Mercenary (27 page)

“The operative concept is Kadesh,” she said. "This was one of the earliest Earthly battles of which we have record. The Egyptians met and defeated the Hittites in the vicinity of the town of Kadesh in 1299

B.C."

“Now wait, Rising Moon!” Commander Phist protested, using her song-nickname. “Those were marching land armies; this is space! There's hardly a parallel!”

“You worried about your hardware, King Cole?” she inquired with a glance at his trousers. “I'm trying to protect it for you.” She went on to describe the broad outline of her strategy. “Of course, the tactics are critical,” she concluded.

“Tactics?” I asked. “I thought you just described them.”

“I described strategy,” she said. “That's our effort to bring our forces into play advantageously. Strategy occurs before the combatants meet. Tactics are what happens once the battle begins. A winning strategy can be ruined by losing tactics.”

“Oh, you mean like setting your opponent up for a knockout punch and then missing the punch,” I said.

“Close enough, Worry,” she agreed wryly.

It turned out that the Carolines, having noted our coming, had gathered reinforcements. They still had no capital ships, but they had borrowed another cruiser, and this was a good one, a match for one of ours.

They also picked up several more destroyers; as a result, they now had six, matching ours.

Emerald bit her lip. “I hadn't counted on this,” she said. “We don't want to commit the Sawfish , and without it, the sides are too close to even.”

“Why not use the Sawfish ?” I asked innocently. “She could gun down the enemy ships before they could get within their torpedo range.”

“Same reason you don't use your queen to mop up pawns in a chess game,” she said. “In close quarters a battleship has less advantage and becomes vulnerable. We'll hold the Sawfish out until we have access to another battleship, or at least a cruiser. We'd be fools to risk her in a destroyer battle.”

Emerald wanted to be able to direct the battle personally, which meant she couldn't remain aboard the Sawfish . I designated the destroyer Discovered Check to be her command ship and went along myself.

I wanted personal involvement, too.

“I don't like this, Hope,” Spirit said darkly. “That little ship is a lot more vulnerable than the Sawfish .”

“Also a lot less obvious,” I pointed out. “We'll be observing, not fighting. The enemy will never suspect.”

“If the battle comes near you, I'll bring the Sawfish in to fetch you out,” she warned.

“And take your bodyguard along, sir,” Sergeant Smith said. “Here, I'll assign another dozen men—”

“I don't need any dozen men!” I protested.

“Take them, Captain,” Mondy said. He was pale and drawn; he had no love for battle. But he was not nonfunctional; now that the challenge was on him, he was holding steady. Emerald had been good for him these past few years. “In fact, I would like to accompany you myself.”

“This may be closer to the action than you like,” I warned him. “There is no need for you to expose yourself to this.”

“Yes there is, sir. My wife will be exposed.”

His wife, my former wife. I knew what a woman Emerald was. I was proof from love, but evidently it was a different case with Mondy. He did not want to live if Emerald didn't. She had married him because our unit needed him, and he had proved his value to us many times. But he had needs of his own. Our unit was bound together in special ways. “Come along, Peat Bog,” I said. His song-nickname, no affront.

“And stay out of mischief!” Spirit called as we entered the linked airlocks, transferring to the Discovered Check .

“We know where we're going,” Emerald called back, paraphrasing Spirit's song. Songs became more important as tension mounted.

The destroyer was a nice ship. Commander Phist had requisitioned some very special equipment for her, which was one reason we were using the Discovered Check . She was the fastest of our ships, capable of an astonishing 4.5-gee acceleration in her upgraded condition, which meant she could probably outrun any ship in the Belt. Her torpedoes were of the most modern type, fifty percent faster than standard, with magnetic repulsion fields that made physical interception of them in flight almost impossible. When they homed in on their target, the magnetism was programmed to reverse. Her hull was plated with laser-resistant alloy, and her own laser cannon was oriented by computer to destroy any oncoming missile. She was also armed with “depth” bombs—that were hurled by catapult slowly through space, but so powerful that they could disable a small ship by a proximity explosion. This was, in short, one potent ship, and about as safe as a destroyer could be. Commander Phist had taken a great deal of pride in it, justifiably. He had not been able to upgrade the other destroyers similarly; most were not designed for such changes, and as a unit we had already pushed our luck about as far as we could. Had the officers in charge of these matters possessed Phist's insight into performance, quality, and costs, they would never have let us get away with many of our requisitions. But these officers, like much of the Jupiter Navy, were essentially asleep at the helm.

The problem with the Asteroid Belt is that it obscures things. Much of it is sparse, and, of course, the orbiting rocks are readily avoided by ships that travel outside the Solar Ecliptic, the plane in which most of the planets revolve. But there are more small chunks than large ones, and there is considerable sand.

In some regions there are whole clouds of dust. This interferes with radar and makes it easy for ships to hide; the radar can't readily distinguish between rocks and ships. It was in this manner that we sailed into the pirate ambush.

We were advancing toward the main Caroline base on a half-mile-diameter planetoid. Because of the debris in the area, we were strung out along a natural channel that the pirates normally used. There really wasn't any other way; the Belt was constantly changing its configuration as planetoids ellipsed in and out, stirring up sand and throwing dust about in their wakes. Maps had to be constantly updated, and, of course, we lacked the latest. Only the pirates themselves knew the latest details, and they weren't giving out that information to the Navy. So we used the main channel, watching for pirate ships, but we had underestimated the care with which their ambush had been laid. Or so the pirates believed.

All six of their destroyers materialized from the debris, bare light-seconds from the center of our fleet. In that region we had only two destroyers, a frigate, two sloops, and half a dozen gunboats. Our fleet had started in compact order but had become dispersed because of the differing accelerations of the various types of ships. Our battleship was at the head with two destroyers and several escorts, while our carrier was far to the rear, with two more destroyers and a cruiser. The center was by far the weakest region, lacking either the firepower of the Sawfish or the drones of the Hempstone Crater , without even a cruiser to bolster its striking force. The pirate fleet of six destroyers was much more than a match for our widely spaced eight ships, and, of course, the second pirate cruiser, the battle-fit one, was waiting in their rear. They could cut our column in two, and then concentrate their remaining ships, which were surely deploying invisibly in the debris of the Belt. When our carrier arrived, they could mass against it. We could lose half our force before we got properly organized. Then they would retreat, escaping retaliation, awaiting a new opportunity to strike.

Emerald showed her teeth in no friendly smile. What I have described is the way it was supposed to seem to the pirates—and now they had taken the bait. Kadesh, when the Hittites had pounced on the Egyptians' weak center as the Egyptian forces marched in columns. Perhaps the Egyptians had not planned it that way, but we had. Our vulnerability was a good deal more apparent than actual.

Our light cruiser, the Inverness , thirteen thousand tons, had already rotated in space and commenced acceleration back toward our center as the enemy destroyers made their move. Our radar wasn't good in this region, but we had known what to expect, so had been able to track their ships approximately. The Inverness was armed with a dozen six-inch guns and another dozen five-inch lasers, compared to the four five-inch guns of each enemy destroyer, and her acceleration of 3.5 gee matched theirs. Of course, she was really decelerating, reducing her inertial velocity, but in the situation that was a quibble. When everything is moving at a given velocity, that becomes your basis for orientation in space, and it is convenient to treat your formation as if it is at rest. The enemy craft were matching our velocity, and the Inverness was rapidly closing the distance, and she was a considerably more potent fighting piece than they. Her six-inchers had greater muzzle velocity and accuracy, which translated into greater effective range.

One of our two destroyers in the region was the Discovered Check . She was not here to fight, of course; she was the temporary command ship. If things got difficult, she could outrun any of the enemy destroyers, but it wouldn't come to that. And our frigate was another upgraded ship, as were two of our corvettes. In fact, our supposedly weak center was a good deal stronger than it appeared.

“Corvettes, evasive maneuvers,” Emerald was saying into her scrambled radio connection. “Frigate, fire on your nearest.” She glanced up at me, the light and delight of battle in her eyes. “It's only a pair of three-inchers she can orient without changing course, but they may not know that.” The problem, of course, was that small ships could not fire effectively sidewise; their heavy guns were oriented forward, since their spin made side-oriented guns highly inaccurate. The larger ships had special independent artillery belts, which did not spin with the rest of the ship; that was another reason our battleship was like a chess queen, while the destroyers were like deadly pawns. Versatility in firepower was critical in battle!

Of course, normally attacking ships simply matched velocities, then rotated to point at their targets; destroyers were highly maneuverable this way. But it did take a few minutes, and they were vulnerable while correcting their attitude, as it was called. The enemy destroyers were closing on our ships at an angle so they could fire forward at us, but that meant they presented a larger and steadier target for return fire by any ships in our column that could fire sidewise. That was why the frigate's effort should be slightly unnerving to them, until they discovered that only two three-inch guns were involved. Theoretically one three-incher was enough to score, but it was unlikely at this range.

The Caroline destroyers were coming within effective range of their five-inchers. Our corvettes, not daring to drift in space while changing their attitudes, were maneuvering by irregular acceleration. When a shell approaches at an angle to the target ship, the rate of the target's acceleration has to be taken into consideration. If the target accelerates faster than allowed for, the shell will miss to the rear; if it accelerates slower, the shot will miss to the front. So the attacker has to get close enough to increase its accuracy and to read the acceleration of the target correctly. Even so, the chances of any one shell scoring, even when correctly aimed and timed, are only about one in four at close range, and close range is dangerous when a number of ships are involved.

You may be wondering why ships don't simply loop about, the way ancient Earth vehicles did. Certainly I wondered, at first. The answer is that they can't. Not when they are spinning for internal gee and external stability. They can change course a little, but any sharp turn at speed would encounter precessional resistance that would tear the ship apart before the maneuver could be completed. Those old stories of spaceships making neat loops in space to engage their opponents, on a scale of seconds, are fantasy; any loop they might reasonably make, unless they are almost stationary in space, would be so big as to be useless in a close encounter. Here in the confined channel of the Belt, the attempt would be disastrous. So maneuvers of this sort are sharply limited, and the keys become proximity and rate of acceleration.

Now the Inverness came in range. Immediately her six-inchers opened up, and the Caroline destroyers were in trouble. They had to refocus on the cruiser, because otherwise she would concentrate her firepower and pick them off one by one. The chances of a single shot scoring, in ideal conditions, may be one in four, but our destroyer would fire hundreds of shells. That shifted the odds.

Actually, six destroyers could normally take on a single cruiser. The cruiser would probably knock out a couple, but then the rest would be within their effective range and would be able to fire so many shells that the cruiser's lasers would not be able to handle them all. Saturation shelling was an excellent tactic.

So they ignored our lesser ships and oriented carefully on the Inverness .

Meanwhile, however, the Sawfish , our battleship, was decelerating to approach the battle region from the front, and the carrier HC was accelerating at her maximum gee to get within drone range from the rear, accompanied by our second cruiser, the Brooksville . Our pincers were closing. I really had to admire Emerald's strategy; it was working exactly as she had outlined it to us. Soon we would enclose the enemy destroyers and go after their backup cruiser, which was now approaching in order to take on ours. Our trap was slamming shut on the pirates.

But the best-laid plans, as it has been said, can go astray. A destroyer made a lucky hit on the Inverness and knocked out her communications turret, and perhaps more. Her radio contact with us ceased and so did her acceleration. She had not been holed, but she was in trouble. She would be a sitting target for the enemy ships if she didn't get her drive back soon. Free-fall is for traveling, not for battling.

“Damn!” Emerald swore. “It'll be too long before our wings close; we'll lose her!” She bit her lip fretfully.

I realized that her inexperience had betrayed us. A veteran strategist would have a backup plan in case of the unexpected. Emerald's strategy had been good—good enough to win the battle—but she had not allowed sufficiently for chance. I wondered if the Egyptian king, of the Kadesh battle, had suffered similarly.