Free Extremis by Charles E. Gannon, Steve White Page A

could not look him in the eye. “Plan Zulu-X-Ray. We didn’t discuss it much.”
    Watanabe had already found it on his data tablet. He looked up, expressionless. “This is pretty risky. Could be a death sentence.”
    “For a lot more of them than us, if we play it right.”
    “That’s a mighty big if, Admiral.”
    “It always is, in combat, ’Nab. Send the word to the cruisers first. They should be moving out to a flanking position before the Baldies get here. No reason to—”
    The alert klaxon howled. The automated call to battle stations began droning under it.
    Krishmahnta was on the bridge by the third peal of the klaxon. She looked down quickly into the holotank. And swallowed the sudden rush of responding bile with utter aplomb: “Here they come again.”
    In the holotank, red motes swarmed out of the purple hole like angry hornets. And although some were already beginning to flash amber—indicating potentially disabling damage from the combined firepower of the human monitors and supermonitors—the hornets kept coming, swarming, climbing over each other in their mad, burning desire to kill.
    To kill Erica Krishmahnta’s fleet.

2
    Theirs Not to Reason Why
    Theirs not to reason whyTheirs but to do and die—Tennyson
    Arduan SDH Shem’pter’ai , First Fleet of the Anaht’doh Kainat , Beaumont System
    Narrok looked over at Urkhot, who was absorbed, selnarm infolded, as he watched the fleets grind against each other.In the bridge’s holopod, the titanic struggle appeared to be waged by scintillant gnats that swarmed, tangled, and expired at a very leisurely pace. Theirs was a slow-motion ballet of death—which represented massive ships hurtling through space at twenty percent of the speed of light, intermittently being incinerated or shattered by the scaled-down supernovae of antimatter warheads. At close ranges, the behemoths—here represented as actinic mayflies—actually sliced into each other with matter-annihilating force beams, knife-fighting to the death across light-seconds of open space.
    Or, rather, mostly open space. The human admiral had kept its second line out of the battle, and wisely so: those rearmost enemy ships were beyond the range of most of Narrok’s weapons but were still able to fire long-reaching missiles of great destructive power—HBMs—even while being resupplied by tenders. Narrok had engaged these distant menaces as best he could, but his missiles were of the shorter-ranged CBM and SBM varieties. These smaller missiles launched quickly and were wonderful at overwhelming the humans’ defensive fire: the burning, blackened shells of three of their dreadnoughts and two of their monitors were compelling evidence of that capability. But Narrok did not have enough HBMs to overcome the massive and extraordinarily well-coordinated defensive fire of the farther human ships.
    The victims of the enemy’s steady HBM barrages—fifteen of Narrok’s older generation of SDs, and four of his newer ones with the Desai drive—were dull, lifeless vrel -colored cinders, motionless in the holopod and dropping rapidly behind the van of his fleet.
    “Admiral Narrok,” sent his sensor second.
    “Yes?”
    “We have detected multiple signatures from the Suwa warp point, sir.”
    Urkhot returned from his absorption in the unfolding battle. “Does this mean they are retreating? At last?”
    “No, Holodah’kri . I believe the warp activity indicates that the two human fleets are regularly exchanging information by couriers. Which means they have seen through my ruse, as I thought. They are coordinating their responses to our two separate attacks—here and in the Raiden system.”
    “What will they do?”
    (Humor, rue.) “If I knew that, esteemed Urkhot, I would be Illudor’s twin. But I may conjecture. Ultimately, they will withdraw. Had they enough force to hold the warp point, they would have done so from the outset.”
    “So, let us smash them in their weakness and move straight