Daring (34 page)

All three were shooting off every laser and rocket they had, even as they were flipping ship to fire to their rear.

Spinning like a dervish, it was amazing they could hit anything

The
Intrepid
got the first one. A laser hit blew out an engine, then two torpedoes slashed into the ship's vulnerable engines while they were still hers to hit.

The human ship tried the same treatment on the second one, but the alien managed to flip her vulnerable engines away from the incoming fire. The
Intrepid
badly damaged her, but doing that damage took time.

The third alien blew the gallant
Intrepid
to flaming gas even as two torpedoes slammed into it, leaving her little more than a wreck.

That was the last thing Kris saw before the
Wasp
shot into her jump making over seven hundred thousand kilometers an hour and spinning at forty revolutions a minute.

45

“Sulwan, take her smartly down to one gee,” Captain Drago ordered. “Get her out of this merry-go-round mode as soon as you can, but take the pressure off the reactors and engines first.”

“Engineering says we need to take the power down slowly,” Sulwan answered. “Everything is so hot down there that if we go too cold too quickly, something may snap.”

“Then you tell Engineering that it's her call. We slow down when she says we slow down. Just tell her that the bridge would like to be included in any idle rumors coming out of that den of thieves.”

“Roger, sir.”

Captain Drago now turned to his next-most-important issue. “Chief, I don't care where we are, but I sure would like to know if this system has a gas giant, a gas dwarf, an icy planet, or any other place we might find reaction mass.”

“That's what I've been hunting for, sir,” the chief answered.

“We're still in the Milky Way,” Nelly reported. “I think we jumped about a quarter of the way around the rim. We may very well have to go through Iteeche space to get back to human space, but they are both still a long way off.”

“Any activity in the system?” Kris asked.

“Other than three suns radiating their hearts away, nothing,” the chief said, then went on. “Skipper, there are three gas giants in the system. We're closest to the smallest of the three.”

“Give Sulwan the course, and let's get going.”

“Are we actually going to go cloud dancing with the
Wasp
?” the chief asked.

“It's either that or we get out and push the
Wasp
home,” Captain Drago grumbled. “I don't know about you, but I vote for refueling.”

“Can she hold together?” squeaked the chief.

“Now that she's gotten rid of most of those crates that add weight and mess up her lines, of course the old lady can. But just to be on the safe side, we'll park the rest of them in orbit and muster all hands in the hull spindle, okay, Chief? That worry you less?”

“I guess so.”

“Now, folks,” the skipper went on, “we're going to be very busy in a couple of days doing the kind of work that makes hands blister, so why don't you all take this time to catch up on your rest . . . and get out of my hair.”

Kris gave the rest of the bridge crew a good example by powering back her high-gee station, but she couldn't close her eyes. Now if an alien did shoot through the jump, there would be no more running. True, the
Wasp
would put up the best fight she could, but it would be a short one.

Kris watched her board and watched the chief watch his. Nothing showed up as the time went long. Kris found her eyes growing heavy; the battle had taken its toll.

NELLY, CAN YOU KEEP A WATCH OUT FOR HOSTILES? Kris asked.

THE CHIEF HAS HIS DA VINCI COVERING FOR HIM, TOO, Nelly answered. IF YOU FALL ASLEEP, I'LL WAKE YOU IF THINGS GET INTERESTING. GO AHEAD. THE SKIPPER SAID SLEEP. DO IT.

Apparently, Kris did manage to nap. The next thing she heard was Sulwan's announcement to all hands, “We're down to 1.5 gees, folks. You can quit lounging around in your high-gee stations.”

Kris found she needed a hand up, which the young 2/c gunner's mate who backed her up on weapons was only too ready to supply.

Kris headed for the head, which put her third in line for the facilities. A stuttering young ensign was only too willing to offer Kris her place in line, but Kris didn't need to go that desperately, quite, and she figured if she did, the story about one of those damn Longknifes pulling rank to get to the head of the head line would be around the ship before she was out of the stall.

She waited like her father had taught her to do, as any good politician's child better do.

Chow that night was steaks, more stuff scrounged from the now-long-gone restaurants from the good old days. Cookie let everyone know they better enjoy his chow while they could, it would be wormy hardtack and salt pork before this cruise was over.

Kris hoped it wouldn't be that bad, but she didn't contradict the old cook. Something told her he knew more about maintaining morale than she was likely to ever learn.

Despite the nap, Kris found herself falling asleep at the wardroom table. She managed to stumble to her quarters and fall into bed still dressed.

Exactly when the nightmares came, it was hard to tell, but she came awake screaming and covered in sweat at 0200 ship time. For the next two hours visions of ships dying held her hostage as they ran over and over in her mind's eye.

When sleep finally returned, it was hardly less exhausting than wakefulness.

46

Kris stumbled into the wardroom for early breakfast. She'd given up on risking further sleep.

The colonel and Penny were already there, and Jack and Abby straggled in before Kris had drawn little more than dry toast and coffee for herself. At the table, they stared blearyeyed at each other.

“That was one bad night,” the colonel said, taking a sip from his coffee cup.

“I don't never want to sleep through that again,” Abby agreed.

“I'm glad we're all agreed that that mean kitty should be belled,” Jack said. “Any idea how we do it?”

“Cops have incident interventions, or so my dad told me. Somebody has to use their weapon, they get sat down and talk it through. Someone gets suddenly dead, it gets more serious,” Penny finished.

“What could get more serious than this week,” Kris said, pushing her toast away. She was hungry, but she couldn't eat.

“May I suggest we ‘cry-tique' this puppy,” the colonel offered. “It might not do a whole lot, but if we can all review what we saw, squeeze it of any information we can, then develop a single narrative we can all stand by, it might help. If we can agree that this choice, bad as it was, was far and away better than the other options, we might save ourselves from running the question over and over in our minds late at night.”

He paused for another sip of steaming coffee. “I know talking over that little fight we had on Panda has helped me come to accept that the princess here simply outplayed me. Not that my employers had dealt me all that good a hand.”

“I have most of the data saved,” Nelly said. “I can project it here, or in Kris's Tac Center.”

Kris looked around the room. It was filled with other officers just as bedraggled by the night as her team. She shook her head. “Let's figure out what happened first before we subject the rest of the crew to our nightmares.”

They headed for the Tac Center.

Nelly had the main screen already showing the deployment as the monstrous mother ship made its appearance.

“Okay, Nelly, what happened to the battle line while the corvettes were all otherwise busy?”

“All those big battleships didn't fare very well,” Nelly said, and pictures began to flash on the screen. “I think we guessed right that the range of the aliens' heavy lasers was no greater than ours, but we underestimated how many of them they could fire up. The
Fury
took an entire broadside from the first two scouts and blew up before it knew what hit it.”

“We all saw that. What happened to the other battleships?” Kris asked.

“From its ambush position, the
Wasp
took out the first two alien ships, Kris, and the battle line turned away. They had opened the range to just about maximum when the mother ship came through. That big mother had all kinds of lasers, and she used them. Even though the lasers were cutting through the gases left by the
Fury
's wreck and the ice trailed by the other ships, they were hit with so many beams that it knocked five of them out of the fight one right after another. Each of them ended with an explosion when the reactors lost containment. I think those were all intentional.”

Kris nodded. She had been busy with her own shoot at the time, but the pictures Nelly flashed on the screen were the sights that had filled Kris's dreams. Somehow, she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, the destruction of the battle line. Unprocessed, it haunted her nightmares. Now, with a deep sigh, Kris forced herself to witness that gallant force's annihilation.

It wasn't fair,
she wanted to say. Men like Admiral Krätz and Admiral Kōta were fighting men. They deserved a fighting chance. What they got was laser fire so massive and wideranging that no matter how well they fought their ships, how they jinked or jumped, they were slaughtered. Kris watched the ships die, knowing that Professor mFumbo, and Judge Francine, and so many others of the people she'd shared the
Wasp
with for so long were vanishing in a blink.

She faced her dragon, fed it a tidbit, and, as best she could, made friends with it. Surely, for the rest of her life, she'd never be able to lose this beast.

“Did anyone get out of the battleships before they blew?” Penny asked after a long silence that must have been filled with quite a few silent prayers for the dead.

“There were plenty of survival pods off those five battleships,” Nelly said. “The aliens lasered every last one of them. The aliens were firing fast and wild, so there's no way to tell if they just got in the way or if fire was actually aimed at them. I've searched the visuals several times, Kris. The only survivors from the battle line were the sole Greenfeld ship and Admiral Channing's
Swiftsure
, which fled.”

“And last we saw of that pair, they had escaped out of range of the mother ship's lasers and her baby monster ships and were running for all they were worth,” the colonel added.

“With several hundred of those baby monsters in hot pursuit,” Nelly reported.

Kris thought for a moment how long and hard the pursuit of PatRon10 had been and how it dwindled down to just the
Wasp
. She found no reason to ask her team what they thought were the chances that one of the two battleships might get away.

If they made it, they'd all meet back in human space. If they didn't, maybe the survivors would find the wreckage later.

Kris shook herself, willed herself to turn away from the slaughter of the battleships and to focus on the future. “Well, at least we've found a way to fight them. We can turn the jump points into a death trap for them.”

“Don't be too sure of that,” the colonel said. “I've been thinking about what we did to them and what we saw of them. I had my computer, Don Quixote, look up a few things about warfare back in the bad old days before atomics were fully outlawed. I don't much care for what I found.”

“I know you're going to tell us,” Kris said. “How bad is it?”

“There's an ugly thing called electromagnetic pulse. It seems that the explosion of a nuke throws out a radiation pulse, especially if it's done in space. It fries all the local electronics unless they've been hardened.”

“That's a rude thing to do,” Nelly said.

“Hardened?” Kris echoed. “Nelly, do you know anything about this ‘hardened' thing?”

“Don Quixote warned us all about it when he found it out for the colonel, Kris. If they'd sent one of their bombs through the jump first and blown it up, it likely would have converted all our computers and other electronic stuff to paperweights in one big flash. I do not like this pulse thing. When we get back, we need to search the old archives very thoroughly and find out how to do this hardening thing. There's nothing about it in any of our accessible data.”

That didn't sound good, but Kris did not allow it to surprise her. That was what happened in a war. You surprised them with things like Hellburners, and they surprised you with things they had up their own sleeves.

Part of what made war so much of a bleeding hell was the bleeding surprises.

“Anyone have a guess as to how badly we hurt them?” Kris asked.

“The mother ship knows it's been in a fight,” Nelly said. “We destroyed at least the rear third of the ship and did major damage as far as amidships. They were still able to power up their lasers and direct them from the forward half of the ship, but that ship was dead in space when we left it. In addition, the hulk had taken all kinds of twists and torque. The shock damage to its machinery in the forward half must be horrible.” Nelly paused. “Casualties among the crew must start at a third and go up from there.”

“However large that is,” Kris said, thinking about all the people crammed into the small ship that first attacked them.

“Likely,” the colonel said, “from what we've seen of the way they live, several billion dead. Maybe tens of billions.”

“Which might explain why they showed no interest in taking any prisoners,” Penny said.

“But all of this is just guesswork,” Jack pointed out. “We went in there knowing almost nothing about our alien enemy, and we got out of there, as best we could, knowing nothing more about them.”