Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting

by Mike Shepherd

  “I have passed along those orders.”

  Kris sat in her chair, feet up, patting baby and eyeing the flow of the battle. She was used to battles playing out at breathless speeds. A battle where time stretched out as ships covered distances measured in tens of millions of kilometers while traveling at tens or hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour was hard to get the mind around, and even harder to adjust the flow of adrenaline for. At times, baby had been jumping rope and doing headstands, and Kris gladly would have done the same. Other times, she and baby sat as placid as on a summer’s day.

  “What a way to fight a battle,” Kris whispered.

  “Our time will come,” Jack said, reaching for her hand. They settled down, her in her comfortable chair, his hand on hers, and watched the fight develop.

  “You hungry?” Jack asked.

  “Kind of,” Kris admitted.

  “Want a hamburger and fries?”

  “A cheeseburger with all the fixings, maybe double pickles, but no onions. Hold the onions. I don’t think baby likes onions. Oh, does anyone want half a cheeseburger?” Kris added. “I don’t think I can handle a whole one.”

  “I’ll take it,” Penny said. “I usually leave half of mine.”

  Jack headed out to get chow, with Masao at his elbow, leaving the two women alone. Even Admiral Furzah left to see if there was any fresh meat that hadn’t been burned.

  “I’m sorry about my outburst,” Penny said as soon as they were alone.

  “No need, Penny. It was a miserable thing I did.”

  “But you’re working on setting it straight. I should have realized you’d find a way to work this out. Worse, you were right. There wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it at the moment. The aliens saw an opening and grabbed it.”

  “I don’t know,” Kris said. “Maybe I should have left the reserve fleet there. Heaven knows, I’ve just had that poor fleet flying back and forth and wasting good reaction mass.”

  “Can you read minds or see the future?” Penny asked.

  “Not this week,” Kris said. “I think this gestation thing is messing up my crystal ball.”

  “No doubt. How do you intend to work the intercept?”

  “Carefully. Very carefully. I have no idea how long it will take us to refuel or how fast they dare take the jumps. We’ll just have to play this one as it develops.”

  The cheeseburgers returned. Even the feline from Sasquan had found a couple of pounds of freshly ground beef. They munched their burgers as fragments of a neutron star, chipped off six hours ago, hammered ships for the next twenty minutes, leaving them torn, twisted, or wrecked.

  The one-sided battle continued as the aliens strove to get their revenge for their murdered brothers . . . and themselves.

  “Kris, the alien warships will be approaching the jump soon. That is one place we know they will have to go.”

  “Any suggestions, Nelly?”

  “It would be nice to hammer the jump. Could I ask the beam-ship management teams about some rapid fire just as the ships reach there? They will probably try to go through at ten-second intervals. It won’t do us any good to fire the same because all we’d have to be is off by a second, and all our darts would miss. Still, if we were to try for an eleven-second interval . . .” Nelly left the rest hanging.

  “Nelly, get me the captain of the two ships.”

  “Kris, for this you will likely need the captains, chief science officers, and superintendents of reactors.”

  “Get me all of them.”

  Kris’s screens changed to show six heads. Most were gray- or white-haired. Two were women. None looked happy to face Kris.

  “In six hours, the aliens will be sending their warships through the Eta Jump headed for Alwa,” Kris began. “It would be nice if we could make them share that space with a lot of neutron darts.”

  “How many?” the gray-haired man in a gray Merchant Marine uniform with four stripes on the shoulder boards said.

  “They will try for ten-second intervals. They have been known to risk five-second intervals, but not at this speed. We, of course, won’t know when their ten-second intervals start. I was thinking of getting off a dart every eleven or twelve seconds for fifteen minutes.”

  “So each of us would have to have primary ignition every twenty-two seconds,” the other captain, this one in blue, said.

  “Something like that.”

  “But there would be no guarantee that we’d make even one hit.”

  Kris couldn’t remember whether this speaker was a chief scientist or in charge of reactors. Then it hit her. There was no weapons officer in the whole bunch.

  I’ve got to make some changes when this is done.

  “There hasn’t been an aimed shot from your weapon system this whole battle,” Kris pointed out. “We put the neutron darts out there and the aliens are kind enough to run into a few of them.”

  “That’s an interesting way of thinking,” another civilian said.

  “That is how battles are won and lost,” Kris answered, as evenly as she could manage.

  The six looked at each other, from screen to screen. Kris had the distinct feeling they wanted to say no, but none had the courage to say it to her.

  If they hadn’t the guts to say no to a princess, what are they doing out here?

  Kris took the bull by the horns. “So, in thirty-two minutes will you be ready to begin a rapid fire sequence?”

  “Ah,” came from six mouths.

  Kris gave them her most placid face. Maybe with a Mona Lisa smile.

  “I guess we can do it, Your Highness,” one of the civilians finally said.

  I wonder if Grampa Ray gets this kind of solid support, Kris thought, and bit her lip to kill a wry smile.

  “Thank you very much. You have the thanks of a grateful world.”

  They rang off.

  “Did you get the feeling they didn’t want to do this?” Penny asked no one.

  “I didn’t see any resistance,” Kris said, wearing her sunny smile.

  “Yeah, right,” Jack muttered.

  Thirty minutes later, the beam ships began a rapid-fire staccato. Beneath them, the neutron star sparked every ten, eleven, or twelve seconds.

  Then Kris heard a crunch through the hull of the Conqueror.

  “Kris, Conqueror has suffered a failure in one of its capacitors. It has been taken off-line and the power lines to it cut.”

  “Are we in for a catastrophic failure?” This sounded too much like the failure that took Ultimate Argument out of the fight.

  “No, Kris. The potential failure was spotted in time and the system taken off-line quickly. Also, power requirements were reduced gracefully. There was no backwash into the distribution system.”

  Again, Nelly was using that passive voice. Kris considered digging deeper, then thought better of it. If Nelly wanted to be coy, it was best to leave her alone.

  There was no report from the captain, but the flashes on the neutron star continued, now at the rate of five every minute or so.

  With five minutes left in the shoot, Opening Statement took a third of its systems gracefully off-line. The last shots went out four to a minute.

  When that was done, Kris authorized a four-hour stand-down for maintenance.

  She got some rest while the beam ships were down. When she awoke, the alien base ship was closing fast. The two sections of Kitano’s fleet had pulled well away from them. Admiral Benson had jacked up his deceleration to cut the time needed to make orbit and was now joining Wasp and Intrepid.

  It was time for Kris to make some hard decisions.

  Once again, she talked to the double troika. “The alien base ship is twelve hours out. We’ll again adjust our orbit to dodge them. At their speed, they can’t make a major change but no doubt they will try. You can’t fool many people twice.”

  Now it was their turn to eye her blandly.

  “The best way for you to keep the aliens from slitting your throat is to nai
l them during the next nine hours. I’m thinking the best thing you can do for your insurance companies is to fire off a dart every minute. Can you do it?”

  “One primary ignition a minute for nine straight hours?”

  “Or less if you nail him,” Kris said, helpfully.

  “Could maybe one of us go down for a few hours? We could spell each other?” a civilian asked.

  “I don’t know. How many hits have you been making?”

  “I don’t know,” seemed to be the consensus.

  “By my estimate, maybe three out of a hundred hit,” Nelly said.

  “We’re only getting three percent hits!” came from several throats.

  “Not bad, all considering,” Kris said. “These aren’t guided weapons.”

  “Oh,” the captain in blue said, nodding.

  “So, I think darts spinning out four fragments at this range should do very well. One a minute from each ship. If you have to take a maintenance break, feel free to do so, but remember, you only have nine hours to hit them before they’ll be too close.”

  The six began to talk among themselves; Kris rang off.

  Over the next nine hours, Kris spent most of her time preparing for the next battle as the Battle of the Neutron Star ground its way down to a bloody end.

  Kris transferred her flag to Wasp, leaving Abby, Cara, and Colonel Bruce to control both of the big ships. Wasp joined Admiral Benson’s Reserve Fleet and, without waiting for Kitano’s reinforcements, boosted for the distant jump.

  The alien ships came on, their course limited by intent and speed. The slow beat of the neutron bullets slammed alien warships and the base ship. Warships blew up. The base ship took hits, faltered, but bore in.

  It was a bedraggled few that survived to watch as the beam ships again adjusted their orbit. Or tried. Conqueror suffered an engineering failure as it made a burn. Despite Kris’s best plans, it did not disappear soon enough behind the cinder of a planet. Every alien ship that could bring its fire to bare aimed for it in the few seconds they had her in range.

  Conqueror took hits. She burned and shed skin. Kris expected her to explode any second.

  Beside her, Penny’s face showed a hard smile. “I talked with her first officer,” she whispered. “I told him how you could move Smart Metal around to shield where you were vulnerable. I think he listened to me.”

  “I think he did,” Kris said.

  Hit, skin blazing as it steamed off into space, Conqueror held together even as its orbit took it out of harm’s way. The desperate Enlightened One wore ship trying to follow only to have the base ship clip the tip of a tall mountain on the dead planet. With as much energy as the small moon had on it, the collision was catastrophic. A quarter of the base ship splattered itself across airless waste. What was left of the Enlightened One’s domain ricocheted off, took out three warships, and headed out, spinning wildly, into nowhere.

  New stars appeared and disappeared quickly as warships that had survived the battle thus far chose to end it quickly rather than face their cold future.

  Twenty minutes later, the beam ships came back in communication with Kris. Reports from Conqueror were bad but could have been worse. Despite all her punishment, she was still holding air pressure for her crew and machinery. There was no question that she would never again fire a neutron slug.

  “We’re still here,” her captain reported. “And my first officer says to tell that staff gal of yours that he learned a thing or three from her or else we wouldn’t be.”

  “The next time you go into battle, we’ll see that you have some defensive officers and a few lasers of your own.”

  “Oh, please,” he said.

  Kris turned her gaze toward the jump ahead.

  “Once more, into the fight,” she whispered to herself and baby.

  68

  Admiral Benson’s flag, Temptress, led the fleet through the jump at 50,000 kph and began braking, bending its course toward the near gas giant. Wasp came though, at the tag end of Hanson’s BatRon 16. In another three minutes, the rest of the reserve fleet was in system and braking for a refueling stop.

  Of the aliens that had gone through the jump many hours earlier, there was nothing. They had definitely used it for a long jump and were well on their way to Alwa. Time was critical.

  Kris would have to hold the refueling pass to one partial orbit, grazing the giant’s atmosphere before taking off for the fuzzy jump.

  “Nelly, can we take a battlecruiser down for a refueling pass?”

  “It won’t be good for the crystal,” Nelly answered. “It’s designed to slow down light, not transfer heat.”

  “Nelly, ask anyone you can what we can do to protect the crystal and get a fuel-capturing arrangement on a battlecruiser.”

  Ten minutes later, Wasp’s ship maintainer, an old friend of Kris’s, L. J. Mong, the chief of the boat, and several other chiefs were in her day quarters.

  “Ma’am, the whole idea of the pinnace was to keep the frigates out of a gas giant’s atmosphere. However, thanks to some calculations by your computer, we do have an idea,” he said. Behind Kris, a new view opened up on the screen. On top, Wasp was almost as small as Condition Zed, but with her crystal armor buried under several centimeters of cooling Smart MetalTM. Below, the poor ship bulged out worse than Kris, with a huge maw open to take in reaction mass.

  “You think that will do?” Kris asked.

  “We don’t know for sure, ma’am, but we don’t think we’ll lose any ships. We just aren’t sure what kind of shape we’ll be in when we’re finished.”

  Kris thought for a moment. “I’m willing to take on the hostiles with sixteen ships. Will this foul up more than half the fleet?”

  Senior Command Chief Mong eyed the other chiefs, then glanced at the lieutenant commander in charge of maintaining the Wasp. “I don’t suppose so, ma’am.”

  “Then pass that schematic to the fleet. If anyone has suggestions, they can talk to me anytime.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the chiefs said, and they followed their officer out of Kris’s day quarters.

  “Sixteen ships, huh? Against how many?” Jack asked.

  “About a hundred at last count. We got a third of them. Maybe winged more.”

  “We’ll see what we see.”

  The close pass to the gas giant left one ship unable to reorient itself afterward. The Opal out of Hekate couldn’t change its configuration back. This might have been as much a problem with the Smart MetalTM as the pass.

  Looking very much like Kris felt, the Opal was ordered back to System X to deliver its reaction mass to the ships coming along behind. She would also pass along the idea for capturing reaction mass without slowing down.

  Twenty-four ships accelerated for the fuzzy jump. Their next stop would be the system one out from Alwa. The aliens would very likely jump into that system, their third jump to Kris’s second.

  Of course, they’d be coming in a different jump from Kris. That would make matters very interesting.

  69

  Wasp cleared the jump, snug in the middle of Admiral Benson’s Reserve Fleet. Benson’s Temptress had come through first; he’d bent his course toward the Gamma Jump as he decelerated. With luck, the battle fleet would cruise up to the jump the aliens would use, take up defensive positions, and shoot up the aliens as they stormed through.

  It was a nice battle plan.

  It didn’t survive contact with the enemy.

  Kris’s fleet was halfway there, decelerating all the way, when the jump started spitting out alien ships, also decelerating. They were at a bit over 200,000 kph; they’d need to slow down if they wanted to hit the next jump at 50,000 kph or less.

  Any more, and they’d vault over Alwa to some other system.

  So they decelerated, their bows with all those lasers pointed where they’d been, their vulnerable rocket motors pointed where they were going.

  Admiral Benson ordered the fleet to flip around and change their vectors to slow them a
nd get them across the aliens’ course.

  Kris leaned back in her egg. Most of her flag plot was unfamiliar. Her gear, even including her screens, had been left behind. Kris was offered the screens from the chief’s mess.

  “We won’t have much use for ’em, ma’am, until this fight is over,” Senior Command Chief Mong had said.

  Now the screens showed the aliens running down their base course, like a space elevator on a rail, slowing steadily at 1.72 gees as they headed for the Alpha Jump into Alwa system.

  Benson’s course would have the Reserve Fleet pull up on their port side about three-quarters of the way across the system. They’d have the last quarter of their cruise to the jump to fight it out.

  Kris doubted it would last that long.

  “Nelly, what do you make of the alien ships? How much damage did we do?”

  “Several are hurting, Kris. At least six are not holding to the 1.72 deceleration. That leaves ninety-two.”

  Kris studied the system and the likely encounter ahead. She and Nelly could find no option better than what Admiral Benson was doing.

  For a long day, the two fleets held to their approach courses. Each bore down on the other with the slow finality of death.

  “This waiting is hell,” Penny muttered.

  “It was like this when navies were under sail. The wind might die with the two fleets close enough to hear each other talk but not shoot,” Nelly told them. “They talked of iron men on wooden ships. No women were allowed. They must have been very strange men.”

  “They were different times,” Kris said. Then eyed the clock. “Or maybe not that different.”

  The approach wore on. Kris kept one eye on the enemy and the other on her fuel state. It would be close.

  They had to make the jump at under fifty thousand klicks or risked being thrown into some distant system with a huge amount of energy on the boats but not enough fuel to brake. And if the system had no gas giants to refuel from, or they were out of range of their depleted tanks . . .

  That thought was on every mind.

  The aliens might very well lose this next fight, but the humans could lose as well.