You may be wondering why ships don’t simply loop about, the way ancient Earth vehicles did. Certainly I wondered, at first. The answer is that they can’t. Not when they are spinning for internal gee and external stability. They can change course a little, but any sharp turn at speed would encounter precessional resistance that would tear the ship apart before the maneuver could be completed. Those old stories of spaceships making neat loops in space to engage their opponents, on a scale of seconds, are fantasy; any loop they might reasonably make, unless they are almost stationary in space, would be so big as to be useless in a close encounter. Here in the confined channel of the Belt, the attempt would be disastrous. So maneuvers of this sort are sharply limited, and the keys become proximity and rate of acceleration.
Now the Inverness came in range. Immediately her six-inchers opened up, and the Caroline destroyers were in trouble. They had to refocus on the cruiser, because otherwise she would concentrate her firepower and pick them off one by one. The chances of a single shot scoring, in ideal conditions, may be one in four, but our destroyer would fire hundreds of shells. That shifted the odds.
Actually, six destroyers could normally take on a single cruiser. The cruiser would probably knock out a couple, but then the rest would be within their effective range and would be able to fire so many shells that the cruiser’s lasers would not be able to handle them all. Saturation shelling was an excellent tactic. So they ignored our lesser ships and oriented carefully on the Invernes.
Meanwhile, however, the Sawfish, our battleship, was decelerating to approach the battle region from the front, and the carrier HC was accelerating at her maximum gee to get within drone range from the rear, accompanied by our second cruiser, the Brooksville. Our pincers were closing. I really had to admire Emerald’s strategy; it was working exactly as she had outlined it to us. Soon we would enclose the enemy destroyers and go after their backup cruiser, which was now approaching in order to take on ours. Our trap was slamming shut on the pirates.
But the best-laid plans, as it has been said, can go astray. A destroyer made a lucky hit on the Inverness and knocked out her communications turret, and perhaps more. Her radio contact with us ceased and so did her acceleration. She had not been holed, but she was in trouble. She would be a sitting target for the enemy ships if she didn’t get her drive back soon. Free-fall is for traveling, not for battling.
“Damn!” Emerald swore. “It’ll be too long before our wings close; we’ll lose her!” She bit her lip fretfully.
I realized that her inexperience had betrayed us. A veteran strategist would have a backup plan in case of the unexpected.
Emerald’s strategy had been good—good enough to win the battle—but she had not allowed sufficiently for chance. I wondered if the Egyptian king, of the Kadesh battle, had suffered similarly.
“We’ve got to help the Inverness!” Mondy said.
“We aren’t supposed to get into the action,” I said, as if I were not the commander.
“If they take out that cruiser,” Mondy pointed out, “we’ll be next.”
I had to agree. “Unless we outrun them.”
Emerald nodded. “Can’t risk the Expedition Commander,” she said without irony. The commander is generally considered more valuable than any single ship, and, of course, our strategist and intelligence officer were also at risk. If the Task Force were considered as an organism, we represented its brain. I had been foolish to permit such a grouping of key personnel to occur at the battle site. In addition, Emerald and I both knew that Mondy, with his susceptibility to battle stress, was now a risk to himself and this ship. There was no way to predict how he might react.
But we had misjudged him. “We barely have the force to do our job now,” he said. “Without the Inverness we’ll be so short we’ll have to send for a replacement ship, and that will take too long.” He seemed less nervous now, oddly.
“Way too long,” I agreed. What was he getting at? I had always read the deep disquiet in him before; now I sensed a strange purpose.
“This is a fighting ship; let’s use it,” he said.
I exchanged a glance with Emerald. She was as surprised as I was.
Mondy grinned, now at ease. “Give the order, and I’ll explain.”
Emerald shrugged. “Sure thing, Peat Bog. We do need that cruiser.”
“Captain,” I said into the ship’s intercom. I was not, of course, commanding this ship; I commanded the Task Force, a different matter. Captain was my rank, but the one who commands a particular ship is captain of that ship, whatever his rank, and he has
final authority on that ship.
“Sir,” he responded.
“We are joining the battle. Act in the manner you deem best to protect the Inverness, subject to the overriding directives of Commander Sheller.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a pause, then: “Secure for hi-gee.” We felt the change immediately. We were pacing the frigate; now our acceleration jumped to about two gee as the ship sought to close on the cruiser. The Discovered Check was turning, too, despite the spin; we felt the sheer. Our acceleration couches shifted position, their clamps holding us secure, as the gee of the thrust exceeded that of the spin.
Even at double-gee, a maneuver takes time. We had to wait, watching the slow change on our screens. It wasn’t comfortable in either the physical or the emotional sense, but we were in shape for it—and so, it seemed, was Mondy. I realized now that his original potbelly had slimmed down; he was more fit physically than I had pictured him. “If it is not indiscreet to ask,” I said cautiously, resisting the gee pressure, “how is it that you are having no more trouble now than we are?”
“This is reality,” he said. “Here I have some personal control over my destiny. In my dreams I don’t.”
“That’s not enough, Peat,” Emerald said. “I’ve got more control here than you do, because I can dictate to the captain of this ship, in the name of tactics. But there’s a hand squeezing my heart. There’s none squeezing yours at the moment.”
Mondy smiled. “I saw action in the Saturn Incident,” he said, speaking in brief bursts as the gee squeezed more than our hearts. “We were behind enemy lines and short of rations, especially oxygen; we could not afford to take prisoners. Our lasers were low, so we used knives. We infiltrated an observation bubble, knifed their communication operators, and planted timed bombs. That was our job. After we vacated the bubble, the bombs would detonate, killing the remaining personnel. It went like clockwork; we took out five different bubbles that way and watched each blow behind us. ‘Lovely!’ I exclaimed. Then I realized that it wasn’t lovely; it was awful. Those people were fighting to defend their system, just as we were; they were decent, hardworking people who just happened to speak a different language. Their blood was on my hands, some of it literally. I remembered how one of them had been a young woman; her blood had flowed over my knife as she dropped, and onto my fingers. Somehow it hadn’t bothered me at the time, but in retrospect that blood was horrible, so hot and thick, her life spilled across my hand. My associates thought it was humorous. ‘You really got it into her!’ one quipped. He liked it, liked the killing, the gore of it, the sexual analogy: to ram a thing into the warm body of a woman, drawing blood. And suddenly I realized that I didn’t like it—but it was too late. I was already responsible for the deaths of over a hundred human beings.
“When we reported back to base, I got a commendation and a promotion: my reward for murdering all those people. And yet, in the end, we withdrew from Saturn and the other side took over; all our killing had accomplished nothing. I was left with no justification at all. And since then, I have relived those murders I committed, especially of that young woman—a woman very like you.” He turned his head briefly toward Emerald, the gee drawing down his jowls, making him artificially haggard. “Sometimes in my dreams I think she’s alive again, that all of them are alive, that perhaps I meet her living, and love her, for love was what she deserved, not that cruel k
nife. But I know it isn’t so, and I can’t face it, and I scream.”
Now he turned to me. “You assumed I was afraid of action, but it is myself I fear. I don’t want to murder anyone else, though I do it again every night. But this—” He paused again. “My companion of the quip, who liked killing, he couldn’t get enough of it in the Navy when peace came, so he deserted and became a pirate. I know what pirates do. Them I can kill. They are like the sinister aspect of myself; they need to be extirpated. I cannot undo what I have done, but I can, to a certain extent, atone for it by abolishing the other killers. Only when I am actively atoning does my con
science feel at ease.”
“I understand,” I said. “I also killed—-”
“Pirates,” he finished for me. “And children. And a young woman you loved. I know you understand, but your guilt is less than mine, and your strength is greater. Your system protects your sanity, as it protects you from hallucinogens.”
I had never thought of it that way. Could there be antibodies against destructive emotion? Surely I had suffered events that drove others mad, but I survived—and so did Spirit, who was of my blood. We felt the impact at first but learned to cope, exactly as I had with the hallucinogen. Mondy had provided me another insight into myself. “Yes,” I agreed.
“But now the Inverness is in trouble. If I don’t act, many good lives will be lost. So I must act, to pay another installment on my debt.”
And now, for the time being, he was at ease and fully competent. I had thought I understood him before, but my judgment had been imperfect because I had not allowed for the potential change in him brought about by circumstance.
Emerald, too, was looking at Mondy, her husband. She had suffered, taking care of him. Perhaps she had felt contempt for him. This was no longer the case. His insights into the nature of the Navy had brought us all promotion and success, and now his very suffering spoke eloquently for the state of his conscience. He had never accepted or forgotten the evil he had done. She had married me and then him; I had left evil behind me and had left her when it was expedient to do so. Mondy would never do either. I could almost see the wheels clicking to new settings in her head. What woman, granted the choice, would choose a truly independent man instead of a dependent one? Only a foolish woman.
We watched the action on our screens while Emerald continued to direct the overall battle. I now appreciated much better the distinction between strategy and tactics. We were now immersed in tactics. We veered abruptly to orient on an enemy destroyer.
The change hardly showed on the screen, for our actual shift was small; but the gee was awful, triple normal, and our couches swung about like carnival carriages. At our velocity the slightest deviation from straight-line-forward translated to considerable actual shift, and the acceleration itself was fierce. Slowly we closed on the enemy craft. We could not fire at it, and it could not fire at us; one of us had to turn our guns on the other.
We took the chance. We cut acceleration, damped our spin, and used our attitude jets to rotate in space. This took several minutes, but soon we would be able to launch a torpedo at the other. We resumed spin, stabilizing ourselves.
And the Caroline cruiser, alert to the pressure of a sitting duck, made a beautiful, or lucky, long-range shot and scored glancingly on our nose. Our torpedo tubes were jammed, and we were knocked out of attitude, our precession causing us to rotate slowly in space, end over end. Our hull was tight, but we did not dare use our acceleration jet until we recovered stability. We were, for the moment, effectively dead in space.
“Guide jets damaged,” a technician reported. “Unable to correct.”
Worse yet. We would have to have a repair crew work on the hull, and that was treacherous in battle.
There was a flare of light on the screen. For an instant I thought another shell had scored on us, but that was not so; an enemy destroyer had blown up. One of our ships had taken it out. The battle was continuing, but we ourselves could no longer fight.
Now the enemy destroyers were reorienting. “They’re going to hole us,” Emerald said grimly. Her face was drawn; she had never been in true battle before. There were tears of fear or frustration on her face. I think she feared death less than she feared the disaster this represented to her career. This was the stuff from which future nightmares were made.
But Mondy was unaffected. “No,” he said. “They’re going to board us.”
“How do you know?” she demanded sharply.
“That is the nature of pirates. They’re looters. They want this ship, and if they can’t salvage it, they’ll pillage it, rape the women, and maybe take them as slaves.”
All true, as I well knew. We had many young female personnel in our fleet and on this ship, and Emerald herself was one. There was ugly business coming, but Mondy and I would probably not live to see much of it.
“See, they’re not shooting at the Inverness anymore, either,” Mondy said. “That would be a real prize for them.”
“They can’t hope to take over a cruiser!” Emerald protested.
“Certainly they can,” he said. “They’ve got pacifiers.”
Pacifiers: the electronic devices that caused all unprotected people in their range to lose personal volition. I had had devastating experience with one, as a refugee. “But we’re protected from that,” I said.
Mondy smiled grimly. “Of course. But they don’t know that. I saw to it that accurate information did not get out. I believe our best strategy is to play dead—rather, to play pacified—and then take over their ship. Our men are well prepared for hand-to-hand combat.”
“I don’t like this,” Emerald said. “Nobody ever tried to rape me before.” Indeed, she was as pale as her dark skin permitted.
“It will not come to that, my dear,” he assured her. “I have been in this type of situation before. We shall surprise them.”
“You’ve had dreams about it!” she said. “You scream in the night! I’ve had to hold your hand! How can you fight them, even if you nullify the pacifier?”
“As I mentioned, reality is less severe than my dreams. My conscience is clear, for this. This time I am on the side of the victim.” He turned to me. “Captain, I suggest we plan our strategy in the few minutes remaining before they board us.”
“Agreed.” I spoke to the Discovered Check’s captain, and we entered a four-person dialogue and set our new trap. This ship was aptly named for this ploy!
The ship shuddered as the pirate came into contact. A warning light signaled the presence of a pacifier field. We all had pacifier null-units in our uniforms; our staff had agreed this was essential equipment. But we all slowed our paces, as if caught by surprise, playing the game. The three of us had gone to the ship’s main hall, hoping to serve as a preliminary distraction for the pirates, so that they would not be too careful. We wanted as many as possible to board before we acted. The two ships were now in free-fall, neither accelerating nor spinning; the pirate’s contact had served to steady us.
The pirates operated the linked airlocks and entered. The first three were big, dirty bruisers, exactly the way we had imagined them. They carried hand-lasers and were alert for trouble, but when they saw Emerald floating there, they relaxed.
“Look at the braid on that black doll!” the party leader exclaimed. “A light commander—that’s pretty high!”
“Come here, Commander Doll,” the second ordered.
Emerald slowly looked at them, then caught a handhold and hauled herself toward the one who had called her. The pacifier field did not make people dim-witted or physically slow, it merely robbed them of volition. Emerald obeyed the direct order she had been given; Mondy and I remained where we were, supposedly lacking the initiative to act. Such inaction may seem incredible to people who have not experienced the pacifier’s effect, but a pacifier had caused me to watch passively while my father was brutally slain.
“Hey, this one’s full captain!” the first pirate cried, as more of them crowde
d in from the airlock. “He must be the big boss! What a find!”
“What’s he doing in this little ship?”
“Ask him, dodo!”
So the second pirate asked me: “Who are you, Navy man? Why are you here?”
“I am Captain Hubris, Commander of this task force,” I said carefully. The field tended to interfere somewhat with speech, so I spoke slowly and with seeming concentration, though I was in fact unaffected. “I wanted to be close to the battle.”
He laughed coarsely. “You sure got your wish, Navy man! Now you’re our prisoner. You’ll fetch a good ransom!”
Emerald arrived before him. Eagerly the man grabbed her. “I never had a Navy officer before,” he said, hauling her in for a rough kiss. She did not resist, and still Mondy and I did nothing; we were waiting for the other pirates to board.
“Who gave you the rights to her?” the pirate leader demanded. “Chick like that’s for the top man!”
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