Island Worlds (22 page)

TWELVE

Natalie Tomalis sat facing herself, making up her eyes. The other Natalie was a holo projection, and she was sitting because Manhattan had been given a highspeed spin, yielding almost a full gee. It was more gravity than she had ever felt in her life. Just walking and breathing were a struggle, but making love with the two-hundred-pound Cornelius de Kamp was a nightmare. But Cornelius was special aide to the Fleet Admiral and being his mistress gave her privileges and special access to important ears. Just now she had some special information to deliver and she was taking particular care with her makeup.

The beautiful silk dressing gown Cornelius had given her was pooled around her hips and she had arranged herself as seductively as possible. There was no way she could move gracefully in the awful gravity, so she had learned to exploit Cornelius's visual and olfactory preferences.

De Kamp paused to appreciate the scene as he came in the door. After a hard day's work, the sight of Natalie nude from the waist up was refreshing. Two of them, at artistically-chosen angles, almost recharged his tired batteries. Almost. The Earth Navy had made the island world of Manhattan their home port. It had been one of the first asteroids occupied in the war. It was close enough to the main centers of resistance for convenient forays, but far enough to be fairly safe from attack by the jerrybuilt Sálamid Navy.

The problem was the Manhattanites. The original plan had been to transport them to concentration camps on Luna, although it was generally believed that the transportation vessels would be somehow "lost." The need for cheap labor had been too great, though, and using virtual slaves was far cheaper than bringing out Earth personnel or robots. Every laborer or construction specialist brought out was one less serviceman to man the ships. But the chance of sabotage was great and the Earthmen could never relax. It had its compensations, however. Natalie was one of them. In every occupied territory, there were women who saw that cooperation with the conquerors was far preferable to the life of the conquered.

"What would your neighbors do if they saw you now?" he said.

She turned, acutely aware of the heavy sway of her large breasts. The motion seemed grotesque to her, but she knew that he liked it. The fixation of his eyes confirmed it. "They'd shove me out the nearest lock. That's what they do to traitors and collaborationists here."

"You aren't a traitor, my dear, just a patriotic woman doing her best for Mother Earth." Guiltily, he realized that the thought of this exquisite woman being killed excited him in some obscure fashion. He steered his thoughts away from that. Natalie was the only woman he had found out here who had the kind of fully-fleshed body he liked. Most outerworld women were rail-thin. Natalie was Spaceborn, but she was a throwback to her more voluptuous ancestors.

She got up and went to the side table, walking carefully to avoid stumbling, having to tighten her abdominals against the unaccustomed weight of her viscera. She poured him a whiskey over ice. It had taken her days just to learn to hit the glass. She carried the drink over to him, rippling her stomach to let the gown slip an inch lower. "I've heard something. It may be important."

"What might that be?" Her perfume made it difficult to concentrate. He was tired and didn't want to think about duty. Not so tired that he wasn't growing excited, though. The holo was still on and he could watch her from the side as well as from the front.

"How would you like to catch Martin Shaw?"

The sexual excitement dropped away and was replaced by another kind. He took a sip of the whiskey, not tasting it. "Tell me more."

"You know my contact has always been reliable." It was not a question and he nodded confirmation. Natalie's tips had been few and relatively unimportant, but they had always been reliable. The items he had been able to pass on had earned him his commendations and the trust of the Admiral.

"There's a rock called Galveston. It was named by a Texan back before they ran out of island names. There were some mining operations there, but they played out years ago. In two weeks, Shaw and several of his top aides are to be meeting there."

"Why would they pick an asteroid to meet?" he asked. "They have ships, why not rendezvous in space?"

"My source says they may be using Galveston as a staging area for attacks against this sector. I didn't want to press him too hard."

"You did the right thing." He sipped at his drink distractedly. Martin Shaw! If only he and his top men could be captured, taken back to Earth for a show-trial. Then they would be hanged and the terrorist movement would lose so much face that only the Sálamids would be left to deal with. Then Earth could win this frustrating war, because the Sálamids fought by the rules. That meant that Earth would win, because the weaker power couldn't prevail, fighting by the rules. The terrorists, on the other hand, fought by no rules at all. Several rock bombs had already been intercepted on collision course with Earth. The Sálamids intercepted them, too, but that information was kept from Earth.

De Kamp got on the security phone and asked for an emergency meeting with Fleet Admiral Marat. There had to be a rear-admiralcy for him in this, at the very least. As he turned from the phone, Natalie wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. "And don't I deserve any reward for this?" She smiled up at him.

Gently, he disengaged her arms. "I'll take care of you, my dear. You know I always do. But right now, I have urgent business." He used the holo to straighten his uniform and rushed out the door. When he was gone, Natalie pulled up her gown and switched off the holo. So, there would be no sweaty, suffocating coupling in his bed tonight. Thank God.

Battleship
Kiev
was one of the most powerful fighting machines ever built. Along with her sister ships, they constituted the Imperator class. The battleships carried four long-range laser guns energized by the ship's extremely costly Condensed Energy Tank. The CET was an elaborate name for a super-battery, charged up by the ship's nuclear power plant. Only a battleship carried a power plant and CET powerful enough to supply four laser guns. Once discharged, the CET took hours to recharge. Depending upon conditions, the big guns had a range of twenty to sixty thousand kilometers. By interplanetary standards, that was still close range. The battleships also carried nuclear and non-nuclear missiles as well as defensive missiles and rail-guns used primarily for destroying attacking missiles.

Battleships were few. They were huge and incredibly expensive to build, as well as being limited in their tactical applications. More than anything else, they were an expression of Earth's might, a form of spacegoing propaganda in metal and plastics and ultraglass.

More numerous and versatile were the cruisers. Cruisers were scaled-down battleships equipped with only one laser gun. Smallest of the warships, and in many ways the most useful, were the frigates. Lacking the capacity for a laser gun, they depended on fast acceleration. Conventionally, a frigate would stay out of range of a battleship's or a cruiser s laser guns. In a pinch, it could deploy decoys to distract the bigger vessel's imaging-sensor-computer system guiding the laser gun. The battleship would be reluctant to waste its slow-recharging laser power against decoys. In the fraction of a second required for a laser beam to reach its target, the target could move several times its own dimension. The laser was perfect for destroying ballistic missiles that did not change course or speed, but it was not satisfactory against ships that were programmed to change course and speed at random. They did discourage smaller vessels from getting too close. Only if the enemy were coming in a straight collision course were the lasers used ship-to-ship at long range. They were also useful for taking out the defensive batteries of an enemy port.

In practice, the Confederacy had no large warships. Thus, much of the action fell to the frigates. Most of the Confederacy ships were classed as frigates of some sort, along with the personnel-carrying raiders.

No, Admiral Marat thought, as
Kiev
sped toward its rendezvous with Shaw, the problem was not firepower. In every aspect of firepower, Earth was immensely superior to the Confederacy. The problem was in bringing them to battle. Space was so vast that random ship-to-ship encounters were all but unthinkable. Advance intelligence had to reveal an enemy fleet's course or location to allow an intercept. On Earth, sea battles had almost never taken place on the high seas, but in straits, river estuaries of ports. Space was the same.

The favored Sálamid tactic had been to wait until an Earth fleet left its base and then hit the base. Marat's own subordinates had been surprised when he had ordered out not only his six frigates but the two cruisers and the battleship as well. All to pick up Martin Shaw and his ragtag little squadron. Marat was sure that Manhattan was safe. The Sálamids never cooperated with the terrorists.

The reason he wanted to take
Kiev
along was that, without the whole fleet, there was no excuse for the Admiral to be along on the operation. Damned if he was going to send out a flotilla and let a commodore garner all the glory. It looked as if there were going to be damned few naval actions in this war, so the public would only hear about the officers who turned in those victories. Why, because of the numerous landing actions on crucial asteroids, the people back home were thinking of this as a Marine war. Most civilians could rattle off the names of a half-dozen decorated Marine officers, but only Grand Admiral Fitzsimmons was familiar to most earthmen.

Kiev
took up position at a discreet distance of one hundred thousand kilometers from Galveston, matching its heliocentric motion. This was close enough for a high-resolution imaging sensor, but far enough to escape detection by an ordinary ship's field scanner. Almost immediately, a small ship showed up on the kilometer-sized rock. Analysis confirmed it to be
Spartacus
, the ship most often used by Shaw.

"Frigates to siege positions," Marat ordered. Strapped into his commanders chair, he smiled. His chair was on a dais above and behind that of Ali Almansur,
Kiev
's commander. The frigates would assume a roughly circular formation around the asteroid on the ecliptic and be ready to fire on warning.

"All frigates in position, Admiral," said Almansur some time later.

"Very good, Captain. Cruisers in, marines to commence assault immediately upon reaching position."

"Aye, aye, sir." The order was relayed and the two cruisers,
Drake
and
Togo
, headed toward Galveston.
Drake
halted at a range of one hundred kilometers. The other cruiser worked its way in toward the entrance structure built over the old mining operation. When they were within one kilometer, the marines left the ship in space jeeps—short distance personnel carriers propelled by a slow-impulse rocket motor.

The marine captain couldn't believe their luck. They had achieved complete surprise. The terrorists were so sure of their secrecy that they weren't even posting lookouts. The marines maintained radio silence as they entered the double airlock. Two men had been preassigned to guard the entrance.

Shortly after the last of his mates disappeared inside, the senior of the two guards saw his partner giving him frantic hand-signals—"something wrong." He pointed toward the hulk of the terrorist ship, a hundred meters away. The senior man studied it. There did seem to be something odd about it. He flipped down his magnifier and slowly raised its light and image enhancement. Details became plain—a spindly, metal-strut frame showed below the sheet-metal body, its ports painted on. Only the upper surface, the part the fleet's enhancers would see, had been lovingly detailed.

The marine broke radio silence on the emergency band. "Get out! The ship's a dummy! It's a trap!" But the thickness of rock kept his signal from reaching them and, in any case, they already knew it was a trap. The captain saw the four men bending over the apparatus within the cave a microsecond before a crisscrossing grid of lasers chopped them down. He had just time to notice that the four were grinning.

"I reckon it's time," one of the men said. Like the other three, he had lost his family to Earthie raids. They keyed the four switches. Had the captain had more leisure, and had he been expert in weapons history, he would have recognized the apparatus as a nuclear bomb-powered laser battery, Excalibur class, of late 20th century design. Long obsolete, crude but relatively cheap and simple to produce, it was just the thing for low-tech, guerrilla warfare. It required no complex and expensive condensed energy tank. Each laser required the explosion of a nuclear bomb for its energy, and of course the entire apparatus was destroyed by the explosion, along with any operators. It could have been done by remote, but the four had volunteered for the suicide mission just to make extra sure.

The four beams lanced into the fleet, one for each cruiser, two for the battleship. The two cruisers were destroyed instantly. The battleship, at the extreme edge of the lasers' effective range, fared better. One beam punched through the ship's armor, killing a handful of the crew. Immediately, hermetically-sealing doors closed off the damaged section. The unfortunates who were not killed instantly and could not get to rescue bubbles died painfully, of explosive decompression. It was one of the grim advantages of space warfare that it left few wounded or crippled. Most either survived whole or died.

Marat was pale and raging. "Give that rock two penetration bombs!"

Ali Almansur did not argue, but relayed the order. Any fool could see that it was unnecessary. The rock was spouting lava from a hundred fissures. But the Admiral was not just any fool. He was a great fool. "Damage report," Almansur said.

His XO studied the screens. "Damage confined to landcraft maintenance and topographical analysis sections. Thirty-two killed, none wounded." Implanted instruments fed the computers a continual report of personnel health.

Praise Allah, Almansur thought. Not the weapons, not the engines, not life support. It could have been far worse. He was filled with rage at Marat for allowing his ship to be hurt. Unlike Marat, he kept his head.