John Dalmas - Soldiers

Goosing the Tiger

Drago Dravec had learned something: that a near-suicide mission weeks away can be planned more or less matter-of-factly, but close at hand it was a meaner breed of cat. Not that he was thinking of backing out. But here he was, newly emerged in the far fringe of the Hibernia System-in its cometary cloud-with only two of his three other ships. Several minutes had passed with no sign of Indio Fuentes and the Aztec, and even after one minute, the odds of their showing had become microscopic.

That son of a bitch! he thought, but without heat. Fuentes, a skilled captain, had been with them eight hyperspace hours earlier, when they'd emerged to compute their approach shot. Now he wasn't.

So they'd do it without him. Drago realized how lucky he was that Bachelor and Ludmilla had hung tough. He was asking a hell of a lot.

Drago pulled his attention to his sensor reads. He was always better at disconnecting from his emotions than at dealing with them. From time to time they'd pop up later, unbidden and out of context. That was a major reason even he was sometimes surprised by his actions; even jerked by them.

He tended to cherish those unexplained surprises. He'd told himself more than once they kept life interesting. He'd even told his probation counselor that once, at the Academy. The guy's comeback had been, "Don't fall in love with your faults, Drago. It's like sleeping with rattlesnakes." But Drago hadn't taken the psych seriously. He felt confident in his intentions, and in his ability to make things turn out right.

The main thing that had gotten him in trouble over the years was liquor, and he'd become good at refusing drinks. He'd said more than once, "A couple of drinks and even I don't know what the hell I might do." He didn't allow booze aboard ship, except for his crew's rum ration-three ounces at supper, actually 50/50 rum and water. And he left even that alone. Didn't even keep a bottle in his room back at Tagus, though he'd sometimes share a drink with Lu, his base wife.

His sensors showed him the location of the aliens' system defense force, in the planetary fringe roughly 90 degrees from the primary, some 11 billion miles insystem. While close to the colony was a smaller force, probably a planetary guard flotilla. Unless they had more sensitive hyperspace emergence detectors than human technology had come up with, which seemed doubtful, there was a good chance they hadn't picked up the emergence of his own three small craft.

And his EM signature wouldn't arrive with them for seventeen hours, so he radioed his other two commanders.

"Fuentes isn't going to show," he said, "so we'll do it without him. Give me your location fixes on the system defense force."

They did. Both agreed with his.

"Okay. I'm going to let Kunming know we're here and set to go. Then, on my count, we'll move in, just as we planned. And good luck. A lot depends on us."

He counted, then jumped.

If warpspace emergence produced waves, no human devices had ever detected them. But from this close, the three pirates' electromagnetic signatures reached the aliens in microseconds. They'd already be icons on the alien screens. That's why they'd jumped to emerge between the system defense force and the Star of Hibernia. Hopefully they'd be mistaken for small members of the aliens' planetary guard.

Drago had no way of knowing how close to the system defense force he'd be on emergence-100 miles, 500, 1,000… It turned out to be 83. As planned, the pirate ships didn't pause to size things up. They could do that on the move. Nor did they break radio silence. Instead, as agreed earlier, the two subordinate pirate vessels began at once to move in gravdrive toward the alien battle group, neither hurriedly nor hesitently, as if this were routine. Drago followed more slowly, letting them open a larger gap. To sit motionless at a distance might bring questions he could neither answer nor read. Meanwhile he had the savant, and the responsibility to let War House know what he learned. Otherwise the mission would be wasted effort, and any lives lost, thrown away.

On emergence, the Minerva's sensors and her shipsmind had begun recording everything they could perceive about the enemy. Not everything a warship would perceive, but a lot. On his screen, the alien formation showed as an array of icons. He locked his sensors on one of the five largest, its mass not greatly less than a loaded ore carrier. Surely a battleship. He called for an actual image, and magnified it against a scaling grid. She was huge! By comparison, the pride of the Admiralty, the prototype cruiser Yangtse, was a dwarf. Of the aliens' outriggers, the only one Drago could identify with confidence was the strange-space navigational sensor array. Others, less conspicuous, might or might not be communication equipment and targeting locks.

His own small, base-made torpedoes were designed mainly as threats, though they could easily disable or kill a merchantman.

So far his sensors had detected no changes in the alien radio traffic. To Drago even their code sounded somehow laconic. Hopefully this meant they'd accepted his three small craft as normal.

The pirates slowed their approach now, as if to join the battle group, intending to come alongside one or more of the large ships. Drago's fists and belly had clenched. "Not yet," he muttered, "not yet… NOW!"

It was as if the Bachelor's master had heard him; less than a mile from the nearest cruiser, he released three torpedoes. A moment later there was a great flash, the explosion driving the cruiser sideways. Magnified on his bridge screen, Drago saw flame and debris vent from the breached hull. Even as he'd fired, the Bachelor's skipper had activated his strange-space generator. A second later the pirate vessel winked into warpspace.

Drago emitted a single explosive "Yeah!" Then his gaze fixed on the Ludmilla, intense again. She'd been trailing the Bachelor by about two miles. This was a delicate moment. Kunming's most urgent question was whether the aliens had force shields. The Ludmilla's skipper was to hold his fire until they'd had time to generate shields, if any. Then they'd surely generate them, if they had them.

Seconds passed-dragged-three, four, five… No shields. It seemed to Drago they'd had abundant time. Meanwhile the Ludmilla had slowed to avoid overrunning her target. "Not yet," he muttered. "Not yet. Not… " Then, faintly luminous in the blackness, shields began to form. "Now!" he shouted. At that instant the Ludmilla launched her salvo. Almost as quickly the battleship's war beam hit her, and seconds later the pirate's unarmored hull blew apart in a widening sphere of gassed metal and debris.

Time to leave! The Minerva had half-closed the gap. As Drago activated the strange-space generator, her light hull resonated to an alien target lock. Had it been a torpedo lock, he'd have been in warpspace before the torpedoes reached him. As it was, a war beam began its non-explosive but sustained and intense energy transfer an instant before the Minerva left F-space.

An instant too short for human reaction, though the temperature increased. Then Drago stared at his screen. It showed not the indigo blue his shipsmind used to represent warpspace, but the restful yellow it showed for hyperspace.

"Gracious god," he breathed. He knew exactly what had happened. In the moment when warpspace was generating-in that small fraction of a second-the beam had corrupted his warpdrive, and he'd entered hyperspace instead.

His first officer too sat staring, then finally spoke. "Looks like we're screwed," he said softly.

"Screwed, rolled over, and screwed again," Drago answered, then paused. "Take the helm. I've got a report to make." Getting up, he started aft to the cabin shared by his savant and her attendant.