“Good plan, mate!” Crow laughed again. Some of the harshness and confidence was gone from the laugh, however. He sounded a little nervous. I didn’t blame him. Who wasn’t nervous at this point?
I heard him shout for quiet on the public channel. He gave them the instructions, telling them to sing out if their ship was the one under fire. Before we managed all this, a third ship blew up. Finally, the red lines were on everyone’s wall.
“Right!” shouted Crow. “Talk to me people, don’t be shy. Who is next on the death list?”
No one answered.
“Enemy in range in four minutes,” said the Alamo.
“Dammit, talk to me before it blows us all up!” screamed Crow.
“Jack?” I said.
“What now, Riggs?”
“Did you color your ship yet?”
“No, I’ve been too damned busy with your cocked-up plan to—”
“Jack, it’s you. If no one else can see it’s targeting them, then it must be the one who hasn’t done it yet.”
One second of silence, then: “Everyone, order your ships to cluster around the Snapper. Do it now.”
“Alamo, move close to the Snapper,” I said. “Do it as fast as you can.”
The fourth little red contact had almost reached us. I watched as, sluggishly, a dozen or so ships moved to cover what must have been the Snapper. Sandra and I watched with our teeth clenched. I hoped I’d guessed right. What if our ships couldn’t shoot down these incoming weapons? What if instead Jack’s ship took us all out in the resulting explosion because we were too close?
We didn’t have long to wait. Our ship began to shudder. I knew the sensation, it had happened every time the ship fired its beams.
“Is that our ship shooting? Or are we being hit?” asked Sandra.
“I think if we were hit, we’d be toast. Our ship is automatically firing at the incoming weapon.”
The red dot grew very close. It was pointless, but I clenched every muscle in my body. I couldn’t help it.
Suddenly, the sensation of firing stopped, and the red weapon contact was gone. I couldn’t tell with the intermingling of ships if there was one missing or not.
“Jack? Jack Crow, are you still there?”
“Yeah. I’m here. Who’s next? Talk to me.”
“Enemy in range in three minutes,” said the Alamo.
More panic people identified themselves. We ordered our ships to gather around each in turn. As we closed with the enemy, the enemy rate of fire seemed to be increasing. The big red ship was retreating now, slowly at first, but picking up speed.
“They are pulling out, let’s go after them!” shouted Crow. “Everyone, order your ships forward. Increase speed.”
We chased them, still blowing up each missile as it came in. It only caught one more ship, a woman who screamed and howled for us to get close. She was too far out and hadn’t clustered like the rest of us. Clearly, she hadn’t followed Jack’s orders.
“See?” demanded Crow as her contact vanished and her cries for help were cut off. “See what happens when we don’t all work together? She was a rogue, and she acted like one, and now she’s dead. We couldn’t save her because she wouldn’t work with the group.”
I worked on creating a program to cluster around the targeted ship. By giving our ships a carefully worded set of commands, they should automatically move to protect the one that was targeted.
Soon, we were in range of the big red bastard itself. I wished, right then, that I knew just what it looked like. Our ship began firing. So did the others, according to the reports. We circled around the ship and engulfed it. The big ship tried to pull out, to run, but we were all over it. At some point, it stopped firing missiles. Still, we kept pounding it.
“I wonder who is on that ship?” asked Sandra aloud. “Who are we killing? Are we really the good guys, or the bad guys?”
“Yeah,” I said, slightly troubled. What if this ship had come here to rescue Earth? What if its mission was to get rid of these vulture-ships that had kidnapped us? Maybe the ship was full of angry, righteous centaur people, bent on revenge for what these ships had done to their own world. We had no idea and no way of knowing.
After a while longer, the ship stopped retreating as well. Still, we rippled and churned around it, like a school of piranhas tearing apart a side of beef. Each of us got our mouthful, then went back for more.
When it finally blew up, we felt it. The Alamo stuttered. We lurched and drifted. The firing stopped. The other ships stopped moving, too.
We had lost six ships altogether. But we had won.
-9-
“Riggs? Hey, Riggs?”
It was Jack Crow again. He sounded pretty happy.
“Hello Jack. We lived.”
“We sure did, my fat-brained friend. You helped out tremendously. I want to make you a lieutenant commander, Riggs. No, forget that. A full commander! How does that sound, Commander Riggs? I want you to know, you would be the only person with such a high rank in my fleet. You would be my second in command.”
I chuckled. “If I wait another day, will you make me a captain?”
“Right. Well, right. Laugh it up. Well done. This is all a big joke, isn’t it? But consider, the fact that I put together some sort of organization kept us alive today. That ship might have killed all of us, you know. Think about that. Your ideas saved the day, but without my organization, we wouldn’t have worked together at all and we would have failed.”
“You have a point there, Jack.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear you admit it. I’m not just some megalomaniac who wants to call myself a commodore.”
“What’s a commodore?” I asked.
“It’s a rank between captain and admiral.”
“You are a commodore now?”
“Well, I realized I needed to have more ranks as more ships join us. More of a hierarchy.”
“I see,” I said, grinning.
“But that doesn’t matter. What I want you to think about, Riggs, is what that ship would have done if we had lost the battle. What if it had made it down to Earth?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what about the next time? What if there are a dozen ships like that, or a hundred?”
“Next time?” I asked wonderingly. I had honestly not had time to think through the implications of the battle we’d just faced. I felt out of my depth. I had no idea what was going on out here. Was Earth involved in some kind of war? We desperately needed more information. Would there be a next time? Why not? Wars were not usually fought in a single battle. And it did indeed seem like we were involved in a war.
“Jack—Commodore Crow, I mean. Do you have any more detailed political information? Is Earth in a war? Or did Earth just declare war on whoever was in that ship, by helping our ships destroy it?”
“Great questions. Join us, and I’ll assign you the task of figuring out the answers. I’ll do recruitment and organization.”
“What the hell have your people been doing? Do I have to figure out everything?”
“Look, Jack, most paranoid people who sleep with a gun in their hand aren’t deep thinkers. This organization isn’t made up of a bunch of philosophers, diplomats and techies. We are a fleet of opportunistic killers—survivalists. Unfortunately, running a fleet of alien ships in space combat requires more than reflexes and a killer instinct. I’m coming to realize I need you more than anyone else in my fleet. For the last time, will you join me?”
I thought hard for about five seconds. I looked over at Sandra, who nodded firmly. I sighed, and realized they were both probably right. I didn’t really like joining some independent, militia-like organization. It wasn’t my style. But in our situation, I couldn’t see how we were going to be taking orders from the ground, and I wasn’t interested in letting some military agents come aboard and toss me out of this ship. Self-sacrifice had its limits. Who knew, anyway, if the Pentagon could run this ship better than I had done? Would they have won that battle? Maybe I was overestimating my problem-solving skills, but then again, this ship had chosen me for good reasons.