“Thank you, my lord.”
“I’m glad that’s settled,” Kamarullah said. “The least we can do is learnone tactical system before we go off inventing another.”
The rest of the conference produced little of interest, and Martinez left virtual world with a burning determination to wipe Kamarullah’s smirk right off his face.
He invited his three lieutenants to dine with him, then hesitated for a moment and invited Cadet Kelly as well. She was one ofCorona ‘s old crew, one of those who had helped him steal the frigate on the day of the mutiny and escape the enemy, and she had been clever and useful on that occasion.
Corona’s former captain, Tarafah, had been served at his lonely table by a professional chef he’d brought aboard, given the rank of petty officer, and doubtless kept sweet with under-the-table payments. Despite the war and the edict forbidding Fleet personnel to leave the service, on arrival at Zanshaa the chef had produced a doctor’s certificate testifying to a heart condition unable to stand heavy gravities, and Martinez had shrugged and let him go.
Alikhan, who had cooked for Martinez before the war, now continued in that capacity. He’d prepared a meal for Martinez alone, and couldn’t alter his arrangements until the ship lowered its acceleration to 0.7 gravities at dinnertime and he could get into the kitchen. Alikhan’s last-second improvisations might be less appealing than his usual fare, so Martinez decided to try to provide a convivial reception for the food by opening two bottles of the wine that his sisters had crated up to him when he’d been officially promoted intoCorona.
“Ido want to apologize about today’s drill, lord elcap,” Dalkeith began. “The confusion with the damage-control robots will not be repeated.”
“Never mind that,” Martinez said, and for once in her life Dalkeith looked surprised. “I’ve got something else to show you.”
He called up the wall display and showed selected bits of the battle at Magaria. He watched the shock as they saw squadrons of the Home Fleet buried beneath waves of antimatter. “Our tactics aren’t working,” Martinez said. “The best we can hope for is mutual annihilation. And I don’tlike annihilation, not even if we take enemy with us.”
His officers looked at him in shocked surprise. “We need something new,” Martinez said. “Lord Lieutenant Vonderheydte, the bottle is at your elbow.”
“Oh.” Pouring. “Sorry, lord elcap.”
“My lord?” Cadet Kelly looked at him with wide black eyes. “Are you asking us to invent a new tactical system? Over dinner?”
“Of course not!” Dalkeith poured scorn into her child’s voice. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
Ah, Martinez reflected, the moment awkward.
“Well,” he began, “I’m afraid I’m the ridiculous one, because that’s what I hope to accomplish.”
Dalkeith’s face expressed surprise for the second time that day.
“Very good, my lord,” she said.
Martinez raised his glass. “Here’s in aid of thought,” he said.
The others raised their glasses and drank. Vonderheydte looked appreciatively at the wine, glowing a deep red in the heavy leaded crystal created to stand high accelerations. “This is a fine vintage, my lord,” he pronounced.
Vonderheydte, young and small-boned and blond, wasCorona ‘s most junior lieutenant. He’d been one of the frigate’s cadets when the Naxids mutinied, and as he’d performed well in a number of highly improvised roles duringCorona ’s escape, Martinez had exercised his powers of patronage and had promoted him.
Vonderheydte took the bottle and looked at the label. “We should get some of this for the wardroom.” The others agreed.
Martinez let the wine roll over his tongue and found it much like any other red wine he’d ever tasted.
“I’m glad you like it,” he said.
“So should we starburst earlier?” Kelly asked as she drew her cuffs forward over exposed bony wrists. “Is that what you’re after?”
“Sort of,” Martinez said, and explained his vague ideas. Kelly listened, her head tilted to one side.
The lanky, black-eyed pinnace pilot had been weapons officer duringCorona ‘s escape from the Naxids, a job at which she’d shown unexpected talent. Subsequently, in flight toward desperate pleasure from a host of incoming terrors, she and Martinez had shared a frantic few moments in one of the frigate’s recreation tubes. Those moments had never been repeated—common sense had reasserted itself in time—but they were moments which Martinez, at least, could not bring himself to regret.
“So not a starburst, exactly,” she clarified, “but a very spread-out formation.”
“I don’t know,” Martinez confessed. “I know that I don’t want to lose the defensive advantages of a formation, and I don’t want everyone to get so dispersed the battle will turn into a melee.”
“How do you coordinate movement and formation changes?” Dalkeith wondered. “You’ll only be guessing where your ships will be, so it will be sheer chance if you hit them with a comm laser. And if you broadcast on radio, the enemy will hear it, and their computers have the same software that ours do, and plenty of computing power, so they might be able to decode it.”
Martinez had been thinking about this since the captains’ conference. Before the war his specialty had included communication, and he thought he’d worked out the solution. “Using radio’s not a problem,” he said. “First, you have each ship repeat the message to all others once it’s received, to make certain that each ship receives its orders. Then you devise a very thorough code describing any maneuvers necessary for the fleet, and your computers cipher the codes using a one-time system. The one-time system means that even if the cipher is broken, it won’t help the enemy read thenext message. And even if theycan read the cipher, all they get is a code they can’t read without a key.” He shrugged. “You can make it more elaborate than that, but that’s all that’s really necessary.”
The others considered this while Alikhan appeared and placed upon Captain Tarafah’s mahogany table the first course of his improvised meal, which on inspection proved to be white beans on a bed of greenish-black vegetable matter, with a splash of ketchup for color.
It could be worse, Martinez thought, and picked up his fork.
“How far can we spread out the ships?” Vonderheydte wondered aloud. “Our superior officers like to see smart maneuvers, with every ship rotating and changing course at the same moment. Obviously this is going to be a good deal more ragged.”
Martinez cared less about ragged formations than the fact that this would make the new tactics harder to sell to his superiors. A formation in which all orders were not instantly and smartly executed would not be an attractive picture to the average Senior Fleet Commander.
“My lord,” murmured Sublieutenant Nikkul Shankaracharya into his wineglass, “there should be a formula, I mean a mathematical set of formulas, that will tell us how far we can safely set our formation.”
His voice was so low that Martinez could barely make out the words. Shankaracharya was a shy youth with a lieutenancy of less than a year’s seniority, and his posting toCorona was the result of direct intervention by one of the few divinities recognized by the service—in this case a clan patron who served on the Fleet Control Board. ThatCorona was then handicapped by the presence of two very junior lieutenants with little time to learn their jobs, who were supervised by a lackluster, nearly superannuated senior in Dalkeith, was beneath the notice of the divinity in question.
A further complication was added by the fact that Shankaracharya was the beloved of Martinez’s younger sister, Sempronia. Sempronia, who was, as part of a plot laid by Martinez and his other sisters, engaged to marry someone else entirely.