Imperfect Sword

by Jack Campbell

  “The maneuver is acceptable,” Marphissa said. Nothing fancy, nothing to cause Hua to worry about the skills or predictability of her opponent. “We’ll let CEO Boucher think that’s how we’ll maneuver when we fight.”

  “She must know you’re better than that,” Diaz said. “The Syndicate has seen you command in fights here and at Indras.”

  “If reports of those fights have made it to the right people rather than being buried in the databases,” Marphissa replied. “And if anyone who read them paid attention to them. I’ll hope for anonymity born of ignorance or arrogance when it comes to what CEO Boucher may know about me.”

  After that, it was just a matter of waiting. Warships could boost to awesome velocities when measured in planetary terms. Pele was now coming toward Marphissa’s formation at point two five light speed, Kontos having increased velocity once he saw the arrival of the Syndicate flotilla. Point two five light speed was the equivalent of seventy-five thousand kilometers per second. The human mind couldn’t really grasp such distances or such velocities. Even the universe itself partially rejected them. By the time a spacecraft reached point two light speed, its vision of the universe outside it had begun stretching and distorting. Human equipment could compensate for that, could provide a “true” image of the outside, but once beyond those velocities, once a ship reached for point three or even point four light speed, human ingenuity could not prevail against the relativistic distortion that made the universe appear to be stretched and bunched like loose, elastic fabric. And the ship itself grew heavier, its mass increasing, making it ever harder to increase velocity. The cost and complications made such velocities much more expensive for trade than the extra days needed for travel cost. In practice, only warships boosted to point one and point two light speed, and didn’t try to fight at higher speeds than that because of the impossibility of scoring hits on one another when their view of the universe was warped too badly.

  Despite the obstacles facing them, humans had found the means to travel to different stars. Jump drives that pushed ships into a different place where distances were much shorter and the rules of this universe did not apply. The hypernet that used quantum entanglement to transport ships between stars without, technically, ever moving them. Humans had used those to settle the worlds orbiting other stars, trade between those worlds, and fight wars spanning the stars.

  Wars like that of the last century, started by the Syndicate Worlds and sustained by the refusal of the Alliance to surrender and the refusal of the Syndicate to stop fighting. In the end, with both sides tottering on the brink of collapse, a man who had supposedly died a century before, the legendary Black Jack Geary, had reappeared just in time to save the Alliance fleet. Geary had annihilated the Syndicate forces sent to catch him and forced an end to the war. Defeated, with its mobile forces decimated and economy reeling from the costs of the long war, the iron grip of the Syndicate government finally slipped, and star systems began breaking free.

  Star systems like this one.

  “Five minutes to maneuver time,” the senior watch specialist announced.

  Marphissa shook herself out of her reverie. “Execute maneuver on time using automated controls. Link all ships in this formation.” The precision with which the maneuver would be executed would make it clear to outside observers that they were using the systems to control the ships. That should further lull CEO Boucher into complacency.

  “Link all ships and execute maneuver using automated controls,” the watch specialist repeated to ensure that he had heard the order properly. “I understand and will comply.”

  At the mark, every ship in Marphissa’s formation swung up and to the side, coming around under the push of thrusters and main propulsion units. The turn-together maneuver meant that every ship remained in the same spot relative to the other ships in the formation. They changed their facing and accelerated toward a meeting with Pele, but the box formation had not altered.

  “You know,” Captain Bradamont commented, “if Admiral Geary had required his ships to maneuver on automated controls, he would have had to fend off scores of complaints from his ship captains.”

  Kapitan Diaz gave her a skeptical look. “They only would have complained once, though. Right? Then he would have replaced them.”

  “No. It took him a while to assert authority over his ships, and even now his decisions get questioned at times.”

  Marphissa shot Bradamont an irritated glance. “Seriously? Before Black Jack came back, we saw the Alliance ships attack us in swarms rather than rigid formations, but we thought that was doctrine.”

  “In a way, it was.” Bradamont sounded angry herself. “We’d forgotten that courage needs to be paired with discipline, individual initiative with support to your comrades. Admiral Geary reminded us that fighting as a team is much better than a bunch of ships battling individually. You’ve loosened a lot of the controls the Syndic government put on you, Asima. Be careful you don’t let too much freedom into your military forces.”

  “But this is better,” Diaz argued.

  “It is. Just remember the need for balance, for tying everything into the goal of creating an effective military team that makes as much use as possible of the individual skills of your people.”

  “You always make things complicated,” Marphissa grumbled. Her ships had steadied out on their new vectors, but were still accelerating, aiming to match the velocity of the oncoming Syndicate flotilla. “I was thinking, you said Pele should operate separately from my own formation, and I still agree that is a good idea. But if I timed Pele’s attacks to match my own, we would present CEO Boucher with a complication, but still she would be dealing with one set of attacks at once, then have time to recover while we repositioned for our next attack.”

  “That’s true,” Bradamont agreed.

  “But if I just cut Kontos loose, tell him to hit the escorts and keep hitting them, and conduct my own attacks independent of him, then CEO Boucher will face more frequent attacks, from different angles. It will be harder for her to keep track of things and decide which recommendation to accept from her automated combat systems. And Kontos,” Marphissa added with a sly smile, “is likely to do something unexpected, something that the combat systems on the Syndicate ship do not anticipate.”

  “Kontos still doesn’t have a lot of experience himself,” Bradamont reminded her. “He’s good. Hell, he’s brilliant at times. But he’s young, and he hasn’t been doing this long. A miscalculation on his part, a risk whose magnitude he doesn’t fully appreciate because of a lack of experience, could be disastrous when we’re facing a battleship.”

  “True.” Marphissa pondered the matter as her ships finally matched the velocity of the Syndicate flotilla. The two formations were now tearing through space, separated by four light-minutes, heading toward a much faster intercept with Pele. “I believe that Kontos can do this, Honore. President Iceni moved him to command of Pele because she has confidence in him. President Iceni is a good judge of character. You know as well as I do that we need something extra. Something big extra. We might be able to destroy every escort that Syndicate battleship has got, but stopping the battleship itself with what we’ve got is going to take a miracle.”

  “It’s your call, Kommodor,” Bradamont said. “You are right about how hard it will be to hurt that thing without losing all of our own ships in the effort.”

  Marphissa tapped her comm controls. “Kapitan Kontos, I want you to use your three ships to conduct attacks on the enemy independently of my formation. We want to eliminate the battleship’s escorts, confuse and frustrate the Syndicate commander, and ultimately wear down the battleship’s defenses. Keep me informed as necessary of your intentions and planned actions. For the people, Marphissa, out.”

  “Syndicate flotilla is accelerating,” the combat watch specialist reported.

  “Match their acceleration using automated controls,” Marphissa ordered the maneuvering watch specialist. “Maintain four light-minu
tes’ distance between us.”

  “You could let CEO Boucher get closer,” Bradamont murmured to Marphissa. “Let her think she’s slowly gaining on you.”

  “I’m not trying to lead her anywhere,” Marphissa said. “I want to taunt her and frustrate her, like a cat on a fence, just out of reach of the dog trying to get it.”

  “Kommodor,” the senior watch specialist said, “our systems assess that the battleship is exceeding safe limits on main propulsion. If they continue to push their acceleration at the current rate, the chances of catastrophic component failure will rise rapidly.”

  “How long?” Marphissa demanded. “Do we have an estimate of how much longer they can accelerate at current rates?”

  “There are some uncertainties, Kommodor. But they cannot sustain their current effort for more than another sixteen minutes at the most.”

  Marphissa stared intently at her display, imagining the scene on the bridge of the battleship. She had been in such situations before, the workers or junior executives warning of danger, a clueless CEO insisting that the current effort be continued, the sub-CEOs and most of the senior executives seeking foremost to avoid confronting the CEO and thus refusing to back up their juniors as danger readings crept closer toward disaster. More often than not, automatic safety routines had finally activated while senior ranks still denied or debated.

  It was one area where automated systems had saved a lot of Syndicate ships.

  Sure enough, the entire Syndicate flotilla kept accelerating at a rate that was unsustainable for the battleship. Kept accelerating for another twelve minutes, at which point the main propulsion on the battleship abruptly cut back.

  “Syndicate battleship is now accelerating at eighty percent of capacity,” the senior watch specialist said. “That is the standard recovery rate for overstressed systems.”

  “Reduce our acceleration to match,” Marphissa ordered.

  “Kommodor, the Syndicate flotilla has ceased accelerating and is changing course slightly.”

  On her display, Marphissa watched the long curve of the Syndicate flotilla’s projected path shift. Four minutes ago, the enemy had bent their path a few degrees to port. “CEO Boucher is trying to position herself between us and Pele.”

  “She wants to prevent Pele from joining our formation?” Kapitan Diaz asked.

  “Syndicate doctrine,” Marphissa replied. “Concentrate forces. We still look Syndicate because we use Syndicate equipment, so Boucher is assuming we’ll still fight like the Syndicate. She will soon learn otherwise.”

  Marphissa knew that she had to sound confident even though she still had no specific idea how to stop that Syndicate battleship. Any hint of uncertainty, of fear, in her voice and attitude would be scented by the specialists on the bridge and race through this ship and the rest of flotilla like a plague moving at the speed of light. She could lose this battle before a single shot was fired if her crews lost confidence in her.

  At least her next move was fairly simple. Both her formation and the Syndicate formation were now racing through space along almost the same path at point two light speed, which meant their relative velocity was zero, the two groups of ships staying the exact same distance apart even though both were moving very quickly. It reminded Marphissa of two ground vehicles on a highway, both moving fast in the same direction at the same speed.

  Her formation, in front, would need to slow down to get within weapons range of the Syndicate formation. “We’ll need to brake down to point one light,” she told Diaz as she set up the maneuver. “The timing is right for us to hit the Syndicate flotilla just as Pele is about to get there. Hua is going to have to watch both of our formations and decide what to do.”

  Marphissa considered options, then decided to stick with automated control of the maneuver one more time. “All units in Midway flotilla primary formation, I have sent the command for our ships to pivot one hundred eighty degrees and begin braking.”

  Thrusters on Manticore and the other ships pushed their bows up and over, so that the ships were now moving stern first through space, their bows facing the oncoming Syndicate flotilla. To an observer on a planet, their feet firmly planted in a place with an up and down, Marphissa’s ships would have appeared to have looped onto their backs, the crews now upside down compared to their previous alignment. But to the crews, nothing felt different or looked different except that they were now facing the opposite direction. As the pivots ended, main propulsion lit off on all the ships, braking their velocity so that the pursuing Syndicate warships could finally begin to catch up.

  “This is pretty simple,” Diaz commented. “We’ve already got our bows with our strongest shields and armaments pointed at the enemy. All we have to do is slide over a little at the last minute to avoid going head-to-head with that battleship.”

  Marphissa nodded, then noticed the frown on Bradamont. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Bradamont said. “I just don’t trust situations that seem too simple and too easy.”

  “We’ve got over an hour before we get within range of them,” Marphissa said. “I expect they’ll start braking soon, too, now that they see we’re ready to fight.”

  But as the minutes crawled by, the Syndicate flotilla kept charging onward at point two light speed. “We’re getting down toward point one light,” Diaz reported, “but the Syndicate is still moving at point two light speed along the same vector as us. If they don’t brake, we’ll meet them at a relative velocity of point one light.”

  “That’s not good,” Marphissa said. Human fire control systems could do a decent job of scoring hits at velocities of up to point two light speed. Higher speeds than that caused accuracy to fall off fast. But slower speeds caused accuracy to increase just as rapidly. “They’ve got too much of a firepower advantage for us to meet them at point one light. We could get badly chewed up passing through them. Why aren’t they braking? Is CEO Boucher smart enough to realize how that complicates our attack?”

  “How could she be?” Diaz protested. “Happy Hua doesn’t know enough— Oh, hell. That’s why.”

  “What?”

  Diaz waved an angry hand at his display. “You and I look at the situation and say, all right, we’re still forty minutes from contact. Plenty of time to pivot the ships and prepare for the engagement. But Hua Boucher is looking at it and sees us getting closer to her. She is told that to brake she must turn her ships so that their sterns face us, the most vulnerable parts of the ships where the least firepower can be brought to bear. And because she can see us coming and doesn’t really understand how great the distance is between us, she won’t do that. To her, it’s too close to a fight for her to allow her ships to present their sterns to us.”

  Bradamont slapped her forehead. “Damn. Kapitan Diaz is right. Boucher is making this a lot harder for us because she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “Great,” Marphissa said. “That’s great.” She ran both hands through her hair, thinking. “We have to brake our own velocity down more.”

  “How much more?” Diaz asked.

  “They’re coming at us at point two light and not slowing down, and we want to engage them at a relative velocity of point two light! We have to get as close to zero absolute velocity as we can, maybe point zero one or point zero two light.”

  “That’s very slow for a battle situation,” Bradamont cautioned.

  “I know! But what happens if they can target us too well when we get near that battleship? The slower we’re going, the harder it will be for them to hit us, right?”

  “Right,” Bradamont agreed. “And Boucher is certain not to understand that, since it’s so counterintuitive for someone thinking in planetary terms. For what it is worth, Kommodor, I concur in your assessment of the necessary tactics here.”

  Marphissa’s hands moved rapidly as she set up the next maneuver. “We keep braking at a rate that will bring us down to point zero one light when we meet the Syndicate flotilla. I’ll let a
ll of my ships maneuver on their own during the attack run because that will mess up enemy firing solutions assuming our movements will be perfectly coordinated by the automated systems, but I’ll also have an order already in the ships’ systems to begin accelerating again the moment after we pass through the Syndicate formation. The Syndicate ships will be moving so fast they won’t be able to turn back and hit us before we get our velocity up again.”

  “Looks good,” Bradamont said, then shook her head. “Warn Kontos on Pele.”

  “Warn him?”

  “He’s also assuming that the Syndicate flotilla will brake before the encounter. That will throw off his own approach. I’ve noticed that you young officers tend to push your ships to the limits of their capabilities on your maneuvers, so if Kontos misjudges what the enemy is doing here, Pele won’t physically be able to compensate. Kontos will overshoot the encounter and miss his firing run.”

  “Ah! Thank you for that warning!” Marphissa called Kontos, explaining what she thought CEO Boucher was thinking and planning, then sat back, rubbing her forehead. “I have so much left to learn.”

  Marphissa’s formation continued braking, going slower and slower, though only their instruments told them that. Just as it was hard in the immensity of space, without nearby references, to tell when you were going very fast, it was equally difficult to know when you were dropping your speed to what amounted to a crawl for warships. It all felt the same.

  “Ten minutes to engagement range,” the senior watch specialist announced.

  “All units,” Marphissa ordered, “we will hit the upper, port edge of the Syndicate formation. I want fire concentrated on the two light cruisers holding the corners of that edge. Enemy Hunter-Killers are secondary targets if you can’t get a good shot at one of the light cruisers. Don’t waste any fire on the battleship even if it looks like a hit is possible. It’ll just bounce off his shields. For the people, Marphissa, out.”