Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (50 page)

Twenty-four ships accelerated for the fuzzy jump. Their next stop would be the system one out from Alwa. The aliens would very likely jump into that system, their third jump to Kris’s second.

Of course, they’d be coming in a different jump from Kris. That would make matters very interesting.

69

Wasp
cleared the jump, snug in the middle of Admiral Benson’s Reserve Fleet. Benson’s
Temptress
had come through first; he’d bent his course toward the Gamma Jump as he decelerated. With luck, the battle fleet would cruise up to the jump the aliens would use, take up defensive positions, and shoot up the aliens as they stormed through.

It was a nice battle plan.

It didn’t survive contact with the enemy.

Kris’s fleet was halfway there, decelerating all the way, when the jump started spitting out alien ships, also decelerating. They were at a bit over 200,000 kph; they’d need to slow down if they wanted to hit the next jump at 50,000 kph or less.

Any more, and they’d vault over Alwa to some other system.

So they decelerated, their bows with all those lasers pointed where they’d been, their vulnerable rocket motors pointed where they were going.

Admiral Benson ordered the fleet to flip around and change their vectors to slow them and get them across the aliens’ course.

Kris leaned back in her egg. Most of her flag plot was unfamiliar. Her gear, even including her screens, had been left behind. Kris was offered the screens from the chief’s mess.

“We won’t have much use for ’em, ma’am, until this fight is over,” Senior Command Chief Mong had said.

Now the screens showed the aliens running down their base course, like a space elevator on a rail, slowing steadily at 1.72 gees as they headed for the Alpha Jump into Alwa system.

Benson’s course would have the Reserve Fleet pull up on
their port side about three-quarters of the way across the system. They’d have the last quarter of their cruise to the jump to fight it out.

Kris doubted it would last that long.

“Nelly, what do you make of the alien ships? How much damage did we do?”

“Several are hurting, Kris. At least six are not holding to the 1.72 deceleration. That leaves ninety-two.”

Kris studied the system and the likely encounter ahead. She and Nelly could find no option better than what Admiral Benson was doing.

For a long day, the two fleets held to their approach courses. Each bore down on the other with the slow finality of death.

“This waiting is hell,” Penny muttered.

“It was like this when navies were under sail. The wind might die with the two fleets close enough to hear each other talk but not shoot,” Nelly told them. “They talked of iron men on wooden ships. No women were allowed. They must have been very strange men.”

“They were different times,” Kris said. Then eyed the clock. “Or maybe not that different.”

The approach wore on. Kris kept one eye on the enemy and the other on her fuel state. It would be close.

They had to make the jump at under fifty thousand klicks or risked being thrown into some distant system with a huge amount of energy on the boats but not enough fuel to brake. And if the system had no gas giants to refuel from, or they were out of range of their depleted tanks . . .

That thought was on every mind.

The aliens might very well lose this next fight, but the humans could lose as well.

As they closed to within two hundred thousand klicks of the aliens, Kris said, “Nelly, please send a copy of the message Jacques composed for the alien base ships.”

“It is sent.”

“I don’t believe the Enlightened One responded,” Jack said.

“No, not a word.”

“You think this will be any different?”

Kris shrugged. “Nothing beats a try but a failure. Sooner
or later, we have to either learn to talk or kill each other. I’ve had enough killing today.” She found herself reaching for her belly in the egg. Without an order, Nelly expanded the egg to give Kris room to pat baby.

“If we can’t end this, this little one will grow up to fight the same fights again and again.”

Jack nodded. Even in an egg, you could see that simple expression.

They were at two hundred thousand klicks. Kris would order her ships to fire in only a moment. Unless the aliens had a trick up their sleeves, this would be another massacre.

“Kris, I have an answer from the aliens.”

“Yes.”

“‘It is better to die than eat vermin shit.’”

Across the way, eighty warships suddenly veered around, their engines going from decelerating them toward the jump point to ramming them toward Kris’s battle line.

Kris snapped out her orders. “Fire volleys by squadrons. Squadron commanders, select the closest ships for targets. Fire and flip as needed by squadrons. Open fire now.”

The aliens were charging Kris’s line. Again, they charged at whatever acceleration they could lay on: 2.6 to 3.12 gees.

Kris’s battlecruisers cut their deceleration burns. Then, by squadron, flipped to bring their forward batteries to bear. For five seconds, the six lasers struck out at the aliens. In tight salvos of three lasers, they pinned the foremost alien warships. Each stone-protected warship took the full force of forty-eight lasers concentrated on only sixteen points. The lasers, powered by the upgraded reactors, burned the alien ships for five seconds.

Burn through was inevitable.

The four leading alien ships took their hits, burned, and blew up.

Three of Kris’s squadrons then flipped ship, poured on three gees to open the distance from the alien charge, blew away another three ships, and accelerated away for another five seconds while all lasers recharged.

The seven ships from Hekate did a different dance with death. They continued to drift under no acceleration as their second forward battery took a different alien ship under fire,
pinned it, and destroyed it. Then they flipped, jacked up their acceleration away from the onrushing aliens to 3.5 gees, and let both of their rear batteries pin two ships, one after the other.

One ship was hit hard but survived.

Then, like the other divisions, the Hekates repeated the process again.

Alien warships took battlecruiser salvos. They lit up, burned, and exploded.

One managed to get to within 160,000 yards when the human frigates were turned, stern on. Its new lasers got a lucky hit on the
Invincible
, slashing into its engineering spaces and damaging a laser. The
Vince
struggled to get out of the line of fire. Its squadron mates immediately gave the alien their full attention and burned it, but not before the battlecruiser with the unfortunate name began to eat itself. The
Vince
blossomed with survivor pods as its crew took to the cold of space rather than face the fire of their own ship.

The
Lucky Leprechaun II
also took a hit, but she proved luckier than her predecessor. This skipper dodged out of the enemy fire with a fortunate jink, then quickly mended the ship before more damage could be done.

Kris’s ships suffered, but the aliens burned.

Ten warships had stayed steady on course, decelerating for the jump, intent on using the sacrifice of its brothers to get at the system that had defeated them for so long.

Kris fought the fight with one eye on her fuel gauges and the other on the tack she’d need to cancel out all this dancing away from the course to the jump.

“No more running,” she finally had to order. “Set course for the jump. We fight it out on this course.”

The fleet, obedient to her orders, brought their engines around to face the jump. Now they presented their broadsides to the aliens. Battlecruisers could only fight from their bow or stern.

Now the rhythm of the fight changed.

Battlecruisers coasted, faced the enemy, fired, flipped and fired again. Then, while they reloaded, they went to 3.5 gees deceleration.

“That can’t be good for the engines,” Jack muttered from his egg.

“No one’s screaming.”

No one but the aliens.

They had the humans where they wanted them, but of the eighty that had started the mad charge, less than a dozen survived. And while they heated up the battlecruisers, and made hits on the vulnerable sterns of the
Persistent
and
Enterprise
, they did not make the critical hit they aimed for.

Battlecruisers glowed under laser fire that would have blown them away a month ago. They glowed, but held their place in line and hammered the last of the alien charge to dust.

Done, Kris brought her ships back into something like a formation even as she eyed the twelve ships that had held back.

Did someone over there order the charge? Why those ten?

“Nelly, send the surrender offer again.”

“Done, Kris. We’ll be in range of those twelve ships in five seconds.”

“Then they have five seconds to reply.”

“‘I will be your slave,’” Nelly snapped. “That is the message from them. ‘I will be your slave.’”

“Tell them to dump their reactor cores,” Kris ordered.

“I’ll try,” Nelly said.

“We can’t let them get into the Alwa system while they’re under power,” Jack said.

“We can’t let them get close to us while they’ve still got power,” Kris said. “They go dead in space, or they die.”

Kris’s ships passed the two-hundred-thousand-klick mark. There was no word from the aliens.

“Nelly, tell them we need to see their bellies. That’s what dogs do when they surrender.”

“I sent that. There is no word from them. They just repeat, ‘I will be your slave.’”

The fleet decelerated toward the jump. They closed to within 180,000 klicks of the aliens. The aliens continued to decelerate.

“Can we order them to abandon ship, to get into life pods and get out?” Penny asked.

“I doubt they have any.” Kris thought for a long moment on
how to get “Surrender your ship” across in a different language. “Damn, we need Jacques. Nelly, tell them to stop decelerating and give us their ship.”

“I sent it Kris.”

They waited as they came up on the 170,000-klick mark.

“Any answer?” Kris asked.

“They just say the same, ‘I will be your slave.’”

“So, they remember slavery,” Jack said.

“Apparently,” Kris said. “Send to fleet, prepare to take the last alien ships under fire. Fire by divisions.”

Kris’s board showed acknowledgments.

They passed the 165,000 mark and were quickly coming in range of the new alien lasers. Kris considered letting them get the first shot off, do something to prove their treachery. She patted baby one last time. It was doing jumping jacks on her bladder from the feel.
How do you like Mommy’s adrenaline, little love?

“Jack, you asked why I had to be here.”

“Yes.”

“It was for this,” Kris said, then added. “Fire.”

Twenty-nine ships, all the undamaged ones, went to zero deceleration, aimed their bows at twelve alien ships, and lashed out at them with every laser they could bring to bear.

Aliens glowed, burned, and blew out into expanding balls of flame.

Battlecruisers flipped to bring their aft batteries to bear and hit those that still lived.

There were no more aliens headed for Alwa.

70

It
was a near thing, but every ship of the Reserve Fleet made it through the jump, barreling through at just below 50,000 kph. They immediately bent their course for the nearest gas giant.

They had hardly entered the system when Admiral Yi reported they had traffic in the next system out. A fast-moving fleet had jumped in and was slowing down. More reinforcements had arrived.

Still in her egg as
Wasp
made a hard reach for orbit, Kris breathed a sigh of relief. She was pretty sure the new largesse from human space would not have arrived soon enough to stop the aliens’ last try to blast Alwa, but she didn’t ask Nelly for a check.

As it happened, Kris was out of her egg and back in uniform when the new ships began coming through. The screens from her flag plot were back on the walls in the CPO’s locker so she had to go to the bridge to get The Word.

It left her stunned.

“This is Grand Admiral Santiago with orders for Captain Kris Longknife. I am to relieve you forthwith and you are to return to human space soonest. I will explain more when we can talk in private.”

“Hasn’t she said enough?” Jack said.

“I need to sit down.”

Someone else kept a count of the new arrivals. Kris found herself seated in her day quarters, staring at the overhead.

It never quits. They just never quit. Longknifes suck bilgewater. Through a straw.

71

Kris
had recovered by the time
Wasp
caught the first tie-down and pulled into her place on Canopus Station. Kris’s fleet made it in an hour ahead of the
Thunderer
, Admiral Santiago’s flag.

Kris was saved from having to pay her compliments to the newly arrived grand admiral by Santiago’s message that she would instead meet Kris in her quarters.

“Strange and stranger,” was all Kris said.

Kris stood in her spiffiest maternity blues, which was to say the least lumpy. The stripes of an admiral still etched her sleeve as Sandy Santiago walked in. She’d been an admiral when Kris was a freshly promoted lieutenant. Kris had given her daughter a reference for her academy application.

What was the situation between them now?

It was hard to say which one saluted which. Maybe Nelly could have measured it.

“You’ve done an outstanding job, Kris, from everything I’ve seen.”

“We’re still trying to retrieve the last of our scattered ships. I sent a squadron of battlecruisers back loaded as tankers. Should I have asked your permission, Grand Admiral?”

“Oh, right. Oops. Sorry Kris, and it’s Sandy among us admirals. I had specific orders to make that announcement, right from King Raymond. He wants you back soonest, and he figured the best way to get you moving would be to let everyone know right at the get-go that I had orders to relieve you, and you had orders to depart immediately.”