There was no reply to Michi’s demand for surrender. Sula considered this yet more evidence that Dakzad was dead. She hoped his replacement was equally old and useless.
The two days to the Battle of Naxas was filled with activity. Officers and sensor techs scrutinized displays, trying to figure which return signal meant a genuine warship and which did not. The Magaria survivors were known quantities, but the reinforcements weren’t. The nine overlarge signals were real ships, and it was decided that at least two of the others were genuine, though whether real warships or converted civilian craft, it was impossible to say. They seemed to be the size of frigates.
The analysis was all performed under heavy deceleration. Increased gravities strained bodies and slowed minds. Sula stuck one med patch after another on her neck, twitched through dreams of disconnected horror, and fueled herself with coffee and sweets.
Michi gave Chenforce another three-hour break before the engagement, a few blessed hours under low gravity for the crew to have a hot meal and a few hours to relax the knots that heavy gravities had put in their muscles.
Sula called a drill instead. She was worried that Squadron 17 might have lost its edge in the long, dull prelude to the battle.
After the drill, she was glad she’d spoiled her crews’ quiet moment, because her ships performed raggedly. She issued a series of brisk corrections, then had the crouchbacks’ meal served at their stations.
She ate coffee ice cream on her couch, caffeine and sugar combined in a single efficient delivery system, and watched the Naxids come closer.
She was ready for whatever was to come. The converted transports might have large missile batteries, but they could be killed just like any other ship.
She was still the point of the spear. She was going to trust her luck, and trust Ghost Tactics.
This would be the last battle of the war, and she would be in at the kill.
Martinez watched the Naxids coming closer and didn’t like what he was seeing.
Nine enormous missile batteries, screened by twenty-nine warships, or perhaps thirty-one. Worse, Chenforce was following them, in pursuit. When the shooting started and burning plasma began blooming between the two fleets, Chenforce would flytoward the radio-opaque screen, and the Naxids away from it. As the battle intensified, Chenforce would grow more blind just as more enemy missiles were launched.
He had seen this situation once before, as a tactical officer at Protipanu. The situations had been reversed then, and he deliberately used the missile splashes to dazzle and confuse the enemy, and to hide whole volleys of missiles.
The Naxids had not survived that battle. He’d killed ten ships in less than two hours.
He sent a message to Michi pointing out the similarities in the current situation. In response, he was yoked into an encrypted datalink with Michi and Chandra.
“Any solutions to the problem, Captain?” Michi asked.
“There are no choke points the way there were at Protipanu. The enemy had to line up to slingshot around Okiray, and we were able to swamp them with missiles as they came at us. That’s not going to happen here—there’s nothing between us and Naxas.”
A curl of auburn hair had escaped Chandra’s sensor cap and was dangling in her eyes. She grinned.
“You’re suggesting that we go in on a broader front.”
“Why not? We have the time and the distance. Tork made the mistake of feeding his squadrons in one at a time and lost more than half his force. Instead we send our three squadrons against the enemy all at the same moment. We can link our sensor data together, so that maybe we can see around those plasma clouds, and we can throw out pinnaces to extend our range. Each squadron can use the Martinez Method so as to maneuver on its own while still providing maximum protection for its own elements.”
“Thewhat method?” Michi asked.
Martinez blinked. “The Martinez Method.” When Michi failed to react, he added, “I had to call itsomething .”
Michi frowned at him. “You didn’t think to name it after your highly supportive force commander?” she asked.
Dismay filled him. Michi and Chandra began to cackle. With effort, Martinez summoned his dignity.
“Would youlike the tactics named after you, Squadron Commander? You’re already going to get credit for the victory and for winning the war.”
Michi affected to give the matter her consideration. “I suppose in view of my impending glory I can afford to throw out a few tidbits to my juniors.” She gave a gracious wave of her gloved hand.
“The Martinez Method it is.”
Engines fell silent. Ships made minor adjustments in their trajectories. Engines flared again.
Each squadron’s deceleration was slightly different. Sula’s deceleration was the heaviest, Martinez’s the lightest, Michi’s somewhere in the middle. Their courses began to diverge.
Communications and sensor techs fed the sensor data of all Chenforce into one vast, webbed system. The technology had existed for ages, but it was complex—the computers had to compensate for the amount of time it took the signal to arrive from each ship down to the merest fragment of a second, which meant that Chenforce’s ships were continually bouncing ranging lasers off each other, and the data from these worked into the sensor feed calculations.
Chenforce didn’t starburst yet, but Chandra Prasad assigned each squadron a starburst pattern based on Sula’s formula. Each used a separate formula so the Naxids would have a harder time figuring out that the maneuvers weren’t completely random; but each squadron knew the others’ patterns, so the ships could continue to share sensor data.
“Engine flares!” Maitland’s baritone voice rang in the close confines of Command. “Engine flares at Wormhole Three!”
Sula looked at the display and saw a whole constellation of stars flying into the system, plasma tails blazing. Probably the vast majority were decoys, but there were at least three real ships, giants like the converted transports.
Whatever they were, they were too late. Even though they were accelerating at crew-killing velocities, they’d still flash past Naxas a day after the battle.
If Chenforce won, they’d have the newcomers for dessert. If the Naxids won, the newcomers would be redundant.
Michi Chen, with her furious pursuit, had succeeded after all in wrecking the Naxids’ schedule.
Chenforce raced on, Michi’s heavy squadron now in the center flanked by the two light squadrons. The Naxids responded by deploying squadrons of their own. The nine giant auxiliaries were clumped on the far side of the warships, with the smaller ships as their screen.
The warships fired, a volley of over three hundred missiles. Sula checked the chronometer: 2314.
“Message from Flag, my lady,” said Ikuhara. “Return fire at will.”
“Right,” Sula said. “Let’s make sure this is thelast battle, shall we?”
THIRTY-FIVE
Countermissiles lashed out. Antimatter fury raged in the space between the ships. More missiles were on the way.
Martinez looked at the display, the two light squadrons attached to Michi’s heavies like a pair of wings, the Naxids in a formation that countered that of the loyalists. Everyone was in the same plane, just as they’d been at Magaria.
He messaged to Chandra. “Do we really want to limit ourselves to just two dimensions?”
There was no answer till the next salvos of missiles found each other, blossoming to create a screen, and then a series of orders came from Chandra. The two light squadrons were ordered to rotate about a common axis, with Michi’s squadron joining them equidistant from the others. The squadrons were also ordered to starburst.
Martinez’s acceleration cage creaked as it swung to the new heading. He could only imagine the alarm in the minds of the Naxids as they saw Chenforce swinging into its new configuration, the three squadrons rolling around one another as the individual ships darted and flashed in alignments that had never been prescribed by any tactical manual, the ships like chaff flying before a crazed typhoon aiming at their destruction. He wondered how the Naxids could possibly react.
Let’s hope it’s with panic,he thought.