Mercenary

  But as we got deeper in the water, Rue turned serious. “I don’t know how to swim,” she said. “I’ve never been in water over my head.”

  “I’ll show you how,” I volunteered. God, she was beautiful this way!

  “No—you’d hold me under, drowning me until I submitted.”

  “Now there’s a notion!” I agreed, grabbing for her.

  She didn’t scream; even in play, she wasn’t the type. “But I don’t want to drown!”

  “Then submit, slut! I’ve never had a woman in water.”

  “But I know you won’t really drown me,” she protested in a typically female reversal.

  I got hold of her. “Pretend, damn it!” I drew her luscious, slippery body into mine.

  “Pretend?” She seemed genuinely baffled.

  “It’s a game,” I explained. “Like the mock space-battle game on your father’s ship: a representation of something that is, in fact, more serious. I’m the violent man, and you’re the innocent maiden from the garden of thyme. I will drown you if you even hint at resistance. You must do whatever I say, and it is rape because you are coerced by the terror of drowning.”

  “I suppose so,” she agreed uncertainly.

  “Hug me, wench!” I commanded. “Or I’ll hold your head under.”

  She embraced me. The water lapped around the contours of our touching chests.

  “Kiss me,” I said. “Or ...”

  She kissed me—and with real feeling. She had always been good at game playing; she just hadn’t played this particular game before. I realized that this was a way to tame her for gentle love: making a game of it, the actual rape replaced by the mere threat of violence. This had real possibilities.

  “Wrap your legs about my—” I began.

  “Alert!” Heller cried on the beach.

  I broke the posture reluctantly and looked toward shore. Six men were charging across the sand, waving huge curved swords.

  Our three on the beach had their lasers out, but they were not firing. I realized that there was a suppressor field on; we had been effectively disarmed. We had indeed walked into a trap.

  Heller turned toward me. “Swim away, sir!” he called. “We’ll hold them until the troops arrive. Stay clear!”

  But Rue couldn’t swim, so would be left victim to the pirates. Also, I did not relish leaving three unarmed people to fight six sword-slashing men. I forged on out of the water, and Rue followed me. “Should have known!” she was muttering in disgust. “I let a man kiss me, and this happens!”

  “You stay out of it!” I snapped back at her.

  “Like hell!”

  The first two pirates came at Heller and Shrapnel, their curved swords slicing violently down. But both my men were conversant with this sort of combat. Both dodged and dropped, blocking the pirates at knee level, sending them flying to the sand. But as I watched the action, not yet able to reach them, I saw that the two were now vulnerable to the following two pirates. The swords slashed down before our two men could get to their feet.

  Now Rue and I were on the sand, running, but traveling in my imagination in slow motion. I saw Shrapnel rolling out of the way, avoiding the worst of the cut aimed at him; but Heller slipped in the sand and was caught, and the blade sliced into his back. I suffered déjà vu: watching my father cut down by a pirate sword. As then, I could not prevent it.

  Meanwhile, the two remaining pirates were converging on Brinker. She did not try to flee; she stepped into one with what seemed like an ineffective punch to his belly, but he groaned and dropped to the sand. She had knifed him. But the second caught her in his arms from behind, and her strength was no match for his.

  At this point Rue and I arrived. Rue’s shoulder crashed into the side of the pirate holding Brinker while I dived to wrest the sword away from the nearest fallen man. He hung on; I kneed him in the nose and he let go. Then I lifted the blade and clubbed him on the head with the hilt, knocking him out.

  I looked up and saw that the other thrown pirate was on Rue, poking at her with his sword. Evidently her stunning figure had made him pause but not hold back entirely. She cried out as the edge sliced into her right arm.

  Then it was as though a cloud formed around me—a cloud of horror and outrage. I saw the fallen body of Helse, crying to me “Do it!” Helse—just before she died.

  “Not again!” I cried.

  Then the sword was singing in my hand. A pirate came at me, his own sword raised; I dodged it and jumped past him and whirled, my sword swishing in an arc that intersected the back of his neck. The blade hung up on his vertebrae, but it didn’t matter. I could tell as I yanked it free that he was dead.

  I dived at the pirate attacking Rue and skewered him from behind. My point entered his back and must have passed through his kidney; he dropped as I braced my bare foot against his buttock and hauled my weapon out.

  I whirled to face the next, but he was already starting a two-handed chop at my head that I could not avoid.

  Then he lost balance, and his stroke missed. Heller, supposedly dead, had reached out and grabbed his ankle and yanked it out. Now my own blade came around, slashing the pirate across the chest, and the blood welled out as he fell back.

  One other pirate remained standing, and he was pawing at his face. Brinker, keeping her poise, had hurled sand in his eyes.

  Now, at last, after these interminable few seconds, the security squad arrived. The sharpshooters had been caught by surprise by the nullification of their laser rifles. But now the pirates were done for. I picked up my shirt to wrap around Rue’s cruelly wounded arm and staunch the flow of blood.

  “You’re a berserker!” she exclaimed faintly through pale lips. “You went crazy, tearing up those men!”

  “I lost my bride to pirates once,” I said. “I would not let that happen again.”

  “You did it to protect me?”

  “Well, I value you; you know that,” I said awkwardly, knowing she did not appreciate mushy sentiments.

  She turned away. The security force took charge, and the brief, violent interlude was over.

  Heller was dead. His last act in life must have been the one he took to save my life. He had fulfilled his vow, and I had no way to thank him. Except to leave him with a clean record and a commendation.

  The pirate remnant had indeed set a trap for us. The six had been a suicide squad, hiding when the others vacated, waiting for the opportunity to catch us alone. They had intended to kill me or Rue or both of us, to deprive our force of its leadership and its basis for the alliance with the Solomons. The personnel of the base were innocent; they had known nothing of this.

  Now we turned our attention to the Society fleet. Perhaps I should say that I turned my attention to it; my staff had been setting up for it all along. The Society band was not a strong one, but it had a lot of drones—twice as many as we could field at the moment. Mondy’s information indicated that theirs was a suicide mission; they would send their drones at our ships and base without regard for their losses. In fact, their carriers were already decelerating, making ready to retreat; their drones would not even try to return to their bases.

  This was awkward, because drones are hard to stop. They’re small and fast, particularly when jammed up to top velocity, and they pack a considerable punch, and kamikaze drones have nothing to lose. We could try to shoot them all down, but probably they would loose their torpedoes the moment they came in range, and it is almost impossible to pick a traveling torpedo out of space. With targets as big as our battleship and the domes of the base itself, those torpedoes could hardly miss, and could wreak incalculable havoc.

  This time I insisted on knowing Emerald’s strategy. It was simple enough. “We’ve got to take out those drones before they fire, and that means sending ours out to intercept them.”

  “But they outnumber ours!” I protested. “Even if we trade off even, many of theirs will remain to attack us. They won’t fall for the trick you used on the Solomons.”

/>   “Our drones will just have to take them all out,” she said.

  “We have how many drones now?” I asked.

  “Thirty-three, on one and a half carriers.”

  “And they have?”

  “Sixty-eight, on three carriers.”

  “And when drone meets drone in open space, what are the odds?”

  “One drone can take out one drone in a given pass, if it shoots first and accurately. But the odds are about even which one wins, assuming the two are of equivalent sophistication.”

  “And is this the case here?”

  “It is.”

  “Then how—?”

  “I’m going to have ours fire on the bias.”

  “But drones can only fire directly forward.”

  “They fire in the direction they are pointed.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I gave it up; she was unable or unwilling to make her strategy comprehensible to me. But I made sure to watch, for though this was theoretically a minor engagement, the consequences of a loss would be horrendous. We had to stop those drones!

  I watched our carriers go out. The “half” carrier was a damaged one captured from the Marianas; spot reconditioning had proceeded only to the point of allowing a dozen drones to be launched from it, and only eight were actually available. With more time we could have done much better, which was probably why the Society was making its play now.

  The carriers went out to the sides, so as to launch their drones at right angles to the path of the enemy drones. The ideal, in drone versus drone combat, is to “cross the T”; that is, to fire at your enemy from the side, so that he can’t fire back. In fact, a formation ranged in even rows would be highly vulnerable to multiply placed shots from the side. That was one way a few drones could indeed take out many. The type of loading made a difference, too; the Society drones carried heavy torpedoes, while ours were loaded with explosive shells. We could fire four shells for every one torpedo they fired. Of course, we couldn’t take out their ships very well, but we didn’t need to, for a carrier without drones is like a panther without teeth. Had we been able to go for their carriers before their drones got within torpedo range of our targets, that would have been worthwhile; but their tactic of launch and retreat had obviated that. So we had to deal directly with the drones.

  A more popular analogy, perhaps, is to the planetary aircraft: Some are bombers, able to damage landscape, while others are fighters, able to damage other aircraft. It does make a difference. Theirs were bombers, ours fighters. We had a better chance than I had first thought. Still, I was uneasy.

  The enemy drones came on in staggered wave formation, somewhat like nestled flying-goose Vees, so that crossing the T became ineffective for more than one or perhaps two ships at a time. This was a standard precaution, and a good one. Each drone stood behind and to the side of its neighbor, as it were; the overall effect was that of a huge flying arrowhead. Nine drones were in the leading wing, four trailing to each side of the point. Seven wings and a wedge of five filling out the tail section. Each was positioned so that it could launch its torpedoes forward without being blocked by the drones in front; the wings were also staggered vertically, to add another margin of safety from interference, and to broaden the coverage of the target. Sixty-eight deadly missiles, headed for our base!

  The enemy was aware of our defensive formation, of course, but ignored it. The Society knew we would take out some of their drones but also knew that with only thirty-three of ours in service, and their staggered formation, the very best we could hope for was a kill total of thirty-three. That would leave thirty-five of theirs to charge the base, for there would not be time for more than one pass. Our drones could not decelerate, turn, and reaccelerate to catch theirs, which were already traveling at speed. Our base guns would take out perhaps half the remainder, but the odds against getting them all were prohibitive. And if even one drone got close enough to launch its torpedo, a base-dome would be holed, and that would finish it. The sudden holing of a dome is more disastrous than that of a ship, for a dome is not a space vessel. The explosive decompression tears it apart, and even those people inside who are fully suited and ready are unlikely to survive, because of the violence of the destruction. We could not afford to let that one torpedo get through.

  Emerald had said she expected to solve the problem by firing on the bias. I still could make no sense of this. Our drones were now accelerating toward the enemy formation at right angles. They would intersect the Society drones just outside torpedo-launching range. Our formation would be as plain on their radar as it was on ours: a completely conventional array, incapable of taking out more than its own number of enemy drones.

  Well, at least our fire would be accurate. Emerald had tied it to our master firing computer after our pilots’ had positioned their drones. That computer was now orienting each drone to place its shots in a specific pattern. This wasn’t really too complicated, since all shots went in exactly the direction the drone was pointed; several would be fired in rapid order, their shells timed to explode at diminishing intervals, so that the detonations would occur simultaneously along the firing line. If there were six drones in that line, all could be hit. But, of course, there were only one or two in any line. That was the problem.

  The intersection of drones could be tricky. Since it was an advantage to be the second drone on the spot, so as to be able to fire on the first and destroy it, drones were given to abrupt cessations of acceleration near the point of intersection, to change their moment of arrival and foil the timed shells. They could also increase acceleration, to leave the shells behind. Even with light-speed tracking, there was a brief delay in corrections, and the tolerance was narrow, so there was only about one chance in three that a computer-placed shot would score. This was normally compensated for by having the defensive drones (that is, the drone-fighting drones) fire in formation, placing three shots in a line before the enemy drone. If all the spots the enemy could be were covered by exploding shells, then the likelihood of destroying it became total. But that used up a lot of ammunition. Each of our drones carried six shells, so could take out only two enemy drones on that basis—if it had time to orient on two. And if the formation was correct, since it actually required three drones to place a line of shells in front of any enemy drone traveling at right angles. So, in the very best of circumstances, we could take out only sixty-six enemy drones, and the two remaining would have a clear shot at the base. Our best was not good enough.

  The two fleets moved close together. On the radar screen the blips were on the verge of merging. The moment of decision was at hand. I dreaded it.

  Suddenly the Society blips were obscured. All across the formation they were breaking up.

  “One hundred percent, sir,” a technician reported, interpreting the radar image.

  Emerald relaxed. “That’s it, then.”

  “They’re gone?” I asked, bewildered. “But the flights didn’t even intersect!”

  She sighed, pleased. “Must I draw you a picture, sir?”

  “That might help.”

  She grabbed a note pad. She drew a pattern of dots. “Here is the enemy’s nestled V-formation,” she explained. “Note how no two drones are on the same horizontal line.”

  “Yes, of course. So we couldn’t—”

  “Note how they happen to fall into bias lines, five ships per line.”

  “But that’s no good to us,” I protested. “We were proceeding at right angles.”

  “We were coasting at right angles,” she said. “But the orientation of our drones changed. We oriented on their lines and fired—”

  “On the bias!” I exclaimed, catching on at last. “Slant-wise, early, so as to catch five ships per line!”

  “Well, some of their lines are partial,” she said. “But we caught them before they made their evasive acceleration, so they were sitting ducks. Some of our ships took out five, and some
took out only one, but we were able to cover them all in a single sweep. The Society threat is over. Now all we have to do is round up their fleeing carriers for salvage.”

  “It’s so obvious in retrospect,” I said. “Why didn’t they anticipate this?”

  “Why didn’t you, Worry?”

  I shrugged. I had indeed been worrying! “I suppose I’m just a conventional thinker.”