Imperium Restored, page 21
Martinez was relieved that he wasn’t obliged to respond to that message. Draymesh had started his rebellion too early, and there was nothing Martinez or any else could do to help him.
It was possible, he thought, that Draymesh had no option. If he were engaged in a plot to defect, he might have had to move quickly before being denounced. It didn’t change the fact that he was doomed.
Wei Jian chose not to respond to Draymesh’s appeal. Perhaps she viewed the missile launch as the best signal she could send.
In any case, the missiles arrived too late. The rogue squadron twisted and darted and ultimately died in overlapping fireballs while anxiety gnawed at Martinez’s entrails. The missiles sent by Wei Jian would have arrived ten minutes later, but counterfire blew them to bits long before they neared their targets.
Half an hour after the rogue ships had been turned into glittering dust, Wei Jian broadcast in the clear to Do-faq’s Unified Fleet. Jian appeared on video as she always did: perfectly composed, expressionless, her eyes turned to the viewer as if estimating the range. The white stripes in her short hair were as perfectly ordered as the badges of rank on her uniform.
“I offer condolences to the friends of Squadron Commander Draymesh and his officers and crew,” she said. “I would like to assure you that they will be amply avenged.”
Something flickered behind her eyes, as if she were a machine calling up a new piece of code. “It is obvious that your so-called Unified Fleet is anything but unified,” she said, “and that you are hardly in any state to fight a successful action. I would like to suggest to each captain again that you follow Captain Martinez’s proposal and defect to the Restoration. I advise that you pick your time carefully, and choose a moment when the balance of the Unified Fleet is engaged and too busy to effectively respond. To preserve your own lives, it may be necessary to strike first, but in any case, I urge you to avoid the disaster that will soon engulf your entire fleet. End message.”
That wasn’t so bad, Martinez thought. Jian had certainly covered all the points he would have made himself, and he approved of how she had slipped in the suggestion that any defecting unit could best assure their escape through a surprise attack on nearby ships.
His respect for Wei Jian grew a little more.
Now he’d have to hope that Do-faq’s commanders were listening.
Sula clenched her teeth against the heavy gees of Division Nine’s deceleration. If she were going to engage a superior force, she had decided, there was no reason to hurry, and so she would be decelerating all the way.
The med patch she’d stuck to her neck chafed the sensitive skin on the underside of her jaw. The thought of shooting herself in the neck with an injector sent terror clawing at her nerves, so she used patches to deliver the drugs that would support her brain and circulatory system, keep her mind flexible and her blood vessels elastic, and help prevent the strokes and brain bleeds that could come with high accelerations.
She had donned the cap that contained her earphones and virtual reality projectors, but she’d left her helmet in the mesh bag attached to her acceleration couch. She hated the closed-in sensation of wearing the helmet and feared fastening the faceplate that locked her into a world of chemical smells, claustrophobia, and her own body stink.
She hissed as Splendid’s engines increased thrust, and her body sank deeper into her acceleration couch.
There would be some hours yet before the battle started, and Sula would be fighting gravity all the way.
Well, Martinez thought, here I am again.
He faced the camera in his office, the unwinking eye that seemed ready to indict him on any number of charges. He faced as well the possibility that he was about to send his last message to his family. The Battle of Toley would begin in a matter of hours, and if he was killed, this message would be the final memory his family would have of him.
He looked at the paintings of fish on the walls, Young Gareth’s sketches enlarged and improved by an artist drawn from the Fourth Fleet. Scales, eyes, and teeth glittered in the spotlights, and Martinez felt a rising sense of well-being at the sight of his son’s aquatic fantasies gleaming on his office walls. He turned to the camera and began recording.
“The fight against Do-faq’s fleet will begin soon,” he said. “I’m a little relieved that I’m not in command this time—my responsibility now is not to win a war, but simply to stay alive, and I think I can do that well enough.”
He wondered if his false modesty sounded as false as he knew it to be. He wanted to be in charge. Every cell of his body was screaming at him to simply take over. He had built this fleet and won its two victories, he had developed every tactic that it would be using, and Wei Jian had supplanted him not by any virtue or ability, but by threatening to take her ships and go home if she wasn’t put in command.
“Do-faq has been subjected to a series of ambushes that have gone on for weeks,” he told the camera, “his crews are beaten down, and their morale has to be at rock-bottom. The Restoration will soon be able to announce another victory.”
But it couldn’t be just a victory, Martinez knew. The victory had to leave enough of a fleet available to the Restoration to advance on Zanshaa and anywhere else the enemy might be harboring ships. Even he had to admit his previous victories hadn’t achieved that. He doubted that Wei Jian could manage it now.
But these doubts were hardly the sort of thing he should be sending his family right now.
Instead, he said, “I hope that soon we’ll finally be able to see one another in person, in our own home in Zanshaa High City. Please send this video on to Mei-mei and my parents on Laredo. All my love, and you’ll hear from me soon.”
The unwinking eye dimmed, and Martinez viewed the video before he sent it. Watching himself perform always made him uneasy, and he rarely enjoyed the sight of himself on camera, but he decided the brief video was as good as it was going to get and forwarded it to be ciphered and sent on its way.
“My lord,” said Aitor Santana. “We’ve broken the Method formula used by sixty-one percent of the enemy formations. When we engage, we’ll know exactly where their ships will be even if our view is blocked by fireballs.”
“It’s too good to be true,” Martinez said. “I’m sure Do-faq will order new patterns before any engagement.”
“Still,” Santana said. “It would be a relief if we simply got lucky for a change.”
“I believe in luck,” said Martinez. “But I don’t believe in that much luck.”
He and Santana were walking to the flag officer’s station, both in vac suits and carrying their helmets. Wei Jian had decreed some preliminary maneuvering ahead of combat, in hopes of getting Do-faq to make a mistake—and though Martinez thought no mistake would be made, he reckoned that it was worth trying. He just had to hope he didn’t make a mistake himself.
An alarm began to ring as Martinez was strapping himself into his acceleration couch. Elissa Dalkeith’s lisping voice sounded through the ship. “General quarters. Now general quarters. This is not a drill.”
Martinez locked down the displays in front of him and paused to assure himself that nothing unexpected had happened—which didn’t take very long, as the situation hadn’t changed except that the opposing fleets had crept closer to each other. He looked for a moment at Sula’s Division Nine shedding speed as it approached the eighteen ships standing between it and the Combined Fleet, and wondered if Sula had any plan for dealing with the superior force.
Of course she did, he decided. Sula was the one person in the upcoming battle he didn’t need to worry about. She’d already worked out a way to deploy her heterogeneous force in some unexpected and masterful way, because that was exactly the sort of thing Sula did. She’d blow apart the rear guard and come down like a giant hammer on Do-faq’s flank and that would be the end of the battle.
Not that Wei Jian was likely to hand Sula any credit for her part in any victory.
Or to Martinez, for that matter.
Stay alive, first. Claim the glory after.
Martinez took the med injector from the mesh bag attached to his acceleration couch and pressed it to his neck. “Time to fire up,” he said to the room in general.
There was a brief hiss, and Martinez experienced a slight coolness in his throat and a faint chemical taste on his tongue. Otherwise, he felt no difference, and he could only take it on trust that the drug was doing its job.
The others dutifully attended to their injectors. Martinez locked his helmet onto his vac suit and breathed in the scent of suit seals, disinfectant, and his own aftershave. He went virtual, the projectors in his cap sending an illusory battlespace into his optical centers. All Toley expanded to fill his skull. He studied the displays from this new perspective as he played different scenarios in his mind.
Wei Jian waited another ten minutes before issuing her first order. Martinez repeated the order to his own command, and then floated free in his straps as Bombardment of Los Angeles cut its engines. There was a shimmer in his inner ear as the ship rolled about its center of mass, and then a punch to his sternum as the engines fired. Gravities built quickly, and Martinez began deliberate breathing from deep in his abdomen, letting gravity drive the air out of him before he gulped it back in.
The Combined Fleet was now flying before the enemy in what looked like a disordered retreat. The tactic was intended to tempt the enemy into an overhasty pursuit, leaving behind any ships crewed by the hollow-boned Lai-own.
The tactic had worked at Second Shulduc, with Lord Tork ordering his entire command into a rash pursuit, the Lai-own squadrons lagging behind. Martinez thought this feigned flight was unlikely to work against a Lai-own commander, who would be reluctant to order his fleet into a pursuit that would leave him behind, but he thought it was worth trying.
Do-faq didn’t take the bait, and after twenty minutes Wei Jian called off the retreat. Martinez sucked free, weightless air into his lungs while the ship rotated, and then the engines began their burn, taking the Combined Fleet toward the enemy. Two gees this time, a relief after the hard burn away from the enemy.
“Message from Lady Wei, my lord,” said Aitor Santana. “Van and rear are free to extend the line.”
“Acknowledge,” Martinez said. He turned to Santana. “All ships in the Grand Division of the Rear to alter course to two-six-five by zero-zero-one relative, course change to commence in two minutes. Accelerate at two point eight gravities.”
That would send his ships racing for the enemy’s flank at the same time that Michi Chen’s vanguard was dashing for the other wing. To Do-faq, it might look as if the Combined Fleet was intending to surround his command. Again, this was an attempt to get him to maneuver and try to match the velocities of the flanking forces and separate the Lai-own squadrons from the others. But, if he didn’t, the Combined Fleet would be in a position to flank Do-faq.
The danger to the Combined Fleet was that its elements might separate to the point where the enemy could overwhelm a single isolated command before the others could intervene, so Martinez kept a close watch on the gap between his squadrons and the main body. He also had to keep from getting too close to the eighteen warships that had been detached to watch Sula, because if he wasn’t careful he’d find them on his own flank.
He needn’t have worried. The enemy rear tried to match his acceleration for several minutes, but in the end settled for adopting a defensive formation, its squadrons curving back and away to keep from being encircled.
Since the enemy wasn’t to be drawn, Martinez canceled his own dash for the flank and arranged his squadrons in ways calculated to enrich his advantages. From a position hovering off the enemy flank, he could fire missiles at the enemy rear curving away from him, or he could fire straight into Do-faq’s main body, with the missiles arriving from an unexpected direction. It wasn’t a decisive advantage, because the enemy understood their situation as well as he did and would do their best to counter, but Martinez would happily employ whatever benefit the situation gave him.
His concentration on his own situation meant that he paid no attention to what was happening around Michi Chen’s Grand Division of the Van, not until he heard Lalita Banerjee cry out. “Missiles fired! Missiles fired in the van!”
Martinez’s heart leaped into his throat, and he frantically studied the displays. He let out a long breath when he saw that missiles had been fired within the enemy van, at one of their own squadrons. The targets had been in the United Fleet’s lead squadron, and when the other units had abandoned the race and curved away from Michi into a defensive formation, the lead six ships had increased their acceleration and raced away from their own support. It had been several minutes before the enemy fully realized that the ships were defecting, and their missile launches had been ragged. The defectors managed to shoot down the first volley, and by the time the second was launched, Michi intervened with missiles and beam weapons of her own.
The six defectors got away, flying clear of both fleets.
“Now is the time,” Martinez murmured. If there was ever a moment to take advantage of disarray and the collapse of morale among the enemy, it was now.
No sooner had Martinez spoken than orders came from Wei Jian. “Van, main body, and rear to engage. Fire a screening barrage, alter Method pattern, alter transponder codes as per instructions. Fire pinnaces and decoys.”
This was followed by the boom of a massive orchestral chord, and from Martinez’s headphones issued a massed Daimong chorus singing “The Praxis Is Our Only Goal.” Martinez blinked in surprise.
Some commanders inspired their subordinates with speeches, some with the meticulous care and interest they showed in the welfare of their ships and crews. Some micromanaged subordinates to make them all a part of a single machine obeying a single will, and some gave their officers enough freedom to discover their own strengths and apply them.
Apparently Wei Jian relied on patriotic music.
Martinez wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to obey orders immediately or wait till the song was over. He decided not to wait.
He ordered out a barrage, and when the enemy fleet vanished behind expanding spheres of blazing plasma, he ordered a change of course and for his units to alter their patterns. Decoys were fired, as well as pinnaces, yacht-sized vessels with a single crew originally intended to shepherd flocks of missiles but now used as observation platforms, intended to soar great distances away from the fight so they could see over the antimatter blasts and discover where in the battlespace the enemy might be lurking.
By the time the Daimong choir boomed out the triumphant finale, “The Praxis is our only gooooooooal,” the ships of the Grand Division of the Rear were beginning to enter the overlapping radio haze created by the missile explosions, and the Shankaracharya sensor suites were doing their best to find the enemy.
The Combined Fleet’s tactic was based on another that had worked at Second Shulduc, to subject the enemy to a calculated psychological shock—when the fleet appeared out of the expanding plasma fog, the launching of decoys would make it look three times as large as it had been only moments before. The enemy would know that two-thirds were decoys, but what they would see was an overwhelming force bearing down on them, and that first impression would be a shock. In addition, they would have very little time to sort decoys from warships before the missiles started flying, and Martinez could hope that the enemy would waste a great many missiles blasting decoys to flaming pieces.
What Martinez saw as his ships passed through the radio haze was an overwhelming force driving straight at him. He stared for a moment in shock, and then he laughed.
Do-faq had unintentionally mirrored his enemies’ tactics, taken advantage of the two fleets being hidden from each other to alter course and launch decoys, making his Unified Fleet seem much larger than it was. He had probably fired pinnaces and changed his Method patterns as well.
So far Do-faq had avoided panic, avoided plunging heedlessly into combat, and was reacting with tactical intelligence.
Damn. Martinez hated an enemy with brainpower.
On her displays, Sula watched the Combined Fleet in its preliminary maneuvers—the feigned retreat, the attempt to extend the enemy flanks. She wasn’t surprised that Do-faq made no fatal mistakes. The Battle of Toley was going to be a much more straightforward fight than Wei Jian had hoped.
Sula’s eyes sought out the nearest friendly force and found the Grand Division of the Rear on her display. Martinez commanded there, she knew, and she wondered if he was prowling through his ship like a caged animal. He was the most successful of the Restoration’s commanders, had won the greatest victory in the empire’s history, and now he had been superseded by a humorless, inexperienced senior officer obsessed with proper display of shoulder boards. If Sula had been in Martinez’s position, she might well have reached for her pistol—whether to shoot Wei Jian or herself, she wasn’t quite decided.
“Fucking hell,” she muttered. She shouldn’t be thinking about Martinez; he was a distraction that turned her insides to lead and half-paralyzed her brain. She needed to have her mind in the fight, not mooning over a lost lover.
Again, she scanned her display. Sula’s plan to engage the enemy detachment had evolved since it had revealed itself to her, but enough time had passed so that she had begun to doubt the wisdom of engaging at all. She decided to pass the decision up the line of command.
“Message to Fleet Commander Jian,” she sent. “Division Nine consists of fourteen ships, and the enemy has detached eighteen warships to face us. Even without engaging we have taken eighteen ships away from the enemy, and I question the wisdom of fighting at a disadvantage when we have already accomplished our objective of removing eighteen ships from the battle. I request permission to avoid a fight as long as the current conditions, ah, remain current. End message.”
