Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  Introductions were made. Sula was pleased that with Martinez in the room her heartbeat had increased only a little. Martinez’s glance passed over her without hesitation or surprise, and Sula knew that he’d had time to prepare for this meeting as well.

  Michi told everyone to take their drinks and join her in the conference room.

  The conference room had only half its decor installed, with arculé wood paneling, but the ceiling was a tangle of pipes and beams with paper labels dangling on wires, and the deck was composed of metal plates enameled a grayish white. The air smelled of solvent. Rolls of paper had been laid down over the metal to dampen the clanging sound of heels striding across the deck.

  The room was furnished with temporary folding tables, but they had real linen on them. The chairs were resinous and stackable. Usefully there were video displays on all the walls, enabling the conferees to see whatever data they needed to see.

  Sula carefully sat where she wouldn’t have to spend the meeting looking across the room at Martinez. Michi Chen called the meeting to order.

  “I’d like the captains Kangas to open with a report on ship conversions.”

  The twins’ report gave Sula a chance to appreciate Michi’s achievement. While Sula had been fleeing from the capital of Zanshaa, Michi had been creating a haven for Sula to flee to. The Fourth Fleet consisted of a hundred and eighty-three warships, of which only forty had been crewed by Terrans. The ships had been under the command of Senior Fleet Commander Surang, a Daimong, and Michi herself had no ships under her command, but instead was in charge of only the dockyard. Yet once she’d heard that secret orders had gone out to disarm every Terran warship in the empire, she had managed to organize an action in which all non-Terran ships had been bloodlessly boarded, their officers confined, and their crews moved to makeshift prisons on the planet’s antimatter ring.

  A gratifying bonus for Michi had been the fact that Fleet Commander Surang, his staff, and his senior commanders had been arrested at a meeting where they intended to complete plans for boarding the Terran vessels and securing their officers and crews.

  The Kangas twins had been put in charge of converting the non-Terran ships for the use of Terran crews. “Daimong and Torminel are shaped more or less like human beings,” said Paivo, “so we can use their beds and furniture if we run out of those made for Terrans.”

  “Which we will,” said Ranssu.

  “Unless we develop more success at manufacturing new gear than we have at present,” Paivo said. “But everything will be all right with what we have.”

  “Nonii,” assured Ranssu.

  “We’ve been concentrating more on converting the Lai-own ships,” Paivo said. “The seats, beds, and acceleration couches are not compatible with human physiology, so we’ve had to do a complete replacement. I’m pleased to report that the Lai-own ships should be ready for new crews within the next six to ten days, depending on how many people we can add to the work gangs.”

  “And the Cree ships?” Michi asked.

  Paivo waved a hand. “That will take longer.”

  Cree did not have proper eyes, but primitive eye patches that provided them only with a vague and confusing picture of their world. Lacking an effective sense of sight, they depended on acute hearing to navigate their way through their lives. The control rooms on their ships presented a cacophony of sound, buzzes and clicks and shrieks and murmurs that were bewildering to any Terran. Converting every control station, every display, and every gauge to something comprehensible by a Terran was a major undertaking.

  “Fortunately there are only fifteen Cree ships,” Paivo said. Fewer than any other species.

  The Cree, generally speaking, were not a military species and were ill-suited to the formality and discipline of the service. They liked sleeping in a pile in the center of the room, for one thing, and had a hard time understanding why officers should sleep in separate piles from the enlisted.

  Sometimes Sula thought that Cree viewed service in the Fleet as something akin to a hilarious joke.

  “It will be at least a month before the Cree ships are ready,” Ranssu said.

  Michi turned to one of her staff for a report on personnel. Every ship had to be crewed by Terrans, of course, and, for fear of sabotage, all crucial work also had to be performed by Terrans. Since Harzapid had been the base of the Fourth Fleet for centuries, there was a large supply of retired crouchbacks who could be recalled to the service, but many were too old to endure the heavy gravities expected in combat and were relegated to support functions, to training, and to work gangs. There would not be enough trained crew to staff the Fourth Fleet fully, and ships would be obliged to set off without their full complements.

  Plenty of volunteers were flooding the training camps, fortunately, but they were unlikely to be ready by the time they were needed.

  The next report was offered by Martinez’s friend Shushanik Severin, known as “Nikki,” a commoner raised to the officer class following several unconventional exploits—one of which involved shutting off a pulsar, and another of which was his creation of a well-regarded puppet show. He looked at the room from narrow eyes over high cheekbones and reported that the Exploration Service would contribute to the Fourth Fleet his own light cruiser, Expedition, just completing repairs, the frigate Ranger, taken from its Lai-own crew during Michi’s coup, and the light cruiser Explorer, crewed by Terrans, which was returning to Harzapid after a nine-month cruise investigating whatever was to be found on the other side of a newly discovered wormhole. Severin could also offer unarmed scout ships and transports.

  This, Sula thought, was encouraging as far as it went. But like the Fleet, most Exploration Service vessels were crewed by non-Terrans, and right now, in some meeting room somewhere, Exploration Service officers belonging to at least four other species were probably offering their vessels to the other side.

  Since the Exploration Service also staffed the wormhole relay stations on either side of the wormhole gates that knit the empire together, Severin was also sending out armed Terran crews to all stations staffed by other species. The relay stations forwarded all communications between star systems, and the small part of the empire that Michi controlled was slowly expanding as information from Harzapid began to replace information from Zanshaa.

  A hunched, elderly Terran in the uniform of a senior captain, clearly brought in out of retirement, reported on the status of the training camps, which were full of enthusiastic volunteers who knew nothing useful, and who would take months to learn.

  “As we have an insufficient supply of line officers,” Michi said, “I’m going to have to promote a great many officers into posts for which they would otherwise be too junior. For the moment we’re doing training on simulators, and those who do well will have first chance at promotion.”

  Sula sat up and wondered if she had heard Michi properly. Had a high-ranking officer just announced that promotions in her command would be made on something like merit, as opposed to heredity, wealth, family influence, nepotism, and the trading of favors?

  Of course, almost all Fleet officers were Peers, anyway, so the promotions would still remain within one class, but still this was something like revolution.

  But, she reflected, it went without saying that Gareth Martinez, who happened to be married to Michi’s niece, would receive a very important command, so nepotism would hardly be extinguished in the Fourth Fleet. So perhaps Michi was speaking carelessly, and considerations of something other than merit would play their usual part.

  This thought faded beneath the wry realization that, however well connected he might be, Martinez deserved high command. He was the only officer of the Fleet whose accomplishments might equal her own.

  Damn him anyway. He had made her love him, then abandoned her to marry Clan Chen’s heir, who came with connections that would assure promotion and a chance of command. And now she was going to have to find some way of working alongside him for the length of a long, miserable war.r />
  Michi opened a discussion of the timing of reinforcements. Lord Jeremy Foote’s Light Squadron Eight, having struck the first blow of the war with a surprise attack against two enemy squadrons at Colamote, was presumed to be somewhere between Colamote and Harzapid, and would arrive in a month or so, depending on how fast he was pushing his crews.

  Sixty-three Terran ships, defectors from the Home Fleet at Zanshaa, were also believed to be en route but would not arrive for another two months.

  Fifty-five defectors from the Second Fleet at Magaria, under Senior Squadron Commander Wei Jian, were also bound for Harzapid, but they had been forced into a roundabout route and would not arrive for another five or six months.

  Left out of the calculations was the Third Fleet, based at Felarus at least six months’ travel away. The Third Fleet was comprised of 206 ships, forty of them Terran under Senior Squadron Leader Nguyen. Nguyen knew that he had no hope of leading his twoscore ships across the wormhole net of the empire to Harzapid, not with the First and Second Fleets in the way, and so he’d buttoned his crews into his ships and announced that no one was leaving Felarus without being fired on. The result would have been a bloodbath fought at close range, with mutual destruction a near certainty, and so now the entire Third Fleet had been neutralized. Which was lucky, because the Third Fleet’s commander, Do-faq, was one of the most talented leaders in the Fleet.

  “No matter how hard I work the numbers,” Michi said, “they come out the same. Once the Second Fleet joins the Home Fleet, and Supreme Commander Tork calls in the ships and squadrons on detached duty, we’re going to be opposed by five hundred seventy-three warships. And once Foote and the defectors from the Home Fleet join us, and including Captain Severin’s small squadron from the Exploration Service, we’ll have only two hundred fifty-six. So we’ll be outnumbered two to one.”

  Sula had worked the numbers as well, having had little else to do during her days of deceleration. The vast weight of the enemy armada was intimidating, though Sula thought she could do well against the right commander.

  But the numbers themselves posed their own problem. No one knew how to maneuver and fight fleets so vast—the largest fleet in the Naxid War, led by then Fleet Commander Tork, had consisted of eighty-seven warships. Sula had no idea how a single commander could control 256 vessels during the uncertainty and confusion of combat, and she worried that if control broke down, the battle would turn into a confused melee, which the side with the most ships would inevitably win.

  Elissa Dalkeith blinked her watery blue eyes. “Once the Second Fleet defectors join us,” she said, “we’ll have over three hundred.”

  Sula had forgotten Dalkeith’s lisping, piping voice, a six-year-old’s in the body of a middle-aged woman.

  “I dare to presume,” Michi said, “that the enemy knows how long it will take those ships to reach us and will attack before they arrive.” Dalkeith fell into silence.

  Martinez cleared his throat. “We’d better hope that Supreme Commander Tork is going to lead the attack himself. That way we might have a chance.”

  Sula almost laughed. “How could he not?” she said. “He’s led a private war against some of us for years—he’s denied Lady Michi promotion and command, when after the last war she should have a fleet.”

  “Well.” Michi’s expression was grim. “Now I’ve got a fleet, and most days all I long for is retirement. Though the chance to jab a fork in Tork’s eye gets me through my day.”

  “Tork is elderly,” said Ranssu Kangas. “He should not be leading a fleet into battle at that age. Why wouldn’t he assign the command to someone else?”

  Sula cackled. “We have to make sure he doesn’t,” she said. “We should mock the hell out of him in our propaganda. Say that he’s old, incompetent, overrated, and nothing more than a senile lackey to the greedy frauds in the government.”

  “All of which has the advantage of being true,” said Chandra Prasad.

  “It’s true, and that’s exactly why it will sting,” Sula said. “Tork takes every disagreement personally—imagine how he’ll react to insult and defiance aimed at his achievements and character.”

  “We have no way of distributing propaganda in Zanshaa,” said one of Michi’s captains.

  “We can distribute it here in our sphere and send it from our relay station to theirs. I assume it will find its way to Tork sooner rather than later.”

  The gaunt, gray-skinned Tork had a unique position in the government, having leveraged his decisive victory at Second Magaria into being not only Supreme Commander of the Fleet—a rank he had invented for himself—but chairman of the Fleet Control Board, the government committee in charge of the Fleet. No one had ever before held a seat on the Control Board while also retaining active command, and to some it seemed a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a single person.

  Certainly it proved dangerous enough when Tork, in the wake of political turmoil blamed on Terrans, made the decision to proactively board and disarm all Terran ships. He had the prestige and power to carry it out in the face of any opposition. Now that his plan had backfired and spurred mutiny among the Terran elements of the Fleet, Tork had little choice but to double down on the war he’d inadvertently inspired.

  “Do we have someone in charge of propaganda?” asked Naaz Vijana. “Is anyone trying to manage our . . . our message?”

  “We have an ad hoc committee of politicians who are trying to direct operations outside of the military sphere,” Michi said. “Most of them are local, but they include convocates like Lord Roland Martinez, and prominent individuals like Lord Mehrang.”

  Lord Mehrang was the patron of Esley, where he had brought Naaz Vijana to quell the uprising of the primitive Yormaks. Roland was Gareth Martinez’s older brother, the presumed heir to Clan Martinez. Sula thought him capable, but ruthless, calculating, overambitious, and untrustworthy. She also suspected that it was Roland who had bought the Chen heir for his brother and enhanced his own fortunes by saddling Gareth Martinez with a beautiful, polished rich girl who played the harp, instead of . . .

  Well. Instead of someone else.

  That made for two members of this ad hoc committee being cold-blooded intriguers devoted to their own self-interest. Pity the rest of them, whoever they were.

  “I don’t like this ad hoc business,” Sula said. “Whoever’s in charge of the political side needs to get serious about running our little rump empire—keeping the economy moving, adequately supplying the Fleet, and maybe start thinking how we’re going to manage things when we win. What’s our political settlement going to be? The composition of the Convocation and the Fleet Control Board? What’s our policy on amnesties for our enemies—who gets amnestied, and who gets the chop?”

  The others just looked at one another.

  “Ah. Hah,” Sula said. “That’s what I thought.”

  There was another moment of silence, and then Sula cleared her throat.

  “As long as I’m raising uncomfortable issues,” she said, “do we have any evidence that the two heavy squadrons at Zarafan—they’d be under Squadron Commander Rukmin, yes?—are not in pursuit of Foote’s Squadron Eight? If they pushed on at high gees, they could get to Toley ahead of Foote and get between him and us.”

  When that smug idiot Foote had begun the war by prematurely annihilating the two enemy squadrons at Colamote, he’d altered course to dive through a succession of five wormhole gates leading to Toley, and from there to Harzapid. But the two heavy squadrons at Zarafan, either of which outgunned Foote’s force, could beat Foote to Toley if they were willing to pulp themselves with high gravities. They had fewer gates to jump through, for one thing.

  “We analyzed that possibility,” Michi said. “Rukmin’s two Zarafan squadrons might try to intercept Foote, but if they did, they’d almost certainly be destroyed by the Home Fleet defectors, which have to pass through Zarafan and Toley to reach us. They could cut off Foote, but the Home Fleet defectors would cut Rukmin of
f in turn.”

  “Couldn’t they double back through Colamote?”

  “It’s barely possible, but their timing would have to be exactly right.”

  “Or to avoid pursuit the enemy could just fly off into space, off the wormhole routes. That would force any pursuers to choose between pursuing them, and uniting with us.” Sula reached for her tea, decided against it, then retracted her hand. “We have two squadrons orbiting the Harzapid system,” she said. “May I suggest that we send them toward Toley to escort Foote? It’s best to be safe, I think, and we can replace them with new conversions once they launch.”

  Michi parted her lips and took a slow inhalation of breath. “I’ll take it under consideration, but I’ll have to review the timing considerations.”

  That was about all Sula could hope for. She sipped her tea.

  “I don’t see any drawbacks,” said Alana Haz. “If Foote isn’t being pursued, there’s no danger. And if he is, we can save him from destruction.”

  “Nonii,” said Ranssu.

  The meeting devolved into topics less interesting and far less urgent. Sula twisted in her seat to relieve a cramp in her back. Eventually Michi called an end to the meeting, and Sula gratefully stood, rolled her shoulders as she heard the crackle of ligaments echo through her bones. The officers drifted back into the reception room to snack and refresh their drinks. Sula put down her tea, then went to Michi, who was talking to the Kangas twins. She waited for Michi to turn to her and then spoke.

  “I’m sorry if I raised too many awkward questions,” she said, “but the whole time I was strapped into my couch during the deceleration, I had nothing to think about but how to manage the war.”

  “While I, on the other hand, was actually managing it,” Michi said. Her irony had returned. “But,” she conceded, “you may be right about these things—it’s very distracting here, dealing with the day-to-day issues.”