“Screens,” Martinez asked, “what’s the dispersal on that salvo?”
“They’re clumped together, my lord,” Tracy responded.
Martinez pulled the radar tracks onto his own display. The oncoming missileswere clumped, flying as if in formation. One ofCorona’s missiles should suffice to knock them out, but he thought he should fire two just to be sure.
He pulled the weapons board into his own displays and began configuring the missiles. “We’ll fire battery one in salvos of two,” he explained to Kelly. “The first two will take care of the oncoming missiles. The next two will accelerate till they’re just short of the enemy missiles, then cut power and drift through the blast, coming out the far side, heading for the station but looking on the radars like debris—or so we’ll hope. The next pair will burn straight in for the ring station and probably get shot down, but may distract them from the second pair. The fourth pair we’ll keep in reserve.”
Kelly looked a little overwhelmed. “Yes, my lord,” she said finally.
“When you reload, load tube one with a decoy.”
Pressing keypads. “Yes, my lord.”
On a larger ship, there would be a tactical officer to take care of all these details. But as he spun his plans, as his fingers danced in the displays and tapped console pads, Martinez found that he was enjoying himself again, relishing the planning and the execution and, most of all, the little surprise he was planning to spring on the Naxids.
Blow everything. Garcia’s words echoed in his mind, and he felt his pleasure fade. It wasn’t just rebel Naxids on the ships he planned to destroy, it was their captive crews, and the military installations on the ring were only a small part of the huge structure: millions of civilians lived there as well. All would die if his clever little plan succeeded.
He stared for a moment into a dark, cold imagining: the flash, the fireball, the spray of gamma rays. The ring station rent apart, spinning out of control, parts flung into space, others dragged to flame and impact on the planet’s surface by the skyhook cables.
“Three minutes, my lord.” Tracy’s words cut through his reverie, and with a deliberate resolve he put aside the horror of his vision.
“This is not a drill,” Martinez said. “Fire tubes one and two.”
“One and two fired, my lord. This is not a drill.” The gauss rails flung the missiles into space, and the missiles reoriented and ignited. “Missiles fired and running normally.”
Martinez watched them fly away through his displays. “Weapons, this is not a drill. Fire three and four.”
The pair fired, and the next pair, all firing normally.
Martinez decided to put more distance between himself and any detonating antimatter. “Engines, high gravity warning.” The sirens wailed.
“High gee warning, my lord.”
Martinez ordered a resumption of the six-gravity acceleration.
Now we’ll see how they react, he thought as the leaden weights of gravity were added one by one to his chest.
The Naxids must have seen his missile launches, and known thatCorona had teeth. They had to understand that their dense-packed formation of eight offensive missiles would be obliterated byCorona’s counterfire. But it wasn’t too late to save their barrage: they could send orders to the individual missiles to diverge, to separate so they couldn’t all be knocked out at once.
But they didn’t.Corona’s first pair of missiles exploded right in the middle of the enemy salvo, destroying them all in the plasma fireball created when the exploding antihydrogen hit the tungsten surrounding the warhead. A wild, furious cloud of radiation erupted betweenCorona and Magaria, preventing eitherCorona or the Naxids from seeing what was happening on the other side.
The radiation gradually cooled and faded. The first objects the sensors could detect, through the weakening shroud, were the burning tails of missiles five and six heading for the ring; the second thing were missile tails as well, the second salvo of eight fired fromFerogash.
“Twenty-four minutes till impact, my lord.”
That gave Martinez a comfortable amount of time to deal with them. It wasn’t until four of those minutes had passed thatCorona’s radars finally detected missiles three and four falling toward the enemy with their torches extinguished, speed increasing as they were drawn toward Magaria by the invisible threads of gravity.
“The enemy salvo is still flying bunched up, my lord.”
The Naxids, their attack having failed once, were trying the same thing all over again. Martinez could only hope they’d keep this up.
As he stared at the displays he realized that both he and the Naxids were improvising. Standard fleet tactics assumed that both sides would be moving fast, perhaps at a significant fraction of the speed of light, on courses more or less converging. Tactics assumed that the largest problem would be to detect the exact location of enemy ships, since ships could alter their trajectory significantly from the moment any radar or ranging laser detected them until the signal returned to the sender. Since the distances involved made ship-killing lasers useless—at.3c, it did not take a lot of maneuvering to evade a beam of light that, however fast, moved only in a straight line—offensive action was taken with intelligent missiles that, with guidance, could chase their targets down. Lasers were relegated to last-ditch point-defense weaponry to be aimed at missiles homing in on a target. Missiles were maneuvered en route to the target, both to anticipate the target’s evasions and to avoid countermeasures, and they would maneuver behind exploding screens of antimatter that hid them from the enemy, and hid friendly squadrons as well.
So far as Martinez knew, no one had ever developed tactics based on one side running away, from a standing start, while the other stood still, firing missiles at what amounted to point-blank range, barely exceeding a light-second. The irony was that the tactical problem was so dead easy that all the sophisticated tactics developed over the centuries were useless. What the situation called for were ship-killing lasers, since the range was so short that evasion was impossible, but those big lasers didn’t exist. What remained was a slagging match, pure and simple, a giant and a dwarf hammering each other with fists from a range of a few inches.
In order to survive, Martinez thought, the dwarf had better think fast and stay nimble.
He configured two missiles to destroy the enemy salvo, then hesitated. One missile might be enough to do the job.
He had six reloads for each missile battery, making ninety-six altogether. He’d just burned six. He didn’t know how many missiles the enemy squadrons held, but there had to be thousands, with more stored in the huge magazines of Magaria’s ring station.
It might be that he couldn’t afford to spend more than one missile on the attacking salvo. The Naxids could fire eight missiles to his one and stay well ahead.
He decided to fire only the one missile.
“Two more missile tracks, my lord.”
These, Martinez decided, were aimed at his own fifth and sixth missiles, the ones targeted on the ring. He had anticipated these missiles being targeted and wasn’t upset at losing them. Instead he plotted the intersection points to make sure they could be useful to him. He fired his own missile and timed it to intercept the oncoming salvo before the enemy’s interceptors would hit his own missiles five and six.
At which point, now concealed from detection by the vast cloud of radiation shooting outward from the destruction of nine antimatter missiles, he fired his decoy, altered course twenty-three degrees to port, staying within the plane of the ecliptic, and pushed his acceleration to ten gees.
When the concealing cloud began to disperse, the enemy interceptors hit his own missiles five and six, providing two more concealing clouds that maskedCorona for several more minutes. When the radiation began to disperse, Martinez cut his own engines and drifted.
What the Naxids saw now on their screens was the decoy—a missile configured to reflect a radar image of approximately the same size asCorona — burning at a steady six gees acceleration onCorona’s own course. Their radars would also seeCorona, of course, but Martinez hoped they wouldn’t find him interesting. If he was just a symbol on their screens, they might not consider him worthy of investigation, not like the decoy that was so obviously attracting attention to itself. They might think he was a piece of debris, and only if they configured their sensors to show the actual size of the radar blip would they see thatCorona was the size of a frigate.
Throughout all this, Martinez remembered, missiles three and four were falling, silently, unobtrusively, toward Magaria. Lawn-green projectiles with deadly white footballs painted on the nose.
While he was waiting for the Naxids to respond, he made a general announcement and told everyone to get into their vac suits, only to receive a reply from Maheshwari.
“The engine room crew is already suited, my lord.”
It was the first word he’d had directly from Maheshwari sinceCorona had departed its berth.
“Very good,” Martinez said, for lack of anything better, then unstrapped to wrestle himself into the suit that had been hanging in Command’s suit locker all this time. As he was ripping off his trousers he encountered the pistol belt, and hesitated.
His crew, his little kingdom of nineteen souls, had followed him on this mad enterprise. Perhaps it was because of the habit of following orders, perhaps because of his calm pose of authority in a confusing situation…and maybe it was because they were afraid he might use the pistol. But they were all committed now, one way or another, and the pistol was a clumsy thing that had already scored a bruise on his hip.
He rolled up the pistol belt and stuffed the weapon into the suit locker.
He was partway through attaching the sanitary gear in the lower half of the suit when Clarke, who continued to watch the screens while her partner suited, gave a sudden shout.
“Missile tracks! Lots of them! FromFerogash, fromKashma, fromMajesty — they’reall firing, my lord!”
Martinez kicked himself into the suit and lunged for the command cage, then called up the sensor screens. Each ship in the Naxid squadrons had fired a salvo at exactly the same moment.
“Any of them headed forus? ” Martinez demanded.
“Ahh…it’s too early to tell, my lord.”
Martinez hung in the cage and continued to attach the sanitary gear while the situation developed, and it was soon obvious that the decoy hadn’t worked. Of the 164 missiles that had been fired, too many were heading directly forCorona, and too few for the decoy.
But the Naxids had made a mistake in firing so many all at the same moment. Although the weapons directors on the individual ships were taking care to maneuver their missiles from the start and not to let them fly in formation asFerogash had, still they were coming in one broad wave, and Martinez was able to tailor his defense to swat large numbers of enemy missiles out of the void with each interceptor he sent.
The Naxids would have done better to have each ship fire a salvo ten seconds apart, he thought. Then he would have had to use up a lot more missiles to intercept them.
Radiation clouds bloomed in the displays asCorona’s counterfire wiped out most of the Naxid onslaught. Fourteen enemy missiles survived, all of which were killed byCorona’s point-defense lasers. Cadet Kelly proved to have a knack with the lasers, anticipating the missiles’ jinks and knocking them down regardless.
By then the crew in Command were suited andCorona was under acceleration again, six gees for Wormhole 4. Martinez had eighty-one missiles left.
And he still had the two missiles falling toward Magaria’s ring, both of which he watched on the monitors with burning interest. If just one of them got home, the rebellion was over, along with the lives of about four or five million sentient beings.
Apparently, the Naxids eventually noticed at least one of the two missile-sized packages falling toward them, because missile four was hit by a defensive laser and destroyed, its antimatter contents spraying out in an uncontrolled fan, never quite managing a large explosion but creating a spectacular radiation cloud. The cloud must have confused enemy sensors, or their operators, because missile three was able to drift closer before it fired its engine and oriented on its target, the Fleet’s ring station.
Defensive lasers were tardy in responding, and caught the incoming missile only a few seconds from detonation. The missile blew anyway, just north of the ring station, causing a fireball nearly as powerful as if the missile had detonated normally. Martinez watched in knuckle-gnawing suspense as the radiation cloud engulfed the ring station like a wave flinging itself over the shore.
“Fire battery one,” Martinez ordered. Eight missiles leaped from the rails, oriented on the ring, and ignited. Martinez sent their targeting data as they sped on their way.
Again he gnawed a knuckle as he watched the radiation cloud slowly disperse from the ring station. The Magaria ring remained intact, a thin, brilliant silver band rolling around the planet
