Fleet of the Damned (26 page)

"Take the Kali out. There's a busted-up close-support ship over in the boneyard. It should still have a belt-fed Y-launcher. Turn that around and mount it nose first down the Kali tube.

"You'll want to use two-, maybe three-kt mininukes. When you come in, I'd suggest you put the launcher on a five-second interval."

"Is there anything else, Commander?" Sekka's voice was shaking.

"If I knew where we could get some nice, persistent penetrating nerve gas… but I don't. I guess that's all." Sten was deliberately not noticing Sekka's reactions, hoping he would not be required to respond. He was wrong.

Sekka was on his feet. "Commander, I am not a murderer!"

Sten, too, was up. "Lieutenant Sekka, I want you at attention. I want your ears open and your mouth shut.

"Yes. You are a murderer. Your job is to kill enemy soldiers and sailors—any way you can. That means strangling them at birth if somebody would invent a time machine! Who the hell do you think operates those ships you've been shooting at? Robots?"

"That's different."

"I said shut up, Lieutenant! The hell it is! What did you expect me to tell you to do? Wait until those troops load into their tin cans and then hit them? Would that make things more legitimate? Or maybe wait until they land here on Cavite?

"Maybe your family has been living on legend too many generations, Lieutenant Sekka. You had best realize that if it wasn't for war, every
warrior
would be tossed in the lethal chambers for premeditated homicide.

"That's all. You have your orders. I want you offplanet in forty E-hours. Dismissed!"

"May I say something, sir?"

"You may not! I said dismissed!"

Sekka brought up a perfect salute, pivoted, and went out. Sten slid back down into his chair. He heard a low chuckle from the other entrance to
Gamble's
mess hall.

Alex walked in and found another chair.

"I'm not running a combat unit," Sten groaned. "This is a clottin' divinity school!"

"Puir tyke," Alex sympathized. "Next he'll be thinkin't tha be rules a' war. P'raps it'd cheer y' lad, if Ah told th' story ae th' spotted snakes again."

Sten grinned. "I'd keelhaul you, Alex. If I had a keel. Come on. Let's go put our Rover Scouts to bed."

Sekka had followed orders and lifted off. His insertion plan had worked perfectly—and its perfection tasted like ashes. He had brought the
Kelly
in-atmosphere at night and under cover of a storm, far below the horizon, at sea. He had submarined his tacship into the river's mouth and then carefully navigated upriver until his ship sat on the bottom, directly next to the Tahn base. The Tahn did not bother to run any sea or river patrols on the world, which was in a highly primitive stage of evolution.

His crew members were as grim and quiet as he was.

Sekka had decided that what he had been ordered to do was wrong—but he would do it as perfectly as he knew how. Remembering his own days in training, he decided that the most vulnerable time any army has is about an hour after dawn. Even if the unit practices dawn and dusk stand-tos, an hour later everyone is busy with personal cleanup, breakfast, and evading whatever noncoms are looking for drakh details.

At the time click he brought the
Kelly
out of the water and, at full Yukawa drive, on a zigzag pattern crossing directly over the headquarters areas. He had the ship set for contour flying at four meters.

When he crossed the perimeter, he ordered the crew members manning the additional chainguns to open fire. He personally triggered the Y-launcher and saw the small nuclear bombs arc thousands of feet into the air before they started their descent. By the time they hit and exploded, he would be many kilometers away.

Sekka had all rear screens turned off. He was a murderer. Possibly Commander Sten was right and
all
warriors were murderers. But he did not need to be a witness.

The attack, by one small ship, lasted for twenty minutes. At its end, when the
Kelly
climbed for space and went to AM2 drive, one divisional headquarters was completely destroyed and the second had taken forty percent casualties. Of the 25,000-plus Tahn soldiers, nearly 11,000 were dead or critically wounded. Both divisions had ceased to exist as combat formations.

Lieutenant Lamine Sekka refused a proffered medal, requested a three-day pass, and stayed catatonic on drugs and alcohol for the full three days.

Then he treated his hangover, shaved, showered, and went back to duty.

Sh'aarl't had found herself a great target. The problem was that no one could figure out how to destroy it without getting blown out of the sky in the process.

It was a Tahn armaments dump. The Tahn had found a wide cliff-ringed valley. They had studded the rim of the valley with antiaircraft missiles and lasers and maintained overhead patrols as well as an armed satellite in a synchronous orbit just out-atmosphere. To make the situation worse, the world—Oragent—was under almost complete and constant cloud cover.

Sh'aarl't had tracked Tahn resupply ships to the world and figured out their approximate landing point. There had been more than enough traffic to arouse her interest. She assumed some kind of supply dump, since very few of the ships landing or taking off from Oragent were combat craft.

To narrow the field further, she stalked a single unescorted ship, bounced it, and launched a single missile, carefully steered to just remove the ship's power train. Then she had planned to dissect the ship with Fox missiles until she found out what it was carrying.

The missile exploded—and the Tahn ship was obliterated.

"We may theorize," Sh'aarl't told her weapons officer, "that barge wasn't carrying rations."

"Dunno, ma'am. The Tahn like their food spicy."

"Bad joke, mister. Since you're being bright today, how are we going to snoop and poop into that arms depot?"

It was a good question. Finding out what was under those clouds by manned recon could well have been fatal. Any other intelligence gathering would have to be done without alerting the Tahn.

Sh'aarl't put the
Claggett
down on one of Oragent's moons and thought about the problem.

Step one was to set up a stabilized camera with a very long lens. Infrared techniques and computer enhancement helped a little. She now could see the vaguely circular area that was the depot. She chanced a few laser-ranging shots and got enough input to suggest that the depot was in a valley. A series of infrared exposures, taken over time, also showed blotches of heat emanation from one area of the valley floor—what probably was the landing field—and occasional spatters from the cliff walls. AA lasers, most likely.

At that point, she returned to Romney and consulted with Sten and Kilgour.

It was pretty easy to determine what
couldn't
be done. Dumping a missile straight down at the dump wasn't very likely to be successful. Even a MIRVed Kali—and nobody was sure that the missile could be so modified—wouldn't get past the satellite, let alone the ring of AA batteries.

Possibly a specialized Wild Weasel ship might be able to suppress the target acquisition systems long enough for a raid—but Wild Weasels were just one of the many craft the 23rd Fleet was fresh out of.

"The problem is," Sh'aarl't said, "there's no way in."

"Correction, lass," Alex said. "Tha's noo high-tech way in. An' Ah'll wager th' Tahn are thinkit th' same ae you."

Sten got Alex's hint. "Maybe," he said doubtfully. "But first I don't think Doorknob's gonna loan us any of his marines for a landing force. And even if he does, you want to bet they're any more ept than the rest of his people?"

"Ah was noo thinki't aboot borrowin't misery when there's need for but twa of us."

"Us," Sh'aarl't snorted. "Who is us?"

"Why, me an' Fearless Commander Sten, ae course."

"I'll assume you aren't trying another bad joke."

"Nope. Ah'm bein't dead straight."

"That's drakh, Mr. Kilgour," Sh'aarl't said. "You two aren't supercommandos. I don't know what you did before, Kilgour, but our death-defying leader was just a straight old Guards officer. Remember?"

Yes. Well, that was the cover that both Sten and Alex had on their service record to hide their years in Mantis.

"Y're noo hesitatin', are y'? Worri't aboot keepin't up wi' an old clot like me, Commander? Or p'raps y're feelin't soft. Ah hae noticed your wee paunch a' late."

To Sh'aarl't, this was rank insubordination. She waited for the thunder. Instead, Sten looked injured.

"I am not getting fat, Kilgour."

"Ah, you're right, lad. It's naught but the hangin' ae y'r coverall."

"You two are serious!"

"Maybe it's the only way to do it," Sten said.

"You know that Imperial regulations has an article saying that an officer has the duty to relieve his commander in, and I quote, 'instances of incapacitating injury, failure to perform the ordered mission, or'—my emphasis—'mental injury,' end quote?"

"In this fleet ae th' damn't, lost, crazy, an' brainburnt, Lieutenant, who'd be th' judge?"

"All right. One more try. There's no way that two swabbies can take out an entire arms depot. That only happens in the livies."

Sten and Alex looked, at each other. A clotting arms depot? Hell, there were several system governments that had found Sudden Change thrust upon them courtesy of a couple of Mantis operatives.

"I assume that you've got a plot more than just going in cuttin' and thrusting?" Sten asked.

"Ah dinnae hae a plot a' yet," Alex admitted. "But som'at'll come to mind."

"Dinnae fash, Mr. Kilgour. A thought has occurred to me."

"Thinkit, noo. We're in th' crapper for sure."

"On your way out, would you ask Foss to haul his butt in here?"

Sh'aarl't looked at them analytically. She was not stupid. "Very interesting," she observed. "Either both of you have gone bonkers—or somebody's lying to me."

"Pardon?"

"I remember somebody told me once that when somebody gets scooped up by the Imperial sneakies, their service record gets phonied up. Any comments?"

"Great story, Sh'aarl't. We'll have to talk about it sometime. Well, Mr. Kilgour? Time's a-wastin'."

The implementation of Sten's plan would be low-tech, but the method of attack was exceedingly technical. Or possibly antitechnical.

Sten would not have known what a petard was if one had been set off in his air lock—but he, along with Hamlet, hoped that it would indeed be great sport to hoist the Tahn by their own.

The possible solution lay in the sophistication of current fire-control and antiaircraft systems.

The days of brave, keen-sighted gunners crouched behind their weaponry and opening up on overhead aircraft were long gone. A missile launch site or laser blast would be remoted to a central, fixed operation fire-control center. This center—Sten theorized it would be located in the valley's center—would have a current sitrep on aerial traffic, fed in by radar, the orbital satellite, and other air- or ground-based sensors.

If the controlled airspace was intruded on, the fire-control system would evaluate the threat, bring the antiaircraft complex to alert if necessary, allocate targets to the various weapons, and open fire.

The individual weapons might or might not have the capability of local control in the event of the center's destruction. But the maximum crew the individual guns would have could be a gunner or two, certainly a couple of service techs, and possibly a few guards for ground security.

Since the weapons would be remotely aimed and fired, positioning them required a bit more work than just exact geographic siting. It was also necessary to program each gun with a no-fire zone, so that regardless of what an attacking aircraft might be doing, it would be impossible for any gun to fire, for instance, across the valley if another weapon was in its line of fire. Also, since the guns overlooked a highly explosive ammo dump, under no circumstances would it be possible for any weapon to fire down into the valley.

Sten proposed to alter those circumstances.

Blueboxing a local fire-control system was, Foss said, as easy as going to sleep listening to one of Kilgour's stories. The problem would be hooking it up.

Fortunately, not all of the Tahn ships shot down on Cavite on Empire Day had been completely destroyed. Sten and Foss grubbed through the wreckage, carefully examining all possible connections the Tahn used. They also examined the abandoned weaponry—Sten assumed it would have come from Tahn sources—on Romney.

Fortunately, there were no more than a dozen options. Foss also assumed that there would be a certain number of similarities between Imperial weapons controls and those of the Tahn.

The final device, dubbed by Foss a "fiendish thingie," consisted of one control box, anodized the same color as the electronic boxes found in the wreckage, dangling cables, and a separate power source. They fit into two backpacks and weighed about twenty-five kilos each.

Sutton managed to find in some storehouse two sets of the phototropic Mantis-issue camouflage uniforms that semifit Alex and Sten. A combat car was given a radar-absorbing anodizing and fitted with a sensor-reflecting overhead cover. Neither of them would work perfectly, but Sten was working from Alex's original supposition—that the Tahn wouldn't be looking that hard in his direction. He hoped.

Sh'aarl't insisted that the
Claggett
make the insertion—she had found the target, and even if she wasn't going to mount the attack, it was still her eggsac. Sten couldn't tell whether her ruffed hair meant that she was angry, convinced that her CO was mad, or worried.

She brought the
Claggett
in-atmosphere on the far side of the satellite, then contour flew until the tacship's sensors began picking up the signals from the Tahn depot. Again, she assumed the superiority of the Imperial sensors.

Sten and Alex unloaded and broke the combat car out of the slung cargo capsule below the
Claggett
. Their pickup point would be the same, two planetary days away.