Rich Man's War (49 page)

He watched the cooling and power levels. He weighed the risks of another shot in the blink of an eye and then went ahead and took it, following up on
Madrid’s
strike with another. The first softened up the enemy frigate’s armor. The second did serious damage, evident from the shift in the frigate’s path and the venting gasses and trailing debris on its port side.

Other guns saw the opening. The frigate coughed up chaff missiles to obscure its position and spoof the targeting computers, but four of
Madrid’s
smaller laser turrets walked their beams into one another and scored another hit, this one leading to a bigger explosion.

There had been a time, long before
Keever was born, when everything was indeed mostly computerized. In the early days of interplanetary and then interstellar flight, when wars back home were fought more and more with robots and drones, automation made sense. Only computers could get the math right quickly enough. But the so-called artificial intelligences that had been promised for so long never took hold. They were close, and for a long time the designers genuinely believed they’d succeeded, but disillusionment with AI grew partly out of the performance of the prototypes in combat.

Programs
couldn’t reliably prioritize targets the way a captain wanted. Their decisions could follow protocols based out of threat levels or mission objectives or morality, but the computers never
understood
the thinking behind such protocols. They didn’t, in fact, think for themselves. Modern warfare was not the only failing of AI research, but it was one field of endeavor that put the lie to all the marketing.

I
n the end, apart from any debate on the efficacy and legitimacy of AI, most cultures and societies preferred to know a human being was behind the pull of a trigger and not some machine. Remote control weaponry fell in prominence as electronic warfare made that approach too dicey.

Marcus was damn good at his job. He’d been through three engagements, two of them decades ago in a flare-up with
Hashem and one that pit his old frigate against a Krokinthian raider. If he could stand up to aliens, he could stand up to corporate mercenaries, numbers be damned.

With the frigate turning off, Marcus shifted his attention to another target.
Madrid
rattled as missile fire came closer and closer before the defensive guns or chaff missiles made their life-saving interceptions. “Look at the whole board, guys,” Marcus warned. “That frigate’s backing off, someone’s gonna notice we did that and focus on us… Three o’clock high! Three o’clock high!”

The missiles came in fast. His gunners caught them a little too late.
The first one to detonate set off the other two, coming in too tight a group as they did, but the explosion rocked
Madrid
hard. Alarms blared. One of the defense turrets went out, its ammunition cooking off in a cascade that ripped past the safety cut-outs and blew a gaping hole through the entire emplacement.

Gravity generators went out on the ship, meaning that even with the magnetic grip of their vac suits, any further violent impact from a missile explosion threatened to slam people into bulkheads at dangerous velocities.
Madrid
lost emergency stabilizers. Calls went out warning of the oxygen tanks venting out into space.

The main gun was out. The others weren’t. Marcus had been on
Madrid
for almost three years, all of them under the same captain. So long as she had a single defensive turret working,
Madrid
would stay in the fight if only for the sake of taking some of the heat off of other ships. Marcus quickly ran the diagnostics, saw that it was simply a matter of dislodged control lines—all of them, including the back-ups—and knew he could fix it.

“
Hitomi,” Marcus barked, “you still with me?”

“Here, chief!” answered the third class at the fire control station behind the chief’s. He sounded a little shaken up, but otherwise okay.

Marcus routed his screens over to Hitomi, replacing the information on Hitomi’s screens and effectively changing his role at the press of a few buttons. “I gotta go fix the control lines. Take over for me here.”

“Chief?”
Hitomi blinked. “Shouldn’t I go?”

“I’ve got this.
” Marcus was already moving toward the ladder at the other end of their small compartment, a task which at this point required both hands and feet to keep himself from floating around or flying into a bulkhead if another jolt hit the ship. “Power and tracking are running fine! I want you shooting again by the time I make it back to my seat!”

Madrid
shook as he made it to the ladder. He kept going, ignoring frightened and stressed out chatter over the comm. He couldn’t do anything more than this, anyway, nor could he do any less. He was a gunner’s mate. It was his job to keep the gun running. The computer couldn’t do that on its own.

He made it through the first airlock hatch in the ladder, sealed it behind him, and then climbed up through the second. He heard nothing and felt less. Marcus crawled out under the cannon’s armored housing to find paneling shot away. The cables in the exposed housing were loose but uncut. They just needed some human help. A pair of hands, nothing more.
Madrid
shook again, and Marcus felt as if he could feel the heat of a laser blast radiating across the hull and through his suit, but he focused on his task.

“Cables connected!” Marcus announced. He turned and crawled, quickly as he could, out from under the cannon housing. “
Hitomi, talk to me!”

“Diagnostic ru
nning, we’re on in five seconds.” Hitomi exerted obvious, deliberate control over his voice. “Running up a target now.”

“Don’t wait on me, I’ll be fine,” said Marcus. He pulled himself over the side and into the airlock, reaching back to close it behind him. A warning tone joined the background noise on the comm, announcing the imminent return of gravity. He felt the familiar vibration of the main cannon going at full blast through the walls of the small metal tube all around him and heard a triumphant note from
Hitomi. Marcus grinned.
Madrid
was a survivor.

A
thin laser beam barely missed the main cannon, but it cut through the outer service airlock, and the man behind it. Marcus Keever fell down against the interior hatch, gasping for breath that would never come again.

* * *

“Frigate
Carnegie
in Group Ursa reports heavy damage. Destroyer
Atlas
in Group Ursa hit as well, moderate damage,” reported Saraff.

“Tell
Carnegie
she can pull back out of formation at her discretion,” Eldridge said. His gaze held firm on the command boards. The tactical display didn’t fit the proper scale, of course. An amateur would be easily confused by the distances and the icons representing each ship. Properly reading such a board took months of training and practice. It also served to distract someone in Eldridge’s position from the condition of his own ship unless the flag officer remained mindful of it. “Have we been targeted at all?” he asked aloud.

“Negative, sir,” answered Lt.
Djawadi, a
Hercules
officer assigned specifically to help prevent any disconnect between the flag bridge and the battleship it rested upon. “Incoming fire is pretty light. Nothing we can’t handle.”

“They don’t have much they can hurt us with, anyway,”
Eldridge frowned thoughtfully. Yeoh’s flotilla slowed his forces considerably, but that was to Eldridge’s advantage. He had more armor, more guns and a greater depth of force. He could pull any seriously damaged ships back for repairs and still push on with the assault on Raphael. He’d brought this level of power in the hopes of intimidating Archangel out of exactly this sort of pointless fight. Even laying aside the damage in this shooting match and the earlier successes of Yeoh’s sucker punches with the liner and the yacht, his fleet was doing fine.

Two of the enemy’s frigates disappeared off the command boards within a minute of each other. His aides announced the demise of another corvette.
Hercules
hammered a destroyer to pieces while he watched. The thing clung to life mostly thanks to defensive fire from Yeoh’s lone cruiser,
Los Angeles
, but that ship bore some scars now, too, and soon enough he’d knock
Los Angeles
off the board entirely. It was the only one whose beam weapons would be powerful enough to seriously hurt a battleship, but so far she’d been reluctant to engage anything greater than her own weight.

Eldridge
didn’t forget about the large wing of corvettes. They’d curved back in the last minute or so to come at the main formation from behind, rather than swooping in on Group Alpha’s lagging ships like he suspected. That would have at least forced a break in formation, but instead it looked like they were hoping to catch the main body in a pincer movement.

They didn’t have the strength to close the pincers, though. Corvettes on one side, a dwindling force of frigates and destroyers on the other. Weight of numbers and firepower would tell.

“
Cascia’s
down!” called out Commander Saraff. “Frigate
Cascia
just went down!”

“Group Ursa lost corvette
Mastiff
!” called out someone else.

Eldridge
’s eyes flared. He saw it happen on the boards as his officers reported it.
Cascia’s
death was sloppy; she’d turned her back on a crippled destroyer only to find out too late that the “cripple’s” main gun still worked fine.
Mastiff
died in a brutal scuffle with one of Yeoh’s corvettes.

“Tighten it up and plug the gaps, people,”
Eldridge growled. The losses were acceptable on a tactical level, but stupid just the same. Sloppy. His people should be better in a fleet engagement than this. Their enemy was clearly a cut above anything Eldridge had expected. They made do with lesser numbers, smaller ships and a lot of skill and guts, or maybe faith.

Or maybe fanaticism.

The thought chilled Eldridge as he turned his eyes back to that rapidly approaching wing of corvettes, all of them named for saints. Martyrs. And the main body of ships ahead of him seemed focused mostly on bleeding off his escorts…

“Plug the gaps!”
Eldridge barked urgently. “Group Ursa, pull
Atlas
back in tight and focus on defensive fire screens. Same goes for Group Andromeda, tighten them up!” His eyes flashed over to his own strike group.
Cascia
was down, the cruiser
Halley
and destroyer
Telesto
had taken some hits, and he’d already sent
Foxhound
off to chase after that stupid yacht.

“Sir?”
Saraff asked.

“I think those ships are on a kamikaze run,” he said breathlessly. “There’s no other way they can hurt us.”

* * *

“Oh,
now
they start tightening up. Great,” Kelly grunted. She keyed the all-hands PA. “Thirty seconds to fire zone. Stand by.”

“Are we gonna make it?” asked Stan.

Kelly didn’t stop to offer reassurance. “Chief, you see that gap there?”

“Read my mind, skipper,” nodded the senior ops specialist running the helm. With
Joan of Arc
in full battle stations, the bridge canopy was once again replaced by its retractable armor plating. High-resolution images duplicating the view appeared on the inside of the plating, enhanced by numerous tactical figures and highlighting.
Joan of Arc
followed closely behind
St. Mark
,
St. Patrick
and
St. Luke
, but that still put her ahead of the pack.

She had a positive identifier on her target and a small, rapidly closing hole in the enemy’s formation. Chief Romita kicked up the speed, as did several others in the corvette wing when they caught Kelly’s signal. "Gonna have to slow down fast,” Kelly warned.

“Never gonna get as slow as our practice speed was in a mess like this,” Romita countered.

“Fair enough. All gunners,” she called out on the comm, “prioritize on this destroyer here. Let’s see if we can’t make a bigger hole for everyone following behind. We only get one pass at him, so make it count. After that it’s full defense.”

The canopy “screen” on
Joan’s
bridge showed the battle up ahead in full color with only mildly enhanced resolution. Kelly and her crew could see flashes of lasers, explosions and some of the hotter debris floating on ahead.

Missiles and
lasers streaked out from the NorthStar battle group from the moment
Joan
and the other corvettes came within long range. The ships had little need for evasive action in the first few seconds, benefitting from their small size and incredible speed, but as distances shrank and targets became more recognizable, the danger grew fierce.
Joan
dipped low from her earlier course, tilted to starboard and then port, dipped again and then pulled up, pointing her nose straight at her target.