Greenies

'I have a laser lock,' Hamilton reported. 'The weapon is continuing normally on course.'

'I copy you have a lock,' Brett responded. He turned to Mandall. 'Sugi, how many Panamas do we have identified now?'

'Six,' he said, 'and two more ships are just becoming visible on the display that are more than likely Panamas as well, but I don't have quite enough data for a positive ID yet.'

'Good. Put them on my screen. I want to get that second weapon out there too.'

'On the way,' he said.

'And keep your eye peeled for Owls. We know the WestHems have some out there but we don't know where they are. The last thing we need right now is detection.'

'I'm looking,' he assured him.

Brett looked over the display for a moment and ran some basic angles in his head as he compared his ship's position and speed with that of the oncoming vessels. It looked like he could turn Mermaid and launch on the sixth Panama back with a minimum amount of maneuvering and within the time frame allowed him by the first weapon's trip to target.

'Helm,' he said to Mandall, 'lock onto target fifteen and plot a launch course. Once again, let's shoot for 400,000 kilometer separation.'

'Plotting,' she said, turning back to her computer screen.

Soon the course was plotted and the order was given to initiate it. Mermaid's maneuvering thrusters and engines came to life once more, turning the ship and accelerating it at .02 G. The first torpedo continued on, linked to the ship by the laser, and the distance between them increased rapidly, until Sugi could no longer detect the minute amount of heat.

The second release came twenty minutes later. Torpedo number two slid neatly out of the tube and began to drift away. Soon it too was locked by a guidance laser.

'Okay,' Brett said, wiping a slight sheen of sweat from his brow. 'The shots are away. Let's maneuver clear of this place. Helm, turn us to new course of 010 mark 70 and accelerate at point zero eight G.'

'I copy zero one zero mark seven zero and burn engine at point zero eight G,' she repeated, her hands already making the adjustments. She, like everyone else on the bridge, was very anxious to get the hell out of the release zone now that the weapons were on their way.

Mermaid spun well away from the formation and turned her nose downward, seventy degrees from the plain of the elliptic, in effect diving far beneath the formation of ships she was tracking.

The tactic Brett had used in making his attack was a classic one in stealth ship warfare. The idea was to lie in wait in the path of the oncoming enemy, moving at relatively slow speed while the enemy was at maximum velocity. This made the closure speed of the weapon with the target equal to that of the enemy's forward motion plus the velocity added by the launching ship. In effect, the torpedoes that Mermaid had launched were closing with their targets at a speed of nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per hour without so much of a drop of the weapons' own rocket fuel or oxidizer being burned.

Aboard the ships of the armada, it was just after 0700 hours, the time for the daily routine to begin. On the flagship, Admiral Jules was still sound asleep, naked beneath the silk covers in his private suite, one of the attractive servants he had brought along curled up naked with him. On the bridge of the ship, crew change was taking place as the night shift gave report to the oncoming day shift. A full combat information center staff was at hand at their terminals, all of them receiving data from the escorts near the front of the armada and even from the sensors of the Panama ships themselves. No sensors detected the presence of the two nuclear torpedoes closing in on the Camel or the Mule. No one was really looking for any such thing. On both of these ships the marines were climbing out of the bunks in their crowded landing ships and getting ready for the unappetizing meal that was known as breakfast. None of them had the slightest idea that death was rushing at them at eighty-three kilometers per second.

Camel was the first of the targets, the third Panama from the front of the armada. It was a young spacer second class on the bridge that first noticed something unusual on his screen. He was getting slight flickers in the medium range on infrared, just a few at first, nothing to be terribly concerned with, but then they started to get stronger, more frequent. At almost the same moment his anti-meteor radar display began to register something that looked like ghost returns, not a good solid hit on anything, and again, nothing to be terribly concerned with by itself, but they were coming from exactly the same place as the infrared flickers. He hesitated for longer than he really should have, but finally he called it to the attention of the second officer, who was in charge of the ship at that particular moment since the captain and the executive officer were both still asleep.

The second officer stared at it for nearly thirty seconds, running things through in his mind, thirty seconds in which the object in question closed another 2500 kilometers with them. Since the flickers were getting a little stronger and since the radar returns were becoming a little more frequent, he finally advanced a nervous observation. 'That's almost the same signature that one of our torpedoes gives off.'

'One of our torpedoes?' the spacer asked. 'What would one of our torpedoes be doing out there?'

'I don't know,' he said, shaking his head, starting to get a really bad feeling. 'But it kind of looks like it's heading right towards us, doesn't it? I wonder if one of the Seattle's or one of our stealth ships accidentally jettisoned one.'

The spacer then had a particularly unpleasant thought. 'Sir,' he said, 'those torpedoes are pretty stealthy. If that thing is close enough for us to be getting radar returns and infrared detection from it... well... I think that it's probably very close to detonation range then.'

The second officer swallowed nervously, staring at the display before him, watching the bearing change on the target. In his heart he couldn't honestly believe that an actual live torpedo was heading towards his ship — after all, who possibly could have fired it? — but on the other hand, there was a remote possibility, wasn't there? After another six seconds and another 480 kilometers of closure, he finally came to a decision. 'Sound general quarters,' he barked to the bridge. 'Get the anti-missile defenses active. Let's go active with a fire control radar and see if we can enough of a return to pin down the range.'

Ten seconds later the general quarters alarm began to sound. All over the ship, men began to head listlessly to their stations, every last one of them figuring that this was some sort of ill-timed drill. On the outside of the massive ship, panels flipped open and anti-missile lasers popped out. They began to charge up.

'Fire control radar active,' the spacer reported. 'Sweeping the area right now.'

'What in the fuck is going on in here?' a voice boomed from behind them. It was the captain of the vessel. He had just emerged from his quarters after being jarred awake by the sounding of the alarm. He was dressed only in a pair of navy blue underwear, his hair mussed, his eyes furious, looking for blood.

'Sir,' the second officer told him, 'we've detected what appears to be a WestHem torpedo at close range. It seems to be closing with us. I thought that under the circumstances...'

'A WestHem torpedo?' the captain interrupted. 'What the hell are you talking about?'

'Sir,' the spacer said, his face going pale. 'I have a good return on it. It's just over two thousand kilometers out, it's course directly towards us, closing at a speed of eighty-three kilometers per second.'

'Jesus,' the second officer said, his mind performing a quick piece of arithmetic. The missile would be in lethal detonation range in less than thirty seconds. Without bothering to wait for the captain to digest the information and give an order, he gave it himself. 'Lock onto it and fire all anti-missile lasers!'

'Locking on,' the spacer said.

'A torpedo?' the captain repeated, still trying to come to grips with the situation. 'Moving in on us? How in the hell is that...'

'Sir!' the spacer barked. 'A jammer just went active on the weapon! I've lost the range data!'

That piece of information brought it home to everyone just how real the situation was. The jammer was an electronic device installed in the seeker head of torpedoes. Designed to activate when a fire control radar started probing, they sent out a confusing array of infrared and radar noise that would foul a defensive system's ability to lock onto it exactly, which would make it very difficult to guide an anti-missile laser beam to a lethal hit. The fact that one had just come on told them that this was not a weapon accidentally dropped by one of their own ships. This was a weapon that had been deliberately fired at them and that was undoubtedly armed and ready to blow