The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  “I have prepared a contract,” said Lord Roland, “with names of ships and sums specified. Would you like to review it?”

  “Yes, if you please.”

  Lord Roland held up his left arm. “Shall I send it to your sleeve display, my lord?”

  “I don’t have a sleeve display,” Lord Chen said. Sleeve displays were probably a necessity for busy people such as military officers or office managers, he thought, but for a Peer they were vulgar. He produced a wafer-thin comm unit from an inner pocket, extended the display, and captured Lord Roland’s transmission.

  While he was doing so, the Cree waitron delivered their order. The scent of Lord Roland’s coffee wafted over the table.

  “I’m sure there will be no problem,” Lord Chen said as he folded away the display. “I’ll have signed hard copy delivered to your residence tomorrow.”

  “Speaking of tomorrow,” Lord Roland said, “I hope we can expect you and Lady Chen at tomorrow’s party in honor of Vipsania’s birthday.”

  Lord Chen suppressed annoyance. It was one thing to do business with the likes of the Martinez clan, and another to see them socially.

  Still, he supposed there was no avoiding it.

  “Of course. We’ll be happy to attend.” A thought struck him. “You have unusual names in your family, don’t you? Vipsania, Roland, Gareth, Sempronia…are they traditional in the Martinez clan? Or do they have some particular meaning?”

  Lord Roland smiled. “Their particular meaning is that our mother is fond of romantic novels. We’re all named after her favorite characters.”

  “That’s charming.”

  “Is it?” Lord Roland’s thick eyebrows rose as he considered this notion. “Well,” he decided, “we’re a charming bunch.”

  “Yes,” Lord Chen said with a thin smile. “Very.”

  “By the way,” Lord Roland said, “I wonder if I might trouble you for advice.”

  “I’d be only too happy.”

  Lord Roland glanced over the lounge, then leaned toward Lord Chen and lowered his voice. “My brother Gareth keeps urging the family to leave Zanshaa. I know that you serve on the Fleet Control Board and are familiar with Fleet movements and dispositions.” He gazed intently at Lord Chen with his deep brown eyes. “I wonder,” he said, “if this would be your advice as well.”

  Lord Chen struggled to master his thoughts. “Your brother…does he give reasons for his opinion?”

  “No. Though perhaps he considers the defeat at Magaria a self-evident enough reason.”

  So Gareth Martinez wasn’t handing out military secrets to his family, a breach of discretion that would have set Lord Chen to worrying about how confidential his connection to the Martinez clan was likely to remain.

  “I would say,” he said with care, “that there is reason for concern, but there is no need to evacuate at present.”

  Lord Roland nodded gravely. “Thank you, Lord Chen.”

  “Not at all.”

  He reached forward and touched Lord Chen lightly on the hand. Lord Chen looked in surprise at the touch.

  “I know that you have no fear for yourself,” Lord Roland said, “but a prudent man should take no chances with his family. I want you to have the comfort of knowing that should you ever decide that Lady Chen and Terza should leave Zanshaa, they are welcome at my father’s estate on Laredo—and in fact they are welcome to travel with my sisters, in our family cruiser.”

  Let’s hope it won’t ever come to that, Lord Chen thought, appalled. But instead he smiled again and said, “That’s a kind thought, and I thank you. But I’ve already arranged for a ship to be standing by.”

  “The fault of the Home Fleet at Magaria,” Captain Kamarullah said, “is that they failed to maintain a close enough formation. They needed to mass their defensive firepower to blast their way through the oncoming missiles.”

  Martinez watched the other captains absorb this statement. The virtual universe in his head consisted of four rows of four heads each, and smelled of suit seals and stale flesh. Martinez couldn’t read Do-faq’s face very well, or those of his eight Lai-own captains, and the two Daimong captains had expressionless faces to begin with, but the four humans, at least, seemed to be taking Kamarullah’s argument seriously. “How close should we get?” one of them even said.

  Martinez looked at the sixteen virtual heads that floated in his mind, took a deep breath, and ventured his own opinion. “With all respect, my lord, my conclusions differ. My belief is that the squadrons didn’t separate early enough.”

  Most turned curious eyes to him, but it was Kamarullah who spoke.

  “You call for a premature starburst? That’s a complete loss of command and control!”

  “My lord,” Martinez said, “that’s hardly worse than the loss of command and control that results when an entire squadron is wiped out. Now, if your lordships will bear with me, I’ve prepared a brief presentation…”

  The others watched while he beamed them selected bits of the Magaria battle, along with estimates of the numbers of incoming missiles, missiles destroyed by other missiles, by point-defense lasers and antiproton beams.

  “A defensive formation works well only up to a point,” Martinez said, “and then the system breaks down catastrophically. I can’t prove anything yet, but I suspect that antimatter missile explosions, with their bursts of heavy radiation and their expanding plasma shells, eventually create so much interference and confusion on the ships’ sensors that it becomes nearly impossible to coordinate an effective defense.

  “You’ll observe,” running the records again, “that the losses during the first part of the battle were equal, very sudden, and catastrophic for both sides. It was only when both sides had lost twenty ships or so that the enemy advantage in numbers became decisive, and then the attrition of our ships was steady right to the end. Lady Sula’s destruction of five enemy cruisers was the only successful attack made by the Home Fleet without equivalent or greater loss.

  “My conclusion,” looking again at the sixteen heads in their four rows, “is that our standard fleet tactics will produce a rough equivalence in losses, but the unfortunate fact is that the enemy have more ships, and I fear we can’t sustain a war of attrition.”

  There was a long moment of silence, broken by the chiming voice of one of Martinez’s Daimong captains. “Do you have any suggestion for tactics that can take advantage of this analysis?”

  “I’m afraid not, my lord. Other than ordering a starburst much earlier in the battle, of course.”

  Kamarullah gave a contemptuous huff into his microphone that sounded like a gunshot in Martinez’s earphones. “A lot of good that’ll do,” he said. “With our ships scattered all over space, the enemy could stay in formation and pick us off one by one.”

  Frustration crawled with jointed fingers up Martinez’s spine. That was not what he meant to imply, and he couldn’t help but feel that if he could only speak to the captains in person, he could bring his points across.

  “I don’t mean that our ships should wander at random about the galaxy, lord captain,” he said.

  “And if both sides use these tactics, what then?” Kamarullah continued. “Without any formation the battle will just turn into a melee, ships fighting each other singly or in ones and twos, and that’s precisely the sort of situation where the enemy superiority in numbers will be decisive. The enemy should beg us to starburst early.” A sly expression crossed his face. “Of course,” he said, “if we aren’t expected to keep formation or maneuver simultaneously, it will certainly be easier on the ships that are having trouble doing exactly these things.”

  You’ll pay for that, Martinez glowered, and he saw his thought mirrored on the faces of two other underperforming captains. He could feel his hands, in a world he couldn’t at present see, clenching in his gloves.

  “Our ancestors understood these things better than we,” one of the Daimong said. “We should strive to perfect the tactics they’ve passed on to us. Wit
h these tactics our ancestors built an empire.”

  During which time they fought only one real war, Martinez thought.

  Squadron Commander Do-faq fixed Martinez with his golden eyes. “Do you have a remedy for this problem, lord elcap?”

  Martinez chose his words carefully. “I think that we need to expand the concept of formation. Ideally we would need ships traveling in a much looser arrangement, far enough apart that a single volley of missiles wouldn’t destroy all of them, but still able to coordinate their actions against the enemy.”

  Kamarullah breathed another gunshot-huff into his microphone, and Do-faq gave an annoyed start and a flare of his crest hairs. Do-faq’s flag captain, Cho-hal, then asked, “But how do you solve the problem of communication?”

  Ships normally communicated via laser, which had the punch to get a message through a ship’s raging plasma tail, and which also had the advantage of privacy—no enemy could listen in on a directed beam. The alternative was to use a radio signal, which might not get through the radio interference of a ship’s exhaust, and which in any case could be overheard by the enemy. In a civil war, where both sides had started with the same codes as well as the same coding and decoding computers, that was a serious hazard.

  “I have some ideas, lord captain,” Martinez said. “But they’re rather…unformed. We can use secure-coded radio transmissions; or perhaps an arrangement whereby, even after starburst, each ship takes a preassigned path so that orders can reach it by laser…”

  He saw his defeat in the faces of the others, even the aliens whose expressions were difficult to decipher. His idea managed to be both horribly unformed and far too complex—in itself quite an accomplishment, he supposed.

  “Lord squadcom,” he said to Do-faq, “I beg permission to send you a more thorough analysis when my ideas have had time to…to cohere.” The disdainful twist on Kamarullah’s mouth turned into a smirk at the sound of this.

  “Permission is granted, lord elcap,” Do-faq said. “I will also have my tactical officer review your analysis of the battle at Magaria and see what comment he offers.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  “I’m glad that’s settled,” Kamarullah said. “The least we can do is learn one tactical system before we go off inventing another.”

  The rest of the conference produced little of interest, and Martinez left virtual world with a burning determination to wipe Kamarullah’s smirk right off his face.

  He invited his three lieutenants to dine with him, then hesitated for a moment and invited Cadet Kelly as well. She was one of Corona’s old crew, one of those who had helped him steal the frigate on the day of the mutiny and escape the enemy, and she had been clever and useful on that occasion.

  Corona’s former captain, Tarafah, had been served at his lonely table by a professional chef he’d brought aboard, given the rank of petty officer, and doubtless kept sweet with under-the-table payments. Despite the war and the edict forbidding Fleet personnel to leave the service, on arrival at Zanshaa the chef had produced a doctor’s certificate testifying to a heart condition unable to stand heavy gravities, and Martinez had shrugged and let him go.

  Alikhan, who had cooked for Martinez before the war, now continued in that capacity. He’d prepared a meal for Martinez alone, and couldn’t alter his arrangements until the ship lowered its acceleration to 0.7 gravities at dinnertime and he could get into the kitchen. Alikhan’s last-second improvisations might be less appealing than his usual fare, so Martinez decided to try to provide a convivial reception for the food by opening two bottles of the wine that his sisters had crated up to him when he’d been officially promoted into Corona.

  “I do want to apologize about today’s drill, lord elcap,” Dalkeith began. “The confusion with the damage-control robots will not be repeated.”

  “Never mind that,” Martinez said, and for once in her life Dalkeith looked surprised. “I’ve got something else to show you.”

  He called up the wall display and showed selected bits of the battle at Magaria. He watched the shock as they saw squadrons of the Home Fleet buried beneath waves of antimatter. “Our tactics aren’t working,” Martinez said. “The best we can hope for is mutual annihilation. And I don’t like annihilation, not even if we take enemy with us.”

  His officers looked at him in shocked surprise. “We need something new,” Martinez said. “Lord Lieutenant Vonderheydte, the bottle is at your elbow.”

  “Oh.” Pouring. “Sorry, lord elcap.”

  “My lord?” Cadet Kelly looked at him with wide black eyes. “Are you asking us to invent a new tactical system? Over dinner?”

  “Of course not!” Dalkeith poured scorn into her child’s voice. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  Ah, Martinez reflected, the moment awkward.

  “Well,” he began, “I’m afraid I’m the ridiculous one, because that’s what I hope to accomplish.”

  Dalkeith’s face expressed surprise for the second time that day.

  “Very good, my lord,” she said.

  Martinez raised his glass. “Here’s in aid of thought,” he said.

  The others raised their glasses and drank. Vonderheydte looked appreciatively at the wine, glowing a deep red in the heavy leaded crystal created to stand high accelerations. “This is a fine vintage, my lord,” he pronounced.

  Vonderheydte, young and small-boned and blond, was Corona’s most junior lieutenant. He’d been one of the frigate’s cadets when the Naxids mutinied, and as he’d performed well in a number of highly improvised roles during Corona’s escape, Martinez had exercised his powers of patronage and had promoted him.

  Vonderheydte took the bottle and looked at the label. “We should get some of this for the wardroom.” The others agreed.

  Martinez let the wine roll over his tongue and found it much like any other red wine he’d ever tasted.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said.

  “So should we starburst earlier?” Kelly asked as she drew her cuffs forward over exposed bony wrists. “Is that what you’re after?”

  “Sort of,” Martinez said, and explained his vague ideas. Kelly listened, her head tilted to one side.

  The lanky, black-eyed pinnace pilot had been weapons officer during Corona’s escape from the Naxids, a job at which she’d shown unexpected talent. Subsequently, in flight toward desperate pleasure from a host of incoming terrors, she and Martinez had shared a frantic few moments in one of the frigate’s recreation tubes. Those moments had never been repeated—common sense had reasserted itself in time—but they were moments which Martinez, at least, could not bring himself to regret.

  “So not a starburst, exactly,” she clarified, “but a very spread-out formation.”

  “I don’t know,” Martinez confessed. “I know that I don’t want to lose the defensive advantages of a formation, and I don’t want everyone to get so dispersed the battle will turn into a melee.”

  “How do you coordinate movement and formation changes?” Dalkeith wondered. “You’ll only be guessing where your ships will be, so it will be sheer chance if you hit them with a comm laser. And if you broadcast on radio, the enemy will hear it, and their computers have the same software that ours do, and plenty of computing power, so they might be able to decode it.”

  Martinez had been thinking about this since the captains’ conference. Before the war his specialty had included communication, and he thought he’d worked out the solution. “Using radio’s not a problem,” he said. “First, you have each ship repeat the message to all others once it’s received, to make certain that each ship receives its orders. Then you devise a very thorough code describing any maneuvers necessary for the fleet, and your computers cipher the codes using a one-time system. The one-time system means that even if the cipher is broken, it won’t help the enemy read the next message. And even if they can read the cipher, all they get is a code they can’t read without a key.” He shrugged. “You can make it more elaborate than that, but that’
s all that’s really necessary.”

  The others considered this while Alikhan appeared and placed upon Captain Tarafah’s mahogany table the first course of his improvised meal, which on inspection proved to be white beans on a bed of greenish-black vegetable matter, with a splash of ketchup for color.

  It could be worse, Martinez thought, and picked up his fork.

  “How far can we spread out the ships?” Vonderheydte wondered aloud. “Our superior officers like to see smart maneuvers, with every ship rotating and changing course at the same moment. Obviously this is going to be a good deal more ragged.”

  Martinez cared less about ragged formations than the fact that this would make the new tactics harder to sell to his superiors. A formation in which all orders were not instantly and smartly executed would not be an attractive picture to the average Senior Fleet Commander.

  “My lord,” murmured Sublieutenant Nikkul Shankaracharya into his wineglass, “there should be a formula, I mean a mathematical set of formulas, that will tell us how far we can safely set our formation.”

  His voice was so low that Martinez could barely make out the words. Shankaracharya was a shy youth with a lieutenancy of less than a year’s seniority, and his posting to Corona was the result of direct intervention by one of the few divinities recognized by the service—in this case a clan patron who served on the Fleet Control Board. That Corona was then handicapped by the presence of two very junior lieutenants with little time to learn their jobs, who were supervised by a lackluster, nearly superannuated senior in Dalkeith, was beneath the notice of the divinity in question.

  A further complication was added by the fact that Shankaracharya was the beloved of Martinez’s younger sister, Sempronia. Sempronia, who was, as part of a plot laid by Martinez and his other sisters, engaged to marry someone else entirely.

  It seemed unfair to Martinez that he was beset by family intrigues as well as service politics. One or the other were within his realm of competence; but the both together made his head spin.

  “Mathematical formulas?” he prompted.