“So they likely are not bringing their families and friends to this shoot out,” Sandy said.
“Not at all likely. They likely have saved some battleships back to protect the mother ship. Come to think of it, that one time, a hundred and twenty were ordered to attack our diversionary force while sixty or so held back with momma. Yeah, we’re likely looking at all the teeth a wolf pack can send out. Certainly, all they can at any decent acceleration.”
“You’ve beat this size force before, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sandy said. “But remember, these bastards have twelve or so door knockers in their vanguard. You get one of them coming through the jump every second or so and we’re going to have a hell of a time holding the jump. We can fall back in front of them, keeping out of range, but they do have those fast movers to run around our flanks and make life complicated for us.”
“Assuming they can force the jump.” Sandy said, her mind spinning, seeing something, but only vaguely.
“Yeah. Assuming.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Sandy said, as her thoughts jelled. Her team leaned in close as she began to explain her battle plan.
“Oh shit,” her Chief of Staff said after she finished the first outline.
“So, help me improve it.”
“Can we civilians run for it?” Jacques asked.
“If I recall it right, most of the best routes to Alwa are though Alpha Jump, right?” Sandy asked.
“Too right,” Penny said.
Jacques scowled and shook his head. “They have cut us off.”
“So, help me out here,” Sandy said, all admiral.
So, they all began to help her, and themselves, out.
23
Sandy sat on her flag bridge, observing the fleet around her. Thirty-six battlecruisers swung at anchor. Twelve were moored to each other in groups of three. They rotated briskly, giving their crews a sense of down and moving their fore and aft batteries along quickly so that when one fired itself empty, the other one would be swinging in to position to take anything coming through the jump under fire.
Around her waited Task Force 2 and 3 of the 2nd Fleet with the Victory added in for good measure.
Well away from here, the Beta Jump Point was guarded by Admiral Miyoshi with the Haruna, Chikuma, Atago, Tone, Arasi, Hubuki Amatukaze and Arare of BatRon 3, augmented by the Mikasa from BatRon 9. The rest of that squadron’s ships, Asahi, Hatsuse, Yakumo, Iszuma Iwate, Asama and Toikiwa, with the Banshee that Sandy had detached from BatRon 7, protected the transports and stood ready to herd them for the Beta Jump Point if things went bad at Alpha.
Sandy had just completed her deployment when the Activity popped into space announcing that the alien fleet was in system C-3. When last observed, they were accelerating at one gee. However, if they wanted to make the jump to this system, they would have to decelerate to between 55,000 and a hundred thousand kilometers per second.
Mimzy had done the math. If the aliens went for the higher speed, they would start charging out of the jump thirty minutes from now. If they slowed, this wait could stretch out for quite a few hours.
Sandy was prepared to fight her first major, set battle against these monsters. Her ships’ laser batteries were fully charged. Each ship was shrunk down to Condition Zed with their crystal armor spread over every square centimeter of their hull. She had a comfortable distance, 170,000 kilometers, between her and the jump. All the battlecruisers she had here were armed with the 22-inch lasers.
And she had her surprise.
As soon as the first ship came through the jump, her fleet would flip out of their anchorage, but for now, she waited, letting the ships rotate slowly. The crew sat comfortable in their high gee stations.
“This is like it was in the old days, when wind drove the ships,” Admiral Perswah said.
“Have you sailed in sailing ships?” Sandy asked
“Oh, no. That was in my grandmother’s time,” she said.
“Do your people know better how to wait?” Sandy asked.
The cat actually chuckled, a sound that sounded very threatening. “Too often, some hot headed young lass will toss our plans aside and begin the pounce. It certainly looks like our alien enemy is on the pounce.”
“It certainly does,” Sandy agreed.
“I visited the fighting associations before this voyage. Your birds with the long legs. They know how to stop a pounce.”
Sandy nodded.
“You, too, know how to stop a pounce.”
“We will know in a few minutes,” Sandy answered.
“Yes, we will know. This is all different from anything I have ever seen. Then I blink my eyes and everything is so much like I know. This is the same, only so different.”
“We study thousands of years or more of human warfare,” Sandy admitted.
The cat nodded. “We study several hundred. Maybe a thousand. May I read some of your books?”
“Penny, have you given him a copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War?”
“No ma’am. I’ll load it to his computer immediately.”
“I doubt that I will have any time to read this book,” the cat said.
“Then we must win this battle and give you time to take your ease,” Sandy said.
Again, the cat chuckled, this time softly. “By all means, you must win this battle so that I may lay at my ease after a large dinner and read your book.”
That brought a chuckled from the tense staff around Sandy.
At that moment, the top countdown clock in the forward screen reached all zeros. The clock above it still had hours to run, but the aliens could show up anytime between now and then.
Sandy let a breath out. Apparently, the aliens were taking the slow road. Or at least a slower road.
Then all hell broke loose.
24
The alien battleships were large ovals, as much as half a kilometer in length. At 100,000 kilometers an hour, they would cover that distance, from bow to stern, in less than 2/100ths of a second. Exactly 700 meters from the Jump Point Alpha was a small metal ball, floating in space, happily beeping away every hundredth of a second with its specially designed proximity fuse.
The alien door knocker jumped into the home system of its species.
Not quite 2/100ths of a second later, the space mine, with a twenty megaton hydrogen bomb the cats had given Sandy, exploded.
Temperatures stolen from the surface of a sun enveloped the alien ship.
The door knocker had meters of solid rock and meters of ice thickening its hide. Still, even that skin could not protect it from this intense a sunburn.
Nothing came out of the expanding, superheated gas cloud.
Sandy and her team had wondered how quickly the aliens would try to force the jump. Ships usually took a jump with a bit of a break in between. It was better that way, admiralties and insurance firms hated to have ships bounce off of each other when they tousled going through the jump.
The thought had been that the aliens would likely use a one or two second or even a five second delay between ships. Sandy had several high acceleration missiles floating back a bit from the jump, aimed at it and ready to charge it and add more nuclear hell to that of the close in jump guard.
For four seconds, nothing came out of the fireball.
Then, an alien door knocker tumbled out of that hell fire, rolling and flipping end over end. Its surface was red hot and burning. It trailed a tail of red hot magma that once had been armor.
Of Sandy’s twelve rotating trios, four had been assigned the first target. As the rear of the door knocker, what was left of it, rolled into sight, four battlecruisers stutter fired their twelve forward lasers up the vulnerable stern at the propulsion lasers. Four more battlecruisers stutter fired their aft eight lasers.
Lasers that were intended to fire a continuous stream of coherent light for five seconds or more, instead sent a tenth of a second of fire burst at the twisted rocket engines at the stern of the door knocker. Tha
t burst shot into the ship, using the rocket motor as its avenue of entry, avoiding the flaming rock armor. Inside, the lasers raised havoc with the delicate superconducting magnets that held the plasma stream in thrall. Any failure of those containment vessels and the plasma was unleashed to eat the ship, its reactors, its life.
There were twenty reactors feeding plasma to the rockets at the stern of each door knocker. The lasers from the battlecruisers must have disabled several containment fields. Almost instantaneously, there was no stern. In hardly a heartbeat, there was no ship.
Half a second later, a second fireball tumbled out of the atomic maelstrom, spewing lava in every direction. Sandy’s second group of four rotating ships took that one under fire with the same results.
While all this was taking place, one of the small rockets had accelerated at twelve gees toward the cooling fireball. Before the heat got too great, it immolated itself in another burning hell of thermonuclear fire.
For the next few seconds, nothing else tumbled out of the fireball. Later, as Sandy studied the high-speed photography of this battle, she’d realize that the twelve door knockers had hurtled themselves through the jump and into the hell fire, all in a brief six seconds. After that, the ships jumping into this most fiery death were battleships.
These also had rock thickened hulls, but nowhere near as thick as what the door knockers had. The atomic flame scorched them, burned them and gave back nothing of the first dozen or so that shot through the jump.
As the hell began to cool, Mimzy accelerated another missile towards the roiling fireball. Only a super computer could observe so quickly and react so fast. She had identified the interval between ships. She had calculated how quickly the fires of hell cooled. She ordered a missile forward and it added its own hell to the flames.
Nothing escaped that scorching hot breath for several more seconds.
After that one, Mimzy delayed sending another missile at the jump, waiting a moment to see if the aliens had called it quits.
However, no message had returned from the other side of the jump to warn the aliens of what waited for them. They had committed themselves to a blazingly fast course of action and they followed it, one behind the other. The aliens were not known for counting the cost where the chance of murdering vermin was at hand.
Again, a burning slab of rock tumbled from the fire, spewing lava and sparks. Recharged lasers on the battlecruisers took them under fire, shot out their engines, penetrated past them to unleash the fire of their own plasma and freed that possessive hell to devour those who had sought to tame it.
Three battleships managed to escape the hot breath of the atomic gods before a another rocket added more flaming coals to that thermonuclear fire and several more seconds passed without anything escaping that inferno.
Mimzy had the tempo of the alien jumps down solid. For an eternity that flashed away in a flaming minute, the computer kept the gates of hell open. Each alien door knocker or battleship jumped from one system to another only to be swallowed up by the waiting maw of flaming doom.
For sixty-six seconds by the countdown clock on the screen, the aliens charged into oblivion.
Then Mimzy let the hell fire cool.
No sooner did that happen, than alien cruisers began to shoot out of the expanding ball of radioactive fire and gas from slaughtered battleships.
Sandy had issued orders for how to handle any cruisers that came though the jump. Four battlecruisers, two at the left end of the line, two in the middle, took the ship under fire. Forty lasers spat out two bursts of coherent light for two tenths of a second each. Eighty powerful 22-inch beams reached out, pinned the cruiser like an insect caught and mounted by an enthusiastic child.
The cruiser vanished in a cloud of gas.
The next and the next suffered the same fate.
The battlecruisers rotated in their anchorage, slowly around each other. First one ship’s bow battery would come into play, then the next, then the last. At different times, their stern batteries were aimed at the same spot in space that continued to pop out targets. The reactors pumped electricity into the capacitors almost as quickly as the lasers spewed out bursts of destructive light.
At this rate, the aliens would all die with nothing to show for their lives.
Then the aliens changed their tactic.
Someone’s Enlightened Leader was eager to close with the vermin. Now three cruisers came through, lashed together. Immediately, they sprang apart.
Per Sandy’s plan, four battlecruisers took the cluster under fire. One died. One was winged and tumbled out of the aimed volley. The third survived, arrowing off at an angle and streaked for the battlecruisers at 100,000 kilometers an hour.
Unfortunately for the cruiser and its crew, Sandy’s ships were well back from the jump. Even at its initial speed and even with the 3.25 gees acceleration that the alien put on, it still had more than ten minutes to go before it could fire its own lasers.
Other battlecruisers took it under fire and it burned.
But more cruisers in sets of three, four and even five shot through the jump, slamming themselves into high accelerations and zigging and zagging.
Sandy’s fire control plan fell apart as battlecruisers found themselves facing cruisers that were missed by that initial first volley. Battlecruisers out of turn fired at any alien cruiser that looked like a good target.
At that tiny fraction of a moment, Mimzy slipped into the navigation and fire control computers of the Victory and the other two swinging at anchor with her. They slipped their mooring. With no action from the helm, the three battlecruisers swung away from each other and turned to bring their bow batteries to bear. Thirty-six 22-inch lasers fixed their aim at the jump – and did not fire.
Mimzy waited patiently, counting each tiny fraction of a second that only she could measure and react in. One cruiser put on speed, dancing a crazy jig that must have been hell on people in simple cushioned seats or beds. It jitterbugged through this or that tiny burst of laser untouched.
Now Mimzy plotted the sphere of space the aliens would likely occupy. She aimed thirty-six lasers and gave them orders. Fire one tenth of a second, pause a tenth, fire, adjust, fire, adjust.
The first two volleys missed. One lightning bolt from the third hit. The cruiser bent around its center, but kept accelerating. Only now, its course was defined by its damage.
Mimzy adjusted the aim from three battlecruisers and tightened her next salvo. This time four hit and the cruiser spun into a nearly straight course.
The next volley had concentrated thirty-six laser bursts exactly where the ship would be in less than a second.
The cruiser blew up, adding its metal, flesh and bone to the atoms scattering into the void of space from this battle.
More cruisers escaped the ragged fire from the other thirty-three battlecruisers. Mimzy took them under fire one at a time. Still, enough spun free and charged wildly that one cruiser finally got off a salvo from its own forward battery.
By chance, it picked the Victory.
Its four lasers were at maximum range. Only one struck the Victory. The battlecruiser’s 100 millimeters of crystal armor absorbed the weak and attenuated laser beam, slowed the light and spread it throughout the hull’s armor, then radiated it back into space.
Reaction mass flowing beneath the crystal armor, ready to cool it and the hull . . . to carry away the energy into the hungry plasm inside the reactors . . . hardly got warm.
The final alien cruisers jumped.
The final alien cruiser died.
The battle was over.
Mimzy knew it immediately. It took the mortals several seconds before their breath exploded from them in a sigh. The next breath saw them staring at their boards, measuring the wreckage they showed. Slowly the realization dawned on them.
The aliens were dead. They were alive.
Then, and only then did the cheering begin.
Sandy sat in her command chair on her flag bridge as t
he cheering broke out, both around her and on open mics on net. Mics that should not have been open.
Sandy gave a tight, proud smile to those around her as they caught their breath and broke out in joyous grins. The admiral tried to frown at Penny, and the overstepping computer around her neck, but Penny was grinning way too much.
“Mimzy, we’ve got to talk,” Sandy said, failing to get the growl she intended into her voice.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mimzy said, sounding almost contrite. Almost, but not quite. There was way too much pride in her submission.
“You did right,” Sandy finally said. “I just want you to tell me that you intend to do something like that before you do it.”
“I am sorry, Admiral. But really. I didn’t know I was going to do that until the aliens came up with that idea of coming through the jump as a wad of ships and I realized we needed to do that.”
“Understood,” Sandy said. “Crew, let’s get out of these damn eggs, get some clothes on and I want an immediate debrief in my day quarters in thirty minutes. Mimzy you may order up some coffee and sandwiches.
“The mess crew had meatloaf in the ovens during the battle. Admiral, you will have one of your favorite meat loaf sandwiches to celebrate with.”
“Well done, Mimzy. Very well done.
25
Sandy shook her head as she stood up and stepped out of her high gee station; she hadn’t even had a chance to work up a good sweat. Last time she’d been in a fight, she had almost floated her body in the sweat it wrung out of her. This time, nothing.
She didn’t even need a shower.
What she was, was hungry. Sandy quickly pulled on fresh clothes and stepped out of her night quarters into her day quarters. The ship was back to a comfortable Condition Able from the cramped but battle worthy Condition Zed. A coffee pot and thermos of tea had arrived along with thick meatloaf sandwiches on fresh bread, with a slab of Swiss cheese and slathered with ketchup.
No doubt a Navy could win a war without hot, fresh sandwiches, but Sandy would hate to be there when it tried.
Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 14