H.M.S. Lionheart, in Victorian Space
Admiral Douthat scowled at the status board. The longer she looked at it, the worse their situation seemed. Battleships were the fleet’s heavy hitters, carrying forty missile tubes and up to twenty energy beams, a simply awesome amount of fire power. A single battleship was a significant force in any battle. Two battleships working together or with five cruisers were a force of nature, overwhelming and destructive. First Fleet had had three battleships, but two of them had been destroyed by the Dominion ambush, leaving her with only Lionheart.
But that wasn’t her biggest problem.
Most of the Home Fleet’s admirals had died at the Palace, which meant that most of her ship captains were gone. Normally a battleship would be the flagship for its battle group, but now she was going to assign that task to cruisers and assign new captains to all but one of her cruisers and a couple of destroyers. The frigate captains, too junior in rank to have been invited to the Palace, were mostly intact. So if she moved the frigate captains up to the destroyers…hmmm, but that meant moving the cruiser XOs up to captain the cruisers and some of the XOs simply weren’t up to it. If she was honest, she’d admit that despite rank, some of the frigate captains would make better cruiser captains than the current cruiser XOs. Maybe some of the XOs could be made frigate captains — She shook her head; no matter what she did, most of her ships were going to have new captains, and captains who had not worked with that ship’s crew.
But that wasn’t her biggest problem.
The tug boat captain, Murphy, had reported in that in order to keep the stresses tolerable for Atlas as they towed it to Refuge, they would have to accelerate slowly. Now instead of it being a three day flight to the Refuge wormhole, it was going to be at least five days, maybe six. Six days for the Dominion to find them and attack them, six days in which the Dominion could bring sheer numbers into play and grind them into dust.
But that wasn’t her biggest problem.
Her biggest problem was that stiff-necked, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, mulish and goddamed willful child who was now the Queen of all Victoria refused to board the destroyer Repulse and be taken to safety in Refuge. “I think not, Admiral,” she had said.
And that was that. Now Queen Anne was on the Atlas Space Station, the single object the entire Dominion navy was intent on capturing. Or destroying.
So for the next six days, Atlas would be in harm’s way.
“Bugger me,” she snarled, and thought, not for the first time, that when this was over she would welcome the court martial that was sure to follow.
If they lived.