Ruler of Naught (21 page)

The glances that semaphored around the room had altered:
everyone was waiting for the tactical digest that Ng had ordered. Usually
Rom-Sanchez was first on the mark, if not before, eager to anticipate the next
order. Where was he? He had to know that being late was not going to please
anyone.

Once again, apparently, the captain’s thoughts paralleled
his, as Ng addressed Nilotis. “It may be that Tactical is trying for more detail
than we need to get started. Have him send what he’s put together so far.”

She shifted her attention to the other three officers,
giving Nilotis tacit permission to boz Rom-Sanchez.

(Rom-Sanchez, Tactical.)

Nilotis relayed the Captain’s request...

... and listened in disbelief to the Lieutenant’s reply.

o0o

From the periphery of her vision, Margot Ng observed the
stiffening of her chief tactical officer; already a very tall man, he seemed to
grow several centimeters. She couldn’t see his face, since he’d politely turned
away for the boswell communication with his subordinate. When Nilotis turned
back, his high brow was wrinkled with concern.

“Captain, the Officer of the Deck has given the Tactical
Officer permission to report in person, accompanied by Ensign Warrigal. ETA ten
minutes.” Nilotis gave them a painful smile. “Lieutenant Rom-Sanchez also
requests the presence of Commander Hurli for the briefing.”

Ng watched understanding widen Krajno’s and Navaz’s eyes,
but Totokili glanced around, clearly puzzled and irritated. So far as she knew,
no one in the Energetics Department played L-5, which was what this had to be
about.

The situation was spinning away into surrealism. As if to
torment her, the single-shot destruction of
Prabhu Shiva
replayed itself
in memory.

She blinked away the image. “See to it, please,” she replied
to Nilotis.

“Warrigal?” Totokili repeated, glancing from one to another.
“The ensign from Narbon?”

“Bright ensign,” said Krajno. “Difficult to read, doesn’t
have much facility at small talk.” He smiled. “Bit of an enthusiast for
Tactical Semiotics.”

Once again memory obtruded—easier than trying to grasp the
inconceivable now. Never had she seen Krajno’s essential gentleness more
clearly displayed than during Nefalani Warrigal’s earnest, and largely
incomprehensible, explication of her graduate thesis, during a Captain’s Dinner
early in the tour. That dinner could have been one of those painful occasions,
but Krajno had found a way to open the talk from the thesis to everyone’s
background in games.

Not all seniors were so understanding. That same thesis, Ng
knew, that had been the final straw for Jeph Koestler, the Commodore at Narbon.
She’d never gotten around to reading it herself, especially since Warrigal’s
L-5 game apparently had no negative impact on the fitreps of the participants,
least of all Rom-Sanchez’s.

At the very least, this was one more sign of the
lieutenant’s willingness to take risks in the performance of his duty.
But is
this another Smyrna, or has he bought his last can of silver polish?
And
why had he asked that the head of Infonetics be present?

“Our most junior lieutenant seems a bit froward,” growled
Totokili.

“I’ve not found him so,” said Krajno. “Less afraid of new
ideas than some, perhaps.”

Ng watched the subtle way Nilotis set down his coffee cup in
the exact center of the porcelain saucer, as if the weight of the universe
rested on his precision. Thus he avoided any overt reaction to the suspicious
glower Totokili turned on the XO.

It was time to intervene. “Commander Totokili, while the
tactical digest is on the way, I’d like your opinion of how we can deal with
the other problem: a third-tranche Alpha capable of blowing the stern off a
battlecruiser with one shot, and apparently capable of bringing down a
planetary Shield in less than a day.”

The Energetics Officer visibly shifted mental axes as he
gazed at the tac-holo that they all had memorized by now. Then he glanced down
at his compad. “I’ll want a closer look at the tacponder and VSA data, but no
matter what else we figure out, we’ll have to rebalance the ship’s power distribution
to give the shields all they will take. That will also enable us to make them
more reactive, although against that power level I don’t know how much good it
will do.”

“So what should we sacrifice? Maneuverability or weapons?” asked
Ng, as the orderly turned to her for signs.

She noted that only Nilotis was drinking. They were full of
adrenaline enough. She nodded, and the orderly withdrew behind the silver
coffee service, which Ng usually only had brought out for formal dinners.
Instinct had prompted her to have it out now. But its rich gleam, the old
Archaeo-Moderne lines, did not even boost her own mood. She suspected the
others could have been offered Shiidra sock cheese, and they wouldn’t have
noticed.

“Weapons,” Navaz said, her voice emphatic. Although it was
beginning to look like the world they thought they knew had been blasted along
with the
Prabhu Shiva
, this was one area Navaz was sure of. “The
conformation of a destroyer makes it unlikely that they’ve been able to
strengthen their shields much and I’d almost guarantee that the only offensive
improvement they’ve got is the skipmissile. It looks like they’ve found a way
to drop the skip frequency by at least an order of magnitude, which puts the
terminal plasma velocity in fourspace much further up the asymptote.”

“I agree.” Totokili nodded, if possible even more emphatic
than Navaz.

He’s falling back on things he’s sure of
.
Can he
move forward the way we need?

The hatch opened, and Commander Hurli glided in, her uniform
not just crisp and spotless, but fitted like an outer skin. Ng gestured for her
to take her place, and the orderly stepped forward to offer her coffee, which
she took with trained grace, and set down to ignore.

Ng suppressed the urge to summarize, and left that to
Krajno. Best to keep him busy and feeling useful until the inevitable grip of
grief. Ng forced herself to acknowledge that inward gulp of worry, of bracing
for the worst, that never failed whenever something happened to a colleague.
She observed Krajno’s steady hands, his concentration as he spoke. Hurli
revealed absolutely nothing as she listened and watched the holo; Totokili’s
scowl deepened as if the summary was somehow a personal affront.

Then a silence fell, the abstract silence of minds racing
around and around the spin-axis without any landing. Ng was about to ask Hurli
what she thought, just to get them focused on the same thing, when the hatch
opened again and Rom-Sanchez nearly fell through in his haste.

He was followed by Ensign Warrigal. Both carried compads.
They fetched up stiffly as the lieutenant formally reported and then began to
stammer his way through an explanation of their presence here. She could tell
by his phrasing and not-so-surreptitious gestures that he was trying to
encourage Warrigal to speak as well, but the ensign merely stiffened to an even
more impossible degree.

Ng hid the brief spurt of amusement, unexpected and welcome,
even if it did not release her tension. She could have told Rom-Sanchez that
Nefalani Warrigal was not going to say anything until the words were pulled out
of her.

She knew that Warrigal had either removed herself or been
removed from the line of succession in her ancient family. Her type of mind
would never be successful in the political arena of the High Douloi, but in the
navy, the clear chain of command, the comfort of rules and regs might be a
framework for excellence, as it had for the Armorer.

Ng took over to make things easier for both junior officers.
“Lieutenant, we’ve gotten as far as accepting, as a working hypothesis, that
the Rifters have, in addition to skipmissiles of unprecedented power,
superluminal communications, which they used to ambush
Prabhu Shiva
based on standard battlecruiser counter-frigate doctrine. Can you add anything
to this?”

“Yes, sir.” Rom-Sanchez could not hide his strain. Next to
him, Warrigal’s gaze darted from person to person—not nervously, but as if the
other officers were part of a tactical display. “We call it ‘hyperwave.’”

Totokili snorted and Rom-Sanchez colored.

“No need to coin a term when the serial chips did it
centuries ago,” said Krajno gruffly, reminding Ng that his mate Tiburon had
been a devotee of star-fantasy, the more lurid the better.

“I’m sure you have more than just a name for it,” said Ng.

“Yes, sir,” Rom-Sanchez continued. “We have Tenno modules
for it.”

A pulse of startlement ran through face and posture of the
other officers, which Ng herself shared despite what she’d guessed. Rom-Sanchez
hurried on. “With your permission, sir, I’ll play a god’s-eye digest with the
standard Tenno, and then Ensign Warrigal will play it with a Tenno version
based on her extended semiotics. The latter is very rough, and some of it won’t
make sense, so I respectfully request you all watch it all the way through
before asking any questions.”

“Permission granted,” said Ng, and squashed the impulse to
glance Totokili’s way as she said, “We’ll hold our questions.”

Rom-Sanchez tapped his compad and they watched once again
the events leading up to the destruction of
Prabhu Shiva
and the death
of everyone on board. Again the Tenno flickered in futile patterns and eroded
into simplicity, unable to make tactical sense of the actions of the two Rifter
ships.

Ng’s head panged. How could she, how could they, fight the
ship without the Tenno Major to abstract tactical knowledge from the flood of
data that comprised ship-to-ship actions? She remembered how helpless she’d
felt, her first time in a Naval simulator, before she’d learned the Tenno
ideographic system: that gut-wrenching sense of being bombarded by so much
information that she’d been functionally blind.

Now it was happening again. And it was real.

The recording ended. As Warrigal worked her compad, the
tac-holo mist-swirled to a new configuration: the same god’s eye view, but overlaid
with bizarre Tenno glyphs that Ng could only partially read. Most of the
conceptual modules were similar, but combined in ways that wrenched at her
understanding, demanding an almost nauseating shift of perspective that she
couldn’t fully accomplish before she ran up against new modules that she didn’t
understand.

But this time, as the action proceeded, the Tenno evolved
smoothly, and Ng realized with a shock that they were screaming
Danger!
from the moment
Prabhu Shiva
made its appearance. These Tenno—despite
her gaps in understanding—made it obvious that standard doctrine couldn’t stand
against superluminal communications; that Harimoto had been betrayed by
ignorance into a series of disastrous choices that had doomed his ship.

In the tac-holo
Prabhu Shiva
once more seized the
frigate in an unshakable grip, and the Tenno smoothly signaled potential
communication—that much Ng could figure out from the new ideographs—from the
frigate to another ship. Once more the destroyer emerged with its skipmissile
tube already oriented on
Prabhu Shiva
, an impossible two-skip maneuver
outside the light cone of the battlecruiser or frigate, with nary a hiccup from
the Tenno. The new semiotics had even predicted that the Rifters would shut
down the fiveskip of the frigate so that it would not be damaged by the
ruptor-strike-to-tractor modulation called for against a vessel that mounted no
weapon capable of damaging a battlecruiser.

The tac-holo froze as it reached the end of the digest,
leaving total silence in the plot room.

Nilotis looked stunned, Hurli suspicious, Krajno thoughtful,
Totokili outraged, and Navaz was ignoring the tac-holo and studying Warrigal,
her lips parted. The ensign stood at parade rest, her wrists moving slightly,
her gaze restlessly assessing everyone in the room. Rom-Sanchez was
fractionally less tense as he tried to watch Warrigal, the officers, and Ng,
without being obvious about it.

“Ensign Warrigal,” said Ng. “It’s my understanding that you got
your doctorate with a rather unconventional thesis, which you appear to have
applied here. Perhaps you will explain what we just saw? Lieutenant, feel free
to amplify her remarks as you see fit.”

o0o

Ng-double-stroke-upper-quadrant-receding-deceleration-withdrawal-opening.

Nefalani Warrigal turned her class ring around and back on
its finger one last time. During their tactical work-up on the bridge, and on
the way here, Rom-Sanchez had tried to coach her on the likely reactions of the
senior officers, but like virtually everyone else she knew, he spoke about
emotions and human reactions in terms that really didn’t make sense to her.

So she’d let the words wash over her, and while the seniors
were watching the two digests, she’d watched them, carefully touching up the
emotional version of the Tenno she privately called L-6, in which bodily
motions and speech became input for the tactics of conversation.

Warrigal had used L-6 more her first month on
Grozniy
than during her entire year at Narbon. At first she’d longed for the rigid
structure of the Narbon Omega Fleet, despite the memory of the Commodore’s
scorn in her exit interview. Finally, building on the general modules for
facial expressions, posture, and the like, she had laboriously constructed
specialized modules for each of the officers now present—and many others,
although Totokili was still difficult to read since she rarely encountered him.

She took a deep breath. Ng’s L-6 had indicated permission to
explain a technical matter.

“Yes, sir. I was investigating the assumptions behind the
Tenno programming. As I suspected, since they are a semiotic computational
system based on the ideographic languages of Lost Earth and human
neurophenomenology, their fundamental structure is Newtonian, and the
relativistic linkages in the Tenno are for the most part first-order only.”