Her eyes went to Kitano’s Mobile Fleet. Amber had upped her acceleration to 1.5 gees on a course to intercept the alien warships. Now, instead of the aliens being spread wide like a deadly flower set to engulf her fleet, the aliens were edge on to Kitano’s battlecruisers. The aliens were spread out too widely to offer mutual support.
Kitano would hit one of the cruiser groups, cut through it and into the flank of one of the warship disks of disks. Assuming Kitano could arrive at the meeting engagement with the right vectors to run parallel with the warships, she’d be in a perfect position to chew them up one bite at a time.
“Nelly, calculate from Amber’s present position an intercept that lets her come alongside the aliens.”
A vector appeared, one that started at 1.5 gees now and included some intense braking.
“Does the fleet have the fuel for this?” Kris asked.
“It will be close, Kris, and they are likely to use much of the spare fuel you took on, but, yes, it can be done.”
Kris smiled to herself and patted baby on her head. “You’ve got a smart mommy, if I do say so myself.”
Kris eyed her boards that showed the standard availability of the eighteen frigates and couriers. There was nothing on the three beam ships. “Nelly, how are the beam ships doing? Could you give me some visual that tracks them if they fall below optimal?”
“A couple of reactor readouts should work. The weapons are very peculiar, but I can knock together something. Hull integrity is easy to gauge. Jack is worried about boarding parties. Should I have a symbol for boarders?”
“Why not? Though how the aliens will manage it is anybody’s guess. Can you show me where they are? It wouldn’t do to walk out of here for a bite to eat and run into one.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Nelly said.
Kris eyed the board. It was like watching a train wreck, as the old saying went. The aliens were on a direct course for her. Kitano was on a direct course for them. They might as well have been on a space elevator’s rails for all the chance they had to avoid the inevitable.
“Nelly, toss some more bolts out there to keep the aliens honest. I wouldn’t want them to relax. Say, one fragmentation bolt per ship per minute. Can they meet that schedule for the next hour?”
“I think so,” Nelly said.
So Kris watched. One screen showed a visual of the neutron star. Every twenty seconds, there would be a bright flash, and another tiny bolt of fifty thousand tons would head off at a fraction of the speed of light. “It looks like my ships have got their rhythm,” Kris said.
“It does,” Nelly agreed.
Kris curled up in her chair, got comfortable, and watched, gently rubbing her belly and baby.
62
The carnage began to get serious.
First one, then more fifty-thousand-ton bolts smashed into the two gravely wounded mother ships. One began to blow itself apart as it took hits at thirty-second intervals. The first two hits on the other apparently took it on one flank and sent it spinning. Later hits threw huge sections off. It didn’t so much die, as fall to pieces as huge chunks shot away.
“It must be hell there,” Penny whispered softly.
“Yes,” Kris agreed.
The third small moon struggled to stay under way, to follow the alien horde as it sought Kris’s blood. Kris’s anger caught it.
First one 12,500-ton fragment hit, then another, then a third. The bullets drilled into the ship, shattering structure and smashing flesh and blood. Inevitably, some of what they smashed were reactors. The ship began to burn. The alien captain tried to turn the huge thing, to work it out of the incoming barrage. However, there was no escaping. Not now. Not after he’d spent the last seven hours heading straight down Kris’s throat.
More darts slammed into the ship: 12,500 tons hitting at over eighteen thousand kilometers a second. The ship burned from the inside and blew huge jets of plasma from its reactors out into space. It started forward and worked its way aft as the bow became nothing but a burned-out wreck. Later, bolts shot through from bow to stern, where the propulsion reactors made for easy hits and lethal consequences. The fire burned and the ship glowed before yielding itself up as one huge fireball.
“Three down,” Kris said, feeling nothing even as her mind calculated the deaths of 150 billion intelligent beings. The number was just too big to grasp.
The one surviving Enlightened One was quick to react to the slaughter of his three associates and all the people they held in thrall. Two detachments of cruisers, half of what he had, took off for Kris at 3.5 gees.
“I guess they don’t like us,” Kris said, counting the fast-moving cruisers and coming up with 280. “Nelly, let’s put some bolts across their path. They’re bound to run into some of them.”
“A lot of them, if we intend to survive,” Jack said dryly.
“I’ve advised the teams on the beam ships to increase the rate of fire to two bolts a minute,” Nelly said.
“Good. Divide them between the fast cruisers and the rest of the horde, say, one to two.”
“We’re on it.”
The neutron star began to sparkle at ten-second intervals as more chunks off its hide got kicked off at one-twentieth the speed of light. It would be hours before they saw the results.
Apparently, Admiral Kitano saw the same development. Admiral Benson’s reserve fleet had been trailing the four fleets, in reserve as his name, and the training of his crews, implied. Now they beat on four gees and aimed themselves on an intercept course for the fast-moving alien cruisers.
Out in space, less than four AUs from where Kris stood, the bullets snapped out six or seven hours ago began to slash through the alien fleet.
Most missed. Space was huge, and the ships were jinking as much as their huge size allowed. But the aliens had committed themselves to a course right down Kris’s throat. That made them predictable within their randomness.
That fraction of predictability, that they wanted to kill Kris, meant she could kill them.
Bolts pierced through ships, sending them spinning out of control. Bolts slashed into reactors and left a hot, expanding ball of gas in their wake. Some ships survived the encounter with a bolt, only to fall off their course struggling with cascading catastrophes, leaving their formations with gaping holes.
Kris tasted the rage of these dying aliens, unable to come to grips with their tormenters. This didn’t have to be.
“Nelly, we’ve sent them enough messages in hard neutron star. Raise me Jacques.”
“I’m here, Kris.”
“Compose a message. Tell the alien Enlightened One that this slaughter does not have to continue. He can stop it by ending his quest to kill us. He can save his life and the lives of everyone following him if he turns away from this slaughter and makes for open space.”
“You know I can’t say that exactly.”
“Send the message that will carry the freight, Jacques.”
“Give me five minutes.”
Kris counted five minutes, and thirty more bolts before Jacques was back. “I’ve composed the message. Do you want to hear it?”
“No, just sign my name and fire it off.”
“The Last Word has sent it.”
“So its crew is calling the Opening Statement the Last Word?” Kris asked, grinning despite the weight of the day.
“Yep. They are holding up their end of the deal now, but they’re keeping the nickname.”
“Humans,” Nelly said, but there was a smile in her words.
“Aren’t we wonderful, just a little less than the angels?” Penny observed.
Kris turned back to the boards. The surviving alien base ship was accelerating at 1.25 gees, zigging and zagging right and left, down and up by swerving its hind end around and letting the bank of huge rocket motors steer the ship. So far, it had managed to avoid any bullets. It had to be luck. Nothing could explain how he got something that big through all the bolts in space.
Ahead of him,
the alien warships re-formed themselves into one huge set of dishes, three layers thick in front of their last surviving base ship. On the side Admiral Kitano was coming up on, the cruisers formed up well away. That would force the humans to fight their way through the fast movers before they’d get a chance at the warships or have a go at the base ship.
Behind them, the 150 or so warships that had been protecting the three destroyed base ships organized themselves into a fighting force. They accelerated to 2.5 gees and aimed themselves at Kitano’s flank.
“A fight’s coming, and it will be brutal,” Kris muttered.
“It will also come in waves,” Jack said. “They’ve lost their unit cohesion. We may have to fight eight times as many ships, but we’ll fight them in dribs and drabs. This is a fight we can win.”
Penny nodded. So did Admiral Furzah. “They are fools, these aliens you fight. They are throwing away their advantage.”
“We haven’t won yet,” Kris reminded them.
The aliens died in ones and twos as darts found them and took them apart. With the cruisers slamming themselves forward at 3.5 gees, hell-bent on driving themselves down Kris’s throat, it was impossible for them to swerve when a bullet came at them. The smarter ones angled their course a bit away from Kris. The ones that didn’t died in five or six hours as Nelly spotted their folly and sent a bullet out with their name on it.
The smart ones kept up their 3.5-gee acceleration, but varied it a bit up, a bit down, a bit to right or left every half hour or twenty minutes.
They lived while the others died.
Too many lived.
It was the same among the seven hundred warships. Those who came straight at Kris paid the price as 12,500-ton darts six millimeters long and one in diameter harpooned their ships like whales of old, leaving them bleeding, burning, vomiting out their life until they gave up the ghost and blew themselves up.
“I hate this business, Jack,” Kris said after watching five ships go out in different ways in less than a minute.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to do this again.”
“I know.”
“But I’ve got to see this through, don’t I?”
“There’s no way out but through,” Jack agreed.
“Nelly, Kitano will be tackling the outriding cruiser task force in six hours. Have some of them gotten predictable?”
“Yes, Kris. They’ve only been getting the strays from the other targets. I think they doubt we can hit them.”
“Show them the error. Concentrate two out of three bolts on them for the next fifteen minutes.”
“Can do, but the systems on all three beam ships are showing wear. They need a break to let the repair crews fix and mend.”
“Pass the word. In fifteen minutes, we will shut down for maintenance, but let’s create some holes for Kitano.”
The star sparkled as bolts were chipped off and sent on their way. Fifteen minutes later, with fast movers heading down their throat and other ships about to come to blows, the mightiest weapons forged by humanity fell silent as mere men struggled to fix what they had made.
63
The beam ships were down for four hours. Interestingly, Last Word came back online first, and quickly built up to four shots a minute before settling down to a steady throw of three.
Conqueror was its usual steady second. UA was conspicuous by its absence for an entire half hour. Kris sent a congratulatory message, and a princesslike thank-you for all the hard work of both the operators and maintainers when all three were back up.
Out in space, the bolts sent out earlier still had a ways to go. Jack ordered takeout from a Chinese restaurant, and Kris’s staff ate without taking their eyes off developments.
It was surreal. As they ate, more darts slammed into alien warships and cruisers. More aliens died. It was like some bad movie that had only one plot and no development. Kris ate, and patted baby, and watched as aliens died doing all they could to kill her and her child.
Kris ordered more shots sent out at the one remaining base ship. “Maybe if we get it, they’ll go away,” she said, more a hope than a real thought.
Sometimes, five minutes would go by without a ship dying. Then three would vanish in the blink of an eye.
It went that way for much of a day and a night. Three times they paused the bombardment to allow the beam ships time to fix and mend before something got out of hand and did damage to those huge machines.
“Those fast cruisers, headed straight for us, I don’t think they’re going to flip,” Penny pointed out.
“One wild charge at an unthinkable speed,” Admiral Furzah purred, and seemed jealous that the aliens got the wild ride while she was stuck on the receiving end.
Kris studied the situation. If the cruisers didn’t flip and begin deceleration, Admiral Benson would have a tough call. He could keep his thirty-two battlecruisers accelerating—and end up, like the cruisers, doomed to die in ships that couldn’t slow down.
“Nelly, send to Benson. You will decelerate even if the alien cruisers do not. Make orbit and prepare to render assistance.”
That done, Kris ordered more bolts for the fast-approaching cruisers. “Nelly, do you think you could fragment those bolts more, say, eight or sixteen bits? Seems that six thousand, even three thousand, tons ought to vaporize a cruiser.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Kris. No promises. We’ll be testing this on the fly, if you’ll excuse the pun, and we will not know the results until we see what happens when it happens.”
“Do your best.”
“That is what I and my children always do.”
Again, Kris felt the strange absence of Nelly in her skull. Nelly insisted she and her children needed their humans. Kris had no idea what the strange symbiotic relationship was between her and Nelly. Still, Nelly was loath to distance the two sides of the bargain. Where Kris went, Nelly went, and, if like today, Nelly needed to be close to Conqueror’s fire control computers, Kris was here so Nelly could be.
Someday, when things slow down, I’m going to figure this out, Kris swore.
But for now, Nelly worked her miracles, and Kris eyed the boards in flag plot.
The final moments of approach were working out between Admiral Kitano’s Mobile Fleet and the aliens’ cruiser wing. Two hundred and eighty cruisers formed into two groups, one high, one low, each with ten divisions of fourteen cruisers were closing rapidly on Kris’s four battle fleets. Not bad odds compared to what Kris had faced the last times out.
That cruiser wing had gone untouched by the darts from the neutron star. They might have gotten lazy. They paid for it now.
Fragments of 12,500 tons shot into their midst. The angle of attack was not head-on. Here darts gashed cruisers, breaking their backs and leaving them twisted wrecks in the wake of something unseen. A few got off easy; darts took them through the reactor, and they vaporized in one huge burst of light and gas.
Death flashed through their midst for fifteen minutes as they struggled to come to grips with the human battlecruisers. They were 280 strong when the invisible came their way. There were barely 150 when the neutron hailstorm passed them by.
Then Kitano’s battlecruisers opened fire.
Whatever the range of the new cruisers’ lasers, it didn’t have the reach of the 22-inchers on the battlecruisers. Cruisers took hits. Some folded. Some exploded. Unarmored, the cruiser force took the scourging, but the survivors held their course to close with the humans.
Admiral Kitano faced two tough choices. Eight hundred or more large alien warships, four to five hundred thousand tons each, were bearing down on Kris’s beam ships. They had to be defended.
But at the moment, Kitano had these alien cruisers heading in, committed to closing to hand-to-hand range, desperate to get their hands around Kitano’s throat.
If Kitano bore away to keep the range open, the huge fleet of alien warships got to increase its lead in the race to Kris’s slug throwers.
Kitano chose to let the cruisers close and fight it out all along the line.
An alien cruiser fleet got to go toe-to-toe with an equal number of human battlecruisers.
The cruisers did have longer-ranging lasers. They made human ships glow at 140,000 klicks. They lit a few up, but at a horrible price.
The 22-inch lasers ripped at them.
At first, it was one-to-one, and many thin-skinned cruisers died. Battlecruisers then concentrated their fire two, three, or even four on one. The more the humans concentrated, the faster alien cruisers died.
“What does that mean to us and the two hundred and eighty headed our way?” Kris muttered
“Kris, that number is down to one hundred and ninety-two,” Nelly reported. “Several suffered reactor failures. More found neutron star not to their liking.”
“Good,” Kris snapped.
“Kris, I think we have a problem,” Nelly said.
“I’m listening,” Kris grumbled, finding that she was getting tired of having problems. All she really wanted was to have this kid born safe and sound with ten fingers and ten toes.
“There were a hundred and fifty alien warships heading for Admiral Kitano’s flank. They were the guard ships for the three base ships we destroyed. Fifty of them have changed course. Instead of bearing down on Kitano’s fleets, they are heading for the jump we came through.”
“Oh, shit,” Jack muttered.
“We only have a pair of courier ships guarding that jump,” Penny said.
Kris found herself juggling ships in her mind’s eye. She didn’t need Nelly to run a full analysis to know that Admiral Kitano was committed. There was no way any of her ships could reverse course. All Kitano’s energy was aimed at engaging the huge fleet in front of her.
Kris glanced at Wasp and Intrepid, as well as the eight Birds and eight couriers she had guarding the beam ships. Except for the two large frigates with their ten 22-inch lasers, the others were 20-inchers and totaled only eighty at that. Kris had bet the farm that this would not happen. Apparently, she’d been too good and left the aliens so enraged that they’d risk anything to get at Alwa. Now they had a handful of ships in place to do just that.
Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Page 35