Free Gestapo Mars by Victor Gischler

bent over her scanning station. “But ten of the other ships had to join in to catch them all.”
    “We’re still going to have to go dumb,” the admiral said. “All gun crews report to stations.”
    “Gun crews report to stations,” the first officer repeated into the ship’s intercom. “We’re going dumb. Repeat,
we are going dumb
!”
    I’d almost forgotten about dumb warfare, a common practice even back in my time. It had been at the height of an old twenty-year war with the Akrohn Empire, and had been invented by the intrepid and headstrong Captain John Luke Pishman.
    At the time, Pishman had been patrolling a backwater sector of space in a twenty-five-year-old frigate, recently updated with modern equipment. An Akrohn dreadnaught had dropped out of translight and had immediately opened fire. Pishman’s alert crew had launched counter-measures, saving the ship from the surprise attack just in time. They returned fire, only to find that the dreadnaught had equally effective counter-measures. For six days the two ships dueled, floating three hundred thousand miles apart. Each ship deflected the other’s missiles, jammed the other’s targeting electronics, absorbed the other’s laser blasts.
    They couldn’t lay a finger on each other.
    It was all too clear what had happened. As smart bombs and smart weapons got smarter and smarter over the decades, they’d finally reached the point where they totally negated each other.
    Once Pishman had made his decision, he didn’t hesitate. The older, smaller frigate had just a single advantage over the dreadnaught—it could accelerate much faster. Pishman ordered the frigate to move within point blank range, at which time he launched a dozen freezers full of Swanson frozen turkey dinners out of the forward airlocks.
    The freezers had no sophisticated electronics to jam, so the Akrohn sailors could do nothing but watch helplessly with their double-mouths hanging open as the freezers slammed into their engines, utterly destroying them. Pishman then knocked a hole in the dreadnaught’s hull with the reclining easy chair from his own cabin. After rendering the Akrohn’s laser weapons inert with an EMP, Pishman led the boarding party himself, going through the hole in the dreadnaught’s hull to bludgeon the Akrohn sailors to death with cricket bats. (Pishman’s crew had won the fleet cricket championship three years running.)
    Now Vice Admiral Ashcroft, like so many others before him, followed in Pishman’s footsteps, though without the cricket bats.
    “Move us in among them,” the admiral ordered. “They’ll have to risk shooting each other if they want to have at us.”
    “Another group of inbound missiles,” the first officer announced. “They still want to do it the easy way, but our counter-measures took care of them.” She peered at her screen, then added, “I see gun ports opening now on the lead ships. I think they’re taking the hint.”
    “Tell the pocket gunships to position themselves aft,” the admiral said. “I want them running interference for anything targeting our engines.” The battle hulk barreled into the swarm of frigates, and within a second the enemy was all around us. The ship shook with the impact of their guns.
    “Open our gun ports,” the admiral shouted. “Fire as they bear!”
    Six hundred gun ports opened across the hull of the battle hulk. The dumb projectiles were lead spheres about the size of bowling balls, shot with magnetic launchers. It was strictly line of sight, point and shoot. There were also elaborate hydraulic and compressed air systems to fire the guns, in case power to the mag launchers was cut.
    The battle hulk fired, lead shot blasting in every direction. An enemy frigate which had moved in close off the port side, attempting to target the bridge, was instantly shredded, the high-speed lead balls ripping through the hull as if it had been made of tissue paper. Another half dozen ships around it veered off