Mattson will be going to Auxiliary Command,” Martinez told the lieutenant. “Yu and Bernstein will serve the comm boards here.”
Shankaracharya’s face didn’t show surprise—instead there was a kind of spasm, a tautening of the muscles of the neck and cheek, and then no expression at all. “I’m, ah, sorry, my lord,” he said. “I—I’ll try to do better in future.”
“I regret the necessity, lieutenant,” Martinez said. “I’ll do what I can for you, later.”
And what he could do would include never putting Shankaracharya in combat again, at least not in a position in which lives could possibly hang in the balance.
The young lieutenant left Command with his helmet under his arm, his body straight and his eyes fixed resolutely ahead, refusing to meet the pity in the eyes of the other control room crew. It was only then that Martinez remembered that Shankaracharya was his sister’s lover.
Sempronia’s going to really hate me for this.
Yu and Bernstein arrived and settled into their seats. A check showed the crew ready to resume higher gees. Martinez ordered the squadron to increase deceleration to two gravities.
Time passed, and Martinez grew fretful. He wondered if there were a traitor on Hone-bar or some of the other inhabited parts of the system, and if that traitor would see Do-faq’s squadron and alert Kreeku to its existence.
In his long hours, isolated in his foul-smelling suit and with death flying toward him at a significant fraction of the speed of light, Martinez began to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the traitor. In the traitor’s messages. In Kreeku’s genius, who fully alerted by the traitor was now luring the loyalist squadrons to their doom. Martinez was glad when the shooting started, and he didn’t have to think about the traitor anymore.
The approaching forces were still two hours apart when both sides began firing missiles, waves of onrushing destruction that maneuvered in the empty space between the converging warships. When he saw the missile flares on his display, Martinez made a transmission to his ships.
“It’s for Lord Squadcom Do-faq to destroy the enemy,” he said. “He’s the hammer that will smash them out of the sky.Our job will be to stay alive—we should fight defensively and concentrate more on preserving ourselves than on destroying the enemy. Tell your weapons officers to emphasize defense.” He gazed into the winking camera light and thought of the fight that was coming, the weaving missiles bearing their radiation fury, the annihilation that could strike at any of them. “See you on the other side,” he said.
Martinez waited to make certain that Warrant Officer Yu actuallysent the message before he went on to think of other things.
Missiles began finding each other in the depths between the squadrons, the brilliant plasma bursts masking the opposing ships from one another’s sight. When the bursts had gained a sufficient density, Martinez sent a message to Do-faq.
“I believe that your lordship can begin launching missiles now.”
Without waiting for a reply, Martinez ordered his own force to maneuver. The eight-ship squadron was divided into two four-ship divisions, and he ordered the divisions to separate, as if to catch the enemy between two fires. Shankaracharya’s work had shown the theoretical maximum separation at which overlapping defensive fire remained effective, and Martinez kept the ships within that sphere. In the meantime, he made certain thatCorona kept arcing missiles between Do-faq and the enemy, to provide the necessary screen for the heavy squadron’s approach.
The missile bursts intensified, a continuous drumroll of flashes and dying matter. Point-defense lasers lashed across the darkness, striking at any incoming threat. Martinez felt his heart begin an inexorable climb into his throat as he watched the hot, opaque cloud of explosions roll nearer and nearer.
“Starburst!” he ordered. “All ships starburst!”
No doubt Kamarullah would consider the maneuver premature, but his ship as well as the others rotated and began to burn heavy gees away from the others, getting as much separation as possible before the onslaught that was about to engulf them.
“Defenses on automatic!” Martinez called as the hand of gravity slammed him into his couch. The display told him the pressure on his chest was nine gravities before his vision narrowed, and then winked out altogether.
After a long moment of darkness Martinez fought his way to consciousness, clenching his teeth and swallowing to force blood to his brain. He saw his displays as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a long distance down a dim tunnel. Gradually his vision cleared, and he gave a gasp as he realized what he was viewing.
Do-faq and the heavy squadron had launched a hundred and sixty missiles, all of them screened from the enemy by the erupting missiles and counterfire of Light Squadron 14. These missiles now raced out of the concealing plasma clouds, converging on Kreeku’s force at seven-tenths of the speed of light.
The missile strike was a vast expanding carpet of light, like the phosphorescence on a moving wave, the entire enemy force torn to elemental fire in a few brief seconds. Martinez watched in awe, unable to believe that the Naxids’ end had come so swiftly.
But the battle hadn’t ended with the death of the enemy. Missiles were still weaving through space, dodging the defensive lasers and onCorona ‘s trail. There were several minutes of suspense before the last threat was destroyed by Vonderheydte’s laser fire.
There was silence, and then cheers began to ring in Command. Martinez felt a giddy exhilaration, and repressed the urge to climb out of his cage in the heavy gravity and lead the crew in a delirious stomping dance.
More cheers burst out as other friendly ships emerged from the plasma fog, though it was not for several minutes that it became clear that Martinez had wiped the enemy from existence without a single loss to his squadron.
FOUR
AfterCorona had finished a pair of high-gee turns around Hone-bar’s sun and another of the system’s gas giants, and after Martinez had reduced his squadron’s acceleration to 0.8 gravities in order to aid the repairs of the two ships that had suffered damage, Martinez was invited to dine in the wardroom by his lieutenants. When he entered the small room with its cramped cherrywood table, his three officers rose and applauded.
“Congratulations, my lord,” Dalkeith said. She had a broad smile on her face, and Martinez wasn’t surprised —the successful action had almost certainly guaranteed her the promotion that had eluded her for the last fifteen or twenty years, all in despite of the fact that her sole contribution to the battle had been to watch from Auxiliary Control and wait for Martinez to die.
He thanked her and sat at the table, and the lieutenants followed suit. The wardroom steward—a professional chef acquired during Captain Tarafah’s regime, and who had stayed in his post while Martinez’s own chef fled—laid down the first course, a savory soup flavored with bits of smoked duck.
By all rights Martinez should have been exhausted, not having slept in twenty-five hours, almost a full day. But instead of yawning over his soup he felt himself coursing with energy, and his brain bubbled with ideas. He felt a ravenous appetite. The lieutenants were exhilarated as well, and the mood sometimes caught even Shankaracharya, who certainly had reason enough to be cast down.
Some of Martinez’s enthusiasm had been prompted by a message from Sula that had arrived mere hours after the battle, a message featuring her elegant formula for fleet maneuvers. Martinez brought the formula with him to the dinner, hoping to stimulate his officers’ thought. To this end—after the dinner was over, and the last toast drunk—Martinez suggested inviting Cadet Kelly, who had participated in the original officers’ discussions that had led to the new tactical ideas.
Such a suggestion, under the circumstances, was something akin to a command. Kelly came into the wardroom with her brilliant smile blazing. She had spent the entire battle in her pinnace, ready to be launched into space alongside a barrage of missiles. Martinez, for his part, had never for a moment considered launching either of his pinnace pilots into the hell of raging antimatter.
Kelly was brought up to speed with a couple glasses of the wardroom’s excellent wine, and Martinez unveiled Sula’s formula. Shankaracharya considered it carefully, tested it a few times with variables drawn from the day’s battle, and pronounced it worthy of further investigation. The officers were discussing tactical applications when Martinez’s sleeve button gave a discreet chime.
