Briefly the admiral turned his attention to his stateroom "window"-a large wall panel that in F-space usually gave a real-time view of the stars more clearly than an actual window could. But in hyperspace, the default view was of the F-space potentiality, as interpreted by the shipsmind, and it was neither esthetic nor ordinarily interesting. Usually it showed nothing at all. So he'd requested views of Terra. Terra, which he might never see again. Just now it showed the Swedish taiga-its trees sparse and stunted in the ever worsening climate. In the background was the great ice sheet of the Kjolen Range, intensely, painfully white in spring sunshine. It covered the fjelds as far north and south as the view permitted, and oozed slow white tongues of ice down the valleys toward the sea. A magnificent view, it also provided perspective. Many townsites and historical sites had been buried by the ice in this and many other valleys, leaving the region virtually abandoned. A few-a very few Sami had stayed, long since genetically more Swedish and Norwegian than Sami. They had relearned to herd reindeer, a valid lifestyle, given the climatic shift.
A thought surfaced: if the Wyzhnyny prevailed, would they undertake to root out such tiny, harmless enclaves? That was what some of the colonies had been-small harmless enclaves in planetary wilderness. And seemingly the Wyzhnyny had rooted them out. From the alien point of view, he supposed it made sense.
He pulled his attention away from the screen. In a week he'd emerge in the Paraiso System-the first inhabited system at which he could intercept the invader. How terrible, how overwhelming was that alien armada? How good were his Provos-his 1st Sol Provisional Battle Force? What chance did humanity have?
You'll be the first to know, Alvaro, he told himself.
He was not expected to win this battle, in the usual sense. Thank the Tao. He was to attack the enemy, cause as much damage as possible, then disappear into hyperspace before the invader could destroy him. And in the process learn as much as possible about enemy weaponry and tactics. Those were his orders. Engage, flee, and report.
The decisive part-the most dangerous moment-would be just before escape into strange-space. That moment after the shield generators had shut down, but before the shields had sufficiently decayed to allow generation of a carrier bubble.
War House deemed those waited-for reports so vital, they'd invested five of a seriously limited resource to make sure of them. In each battle group, the point battleship carried a savant communicator, and through that savant, a liaison officer was to give War House a running account of the fight. Then, when the fleet had escaped into hyperspace, the surviving commanders would debrief, again via savant.
Though War House didn't know it in advance, the Altai was the exception. Her savant would be far too busy directing battle actions to give a running account. And afterward he'd rest, as long as needed, before channeling Soong's debrief.
Soong hadn't told Kunming about his new battle master. War House might forbid following through on it. It seemed to him he would himself, if he were admiralty chief. Because War House hadn't personally tested Charley Gordon. And the battle would involve most of the battle-ready human warships and crews.
And if somehow Kunming found out before the fact, and forbade it? Probably he'd ignore them. He'd spent weeks as Charley's assistant, developing strategies and tactics, modifying and remodifying procedures. But in simulation tests, he'd been a spectator, while Charley interacted with the Altai and the rest of the battle force in ways no one had thought of before.
Early on, the admiral had been visited by anxiety, but the weeks of development and tests had left him quietly confident. Not of victory, but of Charley's genius and skills, and the wisdom of his own decision. The limitations of ships and weapons remained, along with the unknown abilities and resources of the Wyzhnyny.
And that two-edged sword known as Murphy's Law, which threatened both fleets. Soong wondered if the Wyzhnyny recognized Murphy's Law. It seemed to him they must. It was inaccurate, of course. Murphy's Law-"Whatever can go wrong will go wrong"-had been predicated as humor. It was irony, not science. But by changing one word, you expressed a truth: "Whatever can go wrong may go wrong."
In any case you did what you could, and Charley could outdo anyone.
In normal gaming, a battle master gives the battlecomp a general strategy and a set of candidate tactics, via brief code words or phrases, very explicit. The battlecomp takes it from there, until that instruction is overridden by a new code word or phrase. Some gamers sometimes give a single such order. The secret to whatever success they have lies in evaluating the initial situation, and selecting or creating an effective strategy. The exercise itself is run entirely by the battlecomp.
Charley, however, had come to the job with major advantages. His response time was faster than any other human gamer's, perhaps because his responses were mediated by a shorter, faster neural system.
Charley knew the entire catalog of standard command codes, and had added numerous others of his own to make use of his special talents. And no one, to Soong's knowledge, was nearly so nimble with them. Charley could rattle off a sequence of appropriate commands, for a number of units, almost at the speed of thought. "Appropriate" involving the necessary allowances for unit momenta, signal time, equipment response times, and of course his own delivery rate in a command sequence.
The battlecomp could, of course, handle the command function by default. But it could not know what Charley usually knows: the event vectors of the moment. His central genius.
Meanwhile, in simulation, every warship in the fleet was carrying out battle actions bizarre and unimagined, even by the centuries of tactical wizards who'd labored anonymously at War House desks, programming, testing and gaming.
Because creative and imaginative though they'd been, none of them had envisioned a resource like Charley Gordon.
Estimated conservatively, the Provos would arrive in the fringe of the system twelve days before the Wyzhnyny's projected date of arrival. With the short closing jump, and a force no larger than Soong's, hours would be enough to form opening battle formations. So far, Charley's fleet drills had been in the virtual reality of the Altai's shipsmind. The rest of the fleet didn't know there was a new battle master. In the Paraiso System, the entire fleet would participate, its ships coordinated under Charley Gordon's direction, mediated by the Altai's shipsmind.
Soong was on the bridge four hours before scheduled arrival. Already isogravs showed the system's primary, an F9 star without a name of its own, unless you consider catalog numbers. As soon as shipsmind had computed the optimum emergence solution, the admiral ordered an approach course and emergence tick, informing his battle force via that awkward set of phenomena called hyperspace radio.
When that order had been acknowledged, he sent another: all hands were to be out of stasis before emergence, and ready to receive a live, all-hands briefing from the admiral and his battle master. Because the battle plan, tactics and protocols had changed greatly. The fleet's officers and crews needed to be set up for that; informed of what had happened, and how, reassured, and given confidence in the new command situation.
On naval spacecraft, the signal for hyperspace emergence is a gong, mellow and golden, repeated over five seconds.
Then the Provos popped into F-space scattered over a significant period-more than a millisecond-to occupy a million-cubic-mile volume of F-space shaped like a watermelon seed. Against a scintillant backdrop of stars, cold in aspect but hot, hot. The brightest, most vivid, being the molten-yellow primary only four billion miles away.