Riding the Red Horse (21 page)

Samper looked as puzzled as everyone else, as he stared at the image. “That's not a silhouette I recognize.” A scale appears on the side, and high-contrast lines delineating the outline and features rapidly appear as the picture is hastily analyzed by the ship, including a number of shapes around it nearby. An engineering drawing appears on the screen.

“
Senkaku
,” Armadillo declared. “No reports of having been completed, last estimate was at least another six months. Battleship class. Forty eight thousand tons, sixty fighters, one hundred laser turrets. Unknown railgun, missile launch tube, or conventional cannon configuration. Light armor design, with heavy compartmentalization and redundancy.”

“Shit” the captain swore under his breath. “Relative acceleration?”

“Estimated at half ours.”

“OK. Only a few fighters launched. Fast is good. Tell the APCs to drop two crewmen, prep to get ejected on a ballistic path for low passing highly elliptical orbit. We want them to come over the horizon a moment before we do, but from the opposite side. As soon as they are out, reverse course. We’ll meet
Senkaku
head on, firing over the horizon for time on target.” Harrison’s expression is emotionless and set as he rattles off orders. The APCs were all but doomed, and he knew it. They were a distraction, little more, but a hopefully precious one.

The relative motion of the moonlet below them slows dramatically as the drive fields bite hard into the fabric of space, warping and shoving on trans-dimensional opposition to alter vectors in this universe. The cargo bay ramp drops, the inner airlock doors sliding aside, and two articulated mechanical loading arms grab the front two APCs and pull them hard out the gaping doorway in the momentarily zero-G environment. They fly away in a huddled mass of armor, bristling guns and small missile launchers, rapidly jockeying with their interacting grav-fields to all point the same way as they arc away in the moon’s puny gravity well.

Once clear of her, Armadillo’s drive field leaps out and intensifies with the hard acceleration of reversing course to meet the larger ship in time, so the men’s imminent sacrifice will not be in vain. The drives are pushing hard enough to make the whole ship vibrate, and the whine of overstressed power systems trying to charge all weapons capacitors and drive at flank acceleration makes more than a few foxhole conversions among the crew. On the bridge, the pilot, weapons officer, and AI consult to ensure the best possible timing and coordination of the weapons, knowing they will only have one chance.

On the tactical display, a bright white icon of a mushroom cloud appears in a corner. “
San Clemente
appears to have detonated a two megaton warhead. Survivors improbable,” the AI informed them quietly. “Thirty seconds.”

The seconds tick by. “APCs report hits, they're returning fire. Still broadcasting.”

A
Senkaku
reconnaissance drone appears over the horizon, and is lased a millisecond later.

Armadillo
rotates at an angle, flying somewhat sideways and bringing eighteen of her twenty four tanks’ guns to bear in the direction she’s streaking. Her pulsing drives fall silent, and she drifts for a few seconds before the 120mm conventional cannons open up, thumping out rounds every three seconds, chaff, canister, terminal guidance HE, high velocity penetrators, and more chaff, while missile launch tubes fire a salvo of self-guiding hell, and some of the hard-point missile pods are emptied and discarded, before
Armadillo
rotates around to fly bow-forward to align her main weapon, the biggest railgun ever mounted in a spaceship, with the expected location of the opposition. The conventional cannons and railguns that can continue to fire, filling space with tens of thousands of pieces of hardened metal, small mines, and sensor-disrupting chaff, with velocities and launch times coordinated to sweep the
Senkaku
’s expected course as a dense cloud, just seconds ahead of
Armadillo
.

Armadillo
alters acceleration, then coasts ballistic for a few brief moments to time her arrival precisely, and appear without any over-the-horizon” drive glow to announce her on passive sensors. “Engage the enemy more closely,”
Armadillo
’s avatar murmurs, anticipating the action, drawing grim smiles from one or two of the better-educated members of the bridge crew.

The glow of
Senkaku
’s drive field shimmers over the horizon, shortly followed by the turning outline of her broadside hull firing at the APCs. The resonating PING of the BFR breaks the relative quiet of the briefly drifting ship, followed by the whine of power surging to drives and weapons systems. The flicker of firing guns aimed the other way changes rapidly as the wall of ordnance
Armadillo
has thrown out registers on the defensive systems and they start, too late, to respond, unable to separate a hundred million harmless bit of flat aluminum chaff from tens of thousands of tungsten cubes at similar velocities.
Senkaku
’s near-side railguns and cannons start firing, but many of her numerous beams, already warm from firing at the cluster of APCs lobbing missiles and rounds at them, rapidly heat-limit. Her computers choke trying to sort and prioritize the incoming tungsten, aluminum, and steel, separating ballistic trajectories from accelerating and guided rounds suddenly appearing at close range when most of the guns are aimed the opposite direction.

Most of
Armadillo
’s dense storm of ordnance misses its target, but twenty grams of hard metal impacting at a relative velocity of more than three kilometers per second leaves a mark. Thousands of them, along with a variety of missile warheads, armor-piercing HE rounds, and five-kilogram penetrator rods scour the armor of the ship, holing every surface compartment, damaging every sensor, disabling every major weapon, and sweeping most of its close-flying escort of fighters from the battlefield action. The ten kiloton-equivalent BFR projectile isn’t perfectly aimed down the center of the huge ship, but passes through one drive core, the main power system, primary life-support, and secondary engineering control, punching a hole clear through the ship side-to-side, rendering it checkmated in space. The rounds fired by
Senkaku
start impacting
Armadillo
’s heavy hull armor, making her meter-thick plating ring like a tin roof in a hailstorm. Damage indicator lights start blinking and lighting up as tanks, hatches, and systems are hit.

Passing her by less than a hundred meters away,
Armadillo
rakes
Senkaku
’s other side as well with her dozen remaining tank guns, targeting weapons that survived the initial broadside hit, continuing to fire at any remaining fighters that are not fleeing at max acceleration with weapons not aimed at the much larger, but now battered, ship.

Captain Harrison looks at the mangled mass of wrecked APCs drifting through space. Two of them continue to fire at the larger ship. Without being told, the pilot reverses course, accelerating hard at an angle to match trajectories with the nearly parabolic APC path.

“No primary hull penetration. Four hatches seriously damaged. Eight tanks damaged, five destroyed. Two launch tubes damaged. No remaining missile pods. Drive, power, and life support systems nominal. Prepare to take on the APCs, or search them outside and just recover survivors?” The AI’s avatar looks somber, and its synthetic voice has an edge to it.

“We have to move fast. Take them on, then search, but keep the cargo bay evacuated so we can dump the extra mass in a hurry if we have to.”

Velocities matched, the mangled mess of armor is brought aboard, then swarmed by marines searching for the crew on each one. Miraculously, because of heavy armor and good luck, nine men are pulled alive from the vehicles, though all the APCs are slagged beyond repair.

On the bridge, the com specialist perks up, motioning to Harrison. “Incoming message, open freq.
Yangtze
.” The captain nods and motions to the screen. A moment later, the Chinese captain appears on it.

“You have fired on an unarmed Republic ship! You must surrender! This violation of sovereignty cannot stand!”

Harrison stared at him coldly for a few long moments as the time lag from light-speed catches up. “No. We were fired upon by the
San Clemente
, and the data cores we took from her were quite revealing. The log will show
Senkaku
fired first. And then, there is the matter of who laid the minefield at our planned entry points, is there not?” He waits for the transmission to reach the
Yangtze
, which is still exchanging fire with the slightly more distant German ships. “Captain, you were set up, just like we were. These rings are pretty spectacular, but you don’t think the
Köln
just happens to be here for the scenery, do you?”

A few seconds later
Armadillo’s
avatar appears on the screen, chewing a cigar stub thoughtfully. “If you're interested in my capabilities, I would be happy to give you a close and personal demonstration, as I did for
Senkaku
.”

The Chinese captain's eyes narrow, but he says nothing.”

After a pregnant pause, Harrison continued.
“Senkaku
is inertial ballistic and defenseless, her data cores and crew are ours for the taking if we want them. We boarded and seized the
San Clemente
without losing a man. The Russian contractors are gone. The minelayer is a wreck.

“The
Clemente
’s plan was to use you to attack us, then let the Germans pick over whatever was left of you, and let the Russians take out the damaged Germans when they tried to leave. Maybe they told you it was the other way around. Tell you what. We’ll let you and
Pearl
start recovery operations then slip away spinward and we won’t make any noisy public statements about this unfortunate misunderstanding. Or, spread out as you are, we can hunt you down one at a time because we have better railguns and more powerful lasers than you. You run, or you die. And after a resounding victory, we hit the PR circuit the moment we get back.”

The Chinese captain on his screen still says nothing, but weighs his options in silence. “Feeling lucky, Captain?” Harrison challenged the man. “Or do you want to live to fight another day?” The man on the screen nods curtly once, then cuts the connection.

Armadillo
laughs derisively. And for the first time, though not the last, the ship adds a name to his enemy's list.

In addition to authoring his influential book on technology,
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
, ESR is a supporter of Defense Distributed, the online, open source organization that designs and distributes 3D-printable weapons. He writes: “I approve of any development that makes it more difficult for governments and criminals to monopolize the use of force. As 3D printers become less expensive and more ubiquitous, this could be a major step in the right direction.”

Some of those innovative ideas are further expressed in “Battlefield Lasers”, in which Eric explores the way the combination of inexpensive do-it-yourself technology and 4th Generation War is going to have tremendous consequences for conventional military weapons as well as the conventional militaries that rely upon them.

The second of ESR's two contributions to this anthology, “Battlefield Lasers” ties in nicely with his fiction contribution, “Sucker Punch”.

Warfare is a matter of costs. Inexpensive bullets killed off knightly armor. When a weapons system can be reliably defeated by a counter that is orders of magnitude cheaper, it's obsolete.

On May 12, 2014 in Clovis California, a man named Sergio Rodriguez created a minor flap in the national press when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for zapping a police helicopter with a cheap handheld laser pointer (news accounts suggest about 65 milliwatts of output power). Beam spread helped him do it; over the thousands of feet between ground and the chopper the effect area widened out to about a foot in diameter.

This time, no one was killed. But the first fatal air crash due to a laser-blinded pilot may already have happened; in the nature of things, lasers leave few forensic traces. In 2013, about 4,000 laser attacks were reported to U.S. authorities; those, of course, were the survivors.
^[1]

The FBI has launched a nationwide program to deter the likes of Rodriguez. Because nobody is actually in any doubt that, whether or not it has already happened, a low-flying manned aircraft could be brought down by a battery-powered laser with a power output of well below a watt. The aircraft itself may not be vulnerable, but that doesn't matter because the pilot's eyeballs are.

Rodriguez has gang connections; his attempt was best understood as a form of insurgent action against the police, and is representative of the largest single category of laser attacks. Thus, street criminals have already figured out one of the truths that will shape future warfare: you don't need to down an aircraft if you can blind its sensors.

The U.S. military became aware of this hazard after its tank crews started playing pranks with the laser sights on their AFVs, and surrounds its pilots with polarized glass. That solves the problem—temporarily. When laser power levels increase sufficiently, polarized glass will no longer offer protection.

Thirteen months before Rodriguez's arrest, the U.S. Navy successfully tested a ship-mounted point-defense laser against an incoming drone. The LaWS (Laser Weapons System) is radar-guided and can burn through metal.
^[2]
As if to directly confirm the predictions made three months earlier in previous drafts of this essay, a 30-kilowatt system was forward-deployed to the Persian Gulf on the USS
Ponce
in October 2014. It was certified operational by the Office of Naval Research on December 10, 2014, five days before this book was published.

The LaWS is a big, sexy, power-hungry, expensive piece of equipment that must have been dreamed up by someone who loved space opera.
^[3]
Once the fixed expense is paid, though, a LaWS costs about a dollar a shot. This is roughly a thousand times cheaper than a smart shell or missile or drone, and many millions of times cheaper than a manned aircraft. That cost ratio is extremely significant.