I had the satisfaction of seeing him flinch. He and Fromm had had a private duel of LaserWar going on down in the game room for the past six months, and I knew for a fact that they both occasionally brought the competition into duty hours, using the Volga's lasers for live practice. Strictly against regulations, naturally. "A little, maybe," he muttered. "But mostly that's just a game."
"So? Hivies don't get even that much practice—they don't play LaserWar or any other games. Which brings me to our second advantage over them; a hive mind may learn fast, but all eighteen thousand bodies on that ship are going to start exactly even. It's not as though there's going to be anyone there who has even a
smattering of practical experience with tactics, for instance, or anyone who excels at hitting small, fast-moving targets. We do, and I intend to use that advantage to the fullest."
"By making Fromm and me your chief gunners?" Waskin snorted.
"By making Fromm my chief gunner," I corrected. "You I'm making my second-in-command."
His eyes bulged. "You're—what? Oh, now wait a minute, sir—"
"Sorry, Waskin, the job's yours." I glanced at my watch. "All right. We'll be having a meeting to set up practice sessions in the lounge in exactly one hour.
Be there."
For a moment I thought he was going to argue with me. But he just took a deep breath and nodded. "Yes, sir. Under protest, though."
"I wouldn't have expected it any other way."
He left, and I took a deep breath of my own. There was nothing like a willing team, I reflected, letting my eyes defocus with tiredness. None of the six I'd chosen had any real enthusiasm for what they saw as a stupid decision on the captain's part, but at least only Waskin was even verbally hostile about it.
That would probably change, of course, at the meeting an hour away, when I told them about the rest of my plan. It wasn't something I was especially looking forward to.
But in the meantime... Stretching hard, I cracked the tension out of my back and settled more comfortably into my seat. One: hivies won't be able to think in terms of small-group efficiency. Two: a given hivey mind-segment won't have the same range of abilities and talents that a human force will have. Three:...
No good. Whatever that third hivey weakness was, it was still managing to elude me. But that was okay; I still had a couple of days until breakout, and surely that would be enough time for my subconscious to dig it out of wherever it was I'd tucked it away. They didn't like the plan. Didn't like it at all.
And I couldn't really blame them. The landing boat assault was bad enough, relying as strongly as it did on Hive Mind Weaknesses One and Two—weaknesses they had only my unsupported word for. But the full plan was even worse, and none of them were particularly reticent about voicing their displeasure.
It could have come to mass mutiny right there, I suppose, with the crew going to the captain en masse and demanding either a decent plan of action or else that he scrap this whole thing. And I suppose that there was a part of me that hoped they would do so. It had been rather pleasant, for a change, to be treated with a little respect aboard the ship—to be Tactician Travis, the man who was guiding the Volga into battle, instead of just plain Third Officer Travis, who always lost at poker. But none of that could quite erase the knowledge that I could very well be on the brink of getting some of us killed, me included. I'd already burned my own spaceport behind me, but if the captain decided to quit now, I for one wasn't going to argue too strenuously with him.
But he didn't. Perhaps he felt he'd also come too far to back down; perhaps he really believed that he was obligated to Colonel Halveston's dying order. But whatever the reason, he came out in solid support of both me and my plan, and in the end everyone fell grudgingly into line behind him. Perhaps, with so much uncertainty still remaining as to whether we'd even catch the Drymnu ship, no one wanted to stick his or her neck too far out.
A fair portion of that uncertainty, though, was illusory. True, we had only the Drymnu's departure vector to guide us, and it was true that he could theoretically break out and change his direction anywhere along a path a hundred light-years long. But in actuality, his choices were far more limited: by physics, which governed how long a ship could generate heat in hyperspace before it had to break out and dump it; and by common sense, which said that in case of breakout problems you wanted your ship reasonably close to raw materials and energy, which meant somewhere inside a solar system.
There was, it turned out, exactly one system along the Drymnu's vector that fit both those constraints.
So even while my team complained and muttered to one another about the chances this would all be a waste of time, I made sure they worked their butts off.
Somewhere in that system, I was pretty sure, we would find the Drymnu.
Four days later, we broke out into our target system, a totally unremarkable conglomeration of nondescript planets, minor chunks of rock, a dull red sun...
and one Drymnu ship.
He wasn't visible to the naked eye, of course, but by solar system standards we arrived practically on his landing ramp. He was barely three million klicks away, radiating so much infrared that Waskin had a lock on him two minutes after breakout. Captain Garrett gave the order, and we turned and drove hell for leather straight for him.
The Volga was capable of making nearly two gravs of acceleration, but even at that, the Drymnu was a good seven hours away. There was, therefore, no question of sneaking up on him, especially since half that time we would be decelerating with our main drive blasting directly toward him. There was little chance he would escape into hyperspace—not with the amount of heat he clearly had yet to get rid of—but I'd expected that he would at least make us chase him through normal, gain himself some extra time to study us.
We were less than half an hour away from him when we all were finally forced to the conclusion that he really did intend to simply stand there and hold his ground.
"Damn," Waskin muttered under his breath at the scanners. "He knows we're here—he has to have seen us by now. He's waiting for us, like a—a giant spider in his web—"
"That'll do, Waskin," the captain told him, his own voice icy calm. "There's no need to create wild pictures; I think we're all adequately nervous. Just remember that chances are at least as good that he's waiting because he figures we're a warship and that running would be a waste of time."
"Running doesn't sound like a waste of time to me," Kittredge said tensely.
The captain turned a brief stare on her, then looked at me. "Well, Travis, looks like this is it. Any last-minute changes you want to make in the plan?"
I shook my head. One: hivies don't form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:... Three, where the hell are you, damn it? "No, sir," I told him with a quiet sigh. Half an hour to battle. No way around it; we were just going to have to make do without Hive Mind Weakness Number Three, whatever it was. "I'd better get the team into the boat."
He nodded and motioned someone else to take Waskin's place at the scanners.
"We'll signal just before we drop you," he told me. "And we'll let you know if there's any change in the situation out there. Good luck."
"Thank you, sir."
Waskin beside me, I headed out the bridge door and did a fast float down the cramped corridor toward the landing boat bay. "So this is it, isn't it?"
Waskin murmured. "Your big chance to be a hero."
"I'm not doing this for the heroics of it," I growled back.
"No? Come on, Travis, I'm not that stupid. You and the captain dreamed up this whole landing boat assault just so that he can pretend he's obeying Halveston's damned order while still keeping the Volga itself from getting blasted to dust."