using the then current code. What we found of him was a string of vapor three AUs long. The motor is probably still in hyperspace. Who knows? Scared me out of my mind. I studied singularities. Made up my own rules of thumb, and I’m damned if anybody will tell me not to use them. Yes, they are conservative rules but I’m still alive.”
“Your loyalty to yourself is greater than your loyalty to the navy?”
“Daddy! You promised to be diplomatic! It was part of our deal!”
Yankee couldn’t help himself. He rose to the bait “Em more loyal to the navy than you can imagine, sir if I had my way men like Jenkins and Buford Early would be composting the slat of the newest recruits. With shovels!”
“So you think there is a time when a loyal officer must disobey orders?”
“I couldn’t say. I wasn’t thinking at the time. I was reacting. It was a judgment call. I was trying to keep my men alive to fight the kzinti. Going through the wall didn’t make sense on any counts. Sometimes you have to sacrifice-but it has to count. When I came home I found a poem. I know it by heart. 1854. October twenty-fifth. The Battle of Balaclava. Tennyson. The British were better at obeying orders than I’ll ever be.” He closed his eyes.
“ ‘Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for their guns,’ he said;
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred…
“Someone had blunder’d;
Theirs not to make reply.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Cannon to the right of them
Cannon to the left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.”
Chapter 11
(2437 A.D.)
The Wunderland crewed frigate Erfolg had been commissioned in ‘22, its first fight at R’hshssira. Badly clam- aged during the unsuccessful assault on Ch’Aakin in ‘25, it was rebuilt in ‘26 with an extended midsection to house the most powerful of the redesigned hypershunt motors coming off the We Made It assembly lines. From ‘26 to ‘33 mankind flooded hyperdrive warships into kzinti space. During that time the Erfolg had been an agile part of Admiral Chumeyer’s fleet while the Patriarchy’s supply lines were being decimated.
Yankee laconically referred to the MacDonald-Rishshi Peace Treaty as the “Truce.” For the first year of the Peace the Erfolg’s seventy man crew had patrolled kzinti worlds until forced into a less active role by a newer class of smaller and more economical (and less warworthy) UNSN patrol vessels. But Blumenhandler, with Wunderlander paranoia, had managed to keep the Erfolg out of retirement. She was war ready.
As Yankee boarded the ship through his shuttle’s umbilical he remained apprehensive. Admiral Blumenhandler sympathized with a military readiness that went beyond patrol duty; but were his men as imaginative? Yankee was met by a thin young officer with an adam’s apple and the nametag “Claukski” who took him through a cramped corridor that was stuffed with pipes and boxes and leads; most of them from the ‘26 retrofitting. The officer, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, apologized solicitously for the inconvenience, pointing out possible hazards as they moved along. But where else could they have found room for new equipment but in the corridors? Military vessels are not designed for comfort.
He was led to a claustrophobic gunnery stuffed with five companions of Claukski, most of them too young to have been veterans of the war Clandeboye expected bland camaraderie and a stash of beer but they seemed to know him and to be more interested in discussing his writings than in drinking. Such enthusiasm was heartening. Better yet, they were eager to show him what mischief they had been up to.
The Erfolg’s battle stations were spliced into a simulator that could put the whole ship into game mode. They showed him software “saves” of recreations of the original Battle of R’hshssira, which had been refought with full crew participation. The tactics which had evolved from their practices were a radical departure from standard UNSN procedures.
Brilliant. Yet Yankee was depressed by their approach Like hundreds of generations of military men before them they were preparing themselves to fight the Last War.
He tried to express his concern diplomatically. He had no intention of dampening such ardor. “Haven’t you been unnecessarily restricting yourselves? Suppose war broke out again, might not UNSN ships themselves be equipped with gravitic polarizers? There is some effort being extended in that direction. War is never static.”
Six men just grinned and immediately showed him a wilder scenario. Ship specifications-from firepower to performance-were modifiable with an initialization table. Already tactics were available for several specification upgrades. The recorded simulations on the battle screens appealed to Yankee’s trainer instincts and he found himself grinning, too.
Ensign Tam Claukski, the youth with the adam’s apple, was the first to sober. “We have a big problem we all want to discuss with you, sir.”
They did have a big problem, he thought-they hadn’t equipped their kzinti warcraft with hypershunt capabilities. That would turn out to be a major oversight if their intention was to ready themselves for some future war “Problems? What kind?”
“When we tried to simulate a kzinti hyperdrive fleet we ran into major problems with our model.”
Yankee was not used to naval types who could accept the obvious, and it startled him, suddenly, to find out that with these boys he was not going to have to cajole and convince. They already knew. He felt relief. He nodded and let Claukski continue.
“It turns out that our basic model is an efficient tactical analyzer, but that is more by accident than by design. In it we know everything about our own fleet and what help we can bring in from outside the battle. Without hyperdrive the kzin are limited to what ships they have on site. That makes the number of unknowns manageable. Tactics dominates over strategy.” Tam made a face. “Assuming that the kzinti have hyperdrive changes everything. It connects any local battle to the whole Patriarchy. The number of unknowns, escalates. Strategy begins to dominate tactics. We thought…” The ensign trailed off. Obviously what he had once thought had proved incorrect. They were all waiting for Yankee to comment.
He said nothing. He thought. The Patriarchy already had a distributed military apparatus. With sub-light transport, centralized response to a threat was impossible. And so kzinti factories were everywhere. The ratcats had outposts in places where no hyperdrive-based civilization would bother to maintain a base. Thus given hyperdrive technology the kzin inherited an automatic advantage. They were immune to a centralized knock-out blow. At the same time they could mount an offensive from many directions. Not an easy threat to counter
“Tm impressed with your tactical know-how. What you want from me, I suppose, is to teach you the art of Grand Strategy”
The look in their eyes said yes.
Yankee sighed. “I’m a poor excuse for a strategist. But I suppose we could work on it together.” Just the
