Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Martinez plotted a missile strike and ordered it launched. The missiles would dodge through a series of plasma bursts to strike the enemy from an unexpected direction. He didn’t want Sula’s squadron to get all the glory.

He looked at the tracks of his missiles looping around the enemy warships to target the converted transports. A colossal number of enemy missiles were coming in the other direction. He clenched his teeth.

Courageceased its acceleration, and Martinez’s ligaments shrieked with relief as he floated in his webbing. His acceleration cage made a shimmering noise as the frigate reoriented, and then the engines flamed on again and he was punched into his couch.

Another of the random-seeming maneuvers dictated by Sula’s chaos mathematics. The constant dodging and shifting probably looked deeply sinister to the Naxids, the application of some principle they hadn’t been able to decipher.

The enemy were dodging as best they could, but without the relentless purposefulness dictated by Sula’s formula. The only Naxids who hadn’t starburst yet were the converted transports, which were still moving forward in their inexorable way.

Martinez began to wonder if theycould dodge. The transports were so huge that they couldn’t dart about like a frigate, they carried far too much inertia.

Which meant-theoretically-the transports were vulnerable to beam weapons.

The most formidable beam weapons in Chenforce were the antiproton cannons in Michi’s heavy squadron. He couldn’t command them, and they were already heavily committed in knocking down enemy missiles.

“Message to Flag,” he told Falana. “Transports are not maneuverable. Suggest hitting them with antiproton weapons. End message.”

The second kill went to Michi’s heavy squadron, an enemy ship erupting in a furious burst of angry antimatter. Martinez clenched his teeth and plotted another complex missile attack.

Parts of his display fuzzed out as the squadron flew through an expanding cloud of cooling plasma. He couldn’t tell where all the enemy missiles were. His heart boomed inside the confined space of his helmet, and his gloved hands dug into the padded armrests of the couch.

He launched his own missiles into the murk. He launched another barrage against the transports. He launched countermissiles against an enemy barrage that he could barely detect in all the fuzz. He launched countermissiles against a barrage he couldn’t see but somehow knew was there.

The enveloping plasma cooled and thinned, and his tactical display glowed with the glorious sight of his own missile striking home.

He watched as three enemy ships were engulfed in silent flame. His heart shrieked with triumphant joy and he raised a clenched fist against the gravities that were pinning him to the couch.

“Three for us!”he shouted.“Three for us!”

Hardly immortal words, but at least they had the virtue of sincerity.

He’d just incinerated a neat thirty percent of the enemy squadron facing him, and that would make killing the rest a lot easier.

And he’d scored higher than Sula and Michi, who had only picked off one apiece.

Martinez plotted another series of strikes and sent them on their way.

Things were improving.

Two.Squadron 17’s missiles had found a second Naxid warship, now a bright, hot expanding sphere of plasma as its supplies of antimatter fuel and munitions went up.

Lovely, Sula thought. Another star.

She sought through the radio murk for another target. Orders flashed to missile batteries. Missiles leapt off the rails.

It wasn’t enough to shoot missiles at an enemy, she thought. You had to shoot at the enemy’s neighbors as well, so missile defenses couldn’t combine to aid your real target. You had to keep every defense laser busy-morethan busy. Overwhelmed.

Her attack raced away.

She was busy trying to coordinate the defenses against another massive strike by the converted transports when an enormous plasma bloom flared on her virtual display.

“What’sthat?” she said aloud, and refocused her attention.

One of the giant transports had just blown up. Massive amounts of antimatter had detonated, and the hot expanding plasma sphere was engulfing other ships.

Sula wondered how it had happened. There was no indication that any loyalist missile had even gotten close.

There were no secondary explosions, so it appeared that none of the other transports were destroyed. But flying through a furious bombardment of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and blazing plasma couldn’t have done the other squadron elements any good.

The huge converted ships stopped firing. They began to lumber through a series of evasive maneuvers.

Something had them frightened. Sula sent a pack of missiles after them to keep up the scare.

More missiles splashed white fire against the night. An enemy warship flared and died, leaving two other ships isolated.

She picked them as her next targets and began to plot her attack.

Michi must have followed his suggestion, Martinez thought. One of her antiproton beams must have destroyed one of the converted transports. None of the missiles had gotten close, but a lucky hit with the antiprotons must have hit an antimatter store.

Or an even luckier shot had hit a missile just as it was being launched, and set it and every other missile off within a fraction of a second.

He fired a salvo of missiles at the big Naxid ships, just to see if he could keep their luck consistent.

He picked one of the enemy warships in the opposing squadron and ordered it to become the center of Squadron 31’s attention. The entire squadron began moving toward the target, firing missiles as it went, and moving within the larger vector to the purposeful bob and weave of the Martinez Method.

Martinez was nudging the enemy. The Naxids had starburst and their response was uncoordinated, and he wanted to drive them farther apart and make them even less coordinated. But he couldn’t simply fly into the middle of the Naxids, because then they could throw missiles at him from all sides. He could put his head only so far into the noose. What he had to do was threaten in one direction and then another, wedge the Naxids apart without committing himself in any one direction.

It was a delicate and subtle task. If only the ammunition supply held out.

He scanned the display. Elsewhere in the battle, the last huge barrage of the converted transports was being dealt with by coordinated antimissile defenses. Michi and her opposite number were involved in a furious duel, and it looked as if Michi was gaining the upper hand.

Sula’s squadron, he saw, was threading its way through plasma bursts, striving always to fly through the oldest, coolest bursts in order to keep from completely blinding itself. Sula was in the process of isolating a pair of enemy ships and destroying them.

He looked at the enemy and saw what was probably an unintended pattern in the squadron that faced Sula. If she moved now, if she movedimmediately with her entire squadron, she could detach a second pair of enemy while still keeping the first pair isolated.

Martinez considered sending Sula a message to that effect. He could imagine her scorning the message on its arrival. He could imagine the contemptuous response that would burn across the intervening space between their ships.

But she had to do itnow. It would make a difference.

He was stumbling through his message, which he planned to illustrate with a frozen three-dimensional image of the battle with some hand-drawn arrows added, when he saw that Sula was beginning the movement on her own. She’d seen the opening.

“Cancel that message, Lieutenant Falana,” Martinez said.

Sula was doing just fine on her own.