“Weaponers to clear the faulty missile,” Sula said.
“Weaponers to clear the faulty missile, my lady.”
Sula could only imagine what the scene would be like in real life—seventy enemy missiles racing for the squadron, each with its antihydrogen warhead ready to rip apart the fabric of matter, the countermissiles lashing out, the faulty missile flooding the missile bay with heat and energetic neutrons, on the verge of destroying the ship, tension tautening the nerves, the scent of rising panic in her vac suit…
Nothing like that here.Confidence was following a script that had been written ahead of time by Tork’s staff. The faulty missile had been planned from the beginning, to give the weaponers practice at clearing a missile from the tube.
Sula sat in her vac suit and recited the lines that the script more or less demanded. She left her helmet off so she didn’t have to feel closed-in. Counterbattery fire destroyed most of the enemy missiles, and point-defense lasers got the rest. Weaponers operating damage-control robots cleared the defective missile from the tube. Light Squadron 17 launched its own attack, which was duly parried by the approaching—and virtual—enemy.
Confidencewas annihilated early in the action, which gave a senior surviving captain practice at commanding the squadron until she too was destroyed. In the end Light Squadron 17 was wiped out, along with the squadron it had engaged.
After losing her ship, Sula had one of the cooks bring coffee and soft drinks to Command, and she added clover honey and condensed milk and drank in perfect contentment while listening to calls between ships.
Confidencehad been wiped out in three of the last four of Tork’s exercises. Sula was inclined to view this as a threat.
It had been clear from the moment Tork had ordered Squadron 17 into the van that he was planning to eliminate her from his long list of troubles. Sula supposed she couldn’t blame him. After all, she had spoiled his attack on Zanshaa by capturing the place without him; she had arranged for the elimination of his choice of governor; and she’d blackmailed him into giving her a ship. Probably he wished he could simply have her shot. But she was too prominent for that, too celebrated. Instead he affected to take her at her word—I desire nothing so much as to once more lead loyal citizens into action against the Naxids—and put her in a place of maximum danger.
She had to admit that she admired Tork’s straightforward ruthlessness.
Still, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t anticipated something like this. She knew she was putting herself in Tork’s hands as soon as she requested duty in the Orthodox Fleet.
There only remained the question of what she was going to do about it.
From her point of view, there was only one possible response.
She would have to become a legend.
The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance continued its awkward orbit around Zanshaa. Reinforcements arrived, two or three or five at a time. Martinez continued to hear from old acquaintances. The arrival of the Exploration Service frigateScout brought greetings from Shushanik Severin, who served as its third officer. Severin and his little lifeboat had spent months grappled to a frozen asteroid at Protipanu in order to provide last minute intelligence to Martinez and Chenforce just prior to the battle there, and as a result had been promoted lieutenant despite being born a commoner. Severin seemed cheerful and comfortable in his new status, and Martinez—who remembered the troubles the commoner Kosinic had experienced—was relieved.
He was also impressed that the down-at-heels Exploration Service had actually gotten a brand-new frigate out of the emergency. It was the first actual warship in the service for many centuries, though it would serve under Fleet command for the rest of the war.
Martinez also received greetings from Warrant Officer Amanda Taen, who arrived in command of a boat bringing supplies to the warships. She was a stunningly beautiful young woman who had shared a pleasantly carnal relationship with him before his marriage, and viewing her message sent a nostalgic charge through his groin.
Her arrival made him wonder just how many of his former lovers were serving with the Orthodox Fleet. He counted four women he had known intimately now circling Shaamah without him, and he felt depressed for the rest of the day.
Terza and Young Gareth joined Lord Chen at whatever secret location was playing host to the Fleet Control Board, driving home the fact that the location was secret to Martinez, but not to his wife. The stream of letters and videos from Terza arrived regularly. Martinez tried to find enough subjects for reply, but new topics of interest were rare on the ship. He began to send Terza word-portraits of his fellow crew, starting with Kazakov and working his way down the list in order of seniority. He wondered what she made of these descriptions of people she’d never met, but reckoned she had to at least give him credit for trying. When he ran out of people he wanted to describe, he began a description of Fletcher’s paintings, beginning withThe Holy Family with a Cat . He had a feeling that his description didn’t do the work justice. He considered sending a picture instead.
Martinez saw Sula twice more, as officers visited back and forth. They kept their distance and did not speak.
Roland arrived on Zanshaa and sent him occasional messages. He was with a committee of other convocates, though what they were actually doing in the capital was obscure. Martinez was content that it remain that way.
The Orthodox Fleet grew. Seventy ships. Eight-one. Ninety-five. The last known number of enemy ships had been forty-seven. Martinez began to wonder if Tork would ever engage.
It was when the Orthodox Fleet reached the prime number of 109 that orders began raining down from Tork’s staff. Censorship was tightened. Enlisted crew could send no personal messages home, but only choose from a list of messages provided by the Fleet. All of them were variations on the theme, “I am well, and send you greetings. Long live the Praxis!”
The twenty-two Lai-own ships were placed under Senior Squadron Commander Do-faq and detached to guard Zanshaa against a surprise Naxid attack. The fragile bones of their avian crew would not impede the acceleration of the Orthodox Fleet in pursuit of any enemy.
The rest of the Fleet, on its last swing around the system, participated in several final exercises to accustom them to maneuvering in their new order-of-battle, and then burned one last time around Vandrith for Zanshaa Wormhole 3, where the enemy had fled four months before.
Martinez sent one last message to Terza. If he skated the limits of the censorship, it was because he knew that Michi would be the officer censoring his mail, and that Terza would know more about Fleet activities from her father than she could ever learn from her husband.
Don’t worry about me,he wrote.We’ve beaten them before, and we’ll do it again.
I hope to see you and Gareth within a few months. You have no idea how much I regret this time we have spent apart.
When he signed the wordLove, it was with perfect sincerity.
THIRTY-TWO
When Fleet Commander Jarlath advanced toward Magaria at the beginning of the rebellion, he had come in fast, racing like an arrow aimed at the heart of the enemy.
When Tork moved, he came in slowly, like the tide, and with the same inexorable force.
Magaria had a well-equipped ring and seven wormhole gates to other systems. From Magaria the enemy could threaten a third of the systems in the empire. The Naxids had to defend it or risk losing everything.
There were four wormhole jumps and three systems between Zanshaa and Magaria. The loyalist forces had managed to seize the wormhole station on the far side of Zanshaa Wormhole 3, but not the others—Tork had sent another wave of special forces, but the Naxids again wiped them out with missiles fired from another system. The loyalist forces could see into the first of those three systems but no farther.
Though the Naxid fleet was almost certainly based at Magaria, Martinez knew it was possible they wouldn’t choose to fight there, but to defend their base by fighting forward of it. The Orthodox Fleet had to make every wormhole transit after the first with the assumption that they might at any point encounter the Naxids. In response, Tork repeated the tactics he had used at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet was screened by hundreds of decoys. Relativistic missiles were fired into each system ahead of time, radars and ranging lasers hammering out, all timed so that when the Orthodox Fleet arrived, their sensors would be able to pick up a fairly complete picture
