“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.