The Sundering def-2

by Walter Jon Williams

  He smiled. “Allow me to be the first to call you ‘my lord.’ Your lieutenancy is very well deserved. Have a pleasant return journey. End transmission.”

  He raised his head from his displays and saw Lady Michi smiling at him. “Why don’t you take a break?” she said. “I’ll let you know what the Naxids do around Aratiri.”

  “Very good, my lady. Thank you.”

  He unwebbed and got to his feet, and as soon as he began to move realized how badly he’d stiffened from his hours on the couch. He hobbled toward the door, and as he went he slaved the tactical screen to his sleeve display.

  No sense in being out of touch.

  Severin turned to his crew. “Would any of you care to be thesecond person to address me as ‘my lord?’” he asked.

  There followed a moment of profound stillness.

  “Right,” Severin said. “Let’s get on with the diagnostics, then.”

  Though Severin hoped the radiation hadn’t touched the crew in their little shelter, some stray gamma ray from the destruction of Station 2 might have damaged the lifeboat’s electronics, and so a check was clearly in order.

  As the diagnostic programs ticked along, Severin considered how his future had just changed. The Exploration Service was small, and he’d just made the leap to its elite—and furthermore, the rank carried even more weight now that the service had been militarized. He could now give orders to Fleet personnel—he could give orders to Fleetofficers, provided he outranked them, and as a full lieutenant he now outranked all sublieutenants and full lieutenants with less than—he checked the chronometer—two minutes’ seniority.

  He could give orders toPeers. And despite lieutenants being called “my lord” as a traditional courtesy, he wasn’t a lord, and wasn’t ever going to be.

  He wondered how the lords were going to like that.

  Maybe I won’t be invited to their lawn parties, he thought. Though he suspected the situation was going to be a little more complicated than that.

  But come to think of it, he had a more immediate situation at hand. He and his people had all been enlisted crew together, and their relations had been informal. Though Severin had been in charge, he rarely had to give an actual order: usually he’d simply point out that something needed to be done, and generally the thing was done without his having to pay more attention to it. When he’d come up with the idea of remaining in the Protipanu system to gather intelligence on the enemy, he’d consulted the crew first, to make certain they agreed—he hadn’t wanted to be stuck on an asteroid for months with people who didn’t want to be there.

  Now he was no longer an enlisted man. He was an officer, and even in the small Exploration Service there was a great gulf between officers and crew. He was a lord and a commoner at the same time.

  He didn’t even know how to think of himself. What was he, exactly?

  Severin realized it was growing warm in the balmy air of the control room. The frost that coated the instruments was beginning to melt, in the asteroid’s low gravity forming nearly perfect spheres on the displays. He shrugged out of his overcoat.

  “Engine diagnostics nominal,” the chief engineer reported.

  “No sense in hanging around, then,” Severin said. “Release grapples.”

  Electromagnetic grapples were released, and for the first time in five months the lifeboat was no longer moored to 302948745AF. Through the melting spears of frost on the view ports the Maw glowed red.

  “Pilot,” Severin said, “maneuver us clear of this rock.”

  A wild joy surged through him as the maneuvering jets fired and he felt the tug of inertia on his inner ear. Liberation at last.

  “Pilot,” Severin said, “take us to the wormhole at a constant one gravity.”

  There was a momentary flicker in the pilot’s eye. “Yes, my lord,” he said.

  Yes, my lord.Severin felt an unexpected thrill of pride and delight at the words.

  The engine fired, and Severin’s pleasure in his new status was doused in a rain of ice-cold water that flew off the displays and hit him in the face.

  Laughter broke from his lips. He wiped water from his eye.

  Welcome to the officer corps, he thought.

  Ships’ cuisine tended toward stews and casseroles when a battle or maneuver was at hand: the items could be kept in the oven for hours without significant harm. Perry had brought from Lady Michi’s kitchen a bowl of bison meat stewed with potatoes and vegetables, along with some hard bread that savored of the metal can in which it had been stored for, no doubt, a great many years.

  Martinez ate without interest, his eyes fixed on the tactical display on his office wall. The display was framed by several of those annoying winged children who all stared at it as if something astonishing and wonderful were being revealed. Whether the enemy squadron racing toward Aratiri qualified as astonishing and wonderful was yet uncertain.

  Engines flared on the display. Numerics flashed. Martinez pushed his bowl away and watched and tried to remind himself that he was watching an event that had occurred over an hour ago.

  The formation that Severin had identified as the Naxid squadron raced around Aratiri, and then steadied on the course for Pelomatan.

  A long, reflective sigh passed Martinez’s lips. It would be battle, then. Naxid missiles would be flying up Chenforce’s collective tailpipe, or they would unless he could work out a way to stop them.

  His sleeve display chimed. “Yes, lady squadcom?” he anticipated.

  Michi gazed out of the display without surprise. “You’ve seen it, then?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “We’ll still have hours and hours to make plans. I’d like you to join me for supper.”

  “I would be honored, my lady.” He looked at the screen and frowned. “According to Severin the enemy received two ships as reinforcements. I wish I knew which ships they were, it would make planning easier.”

  “Oh.” The squadron commander blinked. “I should have told you. They’re most likely the frigates the Naxids were building at Loatyn—average size, twelve or fourteen missile launchers.”

  Slow surprise rolled through Martinez like a tide. “They were building frigates at Loatyn?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. You weren’t authorized to receive that information unless”—she made an apologetic gesture—“Unless it became relevant.”

  Which stifled Martinez’s next question: how many other ships were the enemy building?

  “Very good,” Martinez said. “Thank you, my lady.”

  She ended the transmission and Martinez returned to his contemplation of the screen. What, he wondered, were those little painted children seeing that he wasn’t?

  The reinforcements were the smallest class of warship: that was something to be thankful for. The original eight were a light squadron from Felarus, frigates with a light cruiser serving as flagship. The total offensive punch for the enemy was just short of two hundred launchers, as against Chenforce with two hundred and ninety-six launchers. That was a comfortable margin in offensive power, but it was balanced somewhat by the fact that the enemy had a couple more maneuver elements, and it still didn’t mean the enemy couldn’t hurt the loyalists badly enough to seriously compromise Michi Chen’s mission.

  Or even kill all of Chenforce, if someone like Martinez made a serious enough mistake.

  The Naxid torches, he saw, remained at a high intensity. They were really piling on the gee forces. He ran some figures and discovered they were accelerating at a steady twelve-point-one gees.

  Everyone in the enemy squadron was probably unconscious by now. The Naxids didn’t take constant gees any better than Terrans.

  Martinez reached for his coffee and breathed in its fragrance while he considered the Naxids’ tactics. He decided that knowledge of the enemy commander would be useful, and so he called up the enemy Light Squadron 5 in his database and looked for the captain ofGallant, the light cruiser that had served as the flagship for the squ
adron before the mutiny.

  Gallantwas too small to carry a flag officer, so the whole squadron would be under its commander, a Captain Bleskoth. Bleskoth had graduated first in his class at the Festopath Academy, and was of a distinguished family—there had been a Lady Bleskoth in the Convocation, at least until she’d been thrown off the High City on the day of the rebellion. He had edited the academy journal and was captain of the lighumane team.

  After graduation he had risen quickly. While still a lieutenant he had commanded the frigateQuest for several months, its captain being absent on other duty. He’d been promoted to full captain only nine years after graduation. Almost all of his time had been spent on ship duty, the only exception being the three years he’d spent as aide to Fleet Commander Fanagee, one of the great lights of the rebellion who had led their forces at Magaria. He owned a yacht, theBlue Shift, and had won the Magaria Cup two years running. He was clearly on a fast course to higher command, and his appointment to commandGallant, and with it command of Light Squadron 5, had come over the heads of a number of other officers.

  Bleskoth had been a part of the rebellion even then, Martinez thought. Fanaghee had recruited him: the young Naxid had gone to Felarusknowing he was going to blow the other ships of the Third Fleet to bits with his antiproton beams.

  Martinez considered the enemy captain as he sipped his coffee. Bleskoth was young, decisive, and committed. He led a team at lighumane, a sport that combined long-term strategy with sudden, aggressive violence. He hadn’t hesitated at Felarus. He was a yachtsman, used to hard accelerations and last-minute, decisive actions.

  Martinez returned his coffee cup to its saucer. He had his answer.

  “They’re trying to convince us that they’re decoys,” Martinez said later, as he reported to Lady Michi at the Flag Officer Station. “They’re going to do a prolonged acceleration and deliberately take some casualties in order to convince us that they’re a badly managed set of decoys and that we don’t have to worry about them.”

  Lady Michi drummed her gloved fingers on the armrest of her couch. “That implies they want us to believe some particular set of decoys is in fact the real squadron. Which one?”

  Martinez frowned. “I haven’t worked that out yet.”

  “Have they worked out that Severin’s given their whole game away?”

  Martinez, standing by Michi’s cage and looking down at her, felt a touch of vanity at his answer. “I checked the timing. Everyone on their ships must have been unconscious when the light from Severin’s torch reached them. When they wake up they’d have to go back through the records and look for it.”

  “Unless,” Michi pointed out, “they have an automatic alarm set to alert them to any new ships in the system.”

  “Theyshould have set such an alarm, yes,” Martinez conceded. “But they weren’t expecting us, so in their surprise and haste they may not have.” Michi looked dubious, but Martinez had prepared his report thoroughly, and he restrained the impulse to tick off the points on his gloved fingers. “And even if theydo see Severin creeping off, they may not necessarily think he’s been in the system for five months—he may look like a pinnace pilot we sneaked into the system a few hours ahead of our arrival, and who may not have observed a great deal. And if theyhave set an alarm, it would make sense for the alarm to alert the flagship to cease acceleration to give the commander time to work out if the new arrival is a threat, and if that happens we’ll be able to see it in, oh, twenty minutes or so.” He had to stop and take a breath. “If theyare alerted butdon’t stop to evaluate their situation till the end of this long acceleration, then it will be too late, because they’ll be already committed to their strategy.”

  Amusement tweaked the corners of Michi’s lips. “You’ve certainly got your facts in order.”

  Martinez shambled into as decent an approximation of a salute as his vac suit permitted. “I do my humble best, my lady.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Humble? Really? You may take your seat, captain.”

  Martinez saw the two signals lieutenants try to suppress their smiles, and suppressed his own as he shuffled to his acceleration couch. A superior who appreciated his moments of conceit was a welcome change from commanders of the past.

  The couch rocked beneath his weight as Martinez lowered himself into it, the hoops of the acceleration cage vibrating with little metallic shivers. He reached into one of the seat compartments and pulled out a med injector, then held it against his carotid and touched the trigger. A carefully calculated cocktail of pharmaceuticals entered his system, one that would regulate his blood pressure during acceleration and strengthen his blood vessels, keeping their walls supple and whole against the danger of acceleration. Then Martinez put on his helmet, reached above his head, and pulled his displays to the locked position in front of him.

  “Reminder from Captain Fletcher, my lady,” said Li, from the comm board. “Twenty-six point five minutes till our acceleration around Pelomatan.”

  “Acknowledge,” said Michi. She turned to Martinez, then waited for him to finish webbing himself into his place before speaking.

  “Captain, you mentioned the advantages of having the Naxids think that we’re fooled by their decoys.”

  “Yes.” Martinez paused a moment to collect his thoughts. The decoys were self-guided missiles small enough to be fired from a warship’s missile tubes. The warships, with their resinous hulls, were not good radar reflectors, and it was possible to configure a small decoy missile to give off as large a radar signature as a warship. The decoys’ exhausts had also been modified to give off the broader tail of a larger vessel. In general a decoy was less convincing the closer it got to an observer, and the longer an observer had a chance to study it.

  “We have some decoys heading right for us,” Michi said.

  Martinez’s fingers brought up his tactical displays. “We should destroy them, of course. The question is how. If we knew they were decoys we’d let them get quite close. But if we suspect they might be real, we’d open fire early and use a lot of missiles.”

  “I don’t want to waste missiles,” Michi said. “Not when we’ve got a real battle coming on, followed by a long campaign.” Her fingers again drummed on the arm of her couch. “I’ll order the squadron to open fire with lasers on that oncoming group as soon as it’s even remotely possible. If we get lucky and hit one, that will prove to everyone’s satisfaction—including the Naxids‘—that we know the squadron are decoys and can treat them as such.”

  Martinez nodded. This was as reasonable a plan as any he’d been able to devise himself. “Very good, my lady,” he said.

  He watched the tactical displays for the next several minutes. The Naxids’ frenzied acceleration continued without cease, even after the light from Severin’s engine flare reached them. They had not set an alarm, at least not one that could be triggered by a small vessel such as the lifeboat.

  Martinez became aware of the sound of deep breathing in his earphones. He checked the comm board first, to make certain no one had broken into the channel he shared with the squadcom, and then looked up to see Michi Chen lying on her couch with her eyes closed, asleep with a pleasant smile on her lips.

  Sweet dreams, he thought. He felt a stab of envy for a commander who could relax so completely on the eve of battle.

  This was clearly not an ability he had acquired himself. If he snatched a few hours of sleep within the couple of days, he’d be very pleased. And he wasn’t even in charge of the squadron.

  Alarms clattered as the ship prepared for weightlessness, and Martinez saw Michi start awake. She looked at her displays, saw nothing had changed, and closed her eyes. Martinez heard the deep breathing start again as the ship went weightless and rotated about its sleeping center of gravity as it prepared for the burn around Pelomatan.

  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 hea
rd 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.

  Illustriousrotated 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.