendable ordnance, but do so from the sides. Let Indomitable take the beam shots, or force the enemy to shift targets. DeChang out.”
Captain Zholin cursed and half-rose from his chair before his restraints caught him. “General—”
“Comlink is broken, sir.”
The captain growled a guttural sound. “Why does he think he can just step in?” he muttered. “He’s no Liberator.”
“It hardly matters right now,” said Zaxby. “If the admiral or the commodore live, they will regain command. If not, now is not the time for a struggle of leadership. The enemy is launching another salvo of approximately four hundred missiles.”
“Fuel at forty percent, sir,” said the helmsman.
“Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!” The particle beam’s targeting reticle focused and Indomitable fired, sending another superdreadnought to ghastly destruction.
“On the other limb,” continued Zaxby, tilting his eyeballs at Captain Zholin, “we might need someone who speaks this ancient version of Earthan, if only to talk Indy down from her fury.”
The wave of ordnance that approached the Liberation combined fleet was all apparently aimed at Indomitable. The other ships began picking off the missiles—or the decoys, it was impossible to tell—and launching countermissiles of their own.
Indy bore forward, not turning her body’s spinal weaponry away from the enemy, which severely limited her ability to use her defensive broadside. However, she did seem to have the presence of machine-mind to spiral slightly, opening up enough angles to bring her secondary beams into play. Most of the first salvo disappeared without connecting with targets, though a few shipkillers exploded near her hull. These, she seemed to shrug off without damage to anything but surface items.
This nullification of the enemy’s best shots seemed to have little effect on their intention to charge in. Whoever was in command was willing to take horrendous damage and lose irreplaceable ships and crews in order to take his crack at Indomitable.
“And my spirit, raging for revenge, with hate by my side come hot from hell, shall with a monarch's voice cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!”
With this declaration, Indomitable flung another monster-sized railgun bullet into the path of the flagship Beijing, which could not evade in time. The projectile smashed obliquely into the bow of the enemy ship and tore a great chunk out of it, knocking her sideways to tumble slowly in zero-G like a hand-light forgotten by a ship’s mechanic.
“Thirty-five percent fuel, sir.”
Another salvo of missiles roared from the tubes of the enemy, now at close range because both fleets were blasting toward each other, bow weapons aimed at their enemies like pointing dogs—dogs of war, as Shakespeare said, Zaxby thought—and then another salvo, then another.
“They’re dumping all their ordnance for a fleet strike,” said Captain Zholin. “Comms, pass to all ships, mass launch, missiles and mines, everything we have. Indy, change to defensive mode, now!”
Indy appeared to ignore his order, but the effectiveness of her point defense weaponry increased anyway. The oncoming enemy fleet came closer and closer by the second. This subtended a greater and greater part of her forward arc and opened the angles on the cloud of over a thousand missiles, allowing free play of the hundreds of lasers along Indomitable’s broadsides.
“Our fuel is down to twenty-five percent, sir.”
Indy’s anger didn’t seem to interfere with her accuracy. Between her fire and that of the remaining Liberation ships, most of the fleet strike was vaporized. However, several contact nukes crashed against Indomitable. Her armor and reinforcing fields were so dense and strong that, though they gouged great divots and scoured her hull clean of externals for a hundred meters in each direction, the blasts didn’t penetrate.
These weakened spots might have been vulnerable to follow-up attacks, but the two fleets were now approaching each other at such velocity, each evading madly, that fine targeting was impossible. In a few brief seconds they passed through each other—ships firing furiously, hard-driven missiles, mines sown in each fleet’s wake and still flying ballistically—and the wreckage of many, many ships.
“Fleet, face about!” Captain Zholin barked, but apparently most of the Liberation fleet was already doing so—they’d been turning already so that they continued to point their weaponized noses toward the enemy and kept firing. Indomitable’s swing was slow, ponderous, but inevitable, and as soon as she lined up again, she fired her railgun and smashed the stern of a dreadnought.
Zaxby watched closely to see w
hat the Mutualists would do. Would they turn to engage again, or would they run?
“Twenty percent fuel state, sir.”
For long seconds he stared at the grand hologram projected above Indomitable’s bridge, searching for evidence of intention to fight, but he saw none. Rather than try to bleed off momentum and come back for more punishment, the enemy was still accelerating, each ship at maximum and stringing out. Faster ships outstripped slower ones, and damaged vessels were left behind completely.
“This foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men, groaning for burial.”
“They’re running,” said Captain Zholin, slumping in his chair with relief. “We’ve won.”
Celebration broke out among the bridge officers, but Zaxby didn’t join them. “Indy?” he said into his own comlink. “Indy, are you there?”
Indomitable fired another particle beam up a fleeing dreadnought’s tailpipes, crippling it.
“Indy, talk to me,” Zaxby said. “Feel free to continue to eliminate threats, but I would appreciate it if you would converse with me.” After all, the more enemy the ship destroyed now, the fewer that must be fought later. Probably the softhearted humans would disagree, but Zaxby didn’t much care about their feelings on this matter.
Indomitable damaged several more enemy ships before they extended beyond effective range at high speed. Once they did, Zaxby could see them turn about and begin a controlled deceleration toward the planet Ruxin and its fortresses. No doubt the enemy thought to repair and shelter there, at least for a time.
“Fifteen percent fuel state, Captain.” Relief crept into the helmsman’s voice. “Expenditure is dropping.”
“Fleet signal from General Dechang aboard Brisbane,” said the comms officer.
Captain Zholin’s face soured visibly. “Fleet signal, is it? Pretentious bastard. Go ahead, put it on.”
General DeChang’s image appeared on the main holo-screen. “Well done, everyone. We’ve suffered many losses, but we’ve won the day, with Indomitable’s help. That’s an amazing ship. I’d like to transfer my flag aboard her as soon as possible.”