Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Read Online Free PDF Page B

closed. Her ships were heading at them at only one-gee acceleration, but the others were as close to 2.5 gees as they could manage.
    Kris kept one eye on the reloading process for her ships’ lasers and the other eye on the closing aliens. It looked like the aliens would be in maximum range for a full two seconds before Kris would have a forward salvo ready.
    “Go to Evasion Pattern 3,” Kris ordered. “Prepare to engage targets by two-ship sections with fire from forward batteries, then flip ship and fire aft batteries. I will then order a three-gee deceleration burn to keep the aliens in our range and us out of theirs for as long as possible.”
    “Aye, aye,” came back at her on net from her admirals and commodores. On her battle board, the name of each ship blinked as the captain acknowledged the message.
    “Fire,” Kris ordered.
    Twenty-two frigates emptied their forward batteries at fifteen big alien warships.
    Or that was the plan. Actually, it was more like ten.
    Just as they came into range, the alien commander must have ordered evasion maneuvers. Maybe he didn’t, but eight of his ships did it anyway. The evasion wasn’t nearly as good as Nelly would have designed, but it threw off frigates that weren’t expecting any.
    On top of that, there was the confusion created by having sixteen two-frigate sections firing at fifteen ships. Worse, two sections were down to only one ship. Several aliens were not targeted.
    “Flip ships,” Kris ordered. “Commodores, correct your ship assignments. Fire aft batteries when ready.”
    The squadron commanders reallocated targets among their sections and fired. The huge aliens took more hits this time, but the aft batteries were only four guns strong.
    The aliens just kept on coming in their ragged formation.
    “Up deceleration to three gees,” Kris said. “Execute Evasion Plan 6. Deploy chaff.”
    Around Kris, her ships went into a wild dance of up, down, right, left as they jumped up to three gees deceleration, then dropped to one. To complicate fire control solutions more, they popped chaff, shooting tiny balls of iron, ice, and flares out the way they were going just as they changed direction.
    They needed the wild jig. The aliens were just coming into their new, extreme range, and had too many lasers firing into the general space around their dancing target. They missed a lot of shots, but they had so many lasers sweeping the area where Kris’s ships were that some had to connect.
    The Caesar , Asama , and Broadsword took hits on their rocket engines. This time their captains were ready. As soon as one engine’s power skewed, they countered with corrections to their other rockets as well as boosting their ships to a full 4.5-gee deceleration.
    None ran into any more lasers than they would have as they dropped away from the battle line.
    Kris was in a tough fight.
    “Flip ships,” Kris ordered. She’d have to be a fool to keepher vulnerable rear with its rocket engines and reactors where the hostiles could get at them.
    The ships flipped. Now armored bows took the light hits from the attenuated alien lasers. It was bad, but acceptable.
    Better yet, the Mandela and the Saber , repairs made, were coming back into line.
    Kris measured the seconds as the forward batteries edged toward full.
    “Kris, I’ve evaluated the evasions the aliens are using. It’s a simple algorithm. I think I can forecast where they’ll be next.”
    “Feed it to the targeting computers, Nelly.”
    “Done,” her computer reported.
    “Fire forward batteries,” Kris ordered.
    Fifteen alien ships burned as twenty-one frigates hit them hard. Two exploded. Fire from others slackened, but the range was closing, and the alien lasers were taking bigger bites.
    The Smart Metal TM hull of the Princess Royal , like all the other non-Earth frigates, was a honeycomb of metal and cooling reaction mass under a thin covering of reflective material. It spun around the ship to spread out any hit