“...the frigate obviously had its fiveskip shut down,” shouted Krajno. “You said yourself that’s the only way they could have managed to show up back at Treymontaigne just seventeen minutes after a ruptor attack! They were ready for it! They were bait!”
“Enough!” Ng snapped.
The single word cut through the angry voices in the plot room. Even the orderly paused in the act of pouring coffee as Commanders Krajno and Totokili sat back, radiating tension.
Middle-aged, grandmotherly Lieutenant Commander Navaz, the armorer of the Grozniy, exchanged a pained glance with Nilotis.
Rifters with FTL communications? Nilotis felt a headache building: he’d gone through the anomalous actions in the tac-holo in the center of the plot room repeatedly while the XO and the Head of Energetics quarreled. It was the only explanation, and it made the Tenno impossible to use. Worse yet were the strategic implications. With FTL comms, Rifter reinforcements might even now be on the way to Treymontaigne. If so, they had only four days to act before the first such might arrive.
Ng released the invisible hold by making an apologetic gesture at the orderly that didn’t hide how exasperated she had to be feeling. Nilotis was certainly feeling that, and half a dozen other emotions. The orderly finally reached him, but even the smell of real coffee—ground while the senior officers were still staring at that impossible holo—did not provide its customary comfort.
“Commander Totokili, your objections are noted,” Ng said, her tone conveying the calm of habitual self-discipline. Nilotis was willing to wager that not one of the five thousand aboard was calm right now. “Unless you can explain the action we witnessed without reference to superluminal communication, that is the assumption we will be working on.”
Commander Krajno nodded in agreement. Now Nilotis was certain that Ng had let the argument go on as long as she had in part just to give Krajno an outlet for his emotions. There would be no time for authentic grief over the death of his spouse, no time for the grief all of them felt at the loss of the Prabhu Shiva, until the killers had been dealt with.
“AyKay, Captain.” Totokili stared at the tac-holo with a sour look, ignoring the viewscreens on the walls that were displaying various excerpts from the action. His jaw worked as if he were chewing on something unpalatable, making the stiff brush of hair above each ear ripple like caterpillars.
Accepting that their Rifter foe was armed with some unprecedented ability to communicate faster than light without a fiveskip—some sort of superluminal EM analog—was difficult for all of them, but especially for one whose entire education and experience was grounded in the science of Energetics.
The glances that semaphored around the room had altered: everyone was waiting for the tactical digest that Ng had ordered. Usually Rom-Sanchez was first on the mark, if not before, eager to anticipate the next order. Where was he? He had to know that being late was not going to please anyone.
Once again, apparently, the captain’s thoughts paralleled his, as Ng addressed Nilotis. “It may be that Tactical is trying for more detail than we need to get started. Have him send what he’s put together so far.”
She shifted her attention to the other three officers, giving Nilotis tacit permission to boz Rom-Sanchez.
(Rom-Sanchez, Tactical.)
Nilotis relayed the Captain’s request...
... and listened in disbelief to the Lieutenant’s reply.
o0o
From the periphery of her vision, Margot Ng observed the stiffening of her chief tactical officer; already a very tall man, he seemed to grow several centimeters. She couldn’t see his face, since he’d politely turned away for the boswell communication with his subordinate. When Nilotis turned back, his high brow was wrinkled with concern.
“Captain, the Officer of the Deck has given the Tactical Officer permission to report in person, accompanied by Ensign Warrigal. ETA ten minutes.” Nilotis gave them a painful smile. “Lieutenant Rom-Sanchez also requests the presence of Commander Hurli for the briefing.”
Ng watched understanding widen Krajno’s and Navaz’s eyes, but Totokili glanced around, clearly puzzled and irritated. So far as she knew, no one in the Energetics Department played L-5, which was what this had to be about.
The situation was spinning away into surrealism. As if to torment her, the single-shot destruction of Prabhu Shiva replayed itself in memory.
She blinked away the image. “See to it, please,” she replied to Nilotis.
“Warrigal?” Totokili repeated, glancing from one to another. “The ensign from Narbon?”
“Bright ensign,” said Krajno. “Difficult to read, doesn’t have much facility at small talk.” He smiled. “Bit of an enthusiast for Tactical Semiotics.”
Once again memory obtruded—easier than trying to grasp the inconceivable now. Never had she seen Krajno’s essential gentleness more clearly displayed than during Nefalani Warrigal’s earnest, and largely incomprehensible, explication of her graduate thesis, during a Captain’s Dinner early in the tour. That dinner could have been one of those painful occasions, but Krajno had found a way to open the talk from the thesis to everyone’s background in games.
Not all seniors were so understanding. That same thesis, Ng knew, that had been the final straw for Jeph Koestler, the Commodore at Narbon. She’d never gotten around to reading it herself, especially since Warrigal’s L-5 game apparently had no negative impact on the fitreps of the participants, least of all Rom-Sanchez’s.
At the very least, this was one more sign of the lieutenant’s willingness to take risks in the performance of his duty. But is this another Smyrna, or has he bought his last can of silver polish? And why had he asked that the head of Infonetics be present?
“Our most junior lieutenant seems a bit froward,” growled Totokili.
“I’ve not found him so,” said Krajno. “Less afraid of new ideas than some, perhaps.”
Ng watched the subtle way Nilotis set down his coffee cup in the exact center of the porcelain saucer, as if the weight of the universe rested on his precision. Thus he avoided any overt reaction to the suspicious glower Totokili turned on the XO.
It was time to intervene. “Commander Totokili, while the tactical digest is on the way, I’d like your opinion of how we can deal with the other problem: a third-tranche Alpha capable of blowing the stern off a battlecruiser with one shot, and apparently capable of bringing down a planetary Shield in less than a day.”
The Energetics Officer visibly shifted mental axes as he gazed at the tac-holo that they all had memorized by now. Then he glanced down at his compad. “I’ll want a closer look at the tacponder and VSA data, but no matter what else we figure out, we’ll have to rebalance the ship’s power distribution to give the shields all they will take. That will also enable us to make them more reactive, although against that power level I don’t know how much good it will do.”
“So what should we sacrifice? Maneuverability or weapons?” asked Ng, as the orderly turned to her for signs.
She noted that only Nilotis was drinking. They were full of adrenaline enough. She nodded, and the orderly withdrew behind the silver coffee service, which Ng usually only had brought out for formal dinners. Instinct had prompted her to have it out now. But its rich gleam, the old Archaeo-Moderne lines, did not even boost her own mood. She suspected the others could have been offered Shiidra sock cheese, and they wouldn’t have noticed.
“Weapons,” Navaz said, her voice emphatic. Although it was beginning to look like the world they thought they knew had been blasted along with the Prabhu Shiva, this was one area Navaz was sure of. “The conformation of a destroyer makes it unlikely that they’ve been able to strengthen their shields much and I’d almost guarantee that the only offensive improvement they’ve got is the skipmissile. It looks like they’ve found a way to drop the skip frequency by at least an order of magnitude, which puts the terminal plasma velocity in fourspace much further up the asymptote.”
“I agree.” Totokili nodded, if possible even more emphatic than Navaz.
He’s falling back on things he’s sure of. Can he move forward the way we need?
The hatch opened, and Commander Hurli glided in, her uniform not just crisp and spotless, but fitted like an outer skin. Ng gestured for her to take her place, and the orderly stepped forward to offer her coffee, which she took with trained grace, and set down to ignore.
Ng suppressed the urge to summarize, and left that to Krajno. Best to keep him busy and feeling useful until the inevitable grip of grief. Ng forced herself to acknowledge that inward gulp of worry, of bracing for the worst, that never failed whenever something happened to a colleague. She observed Krajno’s steady hands, his concentration as he spoke. Hurli revealed absolutely nothing as she listened and watched the holo; Totokili’s scowl deepened as if the summary was somehow a personal affront.
Then a silence fell, the abstract silence of minds racing around and around the spin-axis without any landing. Ng was about to ask Hurli what she thought, just to get them focused on the same thing, when the hatch opened again and Rom-Sanchez nearly fell through in his haste.
He was followed by Ensign Warrigal. Both carried compads. They fetched up stiffly as the lieutenant formally reported and then began to stammer his way through an explanation of their presence here. She could tell by his phrasing and not-so-surreptitious gestures that he was trying to encourage Warrigal to speak as well, but the ensign merely stiffened to an even more impossible degree.
Ng hid the brief spurt of amusement, unexpected and welcome, even if it did not release her tension. She could have told Rom-Sanchez that Nefalani Warrigal was not going to say anything until the words were pulled out of her.
She knew that Warrigal had either removed herself or been removed from the line of succession in her ancient family. Her type of mind would never be successful in the political arena of the High Douloi, but in the navy, the clear chain of command, the comfort of rules and regs might be a framework for excellence, as it had for the Armorer.
Ng took over to make things easier for both junior officers. “Lieutenant, we’ve gotten as far as accepting, as a working hypothesis, that the Rifters have, in addition to skipmissiles of unprecedented power, superluminal communications, which they used to ambush Prabhu Shiva based on standard battlecruiser counter-frigate doctrine. Can you add anything to this?”
“Yes, sir.” Rom-Sanchez could not hide his strain. Next to him, Warrigal’s gaze darted from person to person—not nervously, but as if the other officers were part of a tactical display. “We call it ‘hyperwave.’”
Totokili snorted and Rom-Sanchez colored.
“No need to coin a term when the serial chips did it centuries ago,” said Krajno gruffly, reminding Ng that his mate Tiburon had been a devotee of star-fantasy, the more lurid the better.
“I’m sure you have more than just a name for it,” said Ng.
“Yes, sir,” Rom-Sanchez continued. “We have Tenno modules for it.”
A pulse of startlement ran through face and posture of the other officers, which Ng herself shared despite what she’d guessed. Rom-Sanchez hurried on. “With your permission, sir, I’ll play a god’s-eye digest with the standard Tenno, and then Ensign Warrigal will play it with a Tenno version based on her extended semiotics. The latter is very rough, and some of it won’t make sense, so I respectfully request you all watch it all the way through before asking any questions.”
“Permission granted,” said Ng, and squashed the impulse to glance Totokili’s way as she said, “We’ll hold our questions.”
Rom-Sanchez tapped his compad and they watched once again the events leading up to the destruction of Prabhu Shiva and the death of everyone on board. Again the Tenno flickered in futile patterns and eroded into simplicity, unable to make tactical sense of the actions of the two Rifter ships.
Ng’s head panged. How could she, how could they, fight the ship without the Tenno Major to abstract tactical knowledge from the flood of data that comprised ship-to-ship actions? She remembered how helpless she’d felt, her first time in a Naval simulator, before she’d learned the Tenno ideographic system: that gut-wrenching sense of being bombarded by so much information that she’d been functionally blind.
Now it was happening again. And it was real.
The recording ended. As Warrigal worked her compad, the tac-holo mist-swirled to a new configuration: the same god’s eye view, but overlaid with bizarre Tenno glyphs that Ng could only partially read. Most of the conceptual modules were similar, but combined in ways that wrenched at her understanding, demanding an almost nauseating shift of perspective that she couldn’t fully accomplish before she ran up against new modules that she didn’t understand.
But this time, as the action proceeded, the Tenno evolved smoothly, and Ng realized with a shock that they were screaming Danger! from the moment Prabhu Shiva made its appearance. These Tenno—despite her gaps in understanding—made it obvious that standard doctrine couldn’t stand against superluminal communications; that Harimoto had been betrayed by ignorance into a series of disastrous choices that had doomed his ship.
In the tac-holo Prabhu Shiva once more seized the frigate in an unshakable grip, and the Tenno smoothly signaled potential communication—that much Ng could figure out from the new ideographs—from the frigate to another ship. Once more the destroyer emerged with its skipmissile tube already oriented on Prabhu Shiva, an impossible two-skip maneuver outside the light cone of the battlecruiser or frigate, with nary a hiccup from the Tenno. The new semiotics had even predicted that the Rifters would shut down the fiveskip of the frigate so that it would not be damaged by the ruptor-strike-to-tractor modulation called for against a vessel that mounted no weapon capable of damaging a battlecruiser.
The tac-holo froze as it reached the end of the digest, leaving total silence in the plot room.
Nilotis looked stunned, Hurli suspicious, Krajno thoughtful, Totokili outraged, and Navaz was ignoring the tac-holo and studying Warrigal, her lips parted. The ensign stood at parade rest, her wrists moving slightly, her gaze restlessly assessing everyone in the room. Rom-Sanchez was fractionally less tense as he tried to watch Warrigal, the officers, and Ng, without being obvious about it.
“Ensign Warrigal,” said Ng. “It’s my understanding that you got your doctorate with a rather unconventional thesis, which you appear to have applied here. Perhaps you will explain what we just saw? Lieutenant, feel free to amplify her remarks as you see fit.”
o0o
Ng-double-stroke-upper-quadrant-receding-deceleration-withdrawal-opening.
Nefalani Warrigal turned her class ring around and back on its finger one last time. During their tactical work-up on the bridge, and on the way here, Rom-Sanchez had tried to coach her on the likely reactions of the senior officers, but like virtually everyone else she knew, he spoke about emotions and human reactions in terms that really didn’t make sense to her.
So she’d let the words wash over her, and while the seniors were watching the two digests, she’d watched them, carefully touching up the emotional version of the Tenno she privately called L-6, in which bodily motions and speech became input for the tactics of conversation.
Warrigal had used L-6 more her first month on Grozniy than during her entire year at Narbon. At first she’d longed for the rigid structure of the Narbon Omega Fleet, despite the memory of the Commodore’s scorn in her exit interview. Finally, building on the general modules for facial expressions, posture, and the like, she had laboriously constructed specialized modules for each of the officers now present—and many others, although Totokili was still difficult to read since she rarely encountered him.
She took a deep breath. Ng’s L-6 had indicated permission to explain a technical matter.
“Yes, sir. I was investigating the assumptions behind the Tenno programming. As I suspected, since they are a semiotic computational system based on the ideographic languages of Lost Earth and human neurophenomenology, their fundamental structure is Newtonian, and the relativistic linkages in the Tenno are for the most part first-order only.”
The captain’s compad beeped and she held up one hand.
Stop talking. That signal Warrigal didn’t need L-6 for.
“Ensign Ammant, Communications, Captain.”
L-6 didn’t work without sight of the speaker’s face, even for someone Warrigal knew, and Ammant’s crisp bridge cadence didn’t help.
“A crypto neuraimai working on the incoming cutter reports popped up a com fragment that I think you need to hear. It’s apparently a leak from the destroyer in high orbit, of a communication relayed through the frigate.”
“Put it on.”
The compartment comm crackled to life. “I don’t care what you think. If you break position I’ll hunt you down and pull your guts out through your nose—or better yet, send you to the Avatar. You won’t like how he treats the chatzers who run out on his orders, and there’s no place anymore to run, anyway.”
Warrigal couldn’t track the sudden eruption of words from the other officers, couldn’t read the sudden pulse that ran through the room, her eidetic imagery of the L-6 glyphs overturned by her own strong emotion.
The Avatar. There’s only one authority who uses that title: the Dol’jharian murderer. It really happened, then, just as the Aerenarch expected. Warrigal breathed deeply, counting heartbeats to quell the sense of unreality that threatened to turn into giddiness. She discovered her fingers moving toward her class ring, and she forced her hands to her sides as she assimilated the new facts. She’d been just a child during the Dol’jharian War, the title “Avatar” merely something from the history vids until her year at Narbon, where everyone had been absorbed in the Aerenarch’s determination to be ready for the next Dol’jharian attack.
And now, it seemed, he’d been right. A light day and a half away burned the proof in a funeral pyre of five thousand victims. Wait. Wait. Wait, Warrigal thought, holding herself ready, though the words felt piled up behind her lips.
“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” Navaz whispered over and over.
Totokilli glared, his teeth showing, a vein pulsing in his neck.
The captain had stilled, though the signs of anger were there in her lips, the tension of her hands.
“... of a Shiidran brood-fouler.” Krajno’s curses died to a mutter.
“Thank you, Communications.” Ng tabbed off the comm and looked at each of the officers around the table. “This time we’ll finish it. Continue, if you please, Ensign.”
Warrigal had readied her words. “As part of my proof I constructed a physics-neutral semantics for the Tenno, and then generalized it using a Kovloskian game-theoretic structure based on L-4 Phalanx to enable further investigation.”
Totokili-single-stroke-upper-quadrant-approaching-acceleration-required. The impatience module triggered and she spoke faster.
“This enabled me to set a wide range of initial conditions and then play out tactical scenarios to determine how the Tenno must be modified to enable the construction and evolution of coherent tactical propositions, statements, and resolutions under those conditions. In order to—“
“Ensign,” Rom-Sanchez interrupted. “Why don’t you bring up that extract from the L-5 game that we discussed—where Ensign Wychyrski pulled off that triple finesse?”
Too late, Warrigal recognized the L-6 signals from the other officers indicating that she’d gone off course, again. The meta-levels of L-6 obviously needed further tuning, although she didn’t know when she’d find time for the eidetic transcription she’d have to make first.
Rom-Sanchez-role-abstraction-station-keeping.
Gratefully, she bent over her compad as Rom-Sanchez began to explain L-5 to the senior officers, and let him set the course.
o0o
Nearing the end of his explanation, Rom-Sanchez cleared his throat as he glanced Warrigal’s way. She was twiddling with her ring again, which had to mean that the officers were intimidating her into confusion, which diffused her focus. So he finished up.
“So you can see how the action in the L-5 game extract we just viewed almost exactly reproduces the salient aspects of the Treymontaigne ambush, based on initial conditions that assumed ship-to-ship hyperwave at the same speed as ship travel.”
“Is that what you think we face here?” asked Lieutenant Commander Nilotis. He was leaning forward, neither his expression or his tone hiding his hope. “Ensign Warrigal, what if the Rifter... hyperwave... is much faster than that?”
Warrigal could deal with that—it was straightforward.
“It doesn’t matter, sir,” she said. “I used the next series of games to establish that the Tenno programming isn’t sensitive to changes in hyperwave speed once it’s faster than a skipmissile.”
“Since then,” Rom-Sanchez added, “we’ve played L-5 assuming instantaneous communications for the sake of simplicity. Our analysis of the ambush at least does not contradict that assumption.”
“And you’ve been playing this game since the beginning of our tour?” asked Captain Ng.
Rom-Sanchez permitted himself to look her way. He hadn’t dared—not with everyone watching. Or glaring, in Totokili’s case. Relief ballooned inside him when he saw the captain’s intent expression, the one she wore when she was mentally in fiveskip.
“Actually only about four months on a regular basis,” Rom-Sanchez said, and then held his breath so he wouldn’t blush.
A corner of Commander Krajno’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, but not quite. For it did not reach the acute misery his gaze could not hide. “Four months longer than anybody else. Sounds like there’s going to be a serious shake-up in billeting. Who all is familiar with L-5?”
Rom-Sanchez was startled by Krajno’s acceptance of L-5’s utility. “Ensign Warrigal, first and foremost, of course,” he replied. “Myself, Ensigns Wychyrski, Ammant, Hjivarno, Sidelmar—I have a list here, with their player rankings.” He tapped his compad and echoed it to a subsidiary viewscreen with open local access. Commander Krajno immediately began tapping at his compad.
“Ensign Warrigal also prepared a lexicon of weapons-related changes to the Tenno semiotics for Lieutenant Commander Navaz to inspect.”
As the Armorer eagerly tapped her compad to access the data, Commander Hurli leaned forward. “Captain,” she said. “Surely you’re not suggesting that we reprogram the Tenno in accordance with this... game?”
“What else can we do? You saw that the standard Tenno are useless in the face of whatever technology the Rifters are using.”
Hurli shook her head. “Limited, sir, but not useless. And once you add the new modules and strip out the relativistic linkages where appropriate, it will take hundreds or thousands of hours to trace all of the changes as they propagate through the Tenno to make sure it’s tactically consistent. Better to go slow here, especially since few if any Rifters use the Tenno Major, anyway.”
“Permission to speak, Captain.” said Warrigal.
“Go ahead.”
“We have played 49.2 hours of L-5 since we standardized on the game assumptions I used in the digest that I showed you, which I have used to seed self-replicating sixth-chthon neuraimai evolutions in my personal dataspace. As of 0800 hours today, that represents 3.46 X 105 hours of evolved semiotic algorithms available for analysis, which I already would have done if my array allotment had been sufficiently large.”
Rom-Sanchez winced at the implied criticism, which he knew Warrigal had not intended, but Hurli just gazed at the ensign, her expression a perfect Douloi mask, then she leaned back in her chair. “Simulations are one thing, battle is another,” Hurli said, the slowness of her words the only hint of her doubt. She turned a hand upward toward the viewscreen showing the death-agony of Prabhu Shiva. “But that puts us a lot closer to what I’d be comfortable with.”
“Good,” said Ng. “We don’t have a lot of time. Please get started on the consistency check with the ensign.”
Rom-Sanchez could not suppress the flush as the Captain focused on him, leaving Hurli to bozlink Warrigal. “Lieutenant, assuming we can reprogram the Tenno, what’s the tactical situation look like?”
Rom-Sanchez straightened his spine. At least he had a definite answer. “The resonance field is down and we have IDs for the first-tranche Alpha and the frigate in Treymontaigne orbit, plus some small stuff. Signals analysis also implies that there are three other Alphas—they’d be third tranche if Eichelly’s bonus chip is right. And two or three more frigates in-system.”
“They’ve probably got a hyperwave-equipped ship watching each of the standard naval emergence points, ten light-minutes normal to Treymontaigne,” said Nilotis.
Another ambush,” Totokilli said. “Not much imagination, there.”
“That’s not surprising,” Navaz put in without raising her head from her compad.
“Rifters.” Commander Krajno snarled the word, his manner forbidding.
“No.” Navaz looked up, her fingers still busy. “What I mean is that they’re not likely to have had FTL communications very long. How long do you suppose the Rift Sodality could keep a secret like that? So they’re not likely yet to fully understand its tactical implications.”
“That’s one of three factors that are in our favor,” said Rom-Sanchez. “Signals analysis leads us to believe than only three destroyers—doubtless the third tranche ones, so not the one in orbit—and the frigate in orbit have the hyperwave. According to our L-5 scenarios, there are tactical soft spots in that combination that the new Tenno will help us exploit. More important is that our L-5 play to date has demonstrated that in most mid-battle scenarios, the advantage conferred by the hyperwave is far less than it is at the beginning or end. This is especially true for close in-system actions, where tacponders can be leveraged most effectively.
“That will make the fourth factor even weightier, then,” Ng commented.
“Fourth factor, sir?”
Ng looked around the room. “There’s got to be more tactical imagination in this plot room than in that whole Rifter squadron.”
She looked across the table at her head tactical officer, her palm up. “Mdeino, what’s your recommendation?”
o0o
Mdeino Nilotis tore his gaze away from the tac-holo, now running a series of evolutions under the control of Hurli and Warrigal. Best to get the worst over with first, he thought.
“Commander Krajno will, of course, have his own billeting suggestions, but I’d recommend you put the Lieutenant in the Tactical pod to help you fight the ship in the coming action,” he began. “He’s got four months on me or any of his seniors with these new Tenno.”
Krajno caught his eye and sketched a salute.
Ng lifted her chin, her approval underscored by her reply. “I’ll frock him LTC,” she said.
Rom-Sanchez reddened to the tips of his ears and sent a revealing glance of gratitude toward Nilotis, his forehead puckered with self-doubt. Nilotis knew that Rom-Sanchez was aware of what it meant for an officer to so advance a junior. Now he’ll be doubly determined to make this work.
“I’ll shadow him, of course, as I assume other seniors will with their juniors experienced with the L-5 Tenno,” Nilotis said. He drew a breath. This next would be perilously close to personal trespass, but this, too, duty commanded: “I also strongly recommend you consider an Augmented sim session for yourself, Captain, to drive the new semiotics as deeply into your mind as possible.”
Ng grimaced, but nodded again. The combination of blood agents, EM fields, and neural alligation were too hard on both mind and body for anything but an emergency—there was a real risk of permanent impairment. Even best case, she would pay for her accelerated learning with a period of mental and physical lethargy that could be ameliorated only for a time with stimulants. Long enough to fight the battle. She could deal with the other side effects that would come later in her recovery.
“As for tactical dispositions, we need to find the other hyperwave-equipped ships, since all their other assets will have to be in EM range of one of them. Assuming they took up position shortly after our first emergence, they’ll have been on station long enough to put them inside the asymmetric detection envelope of Grozniy’s sensor platform, even without a VSA.”
“Better and better,” said Krajno. The battlecruiser could roughly confirm enemy dispositions from farther out than their targets’ sensors could detect emergence.
“ I also agree with the Armorer, and recommend that Grozniy take what looks like a by-the-book approach via one of the emergence points while leveraging our superiority in tactical support materiel to prepare the volume of battle to our advantage. The enemy will undoubtedly choose to fight through cis-lunar space, using the Highdwellings and other installations to impose tactical asymmetry on our engagement. What they probably don’t realize is how much that will mitigate the advantage of their hyperwave.”
Ng nodded again and addressed the armorer. “Lieutenant Commander Navaz. That means in addition to tacponders we’ll need a large quantity of antiship weapons for dispersal by the corvettes and even cutters, as well as heavier devices that Grozniy will discharge. Do you concur?”
“Yes, sir.” Navaz’ voice was soft, almost hesitant.
Nilotis hadn’t spoken to Navaz much, but sensed she was less comfortable with people than with her cims, the machines that created expendable weapons as needed, making a battlecruiser largely independent of its base. “We’d be best tooling up a large number of gee-mines and leeches, I think,” said the armorer.
Ng smiled agreement. “I agree. How long?”
“That’s all standard ordnance: we have a large inventory already. The cims won’t require more than about a day for any reasonable number more.”
“Good. It will take us longer than that to prepare in any case.”
The memory of the Archon’s screams wrenched Nilotis; he could not prevent a twitch as he tried to banish them. Embarrassed, he looked up, to discover similar reactions in the others. Everyone wanted action. But they owed the people of Treymontaigne their best effort; haste would not help.
Here’s how we’ll begin,” said Ng after the briefest of pauses. Swiftly she outlined the tasks she expected of her officers.
Nilotis half-listened to the orders—which he could check later—and concentrated on the subtle signs of purpose: stiffening a shoulder here, lifting a chin there. From confusion and bewilderment, they had moved toward purpose.
Nilotis rose and walked over to where Rom-Sanchez was bent over his compad, working earnestly. The lieutenant looked up and flushed again.
“Thank you, sir.”
Nilotis gestured in the mode of necessity. “Know that I’m on your radiants, and intend to take that pod back if I can.” He smiled. “We’re all Loonies now, and you and I have a lot of L-5 games ahead.”