Valiant Dust

22

CSS Hector, Gadira II Orbit

Panther was ready for trouble. The moment Hector opened fire, the Dremish ship accelerated and replied with her own K-cannons. At their current range, the flight time of the K-rounds was less than a second, not enough for any kind of deliberate evasion by either ship. Despite that, most of the cruiser’s salvos missed each other, simply because both ships were accelerating at full military power. A half second was enough time for Hector to change her vector by several hundred meters, and thus not be quite where she’d been when Panther returned fire. Panther had less of an opportunity to move, since Hector fired first, but even so Mark V rounds streaked past her, missing by a dozen meters or less in most cases—and for a kinetic round, missing by a meter was the same as missing by a thousand kilometers. Without direct impact none of the frightful kinetic energy of the tungsten-alloy projectiles could be turned into damage on the target, and a phenomenal amount of energy was thus wasted on missed shots.

But not all missed.

One of Hector’s shots grazed Panther’s stern, wrecking a main drive plate. Another gouged her belly, failing to penetrate her armor but creating a brilliant spray of molten metal that blossomed behind the Dremish ship. And one solid hit impacted just below Panther’s second main-battery turret, drilling a hole through the barbette armor. The Aquilan shot transformed instantly into a ragged spray of dense, incandescent plasma, driven to unimaginable temperatures by the transformation of sheer kinetic energy into heat. It vaporized the capacitor room below the turret, and compartments all around buckled or melted in turn. The Dremish cruiser shuddered under the secondary explosions, an expanding ball of white-hot plasma streaming from her wound.

“Hit!” Girard yelled, raising a fist in triumph.

Sikander grinned fiercely, and started to congratulate the ensign—but at that moment Panther’s return fire struck Hector.

Like Hector’s initial volley, most of Panther’s shots missed. But Oberleutnant Helena Aldrich’s gunnery team was every bit as well trained as Sikander’s, and Panther’s K-cannons were actually a little larger and more powerful than Hector’s. A grazing hit just aft of Hector’s superstructure sliced through the power conduit feeding the number-three main-battery turret, and a second round found Hector’s main hangar bay and incinerated a docked shuttle in its cradle. The ensuing fireball blew the hangar hatch completely free of the ship, but also ejected a good deal of the molten debris; two of Hector’s shuttles spun away from the ship as blazing meteors that would streak across the sky above the Bitter Sea ten minutes later. The hangar explosion jolted every compartment like a giant pounding the side of the ship with a sledgehammer. Sikander was wrenched sideways and bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood before the inertial compensators kicked in and suppressed the movement.

“Number-three turret out!” Sikander called, reporting the damage blinking on his console. He had no idea what had happened; the turret icon flashed red, and that was all he could tell. Other damage reports echoed around the bridge. He heard Magdalena Juarez on the command channel, reciting a list of damaged or off-line systems. Her battle station was down in the engineering control station, where she monitored the power plant and induction drives.

“Hit them again!” Randall shouted.

“Recharging main battery, sir!” Girard called back. The Mark V couldn’t throw ten-kilo slugs over and over again; each K-cannon had a firing cycle of about fifteen seconds. The deck lurched again under Sikander, and he realized that Chief Quartermaster Holtz was doing his best to throw the ship into every jink, roll, and sharp turn he could manage while climbing up out of Gadira’s gravity well.

“Box your fire, Mr. Girard!” Sikander told the ensign. “They’ll be evading now.” K-rounds moved so fast relative to targets that anticipating enemy evasion essentially became a two-dimensional problem—it was important to spread a salvo a little ahead, a little behind, a little above, and a little under the apparent target so that no matter which way it dodged, it stood a good chance of running into a K-round’s path. He didn’t want Girard to get locked in on aiming his full salvo at the spot where Panther happened to be the instant he fired.

“Yes, sir!” Girard replied. “Firing!” Another volley of Mark V K-rounds hummed and crackled as they blasted toward the enemy cruiser. The range opened as both ships clawed up away from the planet, seeking room to dodge and weave. It seemed Captain Harper had no more taste for knife fights than did Captain Markham. Hector scored again with a hit that wrecked an auxiliary engineering room; Panther hit back and damaged part of Hector’s folded warp ring.

On his own initiative, Sikander keyed a fire mission to the secondary battery. Sublieutenant Reno had control of the ship’s UV lasers, and while unlikely to cause serious damage to an armored warship, they could vaporize antennas and sensor arrays, slagging or jamming weapon mounts with lucky hits. “Knock out their sensors and secondaries, Mr. Reno,” he said. “Anything you see that looks delicate and important. Mind our heat budget, only fire when you see something worth burning.”

“Aye, sir!” Reno replied. He opened up with the laser battery, using high-magnification targeting to hunt for vulnerable spots and burn them. Lasers didn’t carry the hitting power of rail-gun rounds, but nothing material could completely ignore a few million joules of energy arriving in a concentrated area. Puffs of vaporized hull metal began to appear beneath Hector’s searching lasers—and naturally Panther’s own lasers burned Hector’s hull structures, too.

The two cruisers hammered away at each other, continuing to salvo their K-cannons and maneuvering wildly in an attempt to dodge fire. Neither ship carried enough heavy armor to shrug off a kinetic round from the other, but obtaining a square hit was harder than Sikander would have guessed. Most hits struck on the curve of the hull, deflecting a good deal of energy out and away from the interior systems while leaving spectacular gouges and furrows of shattered hull and incandescent metal. Hector’s K-cannons had a more rapid firing cycle; Panther’s hit harder. Again and again impacts hammered the ship, and Sikander found himself so busy with managing the battle damage to Hector’s batteries and fire-control systems that he forgot to be frightened for his own life. He noticed the Dremish transport breaking orbit, and fleeing from the dueling cruisers at her best speed. At least we’ve succeeded in interrupting the landings for the time being.

“Weapons, I need a torpedo spread on Target Alpha!” Randall ordered.

“We’re still inside minimum distance, sir!” Sublieutenant Larkin replied. “We need another thousand kilometers of range for a clean run!”

“Damn it,” Randall snarled. “Stand by and be ready with a spread as soon as we open the distance! Helm, come right and get us more separation!”

“Aye, sir,” the chief helmsman replied. Hector leaned into the turn, still surging and twisting in its evasive maneuvers.

“New target, Target Gamma!” called Sublieutenant Keane from the sensor console. “Range thirty-five thousand, bearing one-three-five! Waffe-class destroyer, accelerating to intercept us.”

“Damn the luck,” said Captain Markham. “It’s Streitaxt. I suppose she didn’t leave the system after all.”

Hiram Randall grimaced. “She probably hid behind the moon,” he said. “They must have slipped back to park in a dark-side crater when we were on the wrong side of Gadira II. Sorry, Captain. We should have confirmed that she left the system after she bubbled up.”

Markham nodded, and leaned back in her seat. “Very well,” she said, maintaining her calm demeanor. “It looks like we’ve got a harder day ahead of us than we thought.”

For the first time in the encounter, Sikander felt the icy touch of fear at the nape of his neck. Dealing with the Panther was a fifty-fifty proposition, but they seemed to be holding their own for the moment. Streitaxt was a powerful new destroyer, and even if she was not the match of a cruiser, she didn’t need to be in order to shift the odds decisively in Panther’s favor.

“Captain, we may need to consider a withdrawal,” Commander Chatburn said from his post in the auxiliary bridge. “We’re outgunned, and we’ve made our point. There may not be much more we can do here.”

“As matters stand, we can’t avoid Streitaxt’s engagement envelope,” said Markham. She studied the displays for a moment, then made her decision. “Mr. Randall, plot a course for disengagement once we get past the destroyer. Mr. North, split your batteries. Keep up the fire on Panther but engage Streitaxt as she bears. We might as well run through with guns blazing, because they’ll certainly be shooting at us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Sikander replied. He didn’t like the idea of admitting defeat, but it wasn’t his call. The tactical situation was clearly unfavorable: Hector would pass between the two Dremish warships no matter how she maneuvered. “Mr. Girard, I’ll take the starboard-side battery and engage the destroyer. You keep the port-side battery and continue firing on Panther.”

“Releasing the starboard-side battery,” Girard replied. “Hit ’em hard, sir!”

Sikander nodded but did not reply, already setting up his console to take control of the Mark V mounts that faced the right-hand side of the ship. It wasn’t strictly by the book, but this orbital battle had proved to Sikander that trying to outguess the defensive maneuvers of one target at a time was enough for any gunnery officer. He deliberately pushed the Dremish cruiser out of his mind, leaving Panther to the ensign while waiting for the range to Streitaxt to close; destroyers were agile targets, and a thirty-five-thousand-kilometer shot would give her almost twelve seconds to dodge. He’d only be wasting power and K-shot, so he held his fire for the moment.

Hector shuddered again with more impacts from Panther’s K-cannons and pounded back at the enemy cruiser as the range to the destroyer steadily narrowed. Sikander studied the engagement with a momentary detachment, reviewing all his training and countless hours of discussion and speculation with other officers. He began to suspect that he didn’t know as much about ship-to-ship combat as he’d thought he did—a realization probably shared by most of Hector’s crew and the Dremish, too. There simply hadn’t been many serious engagements between modern warships in the last twenty years or so, and the Aquilan navy based most of its tactics and expectations on theory, not practice. Hitting a live target that shot back proved a good deal more difficult than simulations or range exercises suggested, and the predicted one-hit kills he’d been told to expect hadn’t happened, at least not yet. This was a battle of attrition, not a quick-draw contest, and if they happened to survive until the end of it, Hector’s experience would necessitate the rewriting of quite a few training manuals.

“Damn it!” Angela Larkin snarled, and punched at her console in frustration. “We just lost tubes one and two, sir!”

“Destroyed or off-line?” Sikander asked.

“Off-line, looks like we lost the capacitor for the upper launch tubes.” She twisted in her couch to look up at him. “Sir, those were the two good Phantoms.”

All that work to figure out what was wrong with the torpedoes, and the only two good ones we have on board are dead in their tubes! Sikander grimaced. Torpedoes in dead launch tubes were not going to be very useful, and right now Hector needed all the firepower she could get. “Tell Chief Maroth to rig a jumper cable from the other tubes,” he told Larkin. The crewmen manning the torpedo room were probably already working on it, but maybe they’d be able to get tubes one and two operational by cross-connecting the power feeds from tubes three and four.

“Aye, sir,” Larkin replied. She turned back to her console.

“Weapons, I need that torpedo spread,” Randall called back to Sikander. “The range looks good to me!”

“Torpedoes off-line, Mr. Randall,” Sikander said. “We lost power to the launch tubes. No ETA on repairs.”

Randall swore under his breath. “Very well,” he replied. “Keep it up with the main battery, then.”

“Aye, sir!” Sikander returned his attention to Streitaxt, now well within his engagement envelope. At twenty thousand kilometers, he opened up on her. “Salvo starboard!” he called, and hit the firing keys. It was perhaps a little long for shooting at a destroyer, but it wouldn’t hurt to force Streitaxt’s crew to start thinking about taking evasive action. He quickly tuned out the chatter of reports and commands not directed at him, concentrating on directing his share of Hector’s main battery. Minutes crawled by as Hector began taking fire from both sides, and the pace of the battle threatened to overwhelm the bridge crew altogether. More hits rocked the cruiser, setting off a chorus of alarms.

“Damage report!” Magdalena Juarez barked over Hector’s command circuit. “We’ve lost generator three, effective power ouput now at sixty-five percent capacity! Drive plate two is off-line, estimated time to repair ten minutes! Hull breaches in the mess deck, personnel office, Auxiliary Engine Room One!”

Sikander winced at the growing list of things that no longer worked on board Hector. He could smell burning insulation nearby, although it was not yet so toxic that he needed to close his visor. Red lights blinked on a dozen consoles around the bridge, and not a few of them flashed on his own weapons display. Two of Hector’s main-battery turrets had been knocked out, and a third was power-starved until the gunner’s mates stationed there could rig a jumper cable big enough to take the energy load needed to fire one of the Mark V K-cannons. The ship’s inertial compensation no longer worked at full effect, either; every jink and swerve from the helm threw Sikander from side to side in his battle couch, and the hull shuddered and groaned under each new impact. Like tired boxers, the two cruisers continued to wear each other down, but neither had yet scored a knockout punch.

“Acknowledged!” Captain Markham replied. “Can you get generator three back on-line, Ms. Juarez? We need the power.”

“It’s destroyed, Captain,” the chief engineer replied. “Half the casing is gone, looks like primary impact from a heavy K-cannon. I can redline the remaining units and give you a little more, but it’s dangerous.”

“Do so,” Markham ordered. “We no longer have the luxury of safety margins.” Her voice remained admirably calm, but her fingers clenched the arms of her couch with fierce strength. Sikander swallowed the words of warning that came to his lips. It wasn’t his job to second-guess the captain on damage management, and for all he knew, she might be exactly correct in her decision.

“Salvo port!” called Michael Girard. So far it seemed like the ensign was doing well with his half of Hector’s main guns: Half a dozen major hits scored and pocked Panther’s hull, and she appeared to be sluggish at the helm. Sikander hadn’t yet landed a good hit on Streitaxt, but he’d grazed her twice, and the destroyer danced wildly at the edge of its own effective range to dodge his fire.

“Tactical, tubes three and four are ready to launch,” Angela Larkin called out. “We have good solutions on Target Alpha!”

Sikander looked up in alarm. “Those are bad torpedoes, Ms. Larkin!”

“They’ll work, sir! I set up a new attack program that won’t trigger the reset.”

“Weapons, do we have torpedoes or not?” Randall demanded from the tactical console.

Sikander realized that while he’d been absorbed in the task of trying to hit Streitaxt, Larkin had stayed focused on her job. The older torpedoes faulted out in the standard attack program, so she’d punched in custom settings for the weapons that were in functional tubes rather than wait for power to be restored to the off-line weapons—and she’d managed it in ten minutes. A month ago I asked her what would happen if we had to fire torpedoes in anger, he remembered. Now we find out.

“Tactical, the torps are good. We can take the shot,” he told Randall. Maybe the effort to isolate the torpedo failure hadn’t been wasted, after all. Trusting Larkin to execute the attack, he focused on Streitaxt again and resumed fire.

“Helm, torpedo attack,” Hiram Randall ordered. “Target Alpha, two torps! As weapons bear … fire!”

“Firing!” Larkin’s console briefly assumed control of Hector’s maneuvers. Expertly she spun the ship on its vertical axis, bringing Hector’s bow-mounted torpedo tubes to face Panther, and punched the keys to fire two Phantoms. These were not practice torpedoes—these were war shots, fitted with deadly fusion warheads. The ship shuddered as the tubes ejected the heavy missiles; they streaked away from their launch tubes, and vanished into warp bubbles.

“Streitaxt firing torpedoes!” Sublieutenant Keane shouted from the sensor station. On Sikander’s display, the Dremish destroyer suddenly wheeled to point her bow at Hector and release her own spread. For an instant, she couldn’t dodge—and his K-cannons were ready.

“Evade torpedoes!” Randall shouted.

Sikander hit his firing keys just before Chief Holtz at the helm wrenched Hector into an emergency torpedo-evasion maneuver. “Salvo starboard!” Sikander called out. Hector rocked and hummed with the magnetic recoil of the big Mark V K-cannons hurling their lethal shot at the oncoming Dremish destroyer. And then several things happened almost at once.

Hector’s torpedo spread arrived at Panther, the weapons dropping their warp bubbles and twisting through terminal maneuvers in the fraction of a second between returning to normal space and detonation. Each Phantom carried a rugged fusion bomb of almost half a megaton. In direct contact they would vaporize a battleship, but warp torpedoes weren’t fused for impact—they were proximity weapons, designed to detonate as soon as they were sufficiently close to the target to cause crippling damage. Larkin set up her attack as a one-two punch; the first Phantom dove in and burst a few hundred meters from Panther’s waist, boiling off the outer skin with the fusion blast just before the second torpedo appeared out of nowhere and detonated even closer, wrecking the cruiser’s main power rooms and sending a wave of impulsive shock racing through her structure. Panther’s armored hull protected the crew from lethal radiation, but shock and spalling fragments wrecked vulnerable control stations and vital systems throughout the Dremish ship.

Because Hector had turned to hit Panther with her torpedoes, her stern faced Streitaxt when the destroyer’s own torpedo spread exploded just behind the hull. The sternmost section of the ship contained few vital control stations or engineering spaces; those were protected in the center of mass, guarded by the heaviest armor Hector carried. But the drive plates for the ship’s induction engines and the retracted warp ring were located at the aft end of the hull, and Streitaxt’s salvo vaporized large portions of Hector’s drive system. Hull plates exploded into vapor, kicking Hector forward so suddenly that Sikander suffered more than a little bit of whiplash—as did something like two-thirds of the cruiser’s crew—before the inertial compensators could react. Sensors, power generators, and control systems were knocked off-line by the jarring hits. Most came back on almost at once, but not the drive plates shattered by the torpedo bursts. In one savage moment, Hector’s legs were slashed out from under her, leaving her in a tumbling, out-of-control spin.

Alarms flashed and wailed throughout the bridge, and half the screens went dark. But weapons controls were especially well hardened against shock, and Sikander could observe the effect of his previous salvo on Streitaxt. As before, five-sixths of his K-cannon shots sailed past the destroyer with little effect, although one rod grazed the hull and left a fifty-meter scoring of molten metal only a few centimeters deep. But the sixth round hit dead center in the destroyer’s bow, still facing directly at Hector. While it was the most heavily armored part of the hull, no destroyer in any fleet could stand up to a direct hit from a cruiser’s K-cannon. The blast incinerated Streitaxt’s forward torpedo room, and touched off a wave of secondary explosions as the bursting charges in the weapons stored in the torpedo tubes detonated. The first fifty meters of Streitaxt simply ceased to exist as a recognizable hull, blasted into streamers of incandescent metal and shattered armor plates spinning off in all directions.

Larkin let out a whoop of exhilaration. “Hits on Panther!” she called out.

“Hit on Streitaxt!” said Sikander. He risked a quick glance away from his display to look at Larkin’s console. “Good work, Ms. Larkin.”

“Well done!” Captain Markham answered, raising her voice to be heard over the din of screeching alarms and confused reports. “Engineering, what’s our status?”

“Acceleration effectively zero, Captain!” Magda answered. Sikander could hear the strain in her voice and a din of shouts and alarms from the engineering control room, carrying over her link to the command circuit. “We can’t maneuver!”

“Helm doesn’t answer, Captain,” Chief Holtz announced from the pilot station. “Attitude control only, and not too much of that.”

“Get me a working drive plate, Ms. Juarez,” Markham ordered. “Mr. North, what’s our main battery—”

“Oh, fuck me,” Hiram Randall said laconically, interrupting the captain. He stared at the tactical console. “Panther is firing, Captain. We can’t evade.”