However, there was one big advantage to the human battlecruisers.
Each one was coated with a crystal armor that covered its skin ten centimeters deep. Those crystals captured laser fire, slowed the light down, just the way quantum computers did, but in huge amounts and for a longer time.
Kris’s crystal armored ships glowed under laser fire as the armor distributed that destructive power all around the hull. They radiated that laser energy back out into space instead of letting the concentrated power blow the ship to atoms.
The humans had that. The Iteeche badly wanted it, but, the tech was embargoed. It didn’t leave human space.
If the rest of Coth’s fleet could hold the rebels in place, Kris intended to use the concentrated firepower of the nearly invulnerable human battlecruisers to roll up the rebel line.
Of course, there were a whole lot of rebel ships and only 128 human ships. It was a tall bet.
Without a flinch from either force, the two fleets maintained their courses, not yet on a solid collision course, but rapidly headed for one.
45
Karl’sum’Ton’sum’Go qu Chap’sum’We, fourth chosen son of the Pasha of the Golden Flying Fish Satrap, Admiral of the First Order of Steel, studied the deployment of the loyalists on his battle board.
By all rights, they should have run away. By all rights, outnumbered 4:1, they should be coming forward to surrender to his superior force. But Karl knew that no Iteeche commanded those ships. No one with half a mind to follow in the traditions of the Empire, to act proper and correct, walked the bridge of his enemy’s flagship.
No! A human commanded there. Humans brought in their wake chaos and disorder. They dredged up the black chaos of the deep abyss and fired it, as if from a fire hose at all the Iteeche that even came close to them. The humans were a plague that needed to be expunged from the Empire!
Even worse, the human commanding the forces against him was the Longknife human female. A female! What chaos allowed a female human to walk freely among men and, worse, act as if she could command warriors in battle.
What true Iteeche warrior would allow themselves to listen to the words of a woman? A human woman who strutted about in uniform and claimed the right to command!
Karl stood up tall and took a few steps away from his battle board. He strode around his flag bridge, catching his breath. His chooser had told him that he should not allow himself to be worked up like this.
“We will wipe the humans from the planets of the Empire, my chosen! We will burn out and cleanse all that they have touched! We will return the Empire to its True Path. I know you hate this Longknife human female, but you must also study her. Get to understand how she thinks. Know what she is thinking before she even knows herself. Only then can you set the net that she will swim into herself. You will trap her with her own fins. Then you can filet and chop her into chum,” his chosen had said as he laughed.
So, Karl had studied this Longknife human woman. His eyes fell on the shelf of readers that he had read so many times that he had committed much of her words to memory. He had every one of her after-action reports, even those going back to when she had but one ship.
He also had a report from the Battle of the Imperial Guard System. No commanding officer or admiral had returned to the Alliance after that fight. No doubt, the Longknife human woman thought she had destroyed anyone from among the rebels who saw and comprehended what took place there.
However, the Alliance were not all as foolish as that idiot Donn’sum’Zu’sum’Nam qu Hav’sum’Domm. Karl’s own chooser had seen that an innocent merchant ship, following close behind the invasion fleet had aboard it one of the greatest tactical minds in the Empire. Sidd was low born, but his mind was as sharp as any Pasha. His chooser had spotted this anomaly in the spawning pools and lifted the youngling up to greater training than even many of his own chosen.
Sidd watched the battle develop in the Imperial Guard System. He saw the mistakes that Donn made. He saw the mistakes and brilliant moves that the Longknife human female made. Sidd’s after-action report on that battle held primacy of place among those other readers with that human female’s ramblings.
He eyed the readers. Each after-action report had its own tablet. Each of them could not be accessed or access any system on his flagship. Karl did not trust the humans. Too often, these small people with their confused minds found ways to wiggle their way like tadpoles into places they should not be.
No, whatever the humans touched, could not be allowed to touch anything proper and Iteeche.
Karl had not wanted to read those tablets, to be tainted by anything human. Still his Pasha and chooser ordered him to and he had. He even journeyed to the Imperial Capital to talk with his most distant cousin Ron’sum’Pin’sum’Chap’Sum’We, the ambassador to the hated humans and the one Iteeche that could most see into the chaos of a human brain.
Ron had also accompanied the Longknife human female, both to see her king and to explore the galaxy. He had been there when the crazy humans began a war with the vicious alien raiders that had been sniffing around the Empire.
Karl had to give the humans credit for that. They had drawn the threat to the Empire far away, keeping them focused on a dot of no significance on the other side of the galaxy. There had been no more alien scouts probing the Iteeche Empire, and none of the daring Iteeche explorers recently had failed to return from their voyage of exploration.
He would not begrudge the humans that. They were keeping the Empire safe from one enemy. Still, they were themselves an enemy to everything the Empire stood for. Everything it was.
The New Path for the Empire didn’t want to destroy the humans, it merely wanted to build a wall against them. As a youth, Karl had been told that such a wall already existed. He had believed what he was told.
Now, it was clear that the wall had only been mostly there. Clearly, some Imperial counselors had kept a few cracks in the wall that they used to listen through. A few cracks to give and take information back and forth.
Ron himself had admitted that his chooser had specifically trained him to comprehend the human way of thinking, to understand a mind that was alien. Ron had been honest with Karl. He still failed to grasp so much about the humans, but Ron, an Imperial counselor of the second order, was trying.
That was the problem. The Empire could not afford to comprehend the chaos of the human mind. That mind had to be hurled back, away from the gates of the Empire.
This Longknife human female who styled herself as Human Emissary to the Imperial Court must die.
“And I will be her death,” Karl said out loud. “I will certainly be her death.”
He returned to his battle board.
This Longknife human was known to throw her ships around hard. She let each ship move, as if by jittering like a water bug, it could avoid laser fire. Everyone knew that lasers moved with the speed of light. Everyone knew that even with the 300,000 kililu range of the new 650 millilu lasers, it only took a second before the beam was slashing through a ship. No, there was no sense in bouncing around.
Still, Sidd’s after-action report showed that the loyalists had suffered fewer casualties in the first exchange of salvos than the ships of the Alliance for the New Path. They’d continued to suffer vastly greater casualties until they began to zig and zag about. More and more as the battle went on, they jittered, but never as well as the loyalists. Never even close to as well as the humans. Even to the end, they suffered more losses in each salvo than either the loyalist or the human battlecruisers.
How could that be?
“Sidd, attend to me,” Karl ordered.
Captain Sidd, his Number 2 Staff Officer, was immediately at is elbow. “Yes, My Lord Admiral.”
“You have the most experience watching the humans and this Longknife female. Observe this battle array and comment upon it. Is it different from what she used when approaching the defeated and dead Admiral Donn?”
“In the Battle of the Impe
rial Guard System, the Longknife human had less than half of the ships she commands today. You, My Eminent Admiral, have a force over half again as large as the late and unlamented Admiral Donn.”
“I can see that. I can also see that our battle array should be able to swallow them up, like a Sonta flower engulfs a Tagga. But then, with five times the forces, Donn should have been able to play the same game. Why did it not work?”
“The Longknife human female orders her ships to maintain twice the individual interval between them. This allows them to jitter about without fear of ramming each other. They also have more space between each of their flotillas.”
“She doesn’t now,” Karl pointed out.
“We are not close enough for her ships to need it. If she acts anything like she has when engaging the two-eyed alien space raiders and when she fought Donn, she will shake out her ships only when she is nearly in range of our lasers. We will be facing a Tagga that is too big for a Sonta flower to even nibble.”
Karl did not like that. He had heard that the Longknife human female bragged that she could fight outnumbered 4:1 and win. No one fought against those odds. You surrendered when faced with those odds. That was the way he had been trained.
That was just the proper and correct way for an admiral to behave.
“How does she succeed when her ships are so scattered?” Karl asked his intelligence officer for aliens. “Her ships are so widely dispersed that their fire cannot be concentrated. We could order each of our divisions to concentrate their fire on one of her ships. It seems as if she wants to lose this battle.”
“She fought her last battle the same way and it was not Admiral Donn who claimed the victory.”
“Then tell me, Captain,” Karl said, holding his temper in all four hands, “what is the magic that she uses to win? How did she defeat the dead and unlamented Admiral Donn?”
There was a long pause before Sidd answered his admiral.
“My Lord Admiral, I have ruminated on this for many long hours. Days. Weeks! I have no answer that I would sell you for a bag of gold coins. However, I do have a few jewels that I have found. I do not see how they give her such victories, but they certainly make her different from every victorious Iteeche admiral that I have studied.”
“Speak on. Do not dally,” Karl snapped. He knew what a staff officer who was afraid to speak his mind sounded like. He would never have taken Sidd for such a flaw.
“Yes, My Lord Admiral,” Sidd said. “It is said that she drills her crews constantly. She drills them until they are dreaming in their sleep of what to do at their battle station.”
“What good is that?”
“I do not know. All I know is that she does it and wins, and we do not and lose. Is this why, or is this just some lucky totem, like a lucky buba’s foot that she rubs for luck? I do not know.”
Sidd paused, then went on slowly. “What I do know is that she has her ships fight each other. Even using lasers at a near infinitesimally low power rating so that they can judge their shooting. For those crews that shoot well, she awards a E for excellency and they can paint it on their lasers. It is very coveted among the ships’ crews.”
“How does she reduce the power of her lasers to a level that does not eat up the armor of her ships?”
“I do not know. It is said that the Longknife human female has a familiar, a voice that speaks to her and those around her. They claim that it is a tiny computer with more computational power than even the ship’s main computer. It is claimed that the tiny computer has taken on a life of its own.”
“Is this witchcraft now rejected by the loyalists?”
“No, My Lord Admiral. The humans insist that this is not witchcraft but superior technology.”
“Has the deep abyss taken all the brain cells of the Emperor’s Imperial Counselors?”
Sidd risked no answer.
“But this witch’s familiar,” Karl said. “You say it can weaken the lasers so they can strike a feather blow to the opposing ship in their training exercises?”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral.”
“Or at least they claim that is how they do the modification to the lasers.”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral.”
Karl spotted something that made even less sense. “Every ship has had this modification?”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral.”
“Stop that My Lord Admiral shit or this conversation will take all day and half the night.”
“Yes, Admiral. And yes, every ship computer has been given just this modification.”
“The loyalists have inserted human subroutines into their computers! What else have the humans done while they were rummaging around inside the guts of those computers?”
“That is impossible to say. However, My Admiral, I know that there is at least one other program the humans have added. Your high gee bed? We have programmed them and keep them beside your battle station. That is not the way on the loyalist ships. We have heard that they now have fewer crew and larger quarters, not as wastefully luxurious as the humans, but they sleep in bunk beds rather than hammocks. When they go into battle, their beds will melt into the deck and they will spin their high gee stations out of metal from those beds.”
Karl shook his head. “For soft beds, the loyalists have let the human shark into their school of younglings!”
“It is not soft beds that let the loyalists shoot better than our ships. It is not roomy quarters that let the loyalists suffer fewer casualties. Yet they do, My Lord Admiral. There is something that they do that we do not. Something that they know, that we do not.
“Don’t prattle on about what we do and do not know. My chooser has raised you up from the lower decks because you are supposed to know things. Don’t tell me what you don’t know. No, the loyalists are fools. They are the little fish, trailing the human sharks, eating the crumbs that fall from their mouths. They will certainly lose! Communications, steer two points closer to the enemy. Let us get this battle joined and the victory ours.”
“As you command, so has it been done,” Comm shouted back.
Admiral of the First Order of Steel, Karl, set all four of his hands on his hips. He would close with these humans and blast them to dust.
The human female Longknife had only hours to live.
Captain Sidd did not allow himself to show any expression. He was merely a lowborn sailor, useful to the clan lords. Whether they listened to him or not, it was no skin off his knees. Still, if this worthless spawn of a Pasha’s mating pond, this pompous gray uniform dripping with gold would not listen, it might very well be the death of them all.
The lowborn Sidd suppressed again the sigh he so often had to swallow. He had told this spoiled lordling that the loyal ships under the human Longknife shot better than their ships. He’d told them that dodging about could save them losses. He’d told him all that rebel intelligence knew, and the things that he wished they knew but didn’t. Yet, all he heard was bunks rather than hammocks.
Maybe it was best for the old Iteeche Empire and its strutting clans to die. Sidd drank beer with lowborn spawn that were just as smart as he was. Much smarter than his admiral, or any of the clan lords he had been pet to.
Let them die.
I just hope they don’t drag us all down into the abyss as they go to their rightful hell.
46
Grand Admiral Kris Longknife listened as Nelly whispered in the back of her head that the data on her battle board was changing, but Sensors had not yet reported it.
START A TIMER, NELLY.
DONE, KRIS.
The enemy fleet off their starboard side had entered a course change. Nelly had that data coming direct from the sensor array to Kris’s battle board. It was not unusual for Kris to know before the rest of her fleet knew.
The question was, how long did it take other admirals of the fleet to learn what she had learned? So, she waited to see how long it would take Sensors to report to her.
“Admiral, the enemy flee
t has altered course to steer eleven degrees closer to us,” Sensors reported before the timer in Kris’s head passed fifteen seconds.
That wasn’t too much of a delay.
“Very good, Sensors. Keep me appraised of any further changes.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am.”
“Nelly, project their new course with ours.”
The battle board showed that the rebels would be in range of Kris’s 24-inch lasers in twelve hours.
“Somebody wants to get this battle over with fast,” Jack muttered.
Jack stood beside Kris. On the other side of the battle board stood her Chief of Staff Titania Tosan and Intel chief, Quinn Sung. Lieutenant Megan Longknife had held back, but Kris had ordered her to join them around the battle board. She stood at Kris’s other elbow.
Kris worried her lower lip. “It does seem that our enemy has gotten eager for battle,” she admitted. “Since we flipped at the midpoint and started our deceleration, I’ve had us steering five degrees ahead of the course we’d need to make orbit around Artiecca 4. At the Battle of the Guard System, when we needed to get to the jump, they did their damndest to crowd us off of our course by closing on us. If our long-range gunnery proves to be better than theirs, I want room to wear away if they try to charge in.”
Those around her nodded their heads.
“We have a problem,” Kris said. “We sail the same ships, built with the same technology. They have the same lasers with the same range as we have. By every right, four of them should be able to blast one of us out of space before we can blast four of them.”
Kris looked around her the faces staring with her at the battle display. “If they trade two or three of their ships for one of ours, we lose.”
“There have been times like this where the same fought same. I had Nelly research it. She found a fascinating example. Nelly?”
“In the first decade of the 1800's back on old Earth,” Nelly began, “every nation used basically the same technology for their navies. Wet water navies, I might add. They built their ships out of wood. They propelled them by means of sails that caught the wind. They had cannons that had the same power and range. Despite sailing basically the same ships, the Royal Navy of England beat the French Navy time after time, usually against greater odds.”
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