The Hot Gate - [Troy Rising 03]

by John Ringo

  “Sections six and seven report heavy damage,” Major Viog shouted over the scream of alarms. The damage control officer was less worried about being shot than most since he was just about the most vital person on the ship at the moment.

  “Really?” Captain Be’Sojahiph said, slamming his helmet closed. “Was it the hiss of evacuating air that gave it away?”

  “No, sir!” Viog said. “It was probably the total destruction of all the shield generators, point defense and missile tubes in our section. Sir!”

  “Enemy’s second wave.”

  “Twenty thousand missiles, the rest of their fleet and one unclassified vessel. All accelerating at eleven seventy meters per second square.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Be’Sojahiph said, keying up the information. He compared the gravity emissions of the vessels to other systems, a job that would have been Ishives’, come to think of it, and frowned.

  “Independence class?” Be’Sojahiph said. “Probably. They’re trying to replicate that horrible Constitution... thing that took out the Herraruo. But... target all long-range fire on that vessel. If they get through...”

  “Targeting set,” the tactical tech said.

  “Then fire!”

  * * * *

  “Maneuver to cover the MinJolnir,” Admiral Marchant said. “Accelerate the missiles. Linear formation. Target the next segments outward from the center. Ships maintain perpendicular formation. Pound the shit out of that thing.”

  “Set up, sir.”

  “Initiate.”

  * * * *

  “Second wave of missiles inbound, Captain,” the tactical tech said nervously. “Seem to be targeting segments five and eight.”

  “Prepare to reduce rotation,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said.

  “Sir?” the tactical tech growled.

  “They’re trying to open up our center so they can break us with that thing,” Be’Sojahiph said. “We need to keep some shields up. We’ll take the damage on one segment until it’s scrap, then rotate.”

  * * * *

  “Sheffield’s lost forward screens,” Captain Whisler said. “Rotating out of formation.”

  “Acknowledged,” Admiral Marchant said.

  * * * *

  “Skew to keep that fleet on our flank,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said.

  “Captain?” the tactical tech said.

  “Yes?” Be’Sojahiph ground out.

  “The Thermopylae has managed to reverse its previous course. It’s... closing.”

  I need at least one tactical specialist alive so I don’t have to do it.

  “Maintain fire with spinal gun. We’ll burn through sooner or later. Or at least take out their damned laser.”

  * * * *

  “So that’s the situation,” Del Papa said. “They’re stuck in that corridor. Good targeting and position so we can’t winkle them out. Not without being bloody slaughtered in the process. On the other hand, they can’t get out, either. But command wants them cleaned out so we can go find more.”

  He wasn’t sure about this Marine. It was nice to find somebody who could speak English. But he hadn’t heard that sort of tone in a long time. Like the last time he worked recovery on one of the bombed out cities.

  “I can do that,” Ramage said, flatly. “Give me enough time, I can burn through the damned wall.”

  Rammer knew he had a message from Comet on his phone. He also knew what it would be. “Last Call.” That message you set up to go out when you’d bought it. “Well, this is the Last Call. Here’s all the stuff I wanted to tell you when I was alive but didn’t have the guts.” He had about sixty of them to work through already. He figured he’d just wait to see if he needn’t have bothered. He figured by the end of the day, about seventy-three people would be getting one from him. Of course, sixty or so of them were never going to pick up.

  In the meantime, there were Rangora to kill.

  “Just suppress them so we can work up the damned tunnel.”

  “On it, Sergeant.”

  * * * *

  Captain Be’Sojahiph’s plan worked. Partially.

  “Shields down in quadrants forty-three, thirty-seven, twenty-eight and sixteen. Those are losses of the generators. Shields yellow in twenty-four, thirty-six, twenty-seven and nineteen. Point defense down in all four plus quadrants twenty-two and sixty-seven. No additional damage to sections six and seven.”

  When a quadrant had been sufficiently trashed, surviving missiles in the wave with enough maneuverability had shifted to adjacent quadrants, working out. But that left the entire rear section, minus the central sectors, undamaged.

  “Full rotate,” Captain Be’Sojahiph said. “Continue max fire. Status on Thermopylae”

  “Starting to accelerate towards us,” Tactical replied. “Still no hits from its laser. We’re hitting it but we have been unable to take out the one laser that appears functional. There are screens and it is adjusting in a... very random manner.”

  “Odd,” Be’Sojahiph said. “Not the random adjustment, the missing. Their systems are generally quite accurate. How long until it reaches this vicinity?”

  “Four hours, sir.”

  “We have time, then.”

  “Third wave of missiles,” Tactical said.

  “That’s why they make these things tough, Tactical.”

  * * * *

  “Prepare to skew,” Admiral Marchant said.

  “Not before time, sir,” Captain Whisler replied.

  The timing was... tricky.

  Granadica wasn’t the only fabber working on a ship when the Rangora showed up. Hephaestus on Troy had been working on an Independence class and was at about the same stage of completion. Notably it had drives and power systems loaded. Squashing it and armoring it was easy. In addition, however, the “Mini-Mjolnir” had been outfitted with heavier armor and screens designed for a Defender class.

  That wasn’t enough, however, to survive closing with a fully prepared AV that was dealing with a few mosquitoes called battleships. It needed more mosquitoes called missiles for cover.

  The problem being that the MinJolnir had much lower acceleration than the missiles. The last wave had to fully occupy the attention of the superdreadnought so the MinJolnir had a chance of plowing through.

  Tricky.

  Marchant watched the vector indicators for the missiles and then made the call less on math than gut.

  “Skew fleet. Full accel on MinJolnir.”

  * * * *

  “The enemy fleet is skewing,” Tactical said. “They’re exposing the rammer ship.”

  “All lasers concentrate on that rammer,” Be’Sojahiph said. He’d done the math. The smaller ship was going to have a fraction of the effect of the heavier rammer. But that fraction, if it hit their central sectors, was going to be enough to crack his AV in half.

  “Rammer is maneuvering,” tactical said. “High delta. Minimal hits at this range. And... it’s shielded this time.”

  “Damn, damn and blast!”

  * * * *

  MinJolnir was, indeed, ducking and weaving for all it was worth. The heavy secondaries of the AV should still have blasted it from stem to stern. However, there were six heavy screens forward. As one dropped from laser fire, another would catch the incoming coherent light. Generally the original screen could reset. But first one dropped offline from fire, then another. With no damage control technicians aboard to fix them, they were permanently lost.

  Eventually the AV was going to win. If something didn’t happen to stop the fire.

  * * * *

  “Enemy missiles overtaking rammer ship,” Tactical said. “They’re maneuvering to take our fire.”

  “Begin rotation,” Be’Sojahiph said. “We’ll see what survives after this missile pass. Maintain fire on the rammer.”

  * * * *

  Since the missiles had the dedicated job of intercepting laser fire to keep it off MinJolnir, fewer than four thousand made it to the superdreadnought. Bet
ween the rapid rotation and point defense, none made it through to the armor. However, they had been set to spread attack and dozens of screens were offline from stem to stern.

  * * * *

  “Sir!” Captain Blades said, sitting up in his command chair.

  “Captain?” Clemons said, halfheartedly.

  “Forward screens in quadrant seven down on the AV,” Blades said.

  “Targeted fire!”

  “Laser’s still warming...”

  “When we fire ...” Clemons said, “maintain fire as long as possible.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  * * * *

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The forward screen hit had been more or less an accident. The Thunderbolt had been part of a group of ten targeted on section two. When the screens on two had failed it automatically shifted to section one. Amazingly, the single missile made it through the point defense fire and hit the screen. All that happened was the penetrator system dropped the screen.

  Even the Rangora had automated reset breakers for that sort of eventuality But repeated impacts had caused enough vibration damage that many of them were offline. Even then, fast action on the part of damage control would have had the screen reset and up in seconds.

  AV damage control crews were, in general, excellent. Elite even. On average. Which meant some were splendid and some were mediocre and a very few were quite poor.

  Unfortunately for Captain Be’Sojahiph’s career, the Damage Control Team 1176, Quadrant Seven, Screens, was not among the elite. How long it would have taken to get the screen back up quickly became a point in the same category as Pickett’s Charge, to be argued over by history buffs.

  * * * *

  The single repaired collimator system on the Thermopylae was, in fact, quite accurate. The tactical group on the Therm had been taking some black humor in precisely missing the AV. The battlestation’s laser had a “bare” sixty petawatts of power at its disposal, about the same as an AV main gun. There was no way that the reduced power of the laser could get through the screens and the armor to the vitals of the beast unless something very fortuitous happened.

  But sixty petawatts was nearly six times the power of a spinal gun on a Defender. Enough to do some serious damage if a screen went down that was oriented precisely at the crippled battlestation.

  “And charrrrged, firing!” Sharp yelled.

  The lights dimmed again as every scrap of available power was fed to the laser.

  “Come on, baby...” Clemons moaned. “Jack those bastards up.”

  * * * *

  The reduced power laser hit the AV squarely on the nose, just off the main spinal gun collimator. It dug through the heaviest armor on any constructed dreadnought in the spiral arm in less than half a second, then started digging deeper.

  It was the true value of “crossing a T.” Generally it was thought that the ability to avoid enemy fire whilst pounding him was the main value. The laser, fired from the side through one of the damaged quadrants, would have simply bored through and gone out the other side. Surrounding, undamaged, quadrants would have shrugged off the rest of the fire. As the Thermopylae proved, the main value was the ability to fire down the length of a ship, rather than transverse, so as to do the maximum internal damage possible. First every system in quadrant seven failed, screen generators were trashed, point defense, then the carefully aimed laser, unimpeded by armor or screens, dug into the massive capacitors for the spinal laser causing catastrophic damage in surrounding quadrants. As it dug deeper systems fell in quadrant after quadrant as secondary detonations caused complete failures in section one, two, three...

  * * * *

  “Skew! Skew! Skew!” Captain Be’Sojahiph screamed.

  His ship seemed to be a continuous set of explosions working front to back just as the missile wave had receded.

  “Laser hit on forward quadrant,” Major Viog said blandly. “Forward three segments offline. Major damage in quadrants...”

  “Status of rammer?” Captain Be’Sojahiph said, cutting him off.

  “It’s...” Tactical said, then rippled his scales. “We’re not going to stop it. Not now.”

  * * * *

  The MinJolnir carried a fraction of the power of its larger cousin. But it was enough.

  It hit the AV squarely on section five, directly over the CIC with a kinetic force of nearly seventy-two megatons.

  From a distance, the explosion was almost unspectacular. It looked a bit like the warning symbol for fireworks. The AV, viewed from a distance, looked not unlike a stick of dynamite. The expanding fireball looked like a painting of an explosion. And the two halves tumbled away from each other quite slowly.

  That was how it looked from a distance, anyway.

  * * * *

  “Quadrants of the AV are still firing,” Captain Whisler said, shaking his head. “And the rear section is getting its rotational capability back already. Lots of screens down and such but...”

  “How in the hell did the Glatun take out any of these?” Marchant asked, wonderingly. “Without a Troy class I mean.”

  “We took out three easy peasy, sir,” Whisler said. “You just need a butt load and a half of missiles.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Marchant said. “Get me Field Marshall Hampson. Time to talk. Again.”

  * * * *

  “Do you want to guess how many missiles I have left?” the President asked. She wasn’t sure if the Rangora understood human body posture or tone. Her staff would probably describe it, quietly, as “tired, frustrated and on her last nerve.”

  “We agree to a cease-fire to clear the survivors. We recover our ships where possible, you recover yours where possible. No prisoners and no engagement until all damaged vessels and survivors are cleared.”

  “I’ll add the condition that when the Troy clears the gate into E Eridani you had better be either gone or ready to rumble.”

  “Understood.”

  * * * *

  Technically, the Pathans should be doing this, Del Papa thought. But closing on an enemy position under heavy fire... wasn’t their strong suit.

  So of course De Pops was hugging the bulkhead and deck, trying to sneak around the corner on a couple of Rangora who were living up to their rep.

  Fortunately the Deuce Jarhead with the heavy laser was laying down so much fire Del Papa could feel the bulkhead heating up. Maybe too much.

  “I am going to get your lizard ass...” Del Papa said, tossing another sensor ball down the corridor.

  Not only was the ball shot out, the fucker’s laser poked around the corner and shot right where DP had been. Fortunately, he wasn’t born yesterday.

  “I am gonna...”

  “All units. Cease-fire in effect. All units. Cease-fire in effect. Switch frequencies for local Rangora contact.”

  Papa brought up the hypercom channel and tried not to scream.

  * * * *

  “Ixi sucking...” Ghezhosil hissed, bringing up the hypercom channel.

  * * * *

  “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE IXIKAGA/FUCKING KIDDING ME!”

  * * * *

  “Wait...” Sergeant Ghezhosil said. “What did he... ?”

  * * * *

  “What?” Del Papa said. “What is... Ikki... ?”

  “Human unit, this is Lieutenant Lanniph, Rangoran Imperial Space Infantry. Cease-fire in effect. Do you acknowledge?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Del Papa said. “Sergeant First Class Del Papa, Terran Marines. Acknowledged.”

  “Do you have details, yet?”

  “Nope,” Del Papa said, leaning up against the bulkhead. The Rangora he’d been trying to kill for the last twenty minutes was, he was sure, just about in arm’s reach. “Just going to cop a squat and wait on that. I’d offer y’all a smoke but it’s sort of tough in vacuum.”

  “And I’d offer skul, but I believe it is poisonous to humans. As tobacco is to us.”

  “It’s the thought that counts,” Del Papa said. “And speaking o
f which, my translator can’t find ikki... whatever.”

  “It involves... I could answer that but I’m going to have you ask Sergeant Ghezhosil while I contact higher...”