Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit

by Owen R. O'Neill

  Kris called up Lieutenant Salsato in CIC. “Tom, our number’s up.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve seen it.”

  Speaking quick, Kris outlined her plan. “Have Osiris conform to our movements and ask Simms to open a hyperwave channel to Jester, wrapped and ghosted. Copy to you.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  A moment later, Ensign Simms’ young face appeared, much healthier looking this time. Maybe the coffee had helped?

  “Channel open, ma’am.”

  “Thanks, Ensign.” Kris settled at the console and typed one-handed.

  Kennakris: He let the dogs out. We need an inside track on those CGS west of the BCG. Can you do anything?

  Yanazuka: We can lift our skirts and offer to dance. That might work.

  Kennakris: Do not— Repeat DO NOT—risk your command.

  Yanazuka: Love your sense of humor. Besides it’s impolite to flash and run—End End##.

  With a smile, Tom Salsato looked up from the text copied on his console. “Do you know the Commander at all, ma’am?”

  “No. I met her years ago—just a week or two.”

  “I served under her on half a dozen deployments. She’s a rare bird, I think you could say. I never knew she had sense of humor, though.”

  * * *

  Tom Salsato wasn’t alone in his ignorance. If Commander Yanazuka had ever told a joke before, her conning officer, Lieutenant Commander Mirabai Knight also hadn’t heard it. She awaited her skipper’s orders on a bridge where you could hear a pin drop.

  “Miri, signal to squadron: Come to attack pattern Wolverine. Raven to engage with us. Tiercel and Peregrine to bat cleanup.”

  “Message sent, ma’am.” Commander Knight reported a moment later. “Acknowledged.”

  “Very well. Lay us across their bows. Be ready to sprint when I give the word.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.”

  As the conning officer gave her orders to the helmsmen, Yanazuka hailed her TAO. “Vince, lock our torps in those two cruisers closest the battlecruiser. Prepare to empty the launchers. Engage any ship that sticks its nose in with missiles.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” Lieutenant Commander Caprelli busied himself at his console. “Firing solutions ready and locked it. Ready to execute.”

  “Okay, people. This is it. Let’s drop our drawers and show ’em the goods.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 233 (0930)

  LSS Polidor, engaged

  Romeo Sector, Apollyon Gates

  Academy tactics instructors like to preach the Three D’s: Deceive, Disrupt, Destroy. Yanazuka’s stealth frigates achieved the first, their torp salvos accomplished the second, and now the rest of Kris’s scanty force were about to undertake the third. Closing to within maximum torpedo range, Kestrel had fired a full salvo of ten torpedoes at IHS Breslau. Three minutes later, two struck the heavy cruiser’s bow and another just aft, blowing away a large of chunk of the armored prow, destroying her forward armament and most of her sensors. The second heavy cruiser, IHS Kolyma, sheared off to avoid four torpedoes fired by Tiercel, while Breslau—blind and nearly deaf—arced off to the east. IHS Stornhauser, which had been lightly damaged in the previous hit-and-run attacks, broke off as well to assist Breslau.

  With the three cruisers guarding IHS Orion’s left flank out of the fight, Kris pounced. Bringing Polidor alongside the battlecruiser while LSS Osiris crossed behind, both ships opened a concentrated fire as Penthesileia, along with LSS Ethalion, pursued IHS Kolyma and rest of Corhaine’s ships drove a wedge through rear of the enemy formation.

  While their mates in Polidor’s starboard railgun bank pounded IHS Orion, the gun crew in No.13 mount (portside), watching for approaching ships, had their hands full in more ways than one.

  “Goddammit Foshie! If you puke on my console one more time, I’m chucking your ass outside!”

  “Can’t fuckin’ help it, Tomb. It’s these fuckin’ jumps. Like we’s a fuckin’ yo-yo!”

  “You’re the fuckin’ yo-yo—”

  “Shut the fuck up, both of you! Load three and find me a goddamn target,” snarled Bates.

  “A’right, lookin’ . . . lookin’—got ’er! That bitch at ten o’clock, range twenty-four point seven-one-four. Startin’ her turn . . . ready to light it up!”

  Bates squinted hard at the target screen, watching the predictor’s pip. He added a shade of bias aft towards the engine cluster. “Fire!”

  The characteristic shriek, muted by the dampers, and ultraviolet flash of accelerator rings; the shiver of the mount as three rounds shot towards the distant target in swift succession.

  “Lightning Shit!” Tomb cackled. “Let’s do ’er again! I love me the fireworks!”

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 232 (1200)

  INS Lexington, engaging

  Nicobar, Antares Region

  As Commodore Bainbridge, from the bridge of the heavy cruiser INS Lexington, beheld what lay before him, a glow began to suffuse his heart, his chest, his whole being: a deep cold furious brilliance more intense any he’d felt before. The codes had worked perfectly: the slaver fleet left port like passel of lambs—fatally uncurious lambs—and were now closing with what they assumed to be their escort with every appearance of eagerness: eager to be about their business.

  Such are the wages of sin, reflected the commodore as he turned his shining face to Lieutenant Garret. “General order to the fleet: Beat to quarters, weapons free.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And bring up this morning’s flash from Trumpet V.”

  Bainbridge leaned forward to savor the words again, a look of intense concentration on his face. “Open a broadcast channel.”

  “Open, sir. Ready to broadcast.”

  The commodore pointed a long large-knuckled finger at the message. “Read it, please.”

  Garret cleared his throat. “Got ’em by the balls here. You kick ’em in the ass. Kennakris, OTC.” Some tactful or diplomatic impulse had caused Kris to sign the message “Officer in Tactical Command” rather than “Commodore”. As much as he appreciated the gesture, he thought it wholly unnecessary.

  Bainbridge accepted the pickup from the lieutenant. “All hands, this is Commodore Bainbridge. You have just heard that Trumpet V is heavily engaged. I know that each and every one of you fully appreciates what that means. I ask that all of you join me in a moment of silent prayer for their souls, and to offer a thanksgiving for the bounty they have caused to be spread before us.”

  The moment of silence went forward and the prayers lifted themselves into the cosmos, for the men and woman of Task Group Red Horse were fond of their commodore and if he’s exaggerated their comprehension a shade in the heat of the moment, it was only by a shade: their sympathies were strongly with Kris’s tiny force, few of which they expected to see again—perhaps none.

  The moment went its rest and Garret keyed the channel open again. The commodore lifted his mellow voice once again. “Now it’s time to dig in, people. Dinner is served.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Day 233 (1213)

  LMR Penthesileia, engaged

  Romeo Sector, Apollyon Gates

  In the age when naval battles were fought on the surface of planetary seas, a callow civilian once innocently asked a scarred Royal Navy captain to describe what battle was like. Pondering on how to convey any sense of such an incommunicable experience, the captain finally said: “There is a great deal of noise—more than you can possibly imagine—and you get rather more excited then you probably should. Then afterwards, you have to clean up the mess.”

  Ever since she’d felt the first sting of battle, that story, despite being almost certainly apocryphal, was all Alexis Corhaine believed one could usefully say on the subject. To be sure, noise did not apply in the same way to modern battles, but the excitement did, and the mess most emphatically did.

  It therefore struck her as deeply ironic that this battle—as desperate as any she’d ever been in and more desperate than all but
two; hazarding not just ships and lives (including, incidentally, her own) but the Ranger’s very existence—should leave her so unmoved. As a rule, passion was out of place in a commander, but Min had never lost hers, and that young CEF (now Ionian) officer’s inner fire burned so fiercely it was a wonder flesh could contain it. Yet they weren’t just good commanders, but brilliant ones, and Corhaine wondered where along the long, crooked line of her life, she’d lost the capacity for such extremes of feeling.

  Watching the battle unfold in pantomime within the volume of Penthesileia’s omnisynth, her feelings seemed almost as remote as the relationship between the omnisynth’s color-coded motes and the ships they represented. Arcing through the display amid veils of gossamer (the ice being deployed so lavishly), they described a tranquil ballet that told nothing of shot-torn hulls and shattered women and men, whose screams had no air to carry them; whose blood, spraying with arterial force, boiled away in vacuum—just a mote shading from green to yellow, then orange or red. The tiny flashes gave no real hint of explosions so violent and fires so hot even molecules could not survive, leaving no legacy of those they consumed beyond a burst of photons that (if they weren’t absorbed by a lonely atom) would not reach their homeworlds for centuries.

  The omnisynth gave no sense of the scale of the battle either, in which planets the size of Terra could comfortably fit within the range the tactics manuals described as “close engagement”. Thus, the battle shown by the omnisynth took place inside an alternate reality, where changing accelerations and exponentially varying distances were tamed so the human eye and mind, better accustomed to simple linearities of speed, time and distance, could more readily comprehend them.

  Her detachment, she was aware, was not shared by the people here with her on CIC, or on those racing far-flung ships; men and women she’d known and fought with for years, for the most part, forging bonds more intimate than lovers’. What to the uninitiated eye would be a scene of calm well-oiled activity was full of meaning to her, read out in an erect posture, the flex of hands addressing a console, the slight inflections in the laconic responses to orders, as when she directed her TAO, Major Dickason, to concentrate their fire on the cruiser squadron’s flagship, IHS Tonnerre.

  His reply, a brisk “Aye aye, ma’am” bespoke the adrenal fires surging through his veins; the rap with which he sent the firing orders to the forward missile room might have been a blow to the target’s spine. The swarm of missiles boosted out, drawing their vivid orange traces through the holographic volume and forcing IHS Tonnerre to turn sharply away from the attack, dropping behind the heavy cruiser IHS Riga, just astern. As her TAO consulted his plot for another target, Corhaine returned her focus to the larger battle.

  * * *

  “Pull!” roared Chief Roshkov, “Move those fucking warheads along now!” His party was maneuvering a string of massy 8-inch railgun warheads from Polidor’s aft magazine to the Numbers 6 and 8 starboard shot lockers. The ammo hoists were out all along this span and midships gun teams were almost dry. “Come on, g’dammit! Steady that line there! Mind the fucking paintwork!”

  This section of hull was open to space and five of his people shot the gap to receive the warheads on the other side and push them through the tricky bend that allowed them to boost the rounds straight up the handlers waiting by the shot lockers. They had all but two of the warheads across when a 14-inch round from IHS Orion burst through the hull just ahead, obliterating the No.6 mount and ejecting Chief Roshkov and his party—what was left of them—into space.

  * * *

  Flashes followed by a message on her console informed General Corhaine that Polidor’s luck had just run out: three 14-inch rounds from IHS Orion had destroyed another gun, disrupted power to her shields, and disabled her starboard engine cluster, cutting the cruiser’s acceleration to sixty percent. She’d already absorbed a dozen hits, but losing shields and that engine would doom her in another minute.

  Corhaine immediately shifted Penthesileia’s attention to IHS Orion, firing another missile salvo at the battlecruiser, allowing Polidor, maneuvering erratically with her single drive, to fall back through a thick band of ice with LSS Osiris and LSS Ethalion covering her. IHS Orion, her drives destroyed by the beating she’d taken, tried to interpose her keel, but too late. The missiles hunted their quarry through streams of point-defense battery fire and six struck her belly as she rolled. Her fusion bottles went critical a moment later, were jettisoned a fraction of a second too late and exploded, breaking her back and sending the devastated ship careening away.

  Slewing to port to avoid the expanding debris cloud, Penthesileia emerged from a bank of ice to find herself almost prow to prow with another heavy cruiser. Opening fire at point blank range, she smashed the cruiser’s superstructure, then rapidly reversed course back into the ice, barely avoiding the cruiser’s 12-inch return fire.

  Grins all around Penthesileia’s CIC now—she even forgave the two junior fire-control officers slapping palms together—the truth, however, was more sobering. Yes, they’d killed a battlecruiser, taken a heavy cruiser of the fight for good, and this last—she proved to be IHS Cormoran—would be some time righting herself.

  But they had paid for it with Polidor, too crippled to engage with any hope of survival until she got both drives back on-line, and LSS Osiris, who’d nearly pumped herself dry engaging IHS Orion. And a potent Dom force still remained and those ships were flying towards Deep Six.

  “Message to Dagger,” Corhaine snapped as the high spirits in CIC failed to abate. “Intercept Dom cruiser squadron heading south by west. They should cut their track at grid reference indigo-hammer.”

  Within moments, the acknowledgment came back from Tisiphone, the light cruiser leading Dagger, and she boosted toward the cruisers, followed by Antiope, Hippolyta, Thalestris and LSS Ariel.

  Ariel had joined without orders (indeed against orders), and Corhaine briefly pondered how the little frigate was managing to keep up. It took a chuckle from her ESM officer, who’d been scrutinizing the frigate’s drive signature, to enlighten her: Lieutenant Trowbridge, LSS Ariel’s chief engineer, had bypassed all the safety interlocks on his ship’s drives to match the fast destroyers.

  At maximum torpedo range, Tisiphone fired a full spread from her forward tubes at IHS Riga, while Antiope and Hippolyta closed in to finish off IHS Cormoran, still half-blind from her earlier encounter with Penthesileia. Thalestris chose a vector that put her in a good position to attack IHS Tonnerre. Corhaine had long known both Britt Chaloner, Thalestris’ captain, and his TAO, Carl Usiskin. That Chaloner had no regard for taking his ship into the heart of the Dom force surprised her not at all. Still, she mediated ordering him to wait until Tisiphone could lend support.

  No, that would never do. Britt knew his business. So did Carl. They were two of the best she had. This was no time to meddle. Other events demanded her attention, but as she turned to them, the twinge deep in her gut misgave her.

  Seven minutes later, at a range of 4 megs, Thalestris’ 6-inch railguns opened a rapid accurate fire on IHS Tonnerre. The heavy cruiser returned fire and within minutes, the destroyer had earned the attention of a large part of the Dom force. Hulled repeatedly by 8- and 12-inch rounds, Thalestris fired a salvo of missiles at close range and came about. Sprinting out of the murderous crossfire, the destroyer detected IHS Stornhauser, another heavy cruiser, on an intercept course. Instead of sheering off, Captain Chaloner steered towards the much heavier ship and launched his remaining missiles.

  The missiles were barely out of the tubes when a salvo of 12-inch rounds found their mark. They tore open her hull from frame 137 back the E-ring, disabling her entire portside battery, her deep-radar, her chase mounts, and sending both fusion bottles into emergency shutdown. Trapped on pure ballistic and reduced to maneuvering thrusters, Chaloner fought his dying ship with savage fury while IHS Stornhauser pounded away at the cripple from point-blank range.

  Having finally driven off IHS Riga, Tisi
phone raced to the aid of her sister, launching a fury of missiles and closing to engage IHS Stornhauser with guns. LSS Ariel, which had escaped detection by cunningly negotiating the ice fields, now came up hard astern of IHS Stornhauser and fired her last three torpedoes at short range. Her skipper, Senior Lieutenant Frederica Green, had denied her TAO’s request to open fire with her 4-inch pop guns, even though tempting targets were in range. Despite Medea’s triumph over IHS Mistral, Lieutenant Green saw no reason to tempt Fate, and now Fate rewarded her with a perfect setup. Shields fatally weakened Tisiphone’s by onslaught, all three torpedoes struck, blowing the stern off the heavy cruiser.

  Seemingly enraged, the surrounding Dom ships concentrated all their ire on Tisiphone, ignoring LSS Ariel and Hippolyta, who were coming to her aid. Fire from three ships poured down, tearing a great gash the side of the light cruiser, damaging engineering, dismounting several guns and nearly breaching the forward magazine. Tisiphone’s captain ordered the magazine emptied and the warheads jettisoned. Working by hand, eleven gun crews cleared the magazine, half of them paying with their lives when an 8-inch round ripped through the compartment.

  But now Hippolyta ranged alongside, screening the light cruiser, and with Antiope closing on their flank, the three Halith ships drew off. As Hippolyta covered Tisiphone, and LSS Ariel lay ice on Dagger’s starboard quarter (in response to General Corhaine’s curt order—the cheeky little frigate had been indulged enough), Antiope came up to offer Thalestris a tow.

  Captain Chaloner waved the destroyer off. It was no use: having absorbed over fifty strikes that riddled his ship from bow to stern, Thalestris had finally lost her fight to survive.

  Aboard Penthesileia, Corhaine saw Thalestris’ icon turn from pulsing red to pale blue as her skipper ordered Abandon Ship. As demolition crews quickly sanitized the hulk, Hippolyta and Antiope informed the general they were taking on Thalestris’ surviving crew. Thirteen minutes later, when the other ships had cleared the space, Thalestris’ fusion bottles detonated leaving only the bright blue-white star of her stasis bottle to mark her passing.