"I have a laser lock," Hamilton reported. "The weapon is continuing normally on course."
"I copy you have a lock," Brett responded. He turned to Mandall. "Sugi, how many Panamas do we have identified now?"
"Six," he said, "and two more ships are just becoming visible on the display that are more than likely Panamas as well, but I don't have quite enough data for a positive ID yet."
"Good. Put them on my screen. I want to get that second weapon out there too."
"On the way," he said.
"And keep your eye peeled for Owls. We know the WestHems have some out there but we don't know where they are. The last thing we need right now is detection."
"I'm looking," he assured him.
Brett looked over the display for a moment and ran some basic angles in his head as he compared his ship's position and speed with that of the oncoming vessels. It looked like he could turn Mermaid and launch on the sixth Panama back with a minimum amount of maneuvering and within the time frame allowed him by the first weapon's trip to target.
"Helm," he said to Mandall, "lock onto target fifteen and plot a launch course. Once again, let's shoot for 400,000 kilometer separation."
"Plotting," she said, turning back to her computer screen.
Soon the course was plotted and the order was given to initiate it. Mermaid's maneuvering thrusters and engines came to life once more, turning the ship and accelerating it at .02 G. The first torpedo continued on, linked to the ship by the laser, and the distance between them increased rapidly, until Sugi could no longer detect the minute amount of heat.
The second release came twenty minutes later. Torpedo number two slid neatly out of the tube and began to drift away. Soon it too was locked by a guidance laser.
"Okay," Brett said, wiping a slight sheen of sweat from his brow. "The shots are away. Let's maneuver clear of this place. Helm, turn us to new course of 010 mark 70 and accelerate at point zero eight G."
"I copy zero one zero mark seven zero and burn engine at point zero eight G," she repeated, her hands already making the adjustments. She, like everyone else on the bridge, was very anxious to get the hell out of the release zone now that the weapons were on their way.
Mermaid spun well away from the formation and turned her nose downward, seventy degrees from the plain of the elliptic, in effect diving far beneath the formation of ships she was tracking.
The tactic Brett had used in making his attack was a classic one in stealth ship warfare. The idea was to lie in wait in the path of the oncoming enemy, moving at relatively slow speed while the enemy was at maximum velocity. This made the closure speed of the weapon with the target equal to that of the enemy's forward motion plus the velocity added by the launching ship. In effect, the torpedoes that Mermaid had launched were closing with their targets at a speed of nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per hour without so much of a drop of the weapons' own rocket fuel or oxidizer being burned.
Aboard the ships of the armada, it was just after 0700 hours, the time for the daily routine to begin. On the flagship, Admiral Jules was still sound asleep, naked beneath the silk covers in his private suite, one of the attractive servants he had brought along curled up naked with him. On the bridge of the ship, crew change was taking place as the night shift gave report to the oncoming day shift. A full combat information center staff was at hand at their terminals, all of them receiving data from the escorts near the front of the armada and even from the sensors of the Panama ships themselves. No sensors detected the presence of the two nuclear torpedoes closing in on the Camel or the Mule. No one was really looking for any such thing. On both of these ships the marines were climbing out of the bunks in their crowded landing ships and getting ready for the unappetizing meal that was known as breakfast. None of them had the slightest idea that death was rushing at them at eighty-three kilometers per second.
Camel was the first of the targets, the third Panama from the front of the armada. It was a young spacer second class on the bridge that first noticed something unusual on his screen. He was getting slight flickers in the medium range on infrared, just a few at first, nothing to be terribly concerned with, but then they started to get stronger, more frequent. At almost the same moment his anti-meteor radar display began to register something that looked like ghost returns, not a good solid hit on anything, and again, nothing to be terribly concerned with by itself, but they were coming from exactly the same place as the infrared flickers. He hesitated for longer than he really should have, but finally he called it to the attention of the second officer, who was in charge of the ship at that particular moment since the captain and the executive officer were both still asleep.
The second officer stared at it for nearly thirty seconds, running things through in his mind, thirty seconds in which the object in question closed another 2500 kilometers with them. Since the flickers were getting a little stronger and since the radar returns were becoming a little more frequent, he finally advanced a nervous observation. "That's almost the same signature that one of our torpedoes gives off."
"One of our torpedoes?" the spacer asked. "What would one of our torpedoes be doing out there?"
"I don't know," he said, shaking his head, starting to get a really bad feeling. "But it kind of looks like it's heading right towards us, doesn't it? I wonder if one of the Seattle's or one of our stealth ships accidentally jettisoned one."
The spacer then had a particularly unpleasant thought. "Sir," he said, "those torpedoes are pretty stealthy. If that thing is close enough for us to be getting radar returns and infrared detection from it... well... I think that it's probably very close to detonation range then."
The second officer swallowed nervously, staring at the display before him, watching the bearing change on the target. In his heart he couldn't honestly believe that an actual live torpedo was heading towards his ship — after all, who possibly could have fired it? — but on the other hand, there was a remote possibility, wasn't there? After another six seconds and another 480 kilometers of closure, he finally came to a decision. "Sound general quarters," he barked to the bridge. "Get the anti-missile defenses active. Let's go active with a fire control radar and see if we can enough of a return to pin down the range."
Ten seconds later the general quarters alarm began to sound. All over the ship, men began to head listlessly to their stations, every last one of them figuring that this was some sort of ill-timed drill. On the outside of the massive ship, panels flipped open and anti-missile lasers popped out. They began to charge up.
"Fire control radar active," the spacer reported. "Sweeping the area right now."