Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  The Naxids’ deceleration wasn’t quite as heavy as that of Chenforce. The loyalists were slowly overtaking them. Sula checked the trajectories and matched them against a current map of the Naxas system, which featured eleven planets dotted around the primary. Chenforce would overtake about halfway toward the Naxid home world, having just passed the orbits of three gas giants.

  There were reinforcements then. Most likely they would sweep around one or more of those gas giants and burn like fury to join the Naxid fleet before the battle.

  Sula messaged these speculations to Chandra Prasad. The tactical officer answered that she, Michi, and Captain Martinez had already worked it out, but thanks anyway.

  Sula consoled herself with the thought that at least there were a few other keen minds in the squadron.

  A swarm of Naxid missiles raced into the systems, hundreds of them. Alarms flashed along Sula’s displays. The missiles decelerated, approached the Naxid ships, and were taken aboard.

  The loyalists weren’t the only ones to have worked out this method of resupply.

  The wormhole to Naxas approached. The Naxids formed into a long line and vanished through it. Hot on their heels came loyalist missiles, racing at relativistic velocities with their lasers and radars pounding out to light up the system before Chenforce arrived.

  Chenforce took its time. Michi reduced the deceleration to three-quarter gravity and gave everyone three hours’ holiday. Meals were laid on the mess room tables for the first time since pursuit had begun, and the crew ate in shifts. A modest amount of alcohol was decanted, enough to produce a glow in the crew.

  Alone in her cabin, Sula drank fragrant tea sweetened with clover honey, ate her dinner, then had three desserts. Every cell in her body rejoiced at the low gravities. She lay on her bed and slept in dreamless peace till Spence arrived to help her into the vac suit.

  Reduction in deceleration of course meant that the fleets would meet earlier, not later. And Michi was still pushing ahead, still doing her best to demolish the Naxid timetable.

  Chenforce flashed into the Naxas system with every sensor operator straining for sign of the enemy, and with Sula having switched her display to virtual. The sensor missiles that had gone into the system earlier had done their work—bits of the system flashed into her mind almost immediately, jigsawing together until she saw, like a spatter of brilliant stars against the blackness, what the Naxids had been running toward.

  For a moment her heart lurched. It seemed that a vast enemy fleet lay ready in the system—but of course at this stage it would look that way, the real ships surrounded by scores of decoys that loyalist observers had not yet sifted out from the genuine warships. But even if ninety percent of the enemy force were bogus, the size of the force still surprised her.

  They were right where Sula had thought they’d be, having swung in succession around a pair of the outer gas giants, and were now burning at eight or nine gees acceleration for a rendezvous with the survivors of the Magaria fleet, which was decelerating briskly in an effort to keep the rendezvous.

  Those heavy gravities that were torturing the Naxids were Michi’s fault, for having pressed the pursuit.

  “Sensors, I want ranging lasers on those new blips,” Sula said.

  “Already done, my lady.”

  The relativistic sensor missiles were racing through the system too swiftly to keep the enemy in their sights for long.

  The rest of the system seemed bare, however. The Naxids had cleared away everything for this final combat.

  Lady Michi, speaking in the clear, transmitted her demand for surrender. Only time would tell whether the government on Naxas was headed by someone as chatty as Dakzad had been at Magaria.

  “My lady,” said Maitland, “I have a preliminary analysis of the enemy. Some of those blips are…well, they’re very large.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  She enlarged the sensor image on her display. Some of the blips were large—not just large, but gigantic, and they were gigantic both in radar and laser-ranging images.

  They couldn’t have, she thought at once. The war simply hadn’t gone on long enough for the Naxids to have built a squadron of giant Praxis-class battleships like those destroyed at First Magaria. Even under the accelerated building schedules produced in wartime, it would have taken ages to put one of those giants together.

  She counted. There were nine overlarge blips. There had only been eight battleships in the entire Fleet, and they had all been destroyed.

  The big ships had to be something else.

  They had to be warships simply because they were here. There had been plenty of time for all nonwarships to clear the system. But the overlarge blips couldn’t have been built as warships, they had to have been turned into warships.

  They were converted transports, big ones like the vast ships Sula had seen in orbit around Magaria.

  “They’re converted merchant ships,” she said, and immediately felt the relief that sighed through Command.

  Merchants couldn’t be much of a threat, she thought. In the days after First Magaria, when Zanshaa was expecting a conquering Naxid fleet every minute, a number of small private vessels had been requisitioned by or sold to the Fleet, given a few missile launchers apiece, and sent to patrol the Zanshaa system as “picket ships.” Fortunately, the ridiculous craft had been withdrawn from service before the Naxids had the chance to wipe them from existence.

  But these Naxid ships, Sula thought, weren’t yachts and little transports and small merchantmen. These were the largest vessels in existence, bigger even than the old Praxis-class battleships, even if they weren’t built for war. All that was needed to turn them to warships would be missile batteries, the addition of turrets for point-defense weapons, an electronics upgrade, and extra radiation shielding for the crew compartments and certain other parts of the ship. The craft wouldn’t be very maneuverable, and damage control would probably be worthless, but there would be lots of redundancy. As missile platforms, they would be serviceable enough.

  The conversion could probably have been done in a couple months. If the order went out after the Naxids lost Zanshaa, the conversions would start appearing about now, too late for Second Magaria. It was a desperate move, but a reasonably practical one.

  Sula began calculating how many missile batteries could be crammed into a space capable of holding ten thousand citizens, like the transports she’d seen at Zanshaa.

  The total was frightening.

  She asked for a line to Chandra Prasad.

  “Yes, my lady?” Chandra said. The camera showed her properly suited, with her helmet in place. Sula, whose helmet was not in place, suddenly felt exposed.

  “Those big blips,” Sula said. “They’re large converted transports.”

  Distance caused a few seconds’ delay between Sula’s words and the response.

  “Yes, my lady,” Chandra said. “We’ve worked that out.”

  There was the tiniest bit of condescension in her voice. Yes, we know that, don’t bother us.

  “Have you worked out how many missile tubes a large transport can carry? Something like six hundred.”

  A few seconds later Sula saw Chandra’s face fall.

  “I doubt they carry that many,” Sula said. “For one thing, transport from the magazines would be incredibly complicated. But we shouldn’t dismiss those ships just because they started out as merchants.”

  Her tone echoed Chandra’s condescension. It was the least she could do.

  “I’ll tell the squadcom,” Chandra said.

  Ten seconds later Michi had joined the conversation.

  “Six hundred?” she demanded. “How do you figure that?”

  Sula explained. The huge hemispheric hull of a transport had a vast surface area. Each missile launcher took only so much of that surface area. Add it all up, there could be lots of launchers.

  Missiles were cheap. Launchers were cheap. The offensive element was the cheapest part of a warship—
the most expensive components were the engines, and merchant transports came with those already fitted.

  The limitation on the total number of launchers wasn’t a factor of the surface area, but of the amount of plumbing necessary to feed the missile batteries their reloads. Missile batteries needed to be near the magazines, and both the magazines and the batteries needed heavy radiation shielding, and the heavy shielding needed structural support. Sula guessed that most of the big ships were completely empty except where missile batteries had been jury-rigged to the exterior, all on special support struts.

  “Thank you for this,” Michi said. There was a little X between her brows, just beneath the bangs. “I’ll give this some thought.”

  “No matter how big the ship,” Sula said, “it still takes only one missile to destroy it.”

  Michi gave a weary smile. “I’ll bear that in mind, Captain.”

  Michi had two days to think about the converted transports, because at the current rate of closing it would take that long for Chenforce to catch the enemy. The Naxids could always maintain distance, but they would still have to fight before they got to Naxas.

  Sula knew the battle was going to happen wherever the Naxids wanted it to. If Michi had adopted her suggestion and pressed the pursuit without decelerating, she would have caught the enemy-before the reinforcement could have caught up with the Magaria survivors. She would have destroyed the Magaria contingent and then swept on to Naxas before the converted transports could have interfered.

  She didn’t mourn Michi’s decision. At least Michi had reasons for what she did, not useless prejudices like Tork.

  There was no reply to Michi’s demand for surrender. Sula considered this yet more evidence that Dakzad was dead. She hoped his replacement was equally old and useless.

  The two days to the Battle of Naxas was filled with activity. Officers and sensor techs scrutinized displays, trying to figure which return signal meant a genuine warship and which did not. The Magaria survivors were known quantities, but the reinforcements weren’t. The nine overlarge signals were real ships, and it was decided that at least two of the others were genuine, though whether real warships or converted civilian craft, it was impossible to say. They seemed to be the size of frigates.

  The analysis was all performed under heavy deceleration. Increased gravities strained bodies and slowed minds. Sula stuck one med patch after another on her neck, twitched through dreams of disconnected horror, and fueled herself with coffee and sweets.

  Michi gave Chenforce another three-hour break before the engagement, a few blessed hours under low gravity for the crew to have a hot meal and a few hours to relax the knots that heavy gravities had put in their muscles.

  Sula called a drill instead. She was worried that Squadron 17 might have lost its edge in the long, dull prelude to the battle.

  After the drill, she was glad she’d spoiled her crews’ quiet moment, because her ships performed raggedly. She issued a series of brisk corrections, then had the crouchbacks’ meal served at their stations.

  She ate coffee ice cream on her couch, caffeine and sugar combined in a single efficient delivery system, and watched the Naxids come closer.

  She was ready for whatever was to come. The converted transports might have large missile batteries, but they could be killed just like any other ship.

  She was still the point of the spear. She was going to trust her luck, and trust Ghost Tactics.

  This would be the last battle of the war, and she would be in at the kill.

  Martinez watched the Naxids coming closer and didn’t like what he was seeing.

  Nine enormous missile batteries, screened by twenty-nine warships, or perhaps thirty-one. Worse, Chenforce was following them, in pursuit. When the shooting started and burning plasma began blooming between the two fleets, Chenforce would fly toward the radio-opaque screen, and the Naxids away from it. As the battle intensified, Chenforce would grow more blind just as more enemy missiles were launched.

  He had seen this situation once before, as a tactical officer at Protipanu. The situations had been reversed then, and he deliberately used the missile splashes to dazzle and confuse the enemy, and to hide whole volleys of missiles.

  The Naxids had not survived that battle. He’d killed ten ships in less than two hours.

  He sent a message to Michi pointing out the similarities in the current situation. In response, he was yoked into an encrypted datalink with Michi and Chandra.

  “Any solutions to the problem, Captain?” Michi asked.

  “There are no choke points the way there were at Protipanu. The enemy had to line up to slingshot around Okiray, and we were able to swamp them with missiles as they came at us. That’s not going to happen here—there’s nothing between us and Naxas.”

  A curl of auburn hair had escaped Chandra’s sensor cap and was dangling in her eyes. She grinned.

  “You’re suggesting that we go in on a broader front.”

  “Why not? We have the time and the distance. Tork made the mistake of feeding his squadrons in one at a time and lost more than half his force. Instead we send our three squadrons against the enemy all at the same moment. We can link our sensor data together, so that maybe we can see around those plasma clouds, and we can throw out pinnaces to extend our range. Each squadron can use the Martinez Method so as to maneuver on its own while still providing maximum protection for its own elements.”

  “The what method?” Michi asked.

  Martinez blinked. “The Martinez Method.” When Michi failed to react, he added, “I had to call it something.”

  Michi frowned at him. “You didn’t think to name it after your highly supportive force commander?” she asked.

  Dismay filled him. Michi and Chandra began to cackle. With effort, Martinez summoned his dignity.

  “Would you like the tactics named after you, Squadron Commander? You’re already going to get credit for the victory and for winning the war.”

  Michi affected to give the matter her consideration. “I suppose in view of my impending glory I can afford to throw out a few tidbits to my juniors.” She gave a gracious wave of her gloved hand.

  “The Martinez Method it is.”

  Engines fell silent. Ships made minor adjustments in their trajectories. Engines flared again.

  Each squadron’s deceleration was slightly different. Sula’s deceleration was the heaviest, Martinez’s the lightest, Michi’s somewhere in the middle. Their courses began to diverge.

  Communications and sensor techs fed the sensor data of all Chenforce into one vast, webbed system. The technology had existed for ages, but it was complex—the computers had to compensate for the amount of time it took the signal to arrive from each ship down to the merest fragment of a second, which meant that Chenforce’s ships were continually bouncing ranging lasers off each other, and the data from these worked into the sensor feed calculations.

  Chenforce didn’t starburst yet, but Chandra Prasad assigned each squadron a starburst pattern based on Sula’s formula. Each used a separate formula so the Naxids would have a harder time figuring out that the maneuvers weren’t completely random; but each squadron knew the others’ patterns, so the ships could continue to share sensor data.

  “Engine flares!” Maitland’s baritone voice rang in the close confines of Command. “Engine flares at Wormhole Three!”

  Sula looked at the display and saw a whole constellation of stars flying into the system, plasma tails blazing. Probably the vast majority were decoys, but there were at least three real ships, giants like the converted transports.

  Whatever they were, they were too late. Even though they were accelerating at crew-killing velocities, they’d still flash past Naxas a day after the battle.

  If Chenforce won, they’d have the newcomers for dessert. If the Naxids won, the newcomers would be redundant.

  Michi Chen, with her furious pursuit, had succeeded after all in wrecking the Naxids’ schedule.

  Chenforce
raced on, Michi’s heavy squadron now in the center flanked by the two light squadrons. The Naxids responded by deploying squadrons of their own. The nine giant auxiliaries were clumped on the far side of the warships, with the smaller ships as their screen.

  The warships fired, a volley of over three hundred missiles. Sula checked the chronometer: 2314.

  “Message from Flag, my lady,” said Ikuhara. “Return fire at will.”

  “Right,” Sula said. “Let’s make sure this is the last battle, shall we?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Countermissiles lashed out. Antimatter fury raged in the space between the ships. More missiles were on the way.

  Martinez looked at the display, the two light squadrons attached to Michi’s heavies like a pair of wings, the Naxids in a formation that countered that of the loyalists. Everyone was in the same plane, just as they’d been at Magaria.

  He messaged to Chandra. “Do we really want to limit ourselves to just two dimensions?”

  There was no answer till the next salvos of missiles found each other, blossoming to create a screen, and then a series of orders came from Chandra. The two light squadrons were ordered to rotate about a common axis, with Michi’s squadron joining them equidistant from the others. The squadrons were also ordered to starburst.

  Martinez’s acceleration cage creaked as it swung to the new heading. He could only imagine the alarm in the minds of the Naxids as they saw Chenforce swinging into its new configuration, the three squadrons rolling around one another as the individual ships darted and flashed in alignments that had never been prescribed by any tactical manual, the ships like chaff flying before a crazed typhoon aiming at their destruction. He wondered how the Naxids could possibly react.

  Let’s hope it’s with panic, he thought.