by David Weber
"I know, Ansten. I know. And I agree with you. None of which will make me feel a lot better if I have just killed some of them."
There wasn't much FitzGerald could offer in the way of comforting responses to that. Especially not when he knew he would have felt exactly the same way in the Captain's place. That he did feel exactly the same way, for that matter.
"Well, Skipper," he said instead with a grim smile, "in that case, I guess the best thing for us to do is to concentrate on taking out our frustrations on Mr. Mars and Friend."
* * *
"Sir, we're being hailed by the bogeys."
Terekhov turned his chair to face Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri and cocked one eyebrow.
"It's voice-only," the com officer added.
"Voice-only? That's interesting." Terekhov stroked the underside of his chin with a thumb. Actually, he'd expected to hear from the bogeys long before. Almost twenty minutes had passed since they'd received confirmation of Lieutenant Hearns' initial attack. The range was down to less than four and a half million kilometers, well inside even the Peeps' powered missile envelope, and the bogeys' overtake velocity was down to only seventy-six hundred kilometers per second. Had Hexapuma's pursuers deliberately waited, letting the "freighter's" crew sweat under the knowledge that they were in missile range, as a psychological measure? Then he shrugged. "Put it on speaker, please."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Freighter Nijmegen, this is Captain Daumier of the heavy cruiser Anhur. Cut your accel immediately and stand by for rendezvous!"
The voice was harsh, hard-edged, with the flat accent of the slums of Nouveau Paris. There was a chill menace to it, despite the absence of any overt threats, and it was female.
"Odd, wouldn't you say, Ansten?" Terekhov murmured, and the executive officer nodded.
"In a lot of ways, Skipper. That's a Peep talking, all right. But why voice-only? And why not identify Anhur as a Havenite vessel?"
"Maybe she's pretending to be a 'regular' pirate, Skipper," Ginger Lewis offered from her own quadrant of Terekhov's com screen, and he made a small gesture, inviting her to amplify her thought.
"On my first deployment to Silesia, the Peeps had organized a complicated commerce-raiding operation designed, at least in part, to look as much as possible like regular pirate attacks on our merchant traffic," she said. "Could this be more of the same?"
"Why bother?" Naomi Kaplan's question wasn't a challenge. The tac officer was simply thinking aloud, and Ginger shrugged.
"One of their objects then was to keep ONI guessing about whether what we faced were Peeps or simply the normal scum, taking advantage of how the war was distracting us from Silesia. But another one—and more important in their thinking—was to keep the Andies from realizing they were operating in the Empire's backyard. They didn't want to drive the Andy Navy into our arms by looking as if they were threatening Imperial territory. Could they be thinking the same way about the Sollies now?"
"Trying to avoid provoking the League by stepping on OFS' toes in an area it's always considered its private turf, you mean?" Terekhov said.
"Yes, Sir." Hexapuma's Engineer shrugged again. "Mind you, Skipper, I can't see any reason why they should be worried about it. We're the ones trying to expand into the area, not them, and the Sollies must know that. So I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense, just that it's the only explanation for their behavior that springs to my mind."
"Well, they're not likely to make anyone believe they're 'regular pirates' with a woman in command," Kaplan observed sourly. "Too many real pirates are neobarbs from backwaters even less enlightened than Nuncio. Some of them remind me of those hard-line bastards on Masada, actually." She grimaced. "The idiots are convinced no one can run a hard-assed lot like them unless he shaves and has testicles!"
"Now, Naomi," Nagchaudhuri said soothingly. "There are some female pirate skippers. Just not very many."
"And by and large, the women who've commanded pirates have been one hell of a lot nastier than the men," FitzGerald agreed.
"True." Terekhov nodded. "Still, there's something about this—"
"Excuse me, Sir," Nagchaudhuri interrupted. "Anhur's repeating her message."
"Missile launch!" one of Kaplan's ratings announced suddenly. "I have a single missile launch from Bogey One!"
Kaplan's eyes flashed back to her plot. A single inbound missile showed on it as a red triangle, apex pointed directly at Hexapuma while it moved steadily across the display. The tac officer scanned the data sidebars, then relaxed and looked back up at her captain.
"Classify this as a warning shot, Skipper," she said. "It's coming in under max acceleration. From their current base velocity, that gives them a maximum range of less than three-point-two million klicks before burnout. Considering the geometry, the actual effective envelope against us is only a tad over two million at launch . . . and the range is four-point-four-point-eight million."
Terekhov nodded. If Anhur had actually intended to hit an impeller-drive target—even a clumsy, lumbering, half-lamed one like "Nijmegen"—at this range, they would have fired at a much lower acceleration to extend the missile drive's endurance so that it could track the evading ship. This bird would be inert and harmless as it coasted ballistically past Hexapuma, which meant it was simply a pointed reminder that Captain Daumier's ship had the range to kill the freighter at any moment, if that was what she decided to do.
"Same message?" he asked Nagchaudhuri.
"Yes, Sir. Almost word for word, in fact."
"Well," Terekhov made himself smile as he watched the missile icon continuing to speed in Hexapuma's general direction, "given that there's no one aboard ship who could produce a believable Rembrandter accent, I think we'll just decline to answer Captain Daumier for the moment."
One or two people chuckled, and he looked at Kaplan.
"Keep an eye on them, Guns. They may get frustrated by our silence and decide to fire something with a bit more lethal intent."
"Aye, aye, Skipper."
Terekhov leaned comfortably back in his command chair and crossed his legs, his expression serene, with the confident assurance expected of the commander of one of Her Majesty's starships. And if there was a hidden, fiery core of anticipation behind those blue eyes, that was no one's business but his.
* * *
Helen tried very hard to look as calm as everyone about her in AuxCon It wasn't easy, and she wondered how difficult it was for the others. Especially, she thought with mixed resentment and reluctant admiration, for Paulo d'Arezzo. The overly handsome midshipman seemed impervious to the taut anticipation winding tighter and tighter at Helen's own center. The only possible indication that he shared any of her own tension was a very slight narrowing of his gray eyes as he sat with the three EW ratings Lieutenant Bagwell had assigned to assist him, watching his displays with quiet, efficient competence.
Twelve minutes had passed since Anhur's first transmission. Despite the Captain's high reputation as a tactician, Helen had never really believed he would succeed in drawing his enemies into pursuing him so unwaveringly for so long. The range was down to 586,000 kilometers—less than two light-seconds, and barely eighty thousand kilometers outside theoretical energy weapon range—and Anhur's overtake velocity was barely two thousand KPS.
Brilliant, she thought admiringly, yet her mouth was undeniably dry. But there's a downside to all this. Sure, we've sucked the bad guys in exactly where we wanted them. Which means we're about to enter the energy weapon envelope of two opponents simultaneously.
The possible consequences of that made for some unhappy thoughts which, although she had no way of knowing it, were very similar to some which had crossed Ansten FitzGerald's mind. But while she was unaware of the XO's reservations, she suspected Captain Daumier was even less happy than she was, if not for exactly the same reasons. The Peep officer's voice had become steadily harsher, harder, and more impatient over the last ten minutes or so. There'd also been two more missile
s, and the second one had been a hot bird—a laser head that detonated barely sixty thousand kilometers clear of the ship.
The Captain hadn't turned a hair as the missile came rumbling down on his command. Helen's fingers had itched, almost quivering with the urge to bring up Hexapuma's missile defenses, but the Captain simply sat there, watching the missile bore in, and smiled thinly.
"Not this one," he'd said calmly to Lieutenant Commander Kaplan. "She's not quite pissed off enough yet to kill a golden goose, and a ship like the real Nijmegen would be worth several times any cargo she could be carrying out here in the Verge. She won't just blow that away when she figures she can have us in energy range—or close enough for pinnaces and boarding shuttles, for God's sake!—in another twenty minutes, and take us intact."
He'd been right, but Helen had decided she never wanted to play cards against the Captain. He was too—
"All right, Guns," the Captain said in an even, conversational tone that sliced the silence on both bridges like a scalpel. "Execute Abattoir in thirty seconds."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Kaplan said crisply. "Execute Abattoir in three-zero seconds." She pressed a stud on her console, and her voice sounded over every earbug aboard Hexapuma. "All hands, this is the Tac Officer. Stand by to execute Abattoir on my command."
Helen found her eyes suddenly glued to the time display, watching the seconds slide away.
"Abattoir," she thought. An ugly name, but fitting, if the Captain's plan works out. . . .
Stress did strange things to her time sense, she discovered. On the one hand, she was focused, intense, feeling each second flash past and go speeding off into eternity like a pulser dart. On the other, the time display's numerals seemed to drag unbearably. It was as if each of them glowed slowly to life, then flowed into the next so gradually she could actually see the change. Her pulse rate seemed to have tripled, yet each breath was its own distinct inhalation and exhalation. And then, suddenly, the hyper-intensive cocoon which had enveloped her burst, expelling her into a world of frantic activity, as Naomi Kaplan pressed a red button at the center of her number one keypad.
Only a single command sped outward from the button, but that command was the first pebble in a landslide. It activated a cascade of carefully organized secondary commands, and each of those commands, in turn, activated its own cascade, and things began to happen.
HMS Hexapuma's impeller wedge snapped abruptly to full power. Senior Chief Clary's joystick went hard over, and the heavy cruiser snarled around to starboard in a six-hundred-gravity, hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Her sidewalls snapped into existence; tethered EW drones popped out to port and starboard; her energy weapons ran out, locking their gravity lenses to the edges of the sidewalls' "gun ports"; and radar and lidar lashed the two Havenite ships like savage whips.
It was the worst nightmare of any pirate—a fat, defenseless merchie, transformed with brutal suddenness from terrified prey into one of the most dangerous warships in space at a range where evasion was impossible . . . and survival almost equally unlikely.
It took Hexapuma fourteen seconds to go from standby to full combat readiness. The EW drones' systems were still coming on-line, but Kaplan's fire control computers had been running continuously updated tracks on both targets for hours. The missiles in her tubes' firing queues had been programmed for three broadsides in advance, and the firing solutions had been updated every fifteen seconds from the instant Bogey One and Bogey Two entered her maximum missile range. Now, even as she turned, a double broadside roared from her tubes, oriented itself, and drove headlong for Bogey Two.
At such a short range, they were maximum-power shots, and current-generation Manticoran missile drives at that power setting produced an acceleration of over 900 KPS2. Worse, from the enemy's viewpoint, the bogeys were rushing to meet them at over two thousand KPS. Flight time was under thirty-four seconds, and it took the bogeys' tactical crews precious seconds to realize what had happened. Bogey Two's anti-missile crews got off a single counter-missile. Just one . . . that missed. The Haven-built destroyer's laser clusters managed to intercept three of the incoming laser heads. The others—all the others—ripped through the desperate, inner-boundary defenses and detonated in a single, cataclysmic instant that trapped the doomed vessel at the heart of a hell-born spider's lightning web.
The destroyer's sidewalls didn't even flicker. She simply vanished in the flash of a fusion plant which had taken at least a dozen direct hits.
But Kaplan wasn't even watching the destroyer. She'd known what was going to happen to it, and she'd assigned a single one of her petty officer assistants to the tin can. If, by some miracle, the destroyer somehow managed to survive, the noncom was authorized to continue the missile engagement on his own. Kaplan could do that, because she hadn't assigned a single one of her missile tubes to Bogey One . . . also known as Anhur.
Helen knew she was witnessing a brilliantly planned, ruthlessly executed assassination, not a battle. But she was a tactical specialist herself, however junior a practitioner she might still be. She recognized a work of art when she saw one, even if its sheer, brutal efficiency did send an icy chill of horror straight through her.
Aivars Terekhov felt no horror. He felt only exultation and vengeful satisfaction. The Desforge-class destroyer had been no more than an irritant. A distraction. A foe which was too unimportant to worry about taking intact. The cruiser was the target he wanted—the flagship, where the senior officers and relevant data the cold-blooded professional in him needed to capture would be found. And he was glad it was so, for it was also the cruiser—the Mars-class cruiser—the avenger within him needed to crush. There must be nothing to distract him from Anhur, and so he and Kaplan had planned the destroyer's total destruction to clear the path to her.
Hexapuma settled on her new heading, her bow directly towards Anhur. Not so many years ago it would have been a suicidal position, exposing the wide-open throat of her wedge to any weapon her enemy might fire. But Hexapuma possessed a bow wall even tougher than the conventional sidewalls covering her flanks, and Anhur didn't.
There were ports in Hexapuma's bow wall for the two massive grasers and three lasers she mounted as chase weapons. Like her broadside energy mounts, they were heavier than most battlecruisers had carried at the beginning of the Havenite Wars. In fact, they'd been scaled up even more than her broadside weapons, because they were no longer required to share space with missile tubes now that the RMN's broadside tubes had acquired the ability to fire radically off-bore, and the Manticoran cruiser's fire control had Anhur in a lock of iron. It took Hexapuma another twenty-seven seconds to reverse her heading—twenty-seven seconds in which the missiles which doomed Bogey Two were sent hurtling through space and the bogeys' overtake velocity closed the range between them by 54,362 kilometers.
Then Terekhov's ship settled on her new heading at maximum military power. She decelerated towards Anhur at seven hundred and twenty gravities even as Bogey One continued to decelerate towards her at 531g, and that, too, was something Hexapuma wasn't supposed to be able to do. The single enormous tactical drawback to the new bow wall technology was that an impeller wedge had to be open at both ends to function. When the RMN had introduced the new system, it had accepted that ships with raised bow walls would be unable to accelerate and had been happy to do it, given the fact that, for the first time in history, an impeller-drive ship would be protected against the deadly "down the throat" rake which was every tactician's dream.
But BuShips had felt it could do better, and it had in the Saganami-Cs. Hexapuma's bow wall could be brought up in two stages. The second stage was the original wall that completely sealed the front of her wedge, protected against fire from any angle or weapon, and reduced her acceleration to zero. The first stage wasn't a complete wall, however. It was a much smaller, circular shield, its diameter less than twice the ship's extreme beam. It offered no protection against beams coming in from acute angles, and a laserhead could actually slip right past
it before detonating. But against the energy weapons of a single target, Hexapuma could place that defense directly between her hull and the enemy . . . and continue to accelerate at full efficiency.
The sheer stupefaction of the savagely reversed trap paralyzed Anhur's bridge crew, just as Terekhov had intended. Most of their brains gibbered that this could not be happening, and even the parts that worked had no idea what to do about it. A heavy cruiser could not reverse course that quickly. A ship of so much tonnage could not accelerate at that rate. And though they knew RMN heavy cruisers had bow walls, they didn't know a thing about the new technology. Which meant, so far as they could know, that Hexapuma couldn't have hers up. But without it, engaging bow-to-stern, chaser-to-chaser, was suicide for both ships! And yet, that was precisely what the Manticoran maniac roaring down on them was doing.
It took another thirty-one seconds—thirty-one seconds in which the range dropped by another 108,684 kilometers and their closing velocity fell to just over fifteen hundred KPS—for the Mars-class cruiser's captain to reimpose her will on her own ship's maneuvers.
It was obvious when she did. Anhur's bow rose, relative to Hexapuma, which simultaneously dipped her stern, since she was decelerating directly towards the Manticoran ship. Obviously, Daumier—if that was really the other captain's name, Terekhov thought viciously—had elected to stand her ship on her tail, presenting only the roof of her impeller wedge to Hexapuma's bow chasers as they closed. She probably hoped she could get far enough around to present her own broadside, then roll back up to hit Hexapuma from astern with a raking broadside as they crossed over one another.
Unfortunately for her, the range was down to 423,522 -kilometers . . . 50,000 kilometers inside the range at which Hexapuma's chasers could have burned through the bow or stern wall Anhur didn't have.
"Open fire," Aivars Terekhov said in a calm, almost conversational tone, and Naomi Kaplan stabbed the firing key just as Anhur began her maneuver.
