“They might have, too, but Ron showed up at our side of the demilitarized zone with a ton of their own science. Now we know how they managed to spoof our sensors during the war. Even better, we know how to get more energy out of the same power plant. Five times for a small ship reactor. Ten times for a huge city-size power plant.”
“And someone remembered the experiment that gave you the Hellburners,” his wife added. “I’m Bahati, Admiral, and this is Little Phil.”
“Hello,” the youngster said.
“And hello to you,” Kris said before returning to Phil.
“Those things can knock a rock off a moon or something and send it shooting out at, what’s the speed?” Bahati said.
“About .05 the speed of light,” Phil said. “Call it fifty-four million kilometers an hour, give or take a few millimeters.”
“Nelly, show that in comparison with the Alwa system.”
The number sounded huge, but a star system still dwarfed it. “They’ll see it coming,” Kris said, “and dodge.”
“Yes, but a whole lot of stuff can make dodging hard.”
“Yes,” Kris said, but she was looking at System X. It even had a neutron star right there waiting for them, not all that far from a fuzzy jump. It was quite a bit farther from a regular jump.
Something to think about.
Phil Junior was getting more of the fidgets. “Nelly, can you make a toy frigate for this little starship captain?” Kris asked, and just as quickly little Phil was squealing with glee.
“Phil won’t let us use Smart Metal to make toys for the kids,” his wife said.
“The kids?” Kris echoed.
“Several of the crew from the old Hornet brought their families with them. Some of the old chiefs complain the ship is as much a day-care center as a warship,” Bahati said.
“When we went on the Voyage of Discovery,” Phil said, “no one said we weren’t coming back, so yes, the old Hornet had a lot of family men expecting to be away for a couple of months. Now they want to settle down here.”
“Will you be going dirtside?” Kris asked Bahati.
“I’m an Information Systems specialist. Frigate systems are my specialty. I’ve made arrangements with one of the wives who is an elementary-level teacher to care for little Phil while I’m away.” She glanced at her husband. “Phil wants me assigned to the Cannopus Yard. I want to stay on the Hornet. I’ve helped her work up.”
“It would be a hard day for little Phil if I lost another ship with us both on it,” Phil said. There was a darkness behind his eyes that Kris chose not to plumb.
“There are plenty of ships that need crews,” Kris said. “Jack’s still on Wasp most of the time, though.”
“Yes,” Bahati said.
“We’ll talk about it more later,” Phil said.
“Well,” Kris said, sensing the subject needed changing, “what is it with your frigates? You say your reactors are good for five times the power of mine. What’s all that good for?”
“Five times the hitting power,” Phil said, beaming at the chance to praise his new ship. “The main problem is applying all that power. They’re working on a 24-inch laser, but they’re got teething problems. Anyway, the new Hornet has twice the lasers, so we can fire one while the other is recharging. Each laser has twice the capacitors. Instead of a two- or three-second burst, we can hold the beam for five or six seconds. I’ve held it for almost seven seconds by feeding juice in the back while firing it out the front. We have twice the power cabling from the reactor and cooling for the lasers, but we’re firing them just as fast, every fifteen seconds. We fire off the top battery for five to seven seconds, then fire the bottom battery. By the time they’re dry, the top is just about ready.”
“If you flip ship and fire the aft battery, the front will definitely be locked and loaded,” Kris said.
“Yes. Hit them hard and hit them often.”
Kris walked with them to the Forward Lounge, where she met the key staff from the new warships and addressed all hands over the net. The briefing went pretty much to form. The folks who came out this time, even the merchant ships and factory workers, knew this was a one-way voyage until matters were settled. This time Kris announced that there would be Articles of War signed by all hands: Navy, Marines, and civilians.
“Make no mistake, you sure look like the old-time cavalry arriving just in the nick of time. There is a fight for our very lives coming. But it is a fight we will win!” Kris finished, to a cheering room.
“Now we make it happen,” Jack muttered to her as she stood beaming back at the confident new arrivals.
And they did.
It was a well-ordered drill. Freighters parked their cargos for Alwa or the moon base in a trailing or leading orbit. Kris kept them as twin-reactor ships, and several headed out to the asteroids with new miners and their gear to kick production into higher gear.
The two composite factory ships dropped down to the moon. They were set up according to the latest survey near water and better access to aluminum and iron. It took a week, but their fabs were in production just as the extra loads of minerals and other resources arrived from the mines.
Gosport Station doubled in size. The first assignment for the new yards was to spin out six more Bird class guard ships to relieve the six that had been on duty for a month. That ate up nine of the newly arrived freighters, but with Smart MetalTM flowing out of the factory ships as they used rock, iron, and aluminum to replace it in their outer structure, these new Birds were closer to frigate standards.
Frigates and battlecruisers, that was the word around the stations. The newly arrived ships with their twenty 22-inch lasers certainly looked more like battlecruisers than frigates. They were cycled through the yards; there were now sixteen slips in the eight yards. Rather than respinning freighters, they were occupied by battlecruisers as yard personnel went over them with rigs designed by Benson’s crew, coating newly arrived battlecruisers with crystal armor.
All this took time.
As it turned out, the aliens were willing to give Kris time. They were working on a few tricks of their own.
Commander Hanson brought the Victorious back with news; the other suicide-spawning mother ship was gone. He checked two more systems. The alien warships had vanished; their dock now spun empty.
“The clans are gathering,” Jack whispered.
The number of arriving suicide boats dropped to nothing. Kris kept a pair of the new Birds near each jump, but sent the others to outpost jumps away from System X that weren’t being guarded by the fleets. The original Birds were docked and up-armored.
As soon as the first sixteen frigates were up-armored to battlecruiser standards, they were dispatched to the three fleets. They relieved frigates to return to Cannopus Station and be refitted with the Iteeche power system, upgrading them to battlecruiser standards. They might not have twice the lasers, but they halved the time needed to recharge. The lasers would heat up; the yards added extra refrigeration to the guns.
All the training and practice of a lifetime was now on the line. Yard managers reached deep into their heads, their guts, their very hearts and came up with designs that had to work the first time, every time.
While Admiral Benson and his crews worked miracles, Kris sent Hanson and the Victorious to observe System X. She expected the aliens to move as soon as the fourth wolf pack showed up.
His report, dispatched as soon as the Victorious jumped back into the Alwa system, left Kris wondering if, when the aliens came, she’d be able to stop them.
The aliens were learning.
Not far from the gas giant they were fueling from was a tumbling rock of a planet. They were slicing huge slabs off it and lifting them to orbit, where they cut them to fit the outer hull of their giant warships.
Kris had expected that.
What surprised her was the growing fleet of smaller ships. Their three reactors were only slightly larger than those on frigates. From the sensor take off th
em, they were getting warship-size lasers, maybe bigger, set in their bows.
“They’re building frigates,” Jack said.
“We knew they could build a few fast movers,” Penny said.
“But their fast movers were never very good,” Masao said. “Many blew up or broke down.”
Kris nodded. “We’ll see if they solved their quality control problem. I figured the huge number of reactors and lasers on their ships was their way of getting around sloppy maintenance or construction standards. You can afford to have two or three reactors off-line when you have a hundred. Not so much when you only have three.”
“But if they have fast cavalry, as fast as your own,” Admiral Furzah said, “you will not have so much freedom to maneuver.”
“Exactly,” Kris agreed. “We beat them over the head with our advantages, and they learned the lesson.”
“How fast are they knocking those small ones together?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know,” Kris said. “We need some ships on the other side of the jump, so they can observe everything while it’s happening.”
“Will they let us?” Jack asked.
“We are vermin,” Penny reminded them. “They want us to know fear even as they slay us. I’ll give you five to ten they don’t do anything so long as we stay well away from them.”
“I won’t take your bet,” Kris said, “but I’ll try it. Nelly, tell Commander Hanson that I’m promoting him to captain of a division. He’ll take Victorious and Valiant back to System X, Jump Gamma, anchor there, and observe. He’s to sail as soon as we upgrade his sensor suite to the best available. If he needs anything off Wasp, he’s got it. Boffins as well. I want him to fingerprint those new ships, track their production and shakedown process.”
Kris was sending him back out again. Him and his crew. They were turning into a good team. Too bad that meant she would likely use them up.
The reward for a hard job well done was a worse job.
56
Time passed.
The aliens made use of their time. Kris used hers.
Kris wanted to see the Conqueror in action. Becky Kaeyat got her commodore’s star after the last fight; Kris ordered her to take BatRon 16 for a run to the closest gas giant both to get a load of reaction mass and to give the gunners a shoot. Her squadron got away from the pier a half hour ahead of Earth’s BatRon 10 with Wasp and Conqueror.
Without explanation, Kris ordered the Relentless and Stonewall on a high course.
At five million klicks from a large asteroid, Kris turned to Nelly. “Kindly have Conqueror knock a chip off that rock. Something the size of a small frigate and aimed well above the plane of this system to avoid trouble. Then alert the high frigates that they’ll have a target soon.”
“Done, Kris.”
There was a pause, much longer than Kris expected. Apparently, Conqueror’s crew were just along to sightsee. Ten minutes later, sensors reported something going on aboard the big boy.
Two minutes later, a beam shot out from the huge ship, hit the asteroid, and a big chunk of the place took off like a billiard ball.
“Now let’s see if they can it hit,” Kris said.
Both frigates used a shoot, shoot, look, shoot, shoot, look approach to the fire control solution, or so they reported later. They only had to shoot, shoot, and look to see that the fifty-thousand-ton stone bullet was a cloud of dust.
Admittedly, it was dust moving at .05 percent the speed of light.
“Advise Relentless and Stonewall good shooting and well done. Advise Conqueror they were a bit slow, and the stone bullet they produced is not going to do much damage to the alien ships. We need to come up with a better plan.”
“Sent,” Nelly reported.
Kris sent Commodore Kaeyat’s squadron on to the gas giant for more fuel. She returned with the Conqueror and the frigates. They’d be next to have their reactors upgraded.
As it turned out, Benson had figured a way to rework the frigates to battlecruisers without running them through the yards’ graving docks. Those were reserved for the ships he intended to command. Instead, his teams brought a barge around to the pier where a frigate was moored. Using the flexibility that Smart MetalTM allowed, they’d slit open the hull first around one reactor, then the next, and finally, the last, doing what needed doing. The laser cooling didn’t even take that much of an invasive effort. A tiger team would come aboard with a ton of extra Smart MetalTM, pour it into the hull near the lasers, then program it into piping to cool the lasers and carry the heated reaction mass back to the reactors to feed the plasma.
The superconducting cabling to move more power to the capacitors took more work. It had to be manufactured, not squirted out, but it turned out you could have Smart MetalTM swallow the stuff, like a snake, then draw it through the ship to where you wanted it.
Kris was making good use of her time.
Then she got the next report back from Captain Hansson and the Victorious’s sensors. They had sent a pinnace through the jump with a full week of observations. It was downloaded to the Alarm, a new courier ship respun from one of the newly arrived freighters. It raced back at four gees acceleration.
Kris was grateful for the speed. She was none too happy with the report.
The alien cruisers were maneuvering in sections of fourteen, close enough to her squadrons of eight as to make no difference. They formed a small dish of three, four, four, and three. For larger units, they’d form those fourteen into formations of two, three, three, and two, for a task force of 140.
“That’s a lot of fast movers,” Jack said.
“And the mother ships seem to be in some sort of contest to see how many they can knock out. They’re turning out eight or ten a day.”
“They intend to bury us,” Jack said.
“Drown us in our own blood,” Kris repeated the threat of the old woman she’d sent back to human space. She’d asked Phil how that had gone down.
He’s shrugged. “I got there. This force was ready to sail. They asked me if I wanted to go back. I said I’d go if they renamed a ship Hornet. They did the next day. I can’t say my wife was all that happy about being rushed aboard and off across the galaxy. Her folks were left with the job of packing up our apartment and putting it into storage. I suggested they sell it, but they insisted we’d be back. Three days after we arrived, we were boosting back. I suspect if we hadn’t aimed for Wardhaven, we’d have missed the whole thing.”
“And Captain O’dell?”
“She said she’d come back with the next fleet. She had some things she wanted to do. She also had a fortune in media interviews. That’s another sore point with my wife. She wanted me to take some of that money. I told her there was no place to spend it here.” He paused for a thoughtful moment. “She has a lot of reasons to be unhappy with me. I owe that woman, big-time.”
“We all owe folks big-time.”
“Or we will if we can figure out how to make what they gave us work. I saw the report on the Conqueror’s test. Not so good.”
“Not so good at defending this system,” Kris said. “But there are twelve systems between here and there. As well as a neutron star in System X.”
“But if you go out there, could they get between you and Alwa?” Phil asked.
“Could they? We know the fuzzy jumps. They don’t. Would we really risk that much if we did?”
“I’m glad I made commodore, but I’m even gladder you’re the admiral.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome a lot.”
On that, Phil left. Kris continued to cycle ships out to the fleets picketing System X. She’d up-armor one group and up-engine the other. Admiral Benson kept adding to his “reserve fleet,” that he knew quite well would be in the front with the rest. The numbers were reaching toward 184 plus the up-armored and gunned Birds.
That sounded like a fantastic number . . . until Kris got the weekly report from Hanson. The fourth mother ship had arrived; the num
ber of the huge warships was over a thousand. Counting was impossible; they kept moving around, docking on base ships, then shooting off.
Of the new cruisers, the count was 560 in four of their ten segmented dishes plus more forming up into blocks of fourteen.
There were now eighteen battering rams and six more building.
In the last month, Kris had doubled the number of ships at her disposal.
The aliens had done the same.
She’d upgraded the quality of her ships.
The aliens had added an entirely new class that did its training hidden from prying eyes in the next system out.
They had their surprise. Kris set out to examine hers.
She ordered the three Conquerors to follow Kris’s augmented Fourth Fleet. BatDiv 40 led the way with the Triumph, Swiftsure, Hotspur II, and Spitfire. In their wake was Commodore Kaeyat with Alwa’s own BatRon 15’s eight battlecruisers. Right behind them came the twelve Earth battlecruisers of Captain Nottingham’s Task Force 7. All had upgraded armor, reactors, and improved lasers. The three huge beam ships, or death stars, depending on who was talking, followed them and Wasp. Providing the rear guard was Phil Taussig’s BatRon 17, with its upgraded crystal armor.
All of Kris’s ships had been in the yards for one reason or another. Now she would find out if that made a difference.
They accelerated at a constant 1.5 gees, hitting Jump Point Alpha at a good three hundred thousand kilometers an hour. At Nelly’s recommendation, they put on 17.6 revolutions per minute as they approached the jump.
The screen in Kris’s flag plot went hazy, then three new stars appeared.
One was a dead neutron star, swinging rapidly around a dull red dwarf. “Nelly, contact Professor Szilard of the Conqueror and advise him the fleet will conform to his movements. He is to approach the neutron star as close as he considers necessary and test fire all three of his ships. He is to demonstrate how fast they can fire and how well they control their aim.”
“He says the captain of the Conqueror recommends we make for an orbit around the neutron star’s closest planet, one-third of an Astronomical Unit out. He would prefer we not exceed the present 1.5-gee acceleration or deceleration.”
Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Page 31