She almost had a good laugh at the looks on their faces as they sidestepped past the warrior, who studiously ignored them, her interest focused only on Coyle.
“Goodbye, guys,” she whispered into the roar of the boat’s idling lift engines as her crew climbed into the boat. Mills looked out at her from the hatch, and she nodded to him. She hadn’t believed his tale before, about dueling with the big warrior, but she did now. He nodded back, his face grim, before he hit the button to close the hatch.
The last face she saw as the hatch slid shut was that of the reporter woman, Steph, whose cheeks were wet with tears. Coyle raised her hand in farewell.
With a sigh of resignation, she climbed down from the tank as the boat’s lift engines spooled up again, sending up a storm of dust and debris. After a few seconds the landing struts parted company with the ground, and the ship began to climb quickly. She watched it go, flying low over the burning forest in the direction it had come. The pilots weren’t taking any chances against Kreelan air defense weapons. Good luck, she thought.
Then she turned to face the warrior who apparently wanted her head for a prize. It was a small enough price to pay for the safety of the others, Coyle thought.
As the big warrior looked on, Coyle’s opponent approached and handed Coyle a sword. Coyle looked at it, having to admire the beauty of the craftsmanship and thinking that the Kreelans could get rich by making jewelry if they could only get over their urge to kill everyone in sight.
With a shrug, she held the sword up in a salute, whipping it up so the grip was a hand’s breadth from her chin, the sword’s tip high in the air, then lowering it to her right side, pointing it off at a forty-five degree angle at the ground. It was parade-ground perfect, and she knew that Colonel Sparks would have been proud.
Holding the sword at the ready, her attention focused on the Kreelan as the warrior moved forward into the attack, Coyle never felt the ten centimeter-long sliver of hull plating that killed her as the first assault boat finally exploded, scouring the landing zone with flame and metal debris.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“We’re in range, sir,” Bogdanova said as the tactical display showed the range ring for the pulse cannon intersect the Kreelan ships that were gaining on the Terran and Alliance carriers.
“Chief,” Sato called to Chief DeFusco in engineering, “I’m going to bring up the pulse cannon.”
“Go ahead, skipper,” she said. “The damn thing should fire. The only thing I’m really worried about is the structural damage we’ve taken. Running the ship at flank speed is starting to stress what’s left of the keel ahead of the forward engineering spaces. I’ve checked the alignment of the central conduit where the pulse cannon is mounted, and it looks okay for now. But I can’t guarantee that it’ll hold when we start maneuvering.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, chief,” Sato told her. Then, to the rest of the bridge crew, “Stand by to engage.” They were trailing the enemy ships now, slowly gaining on them as they closed with the carriers. It’s going to be close, Sato knew. With no one available to man the tactical station, he had to take care of the weapons himself. “Pulse cannon, target, designate,” he announced. Aligning the targeting pipper of the pulse cannon with one of the enemy ships, the McClaren turned slightly to starboard. Unlike the ill-fated Captain Morrison, Sato waited until the ship had steadied and the targeting computer confirmed a hard target lock and that the ship was slaved to the targeting computer. “Firing.”
As when Morrison had fired, the ship thrummed as the energy buffers dumped their stored power into the pulse cannon, drawing on every non-critical system in the ship to feed the hungry weapon. The lights again dimmed as the McClaren was joined for just an instant with the target ship.
Unlike when Morrison fired, Sato’s shot hit the intended target right between the twin flares of its engines. Designed to pierce the armor of a cruiser’s hull, the emerald beam instantly vaporized tons of metal in the enemy warship’s vulnerable stern. The resulting explosion obliterated the entire propulsion section, sending what was left of the forward part of the ship tumbling end over end, spewing air, debris, and bodies as it quickly fell behind the other three warships.
“Stand by kinetics!” Sato warned. He wasn’t firing to try and hit the other ships, although he wouldn’t pass on a luck shot, but to try and distract them from the carriers, which were now running in low orbit, waiting to pick up the assault boats that were even now coming back from the surface. He prayed that Steph had somehow made it onto one of them.
They had only been able to repair two of the ship’s primary kinetic weapons. The aft ventral turret was of no use in a trailing fight like this. But the forward dorsal battery, mounted on the “top” of the forward part of the hull, was tracking the enemy ships and was locked on for barrage fire. Sato had programmed it to fire a brace of projectiles in a box pattern that would hit the lead ship if it didn’t maneuver out of the way.
“Firing!” he said as he hit the commit button. The ship echoed with thunder as the big cannon fired half a dozen rounds.
The hull suddenly made a screeching shudder, an undulating vibration that shook the entire ship and made Sato’s blood run cold.
“Captain!” DeFusco suddenly shouted over the ship’s intercom from engineering. “We’re losing the keel! I’ve got structural warnings on every frame from forward engineering halfway to the bridge. If we don’t reduce speed, we’re going to lose her, and for the love of God don’t fire the forward kinetic battery again!”
“Can we fire the pulse cannon?” he asked her, ignoring her warning to slow the ship. The weapon display indicated that the energy buffers were still cycling. Twenty seconds remained.
For a moment, DeFusco said nothing. “Sir,” she said quietly, “the ship is going to break up if we don’t slow down. Doing anything else is about as good as detonating a torpedo amidships.”
“Answer the question, chief,” Sato ordered her, eyeing the weapon status. Ten more seconds. None of the remaining enemy ships had reacted to the death of their sister vessel, and he already had the target reticle locked on the trailing warship.
“The cannon might work properly, sir,” DeFusco said stiffly. “Should I pass the word to abandon ship?”
“Stand by to fire,” Sato said, ignoring her. Bogdanova and the others glanced at him as if he were slightly mad. “Those carriers are helpless unless we even the odds for them,” he said. “One of them is worth half a dozen ships like this. Or more. And they’re the only way our surviving troops can get home.” And the only chance Steph might have, if she’s still alive, he thought without a trace of guilt.
The weapon display flashed green: the energy buffers had recharged.
“Firing,” he said, again punching the commit button.
Again the emerald beam flared from the McClaren’s bow, and again it took the next target directly in the stern. The pulse cannon hit one of the ship’s engines, resulting in a massive fireball that sent the ship tumbling around all three axes. It hadn’t suffered fatal damage, but it was enough to take her out of the fight, and that was all Sato cared about.
Another shudder wrenched at the hull, more violently this time, and alarms began to blare on the bridge.
“Hull breach!” one of the crewmen manning the life support section cried. “The main torpedo room is in vacuum. Containment alarm in tubes one, three and four!”
“Dammit,” Sato hissed. He had been hoping to use the torpedoes to take out the other ships if the pulse cannon failed. But the hull had wrenched itself out of line enough, twisting such that some of the torpedo launch tubes themselves had become warped, and three of the big missiles had been ruptured in their tubes. “Can we jettison them?”
“Negative, sir,” the crewman said. “I can’t even get the outer doors open, for any of the tubes.”
The hull suddenly shook so hard that Sato’s head was flung down against his chest. His jaw slammed shut, his teeth biting deep into his tongue.<
br />
“Bridge!” DeFusco’s panicked voice called. “We’re losing everything ahead of frame fifty-eight! Get the fuck out of there!”
“All stop!” Sato ordered, blood streaming from his lips from where he’d bitten his tongue. Hitting the control to open a channel to the entire ship, he said, “Crew, this is the captain. Move aft beyond frame fifty-eight! Now!” With that, he unbuckled from his combat chair and began ushering the bridge crew down the passageway aft.
“Sir, look!” Bogdanova exclaimed as she turned to look one last time at the tactical display. The Kreelan ship that was the target for the kinetic rounds flashed three times and began to lose way, falling out of formation with her surviving sister ship.
Got her, Sato thought as he managed a blood-smeared grin. There’s only one left, now. The carriers can manage that much.
As he turned to run after the others, he saw the remaining Kreelan warship change course. He bit off a curse as he realized what she was doing: going after the unarmed assault boats that were rising from the surface.
* * *
Steph sat silently by herself in the cavernous bay of the assault boat, her senses withdrawn from reality, insulated by the dull roar of the ship’s engines as it rose through the atmosphere. It was eerie, seeing so much space for so few people. The boat she had ridden down to the planet with the men and women of the 7th Cav had been packed full of soldiers, weapons, and equipment. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
She held her video array in one hand, amazed that, like her, it had survived. She wasn’t yet sure what she would do with the footage she had recorded. After reviewing the last few moments before the boat had taken off, watching Coyle wave goodbye as they abandoned her to the Kreelans, Steph had broken down and wept uncontrollably. So many had died. So very many. She realized that what she had recorded wasn’t news, or a story that might lead her to a Pulitzer prize. It was the death of whatever precious innocence Mankind had left, stabbed through the heart by an alien sword.
“Some coffee, miss?”
Unwillingly breaking from her melancholy reverie, she looked up at the big legionnaire, Mills. He sat down next to her in the ridiculous sling chairs that hung on the walls around the bay, handing her the steaming cup. “Be warned, though,” he said, a smile shining through his battered face, “I almost had to beat that fucking loadmaster again before he’d hand over his thermos, and I think the bastard pissed in it.”
Despite herself, Steph had to grin at the big Brit-turned-legionnaire. She took a sip, and was glad for the warning. “Jesus,” she sputtered as the incredibly strong brew hit her tongue, “I think this tub’s entire crew pissed in it.”
Mills laughed. “Compliments of our Colonel Grishin, by the way,” he told her, nodding at the coffee. “Went out like a light, he did, right after ordering me to poison you with it. But he’s a tough bugger. He’ll make it.”
Suddenly there was a stir up front, and several of the NCOs came back looking for Mills and Steph. While they weren’t in charge by rank, they had both earned a special sort of respect from the others.
“We’ve got a laser link to Guadalcanal,” one of them said. Steph recognized the name as one of the four carriers the Terran fleet had brought; the carrier the 7th Cav had originally deployed from had been the Inchon. “They say we’ve got trouble heading our way...”
* * *
“We’ve got to risk one more shot, chief,” Sato told a disbelieving Chief DeFusco. “That Kreelan ship got wise and isn’t going to bother with the carriers: it’s going to pick off the assault boats coming up from the surface. We’ve got to stop it.”
“With all due respect,” she said, not sounding very respectful at all, “you’re fucking crazy. Sir. The ship can’t take it. If somebody so much as farts in the forward section, let alone fires the main guns, we lose the forward third of the ship. We can’t fire the torpedoes because the hull’s warped. We can’t fire the pulse cannon for the same reason: the optical path is out of alignment and we’d blow ourselves up. Did I miss anything?”
Sato saw Ruiz, a giant in his armored suit, stiffen beside him at the chief’s remarks. Sato waved him back. “I’m not asking you, chief,” he said icily. “I’m ordering you. Now.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “Just fucking fine. Captain. You might want to have everybody get into their beach balls before you try this stunt, because if the hull warps anymore aft of forward engineering, we’re going to lose integrity and atmosphere here, too.” She set up one of the engineering consoles to echo the tactical display. “You realize that you’ll lose all the forward tactical sensors, too? What are we supposed to aim with?”
Sato ignored her as he quickly set in the targeting commands for the forward main gun. He was aiming for the Kreelan ship, but didn’t really expect to hit her. What he really needed the guns for was to do just what the chief was afraid of: break the ship’s back. Even with the engines stopped, he could feel a sickening twisting motion in the ship as the hull flexed around her devastated mid-section and weakened keel. To Bogdanova, who had taken over one of the other engineering consoles, he said, “Stand by to maneuver.”
“What?” DeFusco gasped.
“No time to explain, chief,” Sato told her. “Stand by...firing!”
The forward main kinetic battery fired a full volley. Then another. And a third. The magazine ran dry as a horrible screech of metal, more akin to a human screaming in agony, echoed through the ship as the forward third began to break away.
“Engines, aft one quarter,” Sato ordered quickly. “Hard a-starboard.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Bogdanova said uncertainly as she did as she was told.
Sato called up one of the external cameras and watched as McClaren literally tore herself in two. The forward section, nearly a third of the ship, had been pushed to starboard by the firing of the main forward battery, which was aimed to port. Sato’s maneuvering order put even more stress on the fractured hull, bending the metal further until finally, with a terrible banging and tearing noise from the rending metal, the front section broke free.
“Rudder amidships!” Sato snapped at Bogdanova. The ship, of course, did not have an actual rudder, but it was yet another wet navy term that had carried over into space, a shorthand order to stop the turn.
“Aye, sir,” she said, amazed that they were still alive. “Rudder amidships.”
“Status?” Sato barked at DeFusco.
“I don’t believe it,” she said as she scanned the engineering tell-tales. There were plenty that were in the red, but most of them were for the now-gone forward part of the ship. “She’s holding, sir. Slight loss of pressure in some of the compartments aft of frame fifty-eight, but nothing critical.”
Sato nodded, then ordered, “All ahead flank. Make your course...” he eyed the tactical display, which was now blank. All of the primary sensor arrays were in the forward part of the ship. Activating one of the remaining external cameras he quickly found what he wanted: a circular storm formation over Keran to use as a reference point they could navigate by. In the middle of it was a tiny speck. The Kreelan warship. “Bring her fifteen degrees to port, ten degrees down,” he ordered. “Then just keep the target centered in the screen.”
McClaren accelerated like a greyhound, freed of nearly a third of her mass. Sato knew that the severely weakened hull would not long stand the strain, but she only had to last long enough to catch the Kreelan warship. Then Sato planned to use the only weapon he had left that could still be brought to bear: the McClaren herself.
* * *
“You’ve got a Kreelan warship on your tail,” the tactical controller aboard Guadalcanal told the pilot of the assault boat over the laser link. Mills, Steph, and the ranking NCOs were plugged into the comms system to listen. “The destroyer McClaren tagged three others that were coming after us before the last one thought better of attacking the carriers. But now it looks like that last Kreelan ship is hunting the boats.”
Steph leaned her head ag
ainst the cold metal of the bulkhead near the cockpit where she was standing, relief washing over her as she ignored the danger she herself was in. Ichiro was alive, she thought, wanting to cry again. God, she wanted to hold him. She would have given anything to be in his arms right now.
“What should we do?” the pilot asked, trying to mask his fear. He knew the Kreelan ships could operate in atmosphere, so there was no point in trying to run for the surface. They also couldn’t outrun the enemy ship in space. They didn’t have any other options.
“Maintain course,” Guadalcanal ordered. The boat’s trajectory happened to be in the same direction the Kreelan ship was heading, which would help hold the range open as long as possible as this boat and the others caught up to the orbit of the carriers. If they could escape the Kreelan now closing in on them. “The maniac commanding McClaren lost the forward part of his ship, but he’s pursuing the Kreelan, anyway.”
That certainly doesn’t sound like Captain Morrison, Steph thought with a sinking feeling, at least from what Ichiro said about him.
“How long before the Kreelan ship can fire on us?” the pilot asked.
A pause. “We estimate five minutes.”
“What about McClaren? When can she engage?”
A longer pause. “She’d be able to attack by now if she still had her forward weapons,” the controller finally answered. “It looks like they’re going to try and ram.”
Steph slumped down to the deck, wanting to vomit up the bitter coffee in her stomach as she imagined Ichiro’s destroyer slamming into the Kreelan ship, both of them disappearing in an expanding cloud of white-hot plasma. “No,” she whispered. “Please, God, no...”
* * *
The only reason McClaren survived as long as she did was that she was directly astern of the Kreelan ship, in her baffles as the wet navy sailors used to say. While the analogy was inexact, the same basic principles applied: almost every ship had reduced sensor effectiveness directly behind it due to interference caused by the drives. The stern was also usually the weakest area in terms of weapons that could be brought to bear, and it was also generally highly vulnerable.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 42