Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  Illustrioussuffered the expected number of sprains and broken bones during the attack. No one was incapacitated. The Naxid strike had come to nothing, but the crew of the wormhole station observed the Orthodox Fleet’s reactions, and would have been able to deduce at least some of the icons on their screens that represented real ships and some that were decoys.

  Perhaps that had been the whole point.

  Martinez wrenched off his helmet to relieve himself of the scent of spent adrenaline that was souring his suit, then examined the spectra from the brief battle. There had been over two hundred enemy missiles, he saw. Most had missed completely. Only two squadrons had tried to starburst, his own and Sula’s.

  Something about the way Sula’s squadron maneuvered seemed familiar, and he subjected the trajectories to analysis. They looked random, but on closer inspection they were not-they seemed to be following the hull of a chaotic system.

  Somehow, Sula had taught the new tactics to her squadron, and presumably done so without Tork finding out.

  Clever girl,he thought. He wished he and Michi had been as clever.

  Martinez decided that he wasn’t going to leave Command until the campaign was over. He ordered Narbonne to bring him coffee and settled in for the approach to Bachun Wormhole 2, now marked on the display by the glowing dust that had been its station.

  The Orthodox Fleet was preceded through the wormhole by the now usual swarm of relativistic missiles equipped with laser trackers and radar, and then by hundreds of decoys. In order to avoid any theoretical host of missiles waiting for them on the other side, the fleet performed some last minute maneuvers to delay their entry into the Magaria system, a movement that only served to increase suspense.

  Martinez shifted to a virtual display before the fleet made its transit. The Bachun system filled his skull, the sun a white sphere, Bachun itself a tiny blue dot surrounded by a silver ring.

  The wormhole sped closer. Martinez strained his thoughts to sense whatever waited on the other side. Energy raced along his nerves. He could feel his pulse beat hard in his throat.

  He knew thatIllustrious had made its leap through the wormhole when the Bachun system vanished from his mind, replaced by complete darkness. His mind flailed without bearings, and then the sensors began picking up data from the scanning missiles that had been fired into the system ahead of time, and bit by bit Magaria’s system blossomed in his mind.

  When Fleet Commander Jarlath had led the Home Fleet to disaster at Magaria, the battle was influenced by two gas giants, Barbas and Rinconell, that lay between Magaria Wormhole 1 and Magaria itself. This tactical map no longer existed-Barbas and Rinconell had moved on in their orbits, and Magaria itself was on the far side of its primary. The Orthodox Fleet could skate past Magaria’s sun, Magarmah, and blast straight for the enemy-held world.

  Except of course for the enemy fleet, which now flashed onto Martinez’s display like a distant glittering string of fireworks. The Naxids had swung around Rinconell and were themselves heading for the primary.

  The two fleets were on a gently converging course, and if nothing intervened, they could begin hurling missiles at each other in about five days.

  The enemy commander had given Tork exactly the battle he was looking for.

  “Lord Captain,” said Warrant Officer Choy at the comm station, “we have a radio signal from the Naxid commander. It’s in the clear.”

  Martinez had to admire the enemy’s timing. The message came within three minutes of the Orthodox Fleet’s last squadron transiting into the Magaria system. The Naxids had known approximately when Tork would turn up, and had sent their message to arrive shortly afterward.

  “Let’s see it,” he said. He was still scanning the tactical display, just in case the message was intended to distract the loyalist command while some kind of skulduggery went on.

  The image of a Naxid appeared in a corner of Martinez’s display, and he enlarged it. The Naxid was elderly, with gray patches on his head where scales had fallen off. He wore the uniform of a Senior Fleet Commander, a uniform covered with softly glowing silver braid, and his eyes glimmered a dull scarlet in his flat head.

  “This is Fleet Commander Lord Dakzad.” The voice was imperious. “In the name of the Praxis, I demand the immediate unconditional surrender of the disloyal, anarchist, and pirate elements that have just entered the Magaria system. You may signal your surrender by launching all missiles into interstellar space. If you fail to meet this demand, you will be destroyed by fleet elements operating under my command. I await your immediate reply.”

  Martinez was already looking up Dakzad inIllustrious ‘s database. The enemy commander was even older than Tork, and had in fact retired some eight years earlier. Apparently, the crisis had dragged him back into harness, to replace the hapless commander who had fled Zanshaa after the fall of the High City.

  A text message from Chandra appeared in another corner of his display.

  “I don’t think Tork is going to like having his own surrender message preempted.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to like being called a pirate,” Martinez answered.

  He was right. Tork’s reply-also sent in the clear, so his own subordinates could admire it-denounced the rebels as traitors before demanding their surrender. It included a video of Lady Kushdai surrendering all rebel forces to Sula, as a reminder to Dakzad that by fighting he was violating the orders of his own superiors as well as that of the government and Fleet.

  Dakzad replied with a lengthy justification of the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis, a denunciation of piracy as demonstrated by the destruction of wormhole stations and the Bai-do ring, and further demands for submission.

  Tork’s response was even more elaborate, with historical references to the Shaa’s first Proclamation of the Praxis on Zanshaa, and repeated his original demand for capitulation.

  Martinez supped at his own table that night and slept in his own bed. He didn’t think there would be anything interesting happening as long as the opposing commanders were arguing ideology.

  Though there was no fighting beyond the verbal sort, the days following the transit to Magaria were not entirely tranquil. There were many conferences with Michi and her staff, with Martinez’s officers, with sensor operators, and with Tork’s staff and analysts in other squadrons. Enemy formations were endlessly examined to find whether they were decoys or enemy warships. At one point Chandra put forward the startling possibility that they wereall decoys, and that the real enemy were elsewhere, hiding behind Magaria’s sun perhaps, racing toward them behind a pack of a few thousand missiles.

  Fortunately, subsequent evidence disproved this theory. Sensor missiles probed the area behind Magaria’s sun and found nothing but Magaria itself. Careful reading of laser ranging spectra suggested that there was a difference in size between at least some of the Naxid blips and others, indicating a mix of warships and decoys.

  The enemy they saw before them was real.

  The two great fleets gradually approached each other. The Orthodox Fleet remained on course to whip around Magaria’s sun en route for the planet. The course of the Naxid fleet would intersect that of the loyalists right there, at Magarmah.

  Which, Martinez reflected, was an interesting tactical problem. The two fleets would hammer at each other for several hours, and then have to form into a queue for the slingshot around the sun. Given the considerable distance between ships even in the same formation, there was no real danger of collision, but the ships of the two fleets would be intermingled in that long queue, and presumably still be hurling missiles at each other.

  And after their passage around the sun, the two fleets would have to separate somehow, all the while engaged at close range.

  Tork showed he wasn’t totally unaware of these problems, and ordered his fleet into an acceleration to arrive at the intersection point ahead of the Naxids. He was confident he possessed superior numbers, and so ordered his lead squadrons to envelop the enem
y as they came up. The Naxids increased acceleration to prevent this. This went on for the better part of a day, the crews crushed into increasingly flatter shapes, until Tork gave up and grudgingly ordered his rear squadrons to double on the enemy instead.

  The problem of the intersection was still present. Martinez hoped by the time anyone neared the intersection point, the loyalists would already have won the battle.

  Tork thought ahead, and took no chances. He ordered all ships, after passing Magarmah, to form on the same bearing for the passage to Magaria. Tork’s bearing might be the same one the Naxid commander would choose. There was no way of knowing.

  “This shows that a textbook battle is only possible if both sides cooperate,” Martinez told Michi over dinner. “The Naxids knew approximately when Tork would enter the system, and they set up to receive him exactly the way the tactical manuals said to do it. If they’d doneanything else, we’d all be improvising.”

  Michi gave a wry smile. “All Tork’s maneuvers were practice for the real thing after all.”

  “In order to fight his kind of battle,” Martinez said, “Tork had to find a Naxid commander who was even older and more set in his ways than he is.” He thought of the two long lines of ships sailing toward their rendezvous, all more or less in the same plane.

  Neither commander seemed interested in using the third dimension that was available to them. If he were in charge, Martinez thought, he would have stacked his squadrons in that third dimension and descended on the enemy like a giant flyswatter. As it was, Tork’s superior force would drag into battle slowly, one element at a time. It was almost as if he was deliberately dissipating his advantage.

  When battle was within three hours, Martinez turned out in full dress, complete with white gloves and the Orb, and gaveIllustrious a complete inspection. Each division cheered him as he arrived. He found nothing out of place. The division heads’ 77-12s were all up to date, but he checked a few of the items for form’s sake, knowing he would find no discrepancy.

  “Carry on,” he said, unable to think of anything more inspiring, and the crew cheeredthat too.

  He returned to his cabin and Alikhan helped him out of his uniform and into coveralls and his vac suit. He marched to his station and entered.

  “I am in Command,” he said.

  “The captain is in Command,” agreed Husayn. Martinez helped the lieutenant out of the command couch, then lowered himself into it. Husayn took his place at the weapons board. Martinez put on his helmet, locking himself in with the scent of his body and suit seals.

  “Lord Captain,” Pan said from the sensor board, “I’m detecting missile flares from the lead enemy ships.”

  The Second Battle of Magaria had begun.

  Cruiser Squadron 9 was astern of the Supreme Commander’s cruiser division, which was square in the middle of the fleet, and neither would be involved in the fighting for some time yet. Martinez had little to do but watch Sula’s engagement at the head of the long column, and watch it with growing impatience. Apparently the lead squadrons of each fleet were to be allowed to have their battle, and then the next squadrons in line, and the next. Tork had the advantage in numbers, Martinez thought, why didn’t he press the engagement? He should order the entire Orthodox Fleet to close with the enemy all along the line and hammer them till they were nothing but dust glowing on the solar wind.

  Apparently this hadn’t occurred to Tork, or if it had, he’d decided against it. Perhaps he was giving the fates every chance to remove Caroline Sula from his life.

  Martinez found his blood burning with anger on Sula’s behalf. He told himself that he would have been equally angry if it hadn’t been Sula, that he was outraged at the waste of loyal officers and crew.

  In the display, he saw that Sula ordered counterfire to intercept the enemy missiles, and that otherwise she did nothing. He understood her tactics. Past experience showed that long-range skirmishing was unlikely to produce results, and Sula clearly wasn’t about to waste missiles when the odds didn’t favor her.

  The Naxids, it appeared, hadn’t learned this lesson, and fired several more salvos before Sula replied with one of her own. Explosions moved closer to Light Squadron 17, providing a radio-opaque cloud behind which other missiles could advance. Fury and frustration raged in Martinez’s veins. He punched the key that would connect him to the Flag Officer Station.

  “May I speak with Lady Michi, please?” he asked when Coen answered.

  In answer, Michi’s image appeared on his display. “Yes, Lord Captain?”

  “Can we prod Tork into some action?” Martinez demanded. “Do we have to let Sula fight on her own?”

  She looked at him with impatience. “Bywe you meanme, I suppose. You should have an idea by now of how the Supreme Commander responds to prodding.”

  “Ask for permission to engage the enemy more closely.”

  Michi’s tone turned frosty. “Not yet, Captain.”

  Martinez clenched his teeth. “Yes, my lady,” he said, and ended the transmission.

  He gazed at the display with burning anger. Sula was on her own.

  Sula watched the Naxid squadron’s latest volley of missiles get blown into perfect spheres of blazing plasma by Squadron 17’s counterfire. She sat in her vac suit on her couch in Command, a gray, featureless, metal-walled space that had replaced the more sumptuous room flashed into ruin by a charge of antiprotons at Harzapid. Her neck itched where she’d applied a med patch-she felt a spasm of fear whenever she saw a carotid injector, and she refused to use them.

  Her helmet sat in its mesh bag attached to her couch. She hated the damned helmet and the suffocating sensation she got while wearing it; as the captain, she didn’t have to wear it if she didn’t want to.

  She would have preferred not to have worn the vac suit either, but supposed she might need its sanitary arrangements by the end of the day.

  “Another salvo incoming, my lady,” said Maitland.

  “Track and destroy, Weapons,” Sula said.

  “Yes, my lady! Track and destroy!”

  Giove’s excited response rang off the metal walls. Sula wished Giove would calm down. She would have preferred a little peace in which to contemplate her options.

  Tork had put her here to die, that was clear enough. The rest of the fleet wasn’t maneuvering to her support, and Squadron 17 would engage an enemy of equal force on terms that implied mutual annihilation. The woman called Caroline Sula was intended to have a hero’s death within the next hour or two.

  The question that most interested Sula was whether Tork, in his simple way, might not have a point. The first act of her life ended with her wresting an entire planet from the claws of the Naxids and reigning over it as an absolute despot. Whatever any hypothetical second or third acts might contain, they could hardly equal the first.

  Perhaps she had overstayed her welcome in the realm of existence. Perhaps the fittest trajectory of her life would be that of a meteor, blazing a brilliant trail in the heavens before annihilation.

  She couldn’t construct a rationale that justified her own existence, or that of anyone else either. Existence was too improbable to come supplied with a justification, like a book of instructions supplied with a complicated bit of equipment.

  She couldn’t work out why she was alive, and it was therefore difficult to work up a reason why she shouldn’t die.

  “Comm,” she said. “Message to Squadron: fire in staggered salvo, fifteen seconds apart.”

  On the other hand, she thought, there was her pride to consider. The pride that she had instilled in her well-drilled squadron. The pride that didn’t want her effort, and those of others, to go to waste. The pride that rejoiced in her superiority over the Naxids. The pride that wanted Ghost Tactics to triumph over the enemy. The pride that didn’t want to hand Tork a cheap victory.

  Vainglory, she wondered, or Death?

  It was pride that won the argument.

  “Comm,” she said, “message to Squadron.
Starburst Pattern Two. Execute at twelve eleven. Pilot, feed Pattern Two into the nav computer.”

  A few minutes later the nav computer cut the engines, and Sula’s heart lifted as the ship swung in zero gravity to its new heading, the first in the sequence of bobs and weaves dictated by Pattern 2’s chaos mathematics.

  When Tork’s furious message came, she took her time about answering.

  “My lord!” This from Bevins, who was at the sensor station with Pan. “Starburst! Squadron Seventeen has starburst!”

  Martinez enlarged the tactical display and saw Sula’s command separating from one another, engines firing at heavy accelerations. A gust of laughter burst from his throat.

  Sula was surprising them all. Defying the Supreme Commander and her own sentence of death, and setting the rest of the Orthodox Fleet an example.

  Admiration kindled a flame in Martinez’s breast.O Lovely! O Brilliant! Sula’s maneuver made him want to chant poetry.

  He sent a text message to Chandra.Why can’t wedo that?

  Chandra didn’t reply. Perhaps she was making the argument on her own.

  Martinez wasn’t the only one sending messages, becauseIllustrious intercepted a message from Sula to Tork. It was a reply to a message thatIllustrious hadn’t received, since Tork’s message was sent by communications laser to Sula at the van of his fleet, andIllustrious was not in position to intercept the tight beam. But sinceIllustrious was astern of the flagship, it was in a position to catch the reply.

  “Confidenceto Flag. Unable to comply.” That was the entire message.

  Martinez was helpless with adoration. He was even more delighted whenIllustrious intercepted the answer to Tork’s following message.

  “Confidenceto Flag. Unable to comply.” There it wasagain.

  His joy faded, and a cold chill ran up Martinez’s spine as he considered what Tork might do next. He could order each individual ship back into place, bypassing Sula altogether-or he could simply order one of Sula’s subordinates to slit her throat and take command.