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
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.
