Mike Shepherd - Defiant

Winston told the English boat owners there was a British army in trouble on the far shore. So they set sail by the smoke of Dunkirk and brought off 300,000 embattled Tommies and Frenchmen. No one knows the price they paid.

In 44 off Sumar, six escort carriers desperately needed time to run. Three destroyers didn't question their orders, but turned bows on to the entire Japanese Battle Fleet, setting a course from which none returned.

On September 11, a smoking bier told American boat owners that hundreds of thousands needed to be taken off Manhattan. With no orders given, no commands spoken, ferries and taxies, tourist boats and tugs, anything that could sail and carry weary workers, set sail for the sea wall at the Battery to take them home. Upriver, professional divers were working on a bridge pier. They knew, with that many boats in close quarters, someone's rope would wrap itself around another's prop. Without instructions or promise of pay, those workmen dropped what they were doing and sailed for the smoke. A half-dozen lines or more later, their work was done. And an uncounted fraction of a million got home that night.

And the passengers of Flight 93 made their fateful calls. It was their families who drew the heavy duty of telling loved ones they only wanted home that fate now stood in the way. And those souls who were no different from a quarter billion other Americansexcept for the tickets they boughtshowed a wondering world the true mettle of free men and women.

We do what we have to do, because there is nothing else to do.

I would like to sincerely thank Heather Alexander for permission to use her song, ''The March of Cambreadth,'' liberally in this novel. Anyone who hasn't heard a hundred plus fans singing ''How Many of Them Can We Make Die!'' has missed out on one of life's moments. You can own Heather's ''The March of Cambreadth'' for yourself by making a quick visit to www.heatherlands.com and ordering the Midsummer album. Heck, order them all. I did regularly. Every time one of my kids left home, they took my Heather collection with them, and I had to order up a new set.

I would also like to thank the folks at the WWI discussion group for letting me raise the hypothetical question of what might have happened if the British government had fallen in July 1914 over the Irish question and then faced the beginning of World War I. I'd especially like to thank Syd Wise for his refresher on the British and Canadian systems and Luke Taper and Geoffrey Miller for the Australian model which I borrowed with variations for Wardhaven. Obviously, the changes, and any mistakes, are my own.

L ieutenant Kris Longknife grinned from ear to ear, no minor accomplishment at 2.5 g's. The short hairs on the back of her neck were standing up. At a brace. And saluting. She was scared spitless and had never had so much fun in her life.

This being Tuesday, under Commodore Mandanti's rotation system, she commanded Division 3, four dinky fast patrol boats, as they charged the battleship-size target ahead of them. And, if she trusted those little hairs on the back of her neck at all, the Commodore and his gunners on the Cushing had the PF-109, Kris's very first command, and the other boats of Div 3, pinned in the crosshairs of their defensive lasers.

It was time to get her boats moving to a different evasion pattern or they'd be left powerless, drifting in space like the eight boats of Division 1 and 2 that had failed in their attack just minutes before her.

And she and the other eleven skippers of the fast patrol boats would be buying the beer for the Commodore's gunners.

And there would be a very critical report filed saying the PFssmall, easy, and quick to build with semi-smart metalwere failures, unable to defend a planet from attack. If that was true, each planet in the newly formed United Sentients would need a full, heavy battle fleet in its orbit if it was to weather the unknowns rapidly developing in these troubled times.

The political ramifications of that were something Kris Longknife, Prime Minister's daughter and great-granddaughter to King Raymond I of the U.S. alliance of ninety planets, did not want to think about. Far better for each planet to see to its own defense with a tiny mosquito fleet like her boat and let the heavy ships handle the problems of the whole alliance.

You're thinking too much again, Longknife. Get out of your head and kick some battleship butt.

Kris mashed the comm button under her thumb. The order that went out was short and scrambled. What it meant was, ''Division 3, prepare to change to Evasion Plan 5 on my mark.''

Kris waited. Waited for her own helmswoman to switch to the new plan, waited for three other boats to make the same switch.

''Ready,'' Boson 3/c Fintch reported from her station beside Kris on the tiny bridge. The small brunet's voice was hoarse under heavy acceleration. Kris gave the other boats a slow three count.

THEY SHOULD BE READY TO EXECUTE NOW , Nelly said directly into Kris's brain. To call the tiny computer at Kris's neck a supercomputer would probably offend Nelly's growing sense of her own self-importance. What Kris spent on Nelly's last upgrade would have bought and paid for one of the battlewagons Kris and her crew were practicing to kill.

SEND MY MARK , Kris ordered, and the computer not only sent the execute to all four boats, but made the evasion pattern change within the same nanosecondsomething no mere human could do. This computer intervention was not standard Navy procedure, and it had not been easily won. But it was at the heart of the plan of attack that Kris and her division skippers had knocked together last week at the O clubwith Nelly's avid help.

''Executing Evasion Plan 5,'' Fintch reported.

And Kris's tiny command slammed her hard against the left headrest of her high-acceleration chair as what had been a soft left turn converted to a hard right turn and dive.

Kris swallowed and tightened her gut muscles. Again.

The division has started its wild charge from 150,000 klicks out, well beyond even 18-inch laser range. They'd gone to 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 g's acceleration, mixing up their growing speed with erratic right and left, up and down swerves. Sometimes hard, sometimes easy, sometimes in between. Always unpredictable. The tiny fast patrol boats were small as bugs beside the huge battlewagon they sought to slay. Now they danced like June bugs.

If they danced just right, they would live. And the battleship would die.

Because the fast patrol boats, though tiny, were deadly, too. Each PF carried four 18-inch pulse lasers. The quick burst from one of them could gut a cruiser or knock a gaping hole in a battleship's ice armor. Maybe even burn through to the mass of weapons, machinery, and humanity below.

So cruisers and battleships mounted secondary guns that fired fast and often and tried to slash through small stuff like the PFs. And big ships spun on their long axis, rotating slashing lasers away from damaged ice and into thick, unhurt ice before burn-through into vitals could happen.

Measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure, layered thick and heavy. That was the way it had been since the time beyond recall when some human first set out to kill his brother. It wasn't enough to just have a fast ship, good weapons, and solid teamwork. You needed a plan and skill and luck.

Or so Phil had told them all when he invited them out to dinner at the O club a week ago.