Loralynn Kennakris 3: Asylum (28 page)

“Oh hell yeah, ma’am. Just another great day in the Corps!”

“We got the central junction secure; plasma down. Whatcha got?”

“They’ve pulled back to main control—got a bit of crossfire up there.”

“Can you take it now that the plasma’s down?”

“Not until we can cut through these bulkheads and get behind ‘em.” A pause filled with explosions, gunfire, and a section leader’s two-bad-word report. “Hanger deck’s clear though. The kids are holding it and Tallmadge’s got bunch of bad boys pinned back aft. You want I should call up Tallmadge and go all in here? The kids can hold that side.”

Lewis checked her display. As Troy said, the monitor’s crew, except those Tallmadge had pinned down and the turret crews, was organizing their defense forward. She could get to the port-side magazines, but not any of the control spaces without a hard fight and they didn’t have time for a hard fight—not with Adenauer on the way. The monitor’s crew knew that: they’d pulled back because all they had to do was stall things until CENFOR arrived. However, that left only a small detachment in engineering—to her left and down a couple of levels—and they were cut off from the rest of the defenders. And they may not have realized yet how vulnerable their magazines were . . .

“Negative, Troy. We got gatecrashers inbound—”

“Heavy, Ma’am?”

“It’s CENFOR.”

“That would be heavy.”

“Abso-fuckin-lutely. Hold the hanger deck and keep those people pinned down there until you hear
Have Joy
or Henderson gives you the word. I’m sending Drake to you with his first and third sections at the double. I’m gonna go after engineering. Lewis out.”

“Roger that, Captain. Anders out.”

Ordering Drake off with his two sections, Min motioned over Henderson and Ulloa. “Matt, I’m taking one of your sections and one of Drake’s to hit engineering—we can take out all their power and propulsion there and leave them on batteries. That should give the Old Man the time he needs.”

The two men nodded. Local power would only run the point-defense systems. The missile launchers and huge main turrets needed prime power. No way the Doms got that restored for half a day, at least.

She put a hand on each man’s shoulder. “So keep up damndest the racket you can here as if we’re trying to break through to the weapons control spaces. Matt, plant all the demolition charges we have left as close to the magazines as you can get ‘em—fifteen-minute dead-man fuses. When you hear
Have Joy
from me, fall back on the hanger with Anders and prepare to withdraw—I’ll follow in five minutes. If I don’t, take our people and go. If you don’t hear
Have Joy
in ten minutes, start the fuse timers, get our people clear”—she flexed her hands with a grip that could be felt even through combat armor—“and blow those fucking magazines.”

Huron and Kris swung their fighters clear of the fray, a pure out-of-plane maneuver their adversaries did not choose to follow. They were both breathing hard but evenly, their birds were scorched a little here and there, but so far their only real worry was their dwindling store of ammunition and Huron’s remaining reaction mass. The Doms appeared to be worried about a lot more than that.

They still didn’t seem to comprehend what had hit them, and had kept hitting them, with such swift, brutal efficiency. So nonplussed were the Doms, they’d formed their remaining fighters—still a large number—into a tight globe. The formation went by several names, including the odd term luffberry (for reasons no one knew), but CEF pilots called it a ‘bait ball’. Despite the dismissive name, a bait ball was not easy to crack. It provided excellent missile defense, as the fields of fire of the fighters’ anti-missile chain guns overlapped in close to an ideal manner, and any attack against the formation was perforce head-on, because trying to get on an enemy’s tail meant exposing one’s own to his fellows following behind. So the key to attacking a bait ball was speed: repeated slashing runs that chipped away until enough fighters were damaged that the precise station keeping the formation demanded could no longer be maintained.

It called for a great deal of nerve and even better reflexes, and although he and Kris had a superabundance of both those qualities, Huron had another idea. At these odds, attacking ‘by the book’ was pointless: as soon as the Doms got their shit together, they’d break out and then it was game over. It was necessary to keep them perplexed about who they were tangling with, and baffled as how to react. That meant reducing things to a perfect free-for-all, and the great weakness of a bait ball was that its stringent requirements made the whole thing brittle. So he didn’t intend to chip away at the formation—he meant to shatter it.

Keying up Kris on the burst link, Huron said, “I’m gonna see if I can pop this thing. Stay up here and anyone breaks, hammer ‘em. Careful with your missiles until we have a proper knife fight going on down there.”

“Gotcha. Wilco.”

Huron watched as Kris edged off right, then nosed his fighter over and looked for the opening he needed. He didn’t need much—just a second or two would suffice. Easing into extreme range, he stalked a fighter that was lagging a trifle and—there! The Dom moved to close the gap that was threatening to open and overshot, crowding the next ahead.

Huron went to E-boost and waited an instant to see if his target would react. He did: braking instinctively to evade the charge and go for missile lock. That only made the gap worse. Huron opened up with his neutron guns. He held the trigger down as the range closed at a appalling rate. The target had misjudged: instead of trying for missile lock, he should’ve stuck to his guns and now he had nowhere to go. His shields flared out and a fraction a second later, Huron’s sustained fire vaporized his belly. The fighter exploded in a blue-white blaze shot through with violet.

Banking into the opening, Huron jammed his bird into a skid even before he was through. The one place no fighter in a bait ball could engage was
inside
it, and that’s where Huron was, his neutron guns hammering across a wide arc. Now, he opened up with his plasma cannon too. The sweep of his fire was not concentrated enough to kill but it did weaken shields and, more critically, it severely perturbed his opponents. Several of them broke and as he shot out the other side, narrowly avoiding a collision with a pilot that refused to sacrifice himself for a kill (another gamble paying off), Huron saw Kris pounce. She’d timed it perfectly, almost as if she’d known exactly where the break would come. He saw one fighter disappear as her guns tore him apart at the wing roots, and a second spun off trailing glowing slag from a blown drive node.

A third opponent was curling around to get behind her, but that brought him right into Huron’s missile envelope. The lock chime sounded sweetly. He pickled two and watched one go down to chain-gun fire and other detonate right behind the canopy. The fighter broke apart, the pieces pirouetting crazily for an split second before the ruptured fusion bottle reduced them to ions. His wingman jinked and Huron snap-rolled to bring this target into his gun sight. Weakened shields folded under the onslaught and as Kris darted past, the Dom exploded. She had two more Doms zeroed dead ahead of her, and he watched as she put two missiles into one of them. The second rolled and fled, boosting away for all he was worth. But another flight, better organized than the rest, chose this moment to attack.

“Kris, watch the flock in your six.”

“Got it, sir. Bounce that fucker on the right, would ya?”

“I’m comin’ down.” There were two Doms curling around on his own tail, but it would be at least fifteen seconds before they could engage—more than time enough. Locking up on the target, he fired a single missile. The Dom dumped a packet of chaff bundles and juked. Huron burst through the chaff cloud and hit him with plasma fire. His shields took most of it and the Dom veered away with no more damage than a scorched node. He cleared his six, but another fighter engaged him head-to-head. They opened fire at nearly the same moment and then passed each other in a flash.

He boosted up, letting his opponent go—the Dom’s drives flared and he broke apart a second later—and watched as Kris hit the brakes to suck in the two remaining fighters. They bit on the feint, and Kris popped her bird into a perfect cobra. They flew right by, and her missile took one in the tail cone, sending him spiraling away, out of control. A sustained burst of gunfire burned through and torched the other.

Huron nodded with deep satisfaction. A handful of seconds later, Kris caught up with him as he broke over the top of the confusion. “Very nice,” he told her.

“Thanks. So you’re not gonna gimme shit about it later?”

“Perish the thought.” The Halith fighters were milling around below them, completely disorganized. The combat zone was full of hot gas, molten debris, spiraling fighter hulks, and Kris and Huron had set their ECM suites to shrieking banshee mode, jamming almost everything, before abruptly disappearing in a sudden shocking quiet. He smiled.

“Now, see what we got down there? Ain’t it pretty?” Kris laughed out loud. “This is where the real fun begins. Drop your seekers to keep ‘em stirred up, then we’ll go in for the close work and finish this thing. Keep your last two missiles for bolters at the end. You ready?”

“Fuck yeah! . . . Sir.”

He couldn’t recall her ever sounding so happy. Even the
sir
she’d added as afterthought was jubilant.

“Very good, Ensign,” he said as he pushed over and his smile edged wider. “Let’s wrap this up and break for a beer.”

“Y’know how I feel about beer.”

“You name it then, Kris. I’m buying.”

“That’s damn nice of you, sir. See ya on deck.”

Admiral PrenTalien, watching CENFOR advance across half a million kilometers of battlespace, concluded that Adenauer’s reputation sold him short. The big dreadnought was in the lead—a surprisingly bold move, and one PrenTalien hadn’t been prepared for. It ran the risk of getting her mauled, but it also brought her massive firepower to the festivities much more quickly than he’d reckoned on.

“Harry, we can’t let
Marshall Nedelin
get alongside the monitor—not while it has its teeth. See if anyone can do something about her. By any means necessary.”

Bolton took stock of his CO’s expression. “Shall I send that out verbatim, sir?”

“By all means, Harry. Make it so.”

*     *     *

On the bridge of
Athena Nike
, Rear Admiral Sabr turned to the ship’s captain.
Nike
had been stationed as the strike force’s lead element, waiting to administer the
coup de grâce
, but Sabr himself was chafing under the enforced inactivity. Now he saw an opportunity to end it.

“Captain Watanabe, the admiral has requested that something be done about
Marshall Nedelin
and I think we should.”

“Yes, sir.”

“By
any means necessary
, were the words used.”

A gleam came into Shiro Watanabe’s eye. “
Any
means, sir?”

“That was the admiral’s request.” Sabr paused. “I do not intend to involve the rest of the squadron in this, Captain. I think we can handle it.”

“Understood, sir.” Watanabe turned and ordered, “Helm, lock in an interception course for
Marshall Nedelin
. All ahead flank!”

Sabr opened a channel to his chief of staff. “Captain Donovan, please inform the rest of the squadron they will remain at station and conform to Admiral PrenTalien movements until further orders. Please make that very firmly understood. Yes, Captain?”—seeing Watanabe looking at him.

“Sir, considering the admiral’s request, I was wondering—”

“If a certain question we once debated might now be answered? Yes, I think that a excellent notion. By all means.”

Watanabe called on the helmsman as all around the bridge, ears perked up. “Mr. Borodin, I believe you understand the maneuver to which Admiral Sabr is referring?”

WO Karl Borodin did indeed—all too well. “I do, sir.”

“It will call for some very fine work. Do you think it possible?”

The helmsman took a deep breath. “Yes, sir. I believe so, sir.”

The captain grinned and seemed to grow taller. The bridge crew looked increasingly nervous.

“Commander Flores, request engineering to start bleeding a 0.035 mix of H
₂
O into the aft fuel cells.”

“Sir?” his executive officer asked, her face alarmed, for she’d just grasped what Sabr and the captain had in mind. “Is that a request or an order?”

“I should not like to
have
to make it an order, Commander.”

“Yes, sir.” Veronnika Flores swallowed and conveyed the request. A minute later, she relayed, “Commander Kyle reports the bleed is set to go, but he feels it is his responsibility to inform you that this will push the drives forty-five percent past their design limits. He’s—ah—not entirely sure about the hull either.”

“Duly noted, Ronn.” Watanabe’s smile was approaching the divine. “Tell him to commence the bleed and not to worry—we’ll all be sure to hold onto something.”

*     *     *

“What the hell is Lo Gai doing?” Harry Bolton looked up, stunned. “You don’t think . . .”

PrenTalien turned to look at the plot as
Athena Nike
rocketed out of formation like the proverbial bat out of hell. He replied, “I think he did. Watanabe was always hot to give a go.”

Bolton shook his head. “Well, you did say ‘by any means necessary’.”

“So I did, didn’t I?” An odd smile quirked PrenTalien’s lips. “Suppose I oughta be more careful ‘bout that.”

*     *     *

On the bridge of
Marshall Nedelin
, the conning officer, Lieutenant Commander Sikhander Komorov, received a report from the CIC sensor section with a rueful shake of his head. It was impossible, but adrenaline spiking in the heat of combat made men see impossible things.

He requested confirmation.

*     *     *

G-Helmsman Luke Panetta had his full attention rigidly fixed on the plot displayed on
Nike’s
nav console. The range numbers were spooling off at a truly hellacious rate, but what really worried him was that
Nike
was actually closing
faster
than the display indicated. The navigation system’s designers had never conceived that a battlecruiser could accelerate like this and he could
feel
the latency building.

Without taking his eyes off the display, he muttered to the helmsman through clenched teeth, “What the fuck have you got us into here, Karl? The skipper’s gone barking. How the
hell
are we gonna do this?”

Karl Borodin’s attention was every bit as firmly focused and all his senses were even more finely attuned to his ship. Yet, he could still spare his friend the edge of a smirk. “We’re gonna use the Force, Luke—use the fuckin’ Force.”

*     *     *

Marshall Nedelin
’ sensor lead responded to the conning officer’s request with a testy affirmative and linked over the raw sensor data. Komorov stared at it in horrified fascination. Watering the drives of a
battlecruiser
? Someone over there was manifestly insane—in fact, the whole lot of them. Putting the data up on the main screen, he reported to the executive officer in a voice so unnaturally calm it shocked his own ears.

“Battlecruiser coming up hard a-port, sir. Closing on a collision course.”

His report was mere form: the exec already knew that. At such a closing rate, their missiles would never get a clean lock. They would have to engage with guns. He flashed his proposed maneuver to the captain in CIC, who would be receiving a fire plan from the weapons control officer at this moment. It would a be close-run business putting enough fire on target at this aspect once he sheered off, which he would certainly do in the next minute of so.

“What ship is that?” the exec asked the conning officer.

The water molecules mixing in the fusion chambers were playing havoc with their attempts to get a read on the approaching ship’s energy profile. But now the emission’s signature was coming through clear and the sensor lead linked him a preliminary ID.

“I believe that’s
Athena Nike
, sir.”

The exec’s head jerked sharply in his direction. “
Sabr’s
flagship?”

“Yes, sir. That is correct.”

Komorov had never seen a senior officer’s face go so white before.

“Full evasive!” the exec yelled. “Hard roll left! Interpose the keel! NOW!”

*     *     *

“He rolling, sir,” called out
Nike’s
helmsman.

“Excellent, Helm,” answered Captain Watanabe, thoroughly unruffled. “Keep her thus—steady as she goes.”

*     *     *

Deep in CIC, everyone felt it as
Marshall Nedelin
came to full flank acceleration and began her frantic roll. Captain DuPlessis turned to his fleet commander and announced in a stiff formal voice, “Admiral, we have
Athena Nike
engaging—I believe he means to ram, sir. I’m taking emergency evasive action and sounding collision.”

The claxon went off in a wild cacophony at that moment and Jakob Adenauer uttered a string of words his Amelia would never have approved of.

*     *     *

With her keel interposed, as
Marshall Nedelin
was safe from serious harm on this vector—even ramming would do no more than shake her up severely, while
Nike
would never survive. But the dreadnought’s guns could not be brought to bear and her sensors would be blind as soon as
Nike
entered her drive cone, and—most critically—no ship the size of
Marshall Nedelin
could be described as nimble. In spite of her emergency maneuvers, for the next few minutes, her trajectory would be utterly predictable.

“Helm, start shaving the vector,” Captain Watanabe said in the rapt, unnatural silence that now filled his bridge. “Prepare to roll. We need the outer edge of our keel zone to pass within fifty meters of his drive nodes for this to work. Look sharp.”

Karl Borodin had no time or attention to waste wiping away the sweat that was beading on his forehead. “Aye aye, sir.”

Eyes locked absolutely on the roll indicator, he started nudging the thruster control, watching the counterclockwise rate grow steadily as the battlecruiser responded. He needed a revolution and a half to build the requisite angular velocity. He pushed the control further. The rate built faster as
Nike
swung her keel through ninety degrees, then one-eighty. Approaching a full turn, he held his breath, the control now at seventy-five percent. The ship completed her revolution—he shut both eyes and jammed the control hard over.

*     *     *

Nike’s
hyper-keel swung with swift, inexorable majesty, reaching the critical angular velocity of seventy-six radians per second as the edge its shear field swept past
Marshall Nedelin’s
drive nodes at a distance of forty-nine meters. The immense local energies bottled in the keel produced a massive power spike that lasted a millisecond and vaporized the control lines. The dreadnought’s drive locked down at once and emergency shunts snapped open while atomic iron flooded the chambers to damp the reaction, but not before the reaction chambers’ lining (their magnetic buffers hopelessly shorted) cracked and began to boil. The venting plasma surrounded the dreadnought like the corona of a sun, and for thirty seconds all on board prayed that it would be enough.

It wasn’t. The fatally weakened chambers gave way, and the drive nodes exploded. Impelled by the blast, the huge ship lurched forward and began to tumble helplessly, a mere projectile hurtling straight into the reef at ninety-two kilometers per second.

Up ahead, lying cold and dark in a spur of the reef, dozens of robotic sensors, slumbering for decades and shaken from their torpor by the shock wave, awoke. They detected the fast-approaching mass, weighed and measured and calculated, and beeped their electronic conclusions to hundreds more of their kind.

Within minutes, the spur was alive with movement as the mine field stirred, and focused. Thrusters engaged and the mines began to swarm toward the crippled dreadnought: at first by ones and twos, then by fives and tens, then more—like primordial predators scenting blood.

*     *     *

“Any report from Captain Lewis?” PrenTalien’s voice was harsh. His plot showed
Marshall Nedelin
careening to her death—a slow death—as the mines gnawed through her meters of armor. Once they latched on, it could take hours the break the dreadnought down. He took no pleasure in the thought and he had no time to spare on it, in any case. The loss of
Marshall Nedelin
had certainly blunted the sortie, but those ships following on were closing fast. If they got there before Lewis could disable it . . .

“No, sir.”

The monitor had been more badly damaged than he could have expected by
Bellerophon’s
attack. Watching the little carrier hang on the huge vessel’s flank and hammer it savagely until that monstrous salvo drove her off had filled him with a fierce elation—and more to the purpose, it had silenced half its port-side armament. But was it enough? The ponderous vessel could still bring its main and aft-port turrets to bear—it still had it’s missiles.

And yet, if he could interpose
Ardennes
between the monitor’s damaged port side and the Halith fleet he might still destroy it, smashing the enemy’s linchpin and leaving Bannermans unsupported. With the Doms’ left flank in shambles, taking the monitor out of action and cutting off the Bannermans would turn the tide of battle. Between the monitor and what remained of Adenauer’s Center Force,
Ardennes
would take a terrible beating, but she wouldn’t die easy.

“Send:
Close Engagement—close the Bannermans
.” Masers beamed the order to his commanders. “My complements to Captain Quartermain and ask him to lay us alongside that monitor—the port side, please—at long biscuit toss.”

As Lieutenant Reynolds conveyed the request to the
Ardennes’s
captain, PrenTalien saw Bolton looking over at him. “Do we recover the marines, sir?” A pause. “
Bellerophon
is asking.”

PrenTalien stared hard at the icon that was the monitor; an icon that now represented over two hundred extraordinarily brave men and women under his command—men and women who would certainly die if he did not intercede in time. But he was too far away to intercede—
Bellerophon
might make it but only just—and with those ships bearing down and much of the monitor’s armament still active, taking the marines off—assuming they were still alive—would be a desperate undertaking. He had no doubt McKenzie would attempt it, but she was already damaged and he could not afford to lose another carrier . . .

“Negative. Press the attack on the Bannerman fleet.”
But
. . . “Detach DESRON 9. Order them to engage those Halith ships.” With the dreadnought out of the fight and their defense net disrupted, the destroyers had good chance of getting through and slowing them down—probably not enough for
Ardennes
to close, but that was not out of the question. He owed Captain Lewis at least that much.

As the fleet accelerated, plot lines and intercept envelopes arced, converging and dividing, in the omnisynth’s display. He felt the change in vibration as
Ardennes
surged forward, bearing down on the monitor at flank acceleration, her massive batteries already selecting their victims even as the many missiles and torpedoes she owned warmed up and armed their warheads.

After a minute, the Bannermans noted the movement and he saw them contract towards the monitor, clawing free of Admiral Belvoir’s units who let them go to reform according to his approach vector, while the surviving elements of Adenauer’s left-flank force, led by
Jena
, started a pivot towards his own flank and rear.