Kris Longknife: Defender (35 page)

Yep, they’d gotten the word about how Kris blew away their sister. Kris hadn’t expected to use the same trick twice. The only question was, would they spot the new trick any faster?

The lead box of dishes was 150,000 klicks away and closing. Kris let them get to 120,000 before she went to two gees. She ordered the hooligan squadron into the line well to the left of BatRon 1. With BatRon 1 now facing the enemy’s center, Kris edged the rest of her squadrons a bit to the right.

Then the aliens pulled their first surprise.

“The
lead alien square of dishes has jumped to 2.5-gee acceleration, Kris,” Nelly said.

They aren’t supposed to do that! No doubt, a lot of aliens are feeling the pain.

“Squadrons, fifteen degrees right, engage the closest dish,” Kris ordered, as the aliens came within range. The fifteen-degree angle protected their vulnerable engines. BatRons 1 through 4 engaged the enemy’s far-right dish. But the enemy was coming on fast, switching their fire from motes of dust to Kris’s ships. At extreme range for their lasers, damage was light, but there was plenty of it.

On Kris’s board, ships’ armor switched from green to yellow as they began to stream steam and take hits.

But the aliens were well within range of Kris’s 20-inch guns. Her ships lit up the aliens; twenty-six ships engaged thirty aliens.

In a minute, the dish was an expanding ball of gas.

But to finish off the aliens, Kris’s ships had to flip to use their forward battery. That put the enemy way too close. “Accelerate away at 2.75 gees,” Kris ordered. “Pop chaff. Launch a missile volley.”

One dish was gone, but the top and bottom dishes had angled over, getting the range. The far dish was hammering Commodore Benson’s hooligans of BatRon 5. The cheery volunteers gave as good as they got, but Benson had to order them to run for it ahead of Kris’s orders.

The fleet accelerated away from the aliens, who settled back to two gees.

Kris’s board was red.
Constitution
,
Tiger
,
Hotspur
, and
Spitfire
reported damage to their engines. Kris ordered them to three gees to form up as a reserve. All obeyed except
Hotspur
, who couldn’t manage even the fleet’s 2.75.

Four alien ships accelerated away from the rest and leapt out to engage the trailing
Hotspur
. They shot it out, with the other three ships from of the Helvetican Ninth Div trying to support their sister. Two more alien ships died, but so did
Hotspur
.

The three other ships, what Kris labeled CripDiv 1, for crippled division, pulled ahead.

Each side paused to lick its wounds.

The aliens reorganized themselves. The three remaining dishes re-formed in a triangle.

Kris reorganized, too. Despite showing yellow for damage,
Triumph
and
Swiftsure
moved up from BatDiv 9 to replace
Constitution
and
Tiger
in BatRons 1 and 2.
Spitfire
swung around to join Captain Drago’s BatDiv 10, pretty much eliminating not only one division but half of Kris’s reserves.

Kris did get to smile at one thing. Their pressure on the aliens’ right had driven the mother ship to the left. Her course was edging closer to the gas giant.

Good!

The aliens had a problem. They could not handle the edge Kris’s long-range 20-inch lasers gave her.

The fight drew away from the jump point, but three ships still hovered there. That puzzled Kris. “Chief, talk to me about those three aliens holding back.”

“I’ve been meaning to mention those, ma’am. Their reactor configuration is different from the ones fighting us. One has ten smaller reactors. One has eight. Even the one with six is different. I think its reactors are more powerful than the ones we’re fighting.”

“Opinion, Captain Drago?” Kris asked.

“Military observers from other countries. It’s an old tradition.”

“So our next visitors are watching how we handle this bunch for future reference.”

“I hate to say so, but it looks that way.”

“Oh, God,” Kris kind of prayed. “We haven’t figured out how to handle this bunch, and someone is setting us up for the next match.”

“That’s what happens when you’re the champ.”

“And if we aren’t the champ, we’re dead,” Kris muttered. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Anytime, Admiral. How long are we going to hang out here, catching our breath?”

“They’re on the course I want. Let’s see what they do next.”

The aliens chased. Kris fled, now at a sedate 1.75 gees. Once, she ordered an attack at long range on the lower dish, but they quickly killed their acceleration, inviting Kris to close on them while the other two dishes advanced above her.

She declined.

“Smart move. You’re learning,”
Kris mused.
“You’re advancing, which you want to do. I’m falling back, which I don’t want to do.”

Kris adjusted her course to take her close to the gas giant and between two Hellburner command stations, then made a feint at the higher dish. When it flinched back, she swung toward the middle one.

They all fell back and ended up pretty much in line again.

Kris’s fleet kept littering their retreat with chaff. Soon, Professor Labao reported the aliens’ lasers were heating up, and they were cutting back on sweeping their path. Kris dropped off a half dozen mines along with more chaff.

Three mines caught ships.

The aliens went back to blasting everything in front of them.

Kris smiled as they developed the habit she wanted.

The dish opposite the hooligan of BatRon 5 suddenly went to 2.5 acceleration, closing the distance between them in a leap. Commodore Benson saw his danger and upped the acceleration, too, but his ships had suffered more damage than they knew. The
Proud Unicorn
’s motors sputtered, and one blew away into space. The
Lucky Leprechaun
was no luckier. They failed to pull away. Kris ordered BatRons 1, 2, and 3 to swing inward, threatening the attacking dish’s flank.

Still, the aliens came on. The other two dishes now were back up to two gees and edging closer. Kris ordered missiles fired at them and had Drago move BatDiv 10 in to support BatRon 4’s efforts to meet those two.

On her left flank, the hooligans fought their battle with one dish, aided by the arrival of most of the fleet. The
Unicorn
and
Leprechaun
struggled to keep up, then flipped and fired full bow batteries at their tormentors. That cost the aliens two ships, but it cost the two volunteers seconds of precious acceleration. The aliens came on.

Now the dish’s flank burned under the fire of three battle squadrons. Ship after ship blew or stumbled out of formation, internal explosions erupting into space. Still, what was left of the dish locked its teeth onto its two unlucky victims and a third, the
Kikukei
, was proving no luckier than the
Leprechaun
.

Commodore Miyashi’s ships concentrated on supporting the
Kikukei
, and that may have saved her. Still, both the
Unicorn
and the
Leprechaun
fell farther behind, bleeding steam and armor from hits even as they fired ever-decreasing salvos. At close range, they both managed a missile salvo that took their closest enemies with them as their final moment came.

Suddenly, the fight was over as quickly as it had begun. Two more of Kris’s ships were gone, but an alien dish was gone with them. The
Kikukei
managed to put on enough gees to crawl ahead and join CripDiv 1.

With BatRon 5 reduced to three ships, Kris offered Commodore Benson the chance to take all his ships out of the line and join the cripples in reserve.

“We’ve just begun to fight, Admiral,” was his reply. On Kris’s board, many of her ships were showing some red for damaged. However, as the quiet between storms stretched out,
Temptress
’s,
Fairy Princess
’s, and
Pixie
’s hardworking damage control parties brought them back into yellow.

The alien commander also seemed to need time to reassess the situation. The two remaining dishes, both battered, slowed their advance to half a gee. The rear four dishes and mother ship closed on them at one gee.

The clan was gathering, and their swords were sharp.

Kris had started with forty-four ships. She’d lost three and held four damaged ships in reserve. The tip of her spear, the four battle squadrons still had eight ships each, but she had little to play with otherwise. The remnants of BatRon 5 weren’t even a full division, and she wasn’t supposed to send her flagship charging into the line.

Across space, some 180 monsters formed a hexagon. Possibly worse, eighteen speedy small boys were doing a fast run, dropping well below the lowest dish to get behind Kris. So far, those little boys hadn’t shown a lot of firepower, but if they got across Kris’s line of flight and started tossing atomics at her, things could get messy.

“
Constitution
,
Tiger
, and
Spitfire
, you up for a high-speed run and some shooting?” Kris asked. In theory, their boards showed green again, but Kris didn’t trust she was getting the real word. She left the
Kikukei
out. It showed only two lasers online.

“We’re ready now,” the skipper of the
Constitution
said for all.

“You see their little boys. We can’t have them behind us. Proceed independently and stop them.”

Three big war wagons went to 2.75 gees and headed down, jinking all the way.

Kris could only watch that battle out of the corner of her eye. The hexagon of dishes were again trying to engulf her tiny battle array. First, the top dish would edge its speed up, closing the distance a bit, then one of the side dishes would make the threat.

Kris chose to feint toward one, shoot a few long-range salvos, never from more than one division of a squadron, then up her own speed to match the creeper. She picked off a ship here, another ship there, and she kept them at bay. But if they kept this up, there would still be a whole lot of them when they made orbit above Alwa.

This was no way to win the war.

The battle of Kris’s cripples and the aliens’ fast movers evolved into a swirling fight as the aliens spread out and charged in. Kris could respect their courage and their tactics; she’d developed similar tactics herself for the fast attack boats.

“Their jinking patterns are primitive and predicable,” Nelly sniffed.

Kris’s frigates met them, and with longer-range guns and the ability to maneuver almost as wildly as they did, the battle was joined.

The fast movers died one by one.

But the lower dish didn’t ignore the life-and-death fight so near. Suddenly they were doing 2.65 gees and closing on the frigates. Kris shouted a warning and ordered Commodore Miyoshi to take his BatRon 3, the low squadron, down to help. The lower corners of the hexagon put on speed, and Kris had to take her entire fleet down to cover the Musashi squadron’s top.

Suddenly, the entire alien formation was pushing itself to higher acceleration.

“Withdraw fighting,” Kris ordered. “Fleet, go to three gees.”

Among the battle squadrons, ships fired full salvos from their bow lasers, then flipped and began to fall back at three gees. The
Constitution
flipped, but as it accelerated, several engines failed, sending it into a wild twist. Smart Metal
TM
could be repaired, but it took time for armor to flow back and form new engines. The
Constitution
didn’t have time. She was pinned by more lasers that fried away her armor and let later hits slash deep into the hull. Like the enemy ships had done so many times before, the
Constitution
began to blow herself apart.

The reactors lost containment, and the ship was a hot mass of expanding gas.

The
Tiger
suffered the same fate.

Only the
Spitfire
managed to put on three gees and escape the ambush.

Worse, the
Atago
had taken hits in the effort to save the independent frigates. It stayed in formation but showed bright red on Kris’s board in too many departments.

Kris gave up the idea of re-forming a CripDiv. She had nothing in reserve to replace damaged ships in the line, and it looked like soon, the entire fleet would be showing damage.

Still, she’d gained what she intended. Her rear was safe, and one of the aliens’ six dishes was showing thin. She dropped more chaff and a few mines.

The aliens kept burning lasers to sweep the space ahead of them.

And, finally, Kris was approaching the gas giant. Her hopes for victory would be decided in the next few hours.

Orbiting
the gas giant were thousands of large canis- ters of rocks, pebbles, and dust. Their controls were crude and their solid-rocket motors cruder still. However, when Kris ordered the cans to launch themselves toward the incoming aliens, only three failed to start. Two more didn’t blow their dumb cargo into an expanding cloud in the path of the raiders.

Kris edged her squadrons toward a path through the rubble, then spiked it with chaff and several dozen mines. The fleet’s track wasn’t free of rocks, but the 5-inch secondaries handled them well, leaving the main battery to load, wait . . . and cool.

The aliens found themselves in a hailstorm of crud. Their main batteries fired just as fast as they could recharge. “They’re really heating up,” Professor Labao reported. “Heating up and getting weaker. More dispersion and less power per shot.”

Kris smiled as three mines that had been missed came to life and climbed up the engines of the closest monsters.

If possible, the aliens got even more frantic as they shot the rubble from their path.

But they didn’t ignore the larger problems. Two dozen ships broke away from the six dishes and set course for the eight moons orbiting the gas giant. Three worked over each of the moons thoroughly. Anything on their surface was vaporized.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kris watched the moons being sanitized. She concentrated on the main fleet as it was battered by rocks. Their stone bow armor glowed red with the kiss of dust hitting them at several thousand kilometers an hour. Here and there, a laser blew as something more substantial got through.

Kris led the aliens through the rocky system, making a few sallies in to shoot up a ship here or there, but the aliens seemed too busy with their own stony torment to do anything to Kris. That was what Kris wanted, an enemy fixated on the problems coming at them and too much on the ropes to waste time at what was behind them.

The mother ship was not exempt from the rocks. Plenty got through the dishes ahead of her, and others had been launched from different directions. The mother ship’s lasers crisscrossed the space ahead of her, heated up, and fixated on what lay ahead.

The mother ship had passed close to the icy moon with the ocean beneath its thick ice cap. The acolytes had burned the ice, but likely only singed the top. Now the sub cut a hole through its protection using one of the old
Hornet
’s salvaged 24-inch pulse lasers and launched three Hellburners.

The Hellburners didn’t shoot hell-for-leather for the mother ship; Kris and Nelly had planned for a much more indirect approach. The missiles set the tiny chunks of superheavy neutron star on a course that would pass close by the mother ship but not hit it.

To a fire-control computer, the flying bit of flotsam was just another bit of rubble. A chunk that didn’t threaten the mother ship and could be ignored while other, more dangerous pebbles got the attention of the overheated lasers.

So the ignored Hellburners drifted through space behind the mother ship.

And suddenly came to life and slammed into a high-acceleration attack. Their specially designed engines sent them roaring toward the aliens’ vulnerable stern, with all its huge engines.

The attack started and finished in hardly more time than it took to blink, but Kris wasn’t blinking. She caught the moment when three missiles came to life.

The aliens weren’t totally mesmerized by the threat to their front. One laser winged a Hellburner as it made its killing dive. Damaged, its engines sent it off course, but it passed close enough to the mother ship to blow itself up and stove in five hundred square kilometers of laser-battery-covered hide. Possibly one of the other two was hit, but it was already committed to its final crash. Both smashed into the stern engines.

Suddenly, the gigantic alien traveling moon had no stern. Not just the engineering space, but a huge section forward of it was gone. The immense ship twisted on its long axis. Kris could only imagine how that must be hurtling people about. Secondary explosions showed along the hull, as things that were never intended to be tumbled about took exception and went to pieces.

Kris found it easy to pray that she’d never experience what she was putting those aliens through.

“Stand by, fleet,” Kris sent, “the aliens are likely to be even more irrational for the next couple of minutes.”

Kris was right.

One of the dishes broke away from the others and put on three gees, charging Kris’s fleet. One ship blew up, and another suddenly lost all way, but the rest hurtled on. Kris had her squadrons do a quick turn away, then speared the attackers with their rear batteries. Lasers cut through ships already stressed way beyond their specs. Alien ships collapsed upon themselves in rolling explosions. The other dishes watched as their sisters threw themselves on their enemy and achieved nothing.

Somewhere, some sense of proportion must have survived. Four dishes formed a square to hold Kris at bay while the other one, what was left of the lower dish, went to the aid of the stricken mother ship.

Six more Hellburners were already launched at the alien. Five were spotted and shot out of space, with their huge explosions wasted on nothing but rock dust. The sixth made it into a formation of a half dozen monsters, busy trying to figure out how to approach the twisting mother ship. The Hellburner blew one up, hurled its wreckage against two more, and sent them hurtling into the mother ship.

Still, the aliens struggled to succor their mother ship, leaving Kris to wonder if there was someone or something they held so sacred that they had to save it.

Kris had other problems. From the looks of it, some fifty of the ships she had just fought were refugees from the ship she’d fought earlier. Did she want to fight all these ships again, after they joined up with the three watchers?

Not really.

The odds were now down to just 120 of them to 38 of hers. They were the best she’d had all day. She measured the situation and found she liked it.

Quickly, she ordered three BatRons to hit the saucer at the left-hand corner of the square. BatRon 1 and the survivors of BatRon 5 with Kris’s flag division would hold off the rest.

The aliens must have been distracted. Half the dish vanished under her frigates’ fire before the survivors broke ranks and fled. But not all were running. The right-hand dish launched itself at Kris’s flank. Her two battered squadrons held the line long enough for Kris to bring the rest around to reinforce them. The second dish crumbled as half or more of its ships vanished into balls of glowing gas.

Now the other two dishes broke and ran.

Kris ordered her commodores to pursue, but cautiously.

“Damaged ships will fall out of line,” she ordered, which left a dozen frigates forming up slowly in her rear. Kris didn’t mind that; she needed ships to give the final
coup de grace
to alien ships that were damaged themselves and unable to keep up with their fleeing comrades.

The aliens were in a bad way. To flee, they had to show Kris’s ships their vulnerable engines, and they fled at a slower acceleration than Kris’s fleet pursued. Twice, fleeing alien ships turned and tried to charge Kris’s reduced battle squadrons. Twice, Kris had the fleet dance back out of the aliens’ desperate grasp.

The
Atago
approached three hulks spinning in space and prepared to give them the
coup de grace
. One came to life and shot toward her. The
Atago
and the alien died in one ball of gas.

Kris ordered her cleanup ships to be more careful. She doubted that order was necessary.

A dozen ships around the dying mother ship held station too long and were destroyed in Kris’s sweep.

None offered to surrender. None in final distress deployed lifeboats.

Kris was sickened by the slaughter, but she did not order her ships to break off. It was several hours later before the final ship, running for the jump point at 3.25 gees, crumbled under the fire of the
Haruna
. That was fitting, because Commodore Miyoshi’s BatRon 3 had led the pursuit.

“Now we are avenged,” he reported to Kris when the final ship was disposed of. “
Banzai!
May their brave spirits now rest in peace.”

Kris thanked him, but when the remnant of his squadron came to a halt before the jump point with only four ships still with him, he asked Kris if he should continue the pursuit. Kris didn’t have to think long on his question. She ordered him to stay in system.

“We don’t know what they’ve got waiting for us and we’ve just shown them how to hold one side of a jump point.”

Commodore Miyoshi did not question the order.

Indeed, Kris could hardly count on half of her ships being in any kind of fighting shape.

The jump brought a question to Kris. “Nelly, did you notice when the three alien observers ducked out?”

“They took their leave shortly after the mother ship was hit, and the general rout began, Kris. I can’t tell if they’d seen enough or whether they wanted to get a good head start on us pursuing them.”

Kris took a second look at her options of charging through that jump point; she carefully checked her board. Not one ship was undamaged. Even the
Wasp
had been lased hard during the long battle.

“Nelly, if I ordered a pursuit at 3.5 gees, could I catch them before they jumped out of the next system?”

“The next system has four jumps. It’s very unlikely you could catch all of them, assuming even a 2.5-gee flight, before they jumped out of that system. You know very well how hard a stern chase like that can be.”

As a survivor of one, Kris did. The idea of ordering her ships to stick their noses in that noose when the pursued aliens could be waiting for them with atomics gave her the shivers. “This battle is over,” she pronounced, and found it good.

She gave the order to the commodores to bring their ships back to the station at whatever acceleration they thought they could maintain.
The cost of a battle is not tallied until the last ship made port.

“Jack, I think we won,” she reported. “But I need your help. Some of our ships are dead in space. Could you get the crews of the repair ships to the head of the line for the trip to Canopus Station? We need them out here, helping our worst-hit ships limp back.”

When she got his reply of, “Thank God and the Navy. Help is on the way, hon,” longboats were already lifting from Alwa.

Help didn’t arrive soon enough. The
Warrior
of Lorna Do suffered an internal fire they couldn’t control. It reached the reactors. They succeeded in abandoning ship before it blew.

Kris had started the battle with forty-four ships. Seven had paid the ultimate price to save Alwa.

This time.

“Kris, a ship just jumped into the system,” Nelly said. Before Kris could hit the panic button, her computer added, “Its signature matches the
Endeavor
. I think Penny’s back.”

A message from Kris’s friend arrived hours later. “Kris, just a quick report. We found the alien home world! I think. More interestingly, we found a world just one jump from it that was attacked with atomics and rocks until it’s nothing but a blackened jumble. Hardly anything alive right down to bacteria and viruses. Someone seriously wailed on that planet.

“The home planet shows some serious hits from space, too. But it still has people. Primitive hunter-gatherers, not even farming. Our probes got DNA off several. They match the aliens we’re fighting, but no likely mixing for over a hundred thousand years.

“Oh, and get this, one of the badly damaged areas, little more than a glassy plain, has a pyramid right in the middle of it. We didn’t land. Your orders, remember. But I’d sure like to see what someone built in the middle of a dead zone. I’ve got a lot more. Seems like you’ve been busy. See you back at Alwa.”

Kris sent Penny a “See you at Alwa” response.

That would wait. Other things couldn’t. There were wounded. Not many. With Smart Metal
TM
, damage was either controlled or catastrophic. No, a memorial service would have to be near the top of Kris’s to-do list.

Kris tallied her losses and wondered what more might be added to them before the last ship struggled back to Canopus Station.

“And, Kris,” Nelly said, “you promised yourself and Jack some more of that honeymoon time, too. Don’t forget that. I doubt he will.”

Kris looked at what she had done and could only mutter, “I hope not. I sincerely hope not.”