Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  Like Tork’s, Sula’s message had been sent in the clear. Which meant that every signals crew in the Righteous Fleet had seen it, and that meant so had every captain and most of the officers. Presumably none of them—unless they’d served with Sula before—had ever been addressed in this manner in their lives. Certainly Tork hadn’t.

  Probably has done wonders for their morale, Martinez thought.

  “I’ve just opened a bottle of champagne to toast your message,” Martinez said. “If you drank alcohol, I’d invite you to share it with me.”

  He spoke with care. Over the last weeks he and Sula had managed a relationship that stayed within certain well-defined limits. They worked together during exercises, and in the freewheeling postmortems afterward, which typically involved most of the ship’s officers. During that time Sula was brilliant, eyes flashing as she followed some train of thought or overleaped Martinez’s train of logic to land on the place he’d only glimpsed, dimly, somewhere in his mind. She was less exuberant in the obligatory formal dinners that Martinez hosted for his captains: she only came when invited, ate little, said less, and returned to her cabin as soon as the decencies permitted. She never wore the red staff tabs on her collar.

  Otherwise he never saw her. She had a life of her own, it seemed—sometimes he was aware that she played host at her own events, with old comrades like Alana Haz, Rebecca Giove, and Pavel Ikuhara, as well as new friends like the Kangas twins. Martinez was never invited, and he felt obscurely jealous of those who were.

  Alikhan told him that Sula’s chef was learning recipes from Marivic Mangahas and serving them to Sula’s guests. That raised Mangahas’s cooking in his estimation.

  Sula looked at Martinez and sighed. “Even if I drank alcohol, I’d have to turn down your champagne. I need sleep, and we’re sort of on vacation as long as the enemy is in sight.”

  Which, oddly, was true. The Fourth Fleet couldn’t stage any of its realistic fleet exercises as long as Tork was watching and taking notes on the tactics employed. Everyone could sleep late if they wanted.

  “I understand,” Martinez said. He wasn’t entirely sure what he expected to happen even if she’d joined him and matched his champagne with her Citrine Fling. Perhaps he just wanted to explore more thoroughly the walls they’d erected around themselves.

  He looked at her. “Should you have really offered amnesty to the enemy?” he asked. “I take it you haven’t consulted with Michi or Roland on the matter?”

  “Tork demanded that we surrender so that he could kill us,” Sula said. “That seems a self-defeating strategy to me. I thought we ought to offer our enemies a more generous settlement—especially as the Fleet, outside of Tork and his immediate circle, hasn’t been involved in any of the outrages against Terrans. That was all the civilian government.”

  “We’ll see if we get any defectors,” Martinez said.

  “I’ll settle for enemies who are less enthusiastic about torturing us to death,” Sula said.

  Alikhan brought the champagne in its silver bucket, then placed a glass in front of Martinez. With a series of precise, economical gestures, he wrapped the stopper in a towel, popped the stopper open, and poured. Sula, unable to view all this from Martinez’s sleeve display, gazed out of the screen with an arched eyebrow.

  “Well,” she said, “I believe this is my cue to say good night.”

  “Just a moment.”

  He took the glass, foam spilling down his fingers, and raised it to the image on his sleeve.

  “For Lady Sula,” he said, “and her impeccable eloquence.”

  She grinned. “Thank you, Lord Fleetcom,” she said and ended the message.

  Martinez contemplated the champagne, its aroma dancing in his senses, and drank.

  Apparently Tork was stunned into silence by Sula’s message. He, who so enjoyed his own ranting, pompous speeches, could think of no response.

  A day later, the Fourth Fleet passed through the wormhole gate into the Sennenola system, a system of pedestrian gas giants and barren, rocky planets devoid of breathable atmosphere. Martinez had left behind more than a dozen uncrewed shuttles in the fringes of the Toley system, each ready to paint Tork’s ships with lidar in support of an attack. These he unleashed almost at random, or whenever he suspected the enemy had begun to relax. Another half-dozen enemy ships were blown to atoms, but Martinez was hoping that the primary effect would be to enemy morale, to their nerves blasted by alarms at frequent intervals, to their bodies as they lurched to action stations, then were hurled in all directions while their ships made unpredictable evasive moves.

  Inevitably the Righteous Fleet got better at avoiding missile attacks. They shifted course frequently to frustrate missiles coming too fast to maneuver, and they set out a line of constantly shifting decoys ahead of the main body to absorb the initial impulse of attacks. The attacking missiles had been programmed to ignore the decoys and go straight for the warships, but they had only brief seconds to find a target, and sometimes they got it wrong.

  The Righteous Fleet also got better at looking for hostile observers. The uncrewed ships were difficult to locate, because they were dark until they deployed their laser rangefinders, but the uncrewed ships were controlled by other ships, which, because they had live Terrans on board, were easier to find. Some of these were splashed by enemy missiles, and one of the lost ships was crucial to the grand coup that Martinez intended.

  This was just before the Righteous Fleet’s transition to the Sennenola system. Another uncrewed shuttle was triggered at the last minute, and the Righteous Fleet was painted just a few seconds before twelve hundred missiles came racing through the Sennenola wormhole.

  As the antimatter blooms filled the display, as warships jinked and fired countermissiles, as laser and antiproton beams twinkled across the black of space, another three thousand missiles tore into the enemy from behind.

  Toley was a crossroads system. Martinez had sent the extra missiles through Toley Wormhole Three, in the direction of Colamote. They had ghosted into the system, turned around, decelerated, and waited, hovering in space—until the signal came to accelerate to relativistic speeds and race into Toley to hit the Righteous Fleet from behind.

  The Righteous Fleet’s response was uncoordinated due to the ongoing attack through the wormhole, but they did have sensors pointing behind them, and they saw the second strike coming in time to shoot most of them down. But there were a gratifying, dazzling series of antimatter bursts through the Righteous Fleet, a necklace of fire opals scattered throughout its long line.

  The double attacks had sufficiently disorganized Tork’s forces that they came through Wormhole Two in scattered groups, unable to mount a coherent defense against the hundreds of missiles boring straight at them. More fire opals blossomed in the night.

  When the staff finally managed to analyze the data, Martinez learned that the three attacks had killed no less than fifty-seven of the enemy.

  Unharmed, glowing bright in the center of the enemy formation, were the three vast ships of Battleship Squadron One, spared because the Restoration missiles had been programmed to spare them. Aboard one of them was Tork, who had witnessed his fleet’s brief, violent agony, helpless to prevent it.

  Good, Martinez thought.

  Sennenola’s two wormholes were unusual in that they were directly opposite each other on the fringes of the system, which meant that traveling from Wormhole One to Wormhole Two would involve passing directly through the sun, a course normally to be avoided. Fortunately three of the system’s gas giants were positioned such that a close approach to each would allow the Fourth Fleet to make a gentle curve around the system’s sun. Martinez had taken advantage of this by parking hundreds of missiles in the shadow of each of these worlds, or hidden them behind moons or within their rings. These would leap out to intercept the Righteous Fleet as they passed, the same trick Martinez had used to destroy the Conformance during Corona’s escape to Harzapid.

  He also parked a
large number of missiles very close to the sun, in hopes the enemy wouldn’t be able to see them against the sun’s glare and radiation.

  By the time Tork’s disorganized forces emerged from Wormhole One and were slapped with the third missile attack, they found the Restoration Fleet two-thirds of the way across the system and decelerating. The deceleration was an invitation to engage, though because established momentum would take them all through another wormhole, the engagement would take place in another system. Tork put his jumbled survivors in order, began his own deceleration, and began a search of the system for the small observation vessels Martinez had parked in the system’s outskirts. The search was more thorough than it had been in Toley, but then the Fourth Fleet had grown better at hiding its observers, grappled to the far sides of asteroids or planetoids and only revealing themselves when, on a predetermined schedule, they briefly unmasked to take action against the enemy. Still, a few observers were detected and destroyed.

  The Restoration’s greatest success in Sennenola took place at the first gas giant, a dark, dingy-looking world with eight moons and a near-invisible set of tilted rings. Martinez, by that time in the Shulduc system, launched a barrage timed to strike just as the Righteous Fleet passed the wormhole, and in the confusion and flashes of near misses, the missiles hidden near the gas giant launched for the enemy. Nine warships were destroyed.

  By the time the Righteous Fleet approached the second gas giant, they worked out what had happened, and sent their own missile barrage curving around the planet to seek out and destroy Martinez’s missiles lurking in ambush. The few missiles remaining were easily destroyed by point-defense systems as the Righteous Fleet passed by. Missiles waiting by the third gas giant were likewise destroyed.

  When Tork passed through Wormhole Two into Shulduc, he found his entire fleet illuminated by rangefinders—painted not by scout ships in the reaches of the system, but by the Fourth Fleet decelerating in combat formation, barring Tork’s way to Harzapid. Their missiles were already incoming at greater than 90 percent of the speed of light.

  The usual scenario played out—flashes in the darkness, expanding bubbles of radio hash, antiproton beams sweeping across the battle space. The Righteous Fleet had plenty of practice by now, and lost only a pair of ships—and then another set of missiles swarmed on them from the rear, and suddenly the darkness was torn by one blinding explosion after another.

  These were the missiles that had been parked in the glare of the Sennenola system’s sun. As soon as the Righteous Fleet vanished through Wormhole One, a scout ship gave the missiles the order to accelerate to relativistic speeds and pursue the enemy.

  This tactic had caught Tork completely by surprise at Toley, but he was surprised again at Sennenola because Sennenola wasn’t a crossroads system, with no wormhole to Colamote to send missiles through. Tork thought he was safe, was caught flat-footed again, and lost another twelve ships.

  He re-formed his ships one more time, this time with a significant change. More decoys were deployed to the rear, which was to be expected, but more importantly Martinez saw that four squadrons now hung back from the battle line.

  Apparently he wasn’t the only commander on the scene to think of mobile reserves. Damn.

  Martinez calculated his odds. So far as the staff had been able to compute, Tork had set out from Zanshaa with 538 warships, which meant he’d left a couple squadrons behind to guard the capital against an end-run sneak attack by way of Colamote. The campaign of attrition had killed over a hundred ships and left Tork with 433, of which an unknown number had suffered damage.

  Martinez’s fleet constituted 253 warships not counting Compliance, now docked at Harzapid for repairs. If he accepted battle now, he would engage with the odds against him being 1.7 to one, no longer two to one but still bad enough.

  Yet by now he was out of tricks. Planets in the Shulduc system were in inconvenient places in their orbits, and there were no suitable moons or gas giants to hide missiles behind. There was a sun, and Martinez put a few hundred missiles on its far side, but without a lot of hope. Continuing the war of ambush would result in insignificant damage to the enemy while moving the scene of battle closer to Harzapid itself. Martinez preferred to keep his family a safe distance from any action.

  The magazines of the Fourth Fleet were full. The Fleet Train had done its job of bringing resupply forward, and to save time hadn’t bothered to rendezvous with the warships, but instead kicked the missiles out of cargo holds one by one, then accelerated them toward the Fourth Fleet, where they matched velocities and were recovered by the warships. The Fleet Train of support vessels was now racing toward Harzapid ahead of the Fourth Fleet. They would resupply with more war materiel, or—if the battle went badly—they could try to pick up refugees from Harzapid and carry them toward Wei Jian and the Second Fleet defectors, who were still assumed to be en route for Harzapid. Nearly all the Fleet Train had cleared the Shulduc system, and the rest were fleeing the scene of combat as fast as their engines could safely drive them.

  Martinez felt his stomach swoop as Los Angeles shifted its heading to avoid enemy antiproton fire. He thought it unlikely that Tork would open fire at this long range, but with the odds against him he couldn’t afford to lose a single ship before the battle began, and he was taking every precaution that he could.

  Both fleets were now decelerating, with Tork piling on the gees so as to match velocities before engaging. If Tork retained his delta-vee, he would overshoot Martinez and have a clear path to Harzapid, whereas Martinez could have gone on straight to the empire’s capital at Zanshaa. Tork was right in thinking this an unacceptable trade, and if not for the threat to his family, Martinez would have accepted it in an instant.

  Fight or continue the attrition battle? The decision needed to be made soon.

  Right, Martinez thought. Time to be brilliant.

  The cabin lights had been dimmed, and soft shadows filled the corners of the room. Severin’s senses were alight with the warmth of Lady Starkey’s body, the soft texture of her hair, the taste of her skin, the comforting scent of sexual satiation.

  “I should get back to Explorer,” said Starkey. “We’ve got a battle to fight in the morning.”

  Which they did, with Tork’s fleet still engaged in bone-straining deceleration so as to engage within the next ten or twelve hours, their flaming antimatter torches pointed at the Fourth Fleet like so many loaded pistols.

  “If we’re not ready by now,” Severin said, “we’ll never be.”

  “But still,” said Starkey, “we should set an example for the other officers.”

  “We are setting an example,” said Severin. “I hope they all fall in love.”

  Starkey swung her legs off the bed and sat up, and Severin leaned forward to kiss her bare shoulder as she reached for her clothing.

  His sleeping cabin was far less cluttered than it had been, with the puppets, their stage, and the video equipment safely packed away and secure from the high-gravity stresses of battle. Only one puppet remained and gazed down at them from atop Severin’s wardrobe.

  Lady Starkey put on her undress uniform, and Severin helped her into her tunic, holding her hair out of the way as she buttoned her collar. When he pulled on his own clothes, he didn’t bother with anything more formal then the worn blue jumpsuit he usually wore aboard Expedition, at least when he wasn’t playing host at formal dinners.

  “I have a present for you,” he said. He reached atop his wardrobe and picked up the Alois puppet, which he presented to her. “He’s to keep watch over you, to keep you safe,” he said.

  She laughed and took the puppet, then kissed its ridiculous face. “I’ll have him with me in Command,” she said. She ran fingers through her hair. “Do I look all right?”

  “You look brilliant,” Severin said. He reached to embrace her, but she restrained him while she used her sleeve display to summon her shuttle crew from the galley, where they’d been enjoying the hospitality of Expedition’s
crew. Then she let Severin take her in his arms, and she kissed him fiercely.

  “After we win the battle?” she said.

  “We’ll write our own rules,” he said. “You, me, and Alois.”

  He walked her to the airlock and delighted her shuttle crew by kissing her good-bye in public. Before bed he dealt with reports, messages, and other documents that had piled up while he was with Lady Starkey, and then was readying himself for sleep when he received a photo from her.

  The photo showed the Alois puppet in the mesh bag attached to the side of Lady Starkey’s Command chair. Its orange-yarn hair and large, absurd nose overhung the bag’s elastic opening, and its mouth hung open in a broad grin.

  Alois is making himself at home, Severin read.

  Don’t forget to kiss him good night, Severin sent and turned out the light.

  Sula spent the night before the battle in her cabin, tucked in bed with a cup of honey-sweetened tea and surrounded by the sound of derivoo. Some found the traditions that surrounded the performance too artificial and the subject matter too melodramatic, but Sula thought that missed the point. A derivoo singer, standing alone onstage in her traditional flounced skirts, sang of her confrontation with fate and displayed scornful resolution in the face of tragedy or defeat. She might have been deserted by a husband, she might have lost a child, she might have murdered a lover in a fit of jealousy—but she stood unbroken at the end and cried aloud her anguish and her defiance.

  Derivoo was a human art form, and at its best spoke of what it meant to be human, to be tossed and battered by fate, to be torn by raw emotion and raw desire, to survive and still to somehow cry aloud, not a protest, not a complaint, but a scornful acceptance of death and destiny. Do your worst! the derivoo cried, and a listener had no doubt that the worst would be done.

  Some people recoiled from the savagery of the subject matter, but these were people who couldn’t face the truth of their own illusions and terror. Derivoo was true, a faithful record of what it was to be human, to live a typhoon-tossed life that was only a prelude to death.