Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  He shifted his attention to the vast growing radio blur that hid Tork’s squadrons, and another set of emotions began to stir in his heart. Anger, bitterness, hatred, and a growing desire for revenge.

  Severin hadn’t bothered to hate the enemy till that point—he had been baffled by their stupidity and their greed, but he’d viewed these as problems to be solved, or faults to be satirized, not villainy to be hated.

  But now he boiled with fury, and his hands formed claws, as if he could run up to Tork and tear open his throat with his bare hands.

  Chandra Prasad’s face appeared on one of her displays. “All ships should consider themselves free to engage,” she said.

  “With pleasure, Lady Squadcom,” he replied, and he began to pick his targets.

  Division Two reached the turnover point, where they would have to decelerate in order not to overshoot the enemy, and there was half a minute of glorious weightlessness while Los Angeles pitched over. Martinez gave a course correction to carry his warships north of the blazing fight, and he remembered to check the enemy’s two reserve squadrons, still floating on the fringes of the battlespace. Even if they charged into the fight now, he thought, they couldn’t prevent what was about to happen.

  The engines roared again, acceleration cages swung, and the gravities built. Martinez could feel the swooping, evading motions of the ship, the miniwaves pulsing on his back to keep his blood from pooling, hear the hiss of the suit’s air intake, smell the sour sweat inside his suit. His vision was entirely occupied with the battle.

  With Division Two now flying north of the battle, Martinez had a different angle on the action, and he was able to make out Conyngham’s division more clearly. Perfection of the Praxis fought on, dodging and weaving as much as possible for a ship its size, point-defense weapons lancing out at the hundreds of enemy missiles arrowing right for it. Its escort of sixteen ships had been reduced to nine, all fully engaged, whirling with Perfection in the mathematical dance of the Martinez Method. Martinez felt his heart swell with admiration for Conyngham and his courageous, skillful defense.

  As Conyngham’s division intercepted the Righteous Fleet’s missiles, the erupting missiles formed a hot, burning screen between Division One and the enemy. Tork was firing blind into an opaque wall. This didn’t matter so much, since he knew approximately where his enemy was, but it meant he had less time to react to missiles incoming from Division One, and as he was continually passing through the fireballs he might also be blind to Martinez’s approach.

  And to Chandra’s. She had started closer to the battle than had Martinez, and she’d arrived south of the fight just ahead of him. Her missiles were already lancing out into the heart of the storm.

  “Flag to all van ships,” Martinez said. “Open fire on the enemy.”

  Missiles launched from their tubes, reoriented, and burned for the enemy. Martinez could see Tork’s point-defense beams, normally invisible, flaming as they sliced through fireball plasma—and then the flaming lances were all he could see of Tork, now completely invisible behind the wall of fireballs that had been Division Two’s missiles. Tork’s ships were now surrounded by a globe of fire.

  A few missiles raced out of the globe and were picked off by the Restoration point-defense, hardly one of the massive salvos the battleship squadron could have launched. Tork seemed to be concentrating on defense for the moment while he worked out his options.

  Nevertheless Tork scored the next hit. An enemy missile dodged all the interlaced defensive fire, and one of Conyngham’s escorts erupted in a storm of blazing antimatter. Martinez snarled and ordered more missile fire.

  He knew another warship had been destroyed because the radiation meter spiked, for all that the explosion was masked by the blazing screen that hid Tork’s forces. More missiles launched, more fireballs blazed between Tork and the Restoration Fleet.

  If he were Tork, Martinez thought, he’d use the obscuring fireballs to mask a change of course, then try to break out with his remaining forces, overwhelm Martinez or Chandra, then run for Wormhole One and Zanshaa. He found himself waiting for the move, Tork’s huge ships appearing from behind the blazing screen, and he had the order for a response and a course change on the tip of his tongue.

  What came instead were three enormous spikes on the radiation meter, each a few seconds apart, each far larger than any previous spike. All of Battleship Squadron One, he realized, had been annihilated as their combined defense suffered catastrophic failure.

  Martinez felt his heart lift. There were gasps of surprise from the crew in the flag officer’s station, then something like a suppressed cheer.

  Martinez remained focused on the battle. Tork was dead, but the fighting wasn’t over. The battleships’ escorts—some of them, anyway—were still in the action.

  “Flag to all enemy ships,” he said. “Send in the clear. Message follows: The Supreme Commander is dead. It was Tork who started the war, and there is no longer any point in further combat. We can collaborate on creating the peace. I urge you to surrender.”

  There was no reply, and half a minute later he saw burning antimatter tails racing out of the fire globe. The remains of Tork’s command had starburst, every ship for itself, and were flying from the disaster like fragments of a grenade.

  They were, of course, doomed. Single ships couldn’t survive the combined fire of the entire Fourth Fleet, and within mere minutes each was scattered like glowing confetti on the solar wind. As momentum carried the Fourth Fleet onward, the great fire globe that marked the death of the Righteous Fleet was left behind, expanding and dispersing to nothing.

  Martinez tried to restrain the exultation that sang in his blood. The fight wasn’t over. There were still the two enemy reserve squadrons on the fringes of the battlespace, overlooking the action like birds sitting on a wire.

  “Flag to all ships,” he said. “Well done, everyone, and congratulations on our shared victory. Form on your division leaders. Report to the flag the status of your ship, personnel, and missile reserves, and let the flag know if you need assistance.”

  “My lord!” Banerjee’s voice mingled surprise, wonder, and bubbling joy. “Message from the enemy! It’s in the clear!”

  Martinez banished the virtual battlespace from his perceptions and watched as a Daimong appeared on one of his screens. He wore a vac suit without a helmet, and his round unblinking eyes stared from a gray face fixed in an expression of openmouthed astonishment. His voice was a musical chime.

  “Senior Squadron Leader Rivven to the commander, Fourth Fleet. My colleague Squadron Leader An-dar and I were pleased to hear your request for collaboration in ending the war. We hope, however, not to surrender, but rather to defect. We are pleased to place ourselves, our ships, and our crews at your disposal. Please consider us your auxiliaries. We shall await your orders. End message.”

  This time the cheering in the flag officer’s station was unrestrained. From Sula there was cynical laughter.

  Martinez was trying to work out a response to Rivven’s offer. He wrestled his helmet off his head and put it in the mesh bag by the side of his seat. He could feel sweat cooling on his forehead.

  Martinez waited for the cheering to end and then told Santana to send his message in the clear.

  “Fleet Commander Martinez to Squadron Leaders Rivven and An-dar: Your message is very welcome. I intend to speak in person to you very soon, but in the meantime I must give you some very inconvenient instructions. Please order your ships to fire all their missiles due north of your current position, each missile to explode at a safe distance. Hold your ships in readiness to be boarded by representatives of the Restoration. When we have more leisure, we shall meet and discuss items of mutual interest.”

  “He held back from the fight until he knew who won,” Sula said. “I hope you’re not going to trust him.”

  “I can trust him to follow his own self-interest,” Martinez said. “I plan to offer him plenty of reasons to stay on our side.”r />
  “Well,” Sula conceded, “there’s no enemy left to keep us from getting to Zanshaa, so I’d say that fact will loom large in his decisions.”

  Martinez called Dalkeith. “Congratulations, Captain. Could you train some cameras on those defecting squadrons? I need someone to count every missile as it’s launched.”

  There was strain in Dalkeith’s lisping voice. “I’ll do that, Lord Fleetcom. But we have trouble in one of our missile bays. Bad trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Martinez said. In the Fleet, you never wanted the word trouble connected with a part of the ship that held antimatter-powered weapons.

  “I don’t know,” Dalkeith admitted. “I can’t seem to get a complete story. They all tell me they’re working on it.”

  “Have you sent anyone down there?”

  “Who would I send?” Dalkeith said. “All the experienced weaponers are already in place. My weapons officer here in Command is new to the job.”

  “Right,” Martinez said. “Stand by.” He clicked to another channel, then told his comm, “Page Khalid Alikhan.” Alikhan had spent thirty years in the Fleet and retired with the rank of master weaponer, and he was almost certainly the most experienced weapons specialist on the ship.

  “My lord,” Alikhan answered, “now is not the time.”

  “Can you give me a—?”

  “Not now. End transmission.”

  Which left Martinez alone with his imagination, and his imagination was a very good one. One catastrophe after another played out in his mind.

  The moment mortifying, he thought, if Bombardment of Los Angeles managed to blow up now, a victim of its own munitions.

  He had to restrain himself from jumping off his couch and rushing down to battery one to take command. That wasn’t his job—Los Angeles wasn’t his ship, it was Dalkeith’s, and the ship had its full complement of weaponers trained to handle emergencies, all stationed in three Command rooms hardened against radiation. In battle and under high acceleration they would use large robots with powerful hydraulic arms to perform any necessary tasks.

  They were trained, Martinez reminded himself, but without any actual experience in dealing with any kind of dangerous situation.

  His commander key allowed him use of any camera on the ship, and he asked for the feed from weaponer Command Station One, which commanded battery one. He was relieved to see the weaponers all in their couches, all alive, all participating in an animated conversation. He checked the other two Command stations and found them all undamaged, though with about half the weaponers talking intently and the other half staring fixedly at their screens. He saw Alikhan in Station Two, reclined on his couch, his faceplate closed. He was talking while looking at one of his screens, but Martinez had no audio, and the video feed was of poor quality and told him nothing but that Alikhan was working on the problem.

  Martinez decided to go straight to the source and turned to a camera looking out over battery one, receiving only a blank screen accompanied by the words CAMERA MALFUNCTION. The other camera showed nothing but a green-yellow murk. Was that smoke? Martinez wondered. Was Los Angeles actually on fire?

  With the green-yellow cloud providing a background on which Martinez could let his imagination paint whatever disaster seemed most promising, his mind began to gnaw at the problem. He wondered what fire could cause smoke of that peculiar color. He wondered what catastrophe had caused the fire in the first place.

  Missile launching systems were a weak point of a warship, and as a consequence they were overbuilt, designed to load and fire their weapons under extreme conditions, even if the ship was accelerating at fifteen gravities and being bathed in hard radiation. But a launcher was still a mechanical device and prone to the sort of malfunctions that could affect mechanical systems. Nor did the origin of the problem have to be mechanical: Los Angeles had been plagued with electric faults since its hasty conversion to a Terran ship, and of course there could have been a fault in the missile itself.

  “I heard what Dalkeith said, Lord Fleetcom.” Sula’s voice. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t tell. Something big. Take a look at the video.”

  “I don’t have access to that feed. I only have the tactical officer’s key.”

  Martinez used his privileges to give her access to the video. Sula looked at the green murk in surprise.

  “Ah. Hah,” she said.

  “Rivven’s squadron, and that other one, have begun firing missiles,” Banerjee reported.

  “Very good,” Martinez said. The problem with the defecting squadrons had just been assigned a lower priority.

  Martinez called up another screen showing missile consumption and found that while batteries two and three had only 22 and 24 percent of their magazine stocks remaining, battery one had 47 percent. Whatever the problem was, it was preventing the battery from firing.

  Martinez turned to Santana. “Flag to Division Two,” he said. “Reduce acceleration to point five gee.” That would make it easier to get personnel into the missile battery.

  The weight on Martinez’s chest eased. “Smoke’s clearing,” Sula said. “Someone’s got the fans working.”

  Martinez turned to the battery one display and saw the murk was thinning. He waited, eyes fixed on his display, and then the last of the yellow-green mist was swept away, and he saw wreckage strewn across the open bay. One of the big six-armed robots was disabled, hanging from a stanchion by one of its remaining arms, and the parts of another robot seemed to have been blasted to bits and now constituted a layer of rubble on the deck. Every surface in the battery looked as if it had been gone over with a sledgehammer.

  “We’ve got to clear that up,” Martinez murmured. He imagined what would happen to all that wreckage if Los Angeles underwent any sudden, high-gravity maneuvers and realized that this was exactly what had happened, that the debris had been flying through the battery with every shift in course.

  He contacted Dalkeith. “There’s a considerable amount of debris in missile battery one,” he said. “It’s been tearing all over the battery with every course change. We’ve going to have to send a party down there to secure it all somehow.”

  “What about the robots?”

  “The big ones have been wrecked. I don’t know what did it. You’ll need to send all our mobile damage-control robots down there, with a work party to tell them what to do.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Dalkeith said. “At once.”

  “Those squadrons are just fountaining missiles,” Banerjee reported. “It’s like a huge fireworks display.” Martinez had lost interest in what Rivven was up to.

  He paged Alikhan. “We’ll be under reduced gravity for as long as necessary,” he said. “Captain Dalkeith is sending a party to battery one to mop up debris there, and I thought you might care to join them.”

  “That debris includes a live missile, my lord,” Alikhan said. “I will go at once.”

  Martinez felt his mouth go dry. “Fortune attend you,” he said.

  Live missile. Everyone on the ship should be holding their breath.

  One of the two heavy doors leading into battery one jammed, presumably because the mechanism had been hammered by debris, but the other slid open and revealed weaponers in vac suits. These looked at the debris, then drew back to let a robot enter. The robot was box-shaped, featured powerful hydraulic arms, and moved on wheels, which soon buried themselves in the wreckage. The wheels spun hopelessly. Weaponers wrenched the robot free, then stepped into the room to clear as much of the debris out of the robot’s way as possible. This involved tossing or sweeping the metallic carnage into piles to create lanes for the robot, which advanced with deliberation into the room.

  The scene played out as a pantomime, because Martinez had no audio from the room.

  A drizzle of hydraulic fluid fell gently from the broken robot hanging above. Martinez trained the camera until he could see the missile, half buried in wreckage, its red-and-white color scheme blackened by flame
s. He thought about that missile being hurled around the room and shuddered.

  The Fleet had procedures for disposing of a misfired missile, and these involved opening a hatch, after which a cradle would roll out and the missile could be placed in it. The cradle would vanish back into the hatch and travel to a remotely powered workstation where the missile could be taken apart and its antimatter containers removed from the casing, which could then be safely discarded. Any attempt to remove the antimatter containers without the proper authorized hardware would result in a deliberate release of energy sufficient to kill anyone in the vicinity and wreck the tampering device, whatever it was. It could even wreck the Los Angeles, especially if the energy release hit the unfired missiles sitting in their tubes.

  By now Martinez identified Alikhan standing among the weaponers—even in the shuffling walk adopted in light gee, his upright posture and brisk movements were perfectly recognizable even in a vac suit and helmet. He supervised clearing the rubble from around the missile, then brought up the robot to lift the missile in its arms and carry it to the disposal hatch.

  Except that the hatch wouldn’t open. Its mechanism had been battered by flying debris, and for a few moments the weaponers stood around the hatch discussing what to do with it. Alarm clattered in Martinez as he saw wrenches and pry bars being brought into the bay, and he was on the verge of sending an order not to start ripping open a critical piece of equipment, but Alikhan very clearly argued against the action, and eventually the pry bars were put aside. Alikhan made a proposal, accompanying it with illustrative arm gestures, and Martinez saw people nodding. The robot reversed and began moving out of the weapons bay, with two crew for escort.