Crisis

by David Drake

  Someday the Fleet will need these things, he heard the voice of his sensei echo in his skull. Not because Matsunaga was psychic or even believed in telepathy, but because it was the kind of thing Ito would say. Sensei always, always insisted on paying attention to details, to using every advantage nature and their kami allowed, to figure every element into the balance so that the individual could achieve a perfect moment of wa, inner harmony. And it was this harmony that was the essence of battle, the heart of bushido itself.

  His orders were to destroy, but a true warrior does not destroy wantonly. This bunker, who knew about them, he asked the young Khalian.

  The boy had met his eyes fiercely. “My brother and his unit of the Home Defense,” the child had rasped proudly. “Not even the Syndicate knows about this installation.”

  “They had to build it,” Matsunaga had said patiently.

  The boy had barked in what Matsunaga interpreted as a defiant laugh. “Our captives built it, and there are more like it, too. But I don’t know about any others. The Home Defense was never invoked.”

  And a good thing, too, Matsunaga thought privately. Using the adolescents and elderly of the population as the very last line was something he respected the Khalia for planning. He was only glad that his own people hadn’t had to fight these warriors backed against their own bedrock.

  Matsunaga had kept their secret because he trusted these people, strange smelly people though they were. And because he understood their loyalty, and in the end because he could not resist the more personal loyalty the unit of Home Defense owed him. Kazuo Matsunaga was the commander of Khalia who would happily die under him. Who would fight for the glory of doing so.

  * * *

  ”We do not like to wait,” the Khalian rasped at his side. He had forgotten that the alien was there. “We like to attack.”

  Matsunaga nodded sagely. “We will attack when we are needed,” he repeated. It was often necessary to repeat things to the Khalians. “There is more honor, more discipline, in doing what is needful rather than what appears noble at the time.”

  The Khalian grunted. Matsunaga hoped he didn’t recognize the hokey lines off an omni special he had seen as a kid. Now he knew the line was bad and it thrilled him anyway, because it was true.

  In the monitors he could see the damage, floating specks of light that faded and died. Sides looked nearly equal, the hot blue of the Fleet on the readout maybe a little more numerous, the screaming orange of the enemy concentrated in heavier ships. There was something there about the balance, something that made his gut give the warning. Something subliminal, maybe, about the positioning, something that no one in the battle itself could see.

  The Syndicate was pulling back slowly, in a pattern that mimicked retreat but was not the real thing. It was a lure, he thought, drawing the Fleet fighters farther from their carriers, enticing the heavies at the tip of the formation farther into deep space.

  Matsunaga wanted to swear. They were being led out, gently and expertly, but they were being led. They couldn’t see it and he couldn’t tell them. There wasn’t anyone who would listen to him, except to shoot his head off. Mental-discharged ex-flyboy Matsunaga who wanted to trust the Khalia to guard their tail.

  His throat was dry with anger, the tearless rage that threatened to erupt when he saw the shifts, the delicate-patterned interplay that most of the groundhogs at the Fleet Academy didn’t know existed.

  Oh, Matsunaga knew perfectly well enough. His sensei had told him, and sensei had been trained as a Fleet tactician there. He’d been itching to refine the training he had had from the old man in the plain white dojo at home. Then he found out that the old man had known more than the entire General Staff together. It was only much later, when he was delicately given a medical/mental discharge, that he learned the old man had once been Fleet Admiral Ito.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. There had been others. And Matsunaga knew that he was right, the way he’d always been right. That the feeling, the knowing, had never led him wrong. And they just hadn’t been willing to listen ... Maybe in Admiral Ito’s day hunches were more respected. Or, more likely, maybe just Admiral lto had been able to pull it off.

  Overhead, the pattern was resolving itself on the big board. The lures were farther away now, and the whole shape of the battle had shifted. The cone was too long, too far from the planet, not heeding the readings indicating a deep reserve of enemy strength.

  It had all the features of a pincer movement, only neither of the Syndicate flanks had moved. Matsunaga studied the schematic, willing Duane to see what was going on. He wanted to scream, to warn them, to explain. There was no chance, just the way there hadn’t been any chance the times before. And he had learned his own lessons in patience much more painfully than the Khalians around him.

  He waited. He counted very carefully to twenty in Khalian, a feat he had only mastered in the past month. And then he spoke. “Now. But don’t move until I say so.”

  With that order Matsunaga left the command center. Khalians being who they were, they could not respect a leader who was not in front of them in battle. And Matsunaga being who he was couldn‘t resist the urge to take the fore and press the attack. More glory, always glory, alone and in front.

  And so he did the checklist on the Khalian raider that he had commandeered as his personal fighter. It wasn’t as graceful as the Fleet scouts, it wasn’t as powerful as the ground defenses, but it was enough. The battle arrays responded to the test-check, the soft reassuring blue glow enveloping the whole board as the ship came alive.

  “Number Seven, ready.”

  “Red Ball, ready.”

  “First Death, ready.”

  One by one the Khalians checked in, took their place in the hierarchy of the command by group and number, by experience and kills and pure and simple ardor. Still Matsunaga held them back. There was something else, a hunch starting to tighten like a fist of lead in his belly, a knowing that in the dark was some nasty surprise.

  “Surprise is still the greatest weapon we have,” Ito had told him when he was still a boy, brewing tea and sweeping the dojo floor. More than your body, your training, your technology, even your intelligence, it is the creative artist who can defeat any odds or any technology. Surprise, elegance, patience. Battle is an exercise in harmony. If you are completely in the conflict, being and doing are the same, winning and losing are the same. Be perfectly empty. Let the arrow of being, of will, fly to the target. Be the arrow. Be the bow. Be the target.

  Be the target.

  Space rippled around him, barren and cold, a Fleet lured out imperceptibly beyond the margins of decent rear cover. But the enemy was beyond, all their strength concentrated in the attack. Their flanks had not begun the long and deadly surround. Nor was there any reason to think that they could achieve that surround, not with the punishment they were taking.

  Be the target.

  If only they had listened to him before. That was a mistake, past, and the past did not exist. There was only now, and in the now were the twenty-four small raiders he had managed to salvage from the Fleet pacification plan.

  Once he had decided to serve all humanity through the Fleet. The day he told Ito he had been accepted into officer candidate training, the old man had remained perfectly calm. “Drink your tea,” the old man had told him. “If, someday, those you serve break your heart and are no longer worthy of your service, what will happen then?”

  Matsunaga remembered being very confused. The Fleet couldn’t possibly prove unworthy. They were the most perfect organization since the demise of the Shogunate. And so it had taken him some time to frame an answer, and longer to refine it. When he was ready to speak the teacup was empty.

  “Sensei,” he had said carefully, “my honor is how I do my duty, and not how I am used. And my duty is not to anyone individual or even an institution, but to all of the human race, to any population that calls on us for aid.”

  The old man had only sighed. “That’
s a good answer, Kazuo,” he had finally said. “But there’s a long way to go between words and reality.”

  He hadn’t said anything else. Matsunaga had poured another cup of tea and had left. Now, knowing that Ito had once been the great iconoclast of the General Staff, he could never return to the old man again and explain that he had followed his word. That reality had been very different from his dreams and that had not mattered. He had been publicly disgraced and used, eaten and spat out again by the system, but he still had his honor.

  Matsunaga followed the computer voice tallying kills and misses. He didn’t need the board to see it anymore The pattern was already clear, and patterns were like all things set into motion, refusing to leave their trajectories until pushed by a greater force. And then, only if the force was rightly applied.

  And suddenly he was no longer sitting in the cockpit of a Khalian raider, deep in a bunker he had given his good name and record with the Fleet to keep secret. Because he knew, even if they didn’t, that this moment would come. It had always existed in the perfect and unending now.

  There was nothing but the now. Nothing to want, nothing to hope for, nothing to lose. Only the moment and the movement in the pattern that was already set and perfect. Even Kazuo Matsunaga had ceased to exist as an entity and had taken his place in the dance.

  He did not remember giving the order to launch, or what prompted it. He hadn’t waited until the final word on the Syndicate group, returning from Target to appear between Khalia and the Fleet’s defenders, cutting off their escape. There was no escape, in space, anyway. Not that Matsunaga noticed.

  But he was beyond all notice then, acting from instinct in the perfect circles of the perfected now. Without him, without his action, without his phalanx of Khalian raiders, the moment would not be complete. The painting would be missing those final strokes to make it perfect, the artist would be musing, meditating on where those last lines would go. And the arrow, released, was no longer in transit but already united to its goal.

  Be the target.

  He had said that to the Khalians so many times, but they were not capable of understanding the nuances of Ito’s training. And so Matsunaga, in the whole perfection of the now, realized that they were his arrows, as the bunker had been his bow. They were honed and perfect weapons, ready to his hand, and he had spent a lifetime preparing to use them.

  As no one else could. Even the Syndicate, who had known the Khalia for generations and had supplied them against the Fleet, even they had not truly appreciated the Khalia’s heart. They were like steel, like the swords with a soul. Swords were simple in their beings, made only to kill and to win. The Khalia were simple, too, and sharp and clear.

  The com was on when they launched. Matsunaga didn’t need it, but the Khalians were silent. He had taught them that, too, and they had embraced his teaching like religion. He could feel them with him, that subtle energy shift that some engineers said was a function of combined energies in a multiple launch, but that Ito had taught him was the harnessing of wills to a single perfect point.

  From the darkness deep below Khalia’s surface they emerged into a flash of blue sky that deepened into indigo as they sped upward and free into space. A million stars replaced clouds in the canopy display. Far ahead he saw the glitter of the embattled ships, raiders, and heavies all mixed.

  There was no scale here. They were far away, he knew, but they looked only like shiny unused toys. Closer up there would be dark spots and scars, the trimmings of war.

  They were well trained and better chosen, these aliens whom he had selected for his personal command. They formed on him and waited, while he knew they must be tempted by the glitter-brights ahead. Not any real distance and some smart missile could take one or two down now. But they, like himself, were unified in a single vision, a single thrust larger than any of them alone.

  The Syndicate fighters didn’t attack. Why should they? For so many years they had known the Khalians as their shock troops. Loyal reinforcements, more likely, since the Syndicate knew the Khalia’s loyalty but not the creed that guided it.

  Over the com, locked into passive, Matsunaga could hear enough of the Fleet communications to satisfy himself.

  “Khalian raiders lifted, on vector two-oh-twelve. Right down our tail.”

  “Check your sixes, flyboys,” came from one of the cruisers. Matsunaga knew because the boost was strong and the signal clearer than the other comments.

  “Never trusted those Weasels,” someone in a fighter griped.

  The forty-seven ronin indeed. Obviously the Fleet had never learned history. Not Seimpo’s version, anyway. Matsunaga wanted to turn off the passive and resisted. It was better for him to know. It was better that he follow their shortcut commands and have an idea where his twenty-four raiders could do the most damage to the Syndicate flyers on the Fleet’s tail.

  Around him he could see the tiny Khalian raiders. He could feel the energy held back there. His men, his command, they were too well disciplined to fire before he gave the order. All their Khalian battle furor held in check against their nature, his men were waiting for him to choose the perfect moment, the best target.

  As if there ever was any choice. Three big, fat Syndicate cruisers sat like bloated spiders in the middle of their pancake formation. Around them buzzed swarms of smaller craft, destroyers, scouts, fighters. All those ignored the Khalians rapidly penetrating their lines.

  The Khalia had been allies for a very long time. Like the Fleet itself, the Syndicate didn’t understand the very essence of bushido that could turn the whole population in their loyalty in only a few months’ time. They, too, listened in on Fleet communication. They, too, believed the twenty-four raiders to be friends. But they would never regret their arrogant assumption of Khalian solidarity–Matsunaga was quite certain that they wouldn’t live that long.

  He held back. The energy behind him, inside him, built into a great and unstoppable wave. There was no choice now, no decision. There was no thought, either, only the complete and ineffable now, the moment, the paradox, the silence.

  And in the silence Matsunaga knew himself to be the arrow and the bow, the bowman and the target, that all were united in this singularity. Battle crystallized reality, balanced it, and so to fight was to seek enlightenment. It was a thing he had never spoken of with his Khalian command. There had never been any need.

  Matsunaga held back until he could read the painted numerals on the enemy hulls at visual range. And then, without a word to the group leaders of the flight under him, he opened up all cannon on a single point ahead.

  The lead Khalians followed him, homing in on the other oversize cruisers in their sights. The heavies couldn’t bring their guns around in time, or maybe they were afraid of mowing down their own fighter force, who were coming quickly around to destroy the traitors in their midst. “Why” did not exist. Only that the three cruisers blew before they could get off a shot between them, and they took their closest fighters with them to the void.

  Only seventeen of the Khalian raiders were left when the blaze died. But those seventeen were jealous for the honor of the rest. They were not carefully overseen by tacticians, directing their fire to where it would be most useful. They did not spread out carefully and they did not venture past this single rearguard action.

  No matter. It was a rout. The Syndicate ships, so confident of winning the day, were running before the Fleet fighters and ships of the line.

  * * *

  None of the Khalians returned. It would have been shameful for those who had, at least Matsunaga would have thought so. And Matsunaga himself, well, he hadn’t even lived beyond the first blast.

  Within the year, Master Tactician Ito, along with several young students from his dojo, and Jarmon Reeves had swept out the bunker and stripped it of all alien gear. They lay a wooden floor in the main hangar, and bokkun lined the walls. The main screens in the battle management center had gone silver-gray, their leads torn apart, and cushions had
been placed around for daily practice of zazen, or sitting in meditation.

  But the best place was undoubtably the archery garden in a courtyard behind the main gate. There the targets were set on ropes over the garden wall and students practiced while the targets swung. Some of the students were blindfolded. Others were just learning to use the bow. And they were of every sentient race the Alliance had found. Mostly human to be sure, but there were others there. Even Khalians. Especially Khalians.

  The Fleet had thought it was a waste of time and money, as well as a decent bunker, but the memory of Kazuo Matsunaga was too recent. And so there were several young officers there in Fleet uniforms, too, sighting down the arrows in the garden. Officers who would never forget the old, patient sensei who always said, “Be the target.”

  The Articles of War as reprinted in this volume are all taken, virtually word for word, from An Act to make Provision for the Discipline of the Navy as written for Queen Victoria in 1866, and was resurrected by Su Lin Allison almost intact for use by the Alliance Fleet.

  Which simply goes to show that some things never change.

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