Rebel

by Mike Shepherd

  “We will do that, Admiral. Vicky, how’s it going?”

  “I’m running as fast as I can, and I’m just barely keeping pace.”

  “Yes. I hope to see you when this is over.”

  “Me too,” Vicky just managed to get in before Mannie disappeared from the screen. Then she turned to Admiral von Mittleburg. “How much time do we have?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” he said. “It depends on how much weight the Empress is willing to put on. One gee might give us as much as a week. The more gees, the less time we have to get those rockets we need and our ships cycled through the yard.”

  He briskly rubbed the tension in his scalp. “Do we polish our ships in the yard? Dial them in as best we can? Or do we take another spin around the moon, polish our ship handling—and risk breaking a few more? Damn, but this war shit is a bitch.”

  “You want to retire to that vineyard?” Vicky asked.

  “No. This is what I’ve lived for my entire life. I know a lot of my classmates who would part with their right arm to be in my seat.”

  He glanced at Vicky, eyes gleaming. “This is what I was born for.”

  “Then what’s it going to be, a quick trip around the moon to drill your captains, or sitting here, polishing our lasers?”

  “Put that way, there’s no real question, is there?”

  “Then if we’re going to do it, shouldn’t we get it over with before the Empress is looking over our shoulder?” Vicky said

  The fleet sortied at 0900 the next morning. A few of the casualties from the last exercise were left behind in the yard, but they were the only ones to miss the last chance they’d have to practice what they would be doing for real before the week was out.

  CHAPTER 56

  THE Empress held her fleet to a comfortable one gee. Why was anyone’s guess. That left Admiral von Mittleburg’s ships plenty of time to fix and mend what broke during the second practice run.

  Wolverine and Wombat fell back well before the Empress’s fleet came through.

  It was tempting to leave them there at the jump. They could have easily picked off the first destroyers to come through: two, four, maybe even six. If they were light cruisers, however, its 6-inch lasers would quickly range in on the destroyers and shoot them to pieces.

  Vicky knew that in the next couple of days, she might be asking destroyers to make suicidal charges, but to ask two to stand in place, just forty thousand klicks from the jump, was a death sentence she wasn’t willing to sign.

  Apparently, neither was Admiral von Mittleburg.

  The destroyers fell back to well out of 18-inch range and stayed there.

  No sooner had they reached a safe position than the Empress’s fleet began jumping through and forming in full battle formation. Four battle lines of nine or ten battleships held pride of place, surrounded by cruisers and destroyers. The assault transports held at the rear of the fleet, guarded by merchant cruisers and destroyers.

  Only after all this was arrayed in perfect order did the Empress’s barge stick its nose cautiously through the jump.

  Immediately, it blared out an order from the Emperor to lay down their arms and submit to their proper liege lord.

  Vicky was prepared for that. As Commander Blue and his leading chief ran the message through their voice recognition analysis, Vicky stood, in full vice admiral and Grand Duchess mode, and demanded, “Can you authenticate that order?”

  It took quite a while for her question and the Empress’s answer to bounce out and back.

  “What do you mean, authenticate it? You heard the order. Obey,” the Empress demanded right back several hours later.

  “Verbal orders have been known to be faked,” Vicky said. “Words can be patched together like a quilt. I say again, can you authenticate this so-called order?”

  A conversation this elongated could not raise blood pressure half as high as Vicky wanted, but it served its purpose and bought time. She already had Commander Blue’s answer.

  “You little bitch. You know the Emperor’s voice. You claim to be his obedient daughter though I’ve seen none of that. Submit.”

  “Commander,” Vicky said, handing off her center place to an expert.

  “Every one of the words in the Emperor’s order has been taken from one of nine speeches the Emperor made recently. One speech had a lot of applause behind it. It was his birthday speech. The applause has been wiped, but if you check the audio very carefully, you can spot those words for the lack of background noise. This is no order. This is a collage.”

  “Thank you, Commander Blue. Now I have a word for the Navy units that just covered the Empress’s ass as she tiptoed through that jump. Lay down your arms, and you will be received readily into our fleet or allowed to go home unharmed. Fight for that blackhearted bitch against me and my father, your Emperor, and a lot of you will die. Pull out while you can.”

  “You can quit talking, Your Grace,” Commander Blue said. “The Empress has closed down this frequency and is jamming it.”

  “How much got out?”

  “Not much after that blackhearted-bitch remark. She can dish it out, but I don’t think she likes to have it thrown back in her face.”

  “No surprise there,” Vicky said. “Commander, can you get me a secure landline to Admiral von Mittleburg?”

  A screen blinked. The admiral was already looking at Vicky.

  “Did that go as well as you hoped?” he asked her.

  “About as well as I could expect. We countered her claim to have an order from the Emperor. I got an offer out to all her ships, assuming everyone was monitoring that channel.”

  “I think you can count on that. From my check of our own ships, just about every comm unit was turned to you two’s slow tête-à-tête.”

  “So. What do we do now?”

  “What we’ve been doing,” Admiral von Mittleburg said. “Load every weapon your friend down on St. Petersburg can squeeze out of his fabs or reactors. Have the yard dial in every ship so that we can get every ounce of effort out of them when the battle comes. For you and me, that means waiting patiently and killing any snake that can’t be handled below our pay grade.”

  Vicky allowed herself to worry her lower lip. “Can I say that I hate this?”

  “You can, but I can’t help you.”

  “You’ve done more than anyone could have expected of an admiral in these trying times,” Vicky told him.

  “And you, Your Grace, have surprised me more than I ever thought a Peterwald could.”

  “Now you’re just being nasty,” Vicky said through a grin.

  “Right back at you. Now, let’s get to work.”

  CHAPTER 57

  THREE days later, the Empress’s fleet was braking at a comfortable one gee toward orbit around St. Petersburg. The moon was a bit out of the way to provide the perfect pivot for Vicky’s fleet, but they’d used it to swing out and around, blast themselves high above the moon and toward the incoming fleet. They turned on a course that would take them back to St. Petersburg a bit ahead of the Empress’s ships. They’d have a clear shot up their vulnerable aft end with its engines.

  The Empress had her jammer back on, so it was impossible to determine exactly how her force was organized, but before it went up, the pixies had gotten a good read on her battle line. More than half of her battleships, twenty-three in all, were ancient hulks from the reserve fleet. They carried twelve 14-inch or 15-inch lasers, much less powerful and shorter-ranged than the 16- and 18-inch guns on the sixteen newer ships.

  Proof of the poor maintenance aboard the Empress’s ships was clear for all to see. Three of the old battleships and several of the cruisers and other ships had suffered engineering casualties on the acceleration and deceleration toward St. Petersburg. A couple of them trailed the fleet. Those that had failed while decelerating had veered well away and would have to make another try at getting into orbit around St. Petersburg.

  What the Empress still had outnumbered Vicky’s two to on
e.

  None of her ships had broken down and fallen out. The next few hours would tell if the extra maintenance and rocket ships would make enough of a difference.

  During the long approach, the Empress and the Butcher of Dresden had treated the people of St. Petersburg to a series of bloodcurdling threats. They talked, screamed, or shrieked in livid details about what they would do when they got there. It did them no good.

  The fantastic production levels from the fabs below did Vicky’s fleet quite a bit of good.

  It also got her six more ships volunteered to her service.

  There was no time to run those hulls through any kind of conversion. Also, there were some strings attached to the offer. So the merchant ships were loaded with containers full of coarse gravel, large river stones, granite boulders, and other things you did not want to meet in space. These ships, and their owners, would sail from the station and head for the jump to Metzburg. Along the way, they would dump their load, spraying it along the path the Empress’s fleet would sail.

  Buried in with all the rocks were contact explosives, no bigger than stones, as well as some rockets with homing devices that would only activate if their passive sensors picked up a nearby signal. St. Petersburg’s outer orbits would be a mess; they’d have to be swept clear of all this. It was unanimously agreed that was a bridge they’d blow up when they came to it.

  For now, anything that promised the Empress a bad day was good.

  The Empress’s battleships, cruisers, and other ships that could not decelerate went zipping by Vicky’s fleet, desperately trying to vector themselves out of range. The Empress was heard to scream on her command net that the ships should take the chance to charge the rebel fleet, but the ships that were already down with engineering casualties seemed uninterested in seeing if the rest of their systems worked any better.

  Vicky put them in the “they’ll surrender later,” column and ignored them.

  For this battle, she was sharing Admiral Bolesław’s flag bridge on Retribution one level up from the captain’s bridge. She sat in her station chair, her high-gee station parked at her elbow. Admiral Bolesław had the place fully manned and equipped to let him track half of Admiral von Mittleburg’s fleet as well as the goings-on among the Empress’s ships.

  He agreed with Vicky that Commander Blue and his magic boxes were something he wanted. The new skipper of the Retribution would have to make do with the division’s leading chief covering the station on his bridge until Commander Blue trained up an officer replacement.

  Strange how something no one used to think about was now essential. Thank you, Kris Longknife, for showing me that one.

  The Empress’s remaining thirty-six battleships had reorganized themselves into four balanced battle lines, well apart. The middle two were a bit more distant than the upper and lower ones.

  “I think she’s going to try to envelop us,” Admiral Bolesław muttered, half to himself.

  “Why not. We’ve been doing it to her strategically for the last month,” Vicky said.

  “You may have taught her something.”

  “Who commands over there?” Vicky asked Admiral Bolesław.

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that over half her ships are antiques left over from the Iteeche War.”

  “She’s already breaking the reserve battleships out of mothballs and sending them out to fight?”

  “It would appear so,” the admiral said, rubbing his chin. “It doesn’t seem to have helped her all that much. The ships that broke down are all reserve wrecks.”

  “She’s got a lot of destroyers and cruisers stretching out her line toward St. Petersburg. Fewer in the rear,” Vicky observed.

  “Somebody over there knows something about how you fight a battle in space.”

  “Huh?”

  “We want to get some good shots at the aft end of her battleships, where the vulnerable rockets and reactors are. That’s why we’re braking toward St. Petersburg a bit ahead of her. Obviously, she doesn’t want us to do that.”

  “Understandably. Kris Longknife was always trying to get a shot at the alien’s reactors.”

  “Smart girl,” Admiral Bolesław said, clearly not happy praising the Wardhaven princess. “Anyway, the Empress’s fleet is deployed heavy aft. Lots of her cruisers and most of her destroyers are back there, between us and her battleships’ aft ends. This way, if we try to cross her T, cut across her vulnerable rear, she can order the destroyers to launch a high-speed run in, get close enough to fire their pulse lasers, and do us a lot of damage.”

  “Won’t we just pick them off?” Vicky asked. She’d learned a lot from Admiral Krätz. This hadn’t been covered.

  “A few. Maybe a lot. And we’ll order our destroyers to make a fast run in themselves, to get a pulse-laser hit on those aft engines and shoot up the attacking destroyers. The Empress’s cruisers will take a stab at our destroyers and cruisers while our cruisers are rendering honors to theirs. It will be a wild melee battle with no one quite sure how it will turn out.”

  “When will our destroyers and cruisers go in?”

  “When Admiral von Mittleburg gives the order. The Empress has the wind gauge, so to speak. She’s braking; all she has to do is order her ships to reduce their deceleration, and they’ll overtake us. There’s a disadvantage to ordering the first attack. Your ship might build up more energy on the boat, but the battle will take place closer to your enemy’s battle line. Our battleships will be better able to support our destroyers with our secondaries.”

  “But won’t that tend to let them get in range of our battleships?”

  “Maybe, but remember, it’s their vulnerable sterns that are hanging out. Their destroyers are attacking our bows with thick meteorite catchers as well as armor.”

  Vicky frowned at the screens showing the two fleets closing. “As you say, a melee battle.”

  “Yep.”

  CHAPTER 58

  “THE Empress has issued a signal,” Commander Blue said, almost in a whisper. “All ships acknowledged what I take was an order. The Empress just issued an execute.” There was a pause. “All destroyers and cruisers have changed their vector from deceleration to closing with us.”

  “Any orders from Admiral von Mittleburg?” Admiral Bolesław asked.

  “None, sir.”

  “Comm, send to squadron. Prepare to execute orders.”

  “Acknowledged, sir,” said the young lieutenant serving as the flag comm officer.

  Vicky glanced at his board. Each ship in Task Force 2 had sent a digital reply just as the lieutenant finished the order.

  Talk about eager beavers.

  “Signal from Admiral von Mittleburg. All Cru, and DesRons, prepare to close with the enemy cruisers and destroyers when I issue execute.”

  “Comm, pass along to the squadrons. Execute on my order.”

  Vicky tried very hard not to smile. Rear Admiral Bolesław was not about to allow Vice Admiral von Mittleburg to usurp his prerogative.

  On the screen, Vicky could see destroyers and cruisers from all four of the Empress’s squadrons closing on her two lonely ones. She held her breath while Vice Admiral von Mittleburg sweated out the hardest decision of his life.

  “Don’t wait too long, Heinrich,” Admiral Bolesław whispered through clenched teeth.

  Then all the Empress’s cruisers and destroyers began to skew their courses, aiming for the Retribution.

  “That gold-plated bitch,” Admiral Bolesław said. “Now don’t you wish you’d stayed at home by the fire?”

  “No.” Vicky had nothing to add to that.

  “Yeah, I know. Life’s a bitch, then you get bitches like her. Come on, Heinrich. She’s showed her hand.”

  “All Cru and DesRons engage the ships closing on Retribution. Execute now.”

  “Pass that order to all ships,” Admiral Bolesław said. “Give my execute.”

  In the blink of an eye, the comm board turned green as all Task Force 2’s ships acknowled
ged the order. In hardly more time, destroyers changed their deceleration and vector, shooting out to engage their own kind. The cruisers were a bit slower, but they were not far behind.

  Vicky eyed the board. The two battle fleets were a good two hundred thousand klicks apart. At the rate they were closing, they’d likely be within range of her 18-inch guns in less than a half hour. The 16- and 15-inch lasers in both fleets would likely take a few extra minutes. The old 14-inch guns in the Empress’s fleet would take even more time.

  The Retribution was at the head of the column of battleships backing down toward St. Petersburg. That put it closest to the Empress’s fleet. Its secondary battery included twelve 6-inchers and another twelve 4-inchers. That was the biggest secondary armament Vicky knew on any battleship.

  It was about to get a workout.

  Vicky tried to keep her eyes on the Empress’s battleships as they closed the range, and watch the battle of the destroyers and cruisers between them. She found herself in danger of going cross-eyed.

  “Can we ignore the battleships and just shoot at the cruisers and little boys?” she asked Admiral Bolesław.

  “Not if you want to come out of this with your hide relatively intact. You got to watch them both.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “Maybe I can save you some trouble. Computer, warn me if the Empress’s battleships change direction or acceleration. Warn me when they come within one hundred twenty thousand klicks of any friendly battleships.”

  “Orders logged. I will follow your instructions.”

  “See, that takes a bit of the work out of your day and mine.”

  They both turned back to concentrate on the developing battle.

  “Uh-oh,” the admiral said.

  “Do we have a problem?” Vicky asked.

  “The Empress tried a sneak,” Admiral Bolesław said. “We sent every cruiser and destroyer we had into the fight. She was holding back sixteen destroyers to escort her transports. She just had them cut all deceleration and use maximum acceleration to close the distance with us.”