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 MetalTM 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.
54
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.