The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Sorry, my lord!” Fingers punching the display. “That’s zero-one-seven, my lord.”

  “Pilot, rotate ship.” Corona was already a little late.

  “Ship rotated, my lord. New heading two-two-seven by zero-one-seven.”

  “Engines, prepare to fire engines.”

  “Missile flares!” called the two sensor operators in unison. “Enemy missiles fired!”

  “Power up point-defense lasers.”

  “Point-defense lasers powering, lord elcap.”

  Martinez realized he’d been sufficiently distracted by the announcement of the enemy missiles that’s he’d forgotten to order the engines to fire. He leaned forward in his couch to give emphasis to the order, and his command cage creaked as it swung on its gimbals.

  “Engines,” he said. “Fire engines.”

  And then he remembered he’d forgotten something else.

  “Weapons,” he added, “this is a drill.”

  After the drill was over, after the virtual displays faded from Martinez’s mind and the leaden sense of failure rose yet again in his thoughts, he looked out over Command and saw the crew as silent and miserable as he was.

  Too many of them were new. Two-thirds of Corona’s crew had been on board for less than a month, and though they were taking to their new jobs reasonably well, they were far from proficient. Sometimes he wished he’d had only his old crew—the skeleton crew with which he’d saved Corona from capture during the first hours of the Naxid revolt. When he now looked back on that escape—the tension, the uncertainty, the hard accelerations, the terror induced by pursuing enemy missiles—all that now seemed painted in the warm, familiar tones of nostalgia. In the emergency he and the crew had reacted with a brilliance, a certainty that neither he nor they had matched since.

  The old crew were still here, among all the newcomers, but Martinez couldn’t rely on them alone. The new people all had to be trained, had to fit into their roles and perform as proficiently as if they’d been in their places for years.

  There was a whirring in his vac suit as the cooling units cut in, flooding the suit with chilled air and the faintest whiff of lubricant.

  “Right,” he said. “We’ll have another drill after supper, at 26:01.”

  Despite the fact that the crew were in their white-and-viridian vac suits, he could detect in the angle of their heads and shoulders a slumping attitude of defeat.

  In a manual written for officers that he’d found on the frigate’s computers, he’d read of the old formula: praise-correct-praise. First, the manual recommended, you praised them for what they did right, then you corrected what they did wrong, then praised them for their improvement. In his mind he rehearsed the formula as it related to the current situation.

  1. You didn’t screw up as badly as last time.

  2. You still screwed up.

  3. Try not to screw up any more.

  The only problem was that his crew had a perfect right to answer, You first, my lord.

  Martinez, too, was learning on the job, and had discovered that his performance was erratic. Nothing in his training had ever suggested that war was a business filled with such desperate improvisation.

  The voice of his junior lieutenant, Vonderheydte, came over his headphones.

  “Captain Kamarullah, my lord, on intership net. I believe it’s the beginning of the debriefing.”

  This was all Martinez needed. Kamarullah was the senior captain in Light Squadron 14 and would normally have been in command, all save for the fact that he’d once been blamed for a botched maneuver—and blamed by Junior Squadron Commander Do-faq, who was now in overall command of both the light and heavy squadrons, Faqforce, now heading for Hone-bar. In an act of pure autocratic malevolence, Do-faq had removed Kamarullah from command of the light squadron and replaced him with the most junior captain present.

  Martinez.

  Granted that Martinez had accepted the appointment with alacrity. Granted as well that there was some modest justification for this act of despotism: Martinez was the only one of the captains present with actual combat experience. But that experience consisted of stealing Corona and fleeing at top speed from the overwhelming enemy force at Magaria; it hadn’t consisted of commanding and maneuvering a squadron, the skill sets that Martinez needed at present, and which he was desperately trying to acquire.

  It was fortunate that the chance of encountering enemies on this mission was small. Faqforce had been ordered from Zanshaa to Hone-bar before the disaster at Magaria, and when word of the defeat came they had gone too far to turn around. When Martinez’s squadron reached its destination, it would swing around Hone-bar’s sun and head straight back to the capital to aid in its defense.

  It was then, most likely, that Corona would need its combat skills.

  None of which altered the sad fact that Kamarullah was now on the comm, wanting to exult over his own ship’s flawless performance in the drill.

  “Tell him to stand by,” Martinez said. Instead of speaking to Kamarulla he paged his senior lieutenant, Dalkeith, who had spent the maneuver in Auxiliary Command. While he and his crew in Command had been maneuvering a virtual squadron through an exercise, Dalkeith had commanded the actual frigate Corona, keeping it on its steady 2.3 gravity acceleration for the wormhole that led to Hone-bar.

  The second-in-command’s voice lisped in Martinez’s ear. “This is Dalkeith.” He had been startled on first acquaintance with his premiere to discover that she possessed a child’s high-pitched voice in the body of a middle-aged, gray-haired woman. Lady Elissa Dalkeith was one of the officers who had joined Corona a little over a month ago on Zanshaa, and was considered old to have gone so long in the Fleet without promotion, a fact that argued either incompetence or a lack of patronage among her superiors. Martinez hadn’t found her incompetent, but uninspired: she performed every task well enough, but without any particular enthusiasm, and without volunteering anything new, efficient, or interesting. He had hoped to have someone younger and more energetic, someone who would relieve Martinez of some of his work, but youth and energy both had been beaten out of Dalkeith over the years of neglect by the Fleet, and Martinez’s workload remained daunting.

  “The maneuver’s over, my lady,” Martinez told her. “We will resume command of the ship.”

  “Very well, lord elcap. We are prepared to relinquish command.”

  “Stand by.” Martinez shifted his channel to broadcast to the crew in Command. “We are taking control of the ship…now.” His gloved hands tapped his display, and the screens on every board in Command shifted to show Corona’s true situation.

  “You may stand down,” Martinez told Dalkeith.

  The crew in Command all reported Corona’s situation as it was reflected on their displays, and then Martinez heaved a sigh against the gravities that weighed him down. There was no alternative to Kamarullah and the debriefing.

  He told Vonderheydte to patch him into the intership channel and set his display to virtual. The square command room, with its suited figures hanging in their accelerations cages, vanished from his sight, to be replaced at once by Kamarullah’s square, graying head. Fortunately Kamarullah was not alone—most of the other captains had joined the link in the meantime, as well as Lord Squadron Commander Do-faq, who commanded the two squadrons that made up Faqforce. Do-faq was a member of the Lai-own species, flightless birds taller than a human. Their hollow bones couldn’t stand the heavy accelerations that were possible for humans; but because their ancestors had flown through the sky, their brains were supposed to be better configured for three-dimensional maneuvers, and they were considered a race of master tacticians.

  At least the virtual presence of the squadron commander, his bitter enemy, would prevent Kamarullah from being too smug in public.

  “My lords,” Martinez greeted.

  “Lord captain,” said Do-faq, flashing the peg teeth in his carnivore muzzle. He was young for his advanced rank, as demonstrated by the dark feathery
hair on either side of his flat-topped head, hair that Lai-own lost on full maturity. His manner was businesslike without being brusque. Martinez had never actually met him in person, and had little feel for him as a personality, but Do-faq’s history with Kamarullah suggested that Martinez would disappoint the avian only at his peril.

  The faces of the remaining captains appeared one after another in the virtual display. Do-faq began by summarizing the events of the virtual maneuver in which they’d all participated, and then went on to a detailed critique of each ship’s performance. Corona was cited for tardy transmission of orders to the other ships in the light squadron, as well as ragged performance of those same orders.

  “Yes, my lord,” Martinez said. There was little point in offering excuses.

  He could see the quiet exultation in Kamarullah’s eyes as Do-faq admitted in a brisk tone that his ship had done well.

  Do-faq had ordered a maneuver almost every day, the ships flying in close proximity to one another and linked by communication lasers to provide a shared virtual environment. The maneuvers themselves were highly scripted, and taken from the bottomless archive of Fleet maneuvers that went back millennia. Do-faq called for maneuvers in which the heavy and light squadrons battled each other, or fought side-by-side against a computer-generated enemy; or participated as smaller elements in a larger fleet. No independent action was intended, or contemplated: each ship was judged on how well it followed its orders rather than how well it did against the “enemy.” The side the scenario intended to win was always victorious, and thus demonstrated the superiority of proper Fleet doctrine against tactics that were less proper, and less doctrinaire.

  Corona had consistently ranked low in the standings generated after each set of maneuvers, and the only reason it didn’t permanently occupy last place was that other ships were as ill-prepared as Corona. Maneuvers weren’t very common in the Fleet—they were a dreadful inconvenience, taxing the officers’ capabilities and taking the crew away from important duties such as polishing brass, waxing floors, and keeping the engine spaces sparkling clean in the event of an inspection. In a service that hadn’t fought a war in thirty-four hundred years, social virtues had come to seem at least as important as military ones, and there were crews in Do-faq’s command that had never participated even in a virtual maneuver before joining Faqforce.

  Martinez had to give Do-faq credit for realizing that the war had changed everything. He was intent on turning his command into a proper fighting force, and the daily maneuvers and debriefings were a part of it. Martinez commended this industry on the part of a superior even as he winced at his own ship’s performance.

  “My lords,” Do-faq said in conclusion, his golden eyes shifting from one virtual face to the next. “I am pleased to report that the Fleet Control Board has at last agreed to my repeated requests to send me the records of the Battle of Magaria. I am going to transmit them, coded, to each ship under my command. A captain’s key will be required to open the file. I admonish you to view these records in private, and to be careful with whom you share them.” His transparent nictating membranes closed solemnly over his eyes. “Tomorrow’s maneuvers will be conducted by your senior lieutenants from your Auxiliary Command centers. During that time we will confer again and see if we can discover what the battle teaches us.”

  Martinez felt suspense tingling in his nerves. The government had never officially admitted defeat at Magaria, but instead issued an incessant series of clarion calls that urged every loyal citizen to Do His Utmost in the Crisis, to Repel Seditious Thought, to Uphold the Praxis, and to Unceasingly Fight for the Future of the Empire, a barrage of desperate slogans that argued for considerable panic behind the scenes. Martinez had managed to wangle the raw data out of the Fleet Control Board, and had been stunned by the fact of forty-eight of the Fleet’s finest warships blown into radioactive debris along with their commander. What he hadn’t known was how those forty-eight ships had been lost.

  A few hours later, lying in his own bed after supper while the acceleration went on, he called up the overhead display and witnessed exactly that, and he was appalled by the battle’s fury. The number of missiles launched by each side was uncountable: whole squadrons on both sides were annihilated at once, or within seconds, by the blazing fury of antimatter warheads.

  Particularly useful recordings had been made by a pinnace that had been launched by a cruiser in the lead squadron, and which had somehow avoided destruction for the entire battle, shepherding its barrage of antimatter missiles through the entire fight until they could be used to effect against the enemy, destroying five ships that blocked the retreat of the Home Fleet’s six survivors. The pinnace had been in an ideal position to witness most of the battle, from the glorious charge of Cruiser Squadron 2 to the rout of the fleet’s battered remains.

  Martinez wondered how Caroline, Lady Sula, had felt as she watched the doom of the Home Fleet from her lone pinnace.

  Whatever her feelings, they hadn’t altered her skill as a pilot. Not only had she destroyed five enemy ships, but she had followed the act of destruction by a broadcast on the all-ships channel, a hoarse-voiced cry of defiance against the enemy:

  “Sula! It was Sula who did this! Remember my name!”

  The words sent a shiver up Martinez’s spine. He had just wondered how Sula had felt on watching the Home Fleet die—and now he knew how she felt. In her words Martinez heard the despair, the fury, and the loss that lay behind the defiant shout.

  He felt an overwhelming need to wrap Sula in his arms and lie with her in some silent, unspeaking realm, a place where he could bring peace to the terrors he heard in that desperate, challenging voice.

  Which was ridiculous, because he hardly knew her. And when he’d tried to get close to her, she’d fled.

  With an act of will he dismissed Sula from his thoughts, and looked through the recordings again. Again and again he watched the squadrons maneuvering against at each other at significant fractions of the speed of light, the missile tracks that connected them, the blossoms of furious radiation in which they died.

  A conviction began to harden in him. Martinez reached for his sleeve display and called for the one person on the crew he trusted without reservation.

  “Page crewman Alikhan.”

  “My lord.” The answer came quickly, and Alikhan’s stern face appeared in the chameleon-weave display on Martinez’s left sleeve. Alikhan had retired from the Fleet as a thirty-year man, a weaponer first class, and wore the curling mustachios and goatee favored by many senior petty officers. Martinez had brought him back into the service as his orderly, and as a fund of wisdom and practical information on the service.

  Alikhan was wearing his vac suit and helmet, and lying on an acceleration couch.

  “Are you alone?” Martinez asked.

  “I’m in the weapons bays, my lord, for the maneuver.”

  Martinez gave himself a mental demerit for forgetting he’d scheduled a drill for 26:01, after supper. He checked the chronometer on the wall and saw that he had a few minutes before the exercise was scheduled to begin.

  His presence wasn’t strictly necessary: this was a drill he’d scheduled on his own, with Corona’s crew alone, in the hopes of sharpening them for tomorrow’s fleet maneuver. He’d tell Dalkeith to run it instead, with her crew in Auxiliary Command. She’d be in charge during tomorrow’s drill anyway, so she’d need the practice more than Martinez did.

  Martinez looked at the image of Alikhan in his sleeve display. “I’d like you to go virtual and look at a file. You aren’t to show this to anyone. I want you to look at it closely and see what conclusions you can draw.”

  “A file, my lord?”

  Martinez told him what was in it. Alikhan’s eyes widened.

  “Very good, my lord,” he said.

  Martinez then paged Dalkeith and told her that she was in charge of the upcoming drill. “Find something in the files involving two squadrons maneuvering against each other—the
sort of thing Do-faq would pick. Give your people some practice, because Do-faq intends that you command in tomorrow morning’s fleet maneuver.”

  One of the advantages of having an unimaginative premiere, Martinez observed, was that nothing seemed to surprise her. Or perhaps all things surprised her equally.

  “Very well, lord elcap,” she said.

  Martinez’s left arm had grown very tired of being held aloft in the heavy gravity, and when the chameleon weave of the sleeve display shifted to its normal dark green, Martinez thankfully lowered the arm to his side. He would be more comfortable in an acceleration couch, but the couches were all in public areas, and he wanted the privacy of his own cabin. The scent of tomato and oil wafted toward him from his table, where the remains of his supper waited to be cleared during the next moment of standard gravity. Soft light glowed on the dark wood paneling that had been installed by Corona’s previous captain.

  That captain, Fahd Tarafah, had been one of the Fleet’s most extreme football fanatics, and had gone so far as to paint Corona’s hull the lawn green of a football pitch, complete with a white midfield stripe running the length of the ship and a motif of soccer balls bouncing down the ship’s flanks. Tarafah’s cabin had previously been decorated with sports memorabilia, trophies, pictures of his winning teams and of Tarafah with famous players, along with a muddied pair of athletic shoes preserved by rare gases under a glass bowl.

  Tarafah, his winning team, and most of his officers and crew had been captured in the opening moments of the Naxid rebellion, leaving Martinez in command of Corona. Martinez could only hope that wherever Tarafah was, he was taking comfort in the fact that the Coronas, in their last moments of freedom, had beaten the Bombardment of Beijing four goals to one.

  Tarafah’s pictures and other personal effects had been cleared away and sent to Tarafah’s family, but Martinez hadn’t had time to replace any of them with objects personal to himself. The bare walls now had a desolate look, relieved only by a picture Alikhan had copied from a news report, framed, and mounted: the picture showed Martinez addressing the Convocation, the supreme legislative body of the empire, after he’d been awarded the Golden Orb for saving Corona from the rebels.