“That’s not going to be our problem. We need to slam those ships and slam them good. We need our torpedoes to do serious damage.”
“That’s impossible,” Vice Admiral Lüth growled.
“What do you have in mind?” Rear Admiral von Mittleburg asked. And drew a dirty look from the senior admiral. If this kept up, Vicky might end up using her Grand Duchess card to have them swap jobs.
“First, computer, can you come up with some evasion plans that push our antimatter torpedoes to the maximum of their capabilities?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Please begin calculating at least six of them immediately.”
“Processing.”
“Now, Admiral von Mittleburg, how many of those merchant ships can you arm?”
“Maybe half of them, Your Grace. We were already working on arming several liners. They make much more capable warships than the freighters. Not quite as good as a light cruiser, but not all that much below them.”
“And the rest?” Vicky asked.
The admiral shrugged. “We might turn some into raiders. The Empress’s pirates have been raising Cain with our trade. Why shouldn’t we issue a few letters of marque and see how they like it when the shoe’s on the other foot?”
“A good idea,” Vicky said, “but not this week. On the way up here, I had my computer search through some easy-to-build rockets with guidance systems that could be made from phones or game units. It found a few good ones. Computer, retrieve the rockets.”
Several rocket designs appeared on the nearest wall screen. “They’re fairly easy to build. The solid rocket motors can be poured to form and will allow for some hard acceleration. They can’t maneuver quite as hard as a standard Navy torpedo, but the aluminum powder in the fuel leaves an interesting smoke screen, making it easier for your smart rockets to home on the last known location of a target and only become a target when it breaks out of the smoke.”
“You can’t be serious?” Lüth demanded.
“I think she is,” von Mittleburg said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I think she very definitely is.”
“We’ve got eight battleships. At last count, they had nine. Likely more by now. They outnumber us in cruisers and destroyers. We need something to give us an edge. Why not?”
“Because that plan is crazy,” Vice Admiral Lüth snapped.
“I do see some weakness,” Rear Admiral von Mittleburg said. “A merchant ship is no speedster, Your Grace. How will these swarm ships keep up with the fleet?”
“Here is where I hope to get help,” Vicky said.
“And your head examined,” Lüth suggested. “Both of you.”
Vicky and von Mittleburg exchanged glances that went right by Lüth.
“Merchant ships are usually heavily loaded,” Vicky said. “No owner wants to carry a lot of unused space around.”
“Right,” von Mittleburg said.
“So we don’t load the ship up anywhere close to its full load. Better yet, we whack off the bow, forward of the bridge, and only load rockets in the aft holds.”
“Cut them almost in half?” Admiral von Mittleburg sounded incredulous.
“We park the bows trailing the station and the owners can weld them back together once things are back to normal. For now, we save hull weight we don’t need and only load the top half of the aft holds, not the bottom.”
“One-quarter of what they normally carry, huh?”
“Something like that. We can do the hull separation in a slip and load as many rockets as St. Petersburg can ship up. We push through as many ships as we possibly can as fast as we can.”
Vice Admiral Lüth put his foot down, firmly. “I will not risk my battle squadron around anything so crazy as this idea.”
“Then I won’t ask you to,” Vicky said, bringing herself up to full Grand Duchess. “Admiral von Mittleburg, you may assume command of the St. Petersburg Reserve Battle Fleet. Admiral Lüth, you may assume command of the High St. Petersburg Station.”
“You can’t do that,” was Admiral Lüth’s sharp reply.
“Admiral Lüth, the Navy has charged me with raising this rebellion. They trusted me to decide what is and is not a manageable risk. I find your attitude toward the risks involved here way out of line. I’m offering you a place in our movement more in keeping with your tastes.”
“You can’t do this,” he repeated, only this time he was shouting. “I command Battle Squadron 22. Those are my ships.”
“No, sir, they are not. You received them from the hand of my father, the Emperor. Rather than surrender them when the Empress demanded it of you, you brought them to me, Grand Duchess Victoria of Greenfeld. Now I find that the rebellion is better served by their being led by Admiral von Mittleburg.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Commander Boch,” Vicky said almost softly. All deadly.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You will call the Marine guards from outside, and you will escort Admiral Lüth to the brig. There you will see that he is comfortably detained while he awaits my pleasure. He will have no visitors. Understood?”
It finally dawned on Vice Admiral Lüth that Vicky meant exactly what she was saying and was about to do exactly what she said she would.
“Heinrich,” he said, pleading with Admiral von Mittleburg.
“Albert, it is not a bad plan she has come up with even if it is likely borrowed from that whore Kris Longknife.”
“But she’s just a girl,” Lüth half shouted, scowling at Vicky.
“That is wrong in so many ways,” von Mittleburg said, shaking his head. “Albert, it is better that you quit while you are behind. Commander, see to it that he is made comfortable.”
“Yes, sir,” Commander Boch said. “This way, sir.”
The vice admiral was still muttering under his breath as the commander led him out.
Vicky waited until the door was closed, then turned to Heinrich. “Did I do wrong there?”
Admiral von Mittleburg worried his lower lip. “You did what you had to do. Albert is a good man under normal conditions. What we have here is nothing like normal. You have imagination. Likely more than any of us old men who have come up doing what was done by those who came before us. I like your idea. We will have to work on it a bit.”
“No doubt. I’m looking forward to your suggestions.”
“For now, we will have to delay refining your idea. It seems that I must go advise a chief of staff that he is now working for me and not Albert.”
“Will that be a problem?”
“I do not know. Once you choose to join a rebellion, all the normal things that hold military discipline in place are strained. No doubt, your relieving their commanding admiral will add to that strain. However, you have shown yourself to be a competent leader and that you can learn from others. Captain Bolesław has seen to it that that word got around the station. I think this will work. We will see. You might consider an all hands address to the battleships’ crews tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll give serious consideration to that.”
“Now, Your Grace, if you will retire to your own quarters, I will see to what needs to be done here.”
Vicky had only Kit and Mr. Smith to get her back to her quarters aboard Retribution. She noticed that Captain Bolesław had already doubled the guard at the gangway and in the passageway outside both their quarters.
Vicky stepped inside, intent on spending the rest of the day looking into how to improve her swarm boats and what she might say to the battleship Sailors the next day.
CHAPTER 45
IT wasn’t long before Vicky began getting a steady stream of visitors intent on helping her improve on her crazy idea. It seemed that Admiral von Mittleburg kept it about as secret as an erupting volcano.
Captain Bolesław was the first to drop by and begin talking about the idea as if it were his to begin with.
“Where’d you hear about this?” Vicky got out, as much surprised as
startled.
“It’s not often one hears of a vice admiral being hauled off to the brig. I dropped by to see if he needed anything, and he wouldn’t stop shooting off his mouth about your “insane, stupid ideas” long enough to let me know if I could get him something. I don’t think the man noticed when I left, he was so intent on yelling at the bulkheads and overhead of your many deficiencies as an officer and a Peterwald.”
“So my relieving him is no secret,” Vicky said with a sigh.
“Not by an old-fashioned mile. But I have to tell you, you couldn’t have picked a better flag officer to test your newfound powers on.”
“Huh?”
“Albert is known around the fleet as the showcase of the brown-nosing, narrow-minded types that have been promoted to flag rank of late.”
“Like captain what’s-his-name that had the Retribution before you?”
“He would have finished his career with four stars whereas yours truly would have retired after the joy of commanding a heavy cruiser.”
“You enjoying a battleship command?”
“Greatest fun I’ve had with my clothes on if you’ll excuse the phrase, Your Grace.”
“Excused,” Vicky said with a smile.
“Only thing that could make it better is to be shut of some of the crazy passengers I have to chauffeur around the Empire.”
“Sorry, you’re not getting out of that job. When we sortie to take down the Butcher of Dresden, I’m going right along with you.”
“No doubt. Now, about this crazy, insane idea of yours.”
Vicky filled him in on the details. He called in a pair of his officers and a chief.
The senior, a commander, listened, then seemed to knock the whole idea down better than Admiral Lüth had. “Do we really want to be sharing space with a bunch of whacked-off merchies who can’t steer straight? Why not hang those rocket launchers off our cruisers and battleships? That way, we’d for sure have them right where we want them when we launched our good torpedoes.”
Vicky turned to Captain Bolesław, none too sure she hadn’t been bested.
He considered the idea for a long moment, then shook his head—and Vicky started breathing again.
“No, Hyman, not a good idea. Do we really want all that propellant and those explosives dangling off our ice armor when the Butcher’s battlewagons start popping off? I don’t see lasers and rockets mixing at all well. If we got one huge explosion just outside our armor, it might dish in our hull all the way to the central ladder.”
“Right,” the commander said, rather sheepish.
“But keep thinking, folks,” Vicky said. “I much prefer solving our problems before they start eating us alive.”
That got her a “Yes, Your Grace,” all around, and the designers Captain Bolesław had provided quickly knocked out a set of preliminary sketches.
The officers might have gold-plated the design, but the chief would politely get an elbow in their face with a, “Begging the officer’s pardon, but I think the Grand Duchess here wants us to Sailor proof it as much as we can, sir, and that’s going to just clog up the works.”
“And slow down production and jack up the costs,” Vicky would add every time.
It got to where one officer would finish the chief’s sentence for him before he’d gotten much more than, “Begging the officer’s pardon.” Then the other would finish with Vicky’s line.
They got quite good at mimicking the two of them before they had something like a final design.
Then Vicky got Mannie on the line, who extended the call to include some engineers and production people. Before she went to bed, a small fab had already turned out the first rocket and test-fired it. More followed the test article as production ramped up at several different fabs on St. Petersburg.
Admiral von Mittleburg himself dropped in late in the afternoon, saw what was going on, and gave it his blessing. “If only Albert could see this.”
“You want to invite him over?” Vicky asked.
He was shaking his head before she finished. “I dropped in to see the vice admiral. They have a Gunny on watch to see that things don’t go sideways. I was told he hadn’t stopped shouting, except to demand a glass of water, since he arrived in the brig. He didn’t stop shouting the whole five minutes I tried to visit him. If the fellow doesn’t calm down, he’s going to give himself an aneurism.”
Vicky winced. “I’d hate to have that on my conscience.”
“You needn’t worry too much about him. I couldn’t find a single man on his staff or flagship who wasn’t glad to see him crash and burn. He’s a stickler for details and cuts no one an inch of slack . . . except himself. What I did find out was that neither the Navy nor the Empress had any room for him. The Navy told him it was the beach for him once his ships were gone, and the Empress’s folks wanted nothing to do with him. They just wanted his battleships. Hard to believe that bunch would pass up an experienced ship commander.”
“So his only future involved bringing his ships to me,” Vicky said.
“Something like that. The skipper of his flag, the Implacable, said he was really hot to trot for them all to come over to your side. There are a lot of officers over there who still aren’t sure they chose the right side.”
“Oh,” Vicky said. “So the thought that was growing in my mind that you had done a great job of solving one of my problems has a whole new problem following on its heels.”
“Yep, Your Grace, you need to sell this rebellion to a whole lot of Sailors and officers who are none too interested in buying in.”
Vicky sighed through tight lips. “If you sailormen have this insanely crazy idea of mine well in hand, I think I will start thinking about just the right words to bring some more hands on board.”
“And I need to start hacking the bows off freighters and turning them into boats that can carry your rockets right alongside the battle line,” Admiral von Mittleburg said.
“Tomorrow will be another busy day,” Vicky said.
CHAPTER 46
NEXT morning, the chief bosun’s mate of Retribution piped his ancient tune, then added, “Now hear this, now hear this, all hands, this is the Grand Duchess speaking.”
Ensign Vicky Peterwald had heard other people piped: captains, admirals. She’d never expected her own words to be piped to all hands. Never had she felt so much the rebel.
She stood before the microphone. Her words would be transmitted not just to the four battleships of BatRon 22 but also to the other two battleships that had come out with them. At the last minute, Admiral von Mittleburg extended the hookup to include all the cruisers and destroyers that had just joined them on St. Petersburg.
Then he shrugged. “We might as well pipe your message to all ships in the system. If we don’t, scuttlebutt will, and get it all wrong in the process.”
“I agree,” Vicky said. Having relieved a vice admiral, she was not about to disagree with the only admiral she had left.
She suppressed a smile. Take that, Kris Longknife. You relieved your skipper in your first battle, a mere commander. I’ve relieved a vice admiral.
Vicky trembled inside at what she’d done.
Vicky did not dare tremble on the outside just now. She did not clear her throat, or tap the mic, things she had heard captains do that did not impress the listeners.
“Sailors, Marines, and officers of the St. Petersburg Division of the Greenfeld Imperial Navy Reserve, our time has come to stand with my father, the Emperor.” There, she’d gotten it all out in the open in her first breath.
“We stand together, against the usurper, committed to defending every man, woman, and child on the planet below. The blackhearted Empress has sent the self-proclaimed Butcher of Dresden. He bragged to me personally that he and his battleships will slag St. Petersburg down to bare bedrock.
“We. Must. Not. Let. Him. Do. That,” Vicky said, forging her words with deadly calm.
“You may have heard that we are outnumbered. But remember,
Captain Bolesław of Retribution fought two of the Butcher’s battleships. They are now atoms in the cold of space. The Retribution will be joining us in a few days after the High St. Petersburg docks finish patching her up and making her even more deadly.
“The Butcher of Dresden knows how to slaughter unarmed civilians. He doesn’t do so well when he goes up against experienced Sailors who know how to use the lasers they’ve trained with.”
Vicky paused for a moment, then added, “Besides your own ships, we are forging some surprises for the Butcher. Even as I speak to you, fabs on the planet below are turning out weapons that the Butcher knows nothing about—weapons that will give us the edge he only imagines that he has. He sits in a cold, lonely system, one jump out from St. Petersburg. He sits, burning reaction mass, adding wear and tear on equipment, growing weaker.
“We orbit a planet that is making us stronger every minute he delays. He is in for a very deadly surprise.”
Now Vicky took a deep breath. “I want to finish on the same note I started. We are the loyal servants of my father, the Emperor. We serve Greenfeld, not the grasping, greedy blackhearted Empress and her family, who have bled our Empire, sucked its lifeblood, and stolen everything that they haven’t destroyed. The Empress has tried to assassinate me so many times I’ve lost count. I’m still here.
“She tried to take down St. Petersburg twice, and she missed both times. Now she’s trying for the planet below us one more time. I say three strikes, and she’s out. Stand with me as she swings and misses one more time. Then we’ll all send her packing with the pack of dogs that passes for her relatives. There is no room for them in our Greenfeld.”
Around Vicky, on the bridge of Retribution, there was applause, cheers, and even a few loud whistles. She noticed that the mic was still live, carrying that encouragement out to her fleet.
Captain Bolesław was standing next to the comm officer. Likely it was his job to see that this unusual behavior on his bridge got transmitted. Then the chief of the comm watch lit up in a wide smile, and, making a fist, raised his right hand in the air.
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