The Sundering (5 page)

“A second subproblem would involve the maximum dispersion for our ships before any massed offense would begin to lose its punch—that number would be a lot larger, I’d think.”

Shankaracharya took another sip of wine, and again touched his mustache with the napkin.

“And the third subproblem?” Martinez asked.

“I forget.” Shankaracharya looked blank, and during that moment Alikhan brought in his second course, slices of dense pâté, each surrounded by a yellowish gelatin rind that gave off a strong aroma of liver. With this came pickles and flat unleavened biscuits from a can.

The others were looking at their plates when Shankaracharya added, “No, wait, I remember the third parameter. It has to do with the area of destruction caused by a salvo of enemy missiles, so that you can calculate the likelihood of more than one ship being destroyed, but that’s not as important as the first two.” He cleared his throat. “It should be possible to come up with a single rather complex mathematical statement for all of this, once we calculate all the variables concerning the capabilities of the ships, numbers of launchers and defensive beams and so on, and you’d be able to calculate the most efficient manner of dispersion for a whole fleet.”

Martinez crunched a pickle between his teeth. Any solution to the problem would require partial differential equations, which Martinez had studied at the academy, but his memory for all that had grown foggy—since graduation, all he’d been required to do was plug numbers into existing formulae, then let the computer do the work.

But Vonderheydte had been studying for his exams before Martinez made the exams unnecessary by promoting him, and Cadet Kelly had been preparing for her exams when the war interrupted. They’d be much more useful on this approach than Martinez—or, presumably, Dalkeith.

He’d just have to let the younger folk take the lead on this one, preferably without letting them notice that Martinez wasn’t exactly in charge.

Martinez shifted the wall screen to the Structured Mathematics Display.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s begin.”

“My lords,” said Junior Squadron Commander Michi Chen, “Chenforce has now arrived in the Zanshaa system. We await your orders.”

At the sight of his sister, Lord Chen felt his anxiety begin to loosen its grip on his heart. Which was irrational, since Chenforce consisted of only seven ships scraped together from the damaged remnants of the Fourth Fleet at Harzapid. The Naxid revolt had failed at Harzapid, but only just, with ships blasting each other at point-blank range with antiproton beams. Michi Chen had come to Zanshaa with the few undamaged survivors—the rest had either been destroyed or were in dock for urgent repairs. It would be months before Harzapid could send another squadron.

But at least Zanshaa now had a force to defend it besides the six battered, exhausted survivors of the Home Fleet plus the swarm of pinnaces and improvised warships that would be swept away in the event of any determined attack. Chenforce could now cover the capital while the remnants of the Home Fleet decelerated and docked to take on new armament, and while Faqforce made its U-turn around Hone-bar and returned to Zanshaa.

When Faqforce arrived, Zanshaa would have twenty-eight ships to guard it against attack.

The great terror was that the enemy had thirty-five known survivors of the battle at Magaria. These, by now, had probably been reinforced by the ten ships that had rebelled at the remote station of Comador; and there remained at large another eight enemy ships last seen over two months ago at Protipanu. Those ships might well be on their way to join the enemy force at Magaria, and if that were the case, the defenders of Zanshaa would be outnumbered nearly two to one.

Senior Fleet Commander Tork, chairman of the Fleet Control Board, rose from his seat and absently peeled a strip of dry, dead flesh from his face before facing the cameras. “Reply, personal to Squadron Leader Chen.” His Daimong’s voice tinkled like wind chimes in the stillness. “Lady Commander, kindly establish a defensive orbit about Zanshaa and its primary. When other forces enter the system, we will match their trajectories to
you
.”

This wasn’t a dialogue. Michi’s message had taken six hours to reach Zanshaa, and Tork’s reply would take nearly that long to return to her.

The chairman politely turned to Lord Chen. “Would you like to say a few words to your sister?”

“Yes, lord chairman, I thank you.”

Lord Chen rose and looked into the camera, which obligingly panned toward him. “Welcome, Michi,” he said. “Your arrival has brought relief to everyone here. We’re delighted to have you with us.” And then, as he was on the verge of sitting down again, he added, “I’ll send you a personal message later.”

There’s a lot you’d better know,
he thought.

He sat, and butter-smooth leather embraced him. His sister’s message had arrived during a meeting of the Fleet Control Board, and resulted in a considerable lightening of the meeting’s tone. Lord Chen decided that he wasn’t the only person here to feel irrational relief.

Still, the old debates continued.

“The Hone Reach must be defended,” said Lady Seekin. Her large eyes, adapted for night vision, were wide in the soft light of the room, and she’d taken off the dark lenses most Torminel wore during daylight hours.

“We can’t defend the Hone Reach at the expense of Zanshaa,” said Tork. “The capital is everything. It’s the whole war. We can’t afford to lose it.”

A whiff of rotting flesh floated across the table from Tork, and Lord Chen lifted his hand to his face and took a discreet sniff of the cologne he’d applied to the inside of his wrist.

“Two ships, my lord,” Lady Seekin insisted. “Two ships to defend the whole of the Reach.”

“Two ships, yes,” said Lady San-torath, the Lai-own convocate. “There will be no confidence in the Reach unless you can protect them somehow.”

Useless,
Lord Chen thought. When the war broke out he’d been part of a faction insisting that Hone-bar and the Reach had to be defended, but that was before the Battle of Magaria. Lord Chen had given up trying to protect the Reach—now he was just trying to get what he owned
out.
He had to agree with Tork: the capital was more important.

Lose the Hone Reach, he thought, and you have a chance of taking it back. Lose Zanshaa and you lose everything.

The Fleet Control Board met in a well-appointed room of the Commandery, all low-key lighting, polished wood, and pale, spotless plush carpet. Overhead glowed an abstract map of the empire, connected by lines that represented wormhole gates. Hone-bar and the Hone Reach stood out in fluorescent green.

The map was not a star chart: a map of stars would be irrelevant. The wormholes overleaped nearby stars, jumping anywhere in the universe—sometimes to places so remote that it wasn’t clear where they stood in relation to anywhere else.

There were three wormholes in the Hone-bar system, one that led to the fourteen systems of the Hone Reach, and two that led elsewhere in the empire. Whoever controlled Hone-bar controlled access to those fourteen worlds where so much of Lord Chen’s wealth remained at hazard.

At the opening of the rebellion, Lord Chen and the other members of the Hone Reach faction had insisted on sending Faqforce to the Hone-bar system. Now those two squadrons were urgently needed to defend the capital, and were to make a wide, fast swing around Hone-bar’s sun to return as fast as they could.

“It will be close,” said Senior Fleet Commander Tork. “The enemy could be here before Faqforce makes its return.”

The elderly Daimong, who was twirling in his fingers the dry strip of dead flesh he’d pulled from his pale face, let it fall in silence to the carpet. Tork chaired the nine-member board, which consisted of four civilian convocates and five active or retired Fleet officers, some of whom were also convocates.

“Can we order them to increase speed?” one of the civilians asked.

“No. They’re already traveling as quickly as the Lai-own physique permits.”

“But, my lord”—this came from one of the Fleet officers—“the light squadron doesn’t have any Lai-own ships, does it?”

After a long moment of chagrin, Tork gave orders ensuring that the light squadron, under Captain Martinez, would separate from Do-faq’s squadron and return to Zanshaa with the greatest possible speed.

“After the battle the enemy would need at least two months to decelerate, dock with the Magaria ring, and fill their magazines with fresh missiles,” Tork said. “Then another two months to accelerate to fighting speed and begin their journey here. And that’s if the enemy is willing to push gee forces to their maximum, with their personnel already on the point of exhaustion, and also if they are willing to dock their entire fleet at once, and risk it being destroyed by a raid.”

These facts were familiar to all present—all knew almost to the day the moment when they would begin to dread an enemy attack—but all had also learned not to interrupt Tork when the chairman was in the middle of one of his speeches. An interruption only inspired Tork to greater didactic emphasis, not to mention greater length. It was strange how the Daimong voice, normally chiming and bell-like, could at such moments be altered into such an insistent, nagging tone of declamation.

“The Home Fleet will also need to decelerate and take on new armament before they can again build up enough delta-vee to be of use in defending the capital…”

Lord Chen wearily reflected that it was entirely like Lord Chairman Tork to refer to the six battered survivors as “the Home Fleet,” as if it still resembled the armada with which Fleet Commander Jarlath had set about the recapture of Magaria.

“I’m concerned for the well-being of those crewmen,” Tork said. His round-eyed, startled-looking face was incapable of showing fear, concern, or any other emotion, but from the tone of the fleetcom’s voice Chen knew that the concern was real. “By the time their ships are in position to join the defense of the capital, they will have suffered more than six months of high acceleration. The degradation of their mental and physical state will be acute.”

“Yet what choice do we have?” asked Lady San-torath. “As you say, the capital must be defended.”

“We have sufficient personnel on Zanshaa to crew an entire new fleet,” said Tork. “I propose that we move entirely new crews aboard when the Home Fleet comes in to rearm.”

“Ships with new crews?” Junior Fleet Commander Pezzini was startled. “But they won’t have time to learn their ships before they may have to take them into combat!”

“And all the experienced officers will have been taken off the ships,” added the Lord Convocate Mondi, a retired Fleet captain and the second Torminel on the board. “It would be folly to remove the only officers experienced in battle.”

“Fleet doctrine is established,” Tork said, “and experience should make little difference in how the battle is fought. And as far as the officers go, one Peer is the equal of another—
that
is doctrine, too, my lords.” Pezzini tried to interrupt, and Tork’s voice took on its dreaded merciless hectoring tone as he outshouted his junior. “The new crews will have a month to shake down before an attack is likely to come! And beforehand, they can accustom themselves to their new ships in virtual!”

There was argument, but in the end Tork had his way. New crews would be assembled on the ring station and would begin training in virtual ship environments immediately. There was more argument as they appointed commanding officers—each board member had clients and favorites—and then a further brisk discussion in appointing a squadron commander.

“We must appoint an overall commander for the defense of the capital,” Tork went on. “The two squadron commanders, Lady Michi and Lord Do-faq, are young officers with no experience in maneuvering an entire fleet. We
must
pick a fleetcom.”

This was problematical, as most of the qualified officers had died with Jarlath at Magaria. The new commander would have to be Terran, since he would command from one of the Home Fleet survivors, all Terran ships. Again, each board member had his candidates, and when they deadlocked Lord Chen simply suggested they promote his sister to fill the place.

Well, he thought, it seems worth trying.

The motion had no support whatever, and Lord Chen withdrew it. The board reached no agreement, and Tork deferred the matter till the next meeting.

“If one Peer is as good as the next,” Pezzini muttered, “I don’t see why this always takes so blasted long.”

There followed more decisions in regard to the Fleet’s logistical support, and this was where Lord Chen began to earn the money that Roland Martinez was paying him. He managed to snag a delivery contract for a shipping concern owned by a Martinez client, and a supply contract for state-of-the-art laser communications systems for a Martinez-owned firm on Laredo.

“Have you noticed how many contracts seem to be going to Laredo?” muttered Lord Commander Pezzini. “I thought the place was a rustic paradise full of strong-thewed woodcutters and bucolic shepherds, and now I find it’s some kind of industrial powerhouse.”

“Really?” asked Lord Chen. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Why did we lose at Magaria?” From the display in his command cage, Caroline Sula gazed at him with her face drawn by fatigue and deceleration. From her gasping voice Martinez could tell she was undergoing three gees or more.

“There were lots of reasons,” she said. “They were ready for us, for one thing, and they had more ships. They out-planned us, though I can’t fault Jarlath for that, I suppose his plan was as good as he could make it, given what he knew.” She drew in a breath, lungs fighting gravity. “The main reason is that we didn’t starburst early enough. Whole formations got overwhelmed at once. The enemy’s tactics showed the same fault, but they started with more ships, and they could afford the losses.”

Martinez was warmed by Sula’s analysis and the fact that it agreed with his own. He felt flattered.

When did he start counting so much on Sula’s opinion? he asked himself.