Vicky did the numbers in her head. She had thirty-one destroyers closing on the Empress’s battle line. The Empress had thirty, allowing for the two that had broken down. Things were about even. These extra sixteen destroyers raised the Empress’s odds to three to two.
Vicky checked the cruiser count. The Empress had most of her light cruisers, sixteen of them, backing up the destroyers. She was holding most of her heavy cruisers with the battle line, only releasing four to this wild charge. “Admiral von Mittleburg has committed all his cruisers. The odds are even,” Vicky muttered.
“Or maybe better,” Admiral Bolesław said, with a bit of a smile.
“Better?”
“The Empress is coming at us balls, er, pedal to the metal, Your Grace. Three gees.”
“You mean balls to the wall, Admiral.”
“That, too. Anyway, Heinrich has our destroyers holding to just one and a half gees.”
“He’s letting them get closer to us for the meeting clash.”
“Exactly. We’ll have our main battery at least in range. Maybe our 6-inchers as well.”
Vicky let her stomach taste the idea that she was being used as bait. She was not surprised. Why not?
“When they get in close,” the admiral said, “I intend to drop Retribution back to the end of the line. They will have to come through every battleship I’ve got to get at you.”
“I’m the carrot dangling in front of the donkey,” Vicky said.
“And we must keep the carrot out of the donkey’s reach as long as possible, right?”
“What does the carrot say?” Vicky asked.
“It says nothing. It just allows us to make the best use of her that we can.”
“So that’s what a Grand Duchess is worth today?”
“We asked you to stay dirtside. I think there may have even been an order to that effect. You refused. Now you’re used.”
“Foolish me.”
“Enough of this prattle. The battle is about to begin. Do you want to order in some popcorn? You are just going to watch, Your Grace. Right?”
“Right. But I’ll pass on the popcorn. Is there any tea to be had?”
“Chief steward’s mate?”
“Here sir,” and a cup of the requested beverage appeared.
Admiral Bolesław sipped his tea so calmly, eyes flashing as he took in every movement on the screens.
Vicky took a deep breath, a sip of tea, and did her best to stay calm.
Like a good carrot should.
CHAPTER 59
THE Empress’s heavy cruisers opened fire first. They hit nothing, but their fire did make the belt of crud sparkle.
“I bet that’s a surprise,” Admiral Bolesław said.
“But it was one we wanted to save for her battle line,” Vicky said.
“No way to avoid her destroyers finding it.”
Vicky nodded. It had been a long time since there had been a serious battleship engagement. No doubt a lot had been forgotten. And she, of course, was trying several new twists.
That’s what I get for experimenting.
Vicky went back to the screens. Her destroyers began a gentle jinking pattern as they came in range of the cruisers 8-inch guns. That accounted for the misses. The Empress’s were still coming straight in. When Vicky’s heavy cruisers opened up, several of the Empress’s destroyers took hits. One exploded, but the others seemed none the worse for the wear.
Then the Empress’s destroyers began a random pattern, bouncing up or down, right or left. Vicky frowned. That would make the cruiser’s firing solutions harder.
Three of the Empress’s destroyers came apart or bent in the middle.
Admiral Bolesław barked out a laugh. “Got you now,” he snapped.
As Vicky watched, her cruisers made several more hits. The damage gave the destroyers a cruel choice. Reduce their wild maneuvering and risk a second hit, or keep it up and risk bending in half.
Most chose to keep up the jink pattern and abandon ship quickly when the inevitable break came.
“They’d rather break and abandon ship than risk our fire,” Admiral Bolesław observed. “What does that say about their eagerness to die for their Empress?”
“Not much,” Vicky said.
Now the heavy cruisers were in range of each other. The destroyers were handed over to the light cruisers. Their 6-inch lasers could reach the destroyers, just not each other.
Here, the Empress paid the price for keeping her heavy cruisers back with her battle line. Outnumbered three to one, the four Empress heavies took hit after hit. Vicky’s heavy cruisers had begun Evasion Pattern 2 as soon as they came in range. The Empress’s cruisers took a few extra seconds to realize their steady course was a death warrant.
By the time the four heavy cruisers threw themselves into a mad evasion effort, it was too late. Two cruisers bent in half. They spewed out survival pods even as they lost way and became rolling hulks in space.
One ship took a series of direct hits, one after the other. It exploded. The last began to shed ice, then lost all control as chunks of the ship followed the ice overboard.
That one, also, abandoned ship. “Check fire. Check fire on the heavy cruisers,” Admiral von Mittleburg ordered. “Transfer fire to the light cruisers.”
The last heavy cruiser must have had some maniac or one of the Empress’s fanatics aboard. Or maybe a firing circuit closed on its own. However it happened, one 8-inch laser fired after the check fire order. It was a lucky shot.
Painfully lucky.
It took the Augsburg right on one of its forward turrets. The explosion carried backward up the power lines, and the entire forward battery vanished in one cascading explosion.
“Dear God,” Admiral Bolesław muttered.
“Help them,” Vicky added to the prayer. She doubted that she could pray. Yet. But she could piggyback a few of her thoughts on someone else’s.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Admiral Bolesław said, half to himself. “I hope whatever that was isn’t in all our ships.”
Vicky said nothing, but the Empress’s cruisers had died so very quickly. Would hers vanish into smoke just as fast?
Vicky’s remaining heavy cruisers turned their fire on the Empress’s sixteen light cruisers with a vengeance.
Someone, however, was learning quickly. These cruisers had begun to dodge about well before they came under fire. Since they hadn’t programmed their jinking into their fire control computers, their fire became wild while Vicky’s cruisers were just as deadly as before.
Vicky’s ships jinked according to a pattern laid into the ships’ nav computers and shared with the fire control system. The computer was able to predict exactly where its own ship would be when it came time to fire. The targeted Empress’s ship was the only variable. Vicky’s cruisers didn’t hit every time, but they hit a lot more than the Empress’s ships did.
As the cruisers fought it out in a painfully even fight, the destroyers came in range of each other. It could have been a massacre, with Vicky’s ships outnumbered three to two, but her destroyers had one advantage.
They had not yet reached the junk field. Admiral von Mittleburg had timed it perfectly. The Empress’s destroyers charged into the minefield Vicky’s last bunch of volunteers had strewn just as the Empress’s destroyers needed to take their opposite number under fire.
It was a disaster for them.
Initially, they fired at Vicky’s destroyers. With both sides jinking, the results were pretty much a wash. One of Vicky’s destroyers took a hit but kept on going.
Then one of the Empress’s destroyers ran into a rock that exploded. Two others ran into dirt, but the hits were in good places.
“I’m getting talk on a scrambler I can read,” Commander Blue announced.
“Put it on,” Admiral Bolesław ordered curtly before Vicky could say, “Please put it on.”
Oh, well.
“What the hell is this stuff?”
“I don’
t know, but I’ve got a small hull breach. Thank God it wasn’t five centimeters more forward, or I’d have lost my reactor.”
“Use your main battery to sweep the space in front of you,” came the voice of someone in authority.
“Doing it,” came in several voices.
On the screen, Vicky saw several destroyers begin to fire at the space not ahead of them but where they intended to go next.
“Do you see what I see?” Vicky said.
“More importantly, I think our destroyer skippers have spotted it, too.”
Half a dozen of the Empress’s destroyers took hits when they zigged into the space they’d cleared.
“Quit that!” came in a shrill female voice. “Don’t you see, you’re giving yourself away? Charge! Get that willful bitch!”
“I think my loving stepmom is taking tactical command,” Vicky said.
“It’s not a bad order.”
“Not bad?”
“Sometimes the best way past a minefield is through it,” Admiral Bolesław said. “Just ask a Marine. If the way around it is swept by fire, you just have to suck it up and go.”
“Close up your intervals,” came in that authoritative male voice on the Empress’s net. “This damn thing can’t be too thick. Close up and go through.”
“A smart man. Too bad he’s not on our side,” Admiral Bolesław observed.
Vicky acknowledged him with a scowl.
On screen, the destroyers closed up into divisions of four and bored through, returning Vicky’s little boys’ fire.
Small explosions flared as bits of crud and small mines did their damage. Bigger explosions showed where Vicky’s destroyers hit them. Several of the Empress’s destroyers fell out of their tight formation. Some continued to fight their way forward. Three abandoned ship.
With an effort, Vicky tore her eyes away from the battle of the little boys to check in on the cruisers.
Nothing seemed to be happening there.
The twenty cruisers continued to exchange fire. There was the occasional hit, but no sudden, catastrophic end to a ship. No ship going slack and seeding space with survival pods.
Vicky checked the board that reported the status of all ships. The battleships were, of course, solidly in the green. The cruisers were a different matter. All of the ships had one or more systems tending to yellow. A few, like the Augsburg, glared red.
The cruisers were taking punishment. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell if the Empress’s cruisers were getting as much, or worse, than they gave.
“Am I missing something?” Vicky asked.
“I don’t know, Your Grace, but I think I’ve just spotted something. Comm, get me a secure line to Admiral von Mittleburg.”
In a second, he was connected. “Admiral, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“If you mean the failure of the Empress’s cruiser gun line to fall back on the battle line and concentrate on our incoming destroyers. Yes, I just spotted it.”
“The golden bitch really does want to get Our Grace here, doesn’t she?” Admiral Bolesław said.
“It looks like it. If her cruisers keep our cruisers tied up, it could go hard on you, Ališ.”
“Yes, it could,” Admiral Bolesław said. “I’m prepared to pull Retribution back to the tail of our line. Make those destroyers come down through every gun I have to get to Her Grace.”
“Can you use the battleships’ main battery to hit the destroyers?” Vicky asked.
“It would be like swatting flies with a twenty-pound sledgehammer, Your Grace,” Admiral von Mittleburg said.
“But if the battlewagons’ main batteries took out their cruisers?” Admiral Bolesław said.
“Then our cruisers could concentrate on their destroyers,” Vicky said.
“That sounds like a plan,” Admiral von Mittleburg said. “Let’s keep this line open, shall we, Ališ?”
“Good talking with you, Heinrich,” and the two admirals hung up.
In a moment, the orders came down. “Battleships, engage the hostile cruisers when they come in range of your main batteries. Engage destroyers with your secondaries as soon as they come in range.”
Admiral Bolesław passed along the order, adding a “fire at will,” to the Admiral von Mittleburg’s order.
“Now we see what hell we can give them,” Bolesław whispered. “We’ve sure as hell trained as much as we could.”
Vicky checked the board on her battle line. All the ships’ main batteries were solid green. It had taken over a month to get the board that way, and a lot of hard work from the fab workers on St. Petersburg.
I wonder what the blackhearted Empress’s board looks like?
Hell, I wonder if she even has a board.
Vicky smiled at her private argument with herself, then went back to the destroyer battle.
Five more little boys had fallen out of the fight: four destroyers on the Empress’s side, one on hers. Between the engineering casualties, the guns, and the rocky minefield, the Empress was down sixteen ships, one-third of her force.
These were just the ships that had given up the charge. There was no telling how many still coming were limping, lame, or wishing they were somewhere else.
On the cruiser gun line, one of the Empress’s cruisers was out of the fight, spewing survival pods as it drifted in space. Unfortunately, the Augsburg was pulling out of the line, still under some sort of control but letting its own inertia carry it away from the fight.
Vicky did a check: the Retribution’s main battery was sixteen 18-inch lasers. They had a range of one hundred thousand kilometers. The Empress’s destroyers were coming in range. The cruisers were twenty thousand klicks behind them. It wouldn’t be long before the Retribution, Ravager, and Trouncer could open up.
“You hungry?” Admiral Bolesław asked.
“I’m afraid if I ate anything, it might come back up,” Vicky admitted to him in a whisper.
“Good black bread and butter will do you good,” he said, smiling jovially. “You have to keep up your energy. It’s not like we hack at each other with battle-axes anymore. Still, this can take nearly as much nervous energy out of you as swinging a good sword.”
Vicky allowed that might be possible, and the chief steward’s mate disappeared, only to return with the black bread, butter, and a squeeze bottle of honey.
“Ah, perfect, Sergei. Once again, you have read my mind.”
The chief just smiled and cut the bread for them. The admiral slathered on the butter and honey. Vicky followed suit, going light on the toppings.
The chief offered a slice of bread to Commander Blue. He took one, added nothing to it, and munched it without taking his eyes from his boards.
Together, Vicky and Admiral Bolesław munched their bread and watched as the battle developed. A few more destroyers fell out of the charge: two of the Empress’s, one of Vicky’s. Two cruisers, one from each gun line, fell out.
Then the destroyers got in range of the approaching cruisers’ secondary batteries.
All hell broke loose.
CHAPTER 60
THE cruisers continued to hammer each other with their 6-, 8-, or 9.2-inch lasers. Now they reached out for the little boys with their secondaries of 4- or 5-inch lasers. Six destroyers, evenly divided, were swatted down immediately and left crushed in space. Still, the gunfight continued between the cruisers. Another two, one Vicky’s, one the Empress’s, fell out.
Then the Empress’s cruisers crossed the hundred-thousand-kilometer line. In a blink, Admiral Bolesław’s Retribution, Ravager, and Trouncer opened fire, as well as BatRon 22’s ships in Admiral von Mittleburg’s squadron: the Implacable, Adamant, Merciless, and Hunter. Eighty-eight 18-inch lasers spoke almost as one.
The cruisers had just reached the crud field and closed up, dividing their secondaries between shooting at destroyers and doing their best to sweep the space ahead of them.
They were not prepared for 18-inch guns with the best dialed-in fire control
systems in the fleet.
Two cruisers vanished as if grabbed by the fist of an angry god of old. Other cruisers were staggered as they took hits not intended for their class. Some wandered into explosives they hadn’t noticed or reacted to in their distress. Others settled on a straight course as bridge crews were distracted by more pressing matters.
The second broadside was worse than the first.
Four cruisers vanished in the blink of an eye.
“We’re getting surrender offers from two, no three,” Commander Blue said. “No, make that all of the cruisers.”
“Comm, connect me with Admiral von Mittleburg.” The admiral immediately appeared on screen.
“Have your sensors picked up the surrender offers?”
“No.”
“I have. Will you hold your fire while I attempt to negotiate a surrender?”
“Make it quick.”
“Comm?”
“You’re on the guard net.”
“Cruisers on net, who is asking to surrender?”
The reply was garbled as they all tried to speak at once. Admiral Bolesław shouted, “Report in alphabetical order of your ship’s name. Damn it, we don’t have much time.”
“Bielefeld,” came through clear and strong, followed quickly by, “Dusseldorf,” “Gdynia,” “Krotovo,” “Mlawa,” “Tychy.” “Utena,” finished up the list.
“Please don’t shoot,” Utena pleaded. “We know we don’t stand a chance.”
So, of course, the Empress broke in, screaming invectives and ordering that all traitors be shot. She screamed for the security experts on each ship to shoot the cowardly captains.
No security type appeared on screen to execute the Empress’s rant.
The skipper of the Utena rolled his eyes at the overhead. “See what we’ve had to put up with. Who do you think begged me to give up? What do you want us to do?”
“Empty your lasers and do not recharge them,” Admiral Bolesław said. “I’d order you to dump your reactors, but that planet ahead of us is coming up fast. Disable your lasers as best you can.” Bolesław rubbed his chin. “There are a lot of people in survival pods who aren’t going to make it if they aren’t collected. Don’t make me regret this, but you are ordered to pick up as many survivors as you can.”
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