Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Let’s establish the communications array,” Martinez said. The simulation would run in Los Angeles’s computer, and an interlinking web of lasers would loop every ship in the Fourth Fleet into the simulation. Tork’s fleet would exist only in the simulation, and the Fourth Fleet’s maneuvers, accelerations, and missile launches would be real.

  Once each ship reported in, Sula loaded the simulation, and Tork’s Righteous Fleet for Suppression of Dissension appeared on her displays. Sula had assumed that Tork would attempt to reenact his victory at the Battle of Second Magaria, his greatest triumph, and so the enemy fleet, its reality consisting of nothing but electrons, appeared stretched out in a long line. Within each squadron ships were loosely clumped about the flagship, but the squadrons themselves were arranged as nose-to-tail as possible. The enemy fleet appeared even more formidable because at least a third of their number were decoys. Since Fleet records revealed the capabilities of every ship in the Home Fleet and Second Fleet, the virtual ships were designed to reflect their actual capabilities and armament.

  The battle got off to a slow start as Martinez shifted his own formations to match those of the enemy and discovered just how hard it was to alter his dispositions. Nevertheless he succeeded in stretching out his own formation so that the enemy couldn’t wrap around him and smother him in a blaze of fire. Sula was far more experienced at this and gave as much aid as she could, and once the ships were sorted, the battle proper began as the lines closed.

  Fire erupted up and down the line as computer-generated explosions flared around perfectly genuine missiles. Los Angeles had a good view of the action, because Division Two was half of the mobile reserve, the other being a division commanded by Kung. Kung’s force from the Home Fleet, Foote’s light squadron, and Division Two were the elite units of the Fourth Fleet, because the crews were regular long-service veterans who had served together for years. The rest, the majority of the ships of the Restoration force, had only been aboard their ships for, at most, a few months.

  Missiles lanced out. Simulated radio hash from explosions obscured the action. Under pressure, friendly squadrons whirled into the elusive, shifting alignments of Ghost Tactics. Ships, friends and enemies, were ruled destroyed by the computer and vanished from the display.

  Sula sensed a growing mental pressure that signaled the battle’s arriving climax, the moment when the reserves would have to be committed if they were to be used at all. Her job as tactical officer was to point this out, but she wanted to know if Martinez could discover the moment on his own.

  “Message to Division Two,” Martinez said. “Assume Method formation, engage enemy on heading zero-four-zero by zero-zero-one. Execute in one minute. Message to Fleet Commander Kung—‘permission to engage at will.’”

  Sula felt heat racing through her veins. Martinez had spotted the moment, and he had acted.

  Her acceleration cage sang as the ship reoriented, then dropped back to its deadpoint as the engines lit. Missiles leaped from tubes. Sula searched the enemy formation, located a place where an attack might unhinge the enemy alignment, pointed it out to Martinez. He adjusted the division’s course and sent flights of missiles reaching for the enemy.

  Sula and Martinez worked in close consort for the rest of the exercise. It was almost as if they sat with their heads together, whispering into each other’s ears, tasting each other’s breath, smelling the other’s sweat. Their minds leaped from one point to the next, thoughts overleaping each other in dizzying array.

  The result was a victory for the Restoration, with the enemy’s virtual armada wiped out, and the Fourth Fleet reduced to twenty-three survivors, including the Los Angeles.

  The best result so far, with casualties of only 85 percent.

  As the Fourth Fleet began the quotidian business of securing from general quarters, recovering missiles, and sorting itself into its cruising formations, Sula allowed herself to sag into her couch. Her skin felt warm and flushed, and a strange elation sang in her mind despite the gravity-induced kinks and aches in her muscles. For the first time she felt convinced that the Restoration was going to win a decisive victory, and that she and Martinez would do it.

  The air filled with the happy, relieved chatter of the signals officers reliving the crucial moments of the battle. Though Sula badly wanted a shower to scrub off the suit smells that clung to her, there was no point in leaving her couch, because Los Angeles was maneuvering and the air was full of alarms for weightlessness and then the resumption of gravity. Eventually the ship settled into Division Two’s cruising formation and began a gentle acceleration of .6 gravity in the direction of Zarafan. Sula unwebbed, sat up, and wrenched off her helmet and then the soft elastic cap that held her headphones and virtual reality rig. Fresh air cooled the sweat that prickled her scalp.

  Martinez, seen out of the corner of her eye, rolled off his couch onto his feet, and carefully stepped out of the acceleration cage. He looked down at Sula.

  “By the way,” he said, “I’ve decided to follow your suggestion about breaking up Chandra’s squadron. I’ve looked at the data concerning those sensor suites, and you’re completely right about them.”

  She looked at him narrowly as he left the room, helmet tucked under his arm. She suspected she’d heard a hint of condescension in his voice, that he’d offered agreement and praise as a way of keeping her both docile and useful.

  I am just here to make him look good, she reminded herself, and then rose to her feet and made her way from the room.

  Chapter 14

  Scout craft of the Exploration Service first spotted the Righteous Fleet for Suppression of Dissension two wormhole jumps from Zarafan, a system called Roda two-thirds of the distance between Zarafan and the crossroads system of Toley. The Exploration Service had previously sent armed parties aboard the wormhole relay stations in Roda and had sent the original non-Terran crews to Toley to be interned. But since Tork was expected along with his combined fleet, the relay stations had been abandoned, and the crews had returned to their shuttles and shifted to very precise locations on the fringes of the system. Using communications lasers, they were able to send messages through the wormhole to similarly placed shuttles in the Toley system, thus maintaining contact with Harzapid and the Fourth Fleet. Though their engines were shut down, the ships were running on minimal power, and the crews shivering in their winter clothing, continuous use of the comm lasers would generate a lot of heat, and the craft would blaze like a comet in the sky were anyone scanning the system in infrared. To avoid this, communications were kept at a minimum until the arrival of Tork’s ships, after which their position and appearance were reported almost continually. No active scans were employed, no lidar or radar, and only passive sensors recorded Tork’s track.

  Apparently Tork wasn’t bothering to scan the system’s outer reaches, because the feed from Roda came to the Fourth Fleet without interruption. Martinez watched the enemy advance with a sensation of grim tenacity. There were at least eight hundred engine flares advancing across Roda toward Harzapid, and though Martinez knew that nearly half of them were decoys, the very sight of the enemy was intimidating. They outnumbered his own fleet two to one.

  His staff—and officers on every ship in the fleet—were studying the feeds carefully, to try to separate warships from decoys. Decoys became less convincing over time, and Tork took several days to cross the Roda system, providing observers with massive amounts of data.

  Finally, as the Righteous Fleet was only a few hours short of its wormhole transit to Toley, a drifting, distant Restoration shuttle painted the entire fleet with its lidar, and seven hundred missiles, accelerated to relativistic velocities, shot through the Toley wormhole on target for the enemy.

  Tork had been expecting this—the tactic, anticipated by Chandra Prasad, had been deployed by the Naxids in the last war—and so point-defense lasers and antiproton cannon were set on automatic, and Tork’s own radar and lidar was pounding out to make sure the way ahead was clea
r.

  Both the missiles and countermissile batteries had mere seconds to choose targets. Space between the wormhole and the Righteous Fleet blazed with antimatter flares, and the bursts leaped toward the enemy fleet and flamed among the warships.

  The missiles had been programmed to avoid any enemy previously identified as a decoy, and to avoid as well Battleship Squadron One, the three huge vessels that were presumed to include Tork’s flagship. Martinez would have liked to have destroyed the huge vessels, but even more he wanted to preserve Tork. Tork was predictable, and any successor might not be.

  Martinez knew all too well the panic the missile attack would produce, the officers scrambling for their stations while the ships’ engines burned in unpredictable, mad evasions, the Command crews staring in terror at their displays, crew knocked off their feet or thrown from their beds by sudden maneuvers, the sudden, horrific knowledge that death was right before them, hurtling toward them at a speed nearing that of light, and that whether they would live or die was a decision entirely out of their hands . . .

  Martinez gave them a few minutes to recover from their shock and catch their breaths. The next missile barrage was timed to hit the Righteous Fleet just as it was passing through the expanding fireballs of destroyed missiles, when sensors might be confused. This barrage consisted of nine hundred missiles, and Martinez was gratified by what seemed to be a series of secondary explosions flaring in the fireball haze.

  The shuttle that had painted the Righteous Fleet with its lidar shut down immediately after the second strike, but the rangefinder had blazed away long enough for Tork’s staff to get a bearing. Tork dispatched a missile and destroyed the shuttle, but no lives were lost—the shuttle was empty and had been operated remotely by another shuttle a safe distance away.

  Between the two attacks, Martinez’s staff concluded that at least twenty-one enemy warships had been destroyed, and several more were having difficulty maneuvering and had presumably been damaged.

  A third missile attack hit the Righteous Fleet a few minutes after it passed through the wormhole into Toley. Their defense was somewhat more coordinated this time, ships and decoys had been swapped around, and there were only two probable hits.

  Martinez wasn’t disappointed. He had plenty of missiles left. The government at Harzapid had got very good at producing them, and the Fleet Train of support vessels had got equally good at delivering munitions where they were needed.

  Once Tork’s ships emerged from the fireballs of this last attack, they got their first glimpse of their enemy. The Restoration Fleet was visible across the system, stretched out in textbook battle formation and accelerating away from Tork to prevent the Righteous Fleet from overrunning them. Martinez hadn’t bothered sending out any decoys, because Tork knew exactly how many ships he had, and to Tork they must have looked like a morsel that would be gobbled with ease. Tork still had over five hundred warships.

  Toley was the system to which Foote and Rukmin had raced at the very beginning of the war, Foote flying from Colamote, Rukmin driving from Zarafan. Rukmin had won that race and the result was her annihilation at the Battle of Shulduc.

  Martinez had deliberately shown his ships to bait Tork into pursuit, and pursue Tork did, preceded by one of his pompous declarations, sent in the clear so that everyone in the system could admire it. To impress his audience with his majesty he wore his full-dress uniform, with the double row of silver buttons, and the disk of the Golden Orb around his throat.

  “In the name of the Praxis and the Convocation,” he said in his chiming, modulated Daimong voice, “I command all rebel fleet elements to surrender. Your piratical and murderous actions threaten order and decency, and society demands the most rigorous justice. You will fire all missiles into the interstellar void and submit to boarding and arrest, after which you will meet the severe penalties that your traitorous actions deserve.”

  Tork’s cadaverous features looked ancient. His black lidless eyes were dull, and strips of dead flesh hung from his gray, expressionless face. His voice was as beautiful as ever, but his tone lacked the fiery conviction that had marked many of his speeches.

  He seemed so skeletal and emaciated that Martinez wondered if he’d survive long enough to fight a battle.

  Martinez was in his office when the message arrived, trying to cope with the message traffic. He’d issued instructions that only captains should signal him, and only five times each day, but the results had been that some captains sent fewer but longer and more detailed messages. Still, signals traffic had been reduced and left him more time for sleep.

  His cuff display chimed, and he answered to see Sula with her jade eyes glittering.

  “May I respond to Tork?” she asked. “Or do you want to do it?”

  “Tork thinks Lady Michi is in command here,” he said. “If either of us responds, he’ll know that Michi isn’t here.”

  “I don’t see why that matters, but I can say that I’m speaking with Lady Michi’s permission.”

  How much does it matter? Martinez wondered, and he decided it didn’t matter at all.

  “Permission granted,” he said. He realized he was looking forward to viewing the message.

  It was a few minutes before Sula sent her message, either because she was making notes or rehearsing. When it came, Sula appeared in her undress tunic, a deliberate contrast to Tork’s formality. Her porcelain face was flushed with fury, her eyes ablaze.

  “This is Caroline, Lady Sula, speaking with the permission of Lady Michi Chen, who had more important things to do than to respond to the nonsensical message sent by that ancient wheezebag, Lord Tork.”

  That’s making a good start, Martinez thought.

  “Message follows,” Sula said, and her tone changed. “How dare you invoke the Praxis, you senile, witless box of turd! How dare you make demands! You started this war, you imbecile, with your demented order to arrest every Terran crew in the Fleet, and your smug conviction that somehow we wouldn’t find out about it! Your security was so perfect that we knew within hours!”

  Which was, Martinez knew, a bit of an exaggeration.

  Sula’s lips curled in a snarl. “You were so dim-witted that when we responded, you could do nothing but stand there and gobble about pirates and Terran criminals! You were surprised that we took action to defend ourselves! You turned us into enemies with your stupid fucking order! You’re so self-satisfied and swollen with vanity that you had to invent the office of Supreme Commander and award it to yourself! You’re allied with the worst and most corrupt politicians in Zanshaa, and you think they share your principles, when in fact they’re just robbing the state while you provide them protection.” She laughed again. “Lord Minno, a cheap con man and a member of a stock fraud gang. Lady Gruum, a desperate bankrupt. And Lady Tu-hon, greedy and psychotic.”

  Sula grinned. “And what have we done since we sailed out of your clutches? We’ve got a working government, our economy is soaring while yours is prostrate and in the hands of thieves, and more important than that, we keep winning. Rukmin and her command were wiped out! Force Orghoder was wiped out! An-sol and Conformance were wiped out! Lord Oh Derinuus was so stupid that he practically blew himself up!”

  Sula paused for a moment to collect her thoughts while she glowered into the camera. “Now you’ve arrived in person with thousands of crew who you’re willing to sacrifice for your own vanity.” She laughed. “I’m here to tell you that you still haven’t realized who you’re dealing with. We’re going to cut up that fine fleet of yours, take it apart piece by piece, and we’re going to do it on our time, not yours. You’ll watch your fleet’s life’s blood drain away drop by drop, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it. In the end, there will be just you, alone, in your flagship’s magnificent ballroom wondering why no one else has come to the dance.”

  Sula took a breath, then offered a smile. “But there’s a way out. You don’t have to sacrifice the thousands of brave crew that you’re leading to certain
death.” She raised a hand and pointed a finger directly at the viewer. “So I order you, Lord Tork, in the name of the Praxis, to surrender yourself and your command at once. Shoot all your missiles into the void of space, and permit your ships to be boarded by forces of the Restoration. We promise that any who surrender will be treated fairly, and if they have not committed crimes against the Praxis, they will retain rank and status in the Fleet.”

  Martinez was startled. Can we do that? he wondered.

  Sula dropped her hand and looked at the camera, her expression now quizzical, “I’d like to address now the officers and crew of the so-called Righteous Fleet, and I’d like to ask a simple question: Why are you fighting us? Why are you risking lives and honor to defend a gang of hack politicians and a senile, criminal commander? You know what’s going to happen. If I were you, I’d start thinking about how to gracefully escape your fatal situation.” Her lips quirked in a smile. “I’m attaching some entertainment to this message, which I hope you will enjoy. I know that after dodging our missiles, you’re probably in dire need of a laugh.” She favored her audience with a sweet smile. “This is Lady Sula. Message ends.”

  Martinez looked at the attachments to the signal and saw that Sula had included all of Severin’s satiric puppet shows lambasting the Zanshaa government, along with the documentary about the discovery of Lorkin.

  He told Alikhan to open a bottle of champagne, then contacted Sula on his sleeve display. She was half reclined in her office chair, her top tunic button undone, her face glowing with exhausted gratification.

  “That must have been satisfying,” he said.

  Sula gave a weary laugh. “There’s nothing quite so gratifying as not giving a fuck,” she said.

  “Oh? Yet somehow I had the impression you cared.”

  Sula gave a weary laugh, and a half-hidden light gleamed in her eyes. “I’m just a terrific actor.”

  “I’ve got to agree with you.”