Kris allowed herself a chuckle. They were going to be few and far between this week.
Behind her, lashed together in groups of four, battlecruisers began popping into the system every ten seconds. Their Smart MetalTM allowed them to latch on to each other, binding themselves together with a force as strong as any atomic molecule. That made for a lot less risk when you set out to cram a huge fleet through a tiny jump.
As soon as the battlecruisers exited the jump, they split apart and put distance between themselves. Even coming through in quads, her entire battle fleet would take close to two hours to get through; several more for the ships to get reorganized into a fighting formation.
The 200 former battleships, now fast attack transports, would need over three hours to make their jump into the system. Made of old-fashioned metal, no one was willing to risk attempting to lash them together.
Reports had come in from Alwa that the murderous alien raiders had taken to doing this. It merely verified for Kris that the fear and hatred the aliens had for any other intelligent life in the galaxy was driving them to take risks no sane or rational commander would take.
But then, Kris had considered them crazy from the moment she met them.
Given eight hours, Kris would be ready to fight.
It was very unlikely that she would have to.
At one gee, it would take her four days to reach Arti 4. While she intended to seize all the industrial assets in the system, until she defeated the battle fleet orbiting Arti 4, her fleet would not spare a single ship for those other distractions.
So, it was to Arti 4 that Kris looked.
The sensors were reporting 10,000 battlecruisers, give or take a few thousand!
“Sensors, can you get me a better estimate of how many battlecruisers we face and what their types are?” Her last battle at the Imperial Guard System, the rebels had brought 8,000 battlecruisers. Five thousand of them, however, had been obsolescent ships armed only with shorter ranged 22-inch lasers.
That battle had proven that a 22-inch laser could not stand in the battle line against ships armed with 24-inch lasers.
Every battlecruiser in Kris’s battle fleet carried the 24-inch lasers. Twenty of them.
“Admiral, we’ve been working on getting a better answer for you since we jumped into the system. As of right now, I know there are no battlecruisers, or any other warship anywhere else in the system. As to the four stations around Arti 4, I know each one has about the same number of reactors and capacitors, but, ma’am, there are so close together that at this distance, they all merge into just one noise signature. We can’t count individual reactors. All I’ve got is so much noise that I’m estimating that each has about twenty-five hundred each.”
“So it could be three thousand each, or two thousand, huh?”
“Yes, Admiral. It’s just a huge blob of noise. The biggest block of noise I’ve ever heard of. I mean, the eight thousand ships we fought last time were a lot closer to us and spread out in battle array, with five thousand klicks between ships. These ships? Ma’am, all I know is that there are a whole lot of them.”
“I’m assuming that you also can’t tell if those reactors are powerful enough for 24-inch or just 22-inch lasers?”
“Yes, ma’am. There’s way too much noise to get any granularity in the data.”
“Tell me, Commander,” Jack said gently. “If a battlecruiser was swinging around the hook on one of those stations with its reactors powered way down and its capacitors empty, could you separate it out from the noise you’re getting?”
The gulp from the young woman was audible all through flag plot. “No, General. If they’ve got ships with no more than a trickle in their reactors, I wouldn’t have anything showing on my boards.”
Jack exchanged a look with Kris. It was the kind he reserved for her when she was about to stick her neck into a lion’s mouth and floss its teeth.
“Yeah,” was all that Kris would say.
She turned back to her board.
“If we need to make a U-turn,” she told Jack, “we could make it around Arti 5? It’s fairly close to our course.”
“Isn’t it awfully close to Art 4?”
“Yes,” Kris admitted.
“Haven’t you used a planet in that position to loop around and get you headed back toward the planet you’re protecting?”
Kris ran a worried hand through her hair. She was letting it get long. Maybe she needed to cut it back.
She was diddling.
“Yes. If that commanding admiral has read the book I haven’t gotten around to writing yet, he knows I’d use that planet to get myself on a parallel course.”
Kris gauged the distance and scowled. “We’ll have a long and vicious running gun battle.”
“That’s what I thought,” Jack said. “Is there any way to turn around once we get up to speed?”
Kris shook her head. “We’re too low on fuel for that,” she admitted.
“Maybe we should do something about that first?” Jack’s question was more of a suggestion.
Kris widened her survey of the system. Arti 7 was a large gas giant. It would definitely provide a refueling stop for her fleet. It also had the advantage of being much further back in its present journey around their sun. If she swung over to it, the option for her opposing commander to use Arti 5 as a loop around would be much diminished. Not eliminated, but it would certainly cramp his style.
“We refuel,” Kris ordered. “Comm, send to Coth, the fleet will refuel around Artiecca 7 before we close on Artiecca 4.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.” There was a brief pause, then Comm announced, “Message is sent and acknowledged.”
“Very good,” Kris said, as much to herself as to her bridge crew. She frowned at the board. She’d have more time to figure out her opposition. More time to figure out his tactics and develop her own.
More time to train her fleet and make sure they were ready to fight, very likely outnumbered 4:1.
And, if worse came to worse, she could flip around the gas giant and head right back where she came from. Or maybe somewhere else.
The rebels couldn’t have ten thousand battlecruisers or more around every major industrial planet, could they?
44
The journey to Artiecca 7 took them about a tenth of the way across the system. That gave them a solid baseline on the noise being generated from Arti 4.
It also gave the enemy time to warm up any ships that were either incomplete or in reserve. Kris now had a count.
Jack shook his head and scowled. “Four-to-one. Almost exactly four-to-one. With a few left over. On their side.”
Kris had to agree with him. Sensors was quite sure of the count. Three thousand four hundred and eighty-eight battlecruisers had successfully made the complete voyage with her. Of the remaining 32, some might straggle in, but none had during the long dogleg to Artiecca 7.
Kris was also missing two troop transports; she didn’t expect to need the missing 20,000 troops. The thought, however, of what it would be like on those two transports if they couldn’t find their way home haunted Kris’s nights. This gambit of hers had better be worth it.
Of course, if she was honest, a lot more than twenty thousand sailors were about to die in this coming battle.
During the cruise from the jump to the gas giant, Kris exercised her ships. Again, she used lasers at extremely low power to count the hits on her ships. The ships that had been with her since she sailed for Zargoth were getting quite good. The last arrivals had been modified during the voyage out, and then had begun to exercise with the other ships.
In other systems, while accelerating at 2.5 gees on her way here, she had drilled her crews in evasion tactics. First, she’d had to persuade the new arrivals that going into battle lying down was not unmanly. Or was that un-Iteeche?
Once they were in high gee stations, she worked them up into more and more radical evasion maneuvers.
Most of the Iteeche crews were up t
o Evasion Plan 4 or 5. So far, no Iteeche had been able to reach Plan 6 and match the human battlecruisers. Kris was just not willing to create an Iteeche design that equaled the effectiveness of the human’s high gee station eggs.
Kris needed to win this battle. However, how long would it take the rebels to learn what her Iteeche sailors knew? How soon would she be facing her own designs in battle?
Kris shook her head. Fighting a civil war with a Navy that leaked like a sieve was no fun. If only the rebel fleet leaked as well. She again glanced at the estimate of the rebel forces arrayed against her. “Yes, it would be nice if the damn rebels would leak their forces and distribution a bit more.”
“Have you decided whether someone leaked your attack and they reinforced Artiecca?” Jack asked. “Or do you think this is just a secure rallying point for them to organize, train, and prepare this force to take us on somewhere else?”
Kris shrugged. “I have a hard time thinking that this leaked.”
Jack raised an eyebrow.
“Okay,” Kris said, “I don’t want to believe this got leaked. You, me, Coth, and Ron were the only ones at that planning dinner. Nelly said the room was squeaky clean of bugs. So, that doesn’t leave any good choices. Either the Iteeche can evade Nelly’s security measure . . .”
“Not going to happen,” Nelly pointed out dryly from Kris’s neck.
“Or Ron and whoever he had to talk to get us a two million strong Iteeche army and the last fifteen hundred battlecruisers spilt the beans.”
“Have you talked to Ron?” Jack asked.
“No. Never ask a question you won’t trust the answer too.”
Again, Jack raised an eyebrow.
“If Ron is turned, we’re dead. If his chooser Roth has turned on us, we are just as dead. The Chap’sum’We clan is the closest ally we humans have in the Empire. Okay? If, however, someone that they talked with, or someone overheard them, or some human has sold us out and is providing nanos to spy on us . . .” Kris paused to shrug, “The list goes on and there is no benefit to asking Ron if he’s a turncoat. It would be worse to ask him if he thinks his chooser is.”
“So, what do you intend to do?” Jack asked
Kris chose to ignore the question and ask one of her own. “Sensors, can you tell me anything more about that hostile fleet?”
“We’ve managed to isolate individual ships. With us having a bigger baseline, we’re getting more granularity.”
“So?”
“About six thousand of the battlecruisers are the Iteeche version of our twenty-gun cruisers with 24-inch lasers. Allowing for slight variations in programming and material, their reactors and capacitors are right there in the button. The other nearly eight thousand ships are an interesting question.”
“How so?”
“They have the same three reactors that you’d find on a battlecruiser with 22-inch guns.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “After what we did to their smaller cruisers in the Battle of the Imperial Guard System, they can’t be putting those fellows in the line again.”
“I don’t think so,” Sensors said. “We can’t get anything off their lasers yet, but they do have their capacitors at full load. Most of the time, we use two capacitors to a laser. That would mean the aft battery, with eight guns would have sixteen capacitors. We’re counting eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” Kris asked.
“Yes, ma’am. The forward battery of twelve guns has twenty-four capacitors. However, that would also be a match if you have eight lasers using three capacitors each.
“So, you think the enemy has up gunned a lot of their 22-inch battlecruisers to load out eight forward and six aft? Fourteen guns total?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We were working on converting our newest 22-inch battlecruiser lasers to 24-inchers with about the same number,” Megan reminded Kris. It seemed like it was years ago that she was running the battlecruiser desk at Main Navy. It really had been less than a year.
Kris studied the battle board long and hard. Slowly she shook her head and got back to answering Jack’s question. “I wish the odds weren’t balanced so perfectly on the edge of a knife,” she muttered. “If it was worse, I’d turn and run, or duck out and try another of the industrial planets. If it was better, I’d lay on with a will and see this battle and invasion through with a will.”
“Why not try some place else?” Jack asked.
That gave Kris pause. Then, again, she shook her head. “My basic mistake may have been not sending out scouts to recon the enemy situation. I just didn’t think we could get away with running scouts around in enemy territory without them getting picked off or giving away our intent. Next time, I may try that. I just didn’t expect to find a force this large, this far out.”
“So, we attack them here,” Jack said.
“Yes. We attack them here,” Kris said, with finality.
They began refueling as soon as they made orbit around Arti 7. The battlecruisers spawned pinnaces to make runs into the gas giant’s atmosphere and load up on reaction mass and any water available.
While they did that, Nelly and her kids manufactured a pair of maskers for each of the 3,500 battlecruisers in Kris’s fleet. They also set in place the seeds to spin out foxers, complete drone replicas of each battlecruisers, two per ship. Between the maskers and foxers, the rebels would have a very confusing targeting problem.
Both the maskers and drones were created using the 60,000 tons of Smart MetalTM that they appropriated from the closest industrial planet to Zargoth. Kris had asked for 10,000 tons, but the admiral commanding the flotilla sent to fetch it managed to talk the planetary overlord into a lot more. Little had been needed to replace the human Smart MetalTM used in Sunset City’s pipes. Now, the metal was coming in very handy where both maskers and foxers were concerned.
Kris might be outnumbered 4:1, but the rebels would have to target a force that they only outnumbered 4:3.
With every ship topped off to capacity, they began a 1.0 gee acceleration toward their target.
Shortly after they made their move, the rebel commander made his. His ships formed up, headed for Kris, but fifteen degrees off her course.
“Is he running?” Jack wondered.
“No, he’s smart. Too damn smart,” Kris growled. “He’s keeping his acceleration down to half a gee. He doesn’t want to get too far out here. If I’m not reading him wrong, he’s going to flip ship when we’re about a quarter of the way there. That should put him dead in space when we flip to begin decelerating. While we’re doing that towards Artiecca 4, he’ll be accelerating until we match velocities. That’s when he’ll start decelerating right alongside us. My only question is, when will he haul in range and start the battle?”
Kris paused, then added, “Or we haul in range of him?”
“Won’t that use up a lot of reaction mass?”
“Yep. About as much reaction mass as we’ll be using to cover the exact same distance. It takes a gutsy and smart guy to be willing to fight it out side by side with us when neither one of us knows who will be the winner. It’s not like he or I can tack away and break off the action. Have you ever heard of a crazy bunch of nut cases that liked to tie their left arms together and then fight it out with knives in their right hand?”
“I thought I’d heard of every damn fool stunt in the book. Tell me, were they Longknifes?”
“Very funny, Security Chief.”
“I thought you’d find it that way, Grand Admiral.”
A day later, as they approached their flip point, Kris organized her forces into the traditional five wings. They formed a cross with vanguard, center, and rearguard forming the long axis and a top and bottom wing forming off the center. Each wing was evenly balanced with 22 flotillas, except for the rear guard that was shortchanged by a single ship.
If any of the stragglers showed up, they’d join the line there.
The fast attack transports were organized into four task forces of f
ifty ships each and deployed well away on the unengaged side.
The rebel admiral also deployed in five wings. Each of his wings had 87 flotillas. Kris studied the structure of each wing. The flotillas were stacked eight high and ten or eleven long. Hers were only four high and five or six long.
By all rights, the rebel commander should be able to envelop every one of Kris’s wings from the top, bottom, front and back. Kris’s formation should have looked suicidal from his flag bridge.
Kris kept her ships at the same interval of 5,000 klicks as the rebel commander did within his flotillas. She kept the same distance between each flotilla: 15,000 klicks.
However, Kris had two tricks up her sleeve. Before the fight started, she’d shake out her ships to double the distance between them, 10,000 klicks. She’d also doubled the distance between flotillas. This would give them plenty of room to dodge and jink in and her fleet would cover as much front as the rebel fleet.
The other ace up her sleeve was the human ships. The 4 flotillas leading the second column of the vanguard had 128 human-built and crewed battlecruisers.
These crews had the high gee egg stations that held them tight in deep cushioning. They could take higher gees and knocking around in evasion maneuvering that would leave an Iteeche crushed with sprained muscles all over his body.
The lasers in the U. S. battlecruisers had been tightened down in their cradles. Far too often, the shipbuilders delivered the lasers loose in their cradles. Kris made sure her ships had them tightened down and bore-sighted as well. Also, the human ships had better and faster fire control computers.
Kris had done all she could to pass along these two advantages to every loyalist Iteeche battlecruiser under Admiral Coth’s command. Their lasers were now tight in their cradles and human computers had been inserted into their fire control systems. Still, converting data from Iteeche to human and back to Iteeche slowed them down.
They now had a two second advantage over the rebel ships in targeting a hostile ship and getting a salvo off.
Kris Longknife Page 23