Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Again.

Feeling a need for support, he went to the buffet in order to have something to lean against. There he found Michi gazing at the food without much interest. He offered her his fritter.

“May I order you something to drink, my lady?” he asked.

“I’m trying not to drink,” she said. “Torminel toilets don’t agree with me, and it’s a long walk back to the airlock andDaffodil.”

Martinez could see Sula out of the slant of his eye. She was turned away from him, her back arrow-straight as she spoke to a Lai-own captain.

He bolted his whisky. Michi raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll take my chances with the toilets,” he said.

“Fucking imbecile,” Sula told Lord Sori Orghoder. “Next time try following my instructions.”

Lord Sori had grown accustomed to this sort of abuse by now, like the rest of Sula’s captains, and his furry Torminel face was resigned.

“Apologies, my lady. I thought I was-”

“You’re supposed to be following the hull of a chaotic dynamical system, not driving a runaway tram through a parking lot!”

Lord Sori’s face gave a tremor, then subsided. “Yes, my lady.”

Peers, Sula knew, weren’t used to be talked to this way. Her savagery had at first stunned them-and then, perhaps because they had no idea of anything better to do, they had obeyed. Sula’s talent for invective had produced results. Light Squadron 17, under the lash of her tongue, was becoming proficient in Ghost Tactics.

She would never have dared speak to her army this way. Volunteers could all too easily have walked away. The Peers who commanded her ships were stuck with her, and perhaps they were too wedded to their notions of hierarchy ever to protest a tongue-lashing from a superior.

Sula worked them hard. She called them idiots and dunces. She criticized their ancestors, their education, and their upbringing. She even censored their correspondence-which was, she learned, remarkably dull.

Without her, she decided, they were nothing. A bunch of coddled aristocrats without an idea in their collective head. But she was going to be the making of them.

“We are going to storm the Naxid citadel,” she told them. “And I know we can do it, because I’ve done it before.”

One of the advantages of not caring about anything, she had decided, was that she could decide to care about any particular thing. She had decided she was going to care about Light Squadron 17. Her command would become immortal in the eyes of the Fleet.

She was particularly vicious at the moment because of her meeting with Martinez the previous evening. She felt the encounter had shown her at her worst. Not because she’d tried to cut him down, which he thoroughly deserved, but because she’d done it out of anger and surprise. She should have slashed Martinez to ribbons coolly and dispassionately, but instead had blurted out a few feeble insults and then run for it.

She had shown that she was vulnerable. She had demonstrated that she, who cared about nothing, still cared about him.

It was her officers who paid for this discovery with their dignity.

“Have some brain food with your dinner,” she told Lord Sori, “and we’ll try another experiment, starting at eighteen and one.”

She broke the connection with Sori-and with the other captains who had been watching with properly impassive faces-and then unwebbed herself from her acceleration couch.

“Secure from general quarters,” she said. “Send the crew to their dinner.”

“Yes, my lady,” said Lieutenant Giove.

While Giove made the announcement to the ship’s crew, Sula swung forward to put on her shoes, which she’d kicked off and dropped on the deck. The advantage of the Ghost Tactics experiments-radical tactics performed in a shared virtual environment while her actual ships soared innocently in the close formations Tork demanded-was that she didn’t need to suit up. She disliked vac suits, the suits’ sanitary arrangements, the helmet visors that locked her into a closed, encapsulated, smothering world. In an experiment, she could wear ordinary Fleet coveralls, kick off her shoes, and feel free to try out any outrageous strategem she pleased.

On the simplest level, each ship could simply follow the formula as she had created it, maneuvering within a series of nested fractal patterns that maximized both its defensive and offensive capabilities, and-significantly-moving in a pattern that would seem completely random to any observer.

There were more complex levels to the system, as there would be with anything involving fractals, and these had to do with the designated “center of maneuver,” around which the squadron would be navigating, which could be the flagship, a point in space, or an enemy. Choosing the center of maneuver, Sula suspected, was far more an art than a science.

With all the practice, she thought she was getting very good at her art, and she was beginning to hunger for the day when she could test it against the enemy.

Martinez realized that Sula must have been charming others as she’d charmed him, because Tork announced a change in the fleet’s order of battle. Light Squadron 17 was shifted into the van as the lead squadron. In the sort of battle that Tork clearly intended to fight, the van squadron would be the first to engage the enemy, and remain in action until the battle was over or until the squadron had been reduced to radiant debris.

Martinez wondered how exactly Sula made Tork so determined to sacrifice her to the necessities of war. Tork was giving the Naxids every possible chance to kill her along with most of her command.

“For once Tork’s had a good idea,” Martinez said aloud as he sat at his desk and reviewed the order, and then was annoyed at himself because he felt the comment lacked conviction.

He looked down at his desk, at the image of Terza holding Young Gareth, which floated at the margins of the display.

At least, he thought, he’d stopped dreaming about Sula. He could give his family that.

Bulletins came almost daily from Terza, charting Young Gareth’s progress, and when Terza was busy and no message arrived, Martinez found himself missing the daily contact. He sent letters in return, and a few videos so Young Gareth could hear his voice and practice focusing his eyes on his father.

Another message, less welcome, arrived from his brother Roland. The video opened with a shot of Roland seated importantly in a hooded armchair upholstered in some kind of scaly leather that might have been Naxid skin. He had the Martinez looks, the big jaw, broad shoulders, big hands, and olive skin. He was also wearing the dark red tunic of the lords convocate.

“I have good news,” Roland began.

It seemed to Martinez that Roland was trying too hard not to be smug.

“Whatever vices Lord Oda might have enjoyed in the past,” Roland continued, “they seem not to have affected his fertility. Vipsania’s pregnant.”

Martinez’s mental wheels spun a bit before they found traction, and it finally dawned that Roland’s good news-thefirst bit of good news, presumably-concerned their sister, who had been married to the heir of the high-caste Yoshitoshi clan. There had been a cordial sort of blackmail involved, Martinez recalled, Roland having bought the debts that Lord Oda hoped to conceal from his family.

Not unlike the arm-twisting that had gone into his own marriage. Roland’s social wrestling had paid off twice now, with Martinez babies placed, like cuckoos, in the cradles of two of the High City’s most prominent clans.

And as the clan heirs, no less.

“I don’t know whether you’ve heard,” Roland said, “but it seems that PJ Ngeni died heroically in the battle for Zanshaa High City. Walpurga is now an eligible widow, and after a decent interval will find a more suitable spouse. Let me know if you encounter any candidates, will you?”