In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  "Admiral Hill, this is Captain Ridgway," said the hoarse voice from the battleship, confirming Adele's presumption. "Admiral Petersen is not aboard the Helgowelt. To the best of my knowledge—"

  "Prepare to launch," said Daniel. He spoke over the intercom, but as planned Cory copied the warning through the communicators feeding a time synch to the other RCN ships.

  "—he's in his quarters at Liberty Base. The Helgowelt will continue patrolling to prevent the enemy from making a sortie, another sortie that is, from—"

  "Launching four," Daniel said, his tone calm but bright with emotion.

  The Milton rocked with multiple hammer blows. The cruiser's size and stiff frame permitted her to launch four missiles at a time without fear that they would interfere with one another because of exhaust and the shock of launching.

  Captain Ridgway was still chattering, making excuses to stay as distant as possible from the arrest of his commanding officer and its political repercussions. Adele ignored him as she transmitted full particulars on what was happening to the RCN forces on Cacique. She used RCN codes, though by now there wasn't much to conceal from the enemy beyond what multiple missile salvos were making abundantly clear.

  The miniature clock inset in the center of Daniel's display clicked from 59 to 60, then 61 and onward in red block letters. It was counting out the seconds since the Milton extracted into sidereal space.

  He had the Plot-Position Indicator on the top half of his screen and two attack boards splitting the lower display. The Treasurer Johann had finally arrived, three thousand miles out of position but with a fortunately good angle to sweep the Alliance formation—if the cruiser's Chief Missileer were better at his job than Commander Kevin Rowland was as an astrogator. Rowland would not be confirmed in command of the Johann if Daniel had anything to say about it.

  Daniel grinned. For his opinion on the subject to matter, he and Commander Rowland had to survive the next few hours. Daniel never bet against himself, but he was intellectually aware that both were significant variables.

  The right-hand board echoed Borries's display. He was setting up the attack on the Helgowelt in the BDC. Borries had control of two four-tube sets on both the Milton's upper and lower belts. Daniel wouldn't step in unless he saw something critically and obviously wrong with the Chief Missileer's proposal. That wouldn't happen unless Borries had a stroke in the middle of the process, and even then his deputy Chazanoff would doubtless complete it properly. Daniel glanced over the proposed attack anyway.

  Senator Forbes sat against the bulkhead. She as calm as she'd been when seated across a dinner table from Commander, as he then was, Leary in Xenos less than two years before. Forbes hadn't been wearing her senatorial robes then and she shouldn't be wearing them now—this wasn't a civil function by any stretch of the imagination—but it would look good in her campaign presentations.

  Forbes hadn't attempted to bring a flunky to record her presence on the bridge, but she obviously knew that the ship's internal systems did so automatically. No doubt she believed that for the right incentive some member of the Milton's technical staff would arrange for her to get a copy of what was intended to provide evidence for a court-martial or an accident inquiry.

  Irritated as he'd been when Forbes breezed in, Daniel might give her the copy himself. She'd seated herself between two servants who had no more proper business on the bridge than she did . . . and who would without the least hesitation kill her if they decided that was a good idea. That meant she was smart and also that she had guts, virtues that the Senate could do with more of.

  Daniel's own target was the heavy cruiser City of Hoboken, on her first commission and far more modern than the cruisers which Captain Varnell had surrendered above Bolton. The saving grace was that new Alliance ships were likely to be crewed largely by drafted landsmen with only a leavening of experienced personnel released from hospital—or prison. The draftees wouldn't have had time to work down into real spacers, not without a better cadre than the Fleet could provide.

  A warship's computer could launch missile attacks with no human oversight beyond identifying a target, just as the same computer could direct the ship from star to star within the Matrix. A ship without a trained astrogator would take a very long time to reach its destination, and missiles launched by the computer were unlikely to strike home.

  Well, if it came to that, missiles launched by the greatest bloody genius of a missileer mostly vanished into distant vacuum as well. Here, though, the range was short and the enemy both unsuspecting and on a closing course. Those factors, and an initial salvo of in the neighborhood of two hundred rounds, made the odds a good deal better.

  105 read the clock. 106 107 108.

  "Prepare to launch," said Daniel, hearing his voice echo from the bridge loudspeaker. The missileers of the Johann and one or two of the late-appearing destroyers might not have refined their attack plans yet, but the delay might prove an advantage: a second wave that would paralyze defenders with indecision.

  "Launching four!" Daniel said.

  "—ing four!" said Borries over the intercom. His missiles syncopated Daniel's by a half beat, steam slamming each multi-tonne projectile from its tube.

  Missiles were driven by High Drive motors, and some antimatter always escaped in the exhaust instead of being annihilated. Starting the motors within a vessel would eat away the launch tube and shortly the hull itself. Instead, reaction mass flash-heated by a jolt of electricity became live steam in the tube. That shoved the missile into vacuum where it could safely light its High Drive.

  The clock read 128. "Launching four," Daniel repeated. The cruiser's sturdy construction allowed him to sequence the launches within each set more closely than he would have dared do on a destroyer.

  The Milton's interior was pandemonium. The thick-walled launch tubes withstood the slamming steam discharges, but the violence made the hull ring. When they came eight at a time in close succession, the whole ship rang. The hull set the rig aquiver in turn. Since the antennas and yards were steel tubes whose sections telescoped within one another, the sound of them shaking together was overwhelming and indescribable.

  As soon as missiles banged from their tubes, reloads began rumbling down rollerways from magazines close to the cruiser's center of gravity. Against any background save that of combat, the process would have been deafening.

  A crew under the Chief Engineer was responsible for guiding the reloads, clearing stuck or misaligned rounds and—if something went wrong with the launch—winching the massive projectiles back to the magazines and stowing them. It was a brutal job and accounted for most of the casualties aboard ships which had survived a battle.

  The Milton's gun turrets had been in resting position until Daniel ordered the launch. Now their mass rotated into firing position, creating its own varied clangor. If the situation had permitted, Daniel would've been echoing the gunnery displays—and been tempted to take control.

  The cruiser rated not only a full gunner but a gunner's mate, a dour man named Ragi Sekaly who'd been previously been mate and acting gunner on a destroyer. He was in the BDC with independent command of the ventral turret for as long as the plasma cannon were being used as offensive weapons. Their primary use was to deflect incoming missiles, however. When they reverted to that, Sekaly would become backup while Sun directed both turrets as a unit.

  133 seconds.

  "Launching four," said Daniel. He pressed the red execute button again with his index and middle fingers.

  This time the whang/whang/whang/whang! from his tubes was complete before Borries announced, "Launching four!" and his missiles began to clang out of the ship. The missileer was being more gentle with his equipment than the captain was.

  Daniel treated the missiles, the guns, and the Milton herself as tools to be used as efficiently as possible but not to be considered for their own merits. To Borries the equipment was not only his life but his faith, the naval equivalent of the way a devout priest viewed the
statue in the sanctum of his temple.

  That was inevitable, but Daniel was the captain. He wouldn't come down hard on Borries for being a trifle slow in sequencing his salvo, but he'd mention it when they had time to reflect.

  Missiles were leaving all fifteen RCN vessels, including the Treasurer Johann. Force Anston was rather bunched toward the starboard wing because of the way ships had extracted, but the Johann was well out to port and created a useful balance. As such things went, things were going very well.

  "Launching four," said Daniel and pressed execute for the final time in this salvo. He was wrong, though, because there were only three notes, whang! and a stutter whang/whang! The missile in set Starboard A hadn't left its tube.

  The failure was in the launch mechanism itself: either reaction mass hadn't been injected into the steam crucible—a failed relay? corrosion or a break in the feed line?—or the electrical charge had failed to heat it for one of a similar series of reasons.

  The Milton had a crack crew and, unlike the captured Alliance vessels, had been lovingly refitted by the captain's own workmen before she lifted on this cruise. Everything made by human beings could fail, however, and all human beings could fail as well.

  A cannon in the ventral turret fired, making the cruiser squirm like a fish. The bead indicating the Alliance destroyer Heinz Zwack blurred momentarily. She was closer to the Milton than most of Force Anston was, and an 8-inch plasma bolt would have been devastating. Part of her internal atmosphere had vented through her ruptured hull.

  The controlled nuclear explosion from the plasma cannon was greatly the loudest individual noise on the Milton. While not lost in the general cacophony, it certainly didn't stand out as vividly as it had when the cruiser was shooting at ground targets on Bolton.

  Daniel instinctively waited for the second ventral gun to fire. Instead the dorsal turret crashed, shuddered through a triple beat while the tube returned to battery, and crashed again from the second tube.

  Sun and Sekaly—and the other gunners in the RCN squadron—were hampered because their ships had just extracted from the Matrix and the rigging restricted their guns' fields of fire. They fired only when they could safely. There were plenty of targets, but lack of clear lines of sight reduced the rate of engagement sharply.

  Petersen's ships had been operating entirely in sidereal space with their antennas telescoped, their sails furled, and the entire rig clamped against their hulls. Though Force Anston's attack came as a complete surprise, the Alliance gun crews were on alert for fear of a sally by the Cacique defenders. Their plasma cannon began nibbling at the incoming missiles much more quickly than Daniel had hoped would be the case.

  "Launching four!" said Borries. His final quartet of missiles began to whang! out of their tubes.

  Time for us to leave too, thought Daniel. Aloud he said, "Ship, prepare to insert. Inserting—"

  The second ventral plasma cannon fired, the shock stunning because Daniel had been concentrating so completely on his own task. Sekaly's target, the destroyer Z43, was too distant to burst the way the Heinz Zwack had, but specks which had been rigging tumbled away on the PPI.

  "Cease fire!" Daniel said. "Cease fire! Break, inserting in fifteen seconds, over."

  A vessel entering the Matrix had to balance the electrical charge over all her external surfaces, which was impossible to do while her guns were spurting ions. At the velocity the Milton brought with her into normal space, however, fifteen seconds should be more than enough time to clear the cloud of disruption.

  "Inserting," Daniel said, "now!"

  His displays flickered as the Milton slid shuddering back into the safety of the Matrix. The last thing Daniel saw was the tracery of lines on both attack boards as the cruiser's missiles neared their targets.

  CHAPTER 25

  One light-day from Cacique

  One of the reasons Daniel had chosen Robinson's command for data gathering was that Pantellarian optics were famously good. Pantellarian thruster nozzles often had casting flaws and their missiles were inferior to those built on fringe worlds with a lower level of culture and technical accomplishment, but Pantellarian imaging equipment was at or better than RCN Standard.

  Daniel looked at the first sequence of images which the Insidioso had transmitted as she extracted. They were good, but they were impossibly good.

  "Daniel, I was concerned about the high quality of the imagery," said Adele without preamble. "I've examined the background star map, however, and it appears that the data was gathered from fourteen light-minutes from the battle area, not one light-hour in accordance with your directions to Captain Robinson."

  "Ah!" said Daniel. It was good to have a staff which answered questions before you got around to asking them. "Well, we can trust the images, then. As for Robinson, I'll discuss the business with him at leisure, if we're both still around. Over."

  He'd had good reason to order Robinson to extract a full light-hour from Cacique. Closer in, the infuriated Alliance commander might notice the destroyer and send a cruiser out to deal with her. Daniel needed imagery more than he needed highly detailed imagery.

  But Senator Forbes's protégé—

  He glanced sideways at the senator. She was peering at the images as if she understood them. Which just possibly she did, since she'd surprised him in the past.

  —had gotten away with his gamble. Admiral Petersen would have feared—expected, even, given what had just happened to his patrol squadron—that a lone destroyer was bait to lure more ships into a battleship's salvos.

  There was also the fact that Lieutenant Leary, as he'd been not so long ago, would likely have made the same decision. And the detailed imagery was nice to have.

  The Milton's officers were analyzing the performance of individual ships of the squadron. Cory and Cazelet divided the ten destroyers as they'd done during the pre-battle briefing. Daniel gave his attention to the overview.

  The Helgowelt had taken a dozen hits from several directions. Missiles were designed to separate into three pieces when their reaction mass was expended. Each chunk weighed a ton and a half and was travelling at a noticeable fraction of light speed. Because of the short range most of the missiles hadn't reached burnout, so they'd gnawed great chunks from the battleship instead of vaporizing even larger chunks.

  Regardless, the Helgowelt was a hopeless wreck. There was nothing left worth salvaging except one or two hundred of her crew of nearly a thousand.

  The first missile that struck the City of Hoboken was bow-on and ripped her sternward. She'd opened up like a melon hit by a bullet. A trio of projectiles then quartered the cloud of gas and debris, stirring whorls which intermingled. There would be nothing left of the ship and her crew that couldn't be covered by the palm of a man's hand.

  The remaining cruiser, the Kiaouchow, was both well-handled and lucky. Her captain reacted to the attack a good twenty seconds before any other Alliance vessel did, braking with both High Drive and plasma thrusters at maximum output. Their combined thrust was close to 4 g. It would have ripped off any rigging that had been set—none was—and must have strained the hull badly enough to spring hatches and depressurize several of the cruiser's compartments.

  The good luck was that only four of the sixteen missiles that the Direktor Friedrich aimed at the Kiaouchow actually left their tubes. They bracketed the Alliance cruiser, but the rounds which should have filled the interior of the group didn't fire.

  Skill and luck had saved the Alliance cruiser for ninety-three seconds, until the first of the Eckernferde's thirteen missiles arrived. They were well spread in a circular pattern. Its center was the point the Kiaouchow would have been had her captain braked with his High Drive alone, so only two projectiles rather than as many as ten struck the Alliance cruiser.

  One of those spent itself on the retracted starboard outrigger. It exploded into a white fireball, taking with it half the Kiaouchow's High Drive motors. The impact and unbalanced thrust from her portside motors rotated
her. There wasn't time for the cruiser's course to change, however, before a second projectile spiked her Power Room. The fusion bottle didn't vent, but the hit nonetheless left the Kiaouchow a hulk slowly tumbling out of the planetary system.

  Eight of the nine Alliance destroyers were wrecks as well. Multiple hits from the Friedrich's 20-centimeter guns had torn the Z31 and Z34 apart. Z43 and Sharon Pigott, which Sun and Sekaly had hit at extreme range, had lost most of their rigging and propulsion, and the 15-centimeter guns of the Johann and Eckernferde had pummeled the G99, G105, and the old D10 beyond economic repair.

  The Arcona puzzlingly hadn't fired at the S152, however, and the Eckernferde—two of whose turrets were assigned that target also—didn't have an angle because the Helgowelt was in the way. Daniel suspected that the Eckernferde's gunner was more pleased than not at a chance to rake a battleship instead of a destroyer, but on the facts Daniel couldn't fault his decision.