Sandy shook her head. If the aliens knew what they were up against, would they call it quits? She’d seen the pictures from that horror house. If she stayed out here long enough, she’d need to take the trip herself, out to see it with her own eyes. A team of scientists had come out from Wardhaven with her fleet specifically on the chance they might get to spend a month examining the last remains of so many races.
Humans were curious. No proof to the contrary, the aliens were not.
Nor were they likely to change.
Sandy finished her watch with the squadron still going smoothly at 4.3 gees. She turned the watch over to Penny and dimmed her station. She’d done a good four hours of work.
She and Penny switched watches three times before the jump came up. Both were awake for that. The squadron’s ships shot through the tiny pinhole in space less than a second apart. Each ship matched its velocity and acceleration exactly to the alien ships that had gone through before them.
Chapter 33
Nav quickly reported, “All eight ships of the squadron are through, ma’am. We’ve jumped 784 light years.”
Sensors was only a second behind her. “I have the aliens. There is a lot of jamming, but I have thirty-six cruisers and they appear to be on a course to sling shot themselves around a rocky planet and shoot themselves off for another jump.
“Jamming?” Penny demanded before Sandy would have.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve got the ships, but I can’t read anything about the reactors anymore.”
“Is one of their ships having an engineering casualty?” Penny asked. “They’ve blown themselves out of space a few times when their reactors were push too much too far,” she advised Sandy.
The lieutenant on sensors shook his head inside his egg. Very carefully. “It could be the planet they’re passing. It’s making noise like an overheated gas giant but it shows on our sensors as a sold chunk of rock.”
Time was wasting. An admiral had orders to issue.
“Comm, send to squadron, ‘Set course for the rock, acceleration 4.1 gees.’”
A sling shot swing around a planet could give a push to the just as well as the unjust.
Once again, Sandy switched four hour watches with Penny. By the end of Penny’s first watch, the intell officer was still puzzling over that rocky planet they were aiming for. “Noise. Nothing but noise off that pebble. No planet should be that noisy.”
“Space is vast and full of surprises,” Sandy answered and sent Penny to nap.
By the end of Penny’s second watch, the woman was downright paranoid. “There is something definitely wrong with that planet. Noise all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. Nature just doesn’t do that.”
“You’ve spent too much time with one of those damn Longknifes,” Sandy said. “You’re getting as paranoid as one of them.”
“Yeah, but it’s keeps them alive, hasn’t it?”
Which burned Sandy. All too often, the Longknifes stayed alive because a Santiago died in their place.
Sandy said nothing, and sent Penny to rest.
However, her alien advisor had gotten her commander’s attention.
Too damn many Santiagos had died for the Longknife legend, she fumed. Then came up short.
Am I about to add another name to a list with way too many already?
Sandy spent the watch studying the rock they were accelerating toward.
At the velocity and acceleration, they had on the ships, they’d have to nearly skim the surface of that planet to get every bit of the extra acceleration they could.
A planet that cloaked its secrets like a striptease queen in an overcoat and galoshes wanted them to get up close and personal.
Where have I heard that before?
Right.
The alien warships all full of lasers that you never want to let get up in your face.
Sandy slept on that thought and awoke with the absolute conviction that that particular planet was not protecting its secrets for any reason good.
Penny had no pointed questions for Sandy as she briefed her before turning over the watch.
“Don’t sack out just yet,” Sandy told her intel chief. “Sensors, talk to me about that rock we’re headed for.”
“It’s a rock. A big rock that has no right to be making all that noise.”
“Is it inhabitable?”
That got Penny’s eyebrows up.
“No ma’am,” came as a slow answer. “Not unless someone’s come up with an alien species that can breathe vacuum and eat rock. As dead planet come, it’s right up there with the deadest.”
“Okay, Penny, I may need all the computing power your Mimzy and Bruce’s Chesty have got. Get me the skippers of the Newcastle and Yawata.”
“Them?”
“Yep, the cats are about to earn their pay.”
As if Sandy didn’t have enough suspicions dancing a jig with the small hairs on the back of her neck, sensors interrupted the discussion.
“One of the alien cruiser’s deceleration is falling off rapidly. It’s down to 2.8. 2.6. Others are falling out of high boost. Four, eight, fifteen. Ah, all of them”
By the time the ships settled down, they were all steady at 1.5 gee.
“Interesting,” Sandy said. “Very interesting.
Chapter 34
The rock that held Sandy’s interest kept one face toward them and the other face, the one they’d be making a close pass by, away from them. They could see a bit around it, but would only get a good look at that side as they sped by it at over 700,000 kilometers an hour.
That wouldn’t give much time to sightsee.
Making matters worse, as they closed on the planet and got a better view around the edge to that other side, it turned out to have a huge crater wall shielding a vast bit of territory from view.
“If you were setting up an ambush,” Sandy asked Penny, “where would you put it?”
“In that crater. Likely as close to that wall as possible to give you more time when you weren’t in our view. That would also let them shoot longer over the far side of the crater as we’re going away.
“My thoughts entirely.”
“We could have our lasers ready as we go over the lip of the crater,” Penny said, “but I’m guessing they’ll have tons of lasers firing back at us.”
“Worse, whoever is setting up this ambush will have observation posts on the wall of that crater, picking out targets, tracking them and getting the range dialed in just right,” Sandy said.
“They could see us, but we wouldn’t have any idea of what we were about to face,” Penny agreed.
Sandy sighed. It was too late to avoid this. They had way too much energy on the boats. Still, there were several ways around this little problem. Which would she pick?
Silly question, the peace had gone long, but it hadn’t dulled Sandy’s fighting instincts.
“Comm, order the squadron to Condition Zed. Make sure the crystal is nice and smooth forward.”
“Done, ma’am,” Comm reported.
“Newcastle and Yawata, take the lead.”
The rest of the squadron dropped down a fraction of a gee to allow those ships to move ahead. Once they were in place, the squadron resumed its steady 4.1 gee acceleration, adding on the velocity, relentlessly in pursuit of the fleeing cruisers.
It only took a few orders to the two lead ships and Sandy watched as a new window was added to her board. She spent a lot of time checking in with Mimzy’s and Chesty on exactly what she wanted.
What she asked, they provided.
How do you pin a medal on a computer? She would have to try.
Relentlessly, physics ruled this battlefield with an iron rod. Gravity now added to their acceleration, hurling them at the planet even faster than the outrageous speed their reactors had already built up.
With close encounter only seconds away, Grand Admiral Maria Santiago gave the command that she had thought no human commander would ever give again.
“Newcastle, Yawata, launch nuclear strike.”
Chapter 35
Nine specially crafted Smart MetalTM missiles fanned out from the two lead battlecruisers. Mimzy and Chesty had specifically designed them to be quite unique. They accelerated at twenty gees, leaving the launch ships behind like they were standing still.
No sooner were the first nine away than another nine launched out, and then another. Five separate and distinct waves were soon on their way, rocketing ahead of the Sandy’s squadron. The missiles in each wave had been designed for a specific purpose and each followed different paths toward the crater and its fiercely guarded secret.
The first nine flew low. They had been programmed to target the lip of the ridge. By going low, they benefitted from its masking value that previously had gone to the aliens. If the suspected massed laser batteries were in that crater they did not get a shot at this incoming death.
Nine twenty megaton warheads exploded against the ridge a fraction of a second before they would have smashed themselves to atoms.
Instead they blew themselves to atoms. Themselves and the crater lip along with whatever observation posts the alien commander had stationed there. If the posts had any defense, Sandy saw no evidence of any effort to take out the missiles.
Evenly spaced along the lip, thermonuclear warheads converted the rocky ridge line into hell.
Just as evenly spaced, but offset to streak between the thermonuclear explosions, came nine more missiles, likewise uniquely designed by Nelly’s kids. Humanity had never super-hardened anything against the electromagnetic pulse of a huge nuclear explosions, but humanity had the skill to do it. In the last several hours humanity’s best computers had done just that.
Nine rockets shot through the potentially fratricidal effect of the first line of strikes and kept going.
These nine came in higher than the first ones. They dove over the lip of the crater. Again, just nanoseconds before they would have destroyed themselves, their twenty megaton explosions wreaked havoc on whatever lurked unseen inside the crater.
A third wave followed the general course of the first strike. These missiles were not only designed super-hardened against electromagnetic pulse, but their Smart MetalTM protected them from the hellish fire and shock waves coming off the first line of expanding nuclear clouds.
They shot through the upper reaches of the raging maelstrom, then dove.
For a fraction of a second, they might have stood out on radar as targets, but only a fraction of a second. They exploded two thousand feet above the crater floor, flattening everything beneath them for a mile or more.
This was Sandy’s one uncertainty. How fast could the aliens react? Could their computers quickly acquire a target, slave their lasers to it, then fire? It was impossible for Sandy to know that answer. She’d only find out when her ships streaked over the crater when some lasers remained to shoot at them.
Wave after wave, second by second, missiles streaked above the rising nuclear hell before they dove to add their own line to the advancing wall of destruction.
Sandy’s ships sped towards their rendezvous with what she was now sure was an ambush. An ambush she had tripped early. Ahead of them, now, a wall of nuclear hellfire rose up from the planet.
Close encounter would have her ships skimming the planet by a mere five hundred kilometers. At that altitude, the roiling hell clouds of the atomic demons should not reach out for them.
It also meant that Sandy’s ships would have little time to shoot at anything that survived.
Assuming any did.
“Zero acceleration. Nose on to that rock,” Sandy ordered.
Her squadron lost all acceleration. In their high gee stations, crew went from the oppression of weighing over four times their normal to weighing nothing.
Lasers were fully loaded. Half were at full power, ready to smash through armor or rock, if the aliens had chosen to dig their lasers in.
The other half were at ten percent power, with the ship’s power grid ready to feed juice to them just as fast as they pumped power out. These would be targeted at anything the aliens left out in the open that hadn’t been smashed by the thermonuclear attack.
At the speed the squadron was traveling, it would be impossible for the human eye to spot targets, track the lasers in on them, then fire.
As much as it pained Sandy, she surrendered her squadron to Mimzy and Chesty for fire direction. The two computers were now weapons free on both the Birmingham and the Essen, with the other ships’ fire controls slaved to them, but with that pesky speed of light delay.
What happened next took less than a second. Sandy only came to understand it when Mimzy played it back in super-slow motion.
“You were right. There was an ambush waiting for us,” Mimzy said.
“The nuclear bombs took care of most of it. From the partially wrecked equipment we saw on our pass, they had packed that crater with lasers just as tight as they could. Think of an dense black berry thicket,” the computer offered.
Having never seen a black berry thicket, dense or otherwise, Sandy had no real frame of reference, but she assumed they were packed as tight as ready rounds in an ammo box.
“Some of the missiles must have either failed to explode or been intercepted. We hosed down the untouched areas. I doubt if many aliens survived. I would guess that if any actually are still alive down there, the expanding nuclear shockwaves will likely rip them to pieces or fry them. Likely both.”
The computer paused for the humans to comprehend the full extend of her words.
“I don’t think you need to worry about going back to finish them off,” Mimzy concluded.
The bridge crew had fallen silent as a tomb, while the computer narrated what the main screen was showing. Sandy hated to break that silence. Even murderous monsters deserved some respect for their slaughtered dead.
Still, she had a fleet to command.
“Comm, send to squadron. Course for the jump. Stand by to acceleration at 4.1 gees.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. All report course for the jump loaded. Standing by for 4.1 gee acceleration.”
“Punch it.”
BatRon 18 resumed its grim pursuit of the fleeing thirty-six alien cruisers that had been the bait for this trap.
Chapter 36
It quickly became clear that leading the squadron into the ambush had been the primary objective of the cruisers.
While Sandy had been concentrating on blowing her way through and past the ambush, the cruisers had adjusted their course. They were now decelerating at 3.2 gees toward a gas giant.
“Nav, talk to me about their course.”
“If they can hold to this deceleration, they should be able to use that planet to sling shot themselves back in our general direction. They’ll still be going awful fast, ma’am.”
Mimzy had her own assessment. “If they were willing to risk a very close pass, say skimming close enough to get warmed by the upper-most atmosphere, they might get closer to us. If they deployed even the most rudimentary sort of air brakes, they could slow themselves down and be headed very much in our direction.”
“I wonder what they’ll do now?” Penny asked.
Sandy could only shake her head. What would she do if her plan had been busted up as bad as this one had?
For now, she had orders to give.
“Comm, send to squadron “Change course for gas giant. Set Condition Charlie. Deceleration 1.25 gee on my mark. Release one quarter of the crew to quarters to get cleaned up. Rotate every thirty minutes.”
“All ships acknowledge, ma’am.”
“Send my mark.”
Suddenly, Sandy felt so light she could fly. After so long in under punishing gees, a mere 1.25 gees was easy. Her joy was short lived as she also felt the dirt and grim of the last couple of days. She was glad this contraption made sure no one could smell her.
“Penny, you take the first break. I’ll take the watch here.”
“Admiral, it will
be at least an hour before we see how they’re reacted to what we did back there. Would you please go first? I’d hate to have to haul you out of the shower if something came up fifty-five minutes from now.”
With the lid off of her egg, Sandy could run a worried hand through her hair. It was damp and oily from the sweat she’d worked up during the long pursuit and smashing the ambush.
“Okay, you win this one, Captain.”
“Good admiral, now go get cleaned up. I can smell you from here.”
Sandy made a face at her intel chief, but motored the egg off the bridge and into her quarters. That shower was as close as she’d been to ecstacy in years.
Sandy pulled on fresh clothes and returned to the bridge. There, the eggs had vanished back into the deck, leaving the crew standing their watches in very much undress nothing.
Penny greeted Sandy with a smile, a ham and cheese sandwich and a steaming mug of coffee.
“You stink,” Sandy said. “Go shower with Masao. Think of how much water we’ll save.”
“It’s all recycled, or burned as fuel,” Penny said, but with a smile in her boyfriend’s direction, they strode quickly from the bridge.
Sandy was pretty sure that something was coming up there.
As she munched her sandwich, Sandy studied the surviving aliens in the system. They were still braking toward the gas giant at 3.2 gees.
“Sensors, can you tell me anything about that rock we just plastered?”
“We aren’t getting any more jamming, I can definitely report that, Admiral. As for what’s left, it’s hard to tell. The noise from those thermonuclear explosions has pretty much settled down. I cannot pick up any reactors, nor are any capacitors making noise. Ma’am, it sounds like a very dead rock should sound.”
Sandy thought for a moment about any intelligent life that might be struggling to survive in that living hell she’d created back there. Then she reflected on what they intended to do to her and her squadron.
Kris Longknife's Replacement: Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 17