The ship shuddered and groaned under the great surge of gravity. Martinez clamped his jaw in order to force blood to his brain. His vision darkened, narrowed to a tunnel focused on the tactical display. He saw blooms of bright light flash on the display as antimatter missiles detonated. Symbols flickered, indicating thatIllustrious ‘s point-defense weapons were firing. He fought for breath and consciousness, aware that control of the battle had never been his, that he would either live or die in the next few seconds and that he was helpless to make any difference…
The great pressure on his chest and mind eased. He had never felt he would be thankful to experience a mere six gravity acceleration.
Expanding clouds of plasma floated in the void ahead of the ship, showing where the oncoming Naxid missiles had destroyed part of the fleet’s decoy screen. Silver flickers on the display indicated rapidly receding missiles that had flashed through the system so fast they failed to acquire a target. By the time they finished decelerating and had begun their return to the point of origin, the Second Battle of Magaria would be over, one way or another.
There seemed to be no new missiles coming their way.
“Reduce acceleration to one-half gravity,” Martinez said.
Michi’s voice sounded in his earphones. “I take it we’ve survived, Lord Captain?”
“No casualties in the fleet, my lady. We seem to have lost forty or so decoys.”
“Message for the squadcom from the Supreme Commander,” said Nyamugali at the comm station.
“Forward it to her.”
Martinez heard the message secondhand, since his channel to Michi was still open when she played it.
“The lord commander,” said a chiming Daimong voice, “reminds Squadron Commander Chen that no element of the fleet is to disperse without permission of the Supreme Commander.”
Tork, Martinez thought, at least had the virtue of consistency.
More decoys were launched to fill the gaps caused by the surprise attack. Tork then launched a missile to destroy the source of the ranging laser, which turned out to be Wormhole Station 2.
“The old pirate,” Michi said, with feigned affection.
Illustrioussuffered the expected number of sprains and broken bones during the attack. No one was incapacitated. The Naxid strike had come to nothing, but the crew of the wormhole station observed the Orthodox Fleet’s reactions, and would have been able to deduce at least some of the icons on their screens that represented real ships and some that were decoys.
Perhaps that had been the whole point.
Martinez wrenched off his helmet to relieve himself of the scent of spent adrenaline that was souring his suit, then examined the spectra from the brief battle. There had been over two hundred enemy missiles, he saw. Most had missed completely. Only two squadrons had tried to starburst, his own and Sula’s.
Something about the way Sula’s squadron maneuvered seemed familiar, and he subjected the trajectories to analysis. They looked random, but on closer inspection they were not—they seemed to be following the hull of a chaotic system.
Somehow, Sula had taught the new tactics to her squadron, and presumably done so without Tork finding out.
Clever girl,he thought. He wished he and Michi had been as clever.
Martinez decided that he wasn’t going to leave Command until the campaign was over. He ordered Narbonne to bring him coffee and settled in for the approach to Bachun Wormhole 2, now marked on the display by the glowing dust that had been its station.
The Orthodox Fleet was preceded through the wormhole by the now usual swarm of relativistic missiles equipped with laser trackers and radar, and then by hundreds of decoys. In order to avoid any theoretical host of missiles waiting for them on the other side, the fleet performed some last minute maneuvers to delay their entry into the Magaria system, a movement that only served to increase suspense.
Martinez shifted to a virtual display before the fleet made its transit. The Bachun system filled his skull, the sun a white sphere, Bachun itself a tiny blue dot surrounded by a silver ring.
The wormhole sped closer. Martinez strained his thoughts to sense whatever waited on the other side. Energy raced along his nerves. He could feel his pulse beat hard in his throat.
He knew thatIllustrious had made its leap through the wormhole when the Bachun system vanished from his mind, replaced by complete darkness. His mind flailed without bearings, and then the sensors began picking up data from the scanning missiles that had been fired into the system ahead of time, and bit by bit Magaria’s system blossomed in his mind.
When Fleet Commander Jarlath had led the Home Fleet to disaster at Magaria, the battle was influenced by two gas giants, Barbas and Rinconell, that lay between Magaria Wormhole 1 and Magaria itself. This tactical map no longer existed—Barbas and Rinconell had moved on in their orbits, and Magaria itself was on the far side of its primary. The Orthodox Fleet could skate past Magaria’s sun, Magarmah, and blast straight for the enemy-held world.
Except of course for the enemy fleet, which now flashed onto Martinez’s display like a distant glittering string of fireworks. The Naxids had swung around Rinconell and were themselves heading for the primary.
The two fleets were on a gently converging course, and if nothing intervened, they could begin hurling missiles at each other in about five days.
The enemy commander had given Tork exactly the battle he was looking for.
“Lord Captain,” said Warrant Officer Choy at the comm station, “we have a radio signal from the Naxid commander. It’s in the clear.”
Martinez had to admire the enemy’s timing. The message came within three minutes of the Orthodox Fleet’s last squadron transiting into the Magaria system. The Naxids had known approximately when Tork would turn up, and had sent their message to arrive shortly afterward.
“Let’s see it,” he said. He was still scanning the tactical display, just in case the message was intended to distract the loyalist command while some kind of skulduggery went on.
The image of a Naxid appeared in a corner of Martinez’s display, and he enlarged it. The Naxid was elderly, with gray patches on his head where scales had fallen off. He wore the uniform of a Senior Fleet Commander, a uniform covered with softly glowing silver braid, and his eyes glimmered a dull scarlet in his flat head.
“This is Fleet Commander Lord Dakzad.” The voice was imperious. “In the name of the Praxis, I demand the immediate unconditional surrender of the disloyal, anarchist, and pirate elements that have just entered the Magaria system. You may signal your surrender by launching all missiles into interstellar space. If you fail to meet this demand, you will be destroyed by fleet elements operating under my command. I await your immediate reply.”
Martinez was already looking up Dakzad inIllustrious ‘s database. The enemy commander was even older than Tork, and had in fact retired some eight years earlier. Apparently, the crisis had dragged him back into harness, to replace the hapless commander who had fled Zanshaa after the fall of the High City.
A text message from Chandra appeared in another corner of his display.
“I don’t think Tork is going to like having his own surrender message preempted.”
“I don’t think he’s going to like being called a pirate,” Martinez answered.
He was right. Tork’s reply—also sent in the clear, so his own subordinates could admire it—denounced the rebels as traitors before demanding their surrender. It included a video of Lady Kushdai surrendering all rebel forces to Sula, as a reminder to Dakzad that by fighting he was violating the orders of his own superiors as well as that of the government and Fleet.
Dakzad replied with a lengthy justification of the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis, a denunciation of piracy as demonstrated by the destruction of wormhole stations and the Bai-do ring, and further demands for submission.
Tork’s response was even more elaborate, with historical references to the Shaa’s first Proclamation of the Praxis on Zanshaa, and repeated his original demand for capitulation.
Martinez supped at his own table that night and slept in his own bed. He didn’t think there would be anything interesting happening as long as the opposing commanders were arguing ideology.
Though there was no fighting beyond the verbal sort, the days following the transit to Magaria were not entirely tranquil. There were many conferences with Michi and her staff, with Martinez’s officers, with sensor operators, and with Tork’s staff and analysts in other squadrons. Enemy formations were endlessly examined to find whether they were decoys or enemy warships. At one point Chandra put forward the startling possibility that they wereall decoys, and that the real enemy were elsewhere, hiding behind Magaria’s sun perhaps, racing toward them behind a pack of a few thousand missiles.
Fortunately, subsequent evidence disproved this theory. Sensor missiles probed the area behind Magaria’s sun and found nothing but Magaria itself. Careful reading of laser ranging spectra suggested that there was a difference in size between at least some of the Naxid blips and others, indicating a mix of warships and decoys.
The enemy they saw before them was real.
The two great fleets gradually approached each other. The Orthodox Fleet remained on course to whip around Magaria’s sun en route for the planet. The course of the Naxid fleet would intersect that of the loyalists right there, at Magarmah.
Which, Martinez reflected, was an interesting tactical problem. The two fleets would hammer at each other for several hours, and then have to form into a queue for the slingshot around the sun. Given the considerable distance between ships even in the same formation, there was no real danger of collision, but the ships of the two fleets would be intermingled in that long queue, and presumably still be hurling missiles at each other.