“Assuming your St. Petersburg Division of the Greenfield Imperial Navy Reserve Fleet has someone home, yes.”
“Then by all means, let’s run.”
“The Empress’s task force has upped its acceleration to one-point-two-five gees,” Lieutenant Blue reported.
“No surprise,” Vicky said.
“The surprise will be who can maintain that acceleration,” Captain Bolesław said.
“Mmm,” Vicky agreed.
Within the hour, the engineering condition of the other side began to show. First a liner and two cargo ships slowly fell back to one-gee acceleration. One of them even slipped below that. Two destroyers slowed down as well.
“Are they escorting the sick, lame, and lazy?” Captain Bolesław asked Lieutenant Blue.
“I don’t think so, sir,” the sensor chief answered. He’d been joined by his chief, and the two of them had been poring over their boards like a pair of witches with a strangely boiling cauldron.
“Understand, sir, we’ve never actually done this for real. We’ve run proof-of-concept tests . . . when no one was looking, but not actually done this in real time. Still, we are showing a lot of distressed reactors over there.”
“How can you see that?” Vicky asked.
“It’s different frequencies from where the jamming is. Those reactors haven’t gotten needed yard time and even less tender loving care from their engineers.”
“I wonder what he’d show if he ran his gear on our own reactors,” Captain Bolesław muttered to Vicky.
“I have been, sir. I’d say the yard on High St. Petersburg did a bang-up job on your ships before they sailed.”
“And we left behind those that were in worst shape,” Vicky added. “I wonder if anyone had the guts to tell the Empress’s that their ship couldn’t answer bells?”
“We’re about to find out.”
Over the next couple of hours, more of the Empress’s ships fell out of formation, including the Empress’s Terror. The opposing fleet, Vicky couldn’t take it into her heart to call them the enemy, and she never heard that word used around her on the bridge, began to look like a poorly strung strand of pearls.
Halfway to their flip-over point, the other commander gave up the chase and slowed the ships still with him to .85 gees.
“I’m glad he flinched first,” Captain Bolesław said, and ordered his fleet acceleration reduced to one gee.
“The Pride of Darby will be glad you did that,” Vicky said. The Pride of Darby, out of Kiel before it was laid up above Brunswick, had been struggling to keep up even as its reactor rose higher into the yellow zone. It was almost to the red when the order came. Over the next few hours, it worked its way back toward green.
“I didn’t think any minion of the Empress would give up that easily,” Vicky whispered to Captain Bolesław.
“I wouldn’t bet that they have. Lieutenant Blue, how many good ships do they have? Ones that might maintain a hard deceleration?”
Blue studied his boards for a good while before answering. “The Empress’s Revenge is in better shape. Maybe the Vengeance could stick with her, as well as a pair of cruisers and four destroyers, sir.”
“And we have one 18-inch battleship, a 15-inch battlecruiser, a pair of heavy cruisers, and a merchant cruiser,” Bolesław said, tallying up his own force. “If his big guns tie up our big guns, that would give his little boys a free hand to slaughter our freighters.”
Vicky could see the ugly picture in her mind’s eye. Maybe the cargo ships with desperately needed fabs for St. Petersburg would surrender before the destroyers ripped into them. Even if they did, would the Empress’s henchmen settle for that? Was “no surrender” Count Korbinian the only man in that camp proud of the slaughter he’d done?
The two fleets ran down their separate sides of this triangle that ended in the Barbie Jump into St. Petersburg. They were like trains on a track, headed for the same destination and sped on by the physics that would bring them all to a dead stop just before the jump.
“Do we have to hit the jump at dead slow?” Vicky asked Captain Bolesław.
He gave her a look of dismay. “That’s standard fleet practice.”
“Kris Longknife has been known to take them faster.”
“Kris Longknife has Wardhaven-built ships that I suspect have a bigger maintenance budget than our ships have had. Hell, Your Grace, those merchant tubs have been laid up, trailing this or that station, for months. Do you want to trust them to something crazy?”
Vicky felt cowed by his words. Almost, she gave in to silence.
Are you a Grand Duchess or a mouse?
Unlike my dad, I’m someone who listens to those who know better than I do.
And if you listen to the captain, you lose. This rebellion needs a win, and St. Petersburg needs that cargo. Let’s show some backbone, Ensign.
Unlike the rest of Vicky’s argument with herself, that last was spat at her in Admiral Krätz’s voice.
“Captain, if we do what the captain of the Empress’s Revenge expects, we lose. We lose not only this fleet but maybe the entire rebellion. We can do that, today. He can win it all for the Empress.”
“When you put it that way,” Captain Bolesław said through a scowl.
“Lieutenant Blue, what kind of risk will the Empress’s Revenge be taking if it goes to 1.25 gees deceleration toward the jump?”
The lieutenant on sensors worried his lower lip for a long moment, then spoke. “I wouldn’t want to be on his ship, Your Grace. From the looks of what I’m taking off his reactors, I’d say there’s a real chance he’s going to end up with a major engineering casualty.”
Vicky arched an eyebrow at Captain Boleslaw.
His scowl didn’t waver, but he said, “What do you have in mind, Your Grace?”
Vicky took a deep breath, let it out, and took command of her fleet. “Let’s add some uncertainty to this battle.”
CHAPTER 32
THE opposing commander kept up his .85-gee acceleration past the point where his entire fleet should have flipped and begun decelerating. Vicky and Captain Bolesław watched their opponent, allowing for the delay in speed of light.
“I hate not knowing what he did twenty minutes ago,” the skipper said.
“Our ships are better than his,” Vicky said. “We can make up the difference.” She hoped she was right on that.
Finally, most of the opposing fleet flipped and began a one-gee deceleration burn for the jump. Most, but not all. As Lieutenant Blue had foretold, the Empress’s Revenge, Empress’s Vengeance, two heavy cruisers, and three destroyers actually upped their acceleration to 1.25 gees.
“Fleet, go to one-point-two-five gees acceleration,” Captain Bolesław ordered, and all the Grand Duchess’s ships, warship and merchant alike, jacked up their reactors.
“Now we see how this game of chicken will go,” the skipper muttered to himself.
An hour later, the Empress’s Revenge and her reduced task force flipped ship and began a 1.25-gee deceleration burn toward the jump. As soon as Lieutenant Blue reported the change, Captain Bolesław ordered his fleet to do the same.
“Navigator, which of us arrives at the jump first?” the skipper asked.
The man worked his board. Vicky watched as he wiped it twice and ran the calculations three times, then had the chief bosun of the watch double-check his work. Beside her, Vicky watched Captain Bolesław surreptitiously do his own course check. Vicky would have done the same, but she didn’t trust her skills. Math was not her strong suit.
The navigator finally spoke. “Sir, it’s too close to call. Our two task forces will get there within seconds of each other.”
“Assuming we don’t blow each other to bits beforehand,” Lieutenant Blue said softly, but the silence on the bridge allowed for everyone to hear his observation.
“Yeah,” Captain Bolesław said. “We blow bits of them through the jump.”
That brought soft “Yeahs” from half the bridge cr
ews.
Captain Bolesław gave Vicky a wink. Once they were on close approach to the jump, they could fight, or they could jump through it and run. They’d know in a few more hours.
The two groups raced down their separate tracks toward that one point in space they both needed to pass through. One of the Empress’s three destroyers faltered and went to .89 gees deceleration. It edged ahead of the rest of the ships. The Pride of Darby also began to lose deceleration. Its burn fell off slowly until it stabilized at 1.04 gees. It, too, would arrive at the jump well ahead of the rest.
“We’ll get to see what the Empress’s man intends when the Darby gets in range of that tin can,” Captain Bolesław muttered to Vicky.
Time dragged. On the Retribution, it was filled with drills that kept Sailors busy but left Vicky with time to count the monstrous butterflies circling in her stomach like buzzards. Admiral Krätz had told Vicky a junior officer’s job was to look confident and self-assured when everything around the Sailors told them confident was the last thing they should be feeling.
It seemed that a Grand Duchess had pretty much the same job. She smiled confidently when a seaman brought her hot tea. She smiled confidently when a petty officer checked her board to make sure it was in perfect working order. She smiled confidently when a chief petty officer checked her survival pod—and did her very best to hide the choke in her voice when she thanked him graciously.
If Kris Longknife was to be believed, and Admiral Krätz had believed her, it was a defective survival pod that killed Vicky’s brother, Hank, and not the laser fire from that Wardhaven princess’s cruisers.
Did my new stepmother and her family have their fingers in that bit of sabotage?
There was no way to answer that question now, not after the ship bringing Hank’s body home disappeared into a sour jump.
Come to think about it, something as twisted as that almost had to have Bowlingame-family fingerprints on it.
Maybe I finally believe you, Kris Longknife.
Hours and many drills and cups of tea later, the Darby was inexorably coming in range of the destroyer’s 5-inch lasers. Vicky waited, hardly breathing, to see what would happen next.
“I’ve intercepted a massage from the Empress’s Revenge. It’s likely orders for the destroyer.”
“What’s it say?” Captain Bolesław asked.
“I don’t know, sir. It’s a series of three-digit numbers that don’t mean a thing unless you have the codebook.”
The captain and Vicky exchanged frowns.
“The destroyer has replied. Again, I can’t make much of it, but the sequence nine-seven-three is in both messages.”
“Somebody’s been told to do nine-seven-three and doesn’t want to,” Captain Bolesław observed cautiously.
“So what does nine-seven-three mean?” Vicky asked. The captain only shrugged.
“The flag’s reply is nine-seven-three repeated three times.”
“How do you put numbers in capital letters?” Vicky said.
“No doubt the commander of that task force told his comm boss to do exactly that,” said Captain Bolesław.
“They’ve added four extra numbers,” Lieutenant Blue said.
Vicky and the captain exchanged raised eyebrows but ventured no opinion.
Mr. Smith had been quietly observing matters from Lieutenant Blue’s elbow. Now he drawled softly, “An interesting codebook that includes phrases for ‘I’ll hang you up by your balls if you don’t execute my orders immediately.’”
“If my stepmother published the codebook, it wouldn’t surprise me,” Vicky said.
“How could anyone serve that woman?” Captain Bolesław muttered softly, but it echoed around the bridge. Officers and petty officers nodded and returned to their work with a firm set to their lips.
The exact meaning of nine-seven-three was soon revealed. The destroyer fired a broadside of four 5-inch lasers at the Pride of Darby. She scored a single hit.
“The fleet’s gunnery scores have been lousy of late,” Captain Bolesław said, “but that’s just flat bad shooting.”
It was enough for the Pride of Darby. “We surrender. We surrender!” came through on open net from the freighter.
The destroyer sent off a message to the flag with nine-seven-three once again holding pride of place. The Empress’s man on the scene shot back the same message as before.
Captain Bolesław whispered a word not fit for a Grand Duchess’s ears. Vicky, as a lieutenant commander, echoed it.
The destroyer fired another broadside. The Pride of Darby took two hits this time. One to the reactor. The ship began to bloom with survival pods.
The next volley also scored two hits, one aft.
“The reactor containment is failing,” Lieutenant Blue said, his voice high and breaking.
A moment later, the Pride of Darby began to explode, starting aft and moving quickly forward. Hot gases and fragments of ship or cargo blew out, collided with survival pods, and finished what the Empress had begun.
“Are any survival pods squawking?” Captain Bolesław asked.
“A dozen, sir. I’m getting that same order to the destroyer from the flag, sir. What could they mean by it?”
A moment later, the destroyer fired again. They watched in horror as it took four more broadsides, but they wiped out every last one of the survival pods.
“The bastard,” Captain Bolesław growled.
“Message coming in from the Empress’s Revenge,” Lieutenant Blue said, looking rather green.
“Put it on screen,” the skipper ordered.
Again they looked at a red-coated Security Consultant in a uniform dripping in gold and silver. This one was taller, thinner, and not at all the type who’d be in line for a coronary.
“I am the Duke of Radebuel, Butcher of Dresden,” the redcoat growled. “You have been warned. Surrender now, and you might receive the Empress’s mercy. Fail to surrender in the next five minutes, and I will see you slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child.”
The screen went blank.
“A man of few words,” Vicky observed.
“But those words are bloody,” Captain Bolesław said.
“Computer, tell me about this man who styles himself a duke,” Vicky said.
“There was no such dukedom when I was last interfaced with the Greenfeld database, but he was mentioned in the data dump we took off the Golden Empress No. 34. Giorgio Topalski is another one of the bank managers who came to notice during the suppression of State Security. Among other planets he ‘cleaned out,’ his own words, was Dresden. He was particularly bloody in the way he killed the State Security types. He also included their wives and children in the brutal slaughter. He sent videos of his depredations back to the Empress and her father and was praised by them. When riots broke out on Dresden over soaring unemployment, he was chosen to go back there with three brigades of Security Consultants and pacify the planet. An unknown number of demonstrators died when his consultants opened fire. A suppressed report from the Radebuel city coroner determined that most of the dead were shot in the back.”
“That would get you the nickname Butcher,” Captain Bolesław growled.
“That is not why he is called the Butcher of Dresden,” the computer corrected the captain. “If the information contained in several letters and two news records from the Golden Empress No. 34 are correct, once the capital, Radebuel of Dresden, was pacified, some of his guards took over a pub one night to celebrate. They got drunk, then raped several of the barmaids. Three were found dead the next morning, brutally tortured and murdered.”
“Now is he the Butcher?” Vicky asked her computer.
“That only starts the story. Seven of his guards, likely not the ones who killed the young women, were found dead two nights later. Topalski pulled seven hundred people off the street, lined them up against the nearest walls, and machine-gunned them. Since he sent his death squads through the financial district during lunch hour, included among
the dead were quite a few leaders of Dresden’s business community.”
“How’d that go over?” Captain Bolesław asked.
“Very well for him. He bought up a major part of the holdings from families that lost their loved ones in that slaughter, but that came later. Three days later, a bomb went off at a club frequented by redcoat noncommissioned officers. Twenty-two died.”
“Did he kill one hundred for every one of them?” Vicky asked.
“One thousand for each. Included was a football stadium where a national championship was being played. He sent helicopters over to drop explosives and gasoline on the bleachers. When survivors tried to flee, he had machine gunners waiting for them at the exits. Those that survived by hiding among the dead were then gunned down by his guards. The tally from the stadium did not come to twenty-two thousand, so they pulled people off random buses to fill out the quota.”
“Good God,” Captain Bolesław muttered. Vicky glanced around the bridge: Jaws had gone slack and lips pale. The stern, battle-ready faces were slipping away.
“So his reign of terror cowed Dresden, made him a wealthy man off the plunder of those he slaughtered, and got him a dukedom,” Vicky said, then added, “and now he’s the one the Empress picks to soak St. Petersburg in blood.”
“It looks that way,” Captain Bolesław said.
Vicky knew the Empire would rise or fall on her next words. How she wished she had Kris Longknife at her elbow to give her a hint of what to say.
“He doesn’t get his hands on St. Petersburg,” Vicky said, biting her words off sharply. “Not on my watch. His bloody trail ends here. We end him here.”
She looked around the bridge. The future hung by a thin thread as those around her struggled between their fear of what they faced and their duty to those that they defended.
“He may be pretty proud of his record, murdering unarmed civilians, but now he’s up against the Navy. Now he’s got a fight on his hands.”
“Yes,” hissed back at Vicky, and the bridge crew turned back to their work with a determined will.
“I thought we’d lost them,” Captain Bolesław whispered from behind his hand.
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