Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn

by Smith, L. Neil

  At the same time, he directed his vessel toward what he reckoned was the opposition’s greatest strength, thereby regaining for himself the element of surprise. To the enemy, Osprey would look like an auger boring straight at them.

  Aloft, one of the crewbeings slid down a line in answer to the captain’s shouted command, securing a halyard that had somehow broken loose. It was a dangerous action to take, this close to the coming fight, carrying him, as it did, into the lethal range of the bow chasers. Yet, taking confidence from the discipline with which the fellow knew the Osprey to be managed, he never hesitated. Arran felt a momentary swell of pride in the knowledge that this valorous and sensible conduct was quite typical of his crew, rather than the exception.

  Beneath his feet, Arran could feel, more than hear, the low rumble of projecteurs opening their gunports and pivoting their great weapons this way and that to assure themselves that all was in working order since the last drill.

  Briefly, he was aware that, with the exception of Loreanna, who had lived with him through many everlasting moments like this, and Phoebus’s wives, of course, his passengers—Loreanna’s mother and half brother, the former Ceo, Uncle Sedgeley, his friend Frantisek—must be wondering what was happening. Well, let them find out, he thought, the same way he and Loreanna had in their time.

  All about him upon the quarterdeck where he stood, upon the maindeck two and a half measures below, and high overhead, dozens of crewbeings scampered about at apparent cross-purposes, and in seemingly violent disorder. Such an appearance of chaos was, of course, altogether deceptive. In his mind’s eye, Arran could clearly discern his enemy’s crewbeings similarly scrambling across their own decks, swinging upon lines and cabelles from point to point, all the while desperately striving to obey the harshly shouted commands that their own astonished officers—certainly well enough prepared for Osprey’s flight, but never for her bold counterattack—had probably never expected to be issuing.

  And well might they not be, he grinned to himself. As the galactically renowned boy-captain Henry Martyn—in part out of an inherent genius no one among his family and friends had ever suspected he possessed, and in part due to the assiduous and demanding tutelage of Phoebus Krumm and many others—Arran had developed his own personal style of strategy, consisting of three elements.

  “Ease off half a point, now!” he commanded the helm upon the quarterdeck, relieving a lateral strain upon the entire vessel’s structure which correcting for the ill-set sail had engendered. He was satisfied to hear Osprey groan, as if with gratitude. It was unhealthy for a ship to engage others in combat with stressed keels or other members, as it magnified the devastation of her enemies’ thrusts. It was worse when that vessel spun about her axis as his did now. And should all of the projectibles upon one side of a badly strained vessel happen to thrust in concert—Henry Martyn had always been well-known for giving his projecteurs their heads in battle—the consequences could be disastrous.

  Loreanna would know that groan; the others would think it the end of the world.

  Now he paced the quarterdeck in short, ferocious laps, waiting—which was invariably the most difficult part of any battle—for his plans, laid long ago upon Skye and elsewhere, to produce the consequences he desired. At some forgotten point within the past few minutes, he had somehow strapped his thrustibles where they belonged, upon both forearms and wrists, although he could not recall doing so, nor who had brought them to him from his quarters below.

  Unconsciously he clenched and unclenched the fists he held stiffly at the outsides of his thighs. When this day was finally through—provided that he survived it—his arms would sorely pain him, and he would wonder why.

  The first element of Arran’s strategy was drill.

  There had been a time, long ago, when the formidable fighting vessels of the Monopolity of Hanover had reigned supreme throughout the Great Deep, for no other reason than that their crewbeings had all been better trained and more scrupulously practiced than those of any other imperium-conglomerate. The standards they had been expected to live up to had been high and absolute. To Arran’s great fortune (and in the same instant, to his aesthetic regret) that time was no more. An inappropriately fastidious concern for mere appearance had replaced one for actuality and substance within the once-great Monopolitan Navy.

  Still, no one happened to be more aware of that navy’s glorious history than Arran, nor more insistent upon a fit and ready crew of his own, prepared to act together as a unit upon deck, at the projectibles, and aloft. The key to his success was the degree of coordination he had thus engendered among them.

  Peering into the phosphor-lit depths of the binnacle-like device he had begun using at the onset of the attack, he shouted another order as he saw that they had made a serious error—possibly of ship handling, but far more likely one of tactics—allowing their slowly forming sphere of encirclement about him to lump up upon one side, inviting panicky flight through a weakened opposite side that they would presumably attempt to turn into a trap for the Osprey.

  It was truly the most childish of ruses, and had there been sufficient time to spare for the luxury, he would have felt mightily insulted, and said so.

  He failed to take the bait, however, and continued to steer, instead, toward the greatest number and concentration of enemy vessels. Who among them could possibly predict what he intended to do, even now? Given the character of the master they most likely served, such a tactic as this was well beyond the reach of their imaginations. By now they must be absolutely frantic with confusion.

  Arran’s second element was maneuver.

  No commander in the rather lengthy history of the imperia-conglomerate had ever spent more time or effort in the evolution tactics which would remain reliably unpredictable to his enemies, and at the same time quite effective at disabling or destroying them. In general—this was especially true in these overly cautious times—all that this required, more usually than otherwise, was an indomitable audacity such as he displayed upon this day, in the face of seemingly hopeless odds. Nobody could be riper for defeat, Arran had always calculated, than some captain who complacently expected victory, as a kind of entitlement.

  Also, in the two years since they had last seen battle, Osprey and her crew had not been idle. Arran had taken her out upon short-range experimental and practice excursions at least monthly. (He felt a brief, painful twinge at the memory of his beloved eldest daughter, now lost to him forever, who had enjoyed nothing more than to accompany him upon such outings.) In this way, despite the passage of a relatively peaceful decade and a half, Henry Martyn and his infamous minions had retained and improved their well-honed fighting skills.

  He was more than grateful, too, that he always brought his wife along and counted upon her now, as he was certain Phoebus did upon his wives, to calm the others and encourage them—at weapon—point if necessary—to behave themselves. “Chasers, look ye sharp, now! Gundecks, tell yer crews t’fire as they bear!”

  That would be Phoebus, acting as his chief gunner, having handed off his duties as first officer to a grumbling sailing master. What he was shouting now was more by way of authorization, at this point, than orders to the lesser officers belowdecks, in command of their own weapons crews. His well-trained projecteurs knew with precision what was expected. This particular maneuver was called a Sutherland for some reason lost in the mists of history, and it ranked high among the many that the Osprey’s crew knew best. He believed that they could have performed it as required, even had the word never been given.

  Or in their sleep.

  They were preparing, at the moment, to take the best advantage that they might of the Osprey’s stately whirling motion, intended to bring more weight of projectibles to bear upon the enemy than perhaps he was accustomed to—and to offer the temperamental weapons a chance to cool off a trifle between thrusts.

  “Steady as she goes, now!” Arran encouraged a visibly nervous helmsman. Or perhaps it was only he who was n
ervous, requiring the childish reassurance of issuing a command. In any case, the obscenely colored, irregular blotches that marked the nearest part of the enemy fleet in the §-field about the ship had begun to resolve themselves into the identifiable signatures of individual vessels. “Mind you let the other fellow veer off if there is any veering to be done!”

  He nearly bit his tongue then, dreading that some cretin would remember those words and write them down, adding to what he felt was his already rather overripe legend. It didn’t help cases that he had many an illustrious—and altogether all too literate—passenger below who, lacking for any colorful experiences of his own upon which to expostulate, would help to spread the tale.

  “Aye,” replied Phoebus conversationally, albeit at the top of his lungs, for the benefit of the crew. “An’ we shall give him sufficient reason to do so!”

  Arran cringed, knowing too well the way Phoebus enjoyed his discomfiture at being what some idiots would choose to call a hero. He took what minuscule refuge he might, at the moment, in contemplating the third tactical element which had made him one such, which was an almost ridiculous superabundance of weaponry.

  Merely to cast an idle eye upon her, no starship handler would ever have suspected that the Osprey was a vessel of some eightytwo projectibles’ strength—not reckoning upon the weapons carried by her auxiliaries. As the boy-captain Henry Martyn, Arran had first ordered additional projectibles placed between each pair already standing upon the gundeck. Thus, where the gundeck of an ordinary fighting starship Osprey’s, size would usually have carried a dozen, each looking rather like an outsized spherical iron pot about the height of a tall man, Osprey carried twice that number. Moreover, each of the working decks below, that generally never saw a projectible in vessels of Osprey’s class, had been converted into additional and unsuspected levels of utter lethality.

  One manifestation that might have alarmed a more informed observer with regard to the Osprey’s true potential for destruction, was an unusual amount of sail that she bore upon the unusually long spars about her unusually high mast.

  The sophisticated fabric from which these had been fashioned—among the highest technological achievements of the imperia-conglomerate, as well as the most ancient—like those of any starsailing vessel, not only permitted any ship to be propelled through the Deep upon the tachyon breezes, but converted other subatomic particles passing through them into useful power, lighting and warming the vessel. Arran’s starship required half again the ordinary square measurage of sail, in order to satisfy the voracious appetite of her many projectibles.

  Even the trio of conventional bow chasers aimed aloft, forward, through the skylights of the officers’ and passengers’ quarters, had been doubled in number, and two pair of completely unheard-of stern chasers added upon the liftdeck.

  “Away all boats!”

  Osprey shuddered delicately as this order was obeyed.

  Lastly, as a part of his third element of overarming himself, Arran had devised (at the time, desperation had been driving him) an unprecedented use for his steam launches (of which Osprey carried an unusually high number), equipping each with its own full-sized ship’s projectible. These he sent out to buzz about his enemy’s vessels like so many stinging insectoids, harassing them in the defense of their mother ship, and, as often as not, single-handedly achieving their obliteration. Upon the capital world of Hanover, during his war with the Monopolity, it had been demanded that Henry Martyn be tried and executed if only for this highly innovative—therefore heinously “unfair”—tactic.

  The trouble, Sedgeley Daimler-Wilkinson had replied blandly at the time (and perversely enjoyed telling Arran about it later) lay in catching him first.

  The Osprey’s, launches were fusion-powered, employed steam as a reaction mass, and consumed prodigious amounts of water which his defeated enemies were required to replace—it was stage-whispered in the capital—drop for drop, with blood, if the implacable Henry Martyn deemed it necessary. Just now the enemy captains, staring into analytical instruments much as Arran was doing, or directly into the §-field as older hands like Phoebus were wont to prefer, should be wondering why a single target had suddenly become a baker’s dozen—outnumbering their own warfleet, had they but stopped to reflect upon it, by two.

  Arran wished that he were aboard one of the little vessels now, as he had sometimes been a decade and a half ago, just about to encircle the would-be encirclers. How well he remembered the terrifying and thrilling manner in which the single projectible in the bow, supposedly recoilless, had shaken the launch and all aboard her until the very teeth in their heads had rattled. If he were lucky now, the enemy would believe that, confronted by overwhelming numbers, Osprey’s, huge complement of lifeboats had abandoned her in cowardly disarray. If he were extraordinarily lucky, they would go on believing it till it was too late and his hornets were in amongst them, stinging, stinging, stinging.

  Silently he sent his launch commander, Mr. Richard Tompkins, the best of hunting.

  Meanwhile (Arran found himself musing during an unoccupied half second), for the representatives of a highly advanced super-civilization that they were supposed to be, the captains of the opposing vessels—or whatever admiral or commodore happened to be in charge of them—seemed singularly uninspired. Just as he had hoped they might—but not really dared to believe they would—they had simplemindedly continued their dull-witted textbook englobement of his Osprey and her twelve auxiliaries, as if they were unaware that the entire tactical situation had just been altered by the launching of the latter vessels.

  What this told him—although he lacked the time to consider the matter further at the moment—was that, unless he was making an error of complacent judgment himself, the captains opposing him were locked helplessly into some rigid bureaucracy (or worse yet, bureaucratic mentality) that was controlled at an arm’s length—and probably upon pain of torture and execution—by a book-educated pseudoauthority in tactics who was not present himself today and had nothing personal to lose by their defeat. Nor, in theory, win or lose—as long as they could prove they had gone by the same book themselves—had they. Success became an object secondary to avoiding being held to blame for failure. This was just what had happened to the once-formidable Hanoverian Navy.

  Belowdecks, Arran heard the weapons officers urging patience upon their eager projecteurs and their crews. The spirit of the coming battle was well and truly upon them, although, to a degree, their greatest chance for success lay in ignoring it, and waiting until the moment was objectively correct. It had taken him and Phoebus many years, simply teaching this principle to their officers.

  He looked up, confirming by the color of the §-field what he had already glimpsed within the depths of his instrument, and ordered that his crews aloft gather inboard, close about the klomme-high mast, where they would not become the accidental targets of their own ship’s bow chasers. He had seen more than one crewbeing caught by a bolt of pure kinetic energy sufficient to obliterate a starship, and blasted through tier after tier, until nothing but a thin red paste remained upon the ragged edges of a long rent through the last of the staysails.

  The ship’s bow chasers might not be employed in any case, as it could persuade the enemy too soon that they intended to fight. Upon another hand, Phoebus might decide at any moment that there was some reason to alter that part of the plan, and Arran was more than content to leave that to his first officer.

  All at once, the Osprey shook like a freshly bathed triskel, as a bolt of energy from one of the ships ahead found her somewhat sooner than Arran had expected. Most likely it was an impatient lucky thrust from the very sort of bow chaser he had been contemplating. They tended, upon other vessels than his, to be a little lower-powered than most ships’ projectibles and collimated a trifle narrower for greater range. He had not awaited much in the way of discipline or gunnery from these creatures who would rely, instead, upon their numbers.

  For the first time today, he
became conscious of having to force himself not to worry about his beloved Loreanna (and the rest, he supposed grudgingly) belowdecks.

  “Stand easy!” Phoebus shouted, just as his underofficers had done to their own projectible crews. It was ironic, he and Arran had often observed to one another, that having spent so much effort to instill a fighting spirit in a ship’s crew, her commanders were required to work so hard to suppress it until the proper moment. “Hold your thrust, now, wait fer ye little pots t’bear!”

  This initial assault, which seemed to have done the ship no harm, went unrepeated and without an answer from a patient Phoebus who would wait, no matter the cost, until he was sure of his mark. Another projectible thrust, more attenuated this time, seemed to confirm Arran’s judgment that the first had been a matter of luck. His Bretta had been a better projecteur than that when she was nine or ten. Osprey stood on, spinning, headed for the narrow gap between three larger ships, where he reckoned she could wreak the greatest damage.

  Without warning, the situation changed completely, as the Osprey shook from half a dozen blasts delivered from three sides along her beam ends. She was well among the foe now, deeply among them, giving thrice as good as she got with every broad-side. Preoccupied with his own concerns, Arran had not heard the order to fire, but from the thrumming he could feel through the wire-mesh deck beneath his feet, he knew that each time an enemy vessel turned into the sights of each of the projectibles below, the projecteur would pull a lanyard, expending the full force of the mighty charge his machinery had been gathering.

  The screaming had begun now among his own crew, some already turning to injured groans. There would be the damage done to Osprey by her enemies, and the ever-present possibility of a burst projectible or ruptured core-port which could kill a crew and turn the whole deck into a living hell. (He had been there when it had happened, himself.) There was no way of telling when a projectible might fail, or any preventive measure that could be taken against it. It was simply one of the risks of manning a fighting starship of this era.