Commander (17 page)

Our engine room staff complained mightily at first about our continuous course changes, especially when they grew larger and larger in scope as we closed on our enemy. It was sheer misery for them; the rods were heating up, their readings were growing erratic as a result, and the system was generally growing less and less stable. I knew from personal experience what it must be like, and grew a bit irritable on the bridge out of pure sympathy. They took it in good spirits, however, once I explained what the game was and why I was abusing them so. Our engines were tame, simple beasts compared to the complex (not to mention defective) high-output system our enemy was burdened with—what sorts of flow-spikes and temperatures they might be experiencing, I didn’t even want to think about. On the other hand, the Imperials had decades of experience in dealing with the balky things; perhaps they might actually be well-prepared for this sort of situation? I was no more certain about what was going on in their engine room than I was about how many workable guns
November
still possessed. All I could do was assume the worst, sip at my tea, and make them keep turning. In any sort of contest or conflict it’s always best to hold the initiative; to be able through one’s own actions to control what
must
come next.
Richard
had managed this trick through almost her entire cruise by virtue of being effectively invisible. Now, however, that advantage had been cast away. It was up to the Imperials now to step forward and execute, to perform their mission and blot us out of the sky. In the absence of the initiative, the next best thing a commander can do is to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy to accomplish his own goals. To make them execute under the most difficult conditions possible, in other words, and not give the enemy a single inch for free. It’s an inferior strategy—almost always a losing one, in fact. But making things difficult was all that
Richard
could do, so I was determined to keep straining
Whiff of Grape
’s powerplant right up until the bitter end. After all, sometimes the Imperials tripped over their own feet just like everyone else.

In the end it came to blows. She hit us twice fair and square, the medium-caliber weapons rending great gaping holes in our unprotected hull. One of the rounds struck a hold we’d filled with tungsten from the mine we’d robbed. It was lucky for us that this was so; the metal ingots served as a very satisfactory armor-substitute and prevented further damage. The other, however, struck us directly on Mount Three and not only silenced that weapon, but overloaded the main trunks and shut down the rest as well. And just that quickly, we lost the ability to fire back.

“Three hours, sir!” engineering reported. “That’s for One and Two. Three is toast, and the whole crew’s lost as well.”

I slowly closed my eyes. I knew Three’s crew well—every single face. They invariably won all the intraship gunnery contests, and so even before taking command I’d often had reason to stop in and congratulate them during inspections and such. I’d made smalltalk with them as well on these occasions. And now they… They…

I knew
exactly
what a gun crew looked like after a direct hit. All too well, I knew. And now all we had left online were the remaining pair of torps, which were short-range weapons indeed. “Come about, Mr. Wu,” I began, working out the angles in my mind. We’d close as best we could, then fire whatever we had left if we lived long enough. “To course—”

But I never completed the order. Because instead
Whiff of Grape
stopped practically dead in her tracks. The vessel’s Field was still intact, rendering her inertialess. But her propulsion systems had finally failed under the stress of combat after so much previous abuse, leaving her to drift along the leftover vector she still carried from when her Field was last energized. Which amounted to practically nothing. And best of all, the expected next salvo never came. Nor the one after that. The continuity between her cores had broken down. It was the least destructive systemic catastrophe that could befall an engine room, but getting her underway again would take hours nonetheless.

“Run for it!” I ordered instantly. “Make for Point Eight, now! Flank speed plus!”

“You’re not going to finish her, sir?” Josiah asked.

“Let her finish herself,” I replied. “That’s ship’s a deathtrap! Besides, we have bigger fish to fry and only so long to do it in.”

33

Brave words aside, the real reason I let
Whiff of Grape
live was that we had only two torpedoes left and no other functional weapons available. A sharp stick in the hand is always worth several dozen blasters back home in the closet. While engineering had promised me four of our six main guns back within a few hours, I’d turned far too many wrenches myself to bet everyone’s lives on the estimate. A thousand things could go wrong with the repair— further undetected damage might be found, for example, or perhaps we’d experience an unforeseen software glitch. Yes, the ship’s engineering staff always made their best estimate. But it was just that—an estimate. Only fools take estimates as gospel; it’s in the very nature of things that more can go wrong than right. Someday a self-appointed expert on naval strategy was certain to take me to task for letting the light cruiser go; I could almost picture the smug head-shaking as he typed up his disapproving article. But this way everyone aboard
Richard
had a much better chance to live to read it.

The only thing I could see that we really had going for us was the “tightness” of the system. Yes, we were going to have to sail right past our remaining enemies, practically at point-blank range. But just beyond was Point Eight, which led not to more Imperial space but rather to New Geneva, the heavily-armed neutral trading-station that lay just between Imperious and Earth Secundus. The Genevans would not—could not!—tolerate enemy warships in her space.  Indeed, the whole establishment was an artificial construct designed specifically to force the two eternally-warring parties to fight elsewhere. If we could but Jump through, the Genevans would forcibly intern us. Which also implied that they’d defend us, if they had to. The responsibilities and obligations of neutrals in time of war had been clearly defined for centuries, and for once the rules actually made sense in the real world.

I kept us at full speed despite the fact that
Whiff of Grape
still showed no signs of life; while I expected her to be
hors de combat
for hours, who could know for sure that she might not surprise us? “That destroyer is certainly sticking close to home,” I observed eventually, referring to the cruiser’s single escort. It was the last fully-functional warship between us and safety.

“Yes, sir,” First Officer Parker replied. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. Why isn’t she charging in, so that she can engage us for a longer period of time?”

I scowled into my empty cup. My tactical choices were simple, but the enemy’s remained complex. Nothing they could ever do would give them their spanking-new battlecruiser back, or spare them the ignominy of having their capital world’s soil violated. It was too late for all that now. All they could hope for at this point was to kill us in revenge and parade the trophies, which was at most a miserable second-best. By any reasonable standard I’d already won my engagement a dozen times over—
Richard
’s loss would be as nothing to the harm we’d already done. The enemy therefore had little left to fear from us at this point. Yet, their actions seemed overly-cautious to me.

Did they still have something
else
to lose, that I’d somehow overlooked?

“Cruisers don’t grow on trees,” I observed. “Especially the heavy variety.”

“Indeed, sir,” Parker agreed, nodding at the screen. “Look at how much effort they’ve put into salvaging that one! I’ve never seen such a patched-up Field—see all the superconducting tarps thrown over the shrapnel holes? And… I bet it took weeks to get her powerplant up and running again. Maybe even a couple-three months.”

“At least,” Uncle Robert agreed.

I wriggled my nose in concentration. Indeed, they were just barely staggering along with a Field of such inefficient geometry that I was surprised it functioned at all. Then another thought struck me. “Her bridge is slagged. I bet her captain was killed in action.”

“Almost certainly,” my uncle agreed. “All the rest of her line-of-command officers, too. The butcher’s bill must be downright awful. Most likely they towed her into a portable dock to render her at least marginally spaceworthy, then sent her home with a maintenance-heavy scratch-crew.” His eyes widened. “In fact…”

“Yeah,” I agreed, wishing for more tea. I didn’t know how the Imperial Navy did things, but in ours a ship as damaged as
The Seventh
of November
would’ve been stripped of all its most highly-skilled ratings before being sent home for such extensive repairs. Experienced men were always in terrible demand at the front during wartime. Not the engineering staff—they’d be needed more than ever. But the signalmen, medical people, any surviving line officers, the marines and gunners… All would be welcomed with open arms into the rest of the ever-hungry fleet. There probably weren’t more than a handful of true fighting men left aboard, under the command of either a salvage specialist or, more likely, an otherwise unemployable nobleman with a long-since-demonstrated inability to cut the mustard where it really mattered.

What I was looking at, in other words, wasn’t the menacing if badly damaged existential threat I’d been so worried about having to face, a ship that if in good health might’ve been of perhaps ten times
Richard’
s force. Rather, what now lay revealed before clearer eyes was just another target of considerable value, nearly as inert and helpless as the incomplete battlecruiser. And the reason the destroyer was displaying such a lack of aggressiveness was because her captain had known the truth all along, and was terrified we’d see through the false front!

I toyed with the empty teacup a while longer. The last time I’d pushed the limits of sanity, I reminded myself, I’d gotten myself shot, a lot of civilian bunnies killed, and put
Richard
herself at risk due to falling behind schedule. And yet… This was war, and the day I quit pushing the limits was the day I’d serve His Majesty best by tendering my resignation. War is risk and risk is war. Anyone who ever lost sight of that equation was better off staying home by the nice warm fire. “Call Sergeant Petanovich to the bridge,” I ordered eventually. “I think I’ve got one last job for him.”

34

Destroyers are designed with nothing but all-out attack in mind. Certainly, they’re employed in strategically defensive roles far more often than offensive ones. But these ships best accomplish even defensive missions via immoderate aggression on the tactical scale. A destroyer’s function is to charge in and attack regardless of the odds, and the finest commanders of these vessels tend to be young and have dangerously-exciting hobbies like parasailing into hurricanes on gas giants or setting new depth records for scuba-diving in lakes of liquid nitrogen. A destroyer’s guns were only of secondary importance; they provided just enough firepower to drive away even smaller and faster vessels or shoot up either merchantmen or each other at need. But even though most “tin cans” go through their entire careers without ever actually firing them, their signature weapon is the torpedo. These are capable of dealing sledgehammer blows and offer a mortal threat to any ship in the sky. Their mere existence is why a destroyer is always a threat to be taken seriously no matter what the circumstances. These weapons were of very short range, however, and didn’t move much faster than their potential targets. So a destroyer captain’s dream, his entire raison de etre, is to rush in close and then blast away with all tubes. Everything about his ship is designed to optimize his chances of success at this one maneuver—it's why speed is paramount over armor, for example, and why just-enough conventional firepower is provided and no more.

But, of course, actual wars aren’t fought in theoretical universes. Though designed originally to mass together and make swarm-attacks on line-of-battleships, destroyers had proven to be just the thing to take care of dozens of other far more mundane tasks as well. Destroyers made near-perfect escorts, for example, because they were both cheap and potentially powerful threats. They also made pretty decent reconnaissance ships; though specialized higher-performance spacecraft were more effective, they also cost a lot more to build and operate as well, and were useless for anything else. In their way, destroyers had come to fill a similar niche to that which
Richard
herself had been intended for—general fleet workhorses suitable for carrying out a dozen inglamorous routine missions as well as the primary one of directly attacking heavies. Because of this both the Royal and Imperial fleets contained dozens of the things. Indeed,
The
Seventh of November
’s escort’s actual name,
I-234
, spoke volumes about the commonness of the breed.  

So… Where was all the aggression, I kept asking myself as we closed in hour after hour and the Imperials remained clustered up tight next to each other. Where was the reckless charge, the bold head-on assault that was his best chance of success? He couldn’t stand up to our guns at long range, or at least not the six he’d seen in action against
Whiff of Grape
. I doubted that anyone else realized that we’d permanently lost a turret; the hit was so clean that almost no external damage was visible. While our weaponry was still under repair—and already overdue to be back online!—we’d long since swung all the turrets including the damaged one into a nice, spacemanlike fore-and-aft configuration that revealed nothing about the massive destruction inside the rearmost one. So, what was he waiting for? While I had good grounds for assuming that the cruiser-captain wasn’t an effective combat leader, I’d be a fool to imagine the same of the destroyer’s chief officer.