Choosers of the Slain

45

"Fire twelve!"

The warning horn blared and the last Stealth Cruise Missile punched out of its launch cell. Holding the peculiar tail-down attitude of its breed, it arced away from the Cunningham, booster pack streaming a curtain of golden flame. Its razor-blade wings snapped open and the small turbojet power-plant spooled up to power. Completing conversion to flight mode, it kicked free of its exhausted booster, leveled out, and raced for the horizon.

Onboard the SCM, an almost miraculously precise guidance system began tracking on the distant impulses of a NAVSTAR satellite. The cruise missile had been carefully programmed to swing wide along a circular course and to deliver itself to an exact point in space at an exact moment in time. Nothing short of a massive systems failure or total destruction could stop it.

"All SCMs launched, Captain. All missiles running hot and straight on designated headings," Beltrain reported from the tactical console.

"Very well, Dix. Give us a time to target."

In the bottom right corner of the Alpha Screen, a second digital readout flashed into existence over the standard time hack and began counting down.

"There you go, ma'am. First missile estimated in over point item in T minus fifty-one minutes and thirty seconds."

"Okay. Helmsman, are we ready to initiate the speed run?"

"Yes, ma'am," the seaman called back over his shoulder from the battle helm station. "Course to point item is up and in the system. Navicom and autopilot read green and ready to engage. Projected time to point item, fifty minutes."

"Very well. Helm, you will engage on my mark."

Amanda leaned forward in the captain's chair, regarding the time hack through narrowed eyes.

"Stand by to take departure. Coming up on T minus fifty… three… two… one… mark! Engage!"

The helmsman keyed in the autopilot and the light patterns on his console shifted. Without human influence, the helm controller spun to a new heading, and smoothly the Cunningham's bow began to come around in response. On the lee helm pedestal, the power levers and throttles flipped forward against their stops with an audible click. On the propulsion system's repeaters, the glowing green bars of the engine-output gauges crawled up their scales until they reached their limits and flared bloodred.

A soft rushing roar with shrill metallic overtones began to fill the background. The Duke's huge gas turbines were spinning up to their peak RPM, sucking a tornado of cold air down the intake ducts and into their shimmering blades. Like the cruise missiles she had just unleashed, the destroyer herself was now a computer-guided projectile aimed and launched at a specific target.

Amanda pushed herself up and out of the captain's chair and joined her tactical officers at the chart table. A moment later, Arkady ducked through the aft hatchway and joined the group. He'd watched the SCM launch from the weather decks and he wore a heavy navy parka over his flight suit. As he brushed past her, she could feel a clean trace of the topside cold caught in its fabric. He moved into his slot around the table and gave her a nod and a sober smile.

"All right. Let's go over this one last time, just to be sure." Amanda called up the latest satellite photo image of the Argentine convoy onto the chart-table flatscreen. "The enemy task force is continuing to hold a course of one nine zero degrees true and a speed of eighteen knots. The distant covering force has executed its latest cross over the line of advance, and is currently holding on stations some ten miles off the starboard bow of the main formation. Given our current course and speed, and granted they don't make any changes, we will be making intercept on the convoy in about… forty-seven minutes."

Amanda picked up a data wand and drew a glowing line across the screen, converging on the convoy's heading. "We're steering zero degrees true, due north. That will bring us in on the bow of the formation at a shallow angle. Adding their eighteen-knot rate of advance to our own forty-knot speed will give us a cumulative rate of closure of about fifty-eight knots. That should get us across the ten-mile gap between stealth integrity failure and the convoy perimeter in about eight minutes."

"That'll also put us damn near alongside the distant covering force when our stealth crashes," McKelsie interrupted.

"So it will," Amanda agreed. "That's what that cruise-missile stream we just launched is all about. The roundabout course they're flying will bring them in over point item at approximately the same time as we and the convoy arrive there. We'll be coming in from the south. The SCMs will be coming in from the west at thirty-second intervals. Not only will we be catching the Argys in a cross fire, but hopefully we'll also be confusing them as to where the attack is actually coming in from and how many of us there are out here. With a little luck, by the time they sort things out, we'll have gotten at the transports."

"I still don't know about setting the cruisers to come in at two hundred feet, though," Bertram commented, leaning forward against the chart table. "That high, they're going to be a whole lot easier to spot and hit with point defense."

"I know," Amanda replied, "but the whole idea is for them to provide a distraction while we make our run in. If they actually happen to hit anything, it'll be chocolate frosting on sugar pie. Oh, and by the way, Dix, the discriminator circuits on those SCMs should reject lock on anything with a radar cross-section as small as we have. Just in case, make sure our IFF beacons are set to go in case we have to wave one of them off."

"Will do, ma'am."

"To continue, the intent is to get within the convoy perimeter. To do so, we'll kill this nearside forward escort the second we lose stealth. That'll blow us our hole. Once we're inside, between all the grass and garbage being put out by our counter-measures and those of the transports, the Argentines won't be able to be sure of their target designation. They won't be able to fire inward without running the risk of hitting their own ships. We, on the other hand, will be able to blaze away at anything that moves. We'll take down the transports, blow ourselves another hole out the back of the escort perimeter, then beat it out of there. Any comments?"

"It still strikes me," Ken Hiro said slowly, "we're counting an awful lot on the Argys doing exactly what we want them to do. What if they've thrown a course change in on us?"

"That's a point. In fact, if you or I had been running the show, I'd have bet we'd have been throwing in random variances in course and speed all along, especially after each satellite pass. They haven't, though. They've held this heading and speed steadily for the past sixteen hours, and there is no visible reason for them to change for at least another eight or ten. I think those are solid enough odds to bet on.

"If they do throw a major course change in on us… well, we'll sheer off and think of something new. We won't be any worse off then than we are now. One way or another, we'll know pretty soon. Anything else?"

Amanda scanned around the table, meeting the eyes of her people. She was satisfied with what she saw.

"Okay, Ken, I'll be keeping the con down here. You've got the bridge. It's safe to assume that if the CIC goes down, the ship will have received heavy damage and I will be dead or otherwise out of it. If that's the case, your primary concern will be the survival of the ship and the crew. Break off the mission and get the Duke out of there."

"Aye, aye, ma'am. You've got it."

"Very well, then, let's go to stations."

Her people dispersed out from the chart table, all except Arkady. He moved closer in the blue-lit dimness, and Amanda smiled to herself. He had good shoulders, she noted, and just now it would have been rather nice to be able to bury her face against one of them for a few minutes.

"You didn't have too much to say, Arkady."

"Not too much to say. It's a good plan. It's comparatively simple. It makes the best possible use of our available resources. It matches our strengths against the enemies' weaknesses, and like every other military plan of operations since year one, it'll dissolve into elephant snot the second we make contact with the enemy."

"That's a stark assessment."

The corner of his mouth quirked up. "I'm the guy who does honest, remember? In the end, it's all going to boil down to whoever is riding the captain's chair, and how good they are at gluing things back together again after they start falling apart."

"I know," Amanda replied quietly. She crossed her arms across her stomach and hugged herself lightly to suppress a shudder. "God, please don't let me screw up!"

"If I were him, I think my reply would be, 'Don't sweat it. This is what I made you for.'"

Arkady took a step back and saluted crisply. "Captain, request permission to observe the engagement from CIC."

Amanda straightened and answered the salute. "Permission granted, Lieutenant."

From up forward, the Aegis systems operator called out, "Multiple surface-radar sources coming up over the horizon. Position bearing and number consistent with enemy force projection."

Someone else, possibly Christine over in Raven's Roost, whispered, "Show time!"