Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (4 page)

Most of the sixteen ships that surged at Yi’s fleet did the usual when they were hit hard and falling out of the assault. If their own reactors hadn’t torn them apart, they dropped their containment fields and let them eat their ships, annihilating ship and crew in one giant conflagration.

Today was different. Three of the ships were hit, disabled, and left drifting in space.

“Kris, small vessels are departing the disabled ships,” Nelly reported.

“Small, as in lifeboat size?” Kris answered, incredulously.

“Kris, they are larger than the small lifeboat we saw once.”

“Hold it,” Penny said. “These folks have been launching suicide ships at Alwa, and now some of them want to surrender?”

“You think it’s a ruse?” Masao asked at Penny’s elbow.

“Would you put it past them?” Penny answered, another question stacked on top of the others.

“I wouldn’t,” Jacques said, looking grim.

Kris shook her head. “Yi’s got to spot this himself. I will not give away this ambush to do his thinking for him.”

Vice Admiral Yi appeared to be aware only that he was way out of range of the main enemy force. He put on three gees to close the distance. Two of Bethea’s ships,
Puma
and
Loki
, accelerated with the rest of the fleet on a course that would take them awfully close to the tumbling alien ships and their growing sphere of putative “lifeboats.”

Nothing happened, and Kris was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when dozens of the “lifeboats” slammed into high-gee accelerations toward the frigates. The humans’ secondary batteries snapped out, vaporizing a dozen of the alien boats.

But more were attacking. Scores of tiny specks now charged the frigates. Their skippers took defensive actions, even using
the main batteries to swat at the assailants. More died, but those left were getting close.

In a final surge, a handful of the tiny ships closed on two of Bethea’s ships. Three boats closest to the two frigates exploded.

“Atomics,” Nelly reported.

One ship continued on its way, out of the wave of atomic fury . . . for a moment. Then it seemed to cave in upon itself. Survival pods zipped from the ship. Most got far enough. Many did not.

The reactors lost their containment, and the ship disappeared in a glowing cloud of dust that itself quickly vanished.

The other ship did better; it limped out of the battle line and slowly fell behind. It joined up with a smaller blip on Kris’s screens to comb the space around the other kill. The two set about collecting survival pods.

The rest of Admiral Bethea’s two squadrons opened fire with their 5-inch secondary batteries on anything in the space ahead of them.

“All the shooting ships are Bethea’s,” Nelly said. “The Earth squadrons appear to be taking the time to catch their breath.”

“Damn,” escaped Kris’s lips. In the last battle, she’d done to the aliens just what it looked like they were doing to him.

“Damn,” Jack repeated. “Didn’t Yi read the report on how we won the last battle and how there were three ships studying our tactics? Three ships that got away.”

The anthropologist Jacques shook his head. “Yi doesn’t strike me as a man who sees the need to learn anything new. Certainly not from Rim rats. How did Earth ever give him command of a fleet of new ships that would need to fight a new way?”

“I think it’s safe to assume,” Penny said, “that he’s the best they have.”

“I’d hate to have the worst,” Kris muttered.

Third Fleet was coming up on the area Nelly suspected was mined. Now, even Yi’s ships were shooting at the space ahead of them.

There was a blinding flash. A huge one. Then another, and three more in rapid succession.

“More atomic explosions,” Nelly reported.

“God help them,” Penny said.

One of Yi’s ships was caught between two explosions. A moment later, it converted to an expanding ball of gas.

Another ship was close to an atomic mine. It lost acceleration, tumbling in space.

Now all the human ships had cut their acceleration and were devoting all their weapons, main and secondary, to sweeping the space in front of them.

More explosions went off as someone made the decision to use them before they lost them.

And the alien fleet flipped ship and charged in.

Maybe Yi’s sensors had been damaged by the atomic explosions. Maybe he couldn’t see what was happening. What was clear was that he was drifting in space with no weigh on, no way to jink his ships, and a whole lot of enemy charging down his throat.

Worse, the alien base ship had flipped as well and was now headed for the battle scene.

Yi’s ships were from Earth. They had new, bigger lasers. They had new, fancy armor. What they didn’t have was Hellburners that could rip apart moon-size mother ships.

Just exactly how Yi would handle being caught between a base ship and a lot of angry monstrous warships would be anyone’s guess.

Kris wasn’t ready to see how he’d guess.

“So much for my battle plan,” Kris snapped, and made her decision as she did. “Admirals Hawkings and L’Estock, take your squadrons through the jump. L’Estock, have Earth’s BatRon 12 lead the way. Hawkings, the Wardhaven division of BatRon 2 will go last after they retrieve the deployed Hellburners.”

“Understood,” quickly answered her.

The Hellburners were a uniquely Wardhaven weapon.
Renown
,
Repulse
,
Royal Sovereign
, and
Resolute
all had headed toward this fight with two aboard. Four had been deployed as mines; four had been held in reserve on the ships as weapons for the final
coup de grace
for the base ship. Now it would take time for them to retrieve the deployed mines.

Exactly how the “R’s” would close on the alien base ship
with all its lasers firing was a question Kris desperately needed an answer for.

Kris’s staff headed out on the double to get themselves into high-gee eggs, something that wasn’t on the schedule for another hour. Jack pulled Kris’s chair back, and whispered, “After you, my love.”

Kris would have loved to give him a kiss, but they were already overdue for those eggs.

“Captain Gathmann,” Kris called as she raced into her quarters, already unzipping her shipsuit, “Take us through the jump right at the end of Commodore Zingi’s BatRon 9.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Jack was just helping a naked Kris into her egg, him already naked as well, when the
Princess Royal
suddenly lost all sense of down. The high-gravity station eggs fit the Sailor like a second skin. With the ship maybe making four gees and going every which way to jink out of laser fire, you didn’t want anything between your skin and your second one. Buck naked was the uniform of the day in an egg.

Around Kris, her fleet was slipping their moorings and pulling away from the ships they’d been paired with as they prepared to depart the anchorage. That meant ships went every which way and, if you weren’t holding on to anything, so did you.

Kris’s egg held her tight, and used its Smart Metal
^TM
to secure it to the Smart Metal
^TM
deck. Jack, however, was a good meter away from his egg; his only hold was on Kris’s shoulder.

She grinned like a loving wife, and motored her way over to his egg so he could secure himself in it before the ship accelerated away, and there was a down to fall into.

“Thanks,” Jack said. “You’re a good egg.”

“Bad joke,” Kris said, and headed back to her flag plot as soon as Jack was halfway in his egg.

The attack was already under way. The screens showed the
Saladin
, the last of BatRon 12, disappearing through the jump just as Kris did her check. L’Estock’s flag, the
Battleax
, led the eight ships of the Sharp Steel Squadron toward the jump.

The
Princess Royal
was moving, along with Commodore Zingi’s BatRon 9 from Yamato, to be next into that bit of
roiling space that let them jump from one star system to the next.

Then the universe farted.

No sooner was the
Grenade
through than the jump did a boogaloo.

One moment the jump was there, the next . . . it wasn’t!

Kris knew these things could happen. It had happened during the Unity and Iteeche Wars, sometimes at the worst of times.

She knew it, but it had never happened to
her
!

Now it had.

It took everything she had not to dash onto the bridge of the
P. Royal
and demand that they find where the jump had wandered off to. The jumps orbited several suns; some six or even eight. The influence of all of those suns decided how any one jump behaved.

Most of the time, they docilely followed their own way around any one sun. Sometimes, for no apparent reason that we humans had figured out . . . they jumped tens of thousands of kilometers.

“I got it,” was shouted loud enough from the
P. Royal
’s bridge for Kris to hear.

“Where?” from the captain was not quite as loud.

“There.”

“Pass it to the squadron flag.”

“They got it, too,” and the squadron suddenly jerked to three gees and took off for the new jump location, twelve hundred kilometers away.

It took some smart ship handling to accelerate at three gees for six hundred klicks, then flip ship and decelerate at the same hard pace to arrive at the jump as close to dead in space as possible.

Kris spent the time hardly breathing. No doubt, captains, navigators, and helms personnel were chewing nails at a dangerous rate.

Coming to a dead stop with no collisions had to be a minor miracle of naval proportions. Then, as if they did this every day, each of the Yamato frigates followed the
Mikasa
placidly through the jump.

And the
Princess Royal
brought up the rear, following
Toikiwa
.

Kris checked her boards. The frigates from Lorna Do were right behind them. The “R’s” from Wardhaven had collected their Hellburners and were already doing a hell-raising three-gee acceleration for the new jump location.

A moment later, Kris got her first good look at the battle in the targeted star. Her boards filled up with data, encrypted and sent via tight beam at the jump nearly five minutes ago from the ships of the Third Fleet and their fight.

Kris’s boards showed ships in the red and getting worse.

5

During
their planning, Admiral Yi had repeatedly warned Kris that she was dividing her forces. He’d charge into the system using one jump while she would lurk on the other side of the one they intended the aliens to flee through.

Kris had countered that the aliens would find themselves split as well, with half on her side of the jump and half fleeing from his forces on the other.

Admiral Furzah had named several battles won when a force found itself engaged while straddling a river. Nelly had matched the feline admiral example for example.

It had almost been funny, but it had ended Yi’s objections to her orders.

Now, Kris was in the system and all the surviving aliens were between her and Admiral Yi.

In theory, the aliens were in a perfect position to divide and conquer. In reality, they were in a world of hurt.

Only a dozen or so ships stood between Kris’s fleet and the huge, unarmored, but way-too-armed alien mother ship.

Kris had never attacked one of those monsters without some dirty, sneaky, or underhanded trick up her sleeve. But then, Grampa Trouble always said the only fair fight was the one you lost.

Now, with the alien base ship open to her attack, Kris was left struggling to come up with a good way to clobber the damn thing.

If she assaulted the base, they’d throw the whole fleet at her. The odds were only four to one, but they’d be desperate to defend the base ship with their women and children. The crews of alien warships were a sixty-forty split, with males
dominant. No doubt, the base ship was skewed the other way around, if not more so.

Kris’s flag plot filled up as her staff rejoined her, now in their eggs and ready for the fight. They silently studied the battle readouts from all of her ships as Kris did the same. Finally, full information was coming in on what she’d seen dimly through the jump.

Of Admiral Yi’s sixteen super frigates, the
Lincoln
,
Lenin
,
Clemenceau
,
Chairman Mao
, and
Togo
were gone. The
Bismarck
was trailing, well behind the line. Bethea had lost the
Heimdallr
and
Loki
; with the
Puma
out of the line and trailing as well. The remaining twenty-three showed plenty of damage to their weapons, reactors, and hulls as their displays glowed red on Kris’s screen.

At the moment, Yi was slowing but holding his fleet in good order.

That left the aliens free to turn on Kris.

“For what we are about to receive may we be truly grateful,” Kris muttered.

“Amen,” Penny added.

At the moment, Kris’s fleet was scattered, thanks to the jump’s meandering.

“Admiral L’Estock, kindly re-form your ships into a square while at the charge. Three gees acceleration toward the enemy base ship, if you will,” Kris ordered.

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” came back at her quickly, followed by orders for BatRon 12 to keep up its advance at 3 gees and BatRon 8 and 9 to join using up to 3.5 gees.

Kris felt a kick in the rump as the
Princess Royal
responded to his orders.

Behind her, Hawkings’s BatRon 2 began jumping into the system, the Lorna Do warrior class first and in line, followed by the Wardhaven “R’s” in a somewhat disorganized flow.

Ahead, the base ship went to a full 1.25-gee acceleration as it fled toward its returning dishes while the thirty-odd ships that had been a close escort charged in open ranks at the onrushing humans. While most were holding at 2.5 gees, a few were edging up close to three.