The hunt was on.
Martinez watched the radiation counter as the point-defense lasers of Squadron 31 flashed a dozen attacking missiles into a brilliant random pattern of overlapping spheres, like a spatter trail flung by a careless brush.
Thus far, he thought, the squadron had been lucky. Despite the vast quantity of missiles thrown at them, the enemy had been kept at bay. The Martinez Method was keeping the ships of the squadron within supporting distance of each other, and the overlapping fields of defensive fire were walling off the enemy attack.
So far, anyway.
The missile batteries were firing as fast as they could be reloaded. The sensor and weapons techs who shared Auxiliary Command with him, crew who normally sat out combat unless their cohorts in Command were taken out of action, were fully occupied tracking enemy attacks and plotting responses. Forty percent ofCourage ‘s missiles had already been fired, mostly as countermissiles. If this expenditure continued, there could be dire consequences. Martinez found it ludicrous that he might find himself in a superior tactical position, about to administer the coup de grace to the last Naxid formation, and find himself with empty magazines.
Another flight of missiles soared in. Point-defense weapons flashed in answer. Another part of the starscape burned with plasma light. A few missiles, dodging and corkscrewing, survived, but were retargeted and destroyed within seconds.
Courage,already burning for the enemy under heavy acceleration, gave a swerve to dodge any theoretical Naxid beam weapons. The movement felt like a fist in Martinez’s side.
The converted transports huffed out another vast barrage, like overripe weeds hurling a cloud of pollen onto the breeze.
Surely, he thought, they couldn’t keep this up. Surely they’d run out of missiles before long.
Surely.
Anger flashed through him.
“Message to Squadron,” he told Falana. “Each ship to fire one battery at converted transports.Vigilant to order a pinnace to accompany.”
It was time the weaponers aboard those Naxid transports had something to do other than plot offensive action. And the pinnace would be in a position to direct further barrages.
Couragegave another swerve. Martinez’s teeth clacked together.
“First blood to us, my lord.” Gunderson’s mellow baritone was filled with satisfaction.
Martinez looked at the display and saw a sphere of plasma where an enemy ship had once been. Sula’s Squadron 17 had made their first kill.
The enemy’s defenses were beginning to break down. All three warship squadrons had starburst, and their fields of defensive fire weren’t nearly as efficient as those of Chenforce.
Martinez plotted a missile strike and ordered it launched. The missiles would dodge through a series of plasma bursts to strike the enemy from an unexpected direction. He didn’t want Sula’s squadron to get all the glory.
He looked at the tracks of his missiles looping around the enemy warships to target the converted transports. A colossal number of enemy missiles were coming in the other direction. He clenched his teeth.
Courageceased its acceleration, and Martinez’s ligaments shrieked with relief as he floated in his webbing. His acceleration cage made a shimmering noise as the frigate reoriented, and then the engines flamed on again and he was punched into his couch.
Another of the random-seeming maneuvers dictated by Sula’s chaos mathematics. The constant dodging and shifting probably looked deeply sinister to the Naxids, the application of some principle they hadn’t been able to decipher.
The enemy were dodging as best they could, but without the relentless purposefulness dictated by Sula’s formula. The only Naxids who hadn’t starburst yet were the converted transports, which were still moving forward in their inexorable way.
Martinez began to wonder if theycould dodge. The transports were so huge that they couldn’t dart about like a frigate, they carried far too much inertia.
Which meant-theoretically-the transports were vulnerable to beam weapons.
The most formidable beam weapons in Chenforce were the antiproton cannons in Michi’s heavy squadron. He couldn’t command them, and they were already heavily committed in knocking down enemy missiles.
“Message to Flag,” he told Falana. “Transports are not maneuverable. Suggest hitting them with antiproton weapons. End message.”
The second kill went to Michi’s heavy squadron, an enemy ship erupting in a furious burst of angry antimatter. Martinez clenched his teeth and plotted another complex missile attack.
Parts of his display fuzzed out as the squadron flew through an expanding cloud of cooling plasma. He couldn’t tell where all the enemy missiles were. His heart boomed inside the confined space of his helmet, and his gloved hands dug into the padded armrests of the couch.
He launched his own missiles into the murk. He launched another barrage against the transports. He launched countermissiles against an enemy barrage that he could barely detect in all the fuzz. He launched countermissiles against a barrage he couldn’t see but somehow knew was there.
The enveloping plasma cooled and thinned, and his tactical display glowed with the glorious sight of his own missile striking home.
He watched as three enemy ships were engulfed in silent flame. His heart shrieked with triumphant joy and he raised a clenched fist against the gravities that were pinning him to the couch.
“Three for us!”he shouted.“Three for us!”
Hardly immortal words, but at least they had the virtue of sincerity.
He’d just incinerated a neat thirty percent of the enemy squadron facing him, and that would make killing the rest a lot easier.
And he’d scored higher than Sula and Michi, who had only picked off one apiece.
Martinez plotted another series of strikes and sent them on their way.
Things were improving.
Two.Squadron 17’s missiles had found a second Naxid warship, now a bright, hot expanding sphere of plasma as its supplies of antimatter fuel and munitions went up.
Lovely, Sula thought. Another star.
She sought through the radio murk for another target. Orders flashed to missile batteries. Missiles leapt off the rails.
It wasn’t enough to shoot missiles at an enemy, she thought. You had to shoot at the enemy’s neighbors as well, so missile defenses couldn’t combine to aid your real target. You had to keep every defense laser busy-morethan busy. Overwhelmed.
Her attack raced away.
She was busy trying to coordinate the defenses against another massive strike by the converted transports when an enormous plasma bloom flared on her virtual display.
“What’sthat?” she said aloud, and refocused her attention.
One of the giant transports had just blown up. Massive amounts of antimatter had detonated, and the hot expanding plasma sphere was engulfing other ships.
Sula wondered how it had happened. There was no indication that any loyalist missile had even gotten close.
There were no secondary explosions, so it appeared that none of the other transports were destroyed. But flying through a furious bombardment of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and blazing plasma couldn’t have done the other squadron elements any good.
The huge converted ships stopped firing. They began to lumber through a series of evasive maneuvers.
Something had them frightened. Sula sent a pack of missiles after them to keep up the scare.
More missiles splashed white fire against the night. An enemy warship flared and died, leaving two other ships isolated.
She picked them as her next targets and began to plot her attack.
Michi must have followed his suggestion, Martinez thought. One of her antiproton beams must have destroyed one of the converted transports. None of the missiles had gotten close, but a lucky hit with the antiprotons must have hit an antimatter store.
Or an even luckier shot had hit a missile just as it was being launched, and set it and every other
missile off within a fraction of a second.
He fired a salvo of missiles at the big Naxid ships, just to see if he could keep their luck consistent.
He picked one of the enemy warships in the opposing squadron and ordered it to become the center of Squadron 31’s attention. The entire squadron began moving toward the target, firing missiles as it went, and moving within the larger vector to the purposeful bob and weave of the Martinez Method.
Martinez was nudging the enemy. The Naxids had starburst and their response was uncoordinated, and he wanted to drive them farther apart and make them even less coordinated. But he couldn’t simply fly into the middle of the Naxids, because then they could throw missiles at him from all sides. He could put his head only so far into the noose. What he had to do was threaten in one direction and then another, wedge the Naxids apart without committing himself in any one direction.
It was a delicate and subtle task. If only the ammunition supply held out.
He scanned the display. Elsewhere in the battle, the last huge barrage of the converted transports was being dealt with by coordinated antimissile defenses. Michi and her opposite number were involved in a furious duel, and it looked as if Michi was gaining the upper hand.
Sula’s squadron, he saw, was threading its way through plasma bursts, striving always to fly through the oldest, coolest bursts in order to keep from completely blinding itself. Sula was in the process of isolating a pair of enemy ships and destroying them.
He looked at the enemy and saw what was probably an unintended pattern in the squadron that faced Sula. If she moved now, if she movedimmediately with her entire squadron, she could detach a second pair of enemy while still keeping the first pair isolated.
Martinez considered sending Sula a message to that effect. He could imagine her scorning the message on its arrival. He could imagine the contemptuous response that would burn across the intervening space between their ships.
But she had to do itnow. It would make a difference.
He was stumbling through his message, which he planned to illustrate with a frozen three-dimensional image of the battle with some hand-drawn arrows added, when he saw that Sula was beginning the movement on her own. She’d seen the opening.
“Cancel that message, Lieutenant Falana,” Martinez said.
Sula was doing just fine on her own.
As usual.
His own wedging was working. He isolated one enemy ship and hammered it till it vanished in a flash of plasma fire. He began moving to drive another wedge between a pair of enemy and the rest of the Naxid squadron.
At that point the squadron of converted transports fired again. The two Naxids that had been engulfed in the plasma storm from the destroyed ship failed to fire, but the remaining barrage was formidable enough, and it occupied much of his attention for the next several minutes.
When he next had the opportunity to view the battle, he saw that Sula and her entire squadron had vanished into a colossal fireball.
She had miscalculated. She had killed two of the enemy and then shifted the squadron’s center of mass toward a part of the oncoming plasma wall that she expected to cool and thin by the time she arrived, giving them all better sight lines of the enemy. But a salvo of Naxid missiles came racing out of a hotter part of the plasma wall and was hit by counterfire right in her path. She was flying toward a blazing hot, opaque, expanding sphere, and before long, Sula knew that she and the rest of the squadron would be blind.
Sensors from her own squadron showed nothing but a flaming hot wall in her path, butConfidence was still receiving sensor feeds from the other squadrons and the pinnaces. The feeds showed no threat, but any perspective on the engagement had its blind spots, and in any case the situation could change quickly.
Sula felt a growing obsession about the blind spots. She fired a volley of missiles into the hot spot anyway, in hope they would fly through the hash and find and locate any enemy missiles that might be about to plunge into the cloud from the other side.
Right. Fat chance.
For a moment she considered a starburst-areal starburst, each ship clawing for maximum distance from the others. That would reduce the chance of them all being hammered while cloaked in the plasma sphere, but on emerging they would have surrendered any advantages that Ghost Tactics gave them.
No, she thought. Just try to get to the other sidefast.
She ordered all ships to blast through the plasma sphere at acceleration of ten gravities. The acceleration began as soon as they entered the plasma.Confidence groaned as the weight came on. An invisible hand began to close on her throat. She watched the radiation readings rise, and the hull temperature with them.
Darkness encroached on her vision. She felt the pillow press over her face. Perhaps she cried out.
An instant later the darkness seemed to fade. She was floating in her harness. A persistent, irritating tone sounded in her headphones. She tasted iron on her tongue.
“I have command of the ship,” said a voice. Belatedly she recognized it as that of First Lieutenant Haz.
Someone touched her arm, her throat. She flailed at him.
“Are you all right, my lady?” There was an edge of panic in Ikuhara’s voice.
Sula pushed him away. She heard the twanging sound as he rebounded off the bars of her acceleration cage.
“Display!” she called. “Cancel virtual!”
The limitless space of the virtual display was replaced by the soft lights and close confines of Command. Ikuhara, clumsy in his vac suit, floated over her couch. His face was a mirror of concern mingled with a touch of fear.
Something dark floated in the air between them, something round and shiny like little marbles.
“What the hell’s going on?” Sula demanded.
“Acceleration canceled,” Ikuhara said. “Health risk to an officer.”
At quarters the state of the crew was constantly monitored by detectors in their sensor caps. Any threat to the health of the crew-any cerebral hemorrhage, blood pressure spike, or heart malfunction-was monitored, and action taken in accordance with a preset program. If enlisted crew stroked out during a battle or even an exercise, it was usually the pulpy’s hard luck; but a threat to an officer could shut down the engines.
“Who was it?” Sula said. She’d have him off her ship the second they could shuttle the invalid away to a nice safe desk job, preferably on the most distant planet available.
Ikuhara’s expression suggested that he was suffering some gastroenteric malady. “You, my lady,” he said. “Your blood pressure was extremely high and-”
“Right,” Sula said. “Get back on your couch, I’m fine now.”
“You have a nosebleed, my lady.”
She put a hand to her nose and felt the wet. A blob of blood detached itself from her nose and joined the others in the air, a formation of perfect spheres. She could taste the blood running-floating-down the back of her throat.
“I’ll deal with it,” she said. She looked at the displays before her. “Haz!” she cried.
“Yes, my lady.”
“Light the engines! What is thisinsanity about cutting the engines completely during a battle, for all’s sake?”
She groped for a tissue in the necessity bag webbed to the couch.
“It was programmed, my lady.”
“Engine startup in fifteen, my lady,” said Engineer First Class Markios.
“Accelerate at three gravities.” Sula jammed a tissue to her nose.
“I am in command, my lady,” Haz said in her ear. “Your blood pressure is still-”
“It isn’t, and you’re not,” Sula said. “Three gravities, Engines.”
“Yes, my lady,” Markios said smoothly.
She enlarged her biomonitor display and saw that her blood pressure was returning rapidly to something like normal. Her heart rattled in her chest with fear, but at least it wasn’t in the process of giving her a stroke.
This had happened to her once before, at
First Magaria. There might, she thought with a burning resentment, be something wrong with her heart or its wiring that would make it impossible for her to stand high gees.
Make it impossible to do her job.
The engines caught and snarled. The droplets of blood in the air fell like hail, and spattered the breast of her vac suit.
Gravities swung Sula’s couch through a series of decreasing arcs. Her blood pressure elevated slightly with the gravities, but within acceptable limits.
Other lights flashed on her display. She enlarged them and saw a big radiation spike, then another.
Somewhere in the radio darkness of the plasma bubble, missiles were finding targets.
Martinez held his breath. Only six of the nine ships belonging to Light Squadron 17 had flown out of the great furnace of plasma and sundered matter that had concealed them for several nerve-wringing minutes. A glance at the shifting sphere dictated by the Martinez Method showed gaps in the formation. Sula seemed to have lost a third of her command.
He wondered if Sula had been lost along with them.
And then a seventh ship flew out of the great dissipating bubble. The others regrouped, adjusting their formation to their new number, arranging around the late arrival like a flock of angry geese around an injured comrade.
Martinez sent out orders. He had isolated a pair of enemy and had them ready for the kill, but now he ordered Squadron 31 to shift in the other direction, toward Sula’s squadron and the enemy they were engaging. He wasn’t going to let the Naxids take advantage of the disorder in her squadron.
The Naxids seemed startled by this unexpected movement, and scattered before his advance. The two ships he’d cut off were too isolated to take advantage of their sudden reprieve.
Squadron 17, once it had resumed its formation, made a similar movement, toward him. It had likewise cut off a pair of enemy, and likewise ignored them.
Martinez and Sula now found themselves with scattered enemy between their two fires. The two loyalist squadrons moved, dodged, fired. It was as if, without communicating with one another, they were moving in accordance with some higher version of Sula’s formula, one that encompassed the whole battle.
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