“Because?” Kris said.
“The Royal Navy blockaded the French Navy. The ships of the Royal Navy would sail back and forth, outside the ports, day in and day out, in fine weather or stormy, and, remember, these ships were powered by the wind. If the wind blew the wrong way, a ship could end up on a rocky shore. So, the French stayed at anchor, and the English sailed back and forth.
“But the Royal Navy didn’t just sail around. Their crews had to practice changing the sails. Their captains had to become more and more skilled at taking advantage of the wind, and, below decks, they trained their crews to load and aim their cannons so that they were twice as fast as the French gunners. That often told the tale in a fight.”
Nelly paused for a moment, something she was doing regularly now, then went on. “There was one more thing. The French tended to start firing their cannons at extreme range. At that range, their cannonballs rarely hit, and if they did, they had lost most of their energy, so they did little harm. Firing and loading not only used up ammunition, but it exhausted the gunners. The Royal Navy waited to fire their first broadside until they were at close range, a range where they would not only hit, but do horrible damage.”
“Nelly told me there was a joke at the time. ‘The royal sailors drank their grog, but the French, they kept to port.’”
No one laughed at Kris’s joke.
“Ah, grog was drunk by the sailors of the Royal Navy,” she explained. “It was a blend of lime, sugar, and rum. It helped prevent scurvy.”
“Scurvy?” Titania asked.
“Never mind. Lousy joke,” Kris knew she should stop, but she tried to finish her explanation. “The French were known to like a fortified wine called port. The English considered it effete. So, the Royal Navy drank their grog, while blockading, and the French kept to port. Port wine, ships in port? Get it?”
“Yes, Admiral,” Jack said, not even trying to hide his smile. “They got it.”
“I think you should keep your day job, Admiral,” Megan said.
There was only slight intake of breath, still it was noticeable. Lieutenants laughed at admirals’ jokes, no matter how bad they were. Of course, she was a Longknife. Both of them.
The admiral pouted for only a moment and muttered, “Well, at least my children love me.”
Then she was back to business. “So, this is our problem. If we’ve trained and squeezed the most out of our weapons systems, like the Royal Navy, we have a chance. If they’ve gotten better, we’re in trouble. If that happens, we’ll talk about an exit strategy. For now, we concentrate on how to annihilate those poor bastards.”
The bridge fell silent except for the whispered conversations between this or that watchman. Kris went on.
“By now, the enemy knows we fight in a loose formation. I see no benefit to delay going to it. When we haul within a million kilometers of each other, I propose that we go to battle stations and get the crew in their eggs. Ten minutes later, we go to Condition Zed. Twenty minutes after that, we open the formation up to fighting intervals. We will fire by squadrons for Iteeche ships, divisions for human, at least initially. Again, try to target two or three lasers for the same place. It may mean fewer hits, but those that do hit will pack a wallop. Any problems?”
“If they park nine hundred thousand klicks off our engaged side?” Titania asked.
“We’ll blow up that bridge when we come to it,” Kris said. “Somehow, I doubt this fellow is going to delay coming to grips with us. He seems to be quite eager from the last course correction he ordered.”
“He was already closing at ten degrees. Now, twenty-one degrees,” Jack said. “Yep. Does seem a bit eager. Tell me, Admiral, you want to fight at extreme range, don’t you?”
“I think we have an advantage there, yes, General.”
“If we want to keep the option to back off and keep the rebels at arms’ length, shouldn’t we be closing them, if for no other reason than to give us more space to back in to?”
Kris pursed her lips in thought. “I didn’t want to aim too far ahead of the planet’s orbit. If we close too much with him, we could miss the planet” she said slowly. “Still, you’re right. We can always slow down to let the planet catch up. And you’re right, Jack, if they do get frisky and try to charge us, the more room the better.”
Then Kris let an evil grin loose on her face. “Besides, I’d like to see if he backs off when he sees us closing too fast on him. Let’s take the temper of his backbone.”
“Comm, advise Admiral Coth to steer the fleet eleven degrees closer to the enemy.”
“Sent.”
A moment later, Comm reported. “He is ordering the fleet to steer two points closer to the enemy.”
“So,” Kris muttered, “eleven human degrees equals two Iteeche points.”
“Nice to know,” Quinn whispered to herself, softly.
Three minutes later, Kris’s entire fleet of nearly thirty-five hundred ships were steering a course eleven degrees closer to the enemy. The rebels were steering a closing course of twenty-one degrees. There was a bit more than a thirty-degree angle between their courses.
They would be in range within a few hours.
Kris and her team watched as the two fleets closed along this tight course. Seven minutes into it, the rebel commander swung away by six degrees.
“Comm, send to Coth, wear away one point.”
“Message sent.”
Two minutes later, the loyalist fleet took a point off its course. Now they closed at twenty-one degrees. The battle would have to wait for a few more hours.
“Interesting,” Kris said.
“Admiral, excuse me for asking,” Megan said, “but how did anyone win a battle when they are all even? Yes, you mention training, but was there a tactic?”
“Nelly?” Kris asked.
“The greatest and most decisive naval battle of the age took place off of Cape Trafalgar,” Nelly began. “The combined French and Spanish fleets outnumbered the Royal Navy by slightly less than four-to-three. Still, Admiral Nelson of the Royal Navy won because he did not follow the normal tactics of the age.”
“And those were?” the chief of staff asked.
“Most battles were fought much like we do. Form the ships into a line, sail along a near parallel course, and shoot away. Usually, the losing force could just wear away and the battle was over with few ships destroyed or captured. Admiral Nelson chose to violate the rules.”
Again, Nelly paused. Kris was proud that her computer was learning to make her pauses just the right length. Time for the humans to catch up, consider, but not long enough for anyone to grow bored.
“Nelson divided his twenty-seven ships into two lines and aimed them at the allied fleet. Due to their poor seamanship, the French and Spanish ships were in a loose and scattered line. Nelson and his deputy hit the allied line and cut it into three parts. They engaged the two aft parts, and ignored the vanguard.”
“How’d that work, the vanguard?” Jack asked.
“Again, due to poor sailing skills and weak wind, the forward third needed a long time to come about. By the time they might have engaged the Royal Navy, it looked like the battle was lost and they turned about again and fled for the nearest port. Nelson took or destroyed twenty-two of the thirty-three allied ships, including most of the largest ones. There have been few more decisive battles at sea.”
“However,” Titania said, “Nelson won by charging his ships at his enemy’s fleet. We want to keep the battle at a comfortable distance where our better fire control can do more damage to them, and our evasion tactics cause them to do less damage to us. I don’t see how this applies.”
Kris thought for a moment, and then spoke slowly. “I think I see a way that Nelson would have solved our tactical problem. Let’s take a look at what happens if we do this.”
Everyone stared as Kris outlined a battle that Lord Horatio Nelson would have been proud of.
Admiral of First Order of Steel Karl eyed his battl
e board. The two forces had just crossed the million-kilometer line. He was steering two points closer to her, she, one point closer to him. The two courses crossed well before they reached the orbit of Artiecca 4. At this rate, they’d cross the orbit but not get anywhere near the planet.
No doubt, they’d be adjusting their courses a lot between here and there. Suddenly, as one, the ships of the loyalist ships shrunk down to less than a quarter of their previous size.
“Captain Sidd?”
“The loyalist ships have gone to what the humans call, and the loyalists have adopted, Condition Zed. All the magic metal that the humans use for comfort has now been converted into armor for much smaller ships. Since their crews are less than a third our size, they now have a much smaller ship with more armor to cover it.”
“And Admiral Coth’s Iteeche ships?”
“All of them have given up many of their older officers and NCOs. When a ship jitters around like these do, it is hard on the back and knees of the older officers. Others have been transferred off because their duties are no longer required, such as runners or officer boatmen. I understand that gunners now keep their own work spaces clean. The same with engineers.”
“She has no respect for tradition,” Karl snapped.
“It makes her ships smaller targets, My Lord Admiral.”
“Do you think this dishonorable way is good?”
“I did not say good, I said effective.”
Karl shook his head. “Must we become no better than these humans to defeat them?”
“I do not know, My Lord Admiral.”
“Is there anything that you do know, Staff Officer Number 2?”
“I have told you all that I know.”
“Then you are worthless to me. Maybe there is a longboat somewhere on the boat deck with your name on it. Why don’t you go?”
“Maybe there is such a longboat, but I will stay at my post to answer your questions as long as you ask them.”
Karl waved the staff officer off and Sidd went to stand next to his high gee bed.
Alone, the Admiral of the First Order of Steel studied the battle. It was developing very much the way he intended it to. Before too much longer, sailors would begin to die. Let them be, those loyalist dogs.
Karl stood, all four legs spread wide, supporting him like a tree with four trunks. He was the fourth chosen son of the Pasha of the Golden Flying Fish Satrap. No human could defeat him and the forces arrayed around him.
The battle was practically won.
47
Grand Admiral Kris Longknife lay in the firm embrace of her high gee station. The egg had cocooned her as if she were a caterpillar. The ship might lurch from side to side, acceleration or deceleration might try to squish her or slam her forward, but the egg would hold her tight, absorbing all that energy and converting it to power that got fed back into the electric grid. This was the latest version of the egg and it was even better than the former model Kris used in the last battle.
Admiral Kitano had brought this new design out with her battle fleet.
Consequently, Kris had seen to it that the high gee couches on the Iteeche battlecruisers also got a makeover. Now, all her battlecruisers, human or Iteeche, were better able to handle the hard gees and evasion plans.
Kris wondered how much her opposite number had improved their beds.
Iteeche warriors had gone into battle for thousands of years standing on their own four feet. Kris had the devil’s own time getting the Iteeche under her command to lie down. When they did, she had to put up with a lot of grousing but the more the gees increased on acceleration, the more their heads didn’t get knocked about as their ships zigged and zagged, the more the Iteeche liked their high gee couches.
She’d spread her ships out in a loose formation. The rebel ships were 5,000 kilometers apart. Hers were now 10,000, the better to evade. That meant that one of their divisions of 8 ships was 40,000 klicks long. Hers was 80,000 klicks.
Between each flotilla, the rebels used a 15,000-kilometer interval. After serious analysis, Kris was also using the 15,000-klick interval. They both used a 50,000-klick distance between wings.
Each of Kris’s wings was seven or eight flotillas long and 425,000 klicks in length. The opposing rebel wing was eleven or twelve flotillas in length and was usually 20,000 klicks shorter than Kris’s line.
Top to bottom, though, it was a different matter. Kris’s three stacks of flotillas, even with 30,000-klick intervals between them, only managed to cover 90,000 kilometers. The seven stacks in the opposing wing stood 125,000 klicks tall. If Kris was careful to keep her wing centered on the middle of the opposing wing, she’d only be overlapped by 17,500 clicks at top and bottom. Still, four of the enemy flotillas could target each of hers.
Kris faced a major problem, but then, fighting 4:1 odds meant you ended up facing a lot of major problems.
The two forces continued to close. They passed the 500,000-kilometer mark with no surprises. The 400,000-mark was just as quiet. Hardly a word was spoken around Kris.
She listened to the soft hum of the blowers circulating air throughout the ship. She took in the scent of ozone, lube oil, and human sweat with each breath. The feel of the ship’s hum beneath her feet was gone, absorbed by the egg.
Since they were only at one gee, Kris sat up in her station so she was still able to see her key staff. All of them had gone into their high gee stations naked. If they had to spend days in them, the elimination system worked best without clothing. There was also the problem of how black and blue a zipper left human flesh at four gees acceleration.
At the moment, Jack was bare chested. The breasts of the women around him were covered by the high gee stations, not out of modesty, although someone somewhere might have ordered it, but so that two certain delicate feminine items were supported and cushioned if things suddenly became rowdy.
I wonder what the kids are up to? Kris asked herself. It would be terrible to orphan them in just one afternoon watch.
Kris shook herself, straining against her restraints. She focused her mind on the board and only the board.
What’s that other poor son of a squid thinking?
Admiral of the First Order of Steel, Karl’sum’Ton’sum’Go eyed the distance between the two fleets. Battle would come soon. Very soon.
This was the moment he had been chosen for. It was for this that he was schooled, trained, and had trained others. Still, in the pit of his stomach there was a strangeness.
He had never faced battle before.
None of the sailors or officers in his fleet had ever faced battle.
All would be tested in the next few hours.
It might have made a lesser man fearful.
But Karl was not a lesser man. He was the fourth chosen son of the Pasha of the Golden Flying Fish Satrap. It was he who had been given the honor of fighting this Longknife human female and blasting her and the entire fleet that followed her to mere dust scattered among the stars.
He had a battle to win.
“Sidd, attend me.”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral,” the intelligence officer said, coming away from his as-yet-unneeded high gee bunk to stand beside the admiral at his battle board.
“The Longknife human female and her fleet just passed the 450,000-kililu mark. Has she any more surprises up one of her two sleeves?”
“In the Battle of the Imperial Guard System, she had two maskers on each of her ships.”
“How did they produce that many maskers? We don’t even have enough for half our ships here. So, what value are two maskers on a battlecruiser?”
“The humans made drones that they used for target practice. They were just flat silhouettes of one, but it had enough power to behave as one. They modified those target drones into what they called ‘foxers.’ Apparently, in their tongue to ‘out-fox’ someone is to fool them.”
Karl did not know where this rambling was going, and he had little time for it, anyway. “And the foxers did w
hat?”
“The unlamented Admiral Donn found himself suddenly facing three times as many visual targets and two masker targets. His gunners had to blast one or two of the dummy targets before they managed to kill one battlecruiser.”
“Why did they not discern the fake from the real?”
“I had some of the best sensor equipment on the ship I was riding in. As much as I tried, I could not distinguish the two.”
“One fired lasers, the others did not,” Karl snapped.
“Unfortunately, My Lord Admiral, all three fired lasers. The foxers had been rigged with low power lasers that gave off the same evidence of lasers being fired as the actual ships did.”
“Could they not identify them by the radar return, noise from the reactors, heat, on infrared?”
“The radar, when it wasn’t jammed, showed a solid target. The reactor noise was all jammed. As for infrared, the foxers were just as hot as the real ships.”
“So, you say that while we have four ships for every one of hers, we will have to wade through two decoy ships to kill one real one.”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral.”
“Have you any suggestions I might consider?”
“The foxers do not have any armor. One hit may well send them spinning out of control. The loyalist ships under Longknife’s command took to waving their lasers around the target area, like a firefighter waves a fire hose at a burning building. This gave them a better chance of hitting and damaging a battlecruiser. If we did that, our lasers could cover more area and increase the likelihood of a hit on a thin-skinned decoy.”
“Number 1 Staff Officer.”
“Yes, My Lord Admiral?”
“Our Staff Officer Number 2 has just told me something he should have told me last week. We may be facing thin-skinned fake warships. Instruct the fleet’s gunnery officers to swivel their lasers when they fire them. We want to cover as much of the targets down range as possible. Our objective is to destroy the fakes quickly. Then we shall concentrate on our real enemy.”
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