Rebel (26 page)

The admiral was most disappointingly quiet.

“What are the chances we could hold the jump point?” Vicky asked.

“During the Unity War and the following Iteeche War, no one ever tried to defend a jump point,” Admiral von Mittleburg said, no doubt saving his superior from having to cross swords with Vicky.

“Yes,” Vicky said. “Admiral Krätz explained to me that no one wanted to float around the jump point with no gravity.”

Both admirals nodded at her most sagaciously.

“Of course, when he was gallivanting around in the train of Kris Longknife, it involved a lot of waiting for her in orbit with no station and no gravity. Admiral Krätz came up with an idea for hitching two of his battleships together with a long beam and letting them swing themselves around each other. The feeling of down wasn’t perfect, but it beat all to hell no down at all.”

The two admirals exchanged glances. Neither of them was willing to say the obvious.
Why didn’t I think of that?

Then von Mittleburg shook his head. “That might be a good idea once things settle down, but for now, with those battleships liable to come through the jump at any time, it would not be a good idea for us to go charging off. There’s a reason why most battles in space take place around or near a planet.”

“We could find ourselves just getting to the flip point on our way to the jump, and they’d come through,” Captain Bolesław said. “It would be a mess, what with us breaking for the jump as they started accelerating toward St. Petersburg.”

“We’d be in worse shape than that idiot polo player I teased into charging us,” Vicky agreed. “Okay, we don’t go chasing off to the jump. But we don’t want to end up waiting here in orbit for them. Nine battleships have to be stopped well away from Mannie’s farmhands and fab workers.”

“Yes, definitely, as well as my dear
grandmadre
. She wants to go shopping with you.”

“Then we definitely make sure those wonderful dress shops are not burned to dust by any nasty lasers.”

“Nasty, nasty lasers,” Mannie agreed.

“So, Captain Bolesław, is there any planet between here and the jump we could swing around and use to put us on a parallel course so we could slug it out with the Empress’s battleships?”

Her skipper was shaking his head before Vicky finished. “None close by,” he said.

Vicky frowned in thought. “I know you used a high elliptical orbit both times you had to fight an incoming force,” she said slowly to Captain Bolesław. “Didn’t Kris Longknife once use a swing around a moon to get her more fighting time?”

“I haven’t read too much about her fighting tactics,”
Retribution
’s skipper said.

“I’ve spent a lot of time studying her file, both on my own and with Admiral Krätz’s assistance,” Vicky admitted.

“You didn’t seem to think much of her after she got back from losing Admiral Krätz’s battle squadron,” Admiral Lüth said. “Not that I saw your interview. I just heard about it.”

For someone who claimed to have only heard about Vicky’s time on the news, his eyes quickly slid from her face to her chest and what she’d showed off to get her extra time on the air.

Vicky chose not to contradict the admiral, though now, every man in the meeting seemed to have developed an intense interest in the overhead.

“I learned a lot from Kris Longknife,” Vicky said. “I wonder where she is now.”

Mr. Smith cleared his throat. “She was not at Wardhaven when I was last there with your shopping list. I understand she
ended up at Musashi for some reason. They put her on trial for starting the war with the alien space raiders without getting proper permission or something.”

Vicky snorted. “As if she had anyone around who might have given her ‘proper’ permission.”

“That seemed to be the sticking point,” Mr. Smith agreed. “They could neither find her guilty nor innocent.”

“Who could ever find that woman innocent?” Admiral Lüth agreed. “She killed your brother.”

“I’m finding that harder and harder to believe,” Vicky said. That got her both admirals’ attention. “Admiral Krätz was in that battle and agreed with Kris Longknife that whoever sabotaged Hank’s survival pod was who killed him. Now I find myself wondering if the Empress and her family’s grab for power can be traced back to my brother’s death.”

“You think so?” Admiral von Mittleburg asked.

“No way to prove it, but the coincidences are piling up, aren’t they?”

That left the two admirals deep in thought.

“Again speaking of Kris Longknife,” Vicky went on, “where is she now?”

Mr. Smith seemed to wait for the admirals to say something before going on. “There were rumors of her getting a ship from Musashi, one of the new, Smart Metal frigates. After that, she seems to have disappeared. No.” The spy snapped his fingers. “King Raymond later took off for the other side of the galaxy. You know that planet you were fighting to save?”

“Yes.” Vicky nodded. “I always wondered what happened to it.”

“It seems that King Raymond’s long-lost wife was out there. He went off to bring her back home and came back rather empty-handed.”

“It would take a Longknife to tell a Longknife no,” Admiral Lüth muttered.

“Did Kris come back with him?” Vicky asked.

“Not that I heard,” Mr. Smith said.

“There are reports of a lot of new Navy construction,” Admiral von Mittleburg said. “Not just in the US but also in clusters associated with them. Why are you asking, Your Grace?”

“I’m not sure,” Vicky said slowly. “It seems that if we are ever
to find a way to end this civil war short of mutual annihilation, we may need the good offices of some middle person. I’d trust Kris Longknife. She saved my dad’s life once. I doubt he’d trust anyone with his fate, but if he would, it could be Kris Longknife.”

“And your stepmother?” the spy asked.

“Not a chance,” she said.

The looks the men gave her pretty much confirmed that.

“Okay, so we shelve that idea. Now, we’ve got a planet of our own to save.”

The admirals looked at Vicky. Vicky looked at them.

When no one opened his mouth, Vicky opened hers. “I agree we can’t send a battle fleet out to guard the jump, what with the Butcher of Dresden likely to come through at any moment. However, if we sent two destroyers out there with a long beam and orders to zap anything that came through the jump to take a peek at our side, it might equalize the challenges of our situation. We don’t dare stick our necks through the jump to get a look at their forces. If they send anything through smaller than a destroyer, it won’t live long enough to report back. Any problems with that?”

The admirals eyed Vicky like she had grown a second head. Then Admiral von Mittleburg spent a long moment gnawing his lower lip. “That might just work,” he finally said.

“A pair of cruisers might be better,” Vice Admiral Lüth said.

Five minutes later, they had agreed on a pair of old light cruisers.

“Now, what else can we come up with?” Vicky asked.

CHAPTER 38

A
N
hour later, they were no further along than when they had started. They hadn’t been able to think of anything better for when the Empress’s forces came than to have Vice Admiral Lüth lead the battle fleet in a loop out and around St. Petersburg’s one moon. Even that assumed the Butcher didn’t wait too long, and the moon moved out of place. A high loop around the moon would give them a longer running gunfight than they’d get from just a loop out from St. Petersburg. The problem remained that it would be a
long
, running gunfight with a lot of blood and guts all over the place.

“Kris Longknife says the only fair fight is the one you lose,” Vicky said. “What can we do to make this an unfair fight for them?”

That drew her blank stares from the Navy officers.

“What can we do to get ourselves an advantage?” she clarified.

Still no response.

Vicky ran a worried hand through her hair. “I seem to recall both Admiral Krätz and Kris Longknife saying something about water making a better reaction mass than just free hydrogen.”

“Yes,” Captain Bolesław said. “The weight of a water molecule is nine times heavier than a pair of hydrogen atoms. If you heat both of them to the same temperature, you’ll get nine times the specific impulse, but it likely won’t get you any real value.”

“It won’t?” Vicky said. “They seemed to think it was worth the effort.”

“It might be,” Admiral von Mittleburg said, “if you could make use of the extra reaction mass, but our ships can’t take much more than two, maybe two-point-five gees without breaking something.” Admiral Lüth nodded, but seemed distinctly uninterested in crossing his Grand Duchess again.

Vicky knew where she wanted to take this, but she kept it slow for the seniors present.

“Agreed,” she said, “assuming we don’t want to bend or break anything, but what if we were moving greater weight around? Might we benefit from heavier reaction mass if it was moving a heavier ship, just at the same acceleration?”

“Why would we want heavier ships?” Admiral Lüth couldn’t avoid jumping at that one.

“What if we added a half meter or more of ice armor to our battleships?” Vicky said, as offhandedly as she could manage.

The admirals did not jump down her junior officer’s throat, so she continued.

“We’ve got a shipyard here, and the planet below gives us access to water to thicken our ice armor and stoke our tanks with heavier reaction mass. They’re likely refueling on the other side of that jump from a gas giant. An ice giant if we aren’t lucky. Either way, they’ve got the armor they came with and we just peeled that armor off two 18-inch battleships and blew them into gas clouds.”

“We do have the LCAs from the Marine transports,” Admiral von Mittleburg said slowly.

“We’re holding on to them to move cargo down from the station,” Mannie filled in. “Other than bringing up some of the spare parts you need, Your Grace, we could have them lugging water up on the return trip.”

“And there are four slips that could be used to thicken the ice coatings on the eight battleships we have,” von Mittleburg agreed.

“We have eight battleships?” Vicky asked.

“Ten, if we include the two dinged-up ones you brought back,” the station commander corrected. “I was down to just the
Stalker
and the
Scourge
before Albert here showed up with his six homeless waifs.”

“And glad you were to see me,” Admiral Lüth said, not quite elbowing von Mittleburg in the ribs. “Still, Your Grace, battleships are designed to support their armor under acceleration. You add too much weight to a hull, and you could collapse a strength member. Hell, you increase the weight of a turret, and the machinery for rotating the lasers and ice could cave in on you.”

“Yes,” Vicky said, “so we look carefully at how much we add, and maybe go a bit easy on how much we honk these ships around. Captain Bolesław, did you notice that the Empress’s ships attacking us seemed to have a harder time maintaining their acceleration than we did?”

“They most definitely were being delicate with their acceleration and deceleration, and at least one destroyer and one battleship couldn’t hold to the fleet acceleration we had our freighters doing.”

Admiral Lüth shook his head. “The Navy has spent too much time tied up at the pier. But what else could we do, what with the stingy maintenance budgets we got.”

“And the need to use Sailors to bash civilians’ heads,” Admiral von Mittleburg added.

“That, too,” Vicky said. “So, do we have anyone to do the calculations as to how much armor we can pile onto our battleships and how quickly we can get it done?”

Mannie coughed softly. “We sent out feelers for anyone who might be interested in coming to St. Petersburg to work in our shipyards.”

“You mean everyone wasn’t just totally scared to do anything that might displease my darling stepmommy?” Vicky said, batting her eyelashes at Mannie.

“Sad to say, we found quite a few,” Mannie said. “That, and a couple of retired officers from the Navy colonies who were only too willing to get back in harness. Admiral?”

Von Mittleburg nodded. “I was wondering how it happened that so many yard types were dropping by and offering me a hand. So it wasn’t just my sparkling personality?”

“No doubt it was,” Admiral Lüth said dryly.

“I’ll have my flag secretary call a meeting in my office in half an hour,” von Mittleburg said, talking into his commlink. “That should give us a better idea of how much extra armor we can pile onto our war wagons.”

“There’s another matter,” Captain Bolesław said. “My Gunnery Officer thinks he can tighten up our gun cradles so that we can fire more focused salvos. Hitting the Empress’s battleships nearly in the same place destroyed the
Empress’s Vengeance
. It would have been nicer if we could have gotten the
Revenge
just as quickly.”

“I see the agenda for my meeting growing,” said Admiral von Mittleburg.

“And if you don’t mind, while you’re doing that, Admiral,” Mannie said, “I would like to squire our Grand Duchess downside to receive the thanks of a happy and bustling economy. Oh, and she might want to visit some of the fabrication plants that will be putting together what you need to fix up her ride.”

“Already?” Vicky asked.

Mannie eyed his wrist unit. “I understand they have already made scans of the turrets that are still working and have transmitted them down to the fabs at Sevastopol and St. Pete. They’ll be laying down the base parts tomorrow and printing the fine points as quickly as they can make it all happen. You did say there were some very bad people on the other side of the jump into our fair system, didn’t you?”

“I said it, and I saw them,” Vicky said.

“Then I know some people who very much want to wine and dine you tonight, maybe even fill up your dance card.”