"Aye, sir."
Engine shutdown. Back to zero-gee. Impervious and the frigates flew on.
Sir George worked at his planning. The two fleets would pass through each other at a relative speed of about one hundred and five miles a second. The tanker-ships seemed to be well to the rear of the Guardian fleet, which meant there would be marginally more time to hit them before the Guards had passed through the Imp's trajectory. Sir George ordered the ship brought about to aim her stern through the direction of flight—as soon as the Imp was through the Guard fleet, she would have to start matching velocity with the enemy.
The laser cannon crews were given their targets and ordered to stand by. The lasers would be effective at a range of no more than ten thousand miles—and that gave them just over a minute and a half to hit those tankers. Sir George ordered all debris and wreckage thrown overboard and dispersed as widely as possible. With a little luck, one of the Guard ships would run into something, anything. Hitting a Styrofoam cup at one hundred and five miles a second could wreck a ship.
He looked around for Joslyn—she was a comfort, one of the few people he, the captain, could talk to. Oh, yes, she had to get to the flight deck and get her crews ready. It occurred to him that there was battle on the way, and his niece was on the front lines of it. He might never see her again—and he couldn't remember her leaving just now. Well, good luck to her. The way to make her safest was to do his own job properly. But he had already done all he could. It was time to wait again. And time for another bloody cup of tea.
All eight flights of fighters sortied again, an hour before intercept. They held station on the Imp, ready and waiting for action. The fast frigates each deployed their three auxiliary craft. Everyone got ready.
Time moved slowly, wearing on nerves, until the moment when it began to move all too rapidly. "At effective laser range in three minutes," the weapons officer announced.
Sir George thrummed his fingers nervously on the arm of the command chair.
"Two minutes. Impervious and escort craft all well clear of enemy ship's fusion plumes."
Good. Now if those bastards could keep from changing course for a few minutes, the Impervious might not get melted down to slag.
"Sir!" McCrae called. "I have just picked up a very jammed-up radar pulse coming from the Guard fleet. They'll have spotted us now."
"How could they spot us? Is it something we don't have?" Sir George asked anxiously. If the Guards could see through a fusion plume, the League might be in very serious trouble.
"No, sir. Brute force detection, that's all. They're pumping a hell of a big pulse through the radar and seeing if anything makes it back through the plume. Useless at more than this range, and at our closing velocity they don't have time to respond and maneuver anyway. It's an impact warning system, that's all."
Good. Then you might as well crank up our active radar, Ensign, since they know we're here. Pass the refined targeting data along, obviously."
"Sir!" McCrae grinned. It had been frustrating as hell to sit on top of those monster radars for all these long hours without the chance to use them.
"One minute."
"And here we go," Sir George announced. "Put tactical on the main screen." The ship's computers drew a diagram that showed the Imp and her allies and antagonists. Neatly labeled dots on a screen.
"All four laser cannon trained on target one. Concentrated fire commencing—mark!"
"Detection—any effect on the tanker?"
"Temperature of target climbing rapidly. There's a brightness flare! Something has blown on it! Tanks, or the engines, I can't see."
"Laser crew! Shift to target two!. Fire torpedo volley at target one, track it two ways, for constant thrust and for no thrust!" Sir George called, his heart pounding with excitement. Battle well and truly joined, for the first time in his long life.
McCrae was going happily mad, watching nine kinds of monitors at once. "Range to second target much shorter; booml She blew already. Definitely an engine meltdown that time."
Sir George turned to the weapons officer. "Split your fire! Two cannon on target three, two on four! Torpedo volley on target two, as planned!"
"Sir!" McCrae was near a fit. "Incoming laser fire. They've ranged us."
"Intensity?"
"We can take it, and they're not holding target well. But you can bet there's more on the way. Boom twicel Third and fourth tankers blown!"
"Target five!"
The weapons officer shook his head. "Sorry, sir, we're already outside effective range for five."
Sir George looked again at the tactical display on the big screen. The Impervious had already flown clear through the opposing fleet. "Bloody hell. That didn't take long. I want torps chasing targets three four and five. Flight Boss. Are escorting craft at safe distance for maneuver
"Aye, sir."
Helmsman, you may commence planned maneuver on schedule."
"Sir. Attitude at thrust heading. Thirty seconds to throttle-up to three gravities thrust.
"Communications, warn all hands."
"ALL HANDS. STAND BY FOR THREE GRAVITIES THRUST OF PROLONGED DURATION."
"Detection. Damage to enemy fleet."
"Sir. Too soon to read it. Four of the five tankers are out, either wrecked or engines overheated and blown. All four are unable to maneuver. Our torpedoes still chasing them. It will take at least three hundred seconds to call hits and misses."
"And the attack fleet itself?"
"No hits as yet, sir. The frigates and the Wombats are chasing them.”
"TEN SECONDS TO THREE GRAVITIES."
No chance to bother with using half the engines for safety's sake now. It was a stern chase, and the engines would hold or they wouldn't. Depending on how the Guards reacted, they could be under three-gees for ten minutes or three hours. The great fusion engines roared to life and slapped everyone down into their chairs. The Imp shed her velocity starward and headed back in toward Britannica. She would catch the Guards sooner or later, but she was out of the game for the time being. It was up to the frigates and the fighters.
Twenty-three hours had passed since the first rock had hit the Impervious.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Deep Space, Britannic Star System
Five gravities was no fun. Now Joslyn found herself wishing she didn't have a pressure suit. The damn thing was designed for use in high-gee situations, but it wasn't exactly comfortable. Joslyn hated high gravities, had wanted the retro-burn to be over the moment it had started. But the Guardian fleet was already far ahead, and it would take some chasing to catch them.
The Guardian ships were moving toward Britannica at about eighty miles a second now, still braking, slowing all the time. The Imp's fighters had started their retro-burns while moving away from the planet at twenty-two miles a second. The fighters had to lose that speed, reverse course, and then gain speed moving the other way, chasing hell-for-leather after the invaders. It was going to be a long ride.
Joslyn watched the Guardian fleet in her radar. Now the gloves were off, as far as detection equipment went. Both sides knew exactly where the other was, and every frequency was full of radar. The Guards were holding formation for the moment—no, wait a moment.
"Albert Leader to all units. They're splitting their forces. Half the ships are decelerating at higher thrust, call it four-gees. They'll match with our velocity plenty damn quick at that rate. The second half of the fleet maintaining previous thrust—including the fuel ship."
"Albert Four here. Right-o, Joslyn. What's the plan?"
Joslyn checked the numbers. The fighters and the frigates were still in formation together, now headed sunward at about twelve miles a second, perhaps half a million miles from Britannica. The Imp was well behind them, just about dead in space and starting to gather speed back in toward the planet.
'They're the ones who are short of fuel, lads and lassies. We let them do the work. All ships, shut down all engines in thirty seconds from my mark—MARK. We let
them come to us, take one firing pass through them, then relight our engines. We barrel on in toward the planet to take on the second team. We should be able to reform on the Impervious and move in as a fleet if we time it right."
Joslyn cut her engines with the rest of them, glad of an excuse to get back into zero-gee. Let the Guard fleets get tired and worn by gunning around at high gees.
But the second team, the half of the fleet following the fuel ship ... if she had been coaching the opposition, she would have ordered the second team to cut their engines altogether. Without the braking thrust, the ships would have fallen in toward Britannica—and away from the Imp— fester. And the Imp was worth getting away from. So why had they kept to their plodding one-gee thrust?
Aha! Because if they delayed braking, they would have to brake at a higher thrust later on, to make up for the deficiency. And that fuel ship was barely keeping up the pace as it was. And they needed that fuel ship. It was their last ticket out of the system.
In other words, the fuel ship couldn't manage any better than one-gee. It was a fact worth remembering.
Second Lieutenant Madeline Madsen, Royal Britannic Navy, wasn't interested much in strategy or deception schemes or fleet movements. She knew only that there were twenty-five large enemy ships heading straight for her, intent on killing her.
She was interested only in her armament, her fuel, having her pressure suit sealed and ready. She wanted to stay alive, and that meant shooting her way through the Guardian fleet and coming out the other side. Simple.
In some part of herself, she wanted to get mad at the powers that be, because she was merely a pawn, a player's piece in all this—except Captain Thomas and Commander Larson were out here risking their lives too, and the p.m. and the governor general would die just as dead if the Guards bombed the capital. Every ship's commander in the fleet had been in that bloody hangar. They paid the piper, too.
Pawns weren't the only ones dying.
Madeline carefully watched all her screens, rehearsed her firing run, targeting, maneuvers, laid it all into the computer. If she went out, she'd leave the opposing side something to remember her by.
She knew her job—and knew that all the schemes, the strategy, the studies, the simulations, the training, the ships, the expense, the time, the whole damn Navy, had only the point of putting young women and men where they could fight. All of it, the great confusing, clanking, ponderous bureaucratic machinery, was there only so she could be here, to put a few ergs of energy or a few ounces of metal into the enemy ships.
At the moment, she would have been just as happy if the bureaucratic machinery hadn't worked. She was scared, actually aware that she might die, for the first time in her short life.
Time stopped meaning much. She was ready. All she could do was wait. The Guards were coming straight for the Wombats. Maddy swore to herself. They were still braking. The Wombats would be moving at less than five miles a second, relative to the Guards, when they passed through each other's formation.
And it started. Her first assigned target in range. Two torps away and watch for incoming. There. Radar and optical were both tracking it. A torp coming right for her. Use the recoilless gatling guns, throw some metal at it. The gats fired two-ounce steel cylinders, and spread their ammo far and wide. You fired five thousand rounds and hoped one hit. One did. A flash of light, and radar said the torp had stopped accelerating.
But her IFF said someone had her lined. Time to randomize the situation. She kicked in her main engines at six-gees for ten seconds, then spun through ninety degrees and fired her auxiliary thrusters to confuse the track a bit more. Another target. Close enough for lasers, by God. She opened up, gave the target fifteen seconds at full power, then shut down and gave them a dose of Doctor Gatling for good measure.
They had had time and a half to get her lined. Without regard for heading or targets, she fired her mains again, full open, ten-gees for three seconds, then spun end-for-end and braked at ten for another three. That should get her off their screens for a bit.
Time to look around. Tally-ho! Short range—the target was braking, heading straight for her, its fusion plume actually visible to the naked eye.
She had two torps with ablative coatings that could survive, very briefly, in a fusion plume. Time to see if they worked. She loosed one of them at the plume, then maneuvered again, quartering around to get a clear shot at the enemy ship with a conventional torp—
—No need, up she goes! She wasn't sure her torp had had time to get there and hit. But good lord, that ship had been close! Not more than a hundred miles off, at most—
A jarring impact. Red light! Fuel tank two, damn. She was venting hydrogen, bleeding like a stuck pig. The auto damage control took over, pumped to the other tanks, shut it down. Still alive.
Maddy didn't stop to worry about how close the call was. Time to move. For all she knew, she had just flown right into her own gatling gun fire, or hit a random fragment from a blown ship—but she had to assume that a bandit had her lined and was ready to nail her.
Ten-gees again, at a crazy skew to her current course, twenty full seconds, and she wanted to black out and throw up at the same time.
Another target—no, the radar's IFF said it was an aux ship off one of the frigates. She pulled her hands back from the weapons panel and left the aux to her own devices. No radio calls on targets in a fight like this— though there had never been a fight like this before—but ships were too far apart, the complexities of ship-to-ship combat too much to worry about to allow time for calling in a bandit at twelve o'clock high.
And Maddy wondered where the hell she was, and where she was going—oh balls and bastards, she was headed straight out of the system, practically in formation with the Guards. Time to move. Two more bandits, two more torps apiece, and another rip from the gats. She took ten seconds out to take a proper bearing and slammed her engines into gear again, bringing her back to original course and heading in one violent, twisting corkscrew maneuver.
On the radar, dead ahead. A Guardian ship. A straggler. Derelict. Dead in space. Easy target. Was the ship already wrecked, all hands lost? Were they willing to surrender, prisoners to interrogate? Were they making repairs right now—would this be the ship that made the direct hit that blew the Imp when she passed this way? A sitting duck.
Maddy gave it thirty seconds with the lasers that ripped the hull open from stem to stern.
And then she looked up and space was clear. So that was battle. She didn't know it would be that easy. And suddenly she was thinking again, a human being and not a trained shipkiller. She looked to the radar where the derelict still showed, well behind her now. That was the only ship she was absolutely certain she had blown. Would they have surrendered? Battle. She didn't know it would be that hard, either.
Sir George frowned at his screens. Two frigates, three frigate's auxiliary ships, six fighters. Lost; dead. And twelve Guard ships blown.
That left thirteen ships waiting in the Imps path. And these Guardian ships were clearly designed for battle against big ships. They might have had trouble with the fighters, but they could out-maneuver the Imp easily.
A pincer. If the escort fleet was up to it. "Communications. Can we get a secure link to Commander Larson?"
"I'll try sir. The Guardianships are right between the Imp and Albert Leader. They might pick it up."
"That's what scramblers are for, Lieutenant."
"Yes, sir."
"See what you can do. Ah, another thing. Do we still have the link to Mountbatten?" Yes, sir.
"Patch it through to my headphones, if you please. This is Captain Thomas calling Lieutenant Commander Pembroke. Awaiting your reply." The laser beam would have to carry the message across a million miles of space, and then it would take a minute to get Pembroke on line. More waiting, and very little else to occupy Sir George's attention in the meantime.
He suddenly felt very old and tired. He hadn't slept since the night before the reception
—over thirty-six hours now. It seemed more like a century before. This was a young man's game. And would have been, if the Guards had held off for a day. Young Captain Thorpe-Peron would have had the comm, with a full flag staff to run the battle with him, instead of one broken-down old remittance man.
But Sir George knew he had done well. The Guards should have won the Battle of Britannica in the first thirty seconds. But it seemed he had a sporting chance to turn a disaster into a victory. The Guardians were in trouble now. "Pembroke here. Awaiting your reply. From what we're receiving on laser-link, I offer my congratulations, Captain."
"Thomas replying. Thank you. But it might be time for you to do your bit. We've split their fleet. There are twenty-six ships headed your way at one-gee. This will take some timing, but we are going to try forcing them to move fester—right into your gently grinning jaws, if we can manage. The twenty-sixth ship is their fuel ship, their ticket home. We think it can't do more than about one-gee. Knock that ship out, and our visitors can't get home. They won't have the fuel to run far, and we can hunt them down.
"Now let me be honest enough to tell you what you've already guessed. One very good reason that I left the rest of the fleet behind is all your commanding officers are dead. They were killed in the first moments. The junior officers commanding the ships I left behind are all we have. When we were feeing an unknown enemy coming from an unknown direction at unknown strength, I could not risk His Majesty's ships in untried hands.
"The odds are better now. We've gotten a look at the Guard ships and what they can do, and I think if we use you properly, we can bounce the Guardian fleet to pieces. So far, to quote, 'We have scotched the snake, not killed it.'
"And I must ask you a question. The lives of your crew, the survival of the Britannic fleet—and the safety of Britannica itself—rely on your answer. Can you young fellows handle those ships in battle, completely on your own? I will not be able to help you. The Impervious will have her hands full. Say no, and whether you are wrong or right, the Britannic fleet will survive, and these Guard ships will escape, and possibly destroy a ship or two of ours. That will be a small price to pay for the survival of the fleet as a fighting force. Answer yes, and be wrong, and we face disaster. I order you to think before you answer, to confer with your fellow acting commanders, and consider well. Answer on your honor, not on your pride. That is all." Thomas cut the contact.
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