Some of those present drew in their breath in dismay. So the rebels had feetol cannon. That these weapons could have been built outside Diadem—unless, inconceivably, they had somehow been smuggled out of there—came as a shock to Archier. He had assumed the Escorians would endeavour to get in close, so they could fight using short-range weapons.
“Coming within cannon range,” Archier advised.
“Very well,” Archier responded. “Order opening volley as applicable.”
“Volley away!” Gruwert wheezed, almost immediately.
“Combat mode,” said Archier.
With those words the pool, the Command Room itself, vanished, and the battle proper started. Archier and his staff were suddenly in combat space, a seeming void in which they were disembodied entities perceiving the elements of the conflict directly.
There were really two levels to this space. One was merely a three-dimensional spacetime—the arena in which the battle was to take place. The other was an information space. The commanders conducted the engagement by plugging themselves into a data network that shunted to and between them a flow of constantly updated battle reports.
Ordinary, language was too slow to suffice in circumstances like this. Gradually, over a course of minutes, the command staff lapsed into battle language: an abbreviated, syncopated form of speech which relayed information and commands fast enough to take advantage of the speed of machine talk.
The first words Archier heard in this echoing void were those of his pig Fire Command Officer. “Two hits!” Gruwert squealed. “Forward right, Admiral!” Then he added casually: “Enemy guns appear to be taking aim.”
Archier had hoped for better results from his opening volley. He could see the Escorian fleet clearly now. It was fanning out ahead of them. One large and one small vessel had converted into sparkling nebulae: that was how combat-mode display presented a ship disintegrating when hit by a tritium shell.
He rattled out orders. “One—volley-two; two—bowl plan, effect! Three—FCO direct fire.”
He was taking a calculating risk, getting in a following opening volley. A more textbook procedure would have been to disperse the fleet into bowl plan after only one. But while his ships were bunched together in one big feetol bubble their shells could range further; and Archier was counting on still being out of range of the Escorian guns. With luck, they would not have mastered the technique of combining feetol bubbles yet.
He was right, but only just right, given the aggregate speed of approach of the two fleets. He watched a briefly dazzling pinprick display of shells exploding on proximity fuses among the Escorian ships; three more rebels nebulaed. At the same time the Escorians had also opened fire: their shells fell short, falling below c while still one-tenth of a light-year distant.
Meantime the ships of Ten-Fleet were deserting the common feetol bubble, emerging from it like drops of oil until, in moments, it had entirely disappeared. They lost much in speed and manoeuverability; but no admiral could keep his ships so vulnerably close together during battle. They were adopting bowl plan—spreading out in a huge concave formation with the enemy as close as possible to its focus. The fleet’s front-line-o’-warships then began using their prodigious rate of fire on selected targets.
With satisfaction Archier observed the havoc they wrought in the brief interval before the Escorian fleet’s rapidly developing dispersion rendered the bowl-and-focus concept redundant. He had been waiting to see what game plan the rebels would adopt; ruefully he recognised that they had opted for what was probably the best plan of all in their case—namely, none.
It made sense. They had none of Diadem’s military experience; no centuries-old archives on tactics and strategy. Rather than try to outfox professionals, they were attempting to pre-empt tactics altogether by means of enforced chaos. Like an explosion the rebel ships leaped for all points in Ten-Fleet’s formation, firing as they went. The bowl deformed and twisted as the two fleets merged and began to slug it out ship by ship.
For the staff of the Command Room, this was the most frustrating type of situation. It particularly irked Archier to find his task as battle director reduced to a primitive level, having to bend his efforts to seeing that rebel groups did not isolate and surround an Imperial ship so as to outgun it. As he dealt with the reports flooding in from the raging firefight, looking in the Command Room’s combat space like a war of fireflies, he quickly realised that the Escorians had created a melee in which their greater numbers could, conceivably, tell against the superior gunnery of Ten-Fleet. Further, they had achieved their objective of coming in at close quarters so as to deploy those weapons not hitherto denied Diadem’s subject worlds—electromagnetic beams whose temperatures were stellar in intensity and whose density was that of steel; quake beams, a variant of feetol technique, that disintegrated solid matter by quantum shaking; and, of course, an endless variety of self-guided missiles, sub-c in velocity but deadly dangerous when combat distances were measured in light minutes.
A cry of alarm came from the Fleet Manoeuvers Officer. “We’re losing control, Admiral! We’re dispersing!”
In the stress of the moment she had forgotten to use combat speech. “Combat region now exceeds gunnery range,” Gruwert squealed in agreement.
Archier had been aware of this danger for some minutes; it offered another advantage to the enemy. He told the FMO to disengage temporarily, to pull out all ships in order to regroup. As long as they could keep to the tactically effective repertoire of formations that had been proven in the past, he believed victory would eventually be theirs.
But evidently someone on the Escorian side had already thought this through. The FMO had no trouble reducing the battle perimeter, but she found it impossible to extricate the fleet from the enemy. Wherever it went, the Escorians followed, able to match speeds as long as Ten-Fleet did not take up galaxy formation and mesh bubbles. The two fleets went hurtling through Escoria, speeding heedlessly past star after star and clinging together in a furiously energy-spitting mass.
A blinding flash of coruscating purple light suddenly enveloped the Command Room’s combat space. When it had gone, so had the combat space. Normal lighting had returned. Archier was sitting on the throne, blinking, only his flagship staff before him.
Even the pool was dead.
After a moment the Damage Assessment Officer spoke up. “We have sustained a near miss. The hull’s combat mode receptors have been burned off.”
“What about the rest of it?”
The officer paused. “Other communications continue to function.”
“Weaponry too,” Gruwert announced. “It was some Simplex-damned converted gas carrier got in a shot at us. Have range; training all guns…” He tailed off, his small eyes glazed in concentration.
“Any chance of regaining contact?” Archier asked his DAO. The officer shook his head.
The Command Room was now useless, unable to receive the fleet’s sensory webwork that had made combat space possible. “Then we shall have to open the old bridge,” Archier decided. “Let’s get up there quick.”
“It might be a bit of a job getting through,” Arctus remarked. “There’s a big party going on on decks thirty to thirty-five.”
“Well, have the bridge opened ready for our arrival.”
“Excellent work, Turret Fourteen!” Gruwert exploded suddenly. “They got him!”
“Congratulations,” Archier said absently. He stepped down from the throne and led his half dozen officers out of the Command Room and to the nearby travelator. Once inside the capacious compartment they soared up to deck twenty-nine, the site of Standard Bearer’s old-style bridge, without difficulty—Archier had been afraid someone would have tampered with the switches, depositing any unwary transship traveller in the midst of the celebrations; it was a common trick. On debouching from the travelator, however, it became evident the party had strayed outside its stated bounds. On a deck of coloured glass, old-young women danced with extravagantly costumed young men, forming a vivid, swirling crowd. Strictly speaking their presence was out of order, this was a working area of the ship, though disused. Varihued smokes drifted through the air, making Archier feel intoxicated. Someone had mixed a powerful combination of incenses.