“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.”
“Nothing, except that when confronted with a battle fleet, they still shot first and answered no questions,” Kris said, summing up the aliens in few words.
“I do not understand them,” Abby said, shaking her head.
“From the evidence,” the colonel went on, “I would say they are either intent on destroying any life that isn’t theirs, or there is something else a whole lot worse out here that they are afraid of, and they think we might be from it. Any of you see another way to interpret the data?”
“If there’s a bigger monster out there,” Kris said, shaking her head, “wouldn’t they be trying like we are to make a peaceful contact? Gain allies. My guess, Colonel, is that these folks like the galaxy their way and don’t want to share it with any other life-form.”
“I can’t dispute your conclusion,” the colonel said with a sad shake of his head.
“One more thought,” Penny put in, as the silence after that conclusion grew long and ponderous. “Nelly, could you play the video where we hit one of their ships but didn’t destroy it.”
The video changed to show one of their giant ships, hit hard in the engines by the Fearless and drifting. It continued to fire wildly. Almost a minute went by before its reactors blew, and the ship was vaporized.
“Notice what we didn’t see?” Penny asked.
“Survival pods,” Kris said.
“Right. No one abandoned ship. They fought it as long as they were able, then someone in command ordered selfdestruct, and the entire ship blew. They must have known for a whole minute that it was doomed, but no one abandoned ship. Furthermore, there was no reason to blow that ship. We were losing. It could have hung in there and been rescued by its own ships once the fight was over. It didn’t.”
“Dear God,” Abby said in one of her rare references to any being greater than herself. “Victory or death. If they can’t return on their shield, they will damn well blow up the shield,” she said, misquoting the Spartan mother.