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take them out, and they vanished under a hammering of full frontal fire.
    Next, two came in range. Kris flipped ship just long enough to obliterate the pair.
    Forward batteries were reloaded when the last three rushed to their deaths.
    Kris scowled and ordered an end to the massacre.
    “Whether they come at us in full ships, or in tiny, sentiently guided mines, they die,” Jack whispered.
    Now that part of her problem was done. She had ten minutes to destroy a base ship before its bloodthirsty brood came howling back, screaming for Kris’s head.
    “How the hell do you destroy an alert and fully armed base ship?” Kris asked no one in particular.”
    Still, Admiral Furzah attempted a reply. “It is like, what do you call that animal? A porcupine. Sharp spines everywhere.”
    “Only these spines are lasers,” Jack added.
    “Yes,” Kris said, and considered her next major challenge.

7
     
    “Squadrons , flip ship and come up on 4.5 gees deceleration slowly. Let me know if battle damage causes you trouble.”
    At 3.5 gees deceleration Earth’s BatRon 12 had a hard time keeping their overheated crystal armor from sliding off their hulls. Kris reduced them to 3.35-gee deceleration.
    The Asama , Broadsword , and Saber hollered uncle around four gees. Kris detached them to proceed independently. She ordered all the separated ships to aim for well out on the mother ship’s base course.
    They decelerated with their vulnerable sterns to the alien base ship through a loose cloud of intelligently guided mines. They fishtailed a bit, opening up their amidships secondary batteries to pop the bits and pieces of murderous crud. Occasionally, a denser cloud would require short, low-powered bursts from the aft main battery.
    Still, Longbow suffered a near-miss atomic and had to slow down.
    Kris had twelve of the large 22-inch frigates, as well as all eight of BatRon 2’s 20-inch war wagons and the Princess Royal as she matched course and speed with an alien mother ship the size of a small moon, still 180,000 klicks out.
    “Nelly, send to the alien. ‘Enlightened One, you and all your black hats will die. Give up your arms, and I will let you live. Admiral Longknife sends.’”
    “I have sent it, Kris, using what we know of their language.”
    “BatRon 8 and 9, let’s back up my surrender offer with a full broadside. Pick a target on that monster and make it vanish.”
    “Kris, we really ought to concentrate on what will do the most damage,” Nelly said.
    “Yes, we will,” Kris answered, “but not right now. Let’s scourge him a bit before I go for blowing him to bits.”
    “Psychology, huh?” Nelly asked.
    “Just plain human orneriness,” Jack put in.
    “It’s gotten us where we are today,” Kris pointed out.
    “How long do you plan to be ornery before we slice some serious chunks off that ship?” Nelly asked.
    Kris sighed. So long as the ship had rocket power, it could keep up its flight. If she cut the huge bell-shaped rockets off its aft end, would that end the run, or just allow them to douse the reactors back there and become a whole lot harder to blow up?
    Kris posed the question and got half her human staff in favor of destroying the rockets. The other half, Jack included, proposed delaying that until they could get some antimatter torpedoes into the reactors and turn them loose to rip the ship apart.
    Admiral Furzah voted with Jack.
    It didn’t matter.
    A number of Kris’s captains had taken it on their own to aim for the rocket engines that dominated the aft end of the huge, thick ellipsoid. The moon-size ship’s dash through space took on a distinct shimmy before it settled down at a steady .97-gee acceleration.
    A moment later, its acceleration fell off significantly.
    “They’ve dumped reactor cores and closed down half their engines,” Nelly reported.
    “All ships, prepare to flip ship,” Kris ordered. “Aim your aft batteries at the rear of the base ship. Reactors are our