In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  If. A cadet who proposed that solution in a shiphandling class would be flunked for the exercise, with the notation that the High Drive mounts wouldn't take the unsupported strain.

  On the other hand, the Academy instructors would be doing the same bloody thing if they had this many incoming missiles to deal with. They would if they thought quickly enough, at any rate.

  One of the motors in the cruiser's stern section broke the welds on one side, then banged against the outrigger because the other side still held and the attachment plate folded under the strain. The other motors stay put for now.

  The Oldenburg's captain, unlike her gunner, was uninspired and leisurely in his responses. The Direktor Friedrich and the Milton directed full salvos at the remaining Alliance battleship now that the Heimdall was out of action.

  The Oldenburg braked with both High Drive and thrusters, the first evidence Daniel had seen that her captain understood the gravity of his situation. The strain would make even a battleship squirm like a snake, but it did drop her out of the spread from the Friedrich.

  That put the Oldenburg squarely in the path of Borries's fifteen missiles. The Chief Missileer had allowed for maximum braking, while his mate had aimed the remaining fourteen missiles of the Milton's salvo ahead, reasonably assuming that the Friedrich would fill the center of the box.

  As the Direktor Friedrich's salvo neared the target, a missile struck her amidships. It was high, slamming into A Level, though the fireball would scoop away all internal subdivisions in that section down to the armored deck between E and F Levels.

  The battleship began to roll away from the impact. A second missile struck well forward, engulfing her bow including the bridge. She was out of the fight and probably beyond economic repair.

  The Oldenburg's cannon were swatting away incoming projectiles with contemptuous ease. How the bloody hell are they keeping up that rate of fire? It's too fast even for 6-inch—

  As Daniel formed the thought, a change cued his console. It threw up a visual of the Oldenburg. A turret lifted from the battleship's spine, shedding bits as it tumbled outward. Two of the fragments were the barrels of plasma cannon, the portions that were outside the armor when a round vented through the breech. The blast plucked the turret from the barbette on which it rotated.

  If you fired a plasma cannon faster than its tube could be purged of vapor sublimed from the bore, the charge reflected back instead of stabbing toward the intended target. Bad things happened, then.

  Worse things happened to the Oldenburg some nine seconds later: a projectile hit her starboard outrigger at a quartering angle and raked sternward. By the time it slanted out through the port outrigger it was a cloud of superheated steel, more a shock wave than an object. The battleship's hull wasn't seriously damaged, but the thin plating of the outriggers vanished like chaff in a flame.

  The High Drive motors went with the outriggers, and in all likelihood most of the plasma thrusters—set into the lower curve of the hull—were burned away also. The Oldenburg had become a drifting hulk. A considerable portion of its armament remained, but it was unusable.

  Three projectiles were driving toward the Milton. Their grouping was accidental: they weren't segments of the same missile.

  Sun fired his dorsal turret, bouncing the ship seriously despite the other violent inputs. One of the incoming trio diverged from its previous course, driven by the thrust of the half its mass which sublimed when struck by the heavy ion charges.

  The ventral turret didn't engage the remaining projectiles. Because of the angle of approach, the Milton's lower pair of guns didn't bear.

  Daniel touched his port thruster controls, giving them a blip to rotate the Milton slightly on her long axis. That would bring the ventral turret into action. The dorsal guns alone couldn't cycle quickly enough to take out both projectiles.

  The PPI showed the Arcona holding station, though she must have taken damage: her two most recent salvos were of only six missiles each. The Eckernferde drifted without power; the missile had cut her almost in two.

  Meanwhile the Treasurer Johann continued to fight her own private war, ignored by the enemy. She had just launched a second salvo at the Alliance light cruisers, a choice of target so wrongheaded that for a moment Daniel found it perverse. Then he took in the whole tactical situation.

  The enemy battleships were out of action. The Oldenburg was in freefall and spinning around her long axis, driven by the missile which had ripped away her outriggers. Even veteran spacers in her crew would be finding it difficult to keep their breakfasts down. The Heimdall was even more hopelessly crippled: her shutters and hatches were welded shut. Launching at either of them would merely kill fellow spacers to no military purpose.

  The heavy cruisers Sedan and Elisabeth were the next most important Alliance assets, but from the Johann's angle they were largely screened by the Heimdall. The light cruisers, however, had reformed in a line ahead after their initial panicked scattering. They provided the Johann with a zero-deflection shot. The Emden, leading the formation, blocked the view of the following ships unless they were communicating better than they'd seemed to be in the past.

  When the Emden realized the danger, she broke onto starboard tangent from her original course. As she turned, she slewed so that two of her three twin 15-centimeter turrets could bear on the incoming missiles without causing blast damage by overfiring her own hull.

  The next in line, her sister ship Ratisbon, reacted only moments later. Her captain was obviously on his game.

  The older Thetis slewed and turned also, but to port. She carried six 10-centimeter twin turrets. Five bore on the incoming, but the stern dorsal and ventral turrets didn't fire.

  Last in line, the Agadir launched another spread of twelve missiles in the direction of the RCN destroyers. Her captain seemed oblivious of everything that was going on around him.

  The Milton started to rotate, but three more High Drive motors on the port side broke their mountings. Unbalanced thrust made the ship yaw violently.

  Her dorsal guns slammed. Sun was trying to bunt one projectile into the path of the other. Remarkably, he came close to succeeding.

  The last things Daniel remembered from his display were—

  A projectile spiking the Ratisbon just aft of center and slanting out near the stern. The impact carried with it the contents of half the target's internal volume.

  A second projectile striking the prow of the Agadir on a reciprocal. The cruiser became an expanding cloud of debris which followed the course she had been on when she was destroyed.

  An Alliance missile hit the Milton's stern. Everything went white for Daniel, then black.

  The crash was so loud that Adele perceived it as a flash of light. Her data unit was tethered to her equipment belt. It flopped around, of course, but the display corrected for movement.

  Adele's wands twitched also, but she automatically clutched for one or the other of her mechanical aids in a crisis. Reflex didn't send her left hand for her pistol when a missile hit; instead she kept her data unit controls in a grip which would have required surgical shears to break.

  The unit was bulkier than most of its capacity, because it had internal cushioning and an outer case that would stop a pistol shot. It wouldn't have been harmed if it had gone flying across the compartment, but it would have injured anybody who got in its way.

  A jumpseat leaped from the aft bulkhead and cracked Daniel in the head, splitting his commo helmet. The seat caromed off the ceiling, then fell to the deck. One of its broken attachment bolts skittered around the compartment, sounding peevish but not able to do real harm.

  Hogg stepped toward his master. He rode the careening deck as he would a small boat in a storm off the coast of Bantry.

  "Tovera!" Adele said, jerking her head toward Daniel because her hands were busy with the control wands. Her console had blinked when the missile hit, but after running its self-check it was back in service.

  Tovera had been taught
field medicine during her training with the Fifth Bureau. This certainly wasn't the first head injury Hogg had seen either, but Tovera probably knew more about painkilling drugs—besides alcohol—than he did.

  Adele wanted Daniel to make a full recovery more than she wanted anything else in life. The only thing she could do to aid the process was to carry out her own duties, which was what she would have done anyway.

  She smiled coldly. Other people seemed to make life more complicated than she found it to be. For example—

  "Sir! Sir!" Vesey cried. She'd turned to stare at Daniel and was fumbling for the catches of her seat restraints.

  "Lieutenant Vesey!" Adele said. If her most recent transmission—and Adele couldn't remember—had been on the command channel, then this rebuke was going to all the Milton's surviving officers instead of remaining between her and Vesey on a two-way link. That didn't matter. "Take control of this ship now!"

  "Sir!" said Vesey, but this time it wasn't her earlier whimpering. She straightened, bringing up the High Drive and thruster controls on the lower half of her display.

  On the upper portion, Vesey had been trying to view the damage through the Milton's external sensors. That was an obvious waste of time, at least obvious to Adele. Her wands flickered.

  The High Drive shut down momentarily. Things—including Daniel's head on the couch—lifted. Before weightlessness was more than a lurch in Adele's stomach, the motors resumed their snarl, though at a lower level: they were developing no more than the standard 1g acceleration. The cruiser's wild gyrations gradually slowed.

  While Vesey did her proper job, Adele imported visuals of the Milton from the sensors of the Arcona and the Direktor Friedrich. The battleship was operating in emergency mode, limited to passive data collection. Adele switched the command console back to normal, then directed it to amplify the image and transmit it through the laser link.

  After her own computer had sharpened both sets of imagery, Adele forwarded them to Vesey at the astrogation console. As expected, they were ugly sights.

  The missile had taken off fifty feet of the Milton's stern. The outriggers, though tattered at their stern ends, remained to provide scale; otherwise Adele would have had to superimpose a before-action schematic of the cruiser over its present image.

  The Battle Direction Center was gone, along with everyone in it. The missile's trajectory must have been nearly perpendicular, striking on the spine and blasting everything beneath down through the keel.

  Armored bulkheads divided the ship vertically. It was lucky that the one ahead of the impact hadn't ruptured—or again, perhaps it had. The riggers acted as the damage control party on a warship, since they were normally inside the hull during action. Woetjans was chivying sternward the personnel waiting in the forward rotunda.

  Adele glanced around the bridge. Chazanoff looked groggy, but he was trying to plot a missile attack.

  "Officer Chazanoff!" Adele said. "Take command of all the missile sets. Officer Borries is dead, over."

  The only reason she gave the order was that it would waste time to pass the information to someone who had command authority, which Signals Officer Mundy assuredly did not. That was a good reason, though, and in a crisis like this it might well be the best reason.

  "Aye aye, sir," said the new Chief Missileer phlegmatically. He adjusted his display. As Adele had expected, an order delivered in a tone of command was sufficient. Chazanoff was operating on trained reflex rather than intellect as chaos rained down on him.

  Did the Milton have any functional missile tubes? Well, that wasn't Adele's problem.

  "Mundy!" Senator Forbes shouted over the racket. She wasn't linked to the cruiser's commo net, but she'd managed to cross the bucking deck. She clung to the supports of the signals console. "Take command of the fleet! Somebody needs to, and that puppy Vesey certainly can't!"

  "Sit down, Senator," Adele said. "I don't have the authority or the skill either one."

  "Launching four!" said Chazanoff. Only two missiles banged out in response. Still, that was two more than there might have been.

  "You know which ship is which," Forbes said. "And you know how to fight someplace besides on the Senate floor."

  "I can't—"

  "May the demons eat your tits, you bloody fool!" Forbes shouted. "I'll make you an admiral, does that satisfy you? I'm brevetting you! You're a bloody admiral!"

  Adele opened her mouth, then closed it. Forbes was an unpleasant woman, but she wasn't stupid; and in this case, she wasn't wrong.

  Commander Potts in Z44 was probably competent to handle the task or Daniel wouldn't have given him command of the Blue element, but Adele wouldn't trust a destroyer's communications suite to coordinate a fleet action. The Arcona was damaged, and Adele didn't know how badly. The Treasurer Johann was untouched, but Daniel would rise from his stupor and strangle her if she passed the command off to an officer who couldn't astrogate better than Commander Rowland had.

  And Forbes was right about Vesey too. The lieutenant wasn't a puppy, but this was a job for someone who was ready to kill without hesitating an eyeblink.

  "All right," said Adele, bringing up a PPI screen. She'd done so in the past, but only for curiosity. "Now get out of here, I'm busy."

  "Mistress?" said Rene Cazelet urgently. "The squadron on Cacique is coming up, over."

  And so they were. Five, no, six icons; one was crosshatched because it was in the planet's shadow relative to the Milton's sensors. Each had a six-digit alphanumeric designator which Daniel would have identified immediately. Adele could have looked them up, of course, but that would have taken time which she could better spend on other matters.

  "Cory, how long before those ships from Cacique are able to maneuver, over?" Adele said.

  Cory's image stared from her display like a death mask. Adele recalled that he and Midshipman Else, who'd been stationed in the BDC, had become friends.

  "Mistress," he said and swallowed. "The Jervis, seven minutes. The Lupine, eight minutes. The Dido, nine minutes, and the other three cruisers spaced behind her at a minute each. Over."

  "Very good," said Adele. "Break. Anston elements, this is Mundy of Chatsworth speaking for Anston Six. Engage the enemy more closely. Mundy out."

  The force from Cacique guaranteed victory, but if the remaining Alliance forces began launching into the gravity well, they could destroy the reinforcements before they came into action. Therefore the remnants of Admiral Petersen's squadron had to be fully occupied for the next ten minutes or so to ensure an RCN victory.

  There wasn't any doubt what Daniel would have done if he were alert. Adele couldn't execute the details of the plan, but the decision itself hadn't been difficult.

  She wondered if the other RCN captains would refuse or ignore the order. She smiled faintly. If so they wouldn't have to worry about court-martials if she survived. Adele tried to take a more relaxed attitude than came naturally to her, but Mundy of Chatsworth had given the order. Lady Mundy was quite meticulous about the family honor.

  A single gun fired from the Milton's ventral turret. Adele frowned at the visuals. The dorsal turret was intact but unmoving; the plasma cannon were cocked upward at a high angle. Perhaps there was an electrical fault that would be quickly remedied. More likely the turret had jumped its ring and couldn't be repaired short of a dockyard.

  It wasn't likely that the Milton would survive long enough to reach a dockyard, of course. The mission was to drive the Alliance out of the Cacique system. If that required throwing cripples against undamaged enemy ships to buy time, so be it.

  Adele looked at the PPI again. She'd basically exhausted her expertise when she ordered the squadron to attack.

  None of the slowly moving dots on the display were missiles. She knew that it was possible to track the missiles on the PPI—Daniel did it all the time—but she had no idea of how. There was a great deal of what was necessary in a naval battle which she had no idea of. Ordinarily that wasn't a problem.

&
nbsp; Chazanoff continued to launch in sequences of one to three at a time, if a single item could be called a sequence. Adele had no way of telling how many of the launches were reloads; perhaps fewer than a dozen of the Milton's thirty-two tubes were functional.

  Sun's single plasma cannon continued to fire slowly. How much immediate danger was the Milton in? Adele hoped that the way they'd spun after the missile blasted off the stern had taken them out of the zone the Alliance ships had been targeting. The enemy had had time to revise its course predictions by now, but the distances involved meant the projectiles might be some time arriving even if they meant certain death when they did.

  Adele wasn't an admiral save by fiat of Senator Forbes, but she was a signals officer. "Cacique Squadron," she said, broadcasting in clear. "This is Mundy of Chatsworth, speaking for Admiral Daniel Leary."