The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  Another alarm rang, this one for heavy gravity. The engines roared into life, and gravity swung Martinez’s couch to a new attitude. As he was pressed deep into his seat he heard Michi’s breathing grow labored as the gravities began to stand on her ribs with their leaden boots.

  Martinez felt his own breath burn as it fought its way through his constricting throat. His vac suit clamped gently on his arms and legs. The ship cracked and groaned as the gravities built. In succession, as the engine vibration reached the frequency of different elements of the ship, Martinez heard the metallic keen of one of his cage bars as it vibrated in sympathy with the ship, the song of a metal washer on his console, and the hum of one of the room’s recessed light brackets.

  Darkness began to flood his vision, and he clenched his jaw muscles to force blood to his brain. The darkness continued to advance: the last thing Martinez saw was a scarlet stripe on his tactical display, and then the stripe twisted, spun into a narrowing spiral, then faded like a dying spark into the night. In his headphones he heard a snarl as Michi Chen fought for consciousness.

  He thought he hadn’t actually passed out. Dimly he heard the call of the zero-gee warning, and then the sudden release as the engines cut. He gasped in relief as he floated free in his harness, and he saw a dim tunnel in front of him, a tunnel that slowly brightened and widened until he saw the control room before him, the other officers blinking and blowing their cheeks as they looked at the world reborn.

  Illustrious rotated through a brief weightless arc, and then an alarm rang and the engines cut in again, their ferocity tamed in a modest one-gee acceleration.

  Martinez checked his displays. Bleskoth and Light Squadron 5 were still coming on under fierce acceleration, ready to round Pelomatan in another eight or nine hours and overtake Chenforce somewhere on the far side of Okiray.

  There was a blinking light on his display, a reminder, and he looked at it to discover that missiles had destroyed Wormhole Station 1 while the squadron was thundering its way around Pelomatan. The crew hadn’t evacuated, either because they didn’t have a lifeboat or because they decided to remain in case Bleskroth had any stirring messages to send on to Naxas. He reported this fact to Michi.

  “Excellent,” she said, and yawned.

  Another set of lights flashed on Martinez’s display. These pointed to the fact that eight of what Severin had identified as enemy decoys, which had been preceding Chenforce on its loop around Protipanu, had just begun a course change and acceleration. They were going to cut inside the next planet, Okiray, and intercept Chenforce on the other side.

  “There they are, my lady,” Martinez said as he drew attention to this on the wall display. “These are the decoys that Bleskoth wants us to think are his real squadron. They’re maneuvering as if to bring on an engagement on the far side of Okiray, cutting right across our course, and conveniently staying out of range until that point.” More lights flashed. “Ah. And other sets of decoys are setting up to support them.” Admiration for Bleskoth began to shimmer in his mind. “It’s pretty clever, actually. He’s got another set of decoys between us and his real squadron, and if we feel any threat in our rear it’s going to be there, not his actual squadron.”

  It was an ingenious way of minimizing Bleskoth’s tactical disadvantages. To an omnipotent observer, sitting far above Protipanu’s north pole, it would look as if the Naxids were chasing the loyalists down and about to fly up their tailpipes.

  From Bleskoth’s perspective, however, he was flogging himself and his crew senseless in a desperate acceleration right into the muzzles of two hundred and ninety-six missile launchers. If he could keep those missile launchers firing at decoys right up until the critical moment, he had a chance of bringing off a victory.

  Martinez made a note to himself that if he ever found himself defending a star system in the future, he should remember these tactics. If, that is, he could be sure there was no one like Severin to give his game away.

  Hours passed. Martinez’s mind buzzed with tactics, trajectories, calculations, and occasional flashes of deep paranoia, suspicion that a Naxid, just off camera, had been holding a gun on Severin for their entire conversation. Martinez kept the computer busy calculating possible courses, accelerations, and intercepts. Michi gave the order for the whole squadron to open fire with their point-defense lasers on the decoys rushing toward them from Okiray. The range was impossibly long and the targets were doing some dodging, but perhaps it relieved the squadron’s weapons officers of any tension that might have built up during the long hours of waiting.

  With the lasers still firing, Michi announced time for supper. Command of Illustrious passed to Lieutenant Kazakov as Captain Fletcher joined Martinez and Michi at her table. White-gloved formality was preserved, but the custom of not discussing Fleet business at meals was not. Michi was determined to weigh her officers’ ideas.

  “I’m concerned with what to do after we pass Okiray,” she said. “Should we head straight for Wormhole Three, or swing around toward Olimandu and a complete circuit of the system? If we make a circuit we guarantee an engagement, but delay our exit from Protipanu by days. If we head for the wormhole, we give Bleskoth the opportunity to break off the fight, or just to pursue us at a distance.”

  Fletcher stirred his soup with a delicate motion of his spoon, releasing the fragrance of ginger and the fried onion that substituted for scallion. “I agree with you, my lady, that we must beat them here. A victory would be of enormous value to the government and to loyalist morale, particularly after the fall of the capital.”

  “How would the government find out we’d won?” Michi asked. “We’d have to send someone back to carry the news.”

  “A pinnace pilot could do the job,” Fletcher said. He turned to Martinez with a lofty look. “Perhaps we could send someone back in Daffodil,” he said. “Less discomfort for the pilot, and we don’t lose a pinnace that way.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend sending anyone back as long as there are still some of those hundred-odd Naxid decoys in the system,” Martinez said. “We don’t know how they’re programmed—any boat we send back would be defenseless against them.”

  “Not if we make a complete circuit of the system,” Fletcher continued. “We’d launch the boat after we pass Aratiri, and from there it’s a straight flight to Wormhole Two.”

  “With all respect to Lord Captain Fletcher,” he said, “I think we should go straight for the exit. Bleskoth isn’t putting himself through that homicidal acceleration just to let us fly away. He wants a fight. It’s not in his character to let us get away without one.”

  “His character?” Fletcher repeated. His voice was strangely dreamlike. “Are you personally acquainted with Captain Bleskoth?”

  “Not personally,” Martinez said, “but I’ve looked at his record. He’s young, he’s a yachting champion, he was captain of the lighumane team. He destroyed our fleet at Felarus very effectively. Everything points toward his being an aggressive, decisive commander. Just look at the way he’s coming after us.”

  Fletcher stirred his soup again. “I ask because I do know Bleskoth. He was a lieutenant in the new Quest when I had Swift. He wasn’t very aggressive then—he toed Renzak’s line pretty severely, and toadied the squadcom dreadfully, the way those Naxids do.”

  Martinez saw the edifice he’d built begin a slip toward an abyss, and he made an effort to snatch it back. “How did he do at the yachting?” he asked, rather hopelessly.

  “Middling, as I remember. I don’t really follow the yacht scores.”

  An idea struck Martinez. “Who was the squadron commander?”

  Fletcher tasted his soup before answering. “Fanagee.”

  “Ah.” Martinez turned to Lady Michi. “Fanagee passed over a good many officers in order to put Bleskoth in command at Felarus. I think he must have been part of the conspiracy even then.”

  Michi nodded. “That’s plausible.” She turned to Fletcher. “How well did you know Bleskoth?” />
  “I dealt with Captain Reznak regularly. Bleskoth was there fairly often, dancing attendance.”

  When Naxids danced attendance they really danced, Martinez knew; their little bobs and twitches in the company of a superior would seem funny if they weren’t so eerie. Please ignore this unworthy person, the body language seemed to say, but while you’re ignoring me, please take note of the excellent qualities of my cringing and the sincere tone of my supplication.

  Michi looked thoughtful. “We’ve got quite a lot of time yet before we need to make any decisions,” she said. “But if Bleskoth keeps up this pursuit, I’m inclined to Captain Martinez’s opinion.”

  Fletcher shrugged. “As you choose, my lady. But Captain Martinez’s approach allows for the possibility that the enemy may escape. Mine does not.”

  “Very true.” Michi savored her soup, clearly still considering her options. Martinez tasted his own, peeled bean curd off his teeth with his tongue, and then decided to bring forward another element of his plan.

  “Whatever scheme we use, we’ll be engaging on the far side of Okiray. We’re both going to pass through Okiray’s gravity well in order to help make the turn for the next objective. But what that means”—he called up the wall display and showed a graphic of the planet with the long, flat curves that represented potential trajectories—“is that Okiray is a choke point. However dispersed the Naxid squadron is, they’ll all have very limited choices concerning where to pass the planet. So my thought is to have a lot of missiles waiting for them right here, at the choke point.” He flashed a bright cursor onto the display, at the ships’ closest approach.

  Michi studied the display with interest. “They’ll see the missiles coming. They can blanket the area with their own countermissiles.”

  “My lady,” Martinez said, “they need not see the missiles coming. There are eleven decoy missiles between us and Bleskoth, all pretending to be an enemy squadron. If we launch our own missiles at them, we can provide a screen that will prevent the enemy from detecting another set of missile launches.”

  Fletcher looked as if he were about to object, but Martinez, who thought he knew what the objection would be, spoke on quickly. “Our missiles are going to have to burn a good long time, first to counter our own velocity and then begin an acceleration toward the intercept point. Normally that would give the enemy plenty of time to detect them, but in this case we can hide them behind the planet.”

  There was a moment of concentrated silence. “Tricky timing,” Fletcher observed. “Very tricky timing.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Martinez’s answer was heartfelt. “Very tricky timing indeed.”

  Fletcher pursed his lips and looked reflective. Michi narrowed her eyes in thought.

  “Perhaps we need to flesh out this plan with a little more detail,” she said.

  Two hours later, with the crew strapped in after their meals, the warning for zero gravity blasted out, and acceleration ceased. Chenforce rotated, and began a constant one-gravity deceleration in place of the acceleration they’d been maintaining to this point.

  Tricky timing indeed…Martinez wanted to make sure all the elements in the tactical display, all the graphics with their little arrows of velocity and direction, were going to be pointed in the right direction at the right time.

  Chenforce also fired a barrage of sixteen missiles toward the decoys coming toward them from Okiray. The squadron’s laser batteries hadn’t manage to hit a one of them, and Martinez wanted the Naxids to think that Chenforce’s deceleration was to gain a little time to study the oncoming force and to prepare to receive them in the event they turned out to be warships.

  After that, Michi stood the crew down from action stations and resumed normal rotation of watches. It would be hours yet before the missiles reached their targets.

  Martinez remained in his place, however, to see what happened when Bleskoth’s force detected the missile launch. The Naxids broke off their heavy acceleration and reduced to half a gee while they confirmed whether or not the missiles had been fired at them personally, or at something else. Precisely twelve minutes later, the acceleration resumed.

  The telling discovery, though, was that all other Naxid elements behaved in exactly the same way. When the light from the missile flares reached them they decelerated abruptly, waited exactly twelve minutes, and then resumed their previous behavior.

  Bleskoth had programmed them cleverly. If Severin hadn’t warned Martinez which of the Naxid formations were the actual warships, Martinez would have been hard-pressed to work out the answer for himself.

  Martinez left the Flag Officer Station for his cabin, where Alikhan helped him out of his vac suit and then poured his nightly cup of cocoa.

  “There’s a good feeling in the ship, my lord,” Alikhan reported. “The crew are convinced we’re going to win.”

  “I’ll try not to disappoint them,” Martinez said.

  Alikhan bowed slightly. “I’m sure you won’t, my lord.”

  Martinez showered off the polyamide scent of his suit seals, then got into bed for what turned out to be a lengthy struggle between sleep and his own imagination, each making ingenious sallies, excursions, and flanking attacks to thwart the other. Very little was resolved in those hours, except that Martinez realized that his goals had changed.

  He wasn’t simply going to win the battle. He’d known he could beat the Naxids for some time.

  The trick was to beat Bleskoth without compromising Michi Chen’s mission. And that meant that Chenforce could take no hits, lose no ships, suffer no casualties.

  At Hone-bar he had managed exactly that, but at Hone-bar he had an entire friendly squadron to produce, like a magician, from beneath his cloak. Here he had no such advantage.

  In the darkness of his cabin, he swore he would produce such a victory.

  And then, turning on the lights and lighting the tactical screen, he began to make the victory real.

  In five hours the oncoming Naxid decoys, unable to defend themselves except by acceleration and weaving, were destroyed by twelve of Chenforce’s sixteen missiles. The remainder continued to accelerate, taking separate, meandering courses to their destination, Wormhole Station 3. The relay station needed to be destroyed before Martinez unveiled his tactics around Okiray.

  Martinez watched the decoys destroyed on the ceiling display above his bed. Afterward, reasonably content, he managed a few hours’ sleep.

  After breakfast the Naxid squadron, preceded by the group of eleven decoys, made a screaming turn around Pelomatan and fell into the wake of Chenforce. They dropped their acceleration to two gravities while they considered the tactical implications for the loyalists’ deceleration, then increased to eight gravities, which would leave them merely miserable instead of unconscious, crippled, or dead.

  Very tricky timing…

  A quiet, eerie normality continued for the rest of the day. The crew weren’t called to action stations, not even when another missile barrage was fired at yet another group of decoys rounding Okiray. The Naxids paid more attention to the missile firings than Chenforce did: once again every enemy ship and decoy cut its acceleration for twelve minutes as the flares from the missiles reached them.

  Aboard Illustrious officers and enlisted were all employed as the service required, the normal cleaning and polishing and routine maintenance, and Captain Fletcher mustered the divisions responsible for suit-and-seal maintenance and for mechanical repair, and gave their workrooms a thorough inspection, awarding the usual demerits for untidiness and grime.

  The senior petty officers, somewhat more practical, devoted extra time to inspection and maintenance of the powerful damage-control robots, which, remotely controlled by operators in armored crew compartments, would effect repairs in the event Illustrious was damaged by enemy action. Martinez quietly had a few words with the division chiefs, and they gladly accepted Alikhan, Espinosa, and Ayutano as auxiliaries within their commands.

  Martinez figured he wouldn’t
be needing them to uphold his dignity in an actual battle.

  He found himself wandering the ship, with no goal in mind other than a reluctance to stay in any one place for very long. He had never been good at waiting, and the wandering helped keep him from checking the figures on his plan over and over again.

  The crew, he found, were remarkably quiet: it was as if they were listening, going about their duties but extruding invisible antennae that strained the aether for information from the officers, from each other, from the vacuum beyond the cruiser’s hull. Even after the captain ordered the spirit locker opened and the crew served a ration of liquor with their supper, the good cheer was subdued and the drinking thoughtful.

  Walking in his stiff-collared dress tunic to the squadcom’s suite, Martinez encountered Chandra Prasad, dressed with equal formality, on her way to a private supper with the captain. She braced at the salute, but then a broad smile broke out on her face and her stiff posture softened.

  “Three years ago,” she said, “who’d have guessed?”

  He looked at her. Apparently they were going to have the conversation that he had been doing his best to avoid.

  The moment awkward, he thought.

  Chandra shook her head, a disbelieving smile spreading across her face. “Golden Orb,” she said. “Hero of the empire. Marriage to the Chen heir…” Amusement flashed in her eyes. “The captain thinks you’re a freak of nature, you know that?”

  The feeling’s mutual, then, Martinez thought.

  “It’s a violation of Fletcher’s aesthetic to hear clever ideas spoken in your accent,” Chandra said. Then, as annoyance raced along his nerves, she reached out and patted his arm. “But he does believe you’re clever. He thinks it’s a shame you weren’t born to the right family.”