A moment later, he was also looking at the other half. "Yep, gunner, you cut it right in half. Good shooting. Give me a minute. I've got an idea here."

  A moment later, the second half of the mine was jetting away from the station. Five minutes later, the motor cut off, and a few seconds later, the portion of the mine blew up.

  The demolition expert quickly repeated the process with the first piece. The second explosion was noticeably smaller than the first.

  "Your Grace," came on the Victorious' net. "This is Major Stoner, commander of your demolition team. Based on our measurements of the strength of that explosion, even assuming it was a shaped charge and aimed at the outer skin of one of your battleships, I don't see it doing anything to the four meters of ice armor on the Victorious. I doubt it could do much to the Gigi Dee's three meters, either. It might could do something to the meter-thick armor of the fast transports."

  "Thank you, Major," Vicky said. That was the first time she'd heard what nickname the Gracious Grand Duchess had acquired. She found it cute. Strange for a battleship that had been top of the line just a few decades ago should bring 'cute' to mind.

  She turned to Bolesław. "Do you think they know their explosives are underpowered?"

  "Any device that can burn through four meters of ice is going to have to be a whole lot bigger than you can pass off for space junk. No, I suspect the jokers doing this really don't have an idea what they're up against."

  "What's the level of professionalism left in their Navy?" Vicky mused.

  "I can't vouch for them, Your Grace, but I wonder if their Navy officers are even being asking for their advice. We still haven't heard from the Port Admiral. I have no idea who he is, nor what kind of background he has. If he's another one of those jumped up bank clerks, he's way in over his head on this."

  "So, we could be lucky, or he could get lucky, huh?"

  "It's a crap shoot."

  "Let's see what we can do about rattling a few cages. Maggie, get me a line out."

  "That I cannot do, Your Grace. Though it is impossible for a fiber optic line to have static, our lines seem to be full of static."

  "You're kidding."

  "Regretfully, kidding is not within my skill level, and I doubt you would want it to be."

  "Correct. Sorry, Maggie. So, how have you been managing to get information from inside the station?"

  "Our switching and lines are fine. It is only at the first switching component on the station that the static suddenly appears. I have laid a wire around it."

  "And if I make a call on that line, they'll go looking for it."

  "Yes, Your Grace."

  "Are any of my ships having less trouble?"

  "No, Your Grace."

  "Could we land a longboat at another pier and maybe have better luck?"

  Admiral Bolesław grinned as Maggie said, "Yes, Your Grace."

  An unarmed longboat was dropped off the Victorious. She headed for the Baden, but poor handling caused it to miss. The station was rotating under it and the longboat just drifted.

  Then it darted to pier 23B and locked onto the longboat landing. A few seconds later, Vicky had a commlink to the station that worked.

  "This is Her Imperial Grace, the Grand Duchess Admiral Victoria. I will speak to the Port Admiral about the filthy conditions of his station."

  The lieutenant's face again filled her screen.

  "I'm sorry, Your Grace, but the Port Admiral is not here at the moment. How can I help you?"

  "Is the Port Admiral ever there? If he does not show up for work, he should be fired. Better yet, walk him out the nearest airlock."

  The admiral beside Vicky raised his eyebrows. She grinned back. It had been a long time since she'd dare come full-on Peterwald Grand Duchess. Actually, it didn't even taste good now.

  The lieutenant was in full cowering mode, "The Port Admiral is a very loyal and industrious officer, Your Grace. He is indisposed at the moment. A horrible and debilitating stomach flu. The station surgeon has him quarantined to keep it from spreading."

  Vicky very much doubted he has a stomach flu, but she fully expected he would have one in a day or two.

  "Very well, Lieutenant. The amount of space junk is totally unacceptable. I had to shoot one up and then blow up the pieces. This has to stop!"

  "Yes, Your Grace. It certainly must. However, both our Zambonis for junk collection are awaiting parts. I will call our supplier and alert him to the risk he is causing the Grand Duchess."

  "Tell him he is putting himself at risk," Vicky snapped. "If this continues, I will have him out collecting this junk by hand. If he is lucky, I will allow him a space suit with an oxygen tank."

  "Yes, Your Grace. Immediately, Your Grace. Excuse me while I make that call."

  "Very well, this call is over," and Maggie snapped the comm line to off.

  "It will be interesting to see how quickly that changes things," Admiral Bolesław said.

  "I doubt it will change anything at all," Vicky said.

  She should have talked the admiral into putting money down.

  She would have won.

  Over the next six hours, whoever was running this show continued to take pot shots at them. The first two hours, there was one every few minutes. After two hours of not getting anything done, someone launched an entire swarm of limpet mines, throwing caution and deniability to the wind.

  By that time, each of the ships had at least a pair of armed longboats. The fast attack transports had half a dozen landing craft armed as well. Vicky scrambled the lot of them.

  They smeared the space around her small squadron with the wreckage of mines. Some were now equipped with 20mm grenade launchers. They blew the mines up, with even better results.

  After an hour of this, the space around them grew must less occupied. The picket boats with the grenade launchers roved the area, shooting at and blowing up the wreckage. The boats armed with the 13mm lasers came back aboard and the crews turned to re-arm them with grenades as well.

  The quiet lasted for only a bit more than an hour.

  During the early assaults, the mines had been launched from a widely dispersed number of places on the station, and Vicky had refrained from shooting them up. She likely would have turned her station into Swiss cheese if she had, and that was something she preferred to avoid.

  After all, this was part of her father's territory. Indeed, his capital.

  Then the jokers running things on the station massively changed things up.

  Vicky had most of her fleet swinging around each other at anchor well away from the station. However, their anchorage was not random. Her ships were several thousand kicks away from the station, strategically placed at the same level as Vicky's docked ships.

  Simply put, no matter where the station was in its continual rotation, she had a couple of ships swinging around each other, with their eyeballs on the station around her detachment.

  The battleships Peace and Prosperity identified the change. Huge hatches at the end of Piers 23 to 28, and 43 to 48 had opened up and large cube-shaped objects were pushed out and welded in place.

  It was amazing how fast that was done. More amazing was how well it was coordinated. Less than a minute after the first box had been winched out and secured into place, the entire group of ten huge cubes was in place.

  There was a short paused while nothing happened.

  Without warning, the cubes began launching hundreds of small rocket-powered objects, longer and thinner than the mines they'd already blown up. Suddenly, swarms of rockets shot out into space and began arching back, each using a slightly different course.

  The gunnery officers on the Peace and the Prosperity had made a guess that these crates were up to no good. Now they were proven right.

  Even as Vicky shouted the order, "Shoot those rocket launchers!" the gunners were closing their firing circuits. Lasers reached across four thousand kilometers at the speed of light to slash into the cubes.

  Lasers and explosives do not mix well. It didn't take a lot of laser power slashing into the rocket magazines before they'd hit enough rocket motors to cause major damage. One rocket lead to another rocket exploding, taking with them the entire cube of rockets, and leaving a very big hole at the end of a pier.

  The exploding rockets launchers also took out a number of the recently launched rockets. However, each launcher had been spewing out a hundred rockets a second for several long seconds.

  Several thousands of rockets now swarmed toward the Victorious.

  There was no question, Vicky was the target.

  15

  Vicky could only watch as the rockets shot toward her flagship. No one could know how deadly the warheads were. No one could guess how badly they'd damage a huge 120,000-ton battleship.

  The twenty-four 19-inch main lasers were of no use. You do not use a sledge hammer to kill a mosquito. Vicky's life would be lost or saved by much smaller guns.

  She had only a few breaths before she would learn her fate. She used two of them to think, I'm sorry Mannie. I thought I could beat them at this. I'm sorry we didn't have all the time in the world.

  The picket boats took on the incoming swarm. Automatic grenade launchers sent explosive shooting out toward the mass of rockets, even as the 13mm lasers tried to snap off incoming shots.

  However, there were only eight fully loaded picket boats out at the moment, and there were thousands of targets.

  In addition to the big 19-inch guns, the Victorious also carried a secondary battery of thirty-six 5-inch lasers. These were designed to take out small rockets and other nuisances that occasionally cluttered up the battlefield.

  Nine of the 5-inchers were masked by the pier. The other twenty-seven would have some portion of the swarm in their target area. However, there was only so much that they could do. The firing solutions for so many targets were impossible for the ship's computer and fire control computers to calculate that fast.

  Still, those twenty-seven lasers opened fire. However, they did not fire full power laser beams, then recharge, then fire again.

  No.

  Every gun opened up and fired off short, staccato bursts at low power, but enough to hack a rocket in two, explode its rocket fuel or otherwise blow the rocket to hell.

  Each of the guns seemed to be concentrating on its own portion of the sky, taking out one rocket, moving a smidgen, slashing another one in half, then edging a bit over and hacking one in half.

  And they kept doing this as rockets disintegrated, flew to pieces, rammed into wreckage, and blew themselves up.

  Vicky and Admiral Bolesław stared at the screen, struggling to keep their mouths from dropping open.

  "That's impossible," the admiral whispered.

  Even as he said that, the 5-inch batteries on the Protector and Defender opened fire, followed by the Gracious Grand Duchess. A fraction of a second later, the secondaries on the cruisers at either end of the berths swung out of train and into action.

  Every medium-sized gun in the pier side squadron was shooting short, rapid bursts that shot across the sky to smash a rocket. Immediately, they moved on to the next one. Always smashing. Always moving on.

  Finally, the fire began to slacken. The Victorious shook as three explosions rattled her outer hull. Vicky waited for the announcement of a hull breach, but none came.

  "Can anyone tell me what just happened?" Admiral Boleslaw demanded.

  "Were those guns even manned?" Vicky asked.

  "No, Your Grace, the gun crews were not at their stations," Maggie answered from Vicky's neck.

  "Okay, Maggie," Vicky said, suddenly very suspicious of this gift horse one certain Kris Longknife had given her and very much wanting a look in its mouth.

  "I saw that the problem developing could not be resolved by conventional means in the seconds before impact," Maggie said, apologetically.

  "That was certainly true," Admiral Bolesław agreed.

  "I selected two subroutines Nelly had made available to me. One allowed us to dial back our lasers from full strength to one tenth power. I might have been able to get it to one twentieth by modifying it, but I only had one tenth available."

  "And the other subroutine?" Vicky said, doing her best to make sure honey would melt in her mouth.

  "Nelly has subroutines that allow problems to be broken down into small portions and apportioned among several computers. I set each of the ship computers and the main fire control computers to finding the firing solution for the secondary batteries. They succeeded, and we fed the data to the targeting computers for the 5-inch guns and activated them to sweep their assigned portion of the sky."

  Admiral Bolesław began to frown as he studied the screen. Suddenly, his face went pale. He signaled Vicky silently, pointing one finger at his neck repeatedly.

  She reached up and found Maggie's on/off switch.

  The admiral nodded, and Vicky deactivated her computer.

  "Your computer saved our lives," Admiral Bolesław said slowly. "Remember that. No matter what you may think of Maggie in a moment, your computer saved our lives."

  "Yes," Vicky said. "What's wrong?"

  "Our computers processed the problem your Maggie laid out before them: to shoot down the incoming rockets. That she could coordinate getting the firing solution from all our computers, then firing at all those incoming missiles, is not something that could have done by anyone or anything except her."

  "I know all of that," Vicky said, getting aggravated. "You see a problem. What is it?"

  "We had eight picket boats out there when the swarms started attacking," the admiral said, his voice low and even. Then he said no more.

  Vicky's stomach went into freefall. Her vision grayed until she looked at Admiral Bolesław through a small tunnel. She swayed on her feet, as her mouth went dry. For a long moment, her stomach wanted to vomit forth its contents.

  Yes, three minutes ago, there had been eight picket boats out there. Each had a crew of at least two yeomen and two Marine gunners.

  Now there were no picket boats.

  Maggie had arrived at the optimum firing solution in the limited amount of time available. She had either not thought to add in the factor of friendlies in their sky or she had chosen to ignore it.

  Vicky knew that if Maggie hadn't ignored it, the Victorious would very likely have taken a lot more hits while the computer searched for a more complex fire plan.

  "Your Grace, would you like to sit down?" Admiral Bolesław offered.

  "Yes. Yes, I think I will," Vicky said, and quickly did.

  "Bosun, a cup of tea for the Grand Duchess."

  A warm, delicate china cup was soon in her hands. Vicky inhaled the fragrant steam coming off the cup as she tried to order her problems.

  She still had some SOB on this station trying to kill her. That was problem number one.

  She had just killed some very valiant and courageous men. They had died doing their duty. That it was friendly fire that killed them was . . . what? Regrettable? Unacceptable? Painful but unavoidable?

  This was the first time she'd commanded such an act. She knew that she was not the first to have such a horrible choice forced upon her. Still, this time it fell on her shoulders.

  She did not feel good about it.

  So, now she had a computer that, thanks to Nelly and Kris Longknife, was able to pull miracles out of her non-existent hat. Without the new skills her computer had, Vicky might very well be dead.

  Thank you for my life, Kris.

  But Maggie was not Nelly. Nelly knew how important human life was.

  Vicky paused in her thoughts.

  Had Nelly always known how important human life was? Did she have to learn?

  Oh God, not another learning experience, and now I'm sharing them with my bloody computer!

  All Vicky could do was shake her head.

  She also knew that she needed her computer.

  "Captain Blue," she snapped.

  "Yes, Your Grace."

  "Have you been paying attention to what is going on in this station and what we now know about it?"

  "Yes, I have, ma'am."

  "If I wanted you to shut it down, could you do that?"

  "With your computer's help, I think I could."

  Vicky allowed herself a sour face.

  Admiral Boleslaw nodded his agreement.

  "Captain, I need you here."

  In a moment, the sensor chief was at Vicky's elbow. She quickly explained her problem. Her computer might have well just saved their life. However, the cost had been all the human lives in the fire zone.

  "My problem is figuring out how delicate my computer is. Can we keep her ignorant of the loss of human life?"

  "Do we want to?" Blue asked.

  "That is also part of my problem."

  The young and rapidly promoted captain studied the deck for a long minute.

  "I can offer you no guarantees on this, Your Grace. I don't think you're expecting any from me. However, I would just turn your computer back on, and immediately turn her loose on taking down the station without the ground troops knowing they've lost control up here. That ought to keep even a brilliant computer tied up."

  "And if she asks about the loss of time?"

  "Say we had a problem and you accidently turned her off."

  "Can I successfully lie to my computer?"

  "I suspect we'll know real soon."

  16

  Admiral, Her Grace Victoria Peterwald took a deep breath and prepared herself for what she suspected would be one of the most challenging experiences of her young life.

  In the last few days, she apparently had birthed a sentient computer. Nelly, Kris Longknife's sentient computer that told horrible jokes, used contractions in her speech, and argued with Kris, had left one of her children dormant in the computer matrix around Vicky's neck.

  Somehow, Vicky had awakened it.

  Not only was Maggie awake, but she had saved Vicky's life, and the life of thousands of Sailors and Marines aboard the Victorious.

  However, in doing so, she had either killed or allowed the incoming attack to kill at least thirty-two Marines and Sailors.

 

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