The Sundering (38 page)

Bleskoth had been a part of the rebellion even then, Martinez thought. Fanaghee had recruited him: the young Naxid had gone to Felarus
knowing
he was going to blow the other ships of the Third Fleet to bits with his antiproton beams.

Martinez considered the enemy captain as he sipped his coffee. Bleskoth was young, decisive, and committed. He led a team at lighumane, a sport that combined long-term strategy with sudden, aggressive violence. He hadn’t hesitated at Felarus. He was a yachtsman, used to hard accelerations and last-minute, decisive actions.

Martinez returned his coffee cup to its saucer. He had his answer.

“They’re trying to convince us that they’re decoys,” Martinez said later, as he reported to Lady Michi at the Flag Officer Station. “They’re going to do a prolonged acceleration and deliberately take some casualties in order to convince us that they’re a badly managed set of decoys and that we don’t have to worry about them.”

Lady Michi drummed her gloved fingers on the armrest of her couch. “That implies they want us to believe some particular set of decoys is in fact the real squadron. Which one?”

Martinez frowned. “I haven’t worked that out yet.”

“Have they worked out that Severin’s given their whole game away?”

Martinez, standing by Michi’s cage and looking down at her, felt a touch of vanity at his answer. “I checked the timing. Everyone on their ships must have been unconscious when the light from Severin’s torch reached them. When they wake up they’d have to go back through the records and look for it.”

“Unless,” Michi pointed out, “they have an automatic alarm set to alert them to any new ships in the system.”

“They
should
have set such an alarm, yes,” Martinez conceded. “But they weren’t expecting us, so in their surprise and haste they may not have.” Michi looked dubious, but Martinez had prepared his report thoroughly, and he restrained the impulse to tick off the points on his gloved fingers. “And even if they
do
see Severin creeping off, they may not necessarily think he’s been in the system for five months—he may look like a pinnace pilot we sneaked into the system a few hours ahead of our arrival, and who may not have observed a great deal. And if they
have
set an alarm, it would make sense for the alarm to alert the flagship to cease acceleration to give the commander time to work out if the new arrival is a threat, and if that happens we’ll be able to see it in, oh, twenty minutes or so.” He had to stop and take a breath. “If they
are
alerted but
don’t
stop to evaluate their situation till the end of this long acceleration, then it will be too late, because they’ll be already committed to their strategy.”

Amusement tweaked the corners of Michi’s lips. “You’ve certainly got your facts in order.”

Martinez shambled into as decent an approximation of a salute as his vac suit permitted. “I do my humble best, my lady.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Humble? Really? You may take your seat, captain.”

Martinez saw the two signals lieutenants try to suppress their smiles, and suppressed his own as he shuffled to his acceleration couch. A superior who appreciated his moments of conceit was a welcome change from commanders of the past.

The couch rocked beneath his weight as Martinez lowered himself into it, the hoops of the acceleration cage vibrating with little metallic shivers. He reached into one of the seat compartments and pulled out a med injector, then held it against his carotid and touched the trigger. A carefully calculated cocktail of pharmaceuticals entered his system, one that would regulate his blood pressure during acceleration and strengthen his blood vessels, keeping their walls supple and whole against the danger of acceleration. Then Martinez put on his helmet, reached above his head, and pulled his displays to the locked position in front of him.

“Reminder from Captain Fletcher, my lady,” said Li, from the comm board. “Twenty-six point five minutes till our acceleration around Pelomatan.”

“Acknowledge,” said Michi. She turned to Martinez, then waited for him to finish webbing himself into his place before speaking.

“Captain, you mentioned the advantages of having the Naxids think that we’re fooled by their decoys.”

“Yes.” Martinez paused a moment to collect his thoughts. The decoys were self-guided missiles small enough to be fired from a warship’s missile tubes. The warships, with their resinous hulls, were not good radar reflectors, and it was possible to configure a small decoy missile to give off as large a radar signature as a warship. The decoys’ exhausts had also been modified to give off the broader tail of a larger vessel. In general a decoy was less convincing the closer it got to an observer, and the longer an observer had a chance to study it.

“We have some decoys heading right for us,” Michi said.

Martinez’s fingers brought up his tactical displays. “We should destroy them, of course. The question is how. If we knew they were decoys we’d let them get quite close. But if we suspect they might be real, we’d open fire early and use a lot of missiles.”

“I don’t want to waste missiles,” Michi said. “Not when we’ve got a real battle coming on, followed by a long campaign.” Her fingers again drummed on the arm of her couch. “I’ll order the squadron to open fire with lasers on that oncoming group as soon as it’s even remotely possible. If we get lucky and hit one, that will prove to everyone’s satisfaction—including the Naxids’—that we know the squadron are decoys and can treat them as such.”

Martinez nodded. This was as reasonable a plan as any he’d been able to devise himself. “Very good, my lady,” he said.

He watched the tactical displays for the next several minutes. The Naxids’ frenzied acceleration continued without cease, even after the light from Severin’s engine flare reached them. They had not set an alarm, at least not one that could be triggered by a small vessel such as the lifeboat.

Martinez became aware of the sound of deep breathing in his earphones. He checked the comm board first, to make certain no one had broken into the channel he shared with the squadcom, and then looked up to see Michi Chen lying on her couch with her eyes closed, asleep with a pleasant smile on her lips.

Sweet dreams, he thought. He felt a stab of envy for a commander who could relax so completely on the eve of battle.

This was clearly not an ability he had acquired himself. If he snatched a few hours of sleep within the couple of days, he’d be very pleased. And he wasn’t even in charge of the squadron.

Alarms clattered as the ship prepared for weightlessness, and Martinez saw Michi start awake. She looked at her displays, saw nothing had changed, and closed her eyes. Martinez heard the deep breathing start again as the ship went weightless and rotated about its sleeping center of gravity as it prepared for the burn around Pelomatan.

Another alarm rang, this one for heavy gravity. The engines roared into life, and gravity swung Martinez’s couch to a new attitude. As he was pressed deep into his seat he heard Michi’s breathing grow labored as the gravities began to stand on her ribs with their leaden boots.

Martinez felt his own breath burn as it fought its way through his constricting throat. His vac suit clamped gently on his arms and legs. The ship cracked and groaned as the gravities built. In succession, as the engine vibration reached the frequency of different elements of the ship, Martinez heard the metallic keen of one of his cage bars as it vibrated in sympathy with the ship, the song of a metal washer on his console, and the hum of one of the room’s recessed light brackets.

Darkness began to flood his vision, and he clenched his jaw muscles to force blood to his brain. The darkness continued to advance: the last thing Martinez saw was a scarlet stripe on his tactical display, and then the stripe twisted, spun into a narrowing spiral, then faded like a dying spark into the night. In his headphones he heard a snarl as Michi Chen fought for consciousness.

He thought he hadn’t actually passed out. Dimly he heard the call of the zero-gee warning, and then the sudden release as the engines cut. He gasped in relief as he floated free in his harness, and he saw a dim tunnel in front of him, a tunnel that slowly brightened and widened until he saw the control room before him, the other officers blinking and blowing their cheeks as they looked at the world reborn.

Illustrious
rotated through a brief weightless arc, and then an alarm rang and the engines cut in again, their ferocity tamed in a modest one-gee acceleration.

Martinez checked his displays. Bleskoth and Light Squadron 5 were still coming on under fierce acceleration, ready to round Pelomatan in another eight or nine hours and overtake Chenforce somewhere on the far side of Okiray.

There was a blinking light on his display, a reminder, and he looked at it to discover that missiles had destroyed Wormhole Station 1 while the squadron was thundering its way around Pelomatan. The crew hadn’t evacuated, either because they didn’t have a lifeboat or because they decided to remain in case Bleskroth had any stirring messages to send on to Naxas. He reported this fact to Michi.

“Excellent,” she said, and yawned.

Another set of lights flashed on Martinez’s display. These pointed to the fact that eight of what Severin had identified as enemy decoys, which had been preceding Chenforce on its loop around Protipanu, had just begun a course change and acceleration. They were going to cut inside the next planet, Okiray, and intercept Chenforce on the other side.

“There they are, my lady,” Martinez said as he drew attention to this on the wall display. “These are the decoys that Bleskoth wants us to think are his real squadron. They’re maneuvering as if to bring on an engagement on the far side of Okiray, cutting right across our course, and conveniently staying out of range until that point.” More lights flashed. “Ah. And other sets of decoys are setting up to support them.” Admiration for Bleskoth began to shimmer in his mind. “It’s pretty clever, actually. He’s got another set of decoys between us and his real squadron, and if we feel any threat in our rear it’s going to be there, not his actual squadron.”

It was an ingenious way of minimizing Bleskoth’s tactical disadvantages. To an omnipotent observer, sitting far above Protipanu’s north pole, it would look as if the Naxids were chasing the loyalists down and about to fly up their tailpipes.

From Bleskoth’s perspective, however, he was flogging himself and his crew senseless in a desperate acceleration right into the muzzles of two hundred and ninety-six missile launchers. If he could keep those missile launchers firing at decoys right up until the critical moment, he had a chance of bringing off a victory.

Martinez made a note to himself that if he ever found himself defending a star system in the future, he should remember these tactics. If, that is, he could be sure there was no one like Severin to give his game away.

Hours passed. Martinez’s mind buzzed with tactics, trajectories, calculations, and occasional flashes of deep paranoia, suspicion that a Naxid, just off camera, had been holding a gun on Severin for their entire conversation. Martinez kept the computer busy calculating possible courses, accelerations, and intercepts. Michi gave the order for the whole squadron to open fire with their point-defense lasers on the decoys rushing toward them from Okiray. The range was impossibly long and the targets were doing some dodging, but perhaps it relieved the squadron’s weapons officers of any tension that might have built up during the long hours of waiting.

With the lasers still firing, Michi announced time for supper. Command of
Illustrious
passed to Lieutenant Kazakov as Captain Fletcher joined Martinez and Michi at her table. White-gloved formality was preserved, but the custom of not discussing Fleet business at meals was not. Michi was determined to weigh her officers’ ideas.

“I’m concerned with what to do after we pass Okiray,” she said. “Should we head straight for Wormhole Three, or swing around toward Olimandu and a complete circuit of the system? If we make a circuit we guarantee an engagement, but delay our exit from Protipanu by days. If we head for the wormhole, we give Bleskoth the opportunity to break off the fight, or just to pursue us at a distance.”

Fletcher stirred his soup with a delicate motion of his spoon, releasing the fragrance of ginger and the fried onion that substituted for scallion. “I agree with you, my lady, that we must beat them here. A victory would be of enormous value to the government and to loyalist morale, particularly after the fall of the capital.”

“How would the government find out we’d won?” Michi asked. “We’d have to send someone back to carry the news.”

“A pinnace pilot could do the job,” Fletcher said. He turned to Martinez with a lofty look. “Perhaps we could send someone back in
Daffodil,
” he said. “Less discomfort for the pilot, and we don’t lose a pinnace that way.”

“I wouldn’t recommend sending anyone back as long as there are still some of those hundred-odd Naxid decoys in the system,” Martinez said. “We don’t know how they’re programmed—any boat we send back would be defenseless against them.”

“Not if we make a complete circuit of the system,” Fletcher continued. “We’d launch the boat after we pass Aratiri, and from there it’s a straight flight to Wormhole Two.”

“With all respect to Lord Captain Fletcher,” he said, “I think we should go straight for the exit. Bleskoth isn’t putting himself through that homicidal acceleration just to let us fly away. He
wants
a fight. It’s not in his character to let us get away without one.”

“His character?” Fletcher repeated. His voice was strangely dreamlike. “Are you personally acquainted with Captain Bleskoth?”

“Not personally,” Martinez said, “but I’ve looked at his record. He’s young, he’s a yachting champion, he was captain of the lighumane team. He destroyed our fleet at Felarus very effectively. Everything points toward his being an aggressive, decisive commander. Just look at the way he’s coming after us.”

Fletcher stirred his soup again. “I ask because I
do
know Bleskoth. He was a lieutenant in the new
Quest
when I had
Swift.
He wasn’t very aggressive then—he toed Renzak’s line pretty severely, and toadied the squadcom dreadfully, the way those Naxids do.”