“Wemust win,” Mondi muttered, and drew snarling lips back from his fangs.
Lord Chen felt weariness seep into his mind like spring meltwater into the soil, slowing and chilling his thoughts. They had been over these figures meeting after meeting. “This business of replenishing ships’ missiles takes far too long,” he said. “A month or more to decelerate, time in dock, a month or more to get up to speed so that you’re not a sitting duck when the enemy shows up.”
“At least the enemy is under the same handicap,” Mondi said.
“The Fleet is not designed for this sort of war,” said Tork. Despair edged his chiming tones.
The Fleet was designed to sit in space and bombard helpless populations, or to make overwhelming surprise attacks on barbarians whose level of technology was lower than that of the empire. The Fleet hadnot been designed to fight another fleet with the same technology and tactics, let alone one with advantage in numbers.
“Why can’t we just load up a big cargo ship with missiles?” Chen asked. “Accelerate it and just keep it in orbit around the system? Any ship needing a supply of missiles could rendezvous with it and resupply. They wouldn’t have to drop their velocity to zero to dock with the ring.” He thought ofClan Chen burning its way toward Zanshaa, just ahead of Faqforce. “I can even supply the ship,” he said, then mentally added,Lord Roland permitting.
“I’ve considered this,” Tork said. “The enemy will be on our necks before the ship could be modified, loaded, and accelerated to useful velocities.”
“We’ll have your tender ready in time for thenext war,” Pezzini added, teeth biting down on his sarcasm.
“What if the enemy doesn’t come on schedule?” Lady Seekin asked. “What if they attack and we beat them? Wouldn’t it be useful to have missile reloads ready at hand, so that we could pursue them?”
Tork’s long, mournful face remained, as always, expressionless, but there was a profound silence before he raised his head to gaze at the others. “I can’t help but think that this war will change the way the Fleet operates. After this war, I don’t see that our ships will spend so much of their time in dock, where they’re vulnerable to rebellion and mutiny. Some of them, certainly, must be kept in orbit, where they can be useful in an emergency. And these tenders could be a part of that scheme, even if they’re completed too late for the decisive battle of this war.”
“We needwarships, ” someone said. “If we’re going to spend imperial funds, let’s buy something that will kill Naxids.”
“When a warship is in dock taking on supplies it isn’t able to killanything, ” Lady Seekin said. “I think this could work.” She looked up at Lord Chen. “Thank you, my lord, for a very useful idea.”
Lord Chen was calculating how much of this work he could shift to the Martinez family shipyards at Laredo. Not many—they were already stuffed with government contracts.
He’d consult with Lord Roland.
And then he’d speak to some other friends. People who might be very grateful for a contract or two.
Kamarullah issued few commands to the squadron over his first few days. When repairs were completed on his two damaged ships, he increased acceleration toward Zanshaa. Orders for minor course changes came after the wormhole transition.
The first attempt by Martinez to make use of Sula’s formula, with ships simulated inCorona ‘s computer and programmed to make use of Sula’s tactics, succeeded only in crashing the display. Shankaracharya gave the opinion that this wasn’t Sula’s fault, but the fault of the program, which wasn’t flexible enough to absorb Sula’s innovations.
Another attempt was made: Martinez, Vonderheydte, Shankaracharya, and Kelly each commanded a ship in a simulation, battling a squadron commanded by Dalkeith and using conventional tactics. The four ships using Sula’s tactics had their course changes programmed in by hand rather than by running it through the simulator. This approach showed promise, and the battle was beginning to look interesting when Vonderheydte’s ship vanished from its place in the simulation and reappeared clean on the other side of the virtual “universe,” having made an unscripted transition of a sort that was not, so far as was known, permitted in nature. The participants had barely recovered from this surprise when Shankaracharya’s ship made a similar leap.
The simulation software seemed to have a good many more limitations than anyone had suspected.
“We’ll have to try it with actual ships,” Vonderheydte said.
Martinez looked down at his supper, one of Alikhan’s casseroles a bit the worse for gravity. Macaroni stood up to high gees very well until the point when you cooked it.
“I no longer command the squadron,” Martinez pointed out.
“There’s another problem,” said Dalkeith. “Whoever heard of a fleet maneuver in which the outcome wasn’t determined in advance? No commander’s going to call for such a thing—they’d look like idiots if the wrong side won.”
In silence they contemplated the enormity of a senior officer calling for maneuvers this radical, and the colossal loss of dignity that would result when things didn’t go as expected. Dalkeith’s seemed a conclusive argument.
“Well,” Kelly said, musing on her glass of wine, “what if we don’tsay it’s a maneuver? It can be called an ‘experiment.’ The wholepoint of experiments is that no one knows for certain how they’ll turn out.”
Martinez blinked. Stale olive oil wafted to him from his plate. “Worth a try,” he judged.
He sent a message to Do-faq, along with Sula’s formula and a description of the limitations of the standard tactical simulation. He also suggested that an experiment, rather than a maneuver, would be the best way to test the innovations. Do-faq sent a polite reply saying that he and his tactical officer would review the innovations, and Martinez assumed it would end there.
Martinez also sent a copy of the message to Kamarullah. Kamarullah did not reply beyond a routine acknowledgment from his comm officer.
Five days into his tenure, Kamarullah finally called for a maneuver—a maneuver out of the old playbook, the ships flying closely together and linked by laser into a shared virtual environment. Martinez shrugged and assumed that his theories, and Sula’s, would remain in obscurity until one or both of them reached flag rank. But no sooner had the maneuver started than Do-faq’s ships, some ten light-minutes behind and visible on the navigation displays, began to separate, one division maintaining a rigid formation while the other formed in a looser group at a distance, a group in which the relative positions of the ships were constantly shifting.
“Screens,” Martinez told his sensor operators, “I want that maneuver—thatexperiment — recorded.”
Martinez didn’t believe for a moment that this was spontaneous. Do-faq was proving even more devious a service infighter than Martinez had suspected. Do-faq had waited for Kamarullah to call a maneuver—he must have partisans within the light squadron, among the captains—and then he’d called his own for the same moment. His staff must have been working overtime to put this together, to show Do-faq’s commitment to tactical innovation while Kamarullah was putting his squadron through the same old stodge.
Do-faq had placed his bet in history’s sweepstakes, and the bet was on Martinez.
Martinez felt the glow in his heart for days.
As if the Battle of Hone-bar had somehow liberated the frigate from a month-long jinx,Corona performed flawlessly in Kamarullah’s maneuvers. The glow in Martinez’s heart brightened.