Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (5 page)

“Nelly, project the enemy course.”

The main screen revised itself to show red lines pulsing toward her own blue lines. A green arc showed when the human ships would be in range to open fire on the charging alien warships.

The fast-moving aliens would be in trouble. The entire three squadrons of human frigates could slash them to bits.

Then the main alien force would pass quickly through the one-way killing zone, and Kris’s forces would find themselves in range of the massive broadsides the aliens so loved.

Things would get rough then.

“Nelly, I want to try something.”

“I’m all ears.”

Kris shared her idea with Nelly and her key staff. Nelly made the plan appear as squiggles on the main screen. Kris listened as Jack, Penny, and Masao gave their thoughts, then Nelly revised the display.

When Kris was satisfied, she began to issue orders.

6

“Admiral
L’Estock, this is Admiral Longknife. I am taking tactical command of First Fleet,” Kris said tersely. Admiral L’Estock was a good administrator, but he’d never commanded a fight. This battle, Kris’s command could not afford any first-timer mistakes.

Any more of them.

“Aye, aye, Admiral, you have command,” came back just as tersely. Combat was only moments away; there was no time for niceties.

“Three ships are out in front,” Kris said. “BatRon 12, you will take the one to our right. Eight, you have the left one. Nine, take the middle. We will engage them as they come in range with a single shot from each ship’s bow batteries. I want to know how strong their rock armor is. Understood?”

“Aye, aye,” came back from her squadron commanders.

“Hawkings, hold fire on your 20-inch frigates. I’m holding you in reserve for the next echelon.”

“Understood, Admiral, I’m reserve when I come up.” The four “R’s” armed with Hellburners were just catching up with the Lorna Do division, which still trailed the rest of the fleet. Kris was making a virtue of necessity. Only time would tell if it was a true virtue.

The enemy’s thirty-two ships had lost cohesion in their mad charge for the newly arrived humans. Three were out in front. Six more were in a loose line some ten thousand klicks behind them. Fifteen formed what was left of the dish some twenty thousand kilometers behind them while a trailing eight who had either been out of position or were having engine problems were scattered in twos and threes over the next twenty thousand kilometers.

That was it. Thirty-two huge, overgunned warships scattered along a fifty-thousand-klick approach charged hell-bent for Kris’s throat.

So what else is new?

The first three ships were approaching the maximum range, two hundred thousand kilometers, for the new 22-inch lasers on the frigates.

“Begin Evasion Pattern 1. Fire one round per ship,” Kris ordered.

The eight ships in each squadron hit their targeted ship.

The warships lit up as rock melted away and spewed flaming droplets out into space and down their sides.

They kept coming.

“Engage your ship with your full forward battery,” Kris ordered.

Now five big lasers reached out from each frigate to slash into the racing enemy. Pinned by forty big guns, the alien ships bent, folded, and blew as lasers blasted through rock to slash stressed hull-strength members or pierced into reactors and their containment gear.

In the blink of an eye, where three ships had been was a long trail of fire, gas, and wreckage.

But six more were closing fast.

“Flip ships,” Kris ordered, and her gut did a twist as the
Princess Royal
, still under way at three gees, did a one-eighty in space.

“Slow to one gee. Engage hostiles by divisions with aft batteries.”

Despite the egg’s protection, Kris felt thrown forward as the ship slowed drastically. Still, her boards showed all twenty-four ships emptying their four aft lasers at the six onrushing aliens.

Those six aliens were taking only about a third as much fire as the first three. Worse, two of the targets managed to put the wreckage of the first ships between them and their antagonists.

Three aliens blew up. While one staggered forward, the other two were coming on fast and eager.

But Kris’s ships had shot themselves empty. They needed
time to recharge their lasers. Seconds ticked past as the aliens closed.

Kris could have accelerated away from the onrushing aliens. But that would have put herself farther from the huge base ship. If she took too long to reach it, the other ships would be back.

Kris accepted the risk and held to one-gee deceleration while the aliens rushed at her with all the energy their reactors could generate.

Previously, the aliens had demonstrated that their lasers were good out to 120,000 klicks.

Today, they opened fire at 160,000 klicks.

Their lasers were weak. Their power attenuated. Still, the engines on the
Mandela
and
Saber
took hits. Their course went wild, and jink patterns failed for a full two seconds.

They took more hits.

Per Kris’s standing orders, both ships went to three gees and pulled away from their tormentors.

“Flip ship,” Kris ordered. “Engage the closest targets with three lasers per ship by divisions.”

The division commanders called “Right,” “Left,” “Middle,” and in a moment, the three ships died.

That left Kris counting the seconds as the largest alien group closed. Her ships were heading at them at only one-gee acceleration, but the others were as close to 2.5 gees as they could manage.

Kris kept one eye on the reloading process for her ships’ lasers and the other eye on the closing aliens. It looked like the aliens would be in maximum range for a full two seconds before Kris would have a forward salvo ready.

“Go to Evasion Pattern 3,” Kris ordered. “Prepare to engage targets by two-ship sections with fire from forward batteries, then flip ship and fire aft batteries. I will then order a three-gee deceleration burn to keep the aliens in our range and us out of theirs for as long as possible.”

“Aye, aye,” came back at her on net from her admirals and commodores. On her battle board, the name of each ship blinked as the captain acknowledged the message.

“Fire,” Kris ordered.

Twenty-two frigates emptied their forward batteries at fifteen big alien warships.

Or that was the plan. Actually, it was more like ten.

Just as they came into range, the alien commander must have ordered evasion maneuvers. Maybe he didn’t, but eight of his ships did it anyway. The evasion wasn’t nearly as good as Nelly would have designed, but it threw off frigates that weren’t expecting any.

On top of that, there was the confusion created by having sixteen two-frigate sections firing at fifteen ships. Worse, two sections were down to only one ship. Several aliens were not targeted.

“Flip ships,” Kris ordered. “Commodores, correct your ship assignments. Fire aft batteries when ready.”

The squadron commanders reallocated targets among their sections and fired. The huge aliens took more hits this time, but the aft batteries were only four guns strong.

The aliens just kept on coming in their ragged formation.

“Up deceleration to three gees,” Kris said. “Execute Evasion Plan 6. Deploy chaff.”

Around Kris, her ships went into a wild dance of up, down, right, left as they jumped up to three gees deceleration, then dropped to one. To complicate fire control solutions more, they popped chaff, shooting tiny balls of iron, ice, and flares out the way they were going just as they changed direction.

They needed the wild jig. The aliens were just coming into their new, extreme range, and had too many lasers firing into the general space around their dancing target. They missed a lot of shots, but they had so many lasers sweeping the area where Kris’s ships were that some had to connect.

The
Caesar
,
Asama
, and
Broadsword
took hits on their rocket engines. This time their captains were ready. As soon as one engine’s power skewed, they countered with corrections to their other rockets as well as boosting their ships to a full 4.5-gee deceleration.

None ran into any more lasers than they would have as they dropped away from the battle line.

Kris was in a tough fight.

“Flip ships,” Kris ordered. She’d have to be a fool to keep
her vulnerable rear with its rocket engines and reactors where the hostiles could get at them.

The ships flipped. Now armored bows took the light hits from the attenuated alien lasers. It was bad, but acceptable.

Better yet, the
Mandela
and the
Saber
, repairs made, were coming back into line.

Kris measured the seconds as the forward batteries edged toward full.

“Kris, I’ve evaluated the evasions the aliens are using. It’s a simple algorithm. I think I can forecast where they’ll be next.”

“Feed it to the targeting computers, Nelly.”

“Done,” her computer reported.

“Fire forward batteries,” Kris ordered.

Fifteen alien ships burned as twenty-one frigates hit them hard. Two exploded. Fire from others slackened, but the range was closing, and the alien lasers were taking bigger bites.

The Smart Metal
^TM
hull of the
Princess Royal
, like all the other non-Earth frigates, was a honeycomb of metal and cooling reaction mass under a thin covering of reflective material. It spun around the ship to spread out any hit while the reaction mass around a hit bled into space, carrying away heat as well as causing the laser beam to bloom and lose power.

Damaged frigates took on a halo.

The Earth frigates were a different story. Now they fairly glowed as they took in the laser hits, slowed the light down, spread it out along the entire length of their armor, and reflected it back into space.

Earth’s BatRon 12 had led the way through the jump. It was always closest to the enemy. Now the thirteen aliens concentrated on the seven Earth frigates. They made them glow.

But they did not make them explode.

Kris watched her board. The Earth frigates’ armor wasn’t even into the red yet.

“We’ve got to keep our nose to the foe,” Jack whispered.

“And the Earth squadron out front,” Kris agreed.

The forward batteries were recharging. The aft batteries in Kris’s fleet were coming up on full as they crossed the hundred-thousand-kilometer range.

That also put the trailing 20-inch frigates of Hawkings’s BatRon 2 in range.

“Forward squadrons, prepare to flip ships and fire aft batteries. You will flip back, bow toward the enemy as soon as your aft batteries are empty. BatRon 2, fire your forward batteries at the ships you identify as least damaged, then flip and fire aft lasers. You will also flip back and offer the enemy your bows.”

Ships’ names blinked acknowledgments as Kris finished.

“Flip ship. Fire,” Kris ordered.

The slaughter among the onrushing alien ships was brutal, but they gave as well as they got.

Thirteen big warships took fire from twenty-nine frigates. Actually, a full thirty-two as the damaged frigates flipped and contributed their recharged forward lasers as well.

Eight of the five-hundred-thousand-ton alien ships dissolved, wrecked by their own acceleration or eaten by the plasma in their own reactors. One ship actually bent along its middle, then broke in half. Another ship seemed to burn from the inside, gutting itself before the inrush of vacuum could dowse its own fires.

Most just exploded into gas as reactor containment vessels failed and sun-hot plasma was released to incinerate flesh and steel.

Eight ships died, but the other five just kept coming, firing whatever lasers they could still bring to bear.

Hawkings immediately flipped his eight ships and fired their aft batteries at the five survivors. One blew, but the others kept racing at Kris.

Kris’s ships had to take it. Tests had shown that they couldn’t feed all the power into a single capacitor and get one laser ready ahead of the rest. No, they might give three priority, but only at a ten-percent penalty.

Kris had weighted the options and established the fleet doctrine. Charge the entire forward battery. Charge the entire aft battery. Only under unusual circumstances charge three guns ahead of the rest.

Kris considered the present circumstances and shook her head.

The two fleets rushed at each other. Behind this fight, the
monstrous alien base ship fled at 1.14 gees toward the third jump.

No way you’re going to make that,
Kris swore.

Beyond that, the survivors of the ships that had fought Yi were also bearing off to connect with their mother ship. Yi’s ships had time to mend and make repairs. They were now back to yellow or green on their boards although Kris counted five that were trailing the rest of the fleet. Seven destroyed, five too damaged to pursue. That left Yi with only twenty ships. The ten surviving 22-inch war wagons were closing with the retreating aliens, nipping at their heels, but from an extreme range of 180,000 klicks.

Admiral Yi’s secondary batteries were also sweeping the space ahead of him for those troublesome mines.

Admiral Bethea had pulled her two BatRons off a bit, as if to get well ahead of the aliens on their flight to the third jump point. With the speed of her frigates, no doubt Bethea could put herself square in their path and make them come to her as she fired and retreated, fired and retreated.

The humans had shown the aliens that chasing us was a bad idea.

Kris turned back to her own battle.

First Fleet might have lost a ship if the five alien ships had concentrated on a single frigate.

Instead, the aliens seemed mesmerized by the glow from the Earth frigates. What fire they had, they concentrated on them. The ships took their hits, absorbed them, and radiated them back into space.

The five Earth ships showed hull damage as their crystal armor heated up. Kris had suggested to Yi that his ships might benefit from a layer of honeycomb cooling under their crystal belt. He’d declined, with his usual attitude that seemed to say nothing good could come from the Rim worlds.
He
was of
Earth
.