Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  Foote opened fire as well, a wave of missiles blazing out from the light squadron. Rukmin was going to be hit from both sides.

  “Flag to all ships,” Martinez said. “Another volley.”

  Detonations erupted in the space between the two forces, overlapping balls of fierce hot plasma, and Martinez’s view of Rukmin’s ships faded in the radio blaze. Martinez watched the second wave of missiles racing toward the enemy with tails flaming, and then there was the urgent sound of the zero-gee warning, and Martinez floated for a brief moment before his acceleration cage swung as Los Angeles rotated to a new heading. Then there was an acceleration warning, and Martinez was punched into his seat as the cruiser’s engines lit.

  Division Two of the Restoration Fleet consisted of two squadrons, each of eight heavy cruisers, which made a total of seventeen once Los Angeles had been added to the order of battle. The concept of a “division” was itself new and was an attempt to better organize the expanded Fleet that had come into existence after the Naxid War. During that war, the squadron was the largest maneuver unit, but with so many squadrons in the expanded Fleet, maneuvers—not to mention real battle—had threatened to degenerate into confusion. So in hopes of better organizing the Fourth Fleet, Michi had created a unit called the “division,” which would contain two or three squadrons.

  Division Two had been led by Squadron Leader Carmody of Heavy Squadron Eleven, the senior of the two squadron leaders in the unit. Martinez had replaced Carmody in command, then had attached his own ship to Heavy Squadron Twenty, commanded by a Junior Squadron Leader Khalil, who—though formally polite—Martinez suspected resented his usurpation of the unit.

  Plan Two involved Squadrons Eleven and Twenty separating, allowing Rukmin to pass between them and thus avoiding the head-on collision that was bound to be disastrous for both sides. Martinez envisioned Division Two opening wide like the jaws of a monstrous animal, preparing to swallow its prey.

  Once the maneuver was complete Rukmin would be effectively surrounded, with missiles homing in from all sides. Rukmin would be flying through sensor-confusing plasma bursts, while other plasma bursts grew closer and closer. Fire control would grow confused, defensive fire would be less effective, until eventually Rukmin’s defense collapsed altogether and her ships would be turned to ionized gas drifting on the solar wind.

  “Flag to all ships,” Martinez said. “Free to fire pinnaces.”

  Pinnaces were small vehicles carrying a big engine and configured to carry a single crew. They had been designed to be fired along with missile volleys, to guide the missiles to the target. Missiles of course could accelerate at rates that would turn a human being into scarlet mash, but it was hoped that the pinnaces could at least get closer than the warships that had fired them, and might be able to view weaknesses in the enemy defense and exploit them. Prior to the Naxid War, the cadets who crewed the pinnaces held the most glamorous posts in the service, in part because the pinnace pilots were dashing blades who had volunteered to fight alone in the great missile-filled dark, and in part because the pinnaces were considered an introduction to the even more glamorous world of yacht racing.

  But losses among pinnace pilots in the Naxid War were on the order of 80 percent, which made the assignment less glamorous in a hurry. At the start of the war, nearly all pinnace pilots had been high-ranking Peers; but by the end, most pinnaces were crewed by commoners.

  By that point, however, the Fleet had begun firing pinnaces not with missile salvos, but in directions lateral to the flight of the warships, in hopes that from their unique perspective they might be able to see around the bursting plasma screens that shrouded the battle, locate the enemy, and be able either to send information to the flagships or to take command of missiles and drive them through the enemy’s defense.

  Dalkeith fired her two pinnaces immediately. It was best to do this at once, while Rukmin’s ships were shrouded, because firing a pinnace would identify Los Angeles as a warship, and not a decoy. That was why Martinez had chosen not to launch pinnaces while Rukmin was in a position to observe the little ships take flight.

  While Division Two split and the pinnaces were fired, the Restoration forces kept pumping missiles in Rukmin’s direction, to keep her blind to the division’s maneuver. Martinez kept his attention focused on the display, on the enemy ships hidden behind the roiling hot plasma shroud. Data began to come in from the pinnaces, and the image seemed to grow a bit more clear.

  Martinez felt a jolt to his heart as he saw a phantom enemy squadron appear for just a few seconds, the ships standing on their tails of fire, and then the antimatter torches vanished, followed by the ships themselves. Martinez knew that Rukmin had seen at least something of what Division Two was doing and had cut engines while maneuvering to a new heading.

  But which heading? He found himself peering into the display until his eyes ached—useless, because the display was unfolding in his brain and his eyes had been, in effect, switched off.

  Gradually ships appeared, grainy and indistinct in the display, haloed by the brilliant flame of their torches. Quickly Martinez made estimates of their course and speed, and then he felt the hair on his arms prickle as he realized that Rukmin had shaped a course to intercept Martinez and his nine ships, presumably with the hope that she could overwhelm Martinez before the other elements of his command could interfere.

  “Flag to Squadron Eleven and Squadron Eight,” Martinez said. “‘Engage enemy more closely.’ Flag to Squadron Twenty: ‘Alter course to . . .’” He paused while his fingers danced over a virtual keyboard as he made a calculation.

  Prince Huang’s boyish, excited voice piped into Martinez’s headphones. “Suggest one-sixty by ninety-two, my lord!”

  That seemed right. “Alter course to one-sixty by ninety-two. Accelerate to one point eight gravities. Execute in two minutes.”

  Martinez would alter course and fly from Rukmin, which would give the other two squadrons a chance to enter the fight and crush her between them.

  Rukmin’s ships appeared more clearly on the display as the plasma shells dispersed, and there seemed to be more enemy ships than there had been at the beginning of the engagement. The Restoration ships had been concealed from Rukmin, but she had been concealed from them as well, and she’d taken the opportunity to fire decoys.

  Martinez was beginning to feel admiration for his enemy. She’d been undergoing heavy accelerations for nearly two months, and her brain and body had been so beaten down that she shouldn’t have a functional synapse still working; but instead she was fighting aggressively and with intelligence.

  Pity to have to kill her.

  Time, Martinez thought, to keep the pressure on the enemy. While the zero-gee alarm rang and the ships ceased acceleration while they rotated to a new heading, he ordered more missiles launched, and they sped from their tubes and raced toward Rukmin. Best, he thought, to keep her flying into fog as much as possible.

  Carmody’s squadron adjusted their course and began an acceleration toward Rukmin—and after a brief pause, Foote shifted to a new heading as well. All units in the Shulduc system were now heading for a meeting at a single point in space, but one side or another would be annihilated well before that meeting took place.

  Rukmin’s best chance was to destroy Martinez and Squadron Twenty before the others could get within decisive range, and she knew it, so when she saw that Martinez was trying to escape her, she increased her own acceleration, and Martinez pushed his own acceleration to two and a half gees.

  Two and a half invisible Torminel wrestlers sat invisibly on his chest. The miniwaves pulsing from his couch hummed in his bones. He tightened his abdomen and began a series of deliberate breaths and kept his mind focused on his display.

  However bad this was, it was bound to be worse for Rukmin and her crews, who were accelerating at four gees or more.

  He didn’t want to outrun Rukmin. Division Two had come into the Shulduc system with a lot of momentum that it couldn�
�t shed in time, and so he and Rukmin were bound to shoot past each other no matter what maneuvers they underwent in the meantime. He wanted only to delay his fatal encounter with Rukmin until his other units were able to enter the action.

  Right now Rukmin was flying through a blazing cloud of plasma that was blinding her sensors, and the faster she accelerated, the more swiftly his missiles came at her. Enemy missiles flew out of the plasma cloud, looping toward Squadron Twenty, their courses jittering to avoid defensive fire.

  “Flag to Squadron Twenty,” Martinez said. “Adopt starburst pattern one. Commence in forty seconds.”

  Up till now all ships in Shulduc had been arranged in loose order around their flagships, far enough apart so that their antimatter torches wouldn’t cook one another, but close enough for the flagship to maintain control over each ship. Early in the Naxid War, the disadvantages of this formation became apparent, for while the ships were in formation, they remained an excellent, close-packed target for an enemy. The alternative had been to starburst, with each ship racing away from another, but in this case the ships lost contact with one another and ceased to act as a unit.

  This was where the Martinez Method came into play. With Sula, Martinez had worked out a type of starburst in which the ships would fly in an ever-shifting mathematical relation to one another, flying along the convex hull of a chaotic dynamical system, a fractal pattern calculated to maximize defensive weapons’ effectiveness while keeping the ships at a safe, and completely unpredictable, distance from one another.

  Now the question was whether Rukmin would use the Method herself. Even though Supreme Commander Tork had denounced it as an innovation that insulted the perfect tactics of the ancestors, and forbidden its use within the Fleet, the system wasn’t a secret, and Martinez had done his best to disperse knowledge of the Method to as many officers as seemed open to the idea. He wondered if Rukmin was one of the officers who had received the formula, and whether she would consider employing it in a situation that found her at a considerable disadvantage.

  She hadn’t yet, as far as he could see.

  Checking his display, Martinez confirmed that the enemy-held wormhole relay stations had been blown up and wouldn’t be able to send information about Martinez’s tactics to Supreme Commander Tork.

  Martinez watched as the ships of Squadron Twenty drew apart from one another and began maneuvering within their pattern. Antiproton beams flashed from his warships, setting more of space alight as they burned enemy missiles. Countermissiles were fired against the missiles that had evaded the antiproton weapons. Martinez was ordering more missiles fired when Prince Huang’s voice came into his headset. “Lord Fleetcom, I recommend some tactical adjustments. If you would care to view my plot . . .”

  Martinez took several grunting breaths to clear his head, then triggered Huang’s simulation. For a moment it seemed as if Huang was recommending increased acceleration, enough to render everyone in the squadron unconscious, but then he realized that he’d seen a simulation of these sorts of darting, leaping ships before, when Huang had demonstrated his fractal boundary theory. Anger simmered in his brain.

  “What is this, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “You’ve got to shift the unit of measurement larger!” Huang said. “You can run right ahead of those missiles, then jump back closer to the enemy to fire, and then get away again!”

  “It can’t be done!” Martinez said. He wanted to lunge out of his couch and yank the microphone connections out of Huang’s helmet. “Lieutenant,” he said, “in the future, confine your suggestions to the possible!”

  “This is too important!” Huang said. His boyish voice searched for a higher register, and found it. “If we do this, we can save lives!” he shrilled.

  Martinez wondered if Huang was genuinely crazy, or if the sight of missiles heading for Los Angeles had driven him mad with fear. “Not now!” he said. He shifted back to his virtual display of the battle. “Signals,” he said. “Please cut Lieutenant Huang out of the flag station circuit.”

  “Gladly, my lord!” Santana sounded furious, even though the two and a half gravities that sat on his diaphragm had reduced his anger into a croak.

  “No!” Huang said. “This is import—”

  Martinez gasped with relief as Huang’s voice vanished from his perceptions. He was trying to make sense of the virtual combat plot that showed Rukmin still coming on at four or more gravities, largely invisible behind a churning sea of plasma. Some of the enemy’s missiles had been hit by point-defense weapons, and the rest were on the verge of being annihilated by countermissiles. Foote and Carmody were closing with the enemy, and firing steadily.

  “Message from Captain Dalkeith, my lord,” Banerjee said. “We’ve killed one of the enemy.”

  “Confirmed?” Martinez said.

  “Sensors indicate enough radiation for a cruiser’s antimatter store blowing up—wait!” Excitement glittered in Banerjee’s voice.

  “What is it?”

  “Another ship destroyed! Confirmed! And there was a third hit, but apparently it was a decoy.”

  Martinez would have laughed if he could have spared the energy. “Flag to squadron: ‘Congratulations and keep firing. Only fourteen enemy to go.’”

  A shift in course sent Martinez’s acceleration couch swinging, and before it returned to its deadpoint, Martinez glimpsed Prince Huang and saw that his gloved fingers were rapping out a message on a keypad. Foreboding crept into Martinez’s mind.

  “Santana,” he said. “Take a look at what Huang’s doing, will you?”

  “Yes, Fleetcom.” There was a moment of silence, and then the cruiser’s engines shut off without warning, and the air rang with a belated zero-gee alarm. The weight on Martinez’s chest vanished as he floated in his harness. He was aware of Santana shouting, the words buried under the sound of the alarm. He stared at the displays in front of him. These showed the rest of the squadron accelerating on without the flagship, leaving Los Angeles drifting in space with two enemy squadrons bearing down on it.

  “What’s going on?” he said. “Contact Dalkeith!” And then, “Santana, please repeat!”

  “Huang’s sent his damned plan to every one of our ships!” Santana snarled.

  “Send out a cancellation. And cut Huang out of every communications circuit!”

  “Yes, Lord Fleetcom,” said Santana. “But I think I’m going to need your commander key to do that.”

  “Send it to my board, then, and—”

  “Captain Dalkeith reports she doesn’t know what tripped the engines,” Banerjee interrupted. “But the engine crew’s tracking it down.”

  Martinez glared at the display that showed his ships madly accelerating away from him. “Banerjee, send from flag to Squadron Twenty: ‘Re-form, starburst centered on flag.’”

  Santana gave a growl of frustration. “My lord, Huang’s sent the order again.”

  Banerjee called out. “I’ve just received an inquiry from Squadron Commander Carmody asking which set of orders to follow, my lord.”

  “Damn it!” Martinez could see a torrent of enemy missiles flying toward him out of the plasma cloud. “Right,” he said, “put me on video. I’m going to broadcast to the division personally.” Martinez waited until his own underlit, harried face appeared on one of his screens, and he took a breath and spoke.

  “This is Fleet Commander Martinez to all Restoration ships. A panicked crew member on Los Angeles has seized control of some of the communications apparatus and is sending out conflicting instructions. Disregard any orders requiring absurd or impossible accelerations, and accept orders only from me, in person, transmitted by video. Thank you.”

  Martinez ended the transmission and wondered why he’d added the polite thank you at the end. He had no reason at this moment to be thankful for anything, the more so because he saw that Huang was still tapping on his keyboard, sending who knew what insanity out into the world.

  “Lord Fleetcom,” said Santana. “I
’m afraid I do in fact need your commander’s key to take Huang out of the system. I’ve sent the appropriate screen to you.”

  Martinez had already put his commander’s key into the slot on his command board, and so he brought Santana’s signals screen onto his displays and ran his fingers down the list of communication and data privileges from which he was barring Huang. Once all the lights shifted over to Privileges Revoked, he pressed the Confirm button.

  Huang, he saw, kept on pressing keys for a while, then hesitated, jammed more keys for a while, then gave up. He put a hand on one of the struts of his acceleration cage, then swung it around to face Martinez. Martinez could see Huang’s murderous glare through the visor of his helmet.

  “Captain Dalkeith wishes a private channel, Lord Fleetcom.”

  Now what? Martinez wondered. “Put her through,” he said.

  Dalkeith’s child’s voice lisped in his headset. “We’ve tracked the cause of the engine trip, my lord,” she said. “It’s the first lieutenant—he’s had a stroke.”

  Which made sense. High accelerations could cause strokes or other cerebral accidents, and the suits worn by crewmen at quarters monitored their physical condition. Under peacetime conditions a stroke suffered by any crew member would be enough to cause an emergency shutdown, but during combat or an emergency, a different priority took hold, and only the most critical members of the hierarchy could cause an engine trip.

  Which, normally, would include the first lieutenant. That Los Angeles’s premiere had been incapacitated in his bed since early in the voyage had apparently not changed the computer’s priorities.

  “I could page a stretcher team to his cabin,” Dalkeith said, “or—”

  Martinez looked at the flood of missiles heading toward Los Angeles and clenched his teeth. He didn’t like Dalkeith passing this responsibility on to him, not when it was her ship and her officer and her decision.

  “No, Captain,” he said. “The premiere’s on his own. Override the computer, ignite the engines, and accelerate at four gees until we catch the squadron.”