Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting by Mike Shepherd Read Free Book Online

target.”
    Ships blinked on Kris’s board.
    “Flip ship now. Fire.”
    The P. Royal , having been up-gunned only to 20-inch lasers, did not join the shoot.
    “We hit three, maybe four reactors,” Nelly reported. “However, they seemed to have dumped alternating reactors so one wild wave of plasma is not washing over and tripping the next one. Oh, now they’re dumping all reactors along the aft end of the base ship. Kris, the alien is just coasting.”
    “That may make her an easier target,” Jack said.
    “I don’t think so,” Nelly said. “They’ve just put a spin and rotation on the ship, Kris. It will be hell on whoever isn’t tied down aboard it, but it will be hell to target any specific point on its surface or inside.”
    “And, no doubt,” Jack drawled, “their Enlightened One is ensconced in the safest place on that rock, waiting for the fleet to come and save his skin.”
    “It will be a cold day in hell when that happens,” Kris said, and did a new count on the ships charging back from their fight with Admiral Yi. The aliens were down to sixty-three. No, make that sixty-two as another ship bloomed into a colorful flower of hot gas and bits of wreckage.
    Kris eyed the clock; she had eight minutes. Time for thirty salvos from her frigates. Maybe less.
    “Nelly, do you know where the reactors were on that wrecked mother ship we examined?”
    “Yes, Kris.”
    “Send that data to all ships. Close into one hundred and twenty-five thousand klicks and aim for the reactors that power all those lasers.”
    Nelly sent the data, and the frigates began circling the base ship, keeping up their jinking while doing it. Kris had been surprised once today by longer-range lasers.
    As they closed to Kris’s ordered range, she gave her next order. “Skippers, I want to slice that big, ugly melon. Aim your batteries for the same spot on the ship. I want it drilled right down to the reactors. Understood?”
    The message boards blinked acknowledgment.
    “Fire at will,” she ordered.
    Ships flipped to present their forward batteries. The lasers showed nothing as they departed the ships, but showed brightly as they sliced into the spinning ship. Several skippers managed to walk their fire across the twisting ship, keeping the heat on one place for an entire broadside.
    “How’d you do that?” on net got a quick reply. When the aft batteries were brought to bear, each frigates’ fire was much concentrated.
    “Nelly, why didn’t you suggest that?” Kris asked.
    “Nobody asked me, Kris, and it didn’t occur to me that you humans would need help tracking such a slow-moving target. Sorry.”
    BatRon 12 joined the shoot two minutes into it. It fired its aft lasers on the approach, flipped ship, and cut power, then fired the forward lasers. Another flip, and they were decelerating toward the base ship as they recharged. They repeated that maneuver twice before they were circling it, firing with the rest of Kris’s ships.
    Moments later, the rest of the cripples joined up and got into the shoot.
    The monster burned under their fire, but it was a huge monster, and there was a lot of it to burn.
    Then a reactor cut loose. Its plasma vented through the hull, incinerating everything along the way. That had hardly died down when another of the two hundred or so reactors along the centerline of the base ship also let loose its plasma to burn its way to the surface.
    “BatRon 9, fire one antimatter torpedo per ship, if you will.”
    “On their way, Admiral,” Commodore Shoalter answered.
    Before they crossed the hundred-thousand-klick line, lasers reached out to burn them.
    We don’t use the Hellburners yet.
    Thirty-two ships blasted away at the rolling hulk. Volley fire was gone. Every second a couple of ships would fire either their forward or aft batteries. Among Shoalter’s squadron from New Eden, the ships organized themselves into pairs, aiming for a single place on the mother ship.
    That quickly caught on.