Defender

53

“The lead alien square of dishes has jumped to 2.5-gee acceleration, Kris,” Nelly said.

They aren’t supposed to do that! No doubt, a lot of aliens are feeling the pain.

“Squadrons, fifteen degrees right, engage the closest dish,” Kris ordered, as the aliens came within range. The fifteen-degree angle protected their vulnerable engines. BatRons 1 through 4 engaged the enemy’s far-right dish. But the enemy was coming on fast, switching their fire from motes of dust to Kris’s ships. At extreme range for their lasers, damage was light, but there was plenty of it.

On Kris’s board, ships’ armor switched from green to yellow as they began to stream steam and take hits.

But the aliens were well within range of Kris’s 20-inch guns. Her ships lit up the aliens; twenty-six ships engaged thirty aliens.

In a minute, the dish was an expanding ball of gas.

But to finish off the aliens, Kris’s ships had to flip to use their forward battery. That put the enemy way too close. “Accelerate away at 2.75 gees,” Kris ordered. “Pop chaff. Launch a missile volley.”

One dish was gone, but the top and bottom dishes had angled over, getting the range. The far dish was hammering Commodore Benson’s hooligans of BatRon 5. The cheery volunteers gave as good as they got, but Benson had to order them to run for it ahead of Kris’s orders.

The fleet accelerated away from the aliens, who settled back to two gees.

Kris’s board was red. Constitution, Tiger, Hotspur, and Spitfire reported damage to their engines. Kris ordered them to three gees to form up as a reserve. All obeyed except Hotspur, who couldn’t manage even the fleet’s 2.75.

Four alien ships accelerated away from the rest and leapt out to engage the trailing Hotspur. They shot it out, with the other three ships from of the Helvetican Ninth Div trying to support their sister. Two more alien ships died, but so did Hotspur.

The three other ships, what Kris labeled CripDiv 1, for crippled division, pulled ahead.

Each side paused to lick its wounds.

The aliens reorganized themselves. The three remaining dishes re-formed in a triangle.

Kris reorganized, too. Despite showing yellow for damage, Triumph and Swiftsure moved up from BatDiv 9 to replace Constitution and Tiger in BatRons 1 and 2. Spitfire swung around to join Captain Drago’s BatDiv 10, pretty much eliminating not only one division but half of Kris’s reserves.

Kris did get to smile at one thing. Their pressure on the aliens’ right had driven the mother ship to the left. Her course was edging closer to the gas giant.

Good!

The aliens had a problem. They could not handle the edge Kris’s long-range 20-inch lasers gave her.

The fight drew away from the jump point, but three ships still hovered there. That puzzled Kris. “Chief, talk to me about those three aliens holding back.”

“I’ve been meaning to mention those, ma’am. Their reactor configuration is different from the ones fighting us. One has ten smaller reactors. One has eight. Even the one with six is different. I think its reactors are more powerful than the ones we’re fighting.”

“Opinion, Captain Drago?” Kris asked.

“Military observers from other countries. It’s an old tradition.”

“So our next visitors are watching how we handle this bunch for future reference.”

“I hate to say so, but it looks that way.”

“Oh, God,” Kris kind of prayed. “We haven’t figured out how to handle this bunch, and someone is setting us up for the next match.”

“That’s what happens when you’re the champ.”

“And if we aren’t the champ, we’re dead,” Kris muttered. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Anytime, Admiral. How long are we going to hang out here, catching our breath?”

“They’re on the course I want. Let’s see what they do next.”

The aliens chased. Kris fled, now at a sedate 1.75 gees. Once, she ordered an attack at long range on the lower dish, but they quickly killed their acceleration, inviting Kris to close on them while the other two dishes advanced above her.

She declined.

“Smart move. You’re learning,” Kris mused. “You’re advancing, which you want to do. I’m falling back, which I don’t want to do.”

Kris adjusted her course to take her close to the gas giant and between two Hellburner command stations, then made a feint at the higher dish. When it flinched back, she swung toward the middle one.

They all fell back and ended up pretty much in line again.

Kris’s fleet kept littering their retreat with chaff. Soon, Professor Labao reported the aliens’ lasers were heating up, and they were cutting back on sweeping their path. Kris dropped off a half dozen mines along with more chaff.

Three mines caught ships.

The aliens went back to blasting everything in front of them.

Kris smiled as they developed the habit she wanted.

The dish opposite the hooligan of BatRon 5 suddenly went to 2.5 acceleration, closing the distance between them in a leap. Commodore Benson saw his danger and upped the acceleration, too, but his ships had suffered more damage than they knew. The Proud Unicorn’s motors sputtered, and one blew away into space. The Lucky Leprechaun was no luckier. They failed to pull away. Kris ordered BatRons 1, 2, and 3 to swing inward, threatening the attacking dish’s flank.

Still, the aliens came on. The other two dishes now were back up to two gees and edging closer. Kris ordered missiles fired at them and had Drago move BatDiv 10 in to support BatRon 4’s efforts to meet those two.

On her left flank, the hooligans fought their battle with one dish, aided by the arrival of most of the fleet. The Unicorn and Leprechaun struggled to keep up, then flipped and fired full bow batteries at their tormentors. That cost the aliens two ships, but it cost the two volunteers seconds of precious acceleration. The aliens came on.

Now the dish’s flank burned under the fire of three battle squadrons. Ship after ship blew or stumbled out of formation, internal explosions erupting into space. Still, what was left of the dish locked its teeth onto its two unlucky victims and a third, the Kikukei, was proving no luckier than the Leprechaun.

Commodore Miyashi’s ships concentrated on supporting the Kikukei, and that may have saved her. Still, both the Unicorn and the Leprechaun fell farther behind, bleeding steam and armor from hits even as they fired ever-decreasing salvos. At close range, they both managed a missile salvo that took their closest enemies with them as their final moment came.

Suddenly, the fight was over as quickly as it had begun. Two more of Kris’s ships were gone, but an alien dish was gone with them. The Kikukei managed to put on enough gees to crawl ahead and join CripDiv 1.

With BatRon 5 reduced to three ships, Kris offered Commodore Benson the chance to take all his ships out of the line and join the cripples in reserve.

“We’ve just begun to fight, Admiral,” was his reply. On Kris’s board, many of her ships were showing some red for damaged. However, as the quiet between storms stretched out, Temptress’s, Fairy Princess’s, and Pixie’s hardworking damage control parties brought them back into yellow.

The alien commander also seemed to need time to reassess the situation. The two remaining dishes, both battered, slowed their advance to half a gee. The rear four dishes and mother ship closed on them at one gee.

The clan was gathering, and their swords were sharp.

Kris had started with forty-four ships. She’d lost three and held four damaged ships in reserve. The tip of her spear, the four battle squadrons still had eight ships each, but she had little to play with otherwise. The remnants of BatRon 5 weren’t even a full division, and she wasn’t supposed to send her flagship charging into the line.

Across space, some 180 monsters formed a hexagon. Possibly worse, eighteen speedy small boys were doing a fast run, dropping well below the lowest dish to get behind Kris. So far, those little boys hadn’t shown a lot of firepower, but if they got across Kris’s line of flight and started tossing atomics at her, things could get messy.

“Constitution, Tiger, and Spitfire, you up for a high-speed run and some shooting?” Kris asked. In theory, their boards showed green again, but Kris didn’t trust she was getting the real word. She left the Kikukei out. It showed only two lasers online.

“We’re ready now,” the skipper of the Constitution said for all.

“You see their little boys. We can’t have them behind us. Proceed independently and stop them.”

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.