He wasn’t sure—Gha were as hard to read as the Romans said they were—but he thought Fludenoc was worried.
“Are you concerned?” he asked.
The Gha exhaled explosively. “Yes! You must careful be. These very powerful Guildmaster craft.”
Tambo shook his head. “I think you are wrong, Fludenoc hu’tut-Na Nomo’te. I think these are simply arrogant bullies, who haven’t been in a real fight for so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like.”
He did not add the thought which came to him. It would have meant nothing to the Gha. But he smiled, thinking of a college fraternity which had once tried to bully four small Romans in a bar.
Don’t fuck with real veterans.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, Fludenoc,” he murmured. “All those centuries—millennia—while we were out of contact with the galaxy, we’ve been fighting each other. While these Doges—God, what a perfect name!—got fat like hogs.”
VIII
The battle lasted two minutes.
Seeing the huge ancient battleship sweeping toward them, with its accompanying escort of three resurrected Trident missile submarines, the Guild dodecahedron opened up like a flower. Ten laser beams centered on the Quinctius itself, including a powerful laser from the “Titanic” at the center of the Doge fleet. The three remaining Guild vessels each fired a laser at the escorts—the Pydna, the Magnesia, and the Chaeronea.
Powered by their gigantic engines, the shields of the human vessels shrugged off the lasers. Those shields, like the engines, were based on galactic technology. But the Doge Species, with the inveterate habit of merchants, had designed their equipment with a cheeseparing attitude. The human adaptations—robust; even exuberant—were based on millennia of combat experience.
The Pydna-class escorts responded first. The hatches on their upper decks opened. Dozens of missiles popped out—driven, here, by old technology—and then immediately went into a highly modified version of Transit drive. To the watching eye, they simply disappeared.
“Yes!” cried Trumbull, clenching his fist triumphantly. Not three seconds later, the Guild fleet was staggered by the impact of those missiles. As the commodore had suspected, the Doge Species’ long neglect of missile warfare was costing them heavily. Human electronic countermeasure technology was vastly superior to anything the Guild vessels possessed in the way of tracking equipment. Most of the incoming missiles were destroyed by laser fire, but many of them penetrated to the shield walls.
Even galactic shields were hard-pressed against fifteen-megaton nuclear charges. Four of those shields collapsed completely, leaving nothing but plasma to mark where spacecraft had formerly been. The others survived. But, in the case of three of them, the stress on their engines had been great enough to cause the engines themselves to collapse. Their shields and drives failed, leaving the three ships to drift helplessly.
Now the Quinctius went into action. Again, there was an exotic combination of old and new technology. The three great turrets of the ancient battleship swiveled, just as if it were still sailing the Pacific. But the guidance mechanisms were state-of-the-art Doge technology. And the incredible laser beams which pulsed out of each turret’s three retrofitted barrels were something new to the galaxy. Human engineers and physicists, studying the data in the Roman-captured Guild vessel, had decided not to copy the Doge lasers. Instead, they combined some of that dazzling new technology with a revivified daydream from humanity’s bloody past.
Only a ship as enormous as the old Missouri could use these lasers. It took an immense hull capacity to hold the magnetic fusion bottles. In each of those three bottles—one for each turret—five-megaton thermonuclear devices were ignited. The bottles trapped the energy, contained it, channeled it.
Nine X-ray lasers fired. Three Guild ships flickered briefly, their shields coruscating. Then—vaporized.
Thirty seconds elapsed, as the fusion bottles recharged. The Guild ships which were still under power were now veering off sharply. Again, the turrets tracked. Again, ignition. Again, three Doge vessels vaporized.
More seconds elapsed, while the Quinctius’ fusion bottles recharged.
The communication console on the bridge of the Scipio Africanus began humming. “Sir,” reported Lieutenant Sanchez, “it’s the Guild flagship. They’re asking to negotiate.”
“Screw ’em,” snarled the commodore. “They’re nothing but pirates and slavers, as far as I’m concerned.”
Tambo grinned. “You want me to see if I can dig up a black flag somewhere?”