The enemy’s fifteen ships were huge and overweight. They were too heavy on their feet to dance like Kris’s, but what they lacked in finesse, they more than made up for with their huge batteries.
Kris’s ships fired and reloaded. The aliens fired and fired and fired; never for a moment were they silent. Worse, most of Kris’s ships now faced two of them. Only at the head of the line was the Endeavor able to fight a single alien, applying her limited battery of six 18-inch lasers as best she could.
The big war wagons, the Hornet, Constellation, Royal, Wasp, Congress, Intrepid, and Bulwark, each divided its attention between two ships, firing bow batteries at one, aft batteries at the other. This kept each of the enemy ships shedding bow armor; rock, steel, and steam spread down the hull, dispersing their own lasers and occasionally causing damage.
That was good. The bad news was that her ships weren’t hammering through the alien armor to smash reactors inside.
The worst news was Kris’s ships were taking hits; damage was accumulating.
Kris could lose this battle if she kept fighting it this way.
“Wasp. Congress. Intrepid. Concentrate on one ship opposite you and kill it,” she ordered bluntly.
Seconds seemed to take forever, and minutes vanished in a blink. The battle went on with her ships firing, flipping, firing, recharging, then doing it over and over again.
The enemy fire hammered them. The Constellation suffered damage to a rocket motor and zigged out of her place in the line. Unfortunately, she also steadied on a course for more than two seconds.
The luckless Connie took more hits.
The Royal changed fire from the two she faced to slice at the one that had the Connie’s number. It worked . . . for a second. The enemy ship’s fire faltered and the Connie got her engines under control.
But Royal paid for saving her shipmate as her own two targets got off scot-free for a few seconds. Now her armor showed bright red on Kris’s boards.
Across from the Wasp, the enemy ship rocked as a laser slashed through its bow and cut deep inside. It hit a reactor and freed the demons inside. Gouts of plasma shot out its sides, but its huge batteries kept shooting.
Kris watched the readout on her board as the Wasp’s armor went from yellow to red.
The Wasp flipped, and the bow lasers fired. There must have been nothing left of the aliens’ bow. Six lasers cut through it and deep into its guts.
More fire blossomed within the shattered hull. But angry lasers still reached out, cutting through the thin vapor of the space around the ship. Even as the reactors lost containment and the plasma demons gobbled up the ship, it was still spitting death at the Wasp.
“Captain Drago, engage one of the ships fighting the Royal.”
“On it, Admiral.” The Wasp didn’t miss a beat as it flipped ship and began slicing into the ship that Royal had been splitting its fire with.
“Royal, the Wasp has the ship closest to it. You concentrate on the other one,” Kris ordered.
“Great, an even fight,” Royal’s skipper said, and laid into the one target.
The Intrepid did not finish off its ship in quite as spectacular fashion as the Wasp. Its target ended up rolling in space, a silenced hulk with fires gutting it from stem to stern.
Kris ordered Intrepid to turn its attention to the ships attacking the Bulwark. She did it none too soon.
The poor Endeavor was in trouble. She only had six 18-inch lasers, and her armor had been thin to begin with. She was hurting.
The Bulwark switched fire to engage the Endeavor’s ship. The forward end of Kris’s line was still two ships against four, with the Endeavor giving all that it could.
In front of Kris, her boards showed way too much red.
Suddenly, two alien ships blossomed into gas, and there were no ships facing the Royal and the Wasp.
“Royal, help the Connie. Wasp, help the Intrepid.”
Now there were four fair fights. The gallant Hornet was still being hammered by two, as was the Bulwark, but the enemy ships must have been hit just as hard as Kris’s.
The end came quickly, but none too soon. Enemy ships began to burn and explode even as the Connie, Hornet, and Bulwark limped out of the fight, reactors dead, overheated, or redlined.
When the enemy saw that the day was lost, all the ships that had fallen by the wayside began exploding, as containment fields were dropped and plasma was intentionally let loose to finish what the fight had begun.
“Not one surrender,” Kris groaned.
“They never do,” Jack agreed.
48
The battle was won, but the squadron was still in dire straits.
“Kris, did you know that many of the French and Spanish ships the British captured at the great Battle of Trafalgar were lost when a storm came up and blew them all onto the rocky shore?”
“Yes, Nelly, I seem to remember reading that somewhere.”
“We’re in danger of smashing ourselves onto the planet below.”
“Yes, I noticed, Nelly. Now shut up.”
Kris motored her high-gee station onto Captain Drago’s bridge. “Can the Wasp make orbit?”
“Yes. We’ve got one reactor off-line, but we can make it. I can’t say the same thing for the Hornet, Constellation, and Bulwark. They’re both down to a single reactor, and none of them are in good shape.”
“Could we loan them a pinnace?”
“If I do, I’m none too sure the Wasp will make orbit.”
“Penny,” Kris said, turning to her only staff officer, who had spent the battle on the Wasp’s defensive station shuttling Smart MetalTM around to cover for hits on the armor.
“Yes.”
“Can you merge the Hornet onto the Wasp? Say something like a pinnace.”
Penny was already shaking her head before Kris finished. “No, Kris. The pinnace is a subsystem of the ship. The programming to generate it is there. Remember, the hull is a special program with all sorts of security overrides. You can’t just slide it all away from, say, one beam to let another hull merge with it.”
Kris said a most unprincesslike word. But then she was an admiral today, and she’d been told that Sailors cussed.
“We’ve got ships that aren’t going to make orbit if we don’t do something. Get me a fix, not back talk.”
“Maybe we could adjust the two ship’s hulls so they could come alongside and kind of dock together.”
“Make it happen, Penny. Find a good chief and do what you have to do. Otherwise, some of our ships are going to burn up on reentry. That’s bad for our people but worse for the people on the planet we’re supposed to be saving.”