Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  “You are in a position to know,” I said doubtfully. “Is that what turned you off it?”

  She grimaced. “Partly. But mainly, my love of command was greater than my interest in sex or romance. It remains so.”

  “What are the details of pirate courtship?”

  “The groom kidnaps the bride and rapes her. She is given a knife. If she doesn’t kill him then, she is his. That’s the essence. The details differ from clan to clan.”

  “Roulette says she has killed two suitors.”

  “Surely she has. That girl’s a hellion.”

  “Why, then, would her father introduce her to me? I’m not going to kidnap her and rape her!”

  “The courtship convention is often honored more in the forms than in the reality. If you defeat Straight in battle, his daughter might be worth a considerable price.”

  “I wouldn’t buy her either!”

  “But if you wanted her, you wouldn’t kill her father. A pirate would, but not a Navy man. She’s his life insurance.”

  “But I don’t want her!”

  She glanced sidelong at me. “Don’t you?”

  I reconsidered. “Damn it, I do want her. Sexually, at any rate. I never saw a better-formed woman, and I’m sick of the Tail. But that doesn’t mean I’d let that affect my campaign strategy.”

  “Straight evidently is gambling that it will. Also, he may feel you are a good match for her. He doesn’t want war, he wants legitimacy. Many pirates are similar. I am. He’s covering all his bets.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t like being covered.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  I was troubled, but at the moment I had pressing other matters to attend to. Soon we were consulting with my staff. “Brinker will command the captured pirate destroyer on a de facto basis,” I told Sergeant Smith. “Cobble together a competent crew in a hurry.”

  “Yes, sir.” He got on it, taking Brinker with him.

  “We’re going to meet the Solomons in battle in deep space in forty-eight hours,” I said to the others. “Make the preparations.” Actually, two days would not get us out of the Belt, but the principle of avoiding a settled region remained.

  “But our supply ship arrives in thirty-six hours,” Spirit protested. “That won’t give us enough time to organize.”

  “We’ll locate a vacant planetoid and use it as a temporary supply base,” Emerald said. Obviously she had a specific planetoid in mind, as such things were not to be found just like that. If I seem to suggest that things fell into place for us conveniently, that is only because my staff arranged it so. “Our lesser ships will be able to protect that with the pincushion defense.” She turned to me. “You agree, sir?”

  I grasped for an answer, as I hadn’t been paying full attention. “I suppose so.”

  “You have something more important on your mind, sir?”

  “No,” I said, embarrassed.

  “A woman?”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “Tell us about her,” Emerald urged mischievously. “You haven’t had a really good woman since you had me.”

  I saw Juana smile obliquely at that, but she said nothing.

  I sighed. “It seems a pirate chief is trying to fix me up with his daughter, for political reasons. Covering his bets.”

  “A pirate wench?” Spirit asked. “Is she clean?”

  “This one would be,” I said. Then I reacted against the mere supposition. “It’s ludicrous! She has killed two men who wanted her.”

  “That fatal appeal,” Emerald said. “I must remember it.”

  “Not this marriage!” Mondy objected, and they laughed. The two of them had grown closer in the past few days.

  They returned to the details of strategy while I tried to shake off my own foolishness. So Roulette had a body of amazing proportions; why should that matter to me? Juana was as pretty as anyone, and—but that wasn’t the point. Juana was no longer supposed to be of interest to me in that way, and neither was Emerald. I was looking for novelty; and that, indeed, Roulette was. Novelty and forbidden fruit. A pirate wench was certainly not for a Navy captain.

  Sergeant Smith returned with Brinker. “I have set it up, sir. If you will just sign this waiver—”

  “Waiver?”

  “She’s a civilian employee, sir. For her to command a Navy ship—it’s irregular.”

  “She will not command a Navy ship,” I pointed out. “It is a captured pirate vessel; and anyway, this is to be mostly off the record.” Nevertheless, I signed the waiver. If trouble came of this, the blame should be mine, not his.

  Brinker started to go, but I stopped her. “Sit in on the strategy session, Captain. You may have input.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said gratefully.

  Emerald leaned toward her. “What does she look like?”

  Brinker was startled, glancing at me. “My staff has will and mischief of its own, Little Foot,” I said with resignation. That was Brinker’s song-nickname: the foot with no man to shoe it. “Satisfy their curiosity, so we can get on with business.”

  Brinker nodded. Then she made a gesture with her two hands, the classic hourglass shape. “Eighteen. Fire-hair. Face would launch a thousand ships. Imperious. Deadly.”

  There was appreciative laughter. “No wonder he wants her!” Mondy exclaimed. “There’s nothing like that in this task force!”

  Emerald slammed a backhand into his chest. It was her way of displaying affection. She was not ashamed to show it, now.

  We met the Solomon fleet at the designated spot in space. Emerald had planned carefully, protecting each major ship with several escorts. She knew from Mondy’s research that the Solomons had three cruisers and a carrier with fifty drones, and a number of support ships; unless we used our battleship, we would be overmatched. But their ships were old, not as fast as ours, and their observation equipment was obsolete; at any reasonable distance, they would be able to detect our ships only as shapeless blips. Since we were doing battle in open space, this seemed to be no disadvantage; they did not need to track from any distance or to distinguish ships from possible Belt fragments; they could use visual identification up close. With their superior force of drones, they could saturate our defense and put us in immediate difficulty. Yet Emerald, instead of concentrating our force to overpower them, split it in two. She sent one cruiser, three destroyers, the carrier, and all six of our tugs to meet the enemy fleet, keeping the rest of our fleet back.

  I did not want to interfere, but I could not make sense of this. “Why split the fleet?” I demanded.

  “The supply convoy is late,” she explained. “That leaves us all right on food and fuel, since the battle with the Carolines was brief and there was not much maneuvering. But after this battle we’ll be low on ammunition, so—”

  “Low on ammunition? We should have plenty!”

  “Not after double-loading the drones. So we’ll have to establish a defensive base for them, where the supply tanker comes.”

  “Double-loading the drones? They’ll be too heavy to accelerate properly!”

  “Yes. That’s why we’re clustering them with the tugs. The tugs can goose them up to speed.”

  “Clustered? Those drones can fire only straight forward! If you cluster five of them together, they’ll fire five shots at the same target when one is enough! No wonder we’ll run short of ammunition! And what of the tugs? They aren’t fighting ships! The enemy drones will come up on them and destroy them the moment our drones leave them behind.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said with a smile. “They’ll be boosting our drones backward, so ours will be able to cover what’s behind.”

  “Backward! Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “I’d better,” she said wryly. “Your career depends on it.”

  I turned away, ill at ease. I was no strategist, which was why she had the job, but this certainly seemed like nonsense to me. Nevertheless, I shut my mouth and watched my screen. The Sawfish ha
d set course for the projected supply-base planetoid; we would arrive there soon after the battle commenced. The supply ship, behind schedule—such delays were endemic in the Navy— would arrive twelve hours later. I hoped our backward drones would not have been blasted out of space by then, and the Hempstone Crater with them. I had never heard of a battle order as strange as this.

  The Solomons’ fleet was ready, but evidently Straight was as perplexed as I about the lineup. The pirates seemed to hesitate; then their fleet, too, divided, half of it going to meet ours, the other half moving slowly to intercept our battleship where they perceived it to be heading, beyond the planetoid. “Good enough,” Emerald remarked.

  “But if we land on that deserted rock while they remain in space,” I said, “we’ll be unable to get space-borne without getting blasted!” Now I wished we had arranged to do battle in true deep space, a few light-days out of the Belt.

  “But they will be unable to come in after us there,” she said. “The pincushion is virtually impregnable when the fleets are nearly even.”

  I retreated to silence again. Emerald was supposed to be a strategic genius, but little of that had shown so far, and this arrangement seemed nonsensical. Why allow ourselves to be pinned on a planetoid? It was like a position in the game of checkers, with one king pinning the enemy’s king to the edge of the board; the pinned king was indeed impregnable in its bastion, but it could not escape it. It was better to be in the center of the board with free movement; this was elementary.

  But I had not paid proper attention to the strategy discussion and did not want to ask too many ignorant questions. The rest of the staff seemed high on this plan, so there had to be something to it. I was, in effect, a casualty of the pirate’s daughter Roulette; I had been distracted by foolish thoughts of her when I should have been paying individual, undivided attention to the staff meeting. If I had been planning strategy myself, my fleet would be in a bad situation now, and it did not please me to realize that the cunning pirate Straight had probably planned it exactly that way. Damn that divinely shaped girl! And damn me for being distracted by that shape. I had been too long between wives.

  Now the pirate half-fleet swerved at low velocity, coming around behind our fleet. Good God, we were already giving them the advantage of position! The cruisers could fire in any direction, but the drones were far more limited. The drones were now taking off in clusters, angling out from the carrier, and the superior force of drones from the larger pirate carrier was starting in pursuit. What did Emerald think she was doing?

  The essence of the problem was this: Drones and small ships, destroyers included, had to fire forward, for their drive jets were in the rear, and their stabilizing spin prevented side firing. So in order to fire at a craft coming up from behind, a drone had to cut its acceleration, damp its spin, rotate in place, point backward, resume its stabilizing spin, resume its acceleration, and fire. The process required several minutes, and, of course, it made the ship a sitting duck for that period. That had been our problem in the Discovered Check, during the last battle. Our drones, double loaded, would be clumsier, and take longer to turn. So they would have to flee instead, and once they were well away from the rest of the fleet, the enemy drones could perform their own turning maneuver and orient directly on our fleet.

  This, too, about drones: They were remote controlled. They were expendable. So they could be sent charging in to swamp a ship’s defenses. Half of them might be shot down, but if just one of them scored on a cruiser, the pirates would be ahead, for a hundred drones were not worth more than one cruiser. The cruiser was crewed with living, trained people, while the drones were merely machines, operated by trained personnel in the carrier, one to a drone. To the operator, it was like being aboard the drone; his control was immediate, but when the drone was destroyed, the operator survived. Thus drones were very popular battle instruments, but they used a lot of fuel and required a lot of upkeep, so the Navy used them sparingly. Carriers were vulnerable when their drones were lost, so had to have strong escort fleets. And if a carrier was taken out, all its drones went dead in space. One lucky shot could completely reverse the progress of a battle. So the fact was, the age of carriers was passing as planet-sited missiles became more sophisticated; the Navy just didn’t feel it expedient to recognize that yet. The old order of “carrier admirals” remained in power but perhaps not for much longer.

  However, for this limited action against the pirate band, the drones of a carrier were a potent force, if properly managed. Things were suitably primitive in the Belt.

  Still, Emerald’s effort worried me. If the enemy took our drones out of commission, our whole fleet would be in trouble.

  The pirates closed on our drones from behind, accelerating at higher gee, coming near firing range. I winced. “Now,” I heard Emerald murmur.

  Then our drone clusters separated into their component drones and leaped backward at the enemy drones. Abruptly, the region blossomed with explosions: The enemy drones were being blasted out of space.

  Then I remembered: those tugs, accelerating our clusters backward. When our drones separated and accelerated on their own, they were already aimed at the enemy. No delay for turning. Suddenly it all made sense.

  “Sixty percent casualty to enemy craft, estimated,” a technician reported.

  Spirit stood, stretching her arms. “Congratulations, Emerald; you’ve done it. We now have a sufficient advantage in drones.”

  Emerald was obviously pleased but suppressed it. “The battle is not yet over.”

  Maybe not, but the Solomons’ striking arm had been truncated. Their fifty drones had been reduced to twenty without loss of any of our twenty-eight. We could now go after their carrier and quite possibly take it out before their remaining drones could turn and return.

  Juana arrived. “News, sir.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “New pirate fleet has been sighted. Estimated time of arrival: 2200 hours.”

  “Another fleet?” I demanded. “Whose?”

  “Fiji. Two cruisers, ten destroyers.”

  “No carrier?”

  “No carrier, sir. It appears to be a fast-moving raider force.”

  I pondered. We had more large ships but fewer destroyers. We could probably stop the Fiji pirate raid, but not while we were locked in battle with the Solomons. As it was, this new fleet meant disaster.

  I consulted hastily with Emerald. “Damn!” she swore. “We can’t handle two fleets together! We’ll have to go into the pincushion defense with our whole fleet. That’s the only way we can hold them off.”

  “Do it, then,” I agreed. First we had to save our hides, then tackle new pirates.

  As it happened, we were already headed for the planetoid, and so were our drones. We could complete our landing on it before the Solomons could prevent us.

  But Straight, canny tactician that he was, found a way to nullify part of our effort. He diverted part of his force to intercept our incoming supply ship. We couldn’t go to its rescue without becoming vulnerable to the Fiji fleet approaching from the other direction.

  The supply ship and its escorts decelerated, staying clear; the pirates couldn’t catch it without exposing their flank to us, but they had effectively balked its rendezvous with the planetoid. It was a kind of impasse.

  We held a hasty staff meeting to consider the new situation. “We need those supplies,” Commander Phist said, concerned. “We’re now low on ammunition and fuel.”

  “We can’t get them,” Emerald said. “I had something in mind for the Solomons, but we aren’t set up to deal with a fleet at our rear.”

  “You’re making what may be an unwarranted assumption,” Commander Repro said. “How do you know the Fijis are coming to help the Solomons?”

  Mondy’s eyes widened. “You’re right! The Fijis are the scum of the Belt; they don’t ally to anyone! They come in to pick up the pieces.”

  Now Emerald came alive. “Of course! They saw us gear
ing for battle with the Solomons, so they figure whoever wins will be so weakened that they can mop up the remainder. They’re probably right.”

  Repro turned to me. “Sir, we have a difficult decision. I believe it would facilitate our discussion if you would let us thrash it out alone.”

  Startled, I glanced around at the others. “You don’t want me participating?”

  “You high again?” Emerald demanded of Repro. “You don’t just kick the Task Force Commander out of a staff meeting!”

  Repro waved a hand. “My mind is sharp enough at the moment, thank you, Rising Moon.” He turned to me. “Indulge me, sir, if you will.”

  He was up to something. He was the one who had literally dreamed up this present organization; behind the addiction he retained a devious and penetrating mind. He understood people as well as I did, albeit in a different fashion. “I shall return in half an hour,” I said, rising and departing.