Drago backstepped slowly, giving ground while burning the closest warships under concentrated volleys. They burned, but one of his was caught by an atomic explosion. The Vigilant was Alwa-made and had a green crew. They must have missed something. It cost them dearly.
Now ships were coming in from three different directions: warships, suicide boats, and a few fast cruisers that the one surviving mother ship had apparently saved back. Drago’s ships were hard-pressed. The Bismarck followed the Vigilant into an expanding radioactive ball.
Drago turned fleet and began a serious retrograde.
Kitano brought the three other fleets through the wreckage of the alien dishes and took one alien array on the flank.
Drago had held the bridge long enough for Kitano to eradicate one-quarter of the alien force. Now she was back on the battlefield, taking large chunks out of the alien commander who’d arranged his ships in a pentagon.
“That’s got to hurt,” Jack said, as the two outer dishes of the pentagon vanished in little more than a blink.
What was left of that array became chaos as it fell apart and sought to merge itself to the other two. All except one. The center dish charged straight into Kitano’s fleet, blossoming like a flower with suicide boats and smaller craft.
Thirty against 150 were lousy odds. Kris had fought them and knew it for a fact. The alien ignored that, and died too quickly to obtain enlightenment. His warships died, then secondaries mopped up the smaller stuff.
The alien attack failed, but it had taken another battlecruiser out. The newly arrived Maawaska from Tillamook let a suicide boat with an atomic get too close.
Whoever commanded the two remaining arrays took in what they’d seen and appeared to learn a lesson. At least they tried.
The remaining fifteen dishes rearranged themselves. Two dishes higher, three dishes next, five in the middle, then three and two to the bottom. The middle dishes advanced on Kitano’s ships slowly, the upper and lower ones faster.
“Finally, they are using their superior numbers to engulf us,” Admiral Furzah purred. “They can learn.”
“But so can we,” Kris pointed out.
Kitano’s fleets spread out, leaving a hole in the middle facing the enemy’s refused center. Then the fleets dashed up and out, each one taking on all or parts of two wing dishes, thirty-plus battlecruisers against fifty to sixty huge alien warships.
It was not a fair fight.
Again, the long-range lasers galled the stone-clad warships. Again, the warships broke into ragged charges, desperate to close with the humans. Once more, the alien dishes gushed forth a flood of vicious little boats, some tipped with atomics, all striving to get close enough to kill.
The aliens fought, and the aliens died.
But while eight dishes were engaged, seven were free to get into mischief. An alien commander saw it and put it to good use.
Now the center put on acceleration, swept forward and down, trying to take Miyoshi’s Second Fleet on its flank. Five dishes strove to slam into his exposed flank even as the two dishes he was attacking charged in as well.
Miyoshi was sandwiched. His ships began to glow, then burn, even as more aliens exploded into vapor.
Drago’s fleet was on the other side of Miyoshi. Suddenly, he found his targets falling back as fast as they could. He pursued.
As Kris and Drago had learned, a pursuit through recently vacated space was dangerous. Still, Miyoshi was suffering, so Drago plunged in, secondaries sweeping the space in front of him.
Poor Hotspur, second of that name to serve under Kris, stumbled onto a suicide boat with an atomic on board and vanished away to dust. The newly arrived Te Mana suffered a near-similar fate. It must have winged the attacker at the last minute. The battlecruiser from Woolomurra managed to hold together and fall out of line to lick its wounds.
The other fleets closed in as fast as they could dispose of the warships in front of them, in pursuit as Miyoshi’s ships gave ground grudgingly. The Asahi from Yamato paid the full price as six warships got her range. They burned through her crystal armor to the reactors inside. She exploded.
The Roger Young from Alwa suffered the same fate, as did the Essen from New Birmingham and the Tone from Musashi. Other ships glowed but fought back, blowing their assailants into vacuum.
First Fleet closed on the alien formation, fighting its way up from the bottom through space seeded with suiciders in both boats and smaller getabouts. The Daemon from New Eden took an atomic and vanished. The Resolute from Wardhaven took a near miss and limped out of the line. Wardhaven’s new Formidable didn’t see the suicider who got her and blew up, leaving only a few survival pods to show where she’d been.
If Kris was sickened as she lost first one, then another battlecruiser, the alien commander must have gnawed his guts as his own ships vanished by the dozens.
Battles do strange things to time. Even here, far from the wrack and ruin, Kris felt time dilate as seconds stretched into hours, and hours vanished in minutes. It was as if she’d been standing at the boards for hours, but the timer showed only thirty minutes gone as the last warship made a dash for the Atago and blew up under fire from the entire Musashi squadron.
“Thank God that’s done,” Penny breathed.
There was a flash, and Saladin vanished into radioactive dust.
“Nelly, send to Kitano. ‘Well done. Stand clear of the battleground.’” Kris paused for a moment, her eyes flitting across the system from the now-won battle to the alien base ship with its fifty escorts still bearing down on Kris’s position, to the 150 making for Alwa.
“Begin deceleration to set the most economical course to make a sustainable orbit around the red dwarf. Stay clear as much as possible of the direct line of fire between my flagship and the last alien base ship. When you are set on course for the dwarf, concentrate all available fuel on the least damaged ships and have them modify their course to swing around the dwarf star and back to Jump Eta. I will commence the pursuit of the hostile fleet breaking for Alwa using Admiral Benson and forces at hand. Any reinforcement from you will be appreciated. Longknife sends.”
Kris sat down in the comfortable chair, had Nelly raise her swollen legs and recline her back a bit. “Now we fight our own little battle. Let’s see how your brilliant plan works, Penny.”
“God help us,” her longtime friend said.
66
The Battle of the Cinder was a study in vectors and angles. Wasp led the handful of ships Kris had around the neutron star and fell into a course nearly parallel to the racing alien cruisers.
Even with their faster reloads, they only got off two volleys as the aliens shot past.
The beam ships sent as many tiny bullets their way as they could, but the angle rapidly got impossible. For the last twenty minutes the aliens were on approach, there was nothing Kris could do to hit them.
She wondered when the aliens realized that the beam ships had adjusted their orbit enough to put the burned-out planet between them.
Wasp’s skipper kept a live camera on what happened next and passed the feed to Kris as soon as she cleared the cinder. The aliens hammered their ships with even more gees, accelerating to try to catch Kris before she slipped away or decelerating in an insane attempt to make an impossible burn into orbit.
Ships slammed into the planet. Ships broke in two. Two ships collided and one of them banged into a third. “It was a mess,” Wasp’s captain reported, a big grin on her face.
But the alien wave passed, and Kris breathed a sigh of relief.
Well out, the last mother ship and her fifty warships bent on an extra fraction of a gee and headed straight for Kris.
“Let’s send her a few reminders that she’s got a lot of space to cross,” Kris ordered. “Nelly, fill the space in front of them with three-thousand-ton fragments. Let’s see if we can wing that lucky bastard. If we hurt her, maybe we can send something solid for the kill.”
“Should I take the beam ships up to three ro
unds a minute to surprise them with a decent-size wave?” Nelly asked.
“Are the ships good for it?”
“For at least five minutes, Kris. Then we’d better back off to two a minute. The fifteen minutes we were behind the planet gave everyone a break, but not enough to do any major maintenance.”
“So we’ll need to rest in a bit.”
“Yes, Kris.”
“Pass the word. Thirty minutes from now, they can take four hours off.”
“Done, Admiral.”
So the battle slowed again. Slowed enough that Kris found she had a minute to look behind her. Ultimate Argument was slowly boosting toward Jump Zeta at a half gee. Despite Kris’s best effort, allied with the aliens own desperation, a half dozen cruisers were headed fast in her general direction.
Nelly noticed it first. “Kris, we have a problem.”
“Another one!”
“One of the cruisers is bending its course toward Ultimate Argument.”
“Damn,” Jack said. “Don’t they ever give up?”
“I haven’t noticed that in their character,” Penny said, ever the helpful intelligence officer. Even Masao joined the rest in shooting her a dirty look. “Well, I’m just saying.”
“Nelly, has UA noticed the problem?” Three of Nelly’s offspring, along with Kris’s friends Jacques and Amanda, Chief Beni, and her science chief were on that ship.
“I am sending a warning.”
“They’ve got nothing to shoot at that bastard,” Jack noted.
A minute later, it became clear UA had noticed its peril. Now she accelerated at a right angle to her previous course. It was a very close run thing. The alien cruiser gave it everything it had, but at the end, its engines faltered just enough. UA took one laser hit in a section already damaged.
The cruiser went on its mad way. The huge beam ship wobbled in space for a bit before settling back on course for the jump. An hour later, the cruiser blew itself up rather than face a slow death in cold space. Over the next hour, dozens of cruisers who had survived so much gave themselves over to their reactors’ plasma.
“Victory or death,” Kris said.
“I think Jacques would tell you, destroy the vermin or surrender to your fate,” Penny said.
“It seems that way,” Kris agreed.
Kris slept during the four hours the beam ships devoted to preventive maintenance. Even baby seemed exhausted by the battle. Kris woke after the first wave of neutron fragments swept through the general space of the alien mother ship.
“I recorded it,” Penny said.
Kris watched for fifteen minutes, nibbling a bran muffin and drinking chamomile tea as warship after warship was stung by tiny three-thousand-ton pellets. It was harder to make out their impacts on the small moon of the mother ship, but it began to waver in flight. For an entire minute, it steered off course before catching itself and bearing around to face Kris again.
“We hurt them. The mother ship’s acceleration is down to .86 gees. Five warships aren’t there anymore, and a dozen can’t maintain the fleet’s acceleration.”
“Nelly, how much are they zigzagging?”
“They’re not holding one course for more than two minutes, now, but that’s actually putting them in a smaller volume of space. They are also closer. When the beam ships are back online, I’d recommend a half hour of three slugs a minute, spinning to maximum fragmentation. Three thousand tons seems to be a deadly hit.”
“Let the crew know our intention,” Kris said.
A minute later, the ship’s announcer let everyone know, “Maximum primary-ignition effort in thirty minutes. We’re going for the last mother ship, the mother.”
There may have been more to the message, but it was garbled.
So they sat back to wait and watched the show as more bolts shot out at their last target.
“Kris, are we going for total annihilation of these four alien clans?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” Kris said. “Are they all out here?”
“Where are those door knockers?” Penny asked. “The stone-clad battering rams to force a jump.”
“I haven’t seen them,” Masao said.
“Nelly?” Kris asked.
“They have not been present during the fight,” she said. “There are a group of reactors back at the gas giant the aliens used as their base. They have been just sitting there at low power. They appear to have just powered up. Kris, it is likely they are on the move, but I cannot yet say to where.”
“I’d hate it if they followed the wolf pack headed for Alwa,” Kris said. “They’d sure make it harder for us to hold a jump point. Still, if they take off for points unknown, the rest of these bastards will know that we beat four of them and how we did it.”
“If the others find out about this, will they run for cover or run for us?” Penny asked.
“Anyone’s guess is as good as mine,” Kris said, patting baby.
“Kris, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jack said. “Who leads the last-ditch defense of Alwa with what fuel we can scrape together?”
“Who do you think?” Kris said.
“I was afraid of that,” Jack said through a stormy scowl.
“I am responsible for Alwa’s defense, and the Wasp pinnace will be drawing all the spare fuel from the Birds and couriers. She can pick me up.”
“I’ll go tell the Marines to pack it up, we’re moving out.”
“Nelly, ask Kitano to name a commander for the defense of this system. While we’ll be taking all the reaction mass we can find from the fleet, the beam ships can refuel some of the Bird class to get fuel from the next system and bring it back. It may take a while to get the fleet moving again, but they shouldn’t be totally dependent on the success of me and Admiral Benson’s forlorn hope.”
“Sending it, Kris. I have a message from Kitano. Roughly one ship in four will be chasing after your Forlorn Hope. Kris, it’s heavy with division flags. Taussig’s Hornet, Kaeyat’s Tenacious. Admiral Drago is bringing the Earth’s Churchill, and Admiral Nottingham has the George Washington. Miyoshi’s Second Fleet is lightly represented. They took a pounding, but Admiral Zingi’s Mikasa, Cochrane’s Nelson Mandela, and Suliu’s Genghis Khan will make it. All told, twenty will be following you.”
“Is Kitano staying?”
“No, Kris, I should have mentioned the Princess Royal first.”
“Which of my admirals is not on the list?”
“Miyoshi.”
“A good man.”
Kris eyed her board. Admiral Benson’s reserve fleet, which had missed most of the fight since he was detached to try to protect Kris, would arrive just in time to make one swing around the neutron star and head back to the jump. That would give her four squadrons, thirty-two ships, but most of them were crewed by yard workers, colonials, and birds. It would be their home they’d be defending, but they sure hadn’t had a lot of time to learn to fight their ships.
Kris shrugged; she had what she had, which included baby. She smiled and patted its head, or rump or whatever she was presenting for mom’s attention. She would fight this battle as best she could with what she had.
So far, that had been enough to attend to the slaughter of hundreds of billions of aliens.
Kris shivered.
“Tell Kitano to organize her detachment. I’ll be looking for her.” If things go wrong, it will be Kitano’s job to try to save Alwa.
67
The alien skippers were getting smart. The thirty around the mother ship still hovered, but at a greater distance from it and each other. The 126 racing for Eta Jump were spread out. The drumbeat of neutron hail had their attention.
Fewer died as the pellets raced through their formations, but ships were stung. Some blew up.
The mother ship held its course for Kris’s flagship.
Kris watched as the long-distance battle worked itself out. Kitano’s fleets wore away from the lone mother ship as they tacked to reach the red dwarf. As soon as undam
aged pinnaces had redistributed the fleet’s reaction mass, twenty ships detached themselves from the rest, decelerating hard to swing themselves around the dwarf and use the neutron star for more braking before heading back toward Jump Point Eta.
Yes, Kris would use the same jump the aliens were aiming for. With the door knockers still watching from across the system, Kris had to.
She and Nelly had examined the aliens’ acceleration. They’d hit the jump at over a hundred thousand klicks. That would throw them several jumps inward toward Alwa. Kris would have to hit the jump at less than fifty thousand klicks to stay in the system, do a quick swing by the nearest gas giant, then head for the fuzzy jump and a direct jump to the system just out from Alwa. She’d be there when the aliens jumped in after doing two shorter jumps.
The only question was if she could get to the jump into Alwa before the aliens. If she failed, the aliens would have a free shot at Granny Rita and company.
It would be a close run thing. “Nelly, let’s get some more darts out at the Alwa-bound fleet.”
“Kris, both the skippers of the beam ships and their science officers have asked me to inform you that you need to go easy on them.”
“They don’t want to talk to me, Nelly?”
“It seems so.”
“There are some disadvantages to your reputation,” Jack said.
“Do tell,” Kris answered. “How easy, Nelly?”
“One round a minute for half an hour, then an hour off for maintenance.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Yes, Kris.”
“Do we need to cut back even further?”
“No, Kris. I think they’ve got things under control.”
“Okay.” Kris eyed the two targets. The mother ship was closing fast, not attempting to brake, and the warships closing even faster on the jump. “One round a minute from each ship. Three for the Alwa-bound ships, Nelly, one for the inbound mother ship.”
Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Page 37