Commander (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  34

  Destroyers are designed with nothing but all-out attack in mind. Certainly, they’re employed in strategically defensive roles far more often than offensive ones. But these ships best accomplish even defensive missions via immoderate aggression on the tactical scale. A destroyer’s function is to charge in and attack regardless of the odds, and the finest commanders of these vessels tend to be young and have dangerously-exciting hobbies like parasailing into hurricanes on gas giants or setting new depth records for scuba-diving in lakes of liquid nitrogen. A destroyer’s guns were only of secondary importance; they provided just enough firepower to drive away even smaller and faster vessels or shoot up either merchantmen or each other at need. But even though most “tin cans” go through their entire careers without ever actually firing them, their signature weapon is the torpedo. These are capable of dealing sledgehammer blows and offer a mortal threat to any ship in the sky. Their mere existence is why a destroyer is always a threat to be taken seriously no matter what the circumstances. These weapons were of very short range, however, and didn’t move much faster than their potential targets. So a destroyer captain’s dream, his entire raison de etre, is to rush in close and then blast away with all tubes. Everything about his ship is designed to optimize his chances of success at this one maneuver—it's why speed is paramount over armor, for example, and why just-enough conventional firepower is provided and no more.

  But, of course, actual wars aren’t fought in theoretical universes. Though designed originally to mass together and make swarm-attacks on line-of-battleships, destroyers had proven to be just the thing to take care of dozens of other far more mundane tasks as well. Destroyers made near-perfect escorts, for example, because they were both cheap and potentially powerful threats. They also made pretty decent reconnaissance ships; though specialized higher-performance spacecraft were more effective, they also cost a lot more to build and operate as well, and were useless for anything else. In their way, destroyers had come to fill a similar niche to that which Richard herself had been intended for—general fleet workhorses suitable for carrying out a dozen inglamorous routine missions as well as the primary one of directly attacking heavies. Because of this both the Royal and Imperial fleets contained dozens of the things. Indeed, The Seventh of November’s escort’s actual name, I-234, spoke volumes about the commonness of the breed.

  So… Where was all the aggression, I kept asking myself as we closed in hour after hour and the Imperials remained clustered up tight next to each other. Where was the reckless charge, the bold head-on assault that was his best chance of success? He couldn’t stand up to our guns at long range, or at least not the six he’d seen in action against Whiff of Grape. I doubted that anyone else realized that we’d permanently lost a turret; the hit was so clean that almost no external damage was visible. While our weaponry was still under repair—and already overdue to be back online!—we’d long since swung all the turrets including the damaged one into a nice, spacemanlike fore-and-aft configuration that revealed nothing about the massive destruction inside the rearmost one. So, what was he waiting for? While I had good grounds for assuming that the cruiser-captain wasn’t an effective combat leader, I’d be a fool to imagine the same of the destroyer’s chief officer.

  “I just don’t get it,” I sighed, leaning back in my command chair as once again my dressings were changed. I’d been on the bridge for a long time now without a break, and the medical types were clearly unhappy about it. But I was in command, we remained at action stations, and that was that. “Why isn’t she attacking?”

  “They’re exchanging signals with their naval headquarters every few minutes, sir,” Wu observed. “The cruiser, too. Something’s going on. But what?”

  I sighed again and rubbed my throbbing head. What with all the painkillers coursing through my veins, it was amazing that I could still suffer from something so trivial as a headache. But, there it was. “Are they refusing orders?” I wondered aloud. “Or maybe begging their superiors for permission to attack, which is being denied for some reason?” I checked the secondary screen; Whiff of Grape still floated there, inert and harmless. For the moment, at least.

  “I don’t understand it either,” Josiah admitted. “Of course I haven’t been part of the fighting navy all that long, but back in the merchant service when the owners were burning up the frequencies like this it was usually because they couldn’t make a decision. People were over-ruling each other, in other words.”

  Uncle Robert nodded. “Perhaps they find themselves faced with some sort of dilemma?”

  “They surely know we’re headed for New Geneva,” I mused, wishing I could pace back and forth as I usually did at times like these. Perhaps that was why my head was aching, because my body was denied its normal stress-outlet? “Maybe that has something to do with it?”

  “This whole affair is going to become a major diplomatic issue almost immediately,” my uncle agreed. “If you want to inject indecisiveness and hesitancy into a perfectly straightforward situation, the best way I know of is to consult a diplomat.”

  I smiled, but the explanation still didn’t feel quite right. “There’s something odd about that cruiser,” I muttered. Then I tilted my head to one side. Earlier I’d been speculating about her captain having been killed and being replaced, most likely with either a salvage expert or an incompetent nobleman everyone wanted out of the way. I wondered…

  “Ship’s boat, sir!” Wu alerted me. “Casting off from the cruiser!”

  “Maximum magnification!” I ordered, leaning forward eagerly. Sure enough a boat was just getting underway, headed for the destroyer. A rather large boat, far bigger than anything we carried aboard Richard. So large, in fact, that it must’ve been a real pain in the behind to deal with, given that an engagement was imminent.

  A boat chock-full of advisors, aides, servants, hairdressers, expensive furnishings, and Noble House trappings, I was willing to bet my incisors! It wasn’t just the cruiser they were afraid of losing, oh no! There was far more at stake than just that! I punched the button for engineering. “Damnit!” I raged. “When will we have our guns back?”

  “Right now, sir!” the chief replied. “My hand was on the switch to tell you.”

  “Thank god!” I answered. I’d slowed us down a bit, to give him and his men more time to work. “Ahead flank! Let’s show these so-called destroyermen that Richard knows how to deliver a proper attack, even if they don’t!”

  35

  Someday, I suspected, whether we won or lost some famous painter of battles was going to immortalize this last poignant moment before the shooting began again. The sky was absolutely filled with picturesque ships. There was the lean greyhound of the destroyer trembling with eagerness, the horribly battle-scarred cruiser, the big cyndrilical ship’s boat racing for her life across the gap, Whiff of Grape’s exquisitely-sculpted hull off in the distance…

  …and right there, front and center, Richard’s shapeless merchant hull waddling along for all she was worth like a fat old woman with her skirts gathered up in both hands. We must’ve looked utterly ridiculous. None of the other fencible ships had torpedo tubes, and I’d frankly opposed mounting them even on Richard at first, because it seemed so unlikely that such a slow vessel would ever find herself in a decent firing position. But the navy yards had a bunch of them they were trying to get rid of, left over from an obsolete class of destroyers. Since they were basically free and there was considerable pressure to put them back into service somewhere, I’d let them mount six as an experiment despite thinking it was all a waste of effort and manpower that’d be better employed elsewhere. How wrong I’d been!

  We could never hope to torpedo the destroyer—it was much too agile for that. So I set course to intercept the cruiser and engaged the tin can with our primary weapons. The range was still very long, but our ammunition supply was effectively unlimited. Besides, I didn’t expect to hit her—I just needed to force her to maneuver so that the boat
couldn’t dock.

  Our first four salvos failed to connect, and I cursed at the miserable luck that’d taken my best marksmen out of the fight so early. All this time the destroyer sat nice and still for us, waiting for the boat. Then, finally on salvo five we found the range and bracketed her. Salvo six scored not one but two hits, both of which penetrated the weak Field and burned through the thin, unarmored hull below. One caught her forward, probably on the stores deck or thereabouts. The other took out her number-one gun mounting, which had never even had a chance to fire. Salvo seven scored another deep hull hit…

  …and that was all the punishment our enemies chose to take lying down. They raced towards us like a hunting dog unleashed late in the day, all pent-up and eager.

  Leaving the boat adrift, all by itself.

  I scowled as our hit ratio suddenly went down the toilet; it was much harder to hit a ducking and weaving target than one sitting stock still. But we were doing all we could do, and that was that. Nor was the cruiser firing yet, though in theory we'd entered the range of her weapons long before she came into ours. That left me with some personal free time, so I rang up Sergeant Petranovich. “The raid is off,” I explained—our original plan had been to try and raid the cruiser for code books and other valuable intelligence before torpedoing it. “But… Do you see that ship’s boat headed back towards the cruiser?”

  “Yes, sir!” he replied, voice cool and calm.

  “I’ll very likely be calling upon you to capture it intact. I suspect it’s full of VIP’s. Use the same force we told-off for the other thing.”

  There was a short pause—I was asking him to reorganize everything on very short notice. But, in the end there was only one answer he could give. “Aye-aye, sir!”

  “Very good,” I replied. “Stand by and be ready.”

  Now Richard and the destroyer were like two old-style motor-cars playing chicken, racing headlong at one another. Or sort of headlong—both of us had rotated our Fields ninety-degrees to normal so as to thrust us sideways through space and allow all of our guns to bear. We’d scored another hit while I spoke to the sergeant, and now were receiving incoming mail ourselves. The bridge shuddered, and for an instant the lights dimmed. “Deck three, sector nine,” Josiah replied. That was just two levels directly beneath us—no wonder we’d been rattled. “Main galley, sir. Wiped out.”

  So we were going to eat uncooked rations for the rest of the trip; that was unpleasant but hardly critical. Then there was another hit, this time further away. Ominously, though, I felt a wave of nausea at the impact. “Engineering spaces, sir! We’ve lost a core! And there are numerous casualties.”

  I scowled—being essentially a merchantman we only had three of the things. The good news was that our speed would only drop about twenty percent; the more cores you tied together, the greater the efficiency loss. The bad news was that our rate of fire would slow as well, unless we voluntarily cut our speed even further. “Half-ahead,” I ordered. The remaining guns would either carry the day or not for us, and that was that.

  “Half-ahead, aye-aye!” Wu replied. He remained very cool and calm under fire, I noted. Astrogators, like engineers, were specialists and therefore not line-of-command officers. Yet, I thought, this one probably should be. “Sir, the boat’s almost back to the cruiser!”

  I blinked. What we really wanted was the VIP alive, whoever he was. He had to be terribly important, or else the Imperials wouldn’t have broken tradition by having him abandon his command the moment it was endangered. It must’ve been a gutwrenchingly difficult decision for them, they way they’d delayed it until the last minute. My guess was that he’d been ordered away in just enough time to escape, the decision having been kicked around and avoided as long as possible. Then, being a fool, he’d tried to save too much dunnage. The whole affair was going to send shockwaves through their entire navy, especially among those still expected to die at their stations. “Fire torp five,” I ordered.

  “We’re still out of range,” the first officer reminded me.

  “Noted,” I replied, not wanting to take time to explain. Then the weapon raced away, and I turned back to Wu. “What’s the boat doing?”

  “Turning again, sir!” he replied. “Running for Point Eight, now!”

  I smiled. “Good.”

  Then the hull bucked again, and Josiah winced before he spoke. “Hold Five, sir. Where we put the Rabbits from Imperious. Heavy casualties.”

  I winced too, trying not to picture the chaos among the landlubbers as first there was a searing explosion, then the air began rushing out. And Nestor was probably down there, too… I wrenched my mind away from the wretched images. “How’s the Field, Wu?”

  “Seventy-three percent and wobbling all over the place,” he replied. “Engineering’s doing their best, but..”

  “Right,” I agreed. Our enemy was getting the better of us. The more holes we picked up in our hull, the less efficient the Field became. Somewhere around fifty-eight or sixty percent, it’d fail entirely. Then we’d merely drift until we patched things up with replacement plating and superconducting tarps. That took time, and required the drive-system to be powered down entirely. Tarping wasn’t exactly the sort of job one wanted to take on with a nearby destroyer blasting merrily away. We had to kill the thing soon, or we’d be all be dead. It was just that simple. But what more effort could we make than we were already making? We were closing just as quickly as we could, letting fly with everything we had… Suddenly I felt a hard, cold lump of fear forming in my belly. The odds had favored us defeating a single destroyer, and by a fair margin at that. And yet, we weren’t getting enough hits. I was the captain; it was my job, my duty to come up with a way out. Any way out! Some sort of trick or maneuver or subterfuge. But… But…

  I was fresh out of ideas. Professor Lambert had warned me back at the Academy after a particularly thrilling game-session that war wasn’t just about strategy and who could come up with the best plans. “It’s also about toughness, David. Discipline, too. And being bull-headed enough to keep right on doing your job until you either catch a break or die trying. Never forget that eventually, if you fight long enough, you will most assuredly die trying. No one lives forever in wartime.” So Wu held us on course, the engineers muttered curses and twisted their knobs, the gunners served their pieces, and for lack of anything else constructive to do I sat and tried to look brave for the sake of everyone else. We should beat the destroyer, I kept muttering to myself. We should! The math says so!

  Just about then another hit slammed home. We were almost in torpedo range now, at which point we’d be totally at the destroyer’s mercy. “Turret One, sir,” Josiah reported. “Total loss, heavy casualties.”

  And that was that. We were done. Finshed! Kaput! I raised my hand to press the button that’d put me on the shipwide circuit, to make the traditional speech thanking the crew in the name of their sovereign for their sacrifice before the Imperials slaughtered them all like animals. But before I could press it there was a bright flash on the screen. A sudden, terrible explosion had engulfed I-234!

  “Report!” I demanded, using the breath I’d taken to begin my speech with.

  “Sir!” Wu replied, grinning like a kid. “We hit one of their torpedoes! It must’ve been armed and ready to launch!”

  Slowly—very slowly—I forced myself to relax a bit as I watched the several major sections of the Imperial destroyer begin to drift away from each other, still glowing and sparking. “Well,” I said eventually. “What do you think of that?”

  “I think we need to exercise the guns more often, sir!” Josiah replied. He was white as a sheet, I realized, and also understood precisely what a close call we’d just had.

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “Though it’s not easy when they’re buried under containers for months at a time.” Far too casually, well aware that I was fooling no one, I stretched those of my limbs that still worked.

  “We could go around the cruiser, sir,” Wu off
ered hopefully. “Avoid it entirely. At this point we’re home free if we do.”

  “We can’t stand another fight, David,” Uncle Robert warned.

  But I was having nothing of it. Especially not after my nerve had come so close to cracking. There were important targets nearly within our grasp; what kind of officer would shrink from seeing things the rest of the way through? Besides, when you’re thrown from a horse, the best thing to do is climb right back into the saddle and ride some more! “Fight?” I asked. “What fight? We haven’t yet begun to fight!” Then I turned to Wu. “Close in on that damned cruiser, best available speed. Let’s kill her and be done with this whole rotten business.”

  36

  It didn’t make sense to reserve power for our single functional turret anymore, so we diverted everything to the Field. There were two reasons for this. One was that with only two guns firing, hits were so unlikely at the current range that shooting was almost a waste of time. The second was that even if we did strike the heavily-armored Seventh of November, it wouldn’t do any good anyway unless we landed a bolt in an already damaged spot. Then, even if we managed that little trick, pretty much everything that could be ruined in such areas probably already was. Besides, the big cruiser was practically dead already; she still hadn’t so much as fired a shot in her own defense. So instead I focused on lining up our last torpedo shot just so, and making damned sure it was a hit. There was no way the devastated Imperial could absorb another nuke.