Engaging the Enemy

by Elizabeth Moon

  The other three looked at her with an expression that made her uneasy. “Your people worry about digestion over business ethics?” Battersea said finally.

  “Not instead of, but in addition to,” Ky said. She could tell they were not convinced.

  “Simon,” Andreson said, this time without looking at him. He shrugged. Ky realized that he reminded her somewhat of Rafe, but without Rafe’s hard edge of experience.

  A constrained silence lasted until their food orders arrived.

  _______

  “What did you think?” Martin asked when Ky got back to the ship.

  “I don’t know,” Ky said. She had tried to sort out her thoughts, but they were still jumbled. “They’ve worked together before—that’s a plus. They have more experience than I have, that’s certain.”

  “Is it the right kind of experience?”

  “I don’t know.” Ky ran her hands through her hair. “I certainly hope so, because there’s no chance the Bissonet contingent will accept anyone else as commander. The problem is, we don’t have anyone else who even claims to have experience in multiship engagements. My instructors said the difference between one-on-one and small-group engagements was greater than that between small groups and large groups until you got up to dozens. I don’t see how I can put my theoretical knowledge up against her practical experience, at least not until I see how she organizes training. You might prefer it, but the other Bissonet captains won’t, and I haven’t met the others.” That was another concern: she wished she had a way of meeting the other captains before the joint conference, but Andreson would resent that, she was sure. “I’ll be meeting with Andreson—that’s their senior captain—on her ship tomorrow morning. I’ll find out more there, meet the other captains. When I get back, I’ll meet with our senior staff.”

  “What are your criteria, Captain?”

  That was the problem. She didn’t know how to assess the competence of someone that much older, someone who claimed experience she didn’t have. “It has to make sense,” she said finally. “If she wants to rush into a fight without training us as a unit—that’s not going to work. I want to see a plan, first for training and then for engagement.”

  _______

  Andreson had a plan, and laid it out for them. They would leave Corson’s Roads and make two jumps to an uninhabited system—she had the coordinates—where they would train in maneuvers and gunnery until she was satisfied that they could fight an engagement together.

  “How long do you think that will take?” Isak Zavala of Ciudad, captain of Dona Florenzia, asked. His wavy red hair was tied back with a black ribbon; his uniform had a high collar, and he sat very stiffly upright. Ky had noticed his formality of speech, and his distinct accent.

  “I can’t tell until I’ve assessed your ship handling and your weapons crews’ efficiency,” Andreson said. “We can’t rush into combat untrained.” This made sense, but something in her tone suggested that she resented Zavala’s question.

  Zavala’s lips tightened, but he said no more. Ernst Muirtagh, captain of Belcanto from Urgayin, held up his hand, and Andreson nodded at him.

  “What I want to know is how we’re financin’ this,” he said. “Who’s payin’ for the munitions, the fuel, the rest of the supplies? If we’re supposed to support ourselves, we’ll need to spend time tradin’…or gettin’ some juicy prizes.” He said that last with a knowing leer at the others.

  “It is not about profit,” Zavala said. “It is altogether—”

  Muirtagh interrupted. “Everything’s about profit, one way or t’other. And I sure don’t have the resources to fight a war without I get some support.”

  “Gentlemen,” Andreson said, in a tone that made them both stop short. “It is a reasonable question. We hope in time that planetary governments that feel themselves under threat will contribute to our support, but it’s true that at present this is a drain on us personally. If we can free Bissonet, I know our government will reward us—”

  “ ’Snot gonna happen with just us seven, now is it?” Muirtagh said. He lounged back in his chair. “I can’t afford to run my ship on fine words, not for very long. I imagine that’s what Zavala was thinkin’, too, when he asked how long the trainin’ would take.”

  “It was not,” Zavala said hotly. “I was merely—”

  Muirtagh waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, unless one of us is independently wealthy on the grand scale”—he glanced around at their faces—“we have to have some way to support ourselves. So say we defeat some little group of pirates—how do we divide the prize money?”

  “There are more important considerations—” Andreson began, but Muirtagh interrupted.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not if we want to keep ourselves afloat. I don’t see it does any harm to talk about it, and I propose we divide anything we get into nine shares. One for each of us, an extra for our leader here, and one to be given to the ship that’s done the most in that engagement, by majority vote.”

  Andreson had flushed, but as he gave his proposal, she calmed again. “That seems reasonable to me,” she said.

  “I thought it would, bein’ as you’ll be our leader,” Muirtagh said with a grin.

  “I shall reserve my extra share for unexpected expenses affecting the entire group,” Andreson said. “I am not in this for profit any more than Captain Zavala is. My homeland is captive.”

  Muirtagh nodded. “That’s fine with me. Whatever. Now…where are we going to do this training?”

  “Here.” Andreson passed around a navigation chip. “The coordinates are on it. It’s a system I happen to know about—uninhabited, no ansibles, nothing to draw attention to it. Two jumps away. We’ll rendezvous by the largest planet—the data are on your chip.”

  “So—when do we start?”

  “We’ll start training as soon as we’re all there,” Andreson said. “We leave here when Captain Vatta has installed our new communications system.”

  Everyone turned to look at Ky.

  “What communications system?” asked Zavala.

  Ky wished Andreson had waited to tell them—waited even until they were at the training site to tell them. But it made more sense here, where it would be much easier to move the ansibles from her ship to theirs. “Shipboard ansibles,” she said. “The pirates have them; Osman Vatta had them. I offered to give you each one.”

  “How much will it cost us?” Muirtagh asked.

  “Nothing,” Ky said.

  “I did not know such things existed,” Zavala said.

  “They’re about the size of a small scan console,” Ky said. “You’ll need to make room for them—I suggest on or near the bridge—and you’ll need a power source. My Engineering crew has the exact dimensions and will install them for you.”

  “This is a rotating cluster,” Martin said, watching the scan. Ky had positioned her ship exactly where instructed, but Dona Florenzia, instead of being directly aft of her at twenty-thousand kilometers, had lined up behind Cornet, on the right. Sharra’s Gift was on the correct side of the formation, but a sloppy three thousand kilometers behind her assigned spot.

  “We’re on target, though,” Ky said. “Good job, Lee.”

  “What is the purpose of this formation?” Lee asked, not taking his eyes off his board. “It looks admirably suited for getting us all blown away at once. That is, if everyone gets to the assigned place…”

  “It lets us all shoot someone in front of us without worrying about hitting each other,” Ky said. “Except for the Lady, which is guarding our rear.”

  “With one little beam weapon?”

  “And her missiles,” Ky said. “And she can lay a minefield back there to screen us, too.”

  “So you think it’s good?”

  Ky shrugged. “Not exactly what I’d have chosen, but it’s also good for practicing getting into, and maneuvering in, formations. You don’t want to start with some of the trickier formations when people can’t kee
p station in this one. We’re all pointed the same way, at least.”

  “Oh, good grief,” Lee muttered. Dona Florenzia, apparently noticing that she was behind the wrong ship, had tried a quick correction rather than the right one, and was now gaining on the front of the formation, angling toward Vanguard. “I’m going to have to shift, Captain.”

  “I’ll tell Capt—Admiral Andreson.” Ky activated the shipborne ansible. She wasn’t looking forward to this. So far Andreson had taken her election to admiral as proof of godlike powers.

  “Flower communications,” someone answered.

  “Captain Vatta, Vanguard,” Ky said. “Dona Florenzia is out of position and closing on us; I will be moving Vanguard.”

  “Hold your position,” Andreson said. “I’ve ordered the Lady back to her assigned position; she’s just maneuvering.”

  “Our scans show possible intersection.”

  “Nonsense. There’s plenty of room. If you were more experienced—”

  “Lee, give us a kick. Just what we need.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Vanguard under acceleration,” Ky said.

  “I told you to hold position!” Andreson said. “That is gross disobedience.”

  “Better than a collision,” Ky said. “Plot it on scan. I did.”

  “You—oh.” The scans now showed that Dona Florenzia would plow right through the position Ky would have been in. “Even so, you should have waited for me—”

  “Admiral, you have many responsibilities; I would suggest that captains need to be aware of their surroundings and make minor adjustments as needed. As soon as we can, we will resume our assigned station.” She could imagine Andreson’s eyes narrowing, the suspicious tightening of her mouth.

  “You take a lot on yourself, Captain Vatta,” Andreson said finally. “But I am not one to deny merit where it exists, even if it is expressed so…inappropriately. We are, after all, from different cultures. Perhaps in yours juniors contradict seniors so blatantly.”

  We elected you, you arrogant twit. For your three ships, not your brains. Ky knew she couldn’t say that. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, Admiral,” she said. “It’s certainly true that Slotter Key has its own way of doing things.” And if Bissonet was defended by people like Andreson, no wonder the pirates had chosen it for their first system takeover.

  It was the fifth day since they’d begun training, with just the six ships. Muirtagh had never arrived; Andreson was convinced he had just made a course error, but Ky worried that he wasn’t coming, and might have been a pirate plant. In that case, the pirates would know that they weren’t the only ones with shipboard ansibles. Andreson had shrugged off that threat.

  “Even if he doesn’t come, he may just have decided that it wasn’t profitable for him,” she’d said. “No need to think he’s selling us out.”

  No need, but also no need to think he hadn’t. Argelos had told her that his adviser was also concerned, but not enough to argue with Andreson.

  Maneuvers continued rough the rest of that day. Just getting the ships into the simple formation took hours, and trying to maneuver the formation as a whole led to more of what Martin called rotating clusters. At the end of the day’s work, when Andreson called all the captains into the communications net, they all looked and sounded two stages beyond grumpy. Andreson’s scathing analysis, accurate though it was, didn’t help. An extended and exhausting wrangle followed.

  It turned out that Zavala, whose errors caused the first blowup, had only an incomplete command of what Ky had assumed was the common trade tongue familiar to spacers everywhere, and most of his crew knew only a few basic commands. He had honestly mistaken which ship he was supposed to follow, and claimed that the admiral’s command to correct his position had forced him to accelerate faster than he chose.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Simon Battersea said. His Cornet had turned in the third best performance, according to Andreson. She had scored herself first and Ky second. “The orders were perfectly clear: line up behind Vatta’s ship—”

  “No word of Vatta was spoken,” Zavala said. His ice-blue eyes, striking under dark brows and that red hair, flashed angrily. “I have the order here. It says, ‘In direct line from the flagship, form line behind intervening ship and hold position at three thousand kilometers.’ From my initial position, your ship was directly in line with the flagship.”

  “It didn’t mean initial position,” Simon said. “That was obvious to everyone else—”

  “Simon,” Andreson said. He sat back, lips pressed together. She seemed to speak to Zavala, though with the vidscreen showing a window for each, Ky couldn’t tell where she was looking. “I’m sorry, Captain Zavala, that my orders were unclear. I meant, of course, a line parallel to our course, from my ship back through the formation. But I understand I will have to be very clear.” Though the words were courteous, the tone was similar to Simon’s and implied that Zavala had to be really stupid to mistake the intent. Zavala’s pale face flushed.

  “Your correction, I understand, was also an attempt to follow my orders, but it did require Captain Vatta to accelerate and lose her perfect position. I shall be very careful in the future to give precise orders,” Andreson said.

  “That would be wise,” Zavala said. He had lost the flush, but Ky noted a telltale paleness around his mouth. He was still very angry.

  “Tomorrow, we will learn this formation,” Andreson said. The graphic came up on the central window. “Perhaps being in closer order will prevent confusion.”

  Ky opened her mouth then shut it. Close-order drills with ships were, in Spaceforce, not recommended until units could keep position in the more open—and safer—formations.

  “You were going to say something, Captain Vatta?” Andreson said.

  “My crew could use more practice in the open formation, Admiral,” Ky said.

  “Your crew did exceptionally well,” Andreson said. “You don’t need the practice, and frankly, I don’t think more practice will help the others. Close formation will force precise response to precise orders. We will do this one, and we will do it at one-kilometer intervals.”

  Which meant ships that erred were likely to collide and damage or destroy one another.

  “That’s too close,” Argelos said. “By your own plots, we were all out of position more than a kilometer sometime today.”

  Andreson’s mouth widened in a feral smile. “So I expect you all to be more careful. We cannot defeat Gammis Turek’s pirates, who are experienced in ship maneuvers, by being sloppy.”

  “But, Admiral—” That was Pettygrew, the other Bissonet captain. “We don’t have the experience yet—”

  “And we won’t get it if we don’t practice,” Andreson said. “You’re from Bissonet, Captain Pettygrew; you know what the stakes are here. We have no room for careless, sloppy, incompetent ship handling.”

  “Are you saying I’m incompetent?” Zavala asked.

  “I’m saying we must all improve,” Andreson said.

  “You said Captain Vatta didn’t need to improve—”

  “No, I said Captain Vatta didn’t need to practice that particular formation any longer.”

  Ky looked at Zavala’s face; he was clearly not convinced. “I do not think it is safe,” he said. “It will do us no good if we collide.”

  “Then don’t collide,” Andreson said. “If you are careful, nothing will go wrong.”

  _______

  The next day’s maneuvers began badly again. Zavala refused to close within five kilometers; Ky, all too aware of Cornet on one flank and Bassoon on the other, sympathized with him, but had no attention to spare for the argument that raged on the com. When Andreson called for the formation to rotate about its long axis, a tricky evolution, Cornet wobbled, coming within seven hundred meters of Ky before opening the distance again. By the time they broke for lunch, tempers had frayed all around. Zavala had retreated to a thousand kilometers; the others pulled back at the announcement o
f a meal break despite Andreson’s orders to hold formation.

  “My pilot needs a break,” Argelos said. “And before you say it, I know if we were in a battle he wouldn’t get one. Still…”

  “Mine, too,” Pettygrew said. Ky said nothing to Andreson, but nodded when Lee asked permission to open a distance from the two nearest ships.

  “She’s nuts,” Lee said when he had pulled them back to a thousand kilometers from the nearest ship. “If we’re that tight, we’re going to worry more about hitting each other than where the enemy is, and it gives them a target barely five kilometers across.”

  “She’s scared,” Martin said. “I’ve seen that before. That kind of anger is fear, really. She wanted the job, but she’s beginning to realize what it takes and she thinks she doesn’t have it.”

  “Hugh, is that your reading?”

  “Oh, definitely.” Her second in command had remained cool all through that difficult day, but she could tell he was worried. “She thinks the only way to hide it is to act scary herself. Thing is, she’s going to drive Zavala away.”

  “You think so?” Ky said. “He seemed so enthusiastic when we met—”

  “Ciudad’s part of the Loma Linda group,” he said. “We had some recruits from there, and one or two officers. Culturally quite different from Slotter Key. Take you, for instance: you’re used to giving orders to men and having them obeyed, and it doesn’t bother Lee or Martin or anyone else—male or female—that you’re a female captain. Ciudad’s different: they aren’t into gender equality much at all. It’s hard enough for Zavala to obey a woman in command, and she’s not doing anything to make it easier for him. If he’s here another three days I’d be surprised.”

  “Should I talk to him?” Ky said.

  Hugh shook his head. “You’re a woman, too. He may think you’re not as bad, but still you’re female. And you’re not the problem. She is.”