Walter Williams: The Sundering

If they were lucky enough to come together once more, she wasn’t going to let them blow apart ever again.

“I said byzero-one-seven!” Martinez said. “What’s thematter, there?”

“Sorry, my lord!” Fingers punching the display. “That’s zero-one-seven, my lord.”

“Pilot, rotate ship.”Corona was already a little late.

“Ship rotated, my lord. New heading two-two-seven by zero-one-seven.”

“Engines, prepare to fire engines.”

“Missile flares!” called the two sensor operators in unison. “Enemy missiles fired!”

“Power up point-defense lasers.”

“Point-defense lasers powering, lord elcap.”

Martinez realized he’d been sufficiently distracted by the announcement of the enemy missiles that’s he’d forgotten to order the engines to fire. He leaned forward in his couch to give emphasis to the order, and his command cage creaked as it swung on its gimbals.

“Engines,” he said. “Fire engines.”

And then he remembered he’d forgotten something else.

“Weapons,” he added, “this is a drill.”

After the drill was over, after the virtual displays faded from Martinez’s mind and the leaden sense of failure rose yet again in his thoughts, he looked out over Command and saw the crew as silent and miserable as he was.

Too many of them were new. Two-thirds ofCorona ‘s crew had been on board for less than a month, and though they were taking to their new jobs reasonably well, they were far from proficient. Sometimes he wished he’d had only his old crew—the skeleton crew with which he’d savedCorona from capture during the first hours of the Naxid revolt. When he now looked back on that escape—the tension, the uncertainty, the hard accelerations, the terror induced by pursuing enemy missiles—all that now seemed painted in the warm, familiar tones of nostalgia. In the emergency he and the crew had reacted with a brilliance, a certainty that neither he nor they had matched since.

The old crew were still here, among all the newcomers, but Martinez couldn’t rely on them alone. The new people all had to be trained, had to fit into their roles and perform as proficiently as if they’d been in their places for years.

There was a whirring in his vac suit as the cooling units cut in, flooding the suit with chilled air and the faintest whiff of lubricant.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll have another drill after supper, at 26:01.”

Despite the fact that the crew were in their white-and-viridian vac suits, he could detect in the angle of their heads and shoulders a slumping attitude of defeat.

In a manual written for officers that he’d found on the frigate’s computers, he’d read of the old formula: praise-correct-praise. First, the manual recommended, you praised them for what they did right, then you corrected what they did wrong, then praised them for their improvement. In his mind he rehearsed the formula as it related to the current situation.

1. You didn’t screw up as badly as last time.

2. You still screwed up.

3. Try not to screw up any more.

The only problem was that his crew had a perfect right to answer,You first, my lord.

Martinez, too, was learning on the job, and had discovered that his performance was erratic. Nothing in his training had ever suggested that war was a business filled with such desperate improvisation.

The voice of his junior lieutenant, Vonderheydte, came over his headphones.

“Captain Kamarullah, my lord, on intership net. I believe it’s the beginning of the debriefing.”

This was all Martinez needed. Kamarullah was the senior captain in Light Squadron 14 and would normally have been in command, all save for the fact that he’d once been blamed for a botched maneuver—and blamed by Junior Squadron Commander Do-faq, who was now in overall command of both the light and heavy squadrons, Faqforce, now heading for Hone-bar. In an act of pure autocratic malevolence, Do-faq had removed Kamarullah from command of the light squadron and replaced him with the most junior captain present.

Martinez.

Granted that Martinez had accepted the appointment with alacrity. Granted as well that there was some modest justification for this act of despotism: Martinez was the only one of the captains present with actual combat experience. But that experience consisted of stealingCorona and fleeing at top speed from the overwhelming enemy force at Magaria; it hadn’t consisted of commanding and maneuvering a squadron, the skill sets that Martinez needed at present, and which he was desperately trying to acquire.

It was fortunate that the chance of encountering enemies on this mission was small. Faqforce had been ordered from Zanshaa to Hone-bar before the disaster at Magaria, and when word of the defeat came they had gone too far to turn around. When Martinez’s squadron reached its destination, it would swing around Hone-bar’s sun and head straight back to the capital to aid in its defense.

It wasthen, most likely, thatCorona would need its combat skills.

None of which altered the sad fact that Kamarullah was now on the comm, wanting to exult over his own ship’s flawless performance in the drill.

“Tell him to stand by,” Martinez said. Instead of speaking to Kamarulla he paged his senior lieutenant, Dalkeith, who had spent the maneuver in Auxiliary Command. While he and his crew in Command had been maneuvering a virtual squadron through an exercise, Dalkeith had commanded the actual frigateCorona, keeping it on its steady 2.3 gravity acceleration for the wormhole that led to Hone-bar.

The second-in-command’s voice lisped in Martinez’s ear. “This is Dalkeith.” He had been startled on first acquaintance with his premiere to discover that she possessed a child’s high-pitched voice in the body of a middle-aged, gray-haired woman. Lady Elissa Dalkeith was one of the officers who had joinedCorona a little over a month ago on Zanshaa, and was considered old to have gone so long in the Fleet without promotion, a fact that argued either incompetence or a lack of patronage among her superiors. Martinez hadn’t found her incompetent, but uninspired: she performed every task well enough, but without any particular enthusiasm, and without volunteering anything new, efficient, or interesting. He had hoped to have someone younger and more energetic, someone who would relieve Martinez of some of his work, but youth and energy both had been beaten out of Dalkeith over the years of neglect by the Fleet, and Martinez’s workload remained daunting.

“The maneuver’s over, my lady,” Martinez told her. “We will resume command of the ship.”

“Very well, lord elcap. We are prepared to relinquish command.”

“Stand by.” Martinez shifted his channel to broadcast to the crew in Command. “We are taking control of the ship…now.” His gloved hands tapped his display, and the screens on every board in Command shifted to showCorona ‘s true situation.

“You may stand down,” Martinez told Dalkeith.

The crew in Command all reportedCorona ‘s situation as it was reflected on their displays, and then Martinez heaved a sigh against the gravities that weighed him down. There was no alternative to Kamarullah and the debriefing.

He told Vonderheydte to patch him into the intership channel and set his display to virtual. The square command room, with its suited figures hanging in their accelerations cages, vanished from his sight, to be replaced at once by Kamarullah’s square, graying head. Fortunately Kamarullah was not alone—most of the other captains had joined the link in the meantime, as well as Lord Squadron Commander Do-faq, who commanded the two squadrons that made up Faqforce. Do-faq was a member of the Lai-own species, flightless birds taller than a human. Their hollow bones couldn’t stand the heavy accelerations that were possible for humans; but because their ancestors had flown through the sky, their brains were supposed to be better configured for three-dimensional maneuvers, and they were considered a race of master tacticians.