Trade-offs, trade-offs. This was a surprise Kris had ex-
pected.
Then they did the unexpected.
The first seven upped their deceleration, which put the other fifteen rapidly climbing up their rear. However, as the next eight overtook the vanguard, they slewed aside to take station on their far side. Then they also upped their deceleration. The last seven ships slid in smoothly on the side closest to Kris’s squadron. That done, they all resumed their previously scheduled fleet deceleration.
Instead of facing a long line whose T Kris could easily cross, she now was confronted by three much shorter lines. One was a few hundred kilometers closer to her, but the other two were in a perfect position to flank Kris if she tried to have her squadron take that line on alone.
“They’ve formed squadrons,” Kris said softly to herself.
“I bet you didn’t see that coming,” Jack said.
“Actually, I kind of expected something like that,” Kris said, still half talking to herself. “I was thinking they’d form a dish like in the last fight, but three lines have advantages as well.”
“They aren’t dumb,” Jack said.
“I never said they were.”
“No, I don’t believe you have,” he agreed. “So, now what?”
“We use our 20-inch lasers for best effect, and boy, do I wish I’d brought along just two of those 22-inch war wagons.”
“This will be a slugfest,” Jack concluded.
“It’s looking that way. They outweigh us. If they manage to come alongside and board, they’ll bury us in bodies. However, we have the reach, and, unless I’m mistaken, they don’t have any armor.”
“Kris, Chief Beni has been doing his best to get a solid-mass determination on those ships,” Nelly said.
“And they do have armor,” Jack said softly.
“The ships are massing more than they did the last time we met them. Every one of them is different, but there seems to be between forty-five and seventy-five thousand tons more ship there.”
“Nelly, how many extra tons were on the ship we shot up at the Hornet’s arsenic planet?”
“I estimate there were fifteen to twenty thousand tons of rock, Kris, that we had to punch through before we could hit the soft, chewy center. There is likely double or more armor on these hulls.”
“So it’s maybe twice as bad as the last time?”
“It looks that way, Kris.”
“Pass that word to all the captains with my compliments and suggest that they plan on hitting the same place on their target’s hull as hard as they can, as often as they can.”
“I’ve sent it, Kris.”
They were at three hundred thousand klicks and closing when Kris ordered the fleet to set Condition Charlie. She saw no reason to let the aliens know any sooner than she had to that their targets could get smaller. The former mutineers pitched in, manning the Wasp’s extra reactor. Those who weren’t engineers mustered with the Marines to repel boarders.
Sampson stayed sedated in the brig. It was tiny, but it was locked.
Jacques and Amanda joined the twenty alien recruits in a space reserved for them at the center of gravity for the Wasp. Hopefully, that would make the jinking around easier on them.
And hopefully, Jacques could find words to explain what was going on.
Kris had so wanted to talk to an alien, ever since the first time they gave her a choice between killing them or dying herself. Now she had her own pet aliens, and she hadn’t found a second to talk to them.
The problem, of course, was that these aliens were of a different tribe from the strong, silent types that wanted her dead.
Oh, and the tame aliens didn’t have all that big of a vocabulary.
Someday, the world would have to present Kris with a few easy problems.
Someday, hopefully, sooner rather than later.
Physics ruled space warfare. In ancient days, ship battles had depended on the wind. No wind, no battle. Too much wind, and the ships might find themselves struggling to stay afloat more than fight each other.
Space battles were very much like that, only it was gravity that ruled the roost. And while gravity might be more constant than the wind, it was no less a master of the battle.
The alien warships were decelerating, aiming to make orbit around the cat world. What they’d do there was an exercise best left to horror.
Kris was on a course to intercept them.
Gravity ruled both their vectors.
But laser power might very well trump gravity’s vectors.
At 160,000 klicks, Kris ordered all her ships to Condition Zed. Thirty seconds later, she ordered them to cut deceleration and face the enemy. Seven of her ships lashed out at the closest seven enemy ships with six 20-inch lasers each.
No surprise, the targets shed rock and droplets of steel. Some shot off steam as ice burned away to gas. The targets got fuzzy but showed no serious damage.
Kris flipped ships, paused for a second or two for the gunk to fall behind, then hit them with the aft batteries.
The targets fizzed as ice and rock armor ablated away under the lasers’ probing, but again, no explosions.
Kris brought her squadron back on course and returned to a deceleration burn as her lasers recharged.
Twenty seconds later, she repeated the double volley.
Twenty seconds after that, she did it again.
This time, the closest enemy squadron showed damage from the pounding. One blew up, and two staggered out of line, their engines firing in directions they weren’t intended to.
The other four turned bow on to Kris’s squadron and charged.
Above and below those surviving four, the other two lines of ships did the same. Their commander was now much less concerned with making orbit than getting in range of Kris’s ships and slamming them with their main battery of more lasers than Kris had ever had a chance to count.
Maybe whoever was giving the orders didn’t care if they made orbit so long as they destroyed Kris’s ships.
Who’s your Enlightened One?
Kris ignored the question and ordered her ships to flip. They began jinking and danced away.
Now Kris was between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, the moon she’d been using to swing above now was coming up fast below her. The enemy, desperate to get in range to use their own huge battery of lasers, were coming up nearly as fast behind her.
Kris’s ships emptied their now-recharged aft batteries. One more ship blew up, but the surviving close-in three absorbed their hits and kept coming.
The Hornet at one end and the Bulwark at the other end of Kris’s line took on the new ships coming in range. They fired . . . and got only fuzz to show for their shooting.
Kris flipped ships again. Her middle three ships finished off the first squadron they’d attacked. Two ships blew, and the last lost all acceleration and just drifted in space.
However, the other two squadrons had closed the range as Kris’s ships exterminated their fellows. Enemy lasers began to crisscross the space around her ships. In her flag plot, boards began to slip from green to yellow as ships reported their armor taking hits.
Reaction mass and water bled out of the damage into space to disrupt the lasers just as the enemy’s rock, ice, and steel armor had splayed out Kris’s lasers.
It was the same for both sides, except that while the aliens’ gunk quickly fell behind the decelerating ships, Kris’s bleed of ice and hydrogen fouled the middle ground between them for a few critical moments more.
Now, fifteen alien ships charged in to narrow the range for their four to five hundred tons of angry, suicidal commitment to Kris’s doom.
“Kris, we will miss the moon,” Nelly reported, “But if we keep this up, we’ll have trouble making a good orbit around the planet.”
“We’ll worry about that later, Nelly.”
Kris studied her boards. Now her ships were slugging it out as best as they could, dancing the crazy jig that never kept them on a straight course for more than two seconds. A dance that dodged the aimed enemy fire.