I felt my face getting hotter. "You mean is the old man losing his memory at wholesale rates?"
"Well?" she replied coolly. "Are you?"
"I wouldn't bet on it if I were you," I snapped. "You'll see what shape my memory and mind are in when I give the captain my preliminary plan in a couple of days." "Uh-huh." A faint look of scorn twitched at her lip. "I'm sure it'll be Crecy all over again. You'll forgive me if I still try and talk the captain out of it."
"That's up to you," I said as she turned around and walked, stiff-backed, to the door. It opened for her, and she left.
With an odd feeling in my stomach, I realized that I had just set a pleasant little bonfire in the center of my line of retreat. If I didn't come up with a
workable battle plan now, I would humiliate myself in front of Kittredge—and probably everyone else aboard ship, too. In my mind's eye I could see Kittredge's I-knew-you-couldn't-do-it contempt, the captain's maddeningly understanding look, Waskin's outright amusement...
Alone in my cabin, the images still made me cringe. More undeserved shame...
and for once, I suddenly decided I would rather die than go through all of that again. I would draw up a battle plan—and it was going to be the best damned plan Waskin or Kittredge had ever seen.
I would start with a concerted effort to dredge up those three vaguely remembered hivey weaknesses from their dusty hiding places in my memory. And maybe with a trip through the ship's references to find out just what the hell this Crecy was that Kittredge had referred to. We started making preparations immediately, of course. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of preparations that could be made.
The Volga, as was pointed out to me with monotonous regularity, was not a warship. We had no shielding beyond the standard solar radiation and micrometeor stuff, our sole weapon was a pair of laser cannons designed to blow away more dangerous meteors—those up to a whopping half-meter across—and our drive and mechanical structure had never been designed for anything even resembling a tight maneuver. We were a waddling, quacking duck that could be blown into mesons half a second after the Drymnu decided we were dangerous to it.
The trick, therefore, was going to be to make the Volga seem as harmless as possible... and then to figure out how we could stop being harmless when we wanted to. That much was basic military strategy, the stuff I'd learned my second week in basic. Fortunately, there was one very trivial way to accomplish that.
Unfortunately, it was the only way I could think of to accomplish it. Across the room, the door slid open and Waskin walked in, a wary expression on his face. "I hope like hell, sir," he said, "that this isn't what I think it is."
"It is," I nodded, keying the door closed. "I'm tapping you for part of my assault team."
"Oh, sh—" He swallowed the rest of the expletive with an effort. "Sir, I'd like to respectfully withdraw, on grounds—"
"Stuff it, Waskin," I told him shortly. "We haven't got time for it. How much has the ship's grapevine given you about what I've got planned?"
"Enough. You're having a meteor laser taken out and installed aboard one of the landing boats. If you ask me, your David/Goliath complex is getting a little out of hand."
I ignored the sarcasm. Everyone else, even Kittredge, had started treating me with new respect, but it had been too much to hope for that Waskin would join that particular club. "I take it you don't think it would be a good idea to send a boat out after the Drymnu ship. Why not?"
He looked hard at me, decided it was a serious question. "Because he'll blow us apart before we get anywhere near our own firing range, that's why. Or have I missed something?"
"You've missed two things. First of all, remember that this isn't a warship we're going up against. The Drymnu isn't likely to have fine-aim lasers or high-maneuverable missiles aboard."
"Why not?"
"Why should he?"
"Because he knows we'll eventually be sending warships and fighter carriers after him."
"Ah." I held up a finger. "Warships, yes. But not necessarily carriers."
Waskin frowned. "You mean he might not know we've got them?"
I shook my head. "I'm guessing that the concept of fighters won't even occur to him."
"Why wouldn't it? You could put a handful of Drymnu bodies aboard something the size of a fighter, and as long as they didn't get too far from the mother ship, they'd still be connected to the hive mind."
And at that moment Waskin sealed his fate. Everyone else that I'd had this talk with had needed to be reminded that hivies couldn't function at all in groups of less than a few thousand... and then had needed to be reminded that the thirty-thousand-klick range meant that small scouts or fighters could, indeed, have limited use for them. "You're right," I nodded to Waskin. "Absolutely right. So why won't the Drymnu expect us to use small fighters?"
He made a face. "You're enjoying this, aren't you? This is your revenge for all the poker games you've lost, right?"
God knew there wasn't a lot about this situation that was even remotely enjoyable... but in a perverse way I did rather like being ahead of Waskin for a
change. The fact that my years in the Services gave me a slight advantage was totally irrelevant. "Never mind me," I told him shortly. "You just concentrate on you. Why won't he expect fighters?"
He snorted, then shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe a single ship-sized mind can't handle that many disparate viewpoints. No, that doesn't make sense."
"It's actually pretty close," I had to admit. "It's loosely tied into the reason for that thirty-thousand-klick range. That number suggest anything?"
"It's the distance light travels in a tenth of a second," he said promptly.
"I'm not that ignorant, you know."
He was right; that part of the hivies' limitation was pretty common knowledge.
"Okay, then, that leads us immediately to the fact that the common telepathic link behaves the same way light does, with all the same limitations. So what do you get when you have, say, a dozen high-speed fighters swarming out from the mother ship vectoring in on your target?" "What do you—? Oh. Oh, sure. High relative speeds mean you'll be getting into relativistic effects."
"Including time dilation," I nodded. "A pretty minor effect, admittedly. But if a section of mind can't handle even a tenth of a second time lag, it seems reasonable that even a small difference in the temporal rate would foul it up even worse."
He nodded slowly and gave me a long, speculative look. "Makes sense. Doesn't mean it's true."
"It is," I told him. "Or it's at least official theory. We've observed Sirrachat and Karmahsh ships occasionally using small advance scouts when feeling their way through a particularly dense ring system or asteroid belt. The scouts behave exactly as expected: they stay practically within hugging range of the mother ship and keep their speeds strictly matched with it."
"Uh-huh. I take it this is supposed to make me feel better about going up against Goliath? Because if it is, it isn't working." He held up some fingers and began ticking them off. "One: if we can think like hivies, it's just possible he's been able to think like humans and will be all ready for us to come blazing in on him. Two: even if he isn't ready for us right at the start, a
hive mind learns pretty damn quickly. How many passes is it going to take us to hit a vital spot and put his ship out of commission—twenty? Fifty? And three: even if by some miracle he doesn't catch on to the basics of space warfare through all of that, what makes you think we're going to be able to take advantage of it? None of us are soldiers, either."
"What do you think I am?" I asked.
"A former Services engine room officer who got everything he knows about tactics by pure osmosis," he shot back.
I forced down my irritation with an effort. The fact that he was right didn't make it any easier. "Okay," I growled. "But by osmosis or otherwise, I've still got it. And as far as that goes, you and Fromm have both had more than your share of experience using the meteor laser. Haven't you."