Rebel (21 page)

“Navigator, plot me a course that gets us to Jump Point Barbie before they do at their present acceleration.”

“We’ll need to go to at least one-point-two-five gees, sir, to get there well ahead of them. I’ll need a minute to give you something more precise.”

“Send to fleet,” the captain snapped. “The Empress has challenged us to a race. Up acceleration to one-point-two-five gees. Course is for Jump Point Barbie.”

The fleet took off at the highest acceleration it could maintain. Vicky had her computer check the incoming data from the rest of her tiny fleet. The battleships and cruisers seemed to handle the extra acceleration. Not so much the freighters. The fifteen Vicky had brought to Brunswick had been chosen for their ability to manage at least 1.25 gees. However, the four freighters added by
Brunswick quickly showed their reactors moving into the yellow. Two ships from St. Petersburg weren’t much better.

Captain Bolesław noted that Vicky had activated her board at her command chair and glanced at what she was tracking. “Good, Your Grace. You keep an eye on the civilians, and I’ll worry about the Navy.”

Vicky waved a hand at her board and it changed to show the warships’ condition. “I’m keeping an eye on all of them. I assume we’re running because you don’t want to fight the Empress’s fleet in this system.”

“Outnumbered as we are, no,” he agreed.

“Hopefully, there will be reinforcements waiting for us around St. Petersburg,” Vicky half said to herself.

“Assuming your St. Petersburg Division of the Greenfield Imperial Navy Reserve Fleet has someone home, yes.”

“Then by all means, let’s run.”

“The Empress’s task force has upped its acceleration to one-point-two-five gees,” Lieutenant Blue reported.

“No surprise,” Vicky said.

“The surprise will be who can maintain that acceleration,” Captain Bolesław said.

“Mmm,” Vicky agreed.

Within the hour, the engineering condition of the other side began to show. First a liner and two cargo ships slowly fell back to one-gee acceleration. One of them even slipped below that. Two destroyers slowed down as well.

“Are they escorting the sick, lame, and lazy?” Captain Bolesław asked Lieutenant Blue.

“I don’t think so, sir,” the sensor chief answered. He’d been joined by his chief, and the two of them had been poring over their boards like a pair of witches with a strangely boiling cauldron.

“Understand, sir, we’ve never actually done this for real. We’ve run proof-of-concept tests . . . when no one was looking, but not actually done this in real time. Still, we are showing a lot of distressed reactors over there.”

“How can you see that?” Vicky asked.

“It’s different frequencies from where the jamming is. Those reactors haven’t gotten needed yard time and even less tender loving care from their engineers.”

“I wonder what he’d show if he ran his gear on our own reactors,” Captain Bolesław muttered to Vicky.

“I have been, sir. I’d say the yard on High St. Petersburg did a bang-up job on your ships before they sailed.”

“And we left behind those that were in worst shape,” Vicky added. “I wonder if anyone had the guts to tell the Empress’s that their ship couldn’t answer bells?”

“We’re about to find out.”

Over the next couple of hours, more of the Empress’s ships fell out of formation, including the
Empress’s Terror
. The opposing fleet, Vicky couldn’t take it into her heart to call them the enemy, and she never heard that word used around her on the bridge, began to look like a poorly strung strand of pearls.

Halfway to their flip-over point, the other commander gave up the chase and slowed the ships still with him to .85 gees.

“I’m glad he flinched first,” Captain Bolesław said, and ordered his fleet acceleration reduced to one gee.

“The
Pride of Darby
will be glad you did that,” Vicky said. The
Pride of Darby
, out of Kiel before it was laid up above Brunswick, had been struggling to keep up even as its reactor rose higher into the yellow zone. It was almost to the red when the order came. Over the next few hours, it worked its way back toward green.

“I didn’t think any minion of the Empress would give up that easily,” Vicky whispered to Captain Bolesław.

“I wouldn’t bet that they have. Lieutenant Blue, how many good ships do they have? Ones that might maintain a hard deceleration?”

Blue studied his boards for a good while before answering. “The
Empress’s Revenge
is in better shape. Maybe the
Vengeance
could stick with her, as well as a pair of cruisers and four destroyers, sir.”

“And we have one 18-inch battleship, a 15-inch battlecruiser, a pair of heavy cruisers, and a merchant cruiser,” Bolesław said, tallying up his own force. “If his big guns tie up our big guns, that would give his little boys a free hand to slaughter our freighters.”

Vicky could see the ugly picture in her mind’s eye. Maybe the cargo ships with desperately needed fabs for St. Petersburg would surrender before the destroyers ripped into them. Even
if they did, would the Empress’s henchmen settle for that? Was “no surrender” Count Korbinian the only man in that camp proud of the slaughter he’d done?

The two fleets ran down their separate sides of this triangle that ended in the Barbie Jump into St. Petersburg. They were like trains on a track, headed for the same destination and sped on by the physics that would bring them all to a dead stop just before the jump.

“Do we have to hit the jump at dead slow?” Vicky asked Captain Bolesław.

He gave her a look of dismay. “That’s standard fleet practice.”

“Kris Longknife has been known to take them faster.”

“Kris Longknife has Wardhaven-built ships that I suspect have a bigger maintenance budget than our ships have had. Hell, Your Grace, those merchant tubs have been laid up, trailing this or that station, for months. Do you want to trust them to something crazy?”

Vicky felt cowed by his words. Almost, she gave in to silence.

Are you a Grand Duchess or a mouse?

Unlike my dad, I’m someone who listens to those who know better than I do.

And if you listen to the captain, you lose. This rebellion needs a win, and St. Petersburg needs that cargo. Let’s show some backbone, Ensign.

Unlike the rest of Vicky’s argument with herself, that last was spat at her in Admiral Krätz’s voice.

“Captain, if we do what the captain of the
Empress’s Revenge
expects, we lose. We lose not only this fleet but maybe the entire rebellion. We can do that, today. He can win it all for the Empress.”

“When you put it that way,” Captain Bolesław said through a scowl.

“Lieutenant Blue, what kind of risk will the
Empress’s Revenge
be taking if it goes to 1.25 gees deceleration toward the jump?”

The lieutenant on sensors worried his lower lip for a long moment, then spoke. “I wouldn’t want to be on his ship, Your Grace. From the looks of what I’m taking off his reactors, I’d say there’s a real chance he’s going to end up with a major engineering casualty.”

Vicky arched an eyebrow at Captain Boleslaw.

His scowl didn’t waver, but he said, “What do you have in mind, Your Grace?”

Vicky took a deep breath, let it out, and took command of her fleet. “Let’s add some uncertainty to this battle.”

CHAPTER 32

T
HE
opposing commander kept up his .85-gee acceleration past the point where his entire fleet should have flipped and begun decelerating. Vicky and Captain Bolesław watched their opponent, allowing for the delay in speed of light.

“I hate not knowing what he did twenty minutes ago,” the skipper said.

“Our ships are better than his,” Vicky said. “We can make up the difference.” She hoped she was right on that.

Finally, most of the opposing fleet flipped and began a one-gee deceleration burn for the jump. Most, but not all. As Lieutenant Blue had foretold, the
Empress’s Revenge
,
Empress’s Vengeance
, two heavy cruisers, and three destroyers actually upped their acceleration to 1.25 gees.

“Fleet, go to one-point-two-five gees acceleration,” Captain Bolesław ordered, and all the Grand Duchess’s ships, warship and merchant alike, jacked up their reactors.

“Now we see how this game of chicken will go,” the skipper muttered to himself.

An hour later, the
Empress’s Revenge
and her reduced task force flipped ship and began a 1.25-gee deceleration burn
toward the jump. As soon as Lieutenant Blue reported the change, Captain Bolesław ordered his fleet to do the same.

“Navigator, which of us arrives at the jump first?” the skipper asked.

The man worked his board. Vicky watched as he wiped it twice and ran the calculations three times, then had the chief bosun of the watch double-check his work. Beside her, Vicky watched Captain Bolesław surreptitiously do his own course check. Vicky would have done the same, but she didn’t trust her skills. Math was not her strong suit.

The navigator finally spoke. “Sir, it’s too close to call. Our two task forces will get there within seconds of each other.”

“Assuming we don’t blow each other to bits beforehand,” Lieutenant Blue said softly, but the silence on the bridge allowed for everyone to hear his observation.

“Yeah,” Captain Bolesław said. “We blow bits of them through the jump.”

That brought soft “Yeahs” from half the bridge crews.

Captain Bolesław gave Vicky a wink. Once they were on close approach to the jump, they could fight, or they could jump through it and run. They’d know in a few more hours.

The two groups raced down their separate tracks toward that one point in space they both needed to pass through. One of the Empress’s three destroyers faltered and went to .89 gees deceleration. It edged ahead of the rest of the ships. The
Pride of Darby
also began to lose deceleration. Its burn fell off slowly until it stabilized at 1.04 gees. It, too, would arrive at the jump well ahead of the rest.

“We’ll get to see what the Empress’s man intends when the
Darby
gets in range of that tin can,” Captain Bolesław muttered to Vicky.

Time dragged. On the
Retribution
, it was filled with drills that kept Sailors busy but left Vicky with time to count the monstrous butterflies circling in her stomach like buzzards. Admiral Krätz had told Vicky a junior officer’s job was to look confident and self-assured when everything around the Sailors told them confident was the last thing they should be feeling.

It seemed that a Grand Duchess had pretty much the same job. She smiled confidently when a seaman brought her hot tea. She smiled confidently when a petty officer checked her
board to make sure it was in perfect working order. She smiled confidently when a chief petty officer checked her survival pod—and did her very best to hide the choke in her voice when she thanked him graciously.

If Kris Longknife was to be believed, and Admiral Krätz had believed her, it was a defective survival pod that killed Vicky’s brother, Hank, and not the laser fire from that Wardhaven princess’s cruisers.

Did my new stepmother and her family have their fingers in that bit of sabotage?

There was no way to answer that question now, not after the ship bringing Hank’s body home disappeared into a sour jump.

Come to think about it, something as twisted as that almost had to have Bowlingame-family fingerprints on it.

Maybe I finally believe you, Kris Longknife.

Hours and many drills and cups of tea later, the
Darby
was inexorably coming in range of the destroyer’s 5-inch lasers. Vicky waited, hardly breathing, to see what would happen next.

“I’ve intercepted a massage from the
Empress’s Revenge
. It’s likely orders for the destroyer.”

“What’s it say?” Captain Bolesław asked.

“I don’t know, sir. It’s a series of three-digit numbers that don’t mean a thing unless you have the codebook.”

The captain and Vicky exchanged frowns.

“The destroyer has replied. Again, I can’t make much of it, but the sequence nine-seven-three is in both messages.”

“Somebody’s been told to do nine-seven-three and doesn’t want to,” Captain Bolesław observed cautiously.

“So what does nine-seven-three mean?” Vicky asked. The captain only shrugged.

“The flag’s reply is nine-seven-three repeated three times.”

“How do you put numbers in capital letters?” Vicky said.

“No doubt the commander of that task force told his comm boss to do exactly that,” said Captain Bolesław.

“They’ve added four extra numbers,” Lieutenant Blue said.

Vicky and the captain exchanged raised eyebrows but ventured no opinion.

Mr. Smith had been quietly observing matters from Lieutenant Blue’s elbow. Now he drawled softly, “An interesting
codebook that includes phrases for ‘I’ll hang you up by your balls if you don’t execute my orders immediately.’”

“If my stepmother published the codebook, it wouldn’t surprise me,” Vicky said.

“How could anyone serve that woman?” Captain Bolesław muttered softly, but it echoed around the bridge. Officers and petty officers nodded and returned to their work with a firm set to their lips.

The exact meaning of nine-seven-three was soon revealed. The destroyer fired a broadside of four 5-inch lasers at the
Pride of Darby
. She scored a single hit.

“The fleet’s gunnery scores have been lousy of late,” Captain Bolesław said, “but that’s just flat bad shooting.”

It was enough for the
Pride of Darby
. “We surrender. We surrender!” came through on open net from the freighter.

The destroyer sent off a message to the flag with nine-seven-three once again holding pride of place. The Empress’s man on the scene shot back the same message as before.