Walter Williams - Conventions of War

He was also impressed that the down-at-heels Exploration Service had actually gotten a brand-new frigate out of the emergency. It was the first actual warship in the service for many centuries, though it would serve under Fleet command for the rest of the war.

Martinez also received greetings from Warrant Officer Amanda Taen, who arrived in command of a boat bringing supplies to the warships. She was a stunningly beautiful young woman who had shared a pleasantly carnal relationship with him before his marriage, and viewing her message sent a nostalgic charge through his groin.

Her arrival made him wonder just how many of his former lovers were serving with the Orthodox Fleet. He counted four women he had known intimately now circling Shaamah without him, and he felt depressed for the rest of the day.

Terza and Young Gareth joined Lord Chen at whatever secret location was playing host to the Fleet Control Board, driving home the fact that the location was secret to Martinez, but not to his wife. The stream of letters and videos from Terza arrived regularly. Martinez tried to find enough subjects for reply, but new topics of interest were rare on the ship. He began to send Terza word-portraits of his fellow crew, starting with Kazakov and working his way down the list in order of seniority. He wondered what she made of these descriptions of people she’d never met, but reckoned she had to at least give him credit for trying. When he ran out of people he wanted to describe, he began a description of Fletcher’s paintings, beginning withThe Holy Family with a Cat. He had a feeling that his description didn’t do the work justice. He considered sending a picture instead.

Martinez saw Sula twice more, as officers visited back and forth. They kept their distance and did not speak.

Roland arrived on Zanshaa and sent him occasional messages. He was with a committee of other convocates, though what they were actually doing in the capital was obscure. Martinez was content that it remain that way.

The Orthodox Fleet grew. Seventy ships. Eight-one. Ninety-five. The last known number of enemy ships had been forty-seven. Martinez began to wonder if Tork would ever engage.

It was when the Orthodox Fleet reached the prime number of 109 that orders began raining down from Tork’s staff. Censorship was tightened. Enlisted crew could send no personal messages home, but only choose from a list of messages provided by the Fleet. All of them were variations on the theme, “I am well, and send you greetings. Long live the Praxis!”

The twenty-two Lai-own ships were placed under Senior Squadron Commander Do-faq and detached to guard Zanshaa against a surprise Naxid attack. The fragile bones of their avian crew would not impede the acceleration of the Orthodox Fleet in pursuit of any enemy.

The rest of the Fleet, on its last swing around the system, participated in several final exercises to accustom them to maneuvering in their new order-of-battle, and then burned one last time around Vandrith for Zanshaa Wormhole 3, where the enemy had fled four months before.

Martinez sent one last message to Terza. If he skated the limits of the censorship, it was because he knew that Michi would be the officer censoring his mail, and that Terza would know more about Fleet activities from her father than she could ever learn from her husband.

Don’t worry about me,he wrote.We’ve beaten them before, and we’ll do it again.

I hope to see you and Gareth within a few months. You have no idea how much I regret this time we have spent apart.

When he signed the wordLove, it was with perfect sincerity.

When Fleet Commander Jarlath advanced toward Magaria at the beginning of the rebellion, he had come in fast, racing like an arrow aimed at the heart of the enemy.

When Tork moved, he came in slowly, like the tide, and with the same inexorable force.

Magaria had a well-equipped ring and seven wormhole gates to other systems. From Magaria the enemy could threaten a third of the systems in the empire. The Naxids had to defend it or risk losing everything.

There were four wormhole jumps and three systems between Zanshaa and Magaria. The loyalist forces had managed to seize the wormhole station on the far side of Zanshaa Wormhole 3, but not the others-Tork had sent another wave of special forces, but the Naxids again wiped them out with missiles fired from another system. The loyalist forces could see into the first of those three systems but no farther.

Though the Naxid fleet was almost certainly based at Magaria, Martinez knew it was possible they wouldn’t choose to fight there, but to defend their base by fighting forward of it. The Orthodox Fleet had to make every wormhole transit after the first with the assumption that they might at any point encounter the Naxids. In response, Tork repeated the tactics he had used at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet was screened by hundreds of decoys. Relativistic missiles were fired into each system ahead of time, radars and ranging lasers hammering out, all timed so that when the Orthodox Fleet arrived, their sensors would be able to pick up a fairly complete picture of the system. Between wormhole jumps, the Fleet and its decoy screen performed random changes of course to baffle any relativistic missiles fired at them.

The wormholes were unusually close together, and the entire journey to Magaria took only sixteen days. The first eight were spent accelerating, and then the blazing antimatter torches were turned toward the enemy and a deceleration began. Jarlath had gone in fast with the Home Fleet and lost almost everything; Tork would go in more slowly, grapple the enemy with slow deliberation, and crush him with superior weight.

Martinez spent most of his transit time in Command gazing fretfully at the tactical display. He took his meals there and often slept on his acceleration couch. He had been caught away from Command during one attack and nearly broke his neck: he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

He stared at the display and watched the slow advance of the little symbols that represented the Orthodox Fleet as they crawled across the display’s vast emptiness. Decoys were shown in pink, real ships in red. At the head of the long column of red was the little clump that was Squadron 17. Martinez wondered what Sula was doing as she sat at the point of Tork’s spear; if she sat in Command, as he did, and watched her ship creeping toward its destiny.

The long hours of waiting in Command produced a restlessness in Martinez that worked itself out in motion. When he wasn’t watching the tactical display, he walked the corridors ofIllustrious, wandering from one department to the next, watching his crew as they too waited for the Naxids. He knew the value of his own ship and crew by now and wasn’t interested in detailed inspections; and when the crew braced to attention, he was quick to set them back to their work. He chatted informally with the department heads and sometimes with the ordinary recruits; he tried to project an air of quiet conviction in victory, the assured confidence of the veteran commander leading his crew to yet another inevitable conquest.

To his surprise, he found that the crew didn’t seem to need his confidence-they had plenty of their own. They possessed a moral certainty of victory that Martinez began to find inspiring. He had hoped to cheer his crew, and instead they cheered him. It would have seemed churlish not to live up to their trust in him.

The Orthodox Fleet plunged on through the three systems that neither side could truly claim as their own. Along the way, Tork issued demands for obedience and surrender. This was fairly pointless in the case of the first two systems, which were largely barren of life save for a few mining colonies. These, having surrendered to the Naxid fleet when the enemy were heading for Zanshaa, now surrendered with equal alacrity to the loyalists heading the other way.