In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  Until the moment she succeeded, Adele hadn't had any thought beyond that potential success. When it happened, though, an opportunity flared like the sun burning through the fog over her mind. She couldn't hand the Alliance interceptions off to Cory and expect him to keep on top of Force Anston's traffic as well, though. The Milton was the squadron's flagship, and its signals had to have top priority.

  Midshipman Cazelet stamped onto the bridge, still wearing his rigging suit. Condensate crusted the joints where metal bearing surfaces underlay the structural plastic skin.

  He seated himself at the rear display of the communications console and opened the couch wider. Naval workstations were designed to accommodate personnel in any sort of dress an emergency might require. That included a crew working in suits because the ship's hull was no longer airtight.

  "Rene, I'm glad you're back," Adele said, verbally keying a two-way link. She'd trained Cazelet in her duties even before he'd been allowed to join the RCN, and she'd modified her software to reflect that reality. "I want you to take over these Alliance interceptions. Send Daniel and Blantyre what's useful, converted to text. Can you do that, over?"

  "Yes, certainly," Cazelet said. "You broke their day code? Adele, that's . . . even for you, I mean, ah . . . Over."

  He'd brought up his display, but the suit's stiff arms made him clumsy. His expression became briefly savage, then settled again as he regained control of both the equipment and his temper.

  "Ah," Cazelet added as his fingers caught the rhythm of the keyboard, "Captain Leary put all of us midshipmen on the hull to make sure the riggers, ah, obeyed the recall signal. He didn't say quite that, but that's what he meant. Over."

  Adele remembered that Daniel had once sent Hogg out onto the hull to shoot Woetjans if she didn't bring her riggers in when he ordered her to. But what could Rene—who'd never fired a gun and didn't carry one—have done if the bosun ignored him?

  That was the point, though. The bosun might ignore the semaphore, even knowing that Six himself was on the other end of the hydromechanical linkage. She wouldn't ignore an officer standing in front of her and making peremptory gestures.

  Woetjans was a disciplined spacer. She would take orders from a midshipman half her age and strength, because it was her duty to do so.

  Woetjans didn't react to Daniel as she would to a superior officer, however; the relationship of this captain and this bosun was much more complex than RCN regulations could deal with. On Woetjans' side, it was something between a mother protecting her son and a worshipper ready to sacrifice everything to her God.

  Adele adjusted a tight-beam microwave cone; she thought she had the answer. Neither the Signals Officer nor the lieutenant in charge of communications aboard the Heimdall, the Alliance flagship, was a woman, but Admiral Petersen's aide-de-camp was his niece. It might not work, but it was certainly worth a try.

  "Oldenburg, this is Command Three for Squadron Command!" Adele said in what she hoped was a tone of furious denunciation. "Cease fire, cease fire! You're launching at friendly vessels. The admiral says, I quote, 'Hallahan, you're an idiot and I'll relieve you if you launch again,' unquote. Command Three over."

  Adele wasn't very good at denouncing. When she became very angry, she spoke even more slowly and precisely than usual. That was a problem, because people tended not to listen to her words even when she was warning that she would kill them if they persisted in their course of action.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg," said a male voice. Adele felt a smile twitch the corners of her mouth upward. "Hold one, please, over."

  If the Oldenburg's signals officer responded to the Heimdall, there would be a degree of confusion on the bridges of both battleships. That would useful to the RCN certainly, but not earthshaking.

  Instead the fellow responded to the message without checking to see which ship had transmitted the microwave. A transceiver aboard the Oldenburg automatically turned to a reciprocal of the incoming signal. This was much better than random confusion.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg Command!" said an angry voice. Captain Edmond Hallahan was probably shouting, but Adele's console smoothed the volume to where she'd set it. "What's this bloody nonsense about shooting at friendlies? We're shooting at the bloody Cinnabar battleship, over!"

  "Oldenburg, my uncle says, 'You bloody fool, Hallahan, the Direktor Friedrich is friendly,' " Adele said. She was smiling about as broadly as she ever did. "Cease fire, cease fire, over."

  The Milton's dorsal turret, then the ventral, fired in quick succession. Adele was used to the 4-inch guns on the Princess Cecile hammering at a round every two seconds, but the bores and chambers of the cruiser's big guns took far longer to cool between discharges. During the lull between the first four shots, the continuing snarl of the High Drive seemed muted by contrast.

  "Command Three, this is Oldenburg Command," Captain Hallahan said. "I'm ceasing fire, but why are they bloody shooting at us, over?"

  The RF spectrum was hash now: the ships of the RCN Green element were firing plasma cannon as quickly as they could. Alliance missiles were on their way toward the heavy RCN vessels, whose guns were straining to nudge the dangerous ones to one side or another.

  "Oldenburg, Admiral Petersen is working on that," Adele said sharply. "Your orders are to stop making it worse. Do not fire without direct orders from Squadron Command. Out."

  The Milton's plasma cannon slammed stunningly again. The 8-inch guns were causing strains. An audible hiss of outgoing air and a stutter in the environmental system followed each quadruple discharge: plates were starting as the ship twisted.

  The Milton might take a direct hit at any moment, and everybody aboard her might die. Adele didn't care about that or anything else which was out of her hands. If it happened, however, she had the satisfaction of knowing that her last act on behalf of Cinnabar and her shipmates had been carried through very skillfully.

  She smiled even wider. If I do say so myself.

  CHAPTER 27

  Above Cacique

  "Green element," ordered Daniel, "launch at maximum rate. Squadron out."

  He hadn't spoken the last words before Borries and Chazanoff had stabbed their execute buttons. The Milton's hull began to twist to the rhythm of her missile launches while the sharper, heavier slamming of the four plasma cannon punctuated the tubes.

  Daniel had launched the first salvo at long range to break up Petersen's formation, but continuing to fling missiles while the targets scattered wildly would have been wasteful. Now that the Alliance ships had settled—onto individual courses, not into a formation—it was possible to launch with some purpose.

  Space battles involved a great deal of nothingness. A missileer who thought random launches would have a good result was either a cretin or in a blind panic. The Alliance missileers who'd been launching at Force Anston while their own ships gyrated had probably been panicked.

  "Six . . . ," said Vesey on the command channel, her voice showing the strain of heavy acceleration. "Unless we begin braking within forty seconds, we risk being in the pattern of either the Heimdall or the Elisabeth, over."

  Daniel placed her calculations in the lower right-hand quadrant of his display and opened them. She'd coded the missile tracks red for the battleship and green for the heavy cruiser. It was the seventh salvo for each and the first to even approximate accuracy. The Heimdall's spread was aimed to cross the Milton's current course a little ahead of the Elisabeth's.

  But Vesey was being overly cautious—well, very cautious, which in a battle was the same thing. You couldn't predict courses precisely until the missiles had burned out and split, since the process of separation induced variables. It was just possible that the projectiles would spread as widely as Vesey feared, but even if they did there was little chance of them hitting anything but vacuum.

  "Green element," said Daniel. "On command, turn two points toward enemy and boost thrust by point-two gees. In thirty seconds, over."

  "Sir!"
said Vesey on a two-way link. The strain in her voice wasn't entirely due to their present acceleration of 2.1 g. "We'll lose rig if we do that and tumbling yards could damage the hull, over!"

  "Needs must when the devils drive, Vesey," Daniel said. "Break, Squadron, execute!"

  Not even Daniel could feel the incremental acceleration, though a change in the buzz of the High Drive was barely perceptible. The added stress was real, however: just as Vesey had warned, the Port E antenna, jammed with only the topmast telescoped, carried away. The shriek of twisted steel shearing was followed by the nervous jangle of broken cables lashing the ship as they flailed past.

  There was only one further WHANG! though, when one or the other end of the antenna spun back against the hull. Daniel hoped it hadn't penetrated the plating, but he knew very well that they'd be lucky if they got out of this affair with nothing worse than a bad dent.

  The Alliance commanders weren't just wasting the contents of their magazines when they made maximum-effort launches at extreme range. The first missiles of an engagement had been pampered: loaded at leisure and checked whenever the missile crew had a moment's leisure.

  After that—and inevitably even then, to some degree—things began to go wrong. The locks of launching tubes jammed or—worse—sprang open. Reloads jumped the rollerways and sometimes slammed the breech of a tube, putting it out of action until the machinists could turn it smooth. Electrical contacts might fail, feed lines might kink or clog, and a missile which had been on the lowest tier for years might have been hammered enough out of round that it wouldn't seat.

  For that matter, a hydraulic ram could malfunction instead of sliding its missile the proper distance into the tube. Ordinarily "malfunction" meant that several inches of missile stuck out into the compartment and the tube couldn't be closed, but Daniel remembered once on the Defiance when the ram overtravelled and thrust itself a hand's breadth deep through the missile casing. That had been a bitch of a job to clear, and nobody was shooting at the old training cruiser at the time it happened.

  A half-salvo from the Heimdall was forty-eight missiles if everything operated to specification; the spread she launched at the Milton was thirty-one. Miserable as the battleship's performance was, it was still a better percentage than the seventeen out of twenty-eight missiles that the Elisabeth managed.

  Mind, one missile was enough to put paid to a ship, even a battleship. Neither vessel appeared very accurate, but a spacer never discounted luck. Particularly not bad luck.

  The remaining ships of Green element were conforming to the Milton's course, though the seriously underpowered Arcona had been forced to light her plasma thrusters in addition to her High Drive, and the Treasurer Johann was so far out of position that only by plotting her course could you tell that Captain Rowland really had obeyed Daniel's orders. If the engagement continued any length of time, the Arcona might have to borrow reaction mass from another ship before she could risk landing. The trick, of course, would be to survive long enough for that to be necessary, let alone possible.

  By turning toward the enemy and accelerating, Daniel reduced the length of time Admiral Petersen's squadron had to react to incoming missiles. It reduced the RCN's reaction time also, but thus far at least the Alliance ships were shooting very poorly. They hadn't recovered from the disruption of realizing Daniel's initial salvo was coming straight down their collective throat, and most of the navigating officers appeared to be maneuvering without informing the missileers.

  As Daniel had directed, Blue element, the RCN destroyers, was shadowing the Alliance squadron but not closing the considerable distance separating them. Every two minutes or so, the Blue vessels individually loosed a pair or two pairs of missiles toward the Alliance battleships.

  The range was well beyond the possibility of accurate shooting, but Daniel expected a number of projectiles to come close enough to their targets to be noticed. That would prevent the Alliance captains from concentrating wholly on the threat from Green element.

  And who knew? Maybe some Alliance vessel would have bad luck.

  The enemy destroyers were keeping close to their heavy ships, acting as a screen but not actively trying to engage Blue element. If asked, the Alliance captains would probably claim that the RCN destroyers were too far out to be dangerous, and that the greater risk was that RCN assets which had been concealed to that point would mousetrap them if they attacked Blue.

  Daniel wouldn't have done that even if he had hidden assets. He knew to keep his eye on the main target, and that was the pair of battleships.

  Speaking of which, the Oldenburg had stopped launching. Had something gone wrong with her missile control apparatus? Battleships had several-times-redundant systems, but combat stresses were beyond what the most careful captain could test for. Sometimes that caused a catastrophic failure.

  There was nothing wrong with the Oldenburg's defensive armament, though. Her six turrets mounted twin 20-centimeter plasma cannon. At present her gunner was mostly working the turrets in pairs. Four high-intensity bolts hitting in quick succession were enough to convert a projectile into a gas cloud which caromed off at a slant from its dangerous original course.

  Once, however, five turrets fired together at a projectile from the Milton, catching it before burnout. Even at extreme range, that was enough energy to rupture the tanks of reaction mass and leave the melted remains to tumble harmlessly in the void. Somebody on the Oldenburg's bridge had recognized a threat even before it developed and had removed it with a skill beyond anything Daniel had seen before.

  His sudden smile was harsher than usual. It was an article of faith with Daniel Leary that the RCN was the finest naval organization in the human universe. The RCN did not, however, have a monopoly on skilled personnel.

  The four Alliance light cruisers were at the end of their formation. Three—one continued to launch at the Blue element—were concentrating on the Eckernferde, the rearmost vessel of Green element.

  Lighting her plasma thrusters, the Eckernferde made a desperate attempt to avoid a well aimed spread of eighteen missiles from the Ratisbon. The acceleration would flatten any personnel who weren't already in couches as well as shaking loose all manner of things. When the multiple frequencies hit harmonics, they could shatter metal.

  A missile from the Emden struck the Eckernferde squarely amidships. Bits flew away: antennas and yards broken by the impact, and hull plates blasted off when the solid remainder of the projectile exited the hull. The Eckernferde's plasma cannon hadn't engaged that missile because it hadn't been a danger until the target accelerated into its path.

  When Daniel ordered his Green element to resume missile attacks, the Treasurer Johann had launched a salvo of twenty-five, followed by a second of—remarkably—twenty-six missiles from her twenty-eight tubes. The entire spread was aimed at the Heimdall because the leading Alliance battleship masked her consort from the Johann's angle.

  None of the Alliance ships were engaging the Johann, so her crew wasn't distracted. Also, her Chief Missileer was very good. Daniel didn't know that officer's name, but he would after the battle—if there was an after for him.

  The Heimdall's bridge crew had been concentrating on the half-salvos from the Direktor Friedrich and to a lesser degree on missiles from the Milton and the two cruisers accompanying her. The dead-accurate spreads from the Johann went unnoticed until they were too close to maneuver away from. They fell on the battleship like the Wrath of the Gods.

  The Heimdall's 20-centimeter plasma cannon were in their element. Ordinarily the faster rate of fire of lighter guns made up at least to a degree for the enormous wallop from a heavy bolt. Now there wasn't time for multiple shots, but each twenty-centimeter round destroyed the integrity of an incoming projectile. No solid missile got through the battleship's defensive fire.

  But four clouds of recently vaporized metal swept over the Heimdall. They scoured off rigging, sensors, and everything less sturdy than the hull itself. The steel fog didn't penet
rate the gun turrets, but they and the cannon themselves were welded in place.

  The Oldenburg resumed launching. This time the full salvo, sixty-three missiles, was aimed at the Milton.

  Daniel brought up the High Drive control panel. There probably wasn't going to be a happy ending; but still, you did what you could.

  If the Oldenburg's spread had been better aimed, he would have found it easier to choose a response. The central clump of about half the salvo was just that, a random distribution which grouped around the center.

  Whether the Milton braked or tried to increase what was already high acceleration, there was a likelihood that one or more projectiles would hit her. The remaining missiles were scattered around that lethal core.

  Daniel gimballed the motors to slew the Milton sideways at maximum output. The new course would be a shallow tangent to the previous one, the sum of the new thrust acting on the original momentum. It didn't mean safety, but if the cruiser held together she had a chance of survival.