Extremis (83 page)

The injector went in with a hiss, and in a moment the admiral’s face relaxed.

At the same moment, the deck shook, and loose fixtures showered down on Rupe, one cracking him solidly in the head.

Disoriented, flushed with a suddenly resurgent fear of his own imminent death, the young quasi-medic checked on the admiral again: her respiration was good and the tourniquet was holding—and now that he was done, he could seal her up, get off the bridge, and get ready to abandon ship.

Once he had placed Krishmahnta in her escape pod, he hit its autopriming button: the pod’s door swung back down with a sigh and sealed with a sound like a wet, pneumatic kiss. Rupe collected his gear and made for the lift.

And never realized that the falling debris had distracted him from completing his primary task: securing Admiral Erica Krishmahnta’s new tourniquet against the high gee forces that would be imparted by the pod’s escape charge.

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Main Van, Consolidated Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, BR-02 Warp Nexus

Narrok stared at the holoplot in both wonder and dread. Once again, the human ships—sluggishly and scattered at first—had resumed their deadly passage through the minefield. And although their data links were clearly gone, the sheer volume of fire generated by their energy-torpedo batteries was both breaking through the minefield and vaporizing the floating drifts of flechettes.

“How can they do it, Senior Admiral? Surely they must know that they will all be—”

“They know, Fleet Second, they know. And they have forced us to commit our full force.” And having sent that, Narrok wondered if, in another life, he might recall those words as the eulogy for millions of the Children of Illudor. Maybe for all of them—in which case, he would recall no eulogy, for his incarnations would be at an end.

Feeling a moment of utter, paralyzing fear at that concept—and reflecting,
this is what
they
feel, all the time
—Narrok mastered himself and gave the order he had wanted to avoid giving. “All SDHs and SDSs: salvo all missile tubes at the human column. Continue until they are all destroyed. And maneuver Reaction Group Zep’tef to confront any human ships that might survive long enough to break through the minefield.”

RFNS
Gallipoli
, Task Force Vishnu, Allied Fleet, BR-02 Warp Nexus

“Commander Wethermere!”

“I see it, Lubell. I make that—over four hundred missiles inbound.”

“Yes, sir—and I don’t think the salvos are going to stop.”

And once they’ve committed, why would they? Until we’re monoatomic vapor, that is.
Aloud: “Commo, send the signal to Guard Group Excalibur:
Pull the sword from the stone
. Keep repeating.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sensors?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Time to enemy salvo impact?”

“Leading edge hits us in about ninety seconds.”

“Lubell, time remaining before we get through the minefield?”

“Uh…ninety seconds. Give or take.”

“Commo, signal this to all the ships you can reach. In eighty seconds, half of all energy-torpedo batteries are to shift back to defensive fire. And send this shipwide on
Gallipoli
. Nonessential crew are to report to evacuation pods in one minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

Back near the warp point to Polo, the four remaining supermonitors of Guard Group Excalibur received the message they had been waiting for: they immediately sent a flurry of recon drones plunging through the warp point.

A moment later, they began moving out into a rough defensive screen—and started coming under slowly growing fire from the laser and force-beam buoys. Missiles were inbound also—but only a fraction of the obliterating torrent that would have saturated the area had much of its force not already been directed against the crippled van of Task Force Vishnu.

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, Polo System

“My God!” breathed Andreas Hagen as displays exploded into life with a flood of reports from Guard Group Excalibur’s courier drones. “Almost fifty percent Code Omegas, and some degree of damage to all the survivors.”

Ian Trevayne ordered himself to disregard those data for now. There would be plenty of time for horror later. At the moment, he must fixate on the one item that made the nightmare now transpiring in BR-02 worthwhile. Krishmahnta had given the go-ahead to send in the Kasugawa generator. That was what mattered. Now the sword would come from the stone.

“Task Group Pendragon will commence transit,” he said in a harsh voice that brought Hagen out of shock.

The order was transmitted, and in the tactical holotank an array of green supermonitor icons began to vanish into the warp point. One of them—the shell with the pea under it—contained the generator.

RFNS
Gallipoli
, Task Force Vishnu, Allied Fleet, BR-02 Warp Nexus

Wethermere looked at the clock: impact in twenty seconds.

“Sir!” Lubell’s shout was an exultation. “Sensors indicate that
Jellicoe
has cleared the minefield. Admiral Yoshikuni’s done it! She’s—”

He stopped. The
Jellicoe
’s icon—already yellow—began to flutter, and then became an Omega icon. The cause of its destruction loomed ahead of
Gallipoli
’s icon in the plot: at least thirty enemy SDHs were waiting at the end of the tunnel they were trying to exit.

“Escape pods from
Jellicoe
?” asked Wethermere.

“Can’t tell at this range and through all the debris, sir. Our energy torpedoes are now shifting to defensive fire.”

“Commo, send shipwide. All nonessential personnel into escape pods and abandon ship.”

The hull shook: the first missile—and it had been way too close.
Gallipoli
’s icon was ready to exit the minefield: the enemy SDHs—fresh, lethal—loomed large in the tacplot. No way out of the tube now—except through them. And the next wave of kamikazes was beginning to show up as tiny scarlet chips converging on what was left of the column from all points.

“Sir.” It was Zhou.

“Yes?”

“It’s looking pretty bad.”

“It is indeed.”

“So…what trick do we pull this time, sir?”

Wethermere shook his head. “No tricks left, Zhou. Now all we’ve got is guts.” More shaking as missiles detonated—closer still. Wethermere stared hard at the holoplot and the thirty red icons in front of them.

Helm’s voice quavered. “Course, sir?”

Ossian looked up at her. “Right down their throats.”

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Main Van, Consolidated Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, BR-02 Warp Nexus

Narrok saw the new wave of human supermonitors flooding through the warp point and retasked his immense missile assets to fire all tubes on that target. But even as the new, retargeted salvos streaked forward with their payloads of utter annihilation, his sensor prime uttered the words he had feared hearing for weeks. “Gravitic fluctuations near the warp point, Senior Admiral.”

“Given the observed activation time of the Kasugawa generator, will our missiles get there first?”

“Yes, sir—but the new human SMTs and MTs have integrated into the datalinks of the ships that were already on this side of the warp point. I estimate it will take three salvos to bring them down.”

“Because they are using the energy torpedoes in missile-intercept mode?”

“Yes, sir.”

Of course.
Each step the humans had taken was the one he would have pursued, in their place.

“Orders, sir?”

Narrok forced himself to stand very straight. “Fleet signal: general advance. We must bring everything that comes through the warp point under the full weight of our fire.”

And as he sent it, the warp point’s whirlpool of energy emissions pulsed, fluxed—and then expanded dramatically.

RFNS
Gallipoli
, Task Force Vishnu, Allied Fleet, BR-02 Warp Nexus

The
Gallipoli
groaned and shook—and the shaking did not entirely go away.

Zhou looked over at Wethermere urgently. “Tuners are destabilizing, sir. Too much peripheral damage.”

Wethermere nodded to the entire bridge crew. “Thank you, everyone. Commo, all remaining crew to pods. Sound abandon ship. But Zhou, you stay with me for a second longer. I need you to automate
Gallipoli’
s battery activity.”

“Easy.” Zhou pressed three virtual buttons on his console. “Done. The old girl will now hammer away at fixed targets as long as she can.” The bridge was now empty except for them. “Can we go?”

“No, there’s one last thing to do. I need you to rig the computer in engineering to monitor our pod status.”

“Okay.” Zhou started working. “What do you want the engineering computer to do, exactly?”

“Once it sees that all pods are away, the computer is to wait until both the main bridge and auxiliary register as ‘destroyed’ or ‘off-line.’ When that condition is met,
Gallipoli
’s engines are to boost to max”—Wethermere checked the distance and time to the center of the enemy SDHs—“and then, after thirty seconds, the computer is to lower the primary containment field in the main power plant.”

Zhou stared at Wethermere for a second. “What is it with you and destroying your own ships?”

Wethermere jerked his chin in the direction of the tacplot. “Look at those SDHs in front of us, Zhou. They’re a plug with which Baldy is trying to reseal his defensive wall. We’ve got to push that plug out—for just a few minutes—so that the main van of the Fleet can come in and bust the tube we made wide open.”

“Okay, but I think that by charging forward like that,
Gallipoli
is only going to attract even more Baldy atten—”

“Zhou.”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up and finish.”

Zhou rose. “I’m done.”

“Already?”

Zhou smiled. “I had half the programs written already. I’m starting to understand how you think.”

“Then get to your escape pod.”

“Well,” observed Zhou as the little capsule’s hatch hissed open, “this is just like déjà vu—all over again.”

Wethermere watched Zhou dive into the pod and hoped that wouldn’t be the last bad joke he ever heard from the stubby engineer. Wethermere leaped into his own pod—and as its straps grabbed and pinned him,
Gallipoli
gave a great wrench and started shuddering apart in time to the shrill screams of multi-layered armor being sheared into strips.

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, BR-02 Warp Nexus

Ian Trevayne had sometimes quipped that ever since the Battle of Zapata, where his original body had been nearly destroyed, he had no particular fear of death, having already experienced Hell.

Now, emerging from the dredged warp point into BR-02 just in time to witness the catastrophic destruction of
Gallipoli,
he realized he still had a great deal left to learn about Hell.

He stared into the plot and, despite many long years of service, could scarcely credit what he saw as reality. Omega icons littered the plot like fallen autumn leaves, and their numbers continued to creep upward as Task Force Vishnu’s van was ground to pieces within the breaching tube of clear space it had drilled through the Baldies’ cloud of space junk. Most of the survivors were battered and torn in various degrees, staggering on like blood-dripping prizefighters who simply didn’t know how to quit.

“Escape pods from
Gallipoli
?” he demanded harshly.

“Quite a few, sir,” Hagen reported. “But no identification of individuals yet,” he added, reading Trevayne’s mind without difficulty.

“Of course not.” Trevayne told himself that there was at least a chance that Erica Krishmahnta still lived, then filed that thought away and concentrated his entire being on fighting the battle she and the rest of Task Force Vishnu had, by appalling sacrifices, enabled him to fight.

“Admiral,” he heard from the comm station, “we’re being hailed by
Taconic.
”

Trevayne saw that the devastator—from which Mags was now flying her lights—had just made transit. Her face appeared on the comm screen. She said nothing about Krishmahnta’s fate, knowing he would be able to tell her nothing definite. She was merely awaiting orders, as their great ships’ active and passive defenses shrugged off the missile-sleet that was now targeting them.

“We know what the basic condition of battle here is,” Trevayne stated. “There’s no local sun, hence no Desai limit. Which means that fighters—including those employing kamikaze tactics—are at a disadvantage vis-a-vis full-sized ships, which can use their Desai drives. Therefore, we’re going to rely on that—and on our own fighters—and press forward to come to grips with the SDSs.”

“Without spending any more time in their missile envelopes than necessary,” Mags added. As though for emphasis, she steadied herself as the vibration of a near-miss shook even
Taconic
’s mighty frame.

“Right. The SMTs of Task Group Pendragon can use the same tactics Krishmahnta’s people did—I’ve had time to scan the reports from the recon drones—and clear additional paths for us.” He paused for a moment and looked at the face of the woman to whom he’d been joined for so short a time in a marriage which might well be dissolved in minutes by the death of one or both of them…and found himself unable to say anything except, “All elements of the Fleet will advance.”

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Main Van, Consolidated Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, BR-02 Warp Nexus

Narrok watched the holoplot carefully; several of the human DTs flickered and went dark, but most kept coming—and their missiles would be upon his forces in minutes. In addition, the new wave of supermonitors, evidently copying the strategy improvised by the first task force that had breached his defenses, were using their energy torpedoes to cut even more pathways through the defensive hemisphere. If the gargantuan human ships were able to exit his cauldron of concentrated fire too quickly…

“Fleet signal: all remaining Eyes of Illudor—activate for sustained wave attack plan Izref.”

TRNS
Li Han
, Allied Fleet, BR-02 Warp Nexus