At least the virtual presence of the squadron commander, his bitter enemy, would prevent Kamarullah from beingtoo smug in public.
“My lords,” Martinez greeted.
“Lord captain,” said Do-faq, flashing the peg teeth in his carnivore muzzle. He was young for his advanced rank, as demonstrated by the dark feathery hair on either side of his flat-topped head, hair that Lai-own lost on full maturity. His manner was businesslike without being brusque. Martinez had never actually met him in person, and had little feel for him as a personality, but Do-faq’s history with Kamarullah suggested that Martinez would disappoint the avian only at his peril.
The faces of the remaining captains appeared one after another in the virtual display. Do-faq began by summarizing the events of the virtual maneuver in which they’d all participated, and then went on to a detailed critique of each ship’s performance.Corona was cited for tardy transmission of orders to the other ships in the light squadron, as well as ragged performance of those same orders.
“Yes, my lord,” Martinez said. There was little point in offering excuses.
He could see the quiet exultation in Kamarullah’s eyes as Do-faq admitted in a brisk tone that his ship had done well.
Do-faq had ordered a maneuver almost every day, the ships flying in close proximity to one another and linked by communication lasers to provide a shared virtual environment. The maneuvers themselves were highly scripted, and taken from the bottomless archive of Fleet maneuvers that went back millennia. Do-faq called for maneuvers in which the heavy and light squadrons battled each other, or fought side-by-side against a computer-generated enemy; or participated as smaller elements in a larger fleet. No independent action was intended, or contemplated: each ship was judged on how well it followed its orders rather than how well it did against the “enemy.” The side the scenario intended to win was always victorious, and thus demonstrated the superiority of proper Fleet doctrine against tactics that were less proper, and less doctrinaire.
Coronahad consistently ranked low in the standings generated after each set of maneuvers, and the only reason it didn’t permanently occupy last place was that other ships were as ill-prepared asCorona. Maneuvers weren’t very common in the Fleet—they were a dreadful inconvenience, taxing the officers’ capabilities and taking the crew away from important duties such as polishing brass, waxing floors, and keeping the engine spaces sparkling clean in the event of an inspection. In a service that hadn’t fought a war in thirty-four hundred years, social virtues had come to seem at least as important as military ones, and there were crews in Do-faq’s command that had never participated even in a virtual maneuver before joining Faqforce.
Martinez had to give Do-faq credit for realizing that the war had changed everything. He was intent on turning his command into a proper fighting force, and the daily maneuvers and debriefings were a part of it. Martinez commended this industry on the part of a superior even as he winced at his own ship’s performance.
“My lords,” Do-faq said in conclusion, his golden eyes shifting from one virtual face to the next. “I am pleased to report that the Fleet Control Board has at last agreed to my repeated requests to send me the records of the Battle of Magaria. I am going to transmit them, coded, to each ship under my command. A captain’s key will be required to open the file. I admonish you to view these records in private, and to be careful with whom you share them.” His transparent nictating membranes closed solemnly over his eyes. “Tomorrow’s maneuvers will be conducted by your senior lieutenants from your Auxiliary Command centers. During that time we will confer again and see if we can discover what the battle teaches us.”
Martinez felt suspense tingling in his nerves. The government had never officially admitted defeat at Magaria, but instead issued an incessant series of clarion calls that urged every loyal citizen to Do His Utmost in the Crisis, to Repel Seditious Thought, to Uphold the Praxis, and to Unceasingly Fight for the Future of the Empire, a barrage of desperate slogans that argued for considerable panic behind the scenes. Martinez had managed to wangle the raw data out of the Fleet Control Board, and had been stunned by the fact of forty-eight of the Fleet’s finest warships blown into radioactive debris along with their commander. What he hadn’t known washow those forty-eight ships had been lost.
A few hours later, lying in his own bed after supper while the acceleration went on, he called up the overhead display and witnessed exactly that, and he was appalled by the battle’s fury. The number of missiles launched by each side was uncountable: whole squadrons on both sides were annihilated at once, or within seconds, by the blazing fury of antimatter warheads.
Particularly useful recordings had been made by a pinnace that had been launched by a cruiser in the lead squadron, and which had somehow avoided destruction for the entire battle, shepherding its barrage of antimatter missiles through the entire fight until they could be used to effect against the enemy, destroying five ships that blocked the retreat of the Home Fleet’s six survivors. The pinnace had been in an ideal position to witness most of the battle, from the glorious charge of Cruiser Squadron 2 to the rout of the fleet’s battered remains.
Martinez wondered how Caroline, Lady Sula, had felt as she watched the doom of the Home Fleet from her lone pinnace.
Whatever her feelings, they hadn’t altered her skill as a pilot. Not only had she destroyed five enemy ships, but she had followed the act of destruction by a broadcast on the all-ships channel, a hoarse-voiced cry of defiance against the enemy:
“Sula!It was Sula who did this!Remember my name! ”
The words sent a shiver up Martinez’s spine. He had just wondered how Sula had felt on watching the Home Fleet die—and now heknew how she felt. In her words Martinez heard the despair, the fury, and the loss that lay behind the defiant shout.
He felt an overwhelming need to wrap Sula in his arms and lie with her in some silent, unspeaking realm, a place where he could bring peace to the terrors he heard in that desperate, challenging voice.
Which was ridiculous, because he hardly knew her. And when he’d tried to get close to her, she’d fled.
With an act of will he dismissed Sula from his thoughts, and looked through the recordings again. Again and again he watched the squadrons maneuvering against at each other at significant fractions of the speed of light, the missile tracks that connected them, the blossoms of furious radiation in which they died.
A conviction began to harden in him. Martinez reached for his sleeve display and called for the one person on the crew he trusted without reservation.
“Page crewman Alikhan.”
“My lord.” The answer came quickly, and Alikhan’s stern face appeared in the chameleon-weave display on Martinez’s left sleeve. Alikhan had retired from the Fleet as a thirty-year man, a weaponer first class, and wore the curling mustachios and goatee favored by many senior petty officers. Martinez had brought him back into the service as his orderly, and as a fund of wisdom and practical information on the service.
Alikhan was wearing his vac suit and helmet, and lying on an acceleration couch.
“Are you alone?” Martinez asked.
“I’m in the weapons bays, my lord, for the maneuver.”
Martinez gave himself a mental demerit for forgetting he’d scheduled a drill for 26:01, after supper. He checked the chronometer on the wall and saw that he had a few minutes before the exercise was scheduled to begin.
His presence wasn’t strictly necessary: this was a drill he’d scheduled on his own, withCorona ‘s crew alone, in the hopes of sharpening them for tomorrow’s fleet maneuver. He’d tell Dalkeith to run it instead, with her crew in Auxiliary Command. She’d be in charge during tomorrow’s drill anyway, so she’d need the practice more than Martinez did.