Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Martinez to all ships,” he finally ordered. “Fire screening barrage on my mark. Twenty, nineteen . . .”

  The long countdown was to give the Fourth Fleet’s weaponers and officers time to react. By the end of the countdown, Martinez was panting for breath and sweat was prickling on his forehead. Miniwaves pulsed from his couch, keeping his blood from pooling under high gravity.

  Four hundred missiles leaped from their tubes, were carried into space by chemical boosters, then reoriented, fired their antimatter torches, and raced into the gap between the fleets.

  “Stand by for turnabout,” Martinez gasped.

  The four hundred missiles detonated, produced a storm of neutrons, gamma rays, and short-lived pions, while their tungsten jackets created blazing, expanding fireballs, all of which created an opaque radio wall between the Fourth Fleet and Tork’s sensors.

  “All ships commence turnabout,” Martinez said. The zero-gee warning sounded, and Martinez took a grateful breath of free air as the engines cut. Los Angeles again pitched end over end, its nose now pointed toward the enemy.

  “Fire decoys. Launch pinnaces. Assume First Combat Formation, and accelerate at two gees.”

  Tork was about to get a surprise.

  He would be straining his senses, and his sensors, to find out what was going on behind the screen that the Fourth Fleet had just laid down. And what he would finally see, emerging from the screen, was the entire enemy force flying through the radio hash and bearing down to engage.

  And the Fourth Fleet would have grown to twice its previous size.

  To this point Martinez hadn’t bothered to fire decoys because Tork knew exactly how many ships he had, and because if he had used decoys, the fleets were in sight of each other long enough that Tork would have been able to work out which were decoy and which warships. But now, with an engagement coming on in just a few minutes, Tork and his staff didn’t have the time to make that calculation. All they would see were over five hundred ships aimed like bullets between their eyes. And though they would know that half those ships were harmless, they wouldn’t know which half, and the very sight of all those drive signatures emerging through the fog might shock them into making mistakes.

  The Fourth Fleet made some adjustments to its order while under cover, shifting into what Martinez had called the First Combat Formation. Kung’s division and Martinez’s Division Two both dropped their rate of acceleration to let the rest of the fleet surge ahead, reordering to fill the gaps with warships and decoys. The mobile reserves had detached themselves from the line and soon halted their advance entirely. Martinez felt himself floating in his harness as the engines cut.

  Los Angeles approached the cloud, its sensors straining to seek out the Righteous Fleet on the other side. Then the cruiser flashed through the expanding, cooling fireballs, and the enemy was revealed.

  Tork had figured that something was up behind the antimatter screen, and while waiting for the situation to resolve, the Righteous Fleet had cut its engines to observe, all except for the Lai-own ships still scurrying to catch up. When they saw the Fourth Fleet emerge from the murk, they pitched over their ships and began a deceleration to give themselves a chance to reorder their line before the battle started. Their attempts to plug the gaps were slow and almost random.

  In organizing his enormous fleet, Martinez realized, Tork hadn’t done anything like the Fourth Fleet’s creation of the division. He was issuing orders to his squadrons one by one, which meant that most of his ships would be stuck in formation exactly where Tork had put them at the beginning. His vast force of over four hundred ships was just too unwieldy to maneuver properly.

  “All ships but the reserve,” Martinez said, “engage at will. You are free to starburst at any time.”

  He watched as the Fourth Fleet approached the disorganized enemy, as missiles raced out from both sides to be blasted by point-defense weapons or by countermissiles. The battlespace became murky with radio haze. One by one, the Fourth Fleet divisions starburst into the bobbing, weaving formations of the Martinez Method, designed so that the ships wouldn’t be so close together that a single volley could wipe them out, while defensive fire could be concentrated at maximum efficiency. These were the tactics that Tork had officially rejected as breaking with the perfect legacy of the ancestors, and his squadrons remained frozen in the comparatively rigid formations that had been standard in the Fleet for millennia.

  Brave lost. Words marking the Fourth Fleet’s first casualty formed in a corner of Martinez’s display, the event duly reported by Brave’s squadron leader.

  The only element of the Fourth Fleet that hadn’t engaged was the center—Perfection of the Praxis and its two supporting cruiser squadrons had hung back as if they were afraid of engaging Battleship Squadron One and its enormous firepower. That fear, Martinez felt, was perfectly justified, for each of the Praxis-class ships carried eighty-four missile launchers.

  Martinez hoped to tempt Tork into an unwise pursuit of Conyngham’s Division One—and if not that, to at least keep the enemy battleships pinned in place, unengaged but unable to advance. Even without engaging, Conyngham had sent his squadrons into the weaving, stochastic-seeming patterns of the Method, as if to taunt Tork with his lack of orthodoxy. Tork hardly hesitated at all—Battleship Squadron One, along with its supports, moved to engage, preceded by a wave of a thousand missiles.

  Conyngham’s ships drew away while engaged in a frantic defensive dance, antiproton beams flashing out, a surge of countermissiles racing from launchers to knock down the enemy strike. Martinez saw one of Conyngham’s cruisers erupt in a hellish antimatter storm and winced.

  Thrasher lost.

  Able lost.

  Judge Jeffreys disabled, drifting.

  An intense general action had begun along the length of the line. Martinez could see brilliant expanding fireballs as ships were blasted into ionizing radiation. With fireballs and radiant hash clouding the displays, he couldn’t see every detonation, but he could read data from the radiation detectors that spiked as ships exploded behind the obscuring clouds. His anxiety rose as he realized he couldn’t always see which ships had blown up, or which side they belonged to. The battle was too big for him to control, or even to see properly.

  The lagging Lai-own squadrons finally rejoined the Righteous Fleet, but there was no place for them in the battle array—their places had been taken, somewhat haphazardly, by other ships. Some of the Lai-own squadrons hung back, firing missiles around their replacements, and others merged with the squadrons already present, creating a tangle of uncoordinated targets and—Martinez imagined—massive command-and-control issues.

  Conyngham’s command was invisible behind hundreds of radiation blooms. Missiles detonated up and down the line, a constant rippling brightness. There must have been thousands of missiles racing to their destruction at any one time. Despite their awkward deployment, the addition of nearly a hundred ships to the enemy line was beginning to take its toll on the Restoration squadrons.

  Bombardment of Kurthag lost.

  Standard depressurized.

  Judge Jeffreys lost.

  Storm Fury lost.

  The messages of loss and annihilation were coming too fast for Martinez to keep up.

  “Lord Fleetcom.” Sula’s voice came low in his ear. “Now or never.” This only confirmed Martinez’s own instinct.

  “Lieutenant Ricci,” Martinez said. “How long before the solar missiles arrive?”

  “Forty minutes, Lord Fleetcom.”

  Crisis lost.

  Loyalty lost.

  The moment decisive, Martinez thought.

  “Flag to Lord Fleetcom Kung,” Martinez said. “You should consider yourself free to engage the enemy. Flag to Division Two: assume Double Hammer Formation. Accelerate at one gravity on a bearing of—” He called up the compass function into his virtual display. “Two-nine-one degrees absolute. Evolution to begin at—” A glance at the chronometer. “11:41.” Which w
ould give everyone nearly twenty seconds to prepare, which should be enough, considering they’d been waiting for this order for the better part of an hour.

  Right on schedule the fifteen ships of Division Two fired engines, and the two squadrons began a slow spiral around each other. Martrinez was pressed back into his couch, and he felt the ship’s eddies in his viscera. The battle began to move closer.

  Imperious lost.

  Javelin severely damaged, depressurized.

  Martinez had observed, as far back as the Second Battle of Magaria, that Tork had made insufficient use of the third dimension. He intended to take advantage of that.

  While each squadron in the Righteous Fleet was organized in a rigid flat spheroid around its flagship, the squadrons themselves were stretched out head-to-tail in a long line. With Tork’s battleships in pursuit of Conyngham, that line now resembled a shallow V, its point consisting of Battleship Squadron One under their Supreme Commander. That line was under strain, particularly at the points at which it bent to accommodate Tork’s advance.

  Martinez intended Division Two to enter the fight at one of those points of strain, and to utilize the third dimension to reinforce a friendly squadron already engaged. The two squadrons of the Double Hammer would engage north and south of the already-engaged squadron, envelop the enemy, and destroy him, after which the Double Hammer would find more enemy to fight.

  He couldn’t have superiority in numbers. But he could achieve local superiority in crucial parts of the battlespace, and this he intended to do.

  Judge Solomon lost.

  Obedience drifting, will not respond to signals.

  Eager lost.

  “Lord Fleetcom,” Sula said. “May I suggest altering course to two-seven-seven absolute?” Irregular scarlet lines slashed through Martinez’s virtual display, hand-drawn by Sula from her own display. “There’s some disorganization in the enemy forces there. I think they’re more vulnerable to us.”

  Martinez studied the enemy line and agreed. “Flag to Division Two,” he said. “Alter course to two-seven-seven absolute.”

  He felt the nudge as the ship altered course. The two squadrons had gained sufficient separation from each other, so Martinez ordered them into the Method’s starburst formation, and soon his inner ear was teased by minor course changes as Los Angeles shifted its position within the fluid formation.

  Supreme lost.

  “Lady Sula,” he said. “Keep a lookout for the enemy reserve squadrons. If they start moving, I need to know.”

  “Yes, Lord Fleetcom.”

  He was hoping with Division Two to create a decisive intervention. If the enemy committed their reserves at the right time, they could reverse that intervention, or make a decisive intervention of their own.

  “Lord Fleetcom,” Sula said. “Kung’s division is moving.”

  The Restoration had now committed all reserves. There was nothing left. If the enemy reserves committed to the attack, Martinez had nothing with which to counter them.

  Kong Fuzi lost.

  Cyrus lost.

  “Flag to Division Two,” Martinez said. “Each ship to fire two missiles as part of a covering barrage.”

  His heart lifted as his displays showed the missiles streaking toward the enemy, looping to hit from north and south. There was a kind of freedom in making a commitment that couldn’t be retracted, that would lead to life or death, victory or defeat.

  Rapid lost.

  Submission lost.

  Martinez’s mouth was dry. He took a sip of water from the tube inside his helmet.

  “What division are we reinforcing?” he asked.

  “Mustafa’s, Lord Fleetcom,” Sula answered.

  “He seems to be doing fairly well.”

  Mustafa seemed to have exploited some disorganization on the part of the enemy, possibly a trio of squadrons that hadn’t meshed well, or that were receiving contradictory orders, or were simply overstrained in their effort to keep the bending line together. Mustafa’s ships were in the whirling dance of the Martinez Method, riding the chaotic hull of a dynamic system, and they were pummeling the enemy with volley after volley. Though the radio haze made it difficult to be sure of the numbers, it seemed the enemy had lost perhaps half their number, and Mustafa something like a third.

  Mustafa was killing the enemy faster than they could kill him, but if the killing kept up at this same rate, the Restoration would run out of ships before Tork did.

  Defiant lost.

  Tumult lost.

  Obedience lost.

  “All ships commence fire,” Martinez ordered, and the bright sparks that were missiles leaped from their tubes, reoriented, ignited, and raced for an enemy that was suddenly not only outnumbered, but effectively surrounded. The two enemy squadrons reacted differently—one maintained its rigid formation to present a defensive wall against the enemy, while the other starburst, each ship following its own track away from the others so as not to clump together and present such a grand target.

  Both decisions were bad ones. The starburst ships, each without support, were hunted down one by one by darting missiles, and the other squadron held out for a while until their defense was overwhelmed, and they were all destroyed at once. The Restoration ships found themselves encircling nothing but expanding fireballs and flying debris.

  Unity lost.

  Security drifting.

  Judge Kybiq lost.

  The next moves in the fight stacked up in Martinez’s mind, a neat list. “Flag to Squadron Leader Mustafa,” he said. “Regroup your forces and double the enemy to your rear. Flag to Division Two: engage the enemy toward their van. Squadron Twenty, alter course to three-four-four absolute by zero-zero-one absolute and advance at one and a half gees. Squadron to re-form starburst on flag. Squadron Eleven is to operate independently and at discretion.”

  Asking ginger-haired Carmody to operate at his own discretion might be taking a bit of a chance—he was of the charge-and-be-damned school—but Martinez had decided it was useless to keep close control of his units in a conflict this vast. Either he trusted his officers or he didn’t.

  Acknowledgments flashed in a corner of the screen. The zero-gee alarm sounded and Martinez felt a shimmer in his inner ear as Los Angeles reoriented on its new course. Then the alarm came for acceleration, and Martinez dropped back into his couch and viewed the conflict ahead of him.

  Adept lost.

  Arrestor lost.

  Suddenly the radiation counters leaped—a titanic spike in neutrons and gamma rays that jumped off the scale in the most literal way. A cold hand closed on Martinez’s throat as he stared at the counter. Ships had been wiped out—a lot of ships—and all at the same moment. But whose?

  He remembered to breathe and inhaled recycled air that reeked of sweat and spent adrenaline. Then a possible answer came to him.

  “Lieutenant Ricci,” he said, “did the solar missiles just arrive?”

  “Yes, my lord. They struck the enemy rear.”

  I hope, Martinez thought. Because by that point the missiles were traveling so fast they might have had a hard time distinguishing friend from foe in the brief seconds before impact.

  He’d hidden four hundred missiles near the sun. How many of them had actually hit the enemy?

  “Keep monitoring and tell me what’s actually happened there,” Martinez said.

  “I’m checking the feeds from the pinnaces,” Ricci said. “I’m feeling good about this, because I kept the missiles updated with the tactical situation up till the last minute.”

  “Very good,” Martinez said.

  Cosmos lost.

  “Lord Fleetcom,” said Sula, “Kung’s division has enveloped the enemy line. I think they’ve wiped out a squadron or maybe two.”

  “Very good,” Martinez said again—a ritual response, for all that it was, in fact, very good.

  Martinez and Kung had broken the enemy’s line in two places, which meant that what had been one large sprawling battle had n
ow become at least five smaller ones. Division Two would be rolling up the enemy all the way to the van, and achieving local superiority all the way unless the enemy could find some way to react. Mustafa’s division, meanwhile, would be attacking toward the enemy center, and likewise would be enjoying numerical superiority with each encounter, gathering strength as he moved and liberated one Restoration unit after another. Kung, meanwhile, would be battling his way toward the enemy rear, while liberating other units to fight their way centerward.

  In every one of these fights, the Restoration would have local superiority. And if they chewed up enough of the enemy, they would have every other kind of superiority as well.

  The only sub-battle where the Fourth Fleet hadn’t achieved superiority was the fight in the center, with Tork’s battleships fighting Conyngham’s division. That part of the battlespace was so filled with eye-searing fireballs and sensor-baffling radiation that Martinez couldn’t tell what was happening, but at least all the fireballs meant Conyngham had ships left in the fight.

  Protector lost.

  Devastation lost.

  Absolute lost.

  Absolute was Fulvia Kazakov’s ship. She’d been Martinez’s premiere on Illustrious and absolutely steady in the horrific situation following the murder of Lord Gomberg Fletcher.

  Damn.

  Red lines scrawled themselves across Martinez’s display. “I’d recommend this course on the attack,” Sula said.

  “Give me the bearing.”

  “Three-three-eight absolute by sixty-five absolute.”

  Martinez gave the order to Squadron Eleven, and no sooner had the Los Angeles swooped onto its new course than Lieutenant Ricci’s voice rose elated in his headphones.

  “The solar missiles took out six enemy ships, Lord Fleetcom! Six at once!”

  Of four hundred missiles, only six had hit an enemy. But that, it seemed, was fairly standard.

  More importantly, this action freed Chandra Prasad commanding the rear division of the Restoration fleet. She’d be able to work her way toward the center, doubling the enemy all the way, while Kung was fighting his way toward her.