“What’s taking those aliens so long?” she muttered.
“Well, we did get here before them,” Captain Drago noted. “They don’t seem to be all that well organized.”
Then an alien ship popped into existence smack dead ahead.
Admiral Krätz’s ships were ranging the jump point, so their lasers and radar hit the ship and bounced off it. The backscatter was picked up by the passive sensors on the Wasp and the other corvettes. It told them a whole lot about the alien ship without them having to make so much as an electronic peep.
The alien ship was ten kilometers long. Its hull was elliptical, some five kilometers around at its widest point. Its skin was marked irregularly by lumps and bumps that did not proclaim their usage.
Admiral Krätz played his part superbly.
“Who are you?” he announced on the radio, pumping plenty of surprise into his voice. “And what are you doing here? Unknown ship that just jumped into this system, identify yourself,” he demanded in perfect admiral mode.
His battle line also poured on the coal and went from decelerating at half a gee toward the jump point to accelerating at three gees away from the newly arrived alien ship. There was very little way on the ships, so they started opening the range between them and the alien ship in a matter of seconds. The impact on the crew must have been brutal, but they were battleship sailors and supposed to have hair on their chests.
And they’d been warned to prepare for just that.
The corvette crews weren’t the only ones waiting in their high-gee stations for the fight to start.
The alien ship said nothing. It sent no signal at all. It did goose its engines enough to push it away from the immediate area of the jump. A half minute later, Kris saw why.
A second ship, just as huge, popped into view.
It also gave itself a bit of a power boost and was joined thirty seconds later by a third ship. While there had been utter silence from the alien ships so far, now the first ship fired off a ten-second message.
At that, the newest-arrived ship did a 180-degree flip. Which left Kris wondering again what it must be like to be crowded into one of those huge ships while it did maneuvers that knocked around the crew of ships as small as the Wasp.
Nose to the jump, the ship accelerated and disappeared back into the jump.
For the long minute while all this happened, the battle line did its best to make contact. The Greenfeld ships continued to demand communications with the stranger. The Musashi flagship sent a sequence of dots signifying the numbers from one to ten, as well as tonal sounds built around middle C. The Helvetica ships sent pi.
The aliens returned them all a disdainful silence.
Meanwhile, the battleships increased the distance between them and the aliens. They also spread out to give themselves plenty of room to maneuver if it came to a fight. The Greenfeld ships, now in the rear, began to stream ice particles and flakes of aluminum. These defensive measures were meant to throw off ranging lasers and radars as well as cause main battery lasers to bloom and weaken.
Kris hoped the signal was clear: We want to talk. But we’re not defenseless.
Nothing continued to be the main thing happening.
The lead alien ship emitted a single radio signal.
And all hell broke loose.
Scores of lasers reached out from the nodes on the alien ships. Other bumps launched wave after wave of rockets.
Krätz’s flag had been leading the squadron toward the jump. Now it was the last in line and closest to the alien ship. Scores of lasers reached out for it, found it, and slashed into it.
The Fury never had a chance. It exploded in a ball of fire that quickly vanished into the void of space.
LAUNCH TORPEDOES, Kris ordered Nelly, even as she also began to fire the Wasp’s lasers.
Faster than Kris could think, Nelly did what the two of them had planned. Eight antimatter torpedoes launched, accelerating at ten gees. Fast as they were, Nelly had taught them to jink, adjusting their spin and speed just enough to throw off a defensive-fire computer that wasn’t as smart as Nelly.
It also helped that the Wasp lay in ambush only twelve thousand klicks from the vulnerable engines of the aliens.
Nelly also brought the Wasp’s four 24-inch pulse lasers to bear on the aliens’ weapons nodes. After the laser and missile fire from the outpost, Kris had expected a dual attack, lasers and missiles. Nelly now aimed the lasers at ten-percent power, first at a laser node, then at a missile bay. Two lasers for one ship, the other two for the other.
At ten-percent power, the lasers could do a lot of destruction before their charge gave out. If the hostile ships were armored, Nelly was prepared to up the power.
They weren’t protected. Nelly’s shots wreaked havoc.
The hostiles were still fixated on the battleships. Their lasers reached out even as the surviving seven began to dodge and weave, making radical adjustments to their acceleration. Decoys and more ice, as well as the wreckage of the Fury made it harder for the aliens to aim their lasers.
Still, they were firing a lot of them. Several of the battleships took hits, but their ice armor did its job.
And the battleships were shooting back. Their 16- and 18-inch lasers slashed into the alien ships, doing their own slaughter against unarmored hulls.
Kris and Nelly had aimed four antimatter torpedoes at each of the aliens. Two each for the engines, and two others along the length of the hulls.
The aliens got one. The other seven slammed home almost in the exact same microsecond.
The alien ships blew apart like ripe melons slammed by kids with baseball bats.
One second they were there. The next moment there was little more than hot gas where they had been.
“What just happened?” Captain Drago said, his mouth hanging open.
“They can dish it out, but they can’t take it,” Kris said cautiously.
“That was just two of them. There are a lot more where they came from,” Sulwan said, and got grunts of agreement from around the bridge.
“PatRon 10, you did good, staying to your cover,” Kris said. The three ships with the Hellburners were in reserve for the mother ship. They’d sat out the fight per their orders. Still, Kris knew the temptation must have been great.
As she expected, Navy discipline held.
“Battle line, report,” Kris said next.
“Kōta here. We got some of our tail feathers singed, but we’re ready for the mother ship.”
“Feel free to select your range,” Kris told Kōta. “When the mother ship comes through, there will be no effort to establish communications. For the record, they fired first and without provocation. We will attack them immediately. PatRon 10 will launch Hellburners on sight. Expect no further orders. Longknife out.”
Again, Kris spoke to ghosts.
Now they waited.
The clock ticked off minute after minute while nothing happened.
“Does it take longer to run a four- or five-thousandkilometer-long ship through a jump point than it does to run a battleship?” the chief asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Sulwan said. “What we don’t know about jump points would fill an encyclopedia. What we do know you could write on the head of a pin.”
“Maybe they’re waiting for one of their victorious ships to come back and tell them everything is fine here,” Jack suggested on net.
“They’ll be waiting a long time for that,” Penny said.
“Stay sharp, folks,” Captain Drago announced to all hands. “This boredom could end any second now.”