by John Ringo
“I think the word is... Ow...”
“Good,” Clemons said. “Now get us back in the fight.”
“At the moment, the only thing we have is Mjolnir,” Leonidas said.
“The bombardment has let up,” Granadica said. “Crews can get a laser head operating. Maybe two. Might even be able to point a little.” She groaned a little. “I think I need to rethink my maintenance feedback system. Is this what pain feels like?”
“We have less than half our power systems,” Leonidas said. “Given maneuvering and life support, that means a quarter of our laser output.”
“A little sympathy here?”
“Work on it,” Clemons said. “Now... Mjolnir? What are we doing with Mjolnir?”
“I was about to ask permission on that, sir,” Leonidas said. “It is about halfway to its target.”
“Which is... ?”
“I mean, ‘Glad to see you survived, Granadica.’ ‘Sorry you’re hurt, Granadica’?”
“Glad to see you survived, Granadica. Sorry you’re hurt, Granadica. We just lost two boat squadrons, a thousand Marines, six ships, and have lifeboats and people in suits scattered all over the system and no way to recover them. Glad to see you survived, Granadica. Now get to fixing yourself to the point you can get to fixing... everything else”
“Yes, sir, Admiral,” Granadica said firmly. “I have some remaining functioning internal systems. Will comply.”
“Which is... ?”
* * * *
THIRTY-TWO
Star General Subekulh Gi’Tathajagh had seen worse battles. The first three assaults on Tuxughah came to mind. And he had examined, quite carefully, the reports, the true reports, on the assaults on the Terran system. Which were, also, worse than this. For one thing, the Rangora were more or less assured of winning. For values of win. What the humans would call a Pyrrhic victory. Victory at such cost that defeat was less preferable on only a moral level. The loss of General Sho’Duphuder’s entire fleet was going to cost the Imperium dearly. But for once the Rangora were going to carry the field against these damned Terran primates. The battle globe was functionally destroyed, and he had the throw weight to defeat the Terran light units. Of course, the estimates were eighty percent numeric loss of his force to do so. But the AVs were assured of surviving.
Victory. Congratulations of the High Command. Promotion.
He wondered if General Sho’Duphuder had taken one of the six thousand lifeboats on the Search and Rescue screen. If so, Gi’Tathajagh would use every bit of whatever political clout he might gain from this “victory” to ensure Sho’Duphuder stayed a general. Was even promoted. Moral courage of that... intensity was much harder to find among the Rangora than the physical kind.
“General Gi’Tathajagh. Incoming enemy... ship?”
“There are forty-three incoming enemy ships,” Gi’Tathajagh said. “Very hard-to-hit, extremely hard-to-kill enemy ships.”
“This one is coming from the direction of the battle globe,” Colonel Toghazen said. The fleet tactical officer seemed puzzled.
“And our missiles didn’t... deal with it?”
“It appears to have used the mass of the globe to hide behind,” Toghazen said. “And we can’t identify the class. Mass is in the range of one of their Constitution class, as is acceleration.”
“So, another Constitution,” General Gi’Tathajagh said. “There are... eleven of those remaining?”
“Thirteen. Yes, sir. But the density is wrong. Its volume is only a third of a Constitution. And the trajectory is not for fly-by or any normal combat maneuver. It... sir, it appears to be on a ramming course.”
“Mass of...three hundred thousand tons? Kinetic energy on impact?”
“Two hundred plus times ten to the seventeenth of kinetic release.”
“Concentrate fire on it.”
“We have been, sir,” Colonel Toghazen said, a touch nervously. “It’s maneuvering, but despite that we’ve hit it repeatedly with secondaries from both the Aggressors and AVs and it’s— It’s not even shielded! We’re getting major ablation consonant with nanoweave, flintsteel composites. But... it’s not stopping it.”
“Rotate the in-line Aggressors,” Gi’Tathajagh snapped. “Begin maneuvering out of its impact basket.”
“It has the maneuverability of a Glatun cruiser, General!”
General Gi’Tathajagh had even seen that before. Going into the war he, like most Rangora, had viewed the Glatun as effete wimps. And, by and large, they were. But at... Ceghevel? Yes, Ceghevel, another “glorious victory,” a wounded Glatun cruiser had made a suicide run on the AV Woshshusee. Rangora did not suffer from the human problem of “combat flashbacks” but some images were burned indelibly on the brain. The sight of the center third of an AV flashing into gas was one of his indelible images.
“Orders to Cuwwutoa group,” Gi’Tathajagh snapped after a glance at the tactical display. “Physical intercept.”
“General, that would be—”
“Try with light units, but do not let that... thing through! Send it!”
* * * *
Captain Zoa Qa’Zafilach, commander of the Aggressor Battleship Cuwwutoa and Battle Group commander, looked at the orders, looked at the tactical display and made an instant decision. His family was connected and he could worry about the Kazi later.
“Flight. Full power all engines.”
“Sir...” his maneuvering officer said. “Engine four is...”
“I said full power,” the captain said, sending a copy of the orders to the pilot. “All engines. Consonant with our orders to physically intercept an incoming mass kinetic projectile that is targeted on the AV Herraruo.”
“Physic— Full power, aye
* * * *
“Cuwwutoa reports major engine failure. Acceleration drop to sixty percent.”
“Then send the—” General Gi’Tathajagh said, then stopped. “Never mind. I can do the math.”
“Maneuvering fall-off,” Toghazen said. “I think we got it but...”
“But.”
* * * *
There is a term in flight operations: “near miss.” It is a misnomer. By definition a near miss is, in fact, a hit. One has nearly missed but not... quite. A near by miss could perhaps be appropriate. A miss which is very nearby. A better term for a situation where two bodies almost connect is a near hit. Nearly hit but... not quite.
Thus, what occurred was a near miss in the correct meaning of the term. Mjolnir, peppered by high-power lasers, its maneuvering systems junked, even its central processing core cored by an AV secondary laser, very nearly missed the ponderously maneuvering AV.
Nearly. Very. In space terms, it was a near run thing indeed. As near run as any could hope.
However, when a mass of three hundred thousand tons traveling at a blistering four hundred and twenty kilometers per second hits anything it more or less instantaneously converts to 265x1017 joules of energy. (Unless it is made from neutronium and then the physics gets... rather complicated.)
The equivalent of a 6.33 gigaton bomb went off, if not directly in the guts of the assault vector, then, well... near enough.
* * * *
“Yes!” Admiral Marchant screamed as the flagship AV was cut in half in a welter of fire. Gases were jutting from it end to end. Some of the crew might have survived but the AV was toast as a fighting platform. “Yes, BABY!”
“We gotta get us more of those,” Captain Whisler said. “Whatever the hell it was.”
“We’re not out of the woods, yet,” Marchant said as the Jimmy Carter reeled out of the battle formation. Life pods blew out just before the Smiley turned into scrap and plasma. “But that gives us a chance. Full launch. Target the AV. Now, now, now.”
* * * *
“EM Parker?”
The last person in the fucking galaxy Dana wanted to talk to right now was Senor Doctor Palencia.
“Dr. Palencia. I don’t know if you—”
“We have bee
n getting a continuous update through our implants, EM. I... I am very sorry for your losses, corazon. I do not know if it was... although you did not get along... Dario cared for you very much.”
“Sir...” Parker said, trying not to let the choking carry over the transmission. “You just lost a son and Vel is in a coma.”
“You became the target of much analysis, as I’m sure you are aware, Parker,” Palencia replied. “You just lost the closest things you have had in far too long to a mother in Chief Barnett and a father in EM Hartwell.”
“Thank you for that... analysis, sir,” Parker said bitterly.
“The reason that I read it, and paid attention, was...” Palencia paused. “Dario had approached me about... Despite the obvious issues, he wished my assistance on the question of.. .’courting you’ would be the closest term in English.”
“Oh, jeeze,” Dana said, trying not to chuckle. “I had sort of picked up on that, sir. He’d have gotten about as far as... as this shuttle would against that damned AV, sir. But... He was a great guy, sir. He’d gotten to be a damned good engineer. I know that doesn’t seem like enough to say, but...”
“Thank you, EM,” Palencia replied. “All language can be reduced in some ways to numbers. One of the other analyses I’ve paid attention to refers to the question of...praise. What the analysis indicated was that one took the praise from a Norté subculture such as yours and simply applied a multiplier. Or, rather, an inversion algorithm. For someone such as you to say he was ‘a damned good engineer’ is ... high praise indeed. And he is ... was... a fine young man.”
“Shuttle bay’s pressurized, sir,” Parker said, clearing her throat. “Time to debark.”
“Yes,” Palencia said. “And to try to stop this debacle before those drifting in space are lost as well. Corazon, I say this in truth. If I must pull strings to make it an order. When this is done you shall visit us. You shall consider our home, Dario’s home, your home. You shall visit our ranch. You ride. You shall ride and I shall ride with you and we will visit Dario’s horses and his life and his memory. You shall not ride this path alone. And, I beg of you, do not allow me to ride it alone either. In memory of... a damned good engineer.”
“I... I’ll try, sir,” Dana said. “But as far as I can tell, right now I’m the only fully qualified shuttle coxswain and engineer left in the system. I think I’m going to be sort of busy.”
“You shall make the time, corazon. I say this as a man who had become... you would say I was not completely dissatisfied with the idea of you being a daughter-in-law.”
“Damn, sir,” Dana said. “I’ll try not to let that go to my head.”
“Communication is possible.”
* * * *
“A laser, a laser, my kingdom for a laser,” Admiral Clemons muttered.
The Thermopylae, for all its gargantuality, needed certain things to be a battlestation. And if the enemy had trashed every laser collimator, which it had, and every missile fabber, which it had, and most of the maneuvering systems, which the Rangora had, all you had left was a big ball of nickel iron with, fortunately, still functional air and water systems. And, alas, a functioning tactical display. In days of yore were this, say, the Yorktown limping back to Pearl Harbor from the battle of the Coral Sea, Admiral Clemons would have been busy on the radio making preparations for their arrival and repair so that they could go forth and be sunk at Midway.
These days computers handled most of that. So the best use of his time was to watch as Admiral Marchant’s fleet was hammered into bits.
“And the ability to actually point it,” Commodore Guptill pointed out then snorted.
“Didn’t actually fall into the category of funny, Commodore.”
“Yes, sir,” Dexter said. “Just found a tiny slice of irony or something at two six two mark twenty nine. Range two hundred eighty thousand klicks.”
“What is that Rangora destroyer doing?” Clemons asked then frowned. “Where is it going? For that matter, where did it come from? Tell me there’s not another enemy fleet out there.”
“That’s the minor humor, sir,” Commodore Guptill said. “The commander of the first Rangora fleet apparently, and it was a good call, ordered all his personnel to abandon ship. Not sure who’s going to pick them up but those ships weren’t going to survive our missile cloud.”
“I agree, so...”
“So everybody punched. Grab that yellow bar and pull. Now, statistically, it was possible since they set their ships to auto defense that some ships were going to survive.”
Clemons backtracked the Rangora destroyer and snorted.
“Lord above,” he said, shaking his head. “The Flying Dutchman.”
“Just going to keep accelerating, I guess, until it runs out of fuel, sir,” Guptill said. “Which makes me realize I hope nobody is aboard.”
“I’m wondering how we’re getting home,” Clemons said. “Any bright ideas, cause I’m all out.”
“There are as many ideas as there are people aware of the facts, Admiral,” Leonidas interjected. “The exact number is one thousand four hundred and sixty-eight. That is the number who are generally aware of the current condition and with sufficient time on their hands to discuss possible amelioration.”
“Any bright ideas?” Guptill asked.
“By my count... six. None of them particularly good but better than spinning slowly off into the vastness of space as the battle rages behind us. I am... not good at running from a battle.”
“Synopsis,” Clemons said, sitting up.
“In what order?”
“Anything that might... work?”
“One. Bluff. We are reducing rotation. I’ve been working with maneuvering to reduce the rotation so that north is in the direction of the enemy AV. Damage control teams have installed one of our remaining laser collimators and two heavy shield generators protecting it. Adjust rotation and open fire. But, and this is very important, miss the AV.”
“Why?” Guptill asked.
“The enemy is aware we are heavily damaged but how damaged must be a mystery. If the laser impacts, they will be aware that it is not full power. However, if it misses... there is no real way to detect the relative power of that sort of laser without physical contact.”
“So they think we’re back to full power but just missing due to range.”
“Correct, Admiral.”
“Do it,” Jack said, then rubbed his jaw. “But it needs more. We need to get back in the fight. I agree on the missing. But we need to close to really bluff.”
“The Orion drive is destroyed, Admiral.”
“Yep,” Clemons said. “But the nukes ain’t. And we just happen to have a bunch of tailor-made craters on the door to stick them in.”
“Oooh,” Guptill said. “Not sucking up, sir, but that’s brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant.”
* * * *
“And here come their missiles.” Colonel Thoos Ishives was the tactical officer for the AV Jovian Crusher. And with the destruction of the AV Iramozh, tactical officer for the Jomaz Fleet. A nice position if he lived to keep it.
“We will take damage,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said, hands clasped calmly in front of him. With the loss of the Iramozh, and apparently Generals Sho’Duphuder and Gi’Tathajagh, he had acceded to command of the Fleet. “But that is all. Not even crippling. And then we will finish off their mobile units and reduce the former asteroid to... smaller asteroids.”
“Yes, sir,” Ishives replied.
“It was a tactical error on their commander’s part,” Be’Sojahiph said. “That missile array, even given their losses, would have severely reduced the Aggressor squadrons.”
“Yes, sir,” Ishives said, paying more than strictly necessary attention to the tactical display. Then he realized that he had better be paying actual attention to the tactical display. “Sir... The entire missile complement is targeted on us.”
“As I said, a tactical error on the enemy’s part.”
“Yes,
sir,” Ishives replied. “But... it is also entirely targeted on our rear quadrant. Sir... they’re going for our engines.”
* * * *
Humans knew a lot about Aggressors. They owned over forty that were in various stages of repair and upgrade as well as bits and pieces of hundreds more that had run afoul of Troy, Thermopylae and SAPL.
They knew less about AVs. Not because they didn’t have pieces of them. Because that was pretty much all they had. And not nearly enough trained engineers to carefully sweep them up, put the jigsaw puzzle back together and examine them. They even had complete space docks for repairing them, captured in a previous battle in E Eridani space. But the specifications and blueprints had been purged.