Walter Williams: The Sundering

Lord Chen struggled to master his thoughts. “Your brother…does he give reasons for his opinion?”

“No. Though perhaps he considers the defeat at Magaria a self-evident enough reason.”

So Gareth Martinez wasn’t handing out military secrets to his family, a breach of discretion that would have set Lord Chen to worrying about how confidential his connection to the Martinez clan was likely to remain.

“I would say,” he said with care, “that there is reason for concern, but there is no need to evacuate at present.”

Lord Roland nodded gravely. “Thank you, Lord Chen.”

“Not at all.”

He reached forward and touched Lord Chen lightly on the hand. Lord Chen looked in surprise at the touch.

“I know that you have no fear for yourself,” Lord Roland said, “but a prudent man should take no chances with his family. I want you to have the comfort of knowing that should you ever decide that Lady Chen and Terza should leave Zanshaa, they are welcome at my father’s estate on Laredo—and in fact they are welcome to travel with my sisters, in our family cruiser.”

Let’s hope it won’t ever come to that, Lord Chen thought, appalled. But instead he smiled again and said, “That’s a kind thought, and I thank you. But I’ve already arranged for a ship to be standing by.”

“The fault of the Home Fleet at Magaria,” Captain Kamarullah said, “is that they failed to maintain a close enough formation. They needed to mass their defensive firepower to blast their way through the oncoming missiles.”

Martinez watched the other captains absorb this statement. The virtual universe in his head consisted of four rows of four heads each, and smelled of suit seals and stale flesh. Martinez couldn’t read Do-faq’s face very well, or those of his eight Lai-own captains, and the two Daimong captains had expressionless faces to begin with, but the four humans, at least, seemed to be taking Kamarullah’s argument seriously. “How close should we get?” one of them even said.

Martinez looked at the sixteen virtual heads that floated in his mind, took a deep breath, and ventured his own opinion. “With all respect, my lord, my conclusions differ. My belief is that the squadrons didn’t separate early enough.”

Most turned curious eyes to him, but it was Kamarullah who spoke.

“You call for a premature starburst? That’s a complete loss of command and control!”

“My lord,” Martinez said, “that’s hardly worse than the loss of command and control that results when an entire squadron is wiped out. Now, if your lordships will bear with me, I’ve prepared a brief presentation…”

The others watched while he beamed them selected bits of the Magaria battle, along with estimates of the numbers of incoming missiles, missiles destroyed by other missiles, by point-defense lasers and antiproton beams.

“A defensive formation works well only up to a point,” Martinez said, “and then the system breaks down catastrophically. I can’t prove anything yet, but I suspect that antimatter missile explosions, with their bursts of heavy radiation and their expanding plasma shells, eventually create so much interference and confusion on the ships’ sensors that it becomes nearly impossible to coordinate an effective defense.

“You’ll observe,” running the records again, “that the losses during the first part of the battle were equal, very sudden, and catastrophic for both sides. It was only when both sides had lost twenty ships or so that the enemy advantage in numbers became decisive, and then the attrition of our ships was steady right to the end. Lady Sula’s destruction of five enemy cruisers was the only successful attack made by the Home Fleet without equivalent or greater loss.

“My conclusion,” looking again at the sixteen heads in their four rows, “is that our standard fleet tactics will produce a rough equivalence in losses, but the unfortunate fact is that the enemy have more ships, and I fear we can’t sustain a war of attrition.”

There was a long moment of silence, broken by the chiming voice of one of Martinez’s Daimong captains. “Do you have any suggestion for tactics that can take advantage of this analysis?”

“I’m afraid not, my lord. Other than ordering a starburst much earlier in the battle, of course.”

Kamarullah gave a contemptuous huff into his microphone that sounded like a gunshot in Martinez’s earphones. “A lot of goodthat’ll do,” he said. “With our ships scattered all over space, the enemy could stay in formation and pick us off one by one.”

Frustration crawled with jointed fingers up Martinez’s spine. That wasnot what he meant to imply, and he couldn’t help but feel that if he could only speak to the captains in person, he could bring his points across.

“I don’t mean that our ships should wander at random about the galaxy, lord captain,” he said.

“And ifboth sides use these tactics, what then?” Kamarullah continued. “Without any formation the battle will just turn into a melee, ships fighting each other singly or in ones and twos, and that’sprecisely the sort of situation where the enemy superiority in numbers will be decisive. The enemy shouldbeg us to starburst early.” A sly expression crossed his face. “Of course,” he said, “if we aren’t expected to keep formation or maneuver simultaneously, it will certainly be easier on the ships that are having trouble doing exactly these things.”

You’ll pay for that,Martinez glowered, and he saw his thought mirrored on the faces of two other underperforming captains. He could feel his hands, in a world he couldn’t at present see, clenching in his gloves.

“Our ancestors understood these things better than we,” one of the Daimong said. “We should strive to perfect the tactics they’ve passed on to us. With these tactics our ancestors built an empire.”

During which time they fought only one real war, Martinez thought.

Squadron Commander Do-faq fixed Martinez with his golden eyes. “Do you have a remedy for this problem, lord elcap?”

Martinez chose his words carefully. “I think that we need to expand the concept offormation. Ideally we would need ships traveling in a much looser arrangement, far enough apart that a single volley of missiles wouldn’t destroy all of them, but still able to coordinate their actions against the enemy.”

Kamarullah breathed another gunshot-huff into his microphone, and Do-faq gave an annoyed start and a flare of his crest hairs. Do-faq’s flag captain, Cho-hal, then asked, “But how do you solve the problem of communication?”

Ships normally communicated via laser, which had the punch to get a message through a ship’s raging plasma tail, and which also had the advantage of privacy—no enemy could listen in on a directed beam. The alternative was to use a radio signal, which might not get through the radio interference of a ship’s exhaust, and which in any case could be overheard by the enemy. In a civil war, where both sides had started with the same codes as well as the same coding and decoding computers, that was a serious hazard.

“I have some ideas, lord captain,” Martinez said. “But they’re rather…unformed. We can use secure-coded radio transmissions; or perhaps an arrangement whereby, even after starburst, each ship takes a preassigned path so that orders can reach it by laser…”

He saw his defeat in the faces of the others, even the aliens whose expressions were difficult to decipher. His idea managed to be both horribly unformed and far too complex—in itself quite an accomplishment, he supposed.

“Lord squadcom,” he said to Do-faq, “I beg permission to send you a more thorough analysis when my ideas have had time to…to cohere.” The disdainful twist on Kamarullah’s mouth turned into a smirk at the sound of this.