“Coming up on pod,” the pilot said. “Twelve kay clicks and closing. Status.” The wall ahead mapped trajectories and ran digital displays.
“Locked,” her Weapons Officer said, his voice tight but steady.
So young, Yolande thought. Gwen will be that old in a few years. So young . . .
“Unauthorized craft, identify yourself.” That from a resonator film somewhere in the cabin. Flat, grating Yankee accent with the mechanical overlay of a simple AI-interactive system. “You are on an intercept trajectory to within prohibited distance. Identify yourself or alter course.”
“Visual,” the pilot said.
“Acquisition,” the Weapons Officer replied, and called it up on the screen.
A rough cylinder of slag-surfaced metal, pocked with bubbles and lumps from the vacuum-condensation refining process. A pod at one end with sensors and the guidance system, and rings of low-velocity hydrazine steering jets, a minimal course-correction system to send a hundred thousand tonnes of whatever from the asteroid belt to the Alliances melters and factories, here on the Moon and points inward. These days, a good deal of it might end up on Earth, headed for splashdown sites in the Sea of Cortes or the Cook Strait or the Inland Sea.
“Composition,” the pilot was saying.
There was a second’s pause and the Wasp’s computer replied: “Iron, fifty percent, nickel twenty-one percent, chromium group sixteen percent, tungsten ten percent, fissionables three percent, volatiles and trace elements.”
Valuable, Yolande thought. The Yankees were stronger in the asteroid belt; their initial lead in deep-space pulsedrives had given them an opening they had never relinquished. Much cheaper to drop heavy elements down into the solar gravity well than boost them out of Earth’s pull and atmosphere, even now that freight costs were coming down so low. The Alliance would trade metals for the water and chemicals the Draka took from the Jovian and Saturnian moons, of course, but it was cheaper to hijack where you could. Better strategy, too, since it hampered their operations and forced them to divert resources to guarding their slingshot modules and scavenging the asteroids for scarce volatiles . . . She had had a hand in formulating that policy.
At least it’s been better strategy until now. A rectangle appeared in the “air” in front of her, an exterior simulation of the two spacecraft. The Wasp drifted, a blunt pyramid tapering from the shockplate at the rear to the crew compartment at the apex. Slim tubes rose from each corner of the plate, linked to the pyramid with a tracing of spars; asymmetric spikes flared out to guide the parasite bombs riding in station around the gunboat. The simulation limned the outlines, since like any warcraft this was armored in an absorptive synthetic that mimicked the background spectra.
“Closing,” the pilot said. The outside view showed a needle-bright flicker behind the gunboat, deuterium-tritium pellets squeezed into explosion by the lasers. Yolande started, almost surprised not to feel the deceleration that pushed the crew back into their cradles. “One-ninah kay clicks, matchin’.”
“Unidentified craft, this is your last warning,” the robot voice droned.
“Eddie, shut that fuckah up, will you?” the pilot said, exasperated. The man grunted, touched a control surface.
The control chamber vanished, leaving a blackness lit only by the face of the investigating officer in the central portion. “That’s it, Strategos,” he said, shrugging. “End datalink. The fighter went pure ballistic from then until we grappled what was left.” Yolande gestured, and the black went to gray, then faded into her office. She motioned again.
“All right,” she said, as the rectangle expanded to occupy a square meter above the surface of her desk. “Give me the record of the recov’ry action.”
“Well, the Yanks scrambled once they’uns realized what was happenin’,” the Intelligence Section merarch said. The three-dimensional image lifted a cigarette to its lips. “Two Jefferson-class patrollers, with six and four gunboats respectively, in position to do somethin’. Thirty personnel, all told.”
Yolande nodded: Yankee gunboats were single-crew, and the Jeffersons had ten apiece. The Alliance military relied more on cybernetics than the Draka did. “That was all they had within range.”
Space was large, and even with constant-boost pulsedrive units it took a long time to get from anywhere to anywhere, compared with on-planet applications. There were times when she thought it was more like the situation back in her great-grandfather’s time, when it could still take weeks to cross an ocean, months to traverse a continent. Then trouble blew up, and the soldier on the spot was left with his ass hanging in the breeze and no way to call for mama.
“Luckily, we’n’s had three Iron Limper corvettes on, ah, patrol.” Corsair duty, her mind added sardonically, using the crew slang. “This’s what happened.”
The view shifted to points and data columns, a schematic of the corvettes and their twelve—no, eleven—gunboat outriders, and the machinery’s best guess on the Yankees. The usual thing for space combat, a long gingerly waiting before a brief flurry of action. A pulsedrive was sort of hard to hide anywhere in the solar system unless you had something the size of a planet to shelter it, but that told you very little except the past position and a fan of possible vectors. Spaceships were another matter; between stealthing and datamimic decoys, long-range detection had always run a little behind the countermeasures.
“Well, both parties knew they’d have to intersect somewhere along the trajectory of the cargo pod and the stingray.” A section of the curve that looped in from beyond the orbit of Mars turned red, the area where either set of warships could match velocities. “The Yankees went into constant-boost, figurin’ to overrun us on the pass, then go back fo’ it. We went silent, coastin’; had the advantage, comin’ out-system from sunward.”
“Ah.” She could guess what came next. You could think of a pulsedrive as a series of microfusion bombs and field-shielding and reaction mass heated to plasma—or as a sword of radiation and high-energy particles tens of kilometers long. That was the Staff way of seeing it. Her imagination flashed other images on the inner screen of her consciousness. The matte-black shapes of the Limpers falling outward. A shallow disk perched on a witch’s maze of tubing like some mad oil refinery,all atop the great convex soup plate of the pusher. The dozen crewfolk locked into their cocoons of armor and sensors, decision-making units in a dance of photonics. Units that sweated with fears driven down below consciousness; the ripping impact of crystal tesseract mines scattering their high-V shrapnel through hulls and bodies, blood boiling into vacuum. The pulse of a near-miss and secondary gamma sleeting invisibly through the body, wrecking the infinitely complex balances of the cells. Tumbling in a wrecked ship, puking and delirious and dying slowly of thirst . . .
Fears carried down from the ground ape; hindbrain reflexes that twitched muscles in desperate need to flee or fight, pumped juices into the blood, roiling minds that must stay as calm as the machines that were master and slave both. Yolande swallowed past dryness, and used the inward disciplines taught by those who had trained her for war. The slamming impact of deceleration; railguns, lightguns, mine showers, missile and countermissile, the parasite bombs driving their one-megaton X-ray beams like the icepicks of gods. The drives punching irresistibly through fields and shieldings, perhaps a single second for the stricken to know their fate as plasma boiled through the corridors.
Silence. Long slow zero-G fading past, waiting for the sensors to tell you if you were already dead . . .