Laney grudgingly admitted, “It might work."
"Do you formally recommend it as a plan of defensive action?"
Laney did not equivocate now. “Yes."
"Very well,” said Charteris, and Birrel began to breathe a little more easily, and then he heard Charteris saying, “But the Council ruling still applies, the Fifth Lyra will be under your direct command, Admiral."
Birrel gave up. He had done his best to convince them and it had not been good enough, and that was that. But then he heard Laney saying to the chairman, “No. In an operation like this, the Fifth Lyra will have to have independent command. You just can't coordinate such a strike by prearranged order, and direct communication with the Lyrans won't be possible in their radar-hide."
Charteris looked dubious. “If you say so..."
"I do say so."
Charteris stood up. “I have to have full Council approval for this. They're waiting."
He went out. Birrel looked at Laney, but the admiral's eyes were as hard and unfriendly as they had been and he did not say “Thanks” as he had intended.
"The Council will approve,” Laney said brusquely. “I suggest we get down to working it out."
Two hours later, Birrel rode with Garstang in a fast car that took them through the city, heading for the spaceport. The canyoned streets were dark and quiet now, the old metropolis slept. There was little traffic and the car hummed between the dark towers toward the river, waking echoes.
Birrel still could not quite believe that this was it, the start of the long-feared clash between Lyra and Orion. Both Sectors were so far away that their stars were mere points of light in the sky of this ancient, sleeping city. And again he thought that even when things you expected happened, they never happened in the way you expected.
He was tired and he was getting sleepy as the pills wore off, but he had to snap out of it when they reached the spaceport. The looming black bulls of the big cruisers were alive. Men went up and down the gangways, orders were bawled over the sound of cars that dashed between the ships.
In the bridge of the Starsong, he went over it with Brescnik and Hallet, the third in command.
"That's about it,” he finished. “Anything?"
Brescnik showed his teeth in a mirthless smile. “Only that your choice of an ambush hide is going to make it plenty interesting, even before things begin."
Birrel stood up. “It will. Lift out when you get the word from UW's staff, they'll time it with the dummy squadron's movements. I'm going to get some sleep."
Northward, the fields around Orville brightened with a new day. In the meadow, behind the Vinson house, Lyllin stood, shivering a little in the slight chill, looking to the south and listening. A flitter buzzed across the sky to the west, but there was nothing else. Then a far-off roll of thunder crossed the sky. She knew that thunder and what made it. She listened, as one thunder-roll after another pulsed and muttered.
She had had one short call from Birrel. Wait there, I'll come back. Now the muttering thunder in the south seemed like the receding footsteps of everything she had ever loved, passing out over the distant hills.
She turned slowly, and went back into the house.
CHAPTER 18
The sky screamed light. The sun, Sol, its atoms ceaselessly riven and then reborn, shrieked raving energy, magnetism, electricity, light, radiant heat, a rage across the heavens, a cosmic storm, flinging up wild plumes and spindrift of violet calcium, of yellow sodium, of blue and green and red flame.
Over it, as over a limitless fiery ocean, hung the shoal of silver ships. Tossed and twitched by storms of radiation, wrenched by the claws of the titan magnetic field, scorched by the blaze of the star that sought to overcome their shielding, the ships of the Fifth fought to hold position. Their formation wavered, sagged, reformed and wavered again, and still they held together, fighting against the star.
The flagship, the Starsong, had it a little easier. It was much higher above the sun, far enough out from the storm of force so that its long-range radar functioned, at least partially. By that same token, it could be ranged by radar, while the squadron, though itself blind radarwise, could not be ranged.
Birrel sat in the communic-room of the Starsong, eating a sandwich. He did not want it, his stomach was tight with tension and he was not hungry at all, but he had learned long ago that if a commander showed excitement in a tight situation everyone under him would let his own excitement ride him. He chewed his sandwich and watched stolidly as Garstang and Venner hung over the big radar-screens that yielded an approximation of the results of long range radar information, in a form most quickly comprehended.
Garstang swore. “Out again."
The screens had suddenly all blazed a useless white, even the powerful rays that served them wrenched and cut by a sudden outburst of solar activity. The ship shuddered and rocked momentarily.
"There's nothing yet anyway,” said Birrel. He thought, My God, what a fake I am, I'm the most jumpy man in the squadron and I have to sit here and pretend. He wanted to jump up and run to the screens, but he forced himself to sit still and finish the sandwich. Already it was giving him a gut-ache.
He got up then and walked over to the screens. They had come back on again, but they did not show much.
One was ranged west and zenith. It showed a swarm of tiny flecks moving far outside the System of Sol, heading out in the direction of the star Saiph. It looked for all the world like a full naval squadron, with its scouts out screening it, its light cruisers flanking the central heavy columns. Birrel hoped it looked that way to the Orionids. Only the scouts were for real, the rest of that swarm was merchant ships, ore-freighters, everything the UW had been able to gather together and throw out as a dummy. If Orionid scouts got close enough to use short-range radar and detect the imposture, it was going to be their last flight.
He looked at another screen. That one plotted the rim of the asteroid belt, a blur of dots that were rock fragments, dust, pebbles, the streams of debris between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond the rim of that stony jungle, five ships moved slowly, behaving like a normal patrol. The remainder of the UW fleet was hidden among the asteroids and no radar could detect them there.
"Why don't they come?” fretted Garstang. “Do you suppose that captain had it wrong? That plans were changed?"
The screens suddenly blazed white again. The Starsong shuddered and heeled as the wave of solar electricity overloaded and affected relays in its control system. The automatic corrections in the circuits functioned almost instantly, and the fabric of the vessel stopped shivering.
Birrel shrugged. “We should soon know."
"It had better be soon,” muttered Garstang. “The boys can't sit on that star forever."
The storms of force that intermittently rocked the Starsong were bad enough. But on the squadron, hiding much closer to the solar corona, it must be rougher. A lot rougher. Brescnik had so far kept them together, but neither ships nor men could take that sort of thing for too long. Birrel, watching the screens with perfectly faked stolidity, prayed inwardly for the Orionids to come.
They did not. Time passed. He began to sweat. He did not think he could keep up this pretense of calm much longer.
Suddenly Venner caught Garstang's shoulder. “There!” he said. He leaned forward and pointed his forefinger at the screen.
Out of the depths toward Scorpio came a swarm of tiny flecks that might have been nothing more than bits of cosmic drift. They moved together, very fast. They swept in toward the System of Sol with a rush and they came almost exactly on the course that that red dagger in the chart had foretold. Two full squadrons of Solleremos’ fleet, on planetary approach.
The five UW ships on patrol, out beyond the Belt, abruptly wheeled around in perfect formation and moved out to meet them.
Birrel's mouth was dry. Runnels of sweat crept down his temples, down his body. The palms of his hands were clammy.
The Starsong rocked again and Garstang uttered
an oath. The radar was out again, the screens were blank. Then they cleared.
The five UW ships had not gone far out. Suddenly they wheeled again, seemingly abandoning formation. But Birrel knew they were running a firing pattern and his fists clenched tight. The five leaped in formation again and cracked on speed and ran back toward the Belt.
One in the great swarm of flecks, one of the Orionid cruisers, vanished silently from the screen.
Garstang shouted, and, as though at a signal, the screen went out again.
Birrel ran his uniform sleeve over his face, and kept still. There were so few of the UW ships, and so many of the others, something more than double the strength of his own squadron. Far below, Earth lay naked, stripped, utterly without defense. Birrel thought of Lyllin, and the old house with the dusty road in front of it. He thought of the dark woods and the meadow where they had fought in the night, and curiously enough he thought of the cat. Insolent little beast...
He waited for the screens to clear, and watched.
A number of Orionid ships detached themselves from the main fleet and raced after the UW patrol. They were much faster, they could only be light cruisers, S-4s. The long arm of Solleremos was reaching swiftly now, and one of the UW ships winked off the screen. The other four reached the Belt.
The Orionid advance plunged in after them.
"Now,” whispered Garstang. “Now—now—"
The eight Orionid light cruisers apparently detailed to mop up this patrol sped down a deceptively open “lead” through the asteroid drift. The lead pinched out in a culde-sac of radar-specks that were actually wildly gyrating rocks. The Orion cruisers did a fast about, practically on each other's heels, but, before they were finished, the four UW ships and nearly a dozen others appeared from nowhere all around them, coming into view on the screen as they left the radar shelter of the asteroids they had perilously hugged.
"Hit them,” muttered Garstang. “Oh, hell, get onto it and hit them!"
They hit them. Of a sudden, in quick succession, two of the UW ships and five of the Orionids vanished off the screen.
"That hurt them,” said Birrel, and unclenched his fists. “They're hooked."
Garstang turned and looked at him and then picked up the mike of the intercom. He did not speak into it, he looked at Birrel and waited. Birrel bent forward, his eyes on the screen.
Down there in the Asteroid Belt, the trap had been sprung. And now the Orionids knew they had the whole UW fleet, such as it was, to deal with—a force too small to stop them, but too formidable to leave on their flank and rear. All depended on their movements now. If they had been fooled by the dummy Fifth that had gone out, they would move one way and, if they had not, they would move another.
An anguish grew in Birrel as the swarm of specks that were the main body of the Orionid squadrons came on. The stratagem had been too transparent, too clumsy. He should have known that and yet he had talked Laney and Charteris into it, and—
He held his breath. The swarm of flecks was changing pattern, and altering course. The heavy central columns of the Orionid squadrons were forming into a cone-shaped formation that moved toward the UW ships which hovered, in apparent doubt, above the fringes of the drift. The heavy cone moved in to make contacts with its cloud of scouts driving furiously all around it like a thinner, larger outer cone.
Garstang was looking at him, almost pleadingly. No, thought Birrel. Not yet. Not quite yet.
He waited until the van scouts of the Orionids were five times missile-range from the drift. Then he nodded to Garstang.
"Commander to Vice-Commander,” said Garstang rapidly. “Rejoin!"
The Fifth rejoined its flagship fast, glad to get farther from the glare and danger of Sol, and soon the ships came onto visual screens as well as radar.
Down there, at the fringe of the Belt, contact had been made. Dots were vanishing, faster and faster. Birrel's throat was dry. Nobody had ever fought a fleet action before, there had been individual cruiser-skirmishes out on the vague, stellar frontiers, but nothing like this. There was no precedent and the action-plan he had prepared could prove utterly foolish. Throw away your doubts and worries, he thought, you've hooked yourself now and there is only one thing you can do, so you might just as well be heroic about it.
He said, “All right, let's go down,” and the Fifth Lyra swooped out of the sun.
CHAPTER 19
It seemed to Birrel that they had been fighting by the Belt for several eternities.
But was this fighting? Standing here, in the bridge of the Starsong, and looking up at the screens, while the ship groaned and quivered like a living thing?
The screens showed dark space, with the torrents of rushing stone of the Belt only a distant, slanted blur across the upper sector, the blur slipping and heeling over as they changed course. Nothing but that and the occasional fleeting glint of polished metal as a neighboring ship in their column momentarily caught the light, and no sound, but the pounding throb of power.
Then far out, on the left of one screen, a blinding little nova burst into being. It flared, and died, and there was darkness again and nothing to show that a ship had vanished in nuclear explosion.
"We're making contact again,” said Garstang. Standing in the captain's place, his face was dark and still as iron, but with sweat shining on the edges of it. “Where the hell are those UW ships anyway?"
"Laney was hit hard,” said Birrel. “We've got to keep punching while he regroups in the drift. He'll come out again soon.'
He hoped.
He hated to go back to the radar room, where you could see nothing but flecks on a screen, but he had to, it was the commander's place in battle.
Battle? This was not battle the way he had envisaged it—this moving forward in parallel columns groping for an enemy who was using all his devices to blind and confuse radar, two forces clawing for advantageous position here, just outside the Belt's whirling jungle of drift.
It seemed like anticlimax, after their first attack. They had plunged down from their ambush above the sun on full ultra-drive acceleration. Using ultra-drive in planetary neighborhoods was so risky as to approach the suicidal. But the Fifth had gone down on carefully plotted acceleration and deceleration schedules, first building up a terrific velocity and then instantly decelerating to a manageable speed. It had worked. The Orionids had not had time to disperse their formation in defensive evasion. The Fifth had crashed down through the middle of their line like a flying axe-blade.
It had been like that in Birrel's mental picture, but not like that in reality, there was no shock, no crash, the enemy ships hardly even saw each other. Even in their comparatively tight formation, the Orionids were separated by enough open space that the whole two columns of the Fifth had cut down between them without even a near-collision. Nevertheless they had hit the Orionids, and hit them hard, for their attack had been analogous to the classic, old sea-navy tactic of “crossing the T.” The concentrated missile fire of Birrel's ships upon each end of the broken Orionid cone they raced through had been more than jamming-defenses could hold against. The missiles had smothered the ships closest them, as they raced past, and Solleremos had lost three heavy cruisers and two light ones right there.
On down, nadirward from the shattered Orionid line, the Fifth had flashed around and formed in shorter columns that spread out from each other and drove back up at the enemy. The UW ships had come boiling out of the Belt, like angry hornets, to hit them from the other side. It had looked as though it would be decided in minutes. It would have been, except for one thing—the Orionids knew how to fight, too.
They were still as strong as both the UW and Fifth together. Whoever commanded them knew his business. The UW ships were nearest, and the Orionids had slid into a front that faced the Belt and that turned all their fire on the hornets from that direction. It was more than the UW fleet could take, and, after losing four ships within seconds, Laney had pulled back into the Belt. Solleremos’ commander
had had just time enough to face around as the Fifth Lyra came up at him from nadir.
Birrel had been fanning out his columns to form the cone that would flank the ends of the Orionid formation, roll it up into a concentrated target. It was too late for that. With Laney knocked back to the Belt, he would have been “coned” himself if he had persisted. He had ordered them back into columns and had started a rapidfire, one-two-three punching all along the line to keep the Orionids from maneuvering to envelop him.
He did not think he could keep punching this way for very long. Unless Laney came out of the drift and drew off at least a part of the superior forces facing him, it was only a matter of time until the heavier weight told.
Looking down at the shifting pattern on the radar screen, Birrel said sharply into his throat-mike, “Brescnik is moving his column too wide. Tell him."
"Yes, sir.” The communic officer's reply came thinly through the din. On the screen, in a moment, their left column drew back a little.
The Starsong creaked, shivered and jumped as it swerved this way and that on the evasive pattern it was following. The generators were droning in their highest key, furnishing every possible ounce of power for the missile-jamming broadcast that was their defensive armament.
"A C-22 in right column out, sir,” said Venner.
A dot in the shifting pattern had disappeared. A ship of the Fifth Lyra and its crew had vanished in a flare, as a missile got through its jamming.
Birrel's eyes flew to that part of the screen and now he noticed a significant change in the pattern of the Orionid formation.
"They're shifting ships to smother the head of our right column,” he said.
He hesitated, knowing this to be the pivotal crisis. The move could be a feint, inviting him to move forces to his right, so that the Orionids could suddenly smash at their weakened left and center. But if it wasn't a feint, their right would take an equally disastrous punch. What it came down to was that they were outnumbered and losing the initiative because of it. Where the hell were the UW ships? Laney had had time enough to regroup.
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