The four humans quickly shuffled themselves into a line. The Iteeche took a position at Commodore Ajax’s elbow, and stood tall, his right legs straight down, his left legs spread, one forward, the other aft.
All five stared at Kris as if she might have gone around the bend.
“I have discovered that when I achieved command of the Iteeche Imperial Battle Fleet, I gained authority for spot promotions. I didn’t ask anyone how far I could push the promotions, so if I’m wrong, I’ll just have to ask forgiveness.”
That got a snort from several humans present.
“Admiral Coth, would you step forward?”
The Iteeche did.
“I regret that we cannot stand on more ceremony than we have here, but I have the Emperor’s chop on your elevation to Admiral of the Fourth Order of Steel. Congratulations,” Kris said. “I hope you can get your hands on the correct insignia. I’m afraid my supply system struck out.”
“I am sure that a machinist on my flag ship can provide something,” Admiral Coth said drolly.
Kris then went down the line, promoting her two commodores to rear admiral and her chief of staff from captain to commodore.
“Have no doubt. We are headed for a fight. You’ve earned these promotions, now put them to good use.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the three humans answered and saluted.
“As you will it,” the Iteeche said, and struck the center of his chest with a fist.
“Coth, would you please have on my desk promotions for the captains that fought the rebels to a draw? You know them better than I do. We need commanders of three wings and at least fifty flotillas,” Kris said.
“Kris,” Ron interrupted. “My Chooser has given me command of ten flotillas, not five. You have another three hundred and twenty ships.”
“Are they prepared to fight in the Longknife fashion?” Kris asked.
“You mean sitting down, right?”
“I mean doing what it takes to accommodate heavy gees and hard jinking.”
“I was given only the ones that were willing to fight this battle your way. Those who want to fight outnumbered three to one and win.”
“Then let us go find that kind of a fight. Admirals, commodore, there is one more thing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ajax said.
“I’d like to introduce each of you to your new best friend,” Kris said.
“My children,” Nelly said.
“One of those computers,” Commodore Tosan said, with a big gulp and definite blanching of her face.
“Yes. One of them,” Kris said. “No doubt, yours will be better behaved than their mom. It isn’t all that hard.”
“Kris, you cut me to my heart,” Nelly said.
“Which you don’t have,” Kris said, dryly.
“Well, if I have one you would have,” Nelly retorted.
“We can set you up quickly with the neural net that allows you to talk directly to your computer. It will, however, likely take most of tonight for you to be fully integrated with your new friend.”
“We had some problems,” Nelly said, “the first time we brought my children awake. We learned from it. You may borrow Abby, Amanda and Jacques’s associate, to help you tonight, or we will all stay on net with them from our own ships.”
“I’ve seen the course we’ve laid in,” Commodore Tosan said. “There won’t be a lot of time for shuffling officers around at the gees we’ll be pulling.”
“Then I suppose we’ll do it the hard way,” Ajax said. “The way it’s always done around Kris Longknife.”
Kris shrugged. Her subordinates had her number.
I can only hope the rebels don’t have the same.
39
Kris’s armada approached the jump out of the Imperial Capital’s system. There had been no traffic through it in the last five minutes. Likely there would be none inbound for most of the next two hours.
Her Royal Highness, Grand Admiral Kris Longknife, Admiral of the First Order of Steel commanded an armada.
The first time she went to space, it was just her task fleet and three flotillas under Admiral Coth. She’d returned with 96 upgraded Iteeche battlecruisers. The next time they went to space, she returned with over six hundred upgraded warships. Coth had gone out and returned with over fourteen hundred ships, half upgraded and the other half eager for the process.
When Kris sailed away from the station, more than two hundred additional battlecruisers joined them. In addition, Ron brought three hundred and twenty more.
Kris commanded more than twenty-two hundred ships!
Moving and organizing this mob was going to be a challenge. Fighting it would be something else again.
Fortunately, Admiral Coth had three men he considered capable and ready to command the wings that he and Kris would not. He also had fifty more captains to command flotillas. The problem was, a flotilla was usually thirty-two ships. If she organized like that, she’d need commanders for sixty-seven.
That kind of staffing, she didn’t have. She’d have to reach down to green battlecruiser captains and that was not on her list of acceptable things to do today.
Nelly had done the numbers, and in the blink of a computer’s eye, Kris had fifty flotillas, each with five squadrons, most of nine battlecruisers. A few flotillas had to made due with forty-four ships. In order not to make her flagship flotilla conspicuous by being thirty-two, Kris had added thirteen Iteeche battlecruisers to her command.
Nelly and her kids had been busy on the voyage out to the jump. They’d added more secure and padded high gee stations to all the ships they’d upgraded before. That done, they’d begun upgrading the rest by tightening up their gun cradles and inserting human computers into their fire control systems, reducing the completion time for firing solutions by half.
Kris had to expect that the high gee station concept may have leaked to the rebels. They might have already heard about tightening down the gun cradles and sighting in their lasers.
About the human computers inside their systems, only the humans and Admiral Cloth knew anything. Kris could only pray that the rebel spies knew nothing about that one.
At the jump, Kris met the first of many challenges she'd have to face to organizing and sail a battle array as huge as this one.
How do you get over twenty-two hundred ships through one, single, tiny jump point? She had strung out her fleet as they approached the jump, and slowed to only five hundred kilometers an hour. Her ships were now in five single lines. Five wings of over five hundred ships. The first wing, to the right, led the armada through first; ships were at three second intervals. The second wing, the center with Admiral Coth, went next. Kris’s wing, the vanguard, came third. Fourth was the top, and fifth was the bottom wing.
It took almost two hours to get the fleet through.
“Can we do that any faster?” Jack asked.
“I imagine we could, but I’m not sure we want to,” Kris said.
Jack cocked a questioning eyebrow, but Kris gave back no answer.
On the far side of the jump, the five wings formed themselves back into ten flotillas of five squadrons, each of them with nine battlecruisers except a few with only eight.
Kris set a course at 2.5 gees for a blank bit of space in the guard system that stood right in the way of any invasion force that wanted to take down the government.
Kris had to admit that she was a bit surprised when no one raised a question at her course. Apparently, Nelly’s fuzzy jump points were common knowledge around the Iteeche fleet. As the crews conducted battle drills, her fleet spread its five wings out until they were 200,000 kilometers apart.
While all this was going on, Nelly and her crew dialed all the lasers in the fleet down to .005 of full power. Kris didn’t want to waste any target drones. Still, she wanted some serious gunnery practice as well as evasive battle training. Low power shooting had worked before; she’d just make sure less Smart MetalTM was boiled off her ship’s armor.
&nbs
p; Wing 1 and 2 would fight it out, one-on-one. Wing 3, with Kris and many of Coth’s ships, would engage Wing 4 which had all of Coth’s other ships that had drilled with Kris. Wing 5 would engage 4 as well, with half of 4 going against 5, the other half against 3.
Kris ordered the fleet to battle stations, then five minutes later, to Condition Zed. Five minutes later, she ordered the fleet to reduce its acceleration to one gee.
It was then that Kris began giving orders to her own wing. “Prepare to go to maximum acceleration. Initiate Evasion Plan 3 on my order." She paused for a moment, then said, "Execute."
She waited ten seconds while the Princess Royal bounced around hard, then said, “Commence exercise. You may fire when ready. Wing 3, engage your opposite number.”
All her battlecruisers opened fire immediately. Sensors picked up the ever so slight ionization of the stray molecules in space as lasers heated them up. Nelly projected a constructed picture of Kris’s fleet as ships dodged and shot, then dodged some more as their forward batteries fell silent. Then they flipped and emptied the aft battery.
Beside the screen, a list kept tally of hits on each wing. By the time the first salvo had been tallied, there were a dozen ships with one hit in most wings, several with two, and a few with three.
None of Kris’s ships had fired, but they sure had dodged. Her thirty-two human battlecruisers were undamaged.
Kris ordered that score board to be sent to each wing commander with a suggestion that they pass it along to their flotilla commanders, and they to their captains. Then she sent the report to her own flotilla commanders. The full extent of the non-slaughter must have arrived just as the forward batteries reload time counted down.
The battlecruisers began to hammer at each other again. Again, the ships dodged hard. Again, the ships shot for six seconds then flipped and shot their aft batteries dry.
There were fewer hits this time. Still more ships had one hit. A handful of ships were up to three hits.
Kris’s task battle fleet continued to dodge and not fire. Half a flotilla, twenty-two ships, were hammering away at her forty-five ships, but they might as well have been throwing snow balls. Kris’s human battlecruisers evaded hard. Even the Iteeche battlecruisers assigned to her were throwing themselves around way harder than any other of the Iteeche ships.
Kris smiled. Maybe ordering one flotilla to dodge while the other flotilla shot would be a good training drill. Having them devote full time to dodging seemed to be giving skippers time to concentrate on defense. Kris had suspected the Iteeche might need some encouragement to think about not getting killed. This proved her point.
“Prepare to open fire,” she sent to her flotilla, then, on the human channel, she added. “You may fire only two of your forward lasers, one of your aft. Acknowledge.”
Her board quickly showed acknowledgments.
“You want to fight with one arm behind your back, huh?” Jack asked.
“A woman likes to keep a few secrets,” she said, giving Jack a sexy smile. “Open fire,” she added, as if it were an afterthought.
The human cruisers joined in the fire directed at the foremost flotilla of Wing 3. As the aft lasers fell silent, the hits on that flotilla tallied up three to five per ship. Kris managed to check on her Iteeche ships. They’d continued to dodge well; none of them had taken a second hit. They’d scored fifteen hits among the thirteen of them.
The exercise raged on. Fourth flotilla began to dodge more. Admiral Coth took his ships up to three gees and Nelly’s Evasion Plan 4. Their shooting stayed good, which is to say one or two hits out of the twenty lasers they fired in each salvo. Still, of the flotillas not engaged by Kris’s ships, they gave a lot more than they got.
By the time all the ships in Coth’s lead flotilla had taken ten hits and had to fall silent, damage across the board was rising. Depending on how hard each flotilla was pushing their ships to evade, the shooting was connecting with only two or three percent of the shots. That didn’t sound like much, just two or three hits out of five salvos, in say two or three minutes, still, as the exercise approached the six-minute mark, most Iteeche ships had five hits. A few were four. Several, most of them facing Admiral Coth’s experienced gunners, were at seven or even eight.
Kris’s flotilla was about done with its third flotilla.
“The human’s shooting is being remarked upon on the battle net,” Nelly reported.
“What are they saying?”
“That we sure seem to be chewing up our opponent. No one has suggested that we’re only firing a few guns per salvo. They’re wondering if we’ve got more lasers in our batteries.”
Jack and Kris exchanged a chuckle, and it sure sounded like Nelly joined in.
The exercise stretched on. Wings 1 and 2 were trading blows about equally. Wing 3, with Kris’s flotilla, was demolishing the first half of Wing 4. However, the rear half of Wing 4, under Coth’s direct command, was chewing up the half of Wing 5 it was directly engaging. Coth’s ships jinked hard and had enough experience with their improved fire control that they could take full advantage of it. They were taking one hit from the ships in Wing 4 for every five or six they connected with.
The entire rear five flotillas of Wing 5 had to fall out of line over the space of ten minutes. Without pause, Coth’s ships laid in to the other five.
Kris took the human battlecruisers off the fight and left it to the nine Iteeche flotillas under her command to finish up the remnants of the three flotillas they had been engaging.
“Check fire. Check fire,” Kris ordered the next time most lasers went into reload mode. “I am very proud of you,” she said on fleet wide net. “You all showed solid skills at servicing your guns. Every twenty seconds, just about all of you were ready to send off another salvo. There was some sloppiness when it came to flipping ship and bringing your aft battery to bear, but you got that down smoothly before the exercise finished. I identified two major deficiencies. With the exception of the ships under Admiral Coth, your evasion execution was weak. You took hits you didn’t need to. Secondly, your shooting was poor. I would suggest that all your gunnery officers get on a net with Admiral Coth’s gunners and talk it out.”
“Madame Admiral,” one of her newly promoted Iteeche admirals said on net, “if I may be so bold as to point out that the Earth battlecruisers were not that much better than we were.”
“You may point that out. I will allow you such boldness, but I will not allow you such a mistake. I am Admiral Kris Longknife. My gender has nothing to do with this battle we’re heading for. My blood will be as red as yours if we do not win. Now, as for the shooting of the human battlecruisers. You are correct. We scored more hits, but not that much more than the Iteeche warships. However, you were firing all twenty of your lasers. We fired only three per salvo.”
There was an intake of breath.
“Grand Admiral Longknife of the First Order of Steel,” Admiral Coth said, merging Kris’s rank both to honor her and show to all that she was not your average Iteeche admiral. “Maybe you should take the gloves off, as you say, and show Admiral Tun what you kept under wraps.”
“Not until we’re out of this system,” Kris snapped, trying not to give away just how much newly minted Admiral Tun had pissed her off. She took a deep breath before going on.
“Let’s secure from General Quarters. Each Wing may return to Condition Able. Fleet course remains the same. Set acceleration for two gees. Admiral Coth, arrange for your defensive coordinators to talk with their opposite number on the other ships. Likewise, your Gunnery Officers. Commodore Tosan, please issue the necessary order to the fleet and Wing 3. I need some time to think.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Jack, you’re with me.”
The two of them motored off the flag bridge as the ship unfolded around them, going from an armored, small, and hard to hit target to a comfortable ‘Love Boat’ configuration, as the old chiefs were wont to say.
By the time she got bac
k to her night quarters, Nelly was already drawing a warm bath as Kris stood up and her high gee station melted into the deck. Jack soon joined her in the filling tub.
“Which do you need, a Marine general or a loving husband?” He asked her as he put his arms around her.
“I’ll just settle for you,” and there was neither admiral nor general in the tub for a nice twenty minutes.
40
The next morning, Kris’s armada was rapidly approaching a point in space that only the human battlecruisers could see. Getting all the Iteeche battlecruisers blindly through that jump while maintaining exactly 100,000 kph and 38 rpm to the right was her latest challenge.
Fortunately, they wouldn’t be going into a fight after this jump. Not likely.
Kris divided her human battlecruisers into five divisions of six ships each. Then she ordered all five wings of Iteeche warships to form lines, at least three seconds apart. With wings in line ahead, she then ordered the entire armada into a single line.
Then she inserted the human battlecruisers.
Each wing got six. One battlecruiser took the lead for the entire wing. Farther back, the third, fifth, seventh and ninth flotillas got a human cruiser to guide them. If any flotilla strayed off course, there would be a human cruiser ready to guide the follow-on Iteeche warships to the jump point.
That left Kris with two extra ships. The Undaunted would go first. In a fraction of a second after its jump, it would take a snapshot of the space around it a million kilometers deep. That would be fed to a twelve-gee accelerating missile. The warhead of the missile had been replaced with data storage and a transmitter.
Less than a second after the Undaunted’s jump, the data missile would be launched back through the jump.
There, its data would be transmitted to Kris’s flagship. Nelly had ten seconds to process the data and analyze the situation on the other side of the jump. Then she would either abort the jump, ordering all ships to veer off, or the Princess Royal would follow the Undaunted through the tiny hole in space.
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