Chain of Command

by Frank Chadwick

  A power spike pushed the reactor to standby and we don’t have enough juice left in our one power ring to restart the reaction. We’re floating cold, living off the LENR generators and whatever we’ve got in the ring. Lost our coil gun and some other things, but power’s our big problem right now. Chen, Swanson, are you on?

  This is Chen, Ma’am. I’m on.

  Swanson here.

  Chen, what shape’s your boat?

  Still assessing, ma’am, but for sure we lost the bridge and shroud, our forward power ring, five laser mounts, and three of our four radiators.

  Swanson, how about you?

  We are coasting dark, ma’am. We took a major hit aft and I have no contact with engineering and no power aside from nine percent banked in my power ring. I am still trying to assess the extent of the damage, but it doesn’t look good.

  Okay, Rockaway said. My sensor suite’s mostly broke-dick-no-workee. Anybody have a read on the bad guys?

  “I’ve got a sensor probe live,” Sam said. “Looks as if we got at least one of them—two if that was a ship blowing up back when you cut through them—and damaged the rest. We also took a bite out of a couple transports there at the end. Nine of the cruisers and two transports are still generating power, but we haven’t got a handle on how banged up they are. What are your orders, ma’am?”

  Sam listened to the soft crackle of static for several seconds as Rockaway thought that through.

  Sam slid down the faceplate of his helmet so the crew couldn’t hear his conversation. No telling where this could end up.

  Huh. I just got an encrypted broad beam text from some admiral named Crutchley, commanding the forward squadron of a relief force from Earth. They broke J-space about fifteen minutes ago but the broad beam just got here.

  Sam did some quick mental calculations. “That puts them about three hundred million kilometers out, huh? Their astrogators sure weren’t taking any unnecessary risks, were they?”

  Peacetime habits die hard, Bitka, much harder than flesh and blood mortals. They haven’t learned that yet but they will, soon enough. At least they’re not being stingy with reaction mass. They’re giving us a one gee continuous acceleration for twenty-four hours, with a mid-course flip and deceleration at the end, so they’ll be here in about five days.

  “One gee? Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to be uncomfortable.”

  Reaction mass, Bitka. They aren’t going to find any around here, so they’ll have to revector to Mogo. I figure it’s nice of them to stop off here first. I sent a sitrep to General Irekanmi earlier. Just got his reply. Quote: Reinforcements on the way. Act at your discretion. Unquote.

  My discretion. Goddamn, I love my job, she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “Yeah, I can’t believe they’re paying us,” Sam answered with a laugh. “Who wouldn’t do this for free?”

  What kind of guy laughs at a time like this? he wondered. Maybe somebody half-crazy with relief and surprise that he was still alive.

  Chen and Swanson said nothing.

  Okay, I really hate to say this, Rockaway said, but I’m supposed to act at my discretion, and my discretion tells me we’ve done everything here we can. Our main priority now is saving the boats and crews we’ve got left. I’ll tight beam Kropotkin on Arlo to recover the orbital EVA crews and prepare to pull out. Can Champion Hill maneuver, Bitka?

  “They claimed they can. As beat up as Arlo is, I imagine they can keep up.”

  Okay. Chen, you match course and dock with the wreck of Petersburg, take aboard any survivors. Then dock with us. We’ll run a power link and jump our reactor from your power ring.

  Swanson, see what you can do with your damage, but if necessary we’ll take your crew off as well.

  Bitka, it looks as if Puebla is closest to mission-capable, so you’re our rearguard. You’re already pointed the right direction so give me about ten gee-seconds of acceleration to drop back a way, and keep your eyes on the uBakai.

  Sam ran the numbers in his head. They were headed away from K’tok, and with the hard burn they’d made during combat their departing speed was over thirty kilometers per second. As banged up as their radiators were, they could only manage partial power. Puebla could kick out nine thousand tons of thrust, Cha-Cha probably half that, and who knew if Vimy Ridge or Canal du Nord were even salvageable? It would take a long time to just get stopped and then turned around to head back toward K’tok—too long. Unless the uBakai came after them, they were out of the fight. Rockaway was right. All they had left was to live to fight another day.

  “Aye aye, ma’am.” Sam answered. “Puebla out.”

  So this was what defeat felt like. Not just getting jumped, or taking more damage than you inflicted, but major defeat, as in end of the road, end of the campaign, everything gone for nothing. Still, you had to be alive to know you’d taken a beating, and being alive was better than the alternative. Live to fight another day. But what odds would they face next time?

  The new task force commander with all those reinforcements would decide where to rendezvous. Sam hoped it was close; as many radiators as they’d lost, none of the boats was going to be able to manage much acceleration for a while, and reaction mass was getting to be a big problem. There’s been so many holes punched through Puebla, Sam’s instruments said he was down to less than three thousand tons of hydrogen, and he didn’t really trust the instruments any more.

  The ground troops were the ones who had no way out. Once Arlo and Champion Hill pulled out, once it was clear the orbital bombardment threat was gone, the ground brigade would have to surrender. It was a lousy way for the campaign to wind down for them, and all because the Navy couldn’t figure out how to do their job.

  “Helm, give me whatever acceleration engineering can manage without melting the boat. Cut it after ten gee-seconds of delta vee.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Ensign Barb Lee answered, and hit the acceleration klaxon. In another few seconds the main drive fired, kicking out perhaps a tenth of a gee. At that rate Sam figured the burn would take about two minutes.

  “Gambara, get me a broadcast frequency the uBakai Star Navy monitors.”

  “Sir?” she asked, but when she saw his expression she hastened to bring up a standard frequency listing on her workstation. “Uh . . . got one, sir. You want an open channel?”

  “Yup, and no encryption,” When she signaled him the circuit was live he spoke.

  “This is Captain Sam Bitka of USS Puebla. I know you can hear me. Go ahead and run, you cowardly fucking leatherheads. Slither away into your nests. Who’ll blame you? Of course you’re afraid of us; you only outnumber us two to one.

  “It sure didn’t take much of a beating for you to show the color of your souls, did it? So I guess you’ll live, but I don’t know how you’ll look yourselves in the face. Maybe uBakai warships aren’t equipped with mirrors.”

  Sam cut the channel. He looked down and realized everyone on the bridge had turned and was watching him.

  “Back to work,” he said and they all turned away, but not before Ensign Lee at the helm grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Well, we’ll see if that gets a reaction,” Marina Filipenko said softly.

  “This may be one,” Gambara said. “Incoming tight beam voice from Vimy Ridge for you, Captain,”

  As soon as Sam opened the commlink channel, Commander Sadie Rockaway barked, Why the hell didn’t I think of that?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  13 January 2134

  (minutes later) (twenty-third day in K’tok orbit)

  Vice-Captain Takaar Nuvaash, Speaker For The Enemy, stood in the admiral’s tactical center and waited patiently as e-Lappela vented his anger and incredulity.

  “We defeated them! Don’t they understand that? They are beaten, but they pursue us. They pursue us! I don’t believe it!” he roared. “And these insulting taunts!”

  His voice rose as he spoke and Nuvaash saw the half-dozen members of the admiral’s personal staff
trade uncomfortable glances, ears folded back and skin beginning to flush. Nuvaash kept his own ears relaxed and open by sheer force of will, and he made himself speak calmly.

  “Only one ship pursues us and it would have taken them almost twenty hours to reach K’tok at their initial rate of acceleration. In fact, it has already stopped accelerating and has not come close to reversing its vector. We will arrive at K’tok long before they possibly can, and we will have dealt with their orbital bombardment assets. Then let them come. The ground campaign will be—”

  “Let them come?” the admiral shouted, cutting him off. “Would you have our crews think their leaders fear three Human ships? Will our crews think the Humans have good reason for their confidence? That we are facing some secret weapon?”

  “The crews will follow your orders, Admiral. Tell them this is a trick to lure us away from the objective. Tell them—”

  “I will tell them to tear open the hulls of those ships, to spill their atmospheres and crews into the void like an animal’s guts.”

  Nuvaash felt the blood run to his face.

  “Admiral, our sensor platforms have detected jump signatures, ships arriving above the plane of the ecliptic, and they are not uBakai. The Humans have sent reinforcements. They will be here in a matter of days. We have very little time.”

  “We have sufficient time. To take out the three Human ships and then return to K’tok will take less than a day. All the pieces are on the game table, Nuvaash. Now we will take them one by one, and the first will be the Human captain who thinks he can insult the uBakai Star Navy.”

  e-Lapeela seized Nuvaash by the shoulder, pulled him roughly into his private office, and closed the hatch. Nuvaash had never been manhandled by a superior officer before, had never seen it done to another officer. It came to him it was a remarkably Human reaction. eLapeela was responding as he had hoped the Humans would respond to the attack on Earth—he was over-reacting, and Nuvaash wondered if, as it was sometimes claimed, we eventually become the thing we hate. He expected a rebuke, but instead heard a question.

  “What is wrong with our missiles, Nuvaash? The Humans cannot have survived the barrage we launched.”

  Nuvaash stared at him for a moment, unsure if he was serious. Everyone saw what the Humans had done.

  “Admiral, they used their missiles to kill ours, and used the warhead detonations to cover their ships as they closed the range to attack with their high-powered ship lasers. It is proving an effective combination.”

  “You are the Speaker for the Enemy. Why did you not anticipate this?”

  Nuvaash considered his answer. Why indeed? The situation was beyond the need for nuanced answers, so what was the core truth?

  “I believe the Human admiral is more clever than I,” he answered.

  “That may very well be, but he is not smarter than me,” e-Lapeela shot back. “He will soon find that out and the discovery will be the insight he takes with him to The Beyond.”

  He turned his head to the side and spoke, clearly into his embedded commlink.

  “Senior battle staff. My cabin. Now.”

  Since they had all been standing outside in the admiral’s tactical center, within seconds the three others had filed in and stood at anxious attention.

  “Force status, report” the admiral ordered.

  “Three cruisers destroyed,” the asset chief replied, “including an uKa-Maat salvo cruiser by catastrophic explosion of its reactor. Two of our operational ships have matched course with the others and are trying to recover survivors. Of our nine remaining warships, four have disabled jump drives, including the flagship.”

  “We do not need jump drives,” e-Lapeela answered. “We are where we need to be. Weapons and maneuvability?”

  “One cruiser has lost its power ring, Admiral. Two have lost sufficient radiators they cannot operate their reactors except at low power, All ships have lost some point defense lasers and sensor capability, although we still have an intact battle-net and so can pool our sensor readings.”

  “Missile supply?” the admiral asked.

  The asset chief shifted uncomfortably.

  “Very low, sir. By your command, we made a maximum effort in the first pass. The two surviving salvo cruisers have only forty-two missiles left between them. The other seven cruisers have barely thirty missiles total remaining. The flagship has none.”

  The admiral turned to his tactical advisor, the Master of the Lance.

  “What course do you advise?” he demanded, although Nuvaash had already learned that e-Lapeela never seemed to follow Lance’s advice.

  “We should continue to K’tok, eliminate the orbital bombardment force, and clear the way for the ground forces to recapture the needle downstation. This renders the enemy fleet irrelevant, until they can bring more troops. In any case, we will have time to prepare the defenses of the downstation and the surrounding city. It will need more than two or three cohorts of Azza-kaat for them to take it back.”

  Azza-kaat were the troops dropped in meteoric assaults from orbit, which Nuvaash knew the Humans called Mike Troopers.

  e-Lapeela turned to his senior advisor. “Speaker for the Future, what do you counsel?”

  Although he was senior, Nuvaash considered the Future’s Speaker the weakest and least-self-confident of the admiral’s advisors. His only talent, so far as Nuvaash could determine, was an uncanny ability to understand in advance what advice the admiral most wanted to hear.

  “Attack the Human ships now. Wipe away the insult with their screams. K’tok will still be there when we are finished.”

  Finally e-Lapeela turned to Nuvaash. “Speaker for the Enemy, what do you counsel?”

  Nuvaash looked at him and could tell this was as much challenge as question. He was not asking what Nuvaash thought so much as where he stood. He thought only for a moment before answering.

  “The transports cannot easily decelerate and one has suffered critical damage. Send them on to K’tok as planned. There is one Human ship in orbit there. Send the two cruisers with heavy damage to their radiators as escorts, as they can hardly match the acceleration the fleet will need to turn on the enemy. They should be able to finish that destroyer. Turn and fight with the other cruisers.”

  Admiral e-Lapeela nodded.

  When it became clear the uBakai were decelerating and intended to turn back on them, Sam felt a sense of dread wash over him. Yes, he had pulled them away from K’tok for a few hours, bought the ground troops, Arlo, and Champion Hill perhaps another day of life. But he might have purchased it with the lives of his crew and that of the other two boats in the task group.

  Then it got worse. As the sensor echoes made increasing clear, there were now two groups of enemy ships, drawing away from each other. The transpirts were still heading for K’tok. He had gained nothing.

  Although it had seemed as if it took hours, the initial engagement, from the time the uBakai fleet emerged from J-space to the time the surviving boats of the task group had passed far enough beyond them to be out of effective laser range, was only slightly over ten minutes. Twenty minutes later the uBakai had begun decelerating, by which time the distance between the two forces had grown to over fifty thousand kilometers. Seven uBakai cruisers turned to face two damaged destroyers and two more without power, trying to save as many lives and repair as much damage as possible.

  “Gambara, tight beam to Vimy Ridge.”

  Rockaway, here. How’s it look back there. Bitka?

  “Well, ma’am, they took the bait, but they’re sending five ships on to K’tok. Looks like two transports for sure, maybe two cruisers, and can’t make out what the fifth one is.”

  Well, it was a good try. I’ll tell Kropotkin to get ready to pull the plug.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but I think that may be premature. They are only sending two or maybe three cruisers, and we know we banged them up. I don’t think they realize we have Champion Hill operational. I think they figure to face only one de
stroyer, probably damaged. I know they don’t know about the block fours we seeded in orbit.”

  What’s your idea, Bitka?

  “Have Arlo stay in low orbit, engage with missile fire, but have the Hill stay dark, play dead. Make those cruisers come to them and trip the orbital missiles. Then have the Hill join in. It may be the edge they need—at least psychologically. If either of those boats of ours survive, we still hold orbital space, and as long as we do the leatherheads can’t move against the grunts, right?”

  Well, it’s sounds a lot better than just running away. Okay, we’ll try it.

  The math of their situation was both simple and stark. It took the uBakai forty minutes to cancel their residual vector and begin accelerating back toward what was left of the Human task group, and it would take another hour to match the velocity of the destroyers hurtling away from K’tok. By that time the distance between the two forces would have opened to almost two hundred thirty thousand kilometers, but from then on the distance would steadily close.

  One comfort Sam took from these numbers was that they showed a steady acceleration of about three-quarters of a gee. The uBakai ships were capable of better than that, but they must have taken a beating as well in the confused melee. At least some of them couldn’t manage more than that, and the uBakai admiral had not decided to surge ahead with his less-damaged ships.

  He was afraid to.

  The other comfort—although a very mixed one—came a little over an hour after the initial battle, when the uBakai transports and escorts reached K’tok. It was a short, sharp engagement which Sam and the other survivors were able to follow by a live voice report from the Combined Expeditionary Brigade’s rear service unit on the needle highstation. The supply personnel had a ringside seat, about twenty thousand kilometers above the main action, which was mostly fought in low and middle orbit.

  Okay, I think Arlo is firing again. There goes another nuke. Not sure if it was ours or theirs. Oh! Arlo just got hit. I don’t have its tag any more. Dex, does that mean it’s knocked out? Shit. We’re going to . . . wow! Another nuke, and this was one of ours. The laser hit that one cruiser hard. He’s free-floating. I can see atmosphere and a lot of wreckage and—wait! Champion Hill’s tag just came up and it’s accelerating up-orbit. What the hell do they think they can do? That other leather-head cruiser—looks like he’s rotating to fire. There’s a missile off but, Jesus they’re close! The Hill’s firing, maybe at the missile, hard to see what . . . Aw, man. The Hill’s hit. Hit again. There goes its bottle! Jesus, it just blew up! It’s gone! We’re fucked. We’re—wait, Arlo’s tag is back on. They must have power up. There’s so much shit down there, I can’t see shit. Dex, can you tell what’s going on? I think . . . is that another hit on the leather-head? Yeah, his tag’s flashing. He’s down. Arlo’s accelerating up-orbit, going for the transports. Go get em, Arlo!