Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  “We know what they’re doing,” Repro said heartily. “They’re sending the troublesome riffraff off on an impossible mission. They believe we will never return.”

  “Of course,” Phist agreed. “We were supposed to flub the prior Juclip mission; instead, we became heroes. They think we were lucky, but now they have upped the ante.”

  “They?” Spirit asked.

  “The powers-that-be of the Jupiter Navy,” Phist clarified. “The ones who are uncomfortable with ripples in the grand old order. It embarrasses them to have a ragtag outfit officered by a scapegoat, a delayed-stress-syndrome derelict, an addict, a whistle blower, a black female file clerk, and a couple of Hispanic refugees, to have such a collection make good. It is not the Navy Way.”

  “They just can’t believe there is any real competence in our unit,” Repro agreed, looking more satisfied than ever before, for his dream unit was coming true. “That is the beauty of it. If they suspected our potential, they would instantly yank the rug out.”

  “That they would,” Phist agreed somberly.

  “Nevertheless,” Emerald put in, “we’re going to have to scramble on this one. We aren’t facing inferior forces this time. No one has been able to make a permanent dent in the piracy of the Belt before.”

  “No one’s really tried,” Mondy said. “The pirates are into a number of endeavors that cause politicians to hesitate.”

  I shrugged. I had this mission and a fine unit; I was not going to hesitate. My whole prior career had been in preparation for this. Already I had arranged to promote Phist, the longest in grade, to full commander, O5, and would see to the others as feasible. We would succeed.

  Phist did his usual with the equipment specs, upgrading the battleship to 3.2 gee and the lesser ships to more. He saw to special weapons. It was amazing that the powers-that-be in the Navy did not realize the transformation that was occurring in our combat capacity; apparently, the bureaucracy chose not to comprehend the kind of logistics competence Phist possessed.

  Task forces are not formed and launched on a dime, however. It was eight months before we set off for the Belt, and that in itself was a miracle of logistical organization. Work was still being done as we launched, but we were glad to be on our way at last.

  I have said I can match everybody in the Solar System to the continents and islands of pre-Diaspora Earth. The notable exception is the Belt. The so-called asteroids (they really are not small stars, they are fragments of planetary matter) can be matched with the old Pacific islands, and the planetoid Hidalgo aligns nicely with Hawaii, as does Chiron with Cyprus. But I don’t believe the old Earth islands ever had as savage a concatenation of evils and corruption as did the Belt. There were countless pirate vessels, roughly organized into several major bands—the Bands of the Belt. Each band had a specialty of crime and a territory, generally, though not perfectly, honored by the others. The most powerful bands were like six nations. I knew that the pirates of the Juclip were only limping rabble compared to those of the Belt. Criminals who lacked the strength or courage to go for the big time skulked around the various planets, preying on helpless craft such as the refugee-bubbles; those with real ambition went to the Belt. Such was the power of the Belt pirates that most legitimate planetary trading fleets paid toll to guarantee safe passage. It was cheaper than going to war. So the pirate kingdoms flourished, and in their lee, the rabble-pirates of the other regions survived. I had always known that taking out the Juclip pirates was only tokenism; they would regenerate the moment the Navy mission ended, unless the real pirate bastion in the Belt was eliminated too.

  We took our time traveling, picking our spot. We could have reached the nearest section of the Belt in two weeks, but instead we elected to go a quarter of the way around to intersect it at the zone of the Carolines.

  The Carolines were the least of the major pirate bands. Their biggest ship was an ancient cruiser, and that had been refitted as a printing shop and warehouse. The Carolines were specialists in pornography and illicit publication, and they handled the best. I had seen some of it as an enlisted man, and it was eye-popping; Juana had required me to burn it, because she said it degraded women. Perhaps she was correct, but I was male enough to enjoy it no matter whom it degraded. The illicit sexual feelies were also wholesaled by the Carolines; the Hidden F1ower had merely retailed the transsex line of those, putting her own brand name on them. That was how Spirit had reached me with the EMPTY HAND message.

  I did not have a consuming passion against the Carolines; in fact, I felt that pornography was relatively harmless as a vice, and that its suppression was a manifestation of the abridgment of free expression. But pirates were pirates, and Mondy had pinpointed this band as the weakest militarily, and Emerald had decided to start with it so as to test our mettle in true combat without undue risk. I concurred. I was not expert in either Intelligence or Strategy, which was why I had followed Repro’s script to acquire personnel who were. A commander is only as good as his staff and his men, and he has to honor his staff’s informed judgments. A good commander is to some extent a figurehead, a focal point for the expertise of his unit. So I set out to destroy the power of the Carolines (by that I mean the pirates thereof), a decision viewed with a certain regret on my part, and a certain righteous glee on my secretary’s part.

  Emerald was neutral about the social implication; she didn’t care about pornography one way or the other. She viewed this purely as a strategic and tactical exercise, and it was her intent to give us the cleanest possible victory with minimum loss. She explained the essence to us with pride, for this was her moment.

  “The operative concept is Kadesh,” she said. “This was one of the earliest Earthly battles of which we have record. The Egyptians met and defeated the Hittites in the vicinity of the town of Kadesh in 1299 B.C.”

  “Now wait, Rising Moon!” Commander Phist protested, using her song-nickname. “Those were marching land armies; this is space! There’s hardly a parallel!”

  “You worried about your hardware, King Cole?” she inquired with a glance at his trousers. “I’m trying to protect it for you.” She went on to describe the broad outline of her strategy. “Of course, the tactics are critical,” she concluded.

  “Tactics?” I asked. “I thought you just described them.”

  “I described strategy,” she said. “That’s our effort to bring our forces into play advantageously. Strategy occurs before the combatants meet. Tactics are what happens once the battle begins. A winning strategy can be ruined by losing tactics.”

  “Oh, you mean like setting your opponent up for a knockout punch and then missing the punch,” I said.

  “Close enough, Worry,” she agreed wryly.

  It turned out that the Carolines, having noted our coming, had gathered reinforcements. They still had no capital ships, but they had borrowed another cruiser, and this was a good one, a match for one of ours. They also picked up several more destroyers; as a result, they now had six, matching ours.

  Emerald bit her lip. “I hadn’t counted on this,” she said. “We don’t want to commit the Sawfish, and without it, the sides are too close to even.”

  “Why not use the Sawfish?” I asked innocently. “She could gun down the enemy ships before they could get within their torpedo range.”

  “Same reason you don’t use your queen to mop up pawns in a chess game,” she said. “In close quarters a battleship has less advantage and becomes vulnerable. We’ll hold the Sawfish out until we have access to another battleship, or at least a cruiser. We’d be fools to risk her in a destroyer battle.”

  Emerald wanted to be able to direct the battle personally, which meant she couldn’t remain aboard the Sawfish. I designated the destroyer Discovered Check to be her command ship and went along myself. I wanted personal involvement, too.

  “I don’t like this, Hope,” Spirit said darkly. “That little ship is a lot more vulnerable than the Sawfish.”

  “Also a lot less obvious,” I
pointed out. “We’ll be observing, not fighting. The enemy will never suspect.”

  “If the battle comes near you, I’ll bring the Sawfish in to fetch you out,” she warned.

  “And take your bodyguard along, sir,” Sergeant Smith said. “Here, I’ll assign another dozen men—”

  “I don’t need any dozen men!” I protested.

  “Take them, Captain,” Mondy said. He was pale and drawn; he had no love for battle. But he was not nonfunctional; now that the challenge was on him, he was holding steady. Emerald had been good for him these past few years. “In fact, I would like to accompany you myself.”

  “This may be closer to the action than you like,” I warned him. “There is no need for you to expose yourself to this.”

  “Yes there is, sir. My wife will be exposed.”

  His wife, my former wife. I knew what a woman Emerald was. I was proof from love, but evidently it was a different case with Mondy. He did not want to live if Emerald didn’t. She had married him because our unit needed him, and he had proved his value to us many times. But he had needs of his own. Our unit was bound together in special ways. “Come along, Peat Bog,” I said. His song-nickname, no affront.

  “And stay out of mischief!” Spirit called as we entered the linked airlocks, transferring to the Discovered Check.

  “We know where we’re going,” Emerald called back, paraphrasing Spirit’s song. Songs became more important as tension mounted.

  The destroyer was a nice ship. Commander Phist had requisitioned some very special equipment for her, which was one reason we were using the Discovered Check. She was the fastest of our ships, capable of an astonishing 4.5-gee acceleration in her upgraded condition, which meant she could probably outrun any ship in the Belt. Her torpedoes were of the most modern type, fifty percent faster than standard, with magnetic repulsion fields that made physical interception of them in flight almost impossible. When they homed in on their target, the magnetism was programmed to reverse. Her hull was plated with laser-resistant alloy, and her own laser cannon was oriented by computer to destroy any oncoming missile. She was also armed with “depth” bombs, which were hurled by catapult slowly through space but so powerful that they could disable a small ship by a proximity explosion. This was, in short, one potent ship, and about as safe as a destroyer could be. Commander Phist had taken a great deal of pride in it, justifiably. He had not been able to upgrade the other destroyers similarly; most were not designed for such changes, and as a unit we had already pushed our luck about as far as we could. Had the officers in charge of these matters possessed Phist’s insight into performance, quality, and costs, they would never have let us get away with many of our requisitions. But these officers, like much of the Jupiter Navy, were essentially asleep at the helm.

  The problem with the Asteroid Belt is that it obscures things. Much of it is sparse, and, of course, the orbiting rocks are readily avoided by ships that travel outside the Solar Ecliptic, the plane in which most of the planets revolve. But there are more small chunks than large ones, and there is considerable sand. In some regions there are whole clouds of dust. This interferes with radar and makes it easy for ships to hide; the radar can’t readily distinguish between rocks and ships. It was in this manner that we sailed into the pirate ambush.

  We were advancing toward the main Caroline base on a half-mile-diameter planetoid. Because of the debris in the area, we were strung out along a natural channel that the pirates normally used. There really wasn’t any other way; the Belt was constantly changing its configuration as planetoids ellipsed in and out, stirring up sand and throwing dust about in their wakes. Maps had to be constantly updated, and, of course, we lacked the latest. Only the pirates themselves knew the latest details, and they weren’t giving out that information to the Navy. So we used the main channel, watching for pirate ships, but we had underestimated the care with which their ambush had been laid. Or so the pirates believed.

  All six of their destroyers materialized from the debris, bare light-seconds from the center of our fleet. In that region we had only two destroyers, a frigate, two sloops, and half a dozen gunboats. Our fleet had started in compact order but had become dispersed because of the differing accelerations of the various types of ships. Our battleship was at the head with two destroyers and several escorts, while our carrier was far to the rear, with two more destroyers and a cruiser. The center was by far the weakest region, lacking either the firepower of the Sawfish or the drones of the Hempstone Crater, without even a cruiser to bolster its striking force. The pirate fleet of six destroyers was much more than a match for our widely spaced eight ships, and, of course, the second pirate cruiser, the battle-fit one, was waiting in their rear. They could cut our column in two, and then concentrate their remaining ships, which were surely deploying invisibly in the debris of the Belt. When our carrier arrived, they could mass against it. We could lose half our force before we got properly organized. Then they would retreat, escaping retaliation, awaiting a new opportunity to strike.

  Emerald showed her teeth in no friendly smile. What I have described is the way it was supposed to seem to the pirates—and now they had taken the bait. Kadesh, when the Hittites had pounced on the Egyptians’ weak center as the Egyptian forces marched in columns. Perhaps the Egyptians had not planned it that way, but we had. Our vulnerability was a good deal more apparent than actual.

  Our light cruiser, the Inverness, thirteen thousand tons, had already rotated in space and commenced acceleration back toward our center as the enemy destroyers made their move. Our radar wasn’t good in this region, but we had known what to expect, so had been able to track their ships approximately. The Inverness was armed with a dozen six-inch guns and another dozen five-inch lasers, compared to the four five-inch guns of each enemy destroyer, and her acceleration of 3.5 gee matched theirs. Of course, she was really decelerating, reducing her inertial velocity, but in the situation that was a quibble. When everything is moving at a given velocity, that becomes your basis for orientation in space, and it is convenient to treat your formation as if it is at rest. The enemy craft were matching our velocity, and the Inverness was rapidly closing the distance, and she was a considerably more potent fighting piece than they. Her six-inchers had greater muzzle velocity and accuracy, which translated into greater effective range.

  One of our two destroyers in the region was the Discovered Check. She was not here to fight, of course; she was the temporary command ship. If things got difficult, she could outrun any of the enemy destroyers, but it wouldn’t come to that. And our frigate was another upgraded ship, as were two of our corvettes. In fact, our supposedly weak center was a good deal stronger than it appeared.

  “Corvettes, evasive maneuvers,” Emerald was saying into her scrambled radio connection. “Frigate, fire on your nearest.” She glanced up at me, the light and delight of battle in her eyes. “It’s only a pair of three-inchers she can orient without changing course, but they may not know that.” The problem, of course, was that small ships could not fire effectively sidewise; their heavy guns were oriented forward, since their spin made side-oriented guns highly inaccurate. The larger ships had special independent artillery belts, which did not spin with the rest of the ship; that was another reason our battleship was like a chess queen, while the destroyers were like deadly pawns. Versatility in firepower was critical in battle.

  Of course, normally attacking ships simply matched velocities, then rotated to point at their targets; destroyers were highly maneuverable this way. But it did take a few minutes, and they were vulnerable while correcting their attitude, as it was called. The enemy destroyers were closing on our ships at an angle so they could fire forward at us, but that meant they presented a larger and steadier target for return fire by any ships in our column that could fire sidewise. That was why the frigate’s effort should be slightly unnerving to them, until they discovered that only two three-inch guns were involved. Theoretically one three-incher was enough to score, bu
t it was unlikely at this range.

  The Caroline destroyers were coming within effective range of their five-inchers. Our corvettes, not daring to drift in space while changing their attitudes, were maneuvering by irregular acceleration. When a shell approaches at an angle to the target ship, the rate of the target’s acceleration has to be taken into consideration. If the target accelerates faster than allowed for, the shell will miss to the rear; if it accelerates slower, the shot will miss to the front. So the attacker has to get close enough to increase its accuracy and to read the acceleration of the target correctly. Even so, the chances of any one shell scoring, even when correctly aimed and timed, are only about one in four at close range, and close range is dangerous when a number of ships are involved.