A Call to Arms

by David Weber

  Which was a bald-faced lie. The Axelrod Corporation was way too powerful to worry about offending whatever bureaucrats were in charge of enforcing such regulations. Llyn simply didn’t want a bunch of free-lance mercenaries running around with really advanced equipment.

  But that would change. When Llyn saw how quickly and efficiently Gensonne delivered Manticore, Axelrod would surely want the Volsungs on board for whatever project was next on their list.

  And Llyn could bet his rear that the subject of advanced weaponry would come up again.

  “Salvo ready, Sir,” Imbar said.

  “Acknowledged,” Gensonne said. The question now was whether they’d wrung out every bit of data Heissman and Casey could provide. If so, it was time to end the charade and finish them off. If not, a little additional restraint might still be called for.

  “Missiles incoming,” Clymes called into his musings. “Looks like two from each of the corvettes.”

  Gensonne swiveled toward the sensor display. Sure enough, both of the smaller ships were showing the unmistakable signs of booster flares. A waste of time; but then, what else did they have to do? “Six missiles at the cruiser,” he ordered. “Fire when ready.” On the display, the missiles cleared the corvettes’ wedges and lit up their own.

  Two missiles from each corvette…but from Casey, nothing.

  He frowned. Could the damage his attack had inflicted on the cruiser’s sidewall have bled over into its launchers or control systems? Llyn had said that Casey was Manticoran-designed. Had the builders unintentionally incorporated a fatal flaw into its architecture?

  “More flares,” Clymes called. “One more from each corvette.”

  “Still nothing from Casey?”

  “No, Sir.”

  Which made no sense, unless the cruiser had genuinely lost the ability to launch its missiles. Definitely a tidbit worth knowing, especially if similar flaws had been incorporated into the Manticorans’ other ship designs.

  And really, it didn’t matter which of the Manticorans were shooting and which ones weren’t. What mattered was that they were trying the same saturation attack they’d tried before, and it was pretty obvious where that attack was aimed. Heissman was apparently the observant type, and von Belling’s partially completed yaw turn earlier had tipped off the Manticorans as to where Copperhead’s weakness lay.

  Which, again, was hardly a problem. His task force was still coasting, which meant Copperhead could repeat its earlier maneuver without breaking formation. “Order Copperhead to pitch wedge,” he instructed Imbar. “Adder will prepare countermissiles; all other ships, stand by autocannon.”

  He listened as the acknowledgments came in, his eyes on the six wedges cutting through space toward his force at thirty-five hundred gees acceleration. A minute fifteen out, with probably forty seconds before they would either tighten their angle toward Copperhead, or widen it to target both Copperhead and Adder. At that point, Heissman would show whether he’d truly observed Copperhead’s weakness or was a one-trick pony who was throwing missiles at his opponent simply because that was all he knew how to do.

  Which would be pathetic, but hardly unexpected. Manticore had been at peace a long time. Far longer than was healthy for them. War was what kept men strong and smart. Peace turned them into useless drones, where the species-cleansing consequences of survival of the fittest no longer operated.

  Could that be why Llyn had chosen Manticore as his target? Could it be that Axelrod was looking for undeveloped real estate and figured no one would notice or care if a couple of fat, lazy backwater planets underwent a sudden regime change?

  It sounded like a colossal waste of money. Still, Axelrod had money to burn. If they wanted to spend some of their spare cash to set up their own little kingdom, more power to them.

  Copperhead had finished her pitch, her roof once again presenting its impenetrable barrier to the incoming missiles. The missiles were still holding formation, with no indication as to where they were heading. Whatever Heissman’s plan, though, he must surely have accepted the inevitability of his own destruction. Best guess was that his goal was to simply keep throwing missiles in hopes of draining the Volsungs of as many resources as he could…

  Gensonne looked at the gravitics display, feeling his eyes narrow. The Manticorans had launched six missiles—Clymes had confirmed that. And six missile wedges were indeed showing on all of the displays.

  But according to the sensors, all six missiles were running a little hot.

  Why were they running hot?

  On the tactical, a spray of countermissiles erupted from Adder’s throat, blossoming into a cone of protection that would shield both itself and the battlecruisers riding a thousand kilometers behind it. Gensonne watched as the cone stretched out toward the incoming missiles—

  And felt a sudden jolt of horrified adrenaline flood through him. One cone. Not the two cones this configuration was supposed to provide to shield the battlecruisers. Not with Copperhead turned roof-forward protecting itself from those Manticoran missiles.

  Still nothing new from the sensors. Still nothing new on the missiles’ track. But Gensonne was a warrior, with the instincts a warrior needed to survive. And his gut was screaming at him now with a certainty that all the ambiguous data in the universe couldn’t counter.

  Copperhead wasn’t Heissman’s target. Odin was.

  “Full autocannon!” he snapped, his eyes darting to the tactical, wanting to order an emergency turn and knowing full well that it was too late. Six missiles showing…only his gut was telling him that wasn’t the full number bearing down on them. Somehow, Casey had managed to launch its own contribution to the salvo, slipping them in behind and among the corvettes’ missiles with just the right timing and geometry to keep them hidden until they could light off their wedges.

  Odin’s four autocannon were hammering out their furious roar, filling the space in front of the ship with shards of metal. Gensonne watched in helpless fury as the incoming missiles swung wide of Copperhead’s wedge, passed safely through the very edge of Adder’s countermissile defensive zone, and dove straight through Odin’s open throat—

  And with a thundering roar the ship exploded into a chaos of screaming alarms.

  * * *

  “Got him!” Rusk shouted, his voice hovering midway between triumph and disbelief. “One of them made it through.”

  “Damage?” Heissman asked.

  “Assessing now,” Woodburn said. “Lots of debris, but with something the size of a battlecruiser that could be mostly superficial.”

  “Missile trace,” Belokas called. “Six on the way.”

  “Countermissiles and autocannon standing by,” Woodburn confirmed.

  “Assessment’s coming a little cleaner,” Rusk said. “Looks like they took damage to their bow, probably enough to knock out their telemetry system. If we’re lucky, it’ll have neutralized at least one of their launchers and maybe their forward laser.”

  “Excellent,” Heissman said. “Fire four more missiles—let’s see if we can get in before the upper cruiser realizes what happened and turns back to defense position.”

  “Aye, Sir,” Travis said, checking the tracks of Tamerlane’s incoming missiles and feeling a flicker of grim satisfaction. They were still almost certainly going to die, but at least they’d managed to bloody Tamerlane’s nose.

  The vibration of the autocannon rumbled through the bridge. “All missiles destroyed,” Woodburn announced. “Four hard kills, two soft. Our missiles are still on target.”

  Travis was gazing at the enemy formation, trying to anticipate what Tamerlane would do next, when two new wedges flared into view at the edge of the display.

  Bogey Two, the pair of mysterious ships that they’d spotted earlier, had arrived.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Captain Hardasty—whose name, in Chomps’s opinion, said it all—had yelled at Aries’s reactor crew for being slow. Then she’d yelled at the impeller crew for being slower.<
br />
  Now, it was Chomps’s turn.

  “Missiles?” Hardasty’s grating voice rasping over the intercom. “Come on, Missiles, wake up. What’s your status?”

  “Working on getting the tracking system up, Ma’am,” Chomps called toward the mike, resisting the urge to say something nasty under his breath. Ensign Kyell, who was nominally in charge of Aries’s weapons, was elsewhere; but Spacer Second Class Ghanem wasn’t, and she didn’t like him much. Or any of the other Navy personnel, for that matter. And in many cases, the feeling was mutual.

  He’d hoped that some of the animosity he’d first noted aboard Aries would fade with time. So far, though, that wasn’t happening.

  Still, Chomps suspected that even Ghanem would be on his side on this one. What in the world Aries needed her missiles prepped for on yet another mindless MPARS drill he couldn’t imagine.

  “Well, work harder,” Hardasty gritted out. “Everyone—attention; everyone—listen up. We just got an update from HQ, and this is not just another stupid drill. We’ve got six incoming wedges—” she broke off as someone at her end of the intercom said something inaudible “—damn it; make that eight incoming wedges,” she corrected. “Looks like warships, and they’re—oh, damn. We’ve got missile traces, people. Lots of missile traces.

  “They’re taking on Janus Force.”

  Chomps looked at Ghanem, saw her eyes go wide. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  “We can’t get there in time to help,” Hardasty continued, her voice grim. “But if they make it past Janus, and then Aegis, we’re about all that’ll be left between them and Manticore.

  “So let’s get it together, people. Let’s get it together now.”

  The intercom clicked off. “Oh, my God,” Ghanem said, a little louder this time. “Chomps—what do we do?”

  What are you asking me for? But he left the words unsaid. Of course Ghanem would look to him for advice. She was only MPARS. He was Royal Manticoran Navy. Of course he would know what to do in a situation like this.

  Only he didn’t. No one knew.

  “Like the captain said, we get it together,” he told her. “Here—you finish running the tracking check. I’m going to make sure the missiles’ plasma feeds are ready to go.”

  * * *

  “Telemetry transmitters out,” a strained voice came from Odin’s bridge speaker, barely audible above a cacophony of shouts and curses. “Number one laser’s offline, number two’s iffy, and One and Three autocannon are fried.”

  “Record indicates there were ten missiles in that salvo,” Imbar snarled over the noise. “How the hell were there ten damn missiles?”

  “Because Casey’s got a railgun launcher, that’s how,” Gensonne snarled back, a red haze of fury clouding his vision as he skimmed over the sensor summary of what had just happened.

  There had been no way to know until the last fraction of a second where any of the individual missiles had been aimed, of course—by the time they reached the formation they were already going way too fast for that. The standard counter-move—the only counter-move possible—was for all ships to have already opened fire with autocannon and countermissiles, creating a hopefully impenetrable wall of metal.

  Only in this case, Copperhead’s defensive wedge pitch had left the standard defensive zone with a fatal gap. The missiles had exploited that flaw, bypassing both cruisers and continuing on straight at Odin.

  That should have been the end of it. With Odin’s own autocannon the only thing blocking their path, ten missiles should have been able to overwhelm the defenses and turn the battlecruiser into a ball of superheated plasma.

  But Odin had been lucky. Incredibly lucky. In order to hide those four extra missiles, Heissman had been forced to run his salvo in an unusually tight formation. The result was that while Odin’s autocannon had only taken out four of the six leaders, the debris chain reaction from their destruction had taken out three of the trailing group. Of the surviving leaders, one had failed to detonate completely and the other had been knocked off track by Odin’s ECM. Not entirely off track, unfortunately, and its detonation had been close enough to blind the battlecruiser’s portside sensors and take out a few other pieces of minor electronics.

  Only the final missile, one of the four from Casey, had managed to get through. And even that one had detonated just high enough off-center to fail as a kill shot.

  But it had been close enough. It had been hell-and-gone close enough.

  All of Odin’s topside and forward telemetry arrays and sensors were gone. Both forward autocannon were gone, AC1 destroyed, AC2 marginally functional but useless without any active sensors. The dorsal missile launch-cell hatches had been slagged, and the dorsal radiator vanes were wrecked.

  And that didn’t even begin to list the secondary damage that had been done internally. The crews were still assessing and reporting on that.

  Still, Odin was a functioning warship, and that was what mattered. Heissman had rolled his dice and failed, and he wouldn’t get a second roll. Gensonne would make sure of that.

  “So that’s how they launched an extra four missiles without our seeing them.” Imbar swore viciously. “And that’s why the ones we saw looked too hot.”

  “You think?” Gensonne bit out.

  “Four more missiles on the way,” Clymes warned. “Copperhead is turning back…Copperhead’s on it.”

  “About time,” Gensonne muttered under his breath. He ran his eyes over the lengthening damage report, trying to think. The reactor should survive all right—there was plenty of redundancy in the radiator system. The missile crews might be able to release and jettison the damaged missile hatches, though that would take time. The ventral sensors were mostly functional, though there could be scrambled-software issues from the near-miss.

  “Enemy salvo destroyed,” Imbar reported. “Copperhead’s countermissiles made a clean sweep.”

  Gensonne gave a grunt of acknowledgment, his mind still focused on his ship. Beam weapons were probably gone, or at least not safe to fire. And with only two autocannon still functional Odin was at severe risk from any future saturation attacks.

  “New contacts!”

  Gensonne snapped his attention back to the tactical. If the Manticorans had somehow sneaked more ships into play—

  They hadn’t. The two new wedges had appeared right at the edge of the combat zone, leaping forward as they drove in from the left flank toward the Janus formation.

  The Sidewinder force, Umbriel and Miranda, had finally arrived.

  “Admiral?” Imbar called.

  “I see them,” Gensonne told him, his lips curling back in a snarling smile. About damn time. “Order them to fire missiles. Hell, order all ships to fire.”

  He straightened his shoulders. They had enough data. They had more than enough data.

  Time for Heissman and his ships to die.

  “Target the ship at the rear first,” Gensonne said. “Then destroy the rest.”

  * * *

  And in that single, awful microsecond, everything changed.

  “Missile trace!” Rusk called out grimly. “Four from Bogey Two—look to be targeting Gorgon. Bogey Three ships are also firing with…missile trace ten on the way.”

  “He’s learned everything he can and decided it’s time to end it,” Heissman commented. “Time for us to do the same.”

  He hit his com key. “Hercules, Gemini: split tail. Repeat, split tail. Good luck.”

  Travis winced. The split tail was the officially designated last-ditch maneuver for this kind of situation. The two corvettes were to pitch wedges toward Tamerlane’s main force and accelerate away in opposite directions, with each ship’s resulting vector taking it above or beneath the enemy force, hopefully before any of the opposing ships could rotate fast enough and far enough to fire a last shot up the escapee’s kilt.

  It was a risky tactic at best, given the range of modern missiles and lasers. But with a second threat now on Janus’s flank, it was even
worse. The geometry made it impossible for the ships to position their wedges in such a way as to block against missiles coming from both directions at once.

  Worse, for Casey at least, the sidewall facing Bogey Two was the one already running on a single generator. Another solid hit there and the barrier could go completely, leaving that entire flank open to attack.

  On the tactical, Hercules and Gemini were pitching in opposite directions, the first corvette aiming to go positive over Tamerlane’s force, the second aiming to go negative. Far to their rear, Travis saw that Gorgon was rolling her wedge toward the two ships of Bogey Two, her kilt still open to Tamerlane’s main force.

  Leaving Casey to face the enemy alone.

  “Commodore?” Belokas prompted tautly.

  “Hold vector,” Heissman said, his eyes shifting back and forth between the two sets of missiles converging on his force. “I want to fire off one last salvo of countermissiles, see if we can clear a couple of Bogey Three’s missiles off Gorgon’s tail.”

  “We’ve also got two missiles coming in on our starboard flank,” Woodburn warned. “If we cut things too fine, we could lose it all.”

  “Understood,” Heissman said. “Stand by countermissiles…fire. Pitch ninety degrees negative and kill acceleration.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Travis saw all heads turn. “Pitch ninety degrees negative and kill acceleration, aye,” the helmsman said. “Pitching ninety degrees negative; acceleration at zero.”

  “Kill acceleration, Sir?” Belokas asked quietly.

  “Kill acceleration,” Heissman confirmed. “We’re going to go straight through the center of their formation.” His lip twitched. “The distraction may give the corvettes a better chance of escape.”

  There was a moment of silence, and Travis heard Woodburn murmur something under his breath. “Understood, Sir,” Belokas said briskly.

  “Starboard missiles coming in hot,” Rusk warned. “Not sure the sidewall can take them.”