Ruler of Naught (18 page)

“I forgot it all as soon as I was out of there,” Yeoh said.
“Unless we begin fighting wars again by throwing rocks at the enemy, I don’t
see how learning about ancient wars serves the least use now.”

“Wooden warships,” said Rom-Sanchez. “Isn’t the Captain’s
patron Sanctus from that era? Orrenblorr, or something like that?” He knew it
was risky to push this conversation, given its direction, but somehow that made
it more exciting. And perhaps he could deflect Yeoh from needling Warrigal.

Then, more daringly, he added. “And her nickname, too.”

“Broadside?” said Yeoh. “That’s from ancient history? I
thought it referred to her hips.”

“No.” said Warrigal, as always apparently unaware of being
teased. ”For about four hundred years or so, ending about four hundred years
before the Exile began, naval battles were fought between wind-powered wooden
ships, using gunpowder cannon firing solid shot.”

“That’s a chemical explosive, right?” Yeoh put her chin in
her hands.

Rom-Sanchez grimaced down into his caf. How long was Yeoh
going to keep it up? He knew the answer: until it was no longer entertaining.
She
is really still fourteen in some ways.

“Actually a deflagrant, if you’ll permit a bit of pedantry.
It merely burns extremely fast.” Warrigal laid aside her fork, positioning it
carefully next to her plate, leaving her food to congeal even further. “These
ships were really a lot more like the
Grozniy
than you’d expect. They
were made of a very hard, durable wood, and they didn’t have explosive shells,
so it was almost impossible to sink one of them. You had to kill most of the
crew on board to stop one of those ships from fighting—just like a modern
battlecruiser.”

Yeoh pursed her lips. “You seem to know a lot about them.”

Warrigal nodded. “I find the pre-Exile days fascinating. And
even more so, the parallels to our lives now.”

“Go on,” Yeoh said. “Give me a parallel.” Rom-Sanchez was
relieved at the note of genuine interest. That was why he liked Yeoh. She might
be nosy, and arrogant, and sometimes even irritating, but she also enjoyed
learning, and when she got interested in something, her genuine enthusiasm made
her interesting.

From the faint flush along Warrigal’s heavy cheeks, she had
detected the change in attitude. “The ships would sail up to within thirty
meters or so of each other—the cannon weren’t terribly accurate—and blast away
side by side until one or the other fell away downwind to escape, or
surrendered after taking too much damage, like losing masts and
sails—propulsive power—or having too few crew left to tend the guns.”

“But where does ‘Broadside’ come in?” Yeoh asked.

“It’s one of those Academy things that you never live down.”

Rom-Sanchez and the two ensigns looked up guiltily to
discover their captain standing there. The rest of the wardroom was silent,
everyone at attention.

The three leaped to their feet, Warrigal knocking over her
caf in her haste, and Rom-Sanchez nearly flipping his tray; he surreptitiously
slammed it flat on the table. How had they missed the captain’s entrance?

Ng appeared to notice nothing amiss as she smiled ruefully.
“Someday I’ll tell you all about it.” She said, “As you were.”

As the rest of the off-duty junior officers resumed their
places, some talking self-consciously, the captain nodded at Warrigal, then
turned to Yeoh. “Your description, or at least the few words I overheard— I
trust you will forgive me for intruding on a private conversation—is accurate.”

Rom-Sanchez hastened to add his voice to the protest that
she was welcome to join them.

“The term broadside,” continued Captain Ng, “refers to the
fact that the ship’s guns were usually all fired at once from one side of the
ship. From a capital ship that might deliver from five hundred to a thousand
kilos of iron shot at over three hundred meters per second; most wounds were
inflicted by high-velocity wooden splinters.”

Her voice had taken on some of the dryness of Warrigal’s
description.
She’s chaffing Yeoh
, Rom-Sanchez thought, schooling his
face.

Yeoh shuddered. “Sounds almost as bad as a ruptor.”

Ng nodded. “It’s hard for moderns to understand just how
similar warfare was in that era to what we face today—more so than any era
since. Remember, in those days they didn’t have real-time communications, any
more than we do. Messages could only move as fast as the fastest ship.
Moreover, a frigate—which like our ships of the same name were used mostly for
reconnaissance—had a field of view of only about thirty kilometers, from the
highest mast, on an ocean measured in thousands of kilometers. As a result,
enemy ships or fleets were hard to find, and most naval battles were fought in
sight of land, just as ours are fought within solar systems. It was also
difficult to force someone to fight, since with wind-powered ships, the loser
had only to slip away downwind—just as the fiveskip today makes fleeing a battle
quite simple.”

“That would make the skip-smashing effect of our ruptors
equivalent to knocking down the sails of a wooden ship, wouldn’t it?” Ensign
Warrigal said.

“Exactly! Dismasting, they called it.” The captain
hesitated. She seemed to be studying them. Rom-Sanchez began to suspect that
there was more to this discussion than an oblique correction to Yeoh. “The
words that caught my attention when I arrived were ‘parallel to our lives now.’
I believe you are quite right, Ensign.”

Warrigal’s face darkened in a blush.

The captain continued. “The naval strategy of that period
has a lot of valuable lessons for today. Even the tactics, to some extent. For
instance, gunpowder generates so much smoke that, during a battle, firing the
guns quickly obscured what was going on, just as the debris from a modern
battle can sometimes render most of your sensors useless.”

The comm whistled, interrupting their discourse. “Captain,
we’re one hour from Treymontaigne.”

“AyKay. I’ll be up shortly.” She looked at them for a moment,
then smiled. “We’ll go in Green.”

As the three once again leaped to their feet, she started
toward the hatch. “Meanwhile I’m still on the lookout for a definition of a
port wriggle. I want to win a bet that I made almost twenty-five years ago. And
if you help me win, that nets you a full course dinner, you name the venue.”
She laughed. “I like to win my bets.”

The hatch slid shut behind her.

“Green!” Yeoh said, punching Rom-Sanchez in the chest.
“That’s alpha, not senior!”

At the L-4 table Ammant looked up at them, his face alight.

Rom-Sanchez’s stomach lurched, and he looked down at his
food. He’d been expecting the senior crew to take emergence, as they had at
Schadenheim. And so, from her expression, had Yeoh. Warrigal’s mouth tightened.
Envy? Wistfulness? He wondered if Yeoh had seen it.

No time for that now. He wanted a quick shower and the right
uniform. What he had on was clean enough and reg, but he’d had a new uniform on
for Wolakota, and now he felt a little superstitious about it, although he’d
never admit that to anyone.

The junior officers had just dropped into their pods when Ng
reached the bridge. On the main viewscreen the Tenno pulsed quietly in the
absence of input, vivid against skip-blanked darkness.

Commander Krajno returned command to Ng, who said, “Status?”

“Emergence minus three minutes, sir. Standard approach, as
you ordered.”

That would put them within one light-minute of the
Treymontaigne beacon in the leading trojan of the sunward giant in the system,
just as at Wolakota. Another by-the-book approach.

Krajno turned, one bushy eyebrow raised interrogatively. She
wasn’t sure herself why she hadn’t taken them directly to Treymontaigne orbit,
since Harimoto would have taken care of Eichelly by now. It wasn’t as though a
battlecruiser needed to worry about the fuel and navigational advantages the
skip well of a major trojan attractor offered.

Not even a hunch, really.
She shrugged away the
thought. Krajno certainly wouldn’t question her decision. Especially when doing
so would make him look overeager for his reunion.

Not that she blamed him. They both were aware how Navy
romances were hell on the emotions. Krajno hadn’t seen Tiburon for, what was
it, almost a year now. She smiled to herself. They made quite a couple, Commander
Perthes ban-Krajno, executive officer of the
Grozniy
, and Commander
Tiburon nyr-Ketzaliqhon, chief energeticist of His Majesty’s battlecruiser
Prabhu
Shiva
. Tiburon was tall, slender, the picture of Douloi elegance. More than
one unlucky officer had mistaken the burly, rough-edged Krajno, when the two
men were together in mufti, for the other’s valet or bodyguard. It was a
mistake no one made twice. The funniest part of it was that Krajno was the
intellectual of the two—Tiburon’s world consisted of his engines and Krajno.

She sat back, granting tacit permission to chat as she
assessed the mood of her alpha crew and watched how they handled their consoles.
She still wasn’t sure about young Wychyrski and the absurdly gorgeous Ammant,
although they’d performed well enough at Wolakota.

But Ammant can’t help his face, and as for her age, I was
no older than Wychyrski on
my
first posting, when
Jauntevant
was
jumped by the Shiidra..
.

They were both excellent young officers, who worked doubly
hard to overcome prejudices they couldn’t help, and there was no sense in
second-guessing her own decision to emerge green rather than pulling in the
senior crew.

Rom-Sanchez glanced her way before saying to Wychyrski, “Sixty-two
hours since Wolakota. Maybe thirty-two hours or so since Eichelly skipped in.
By now, his pieces are likely well on their way to joining the Oort Cloud
here.”

Wyrchyrski uttered a sinister chuckle. “I wish he’d picked
Schadenheim.”

The descending tones of emergence put an end to their
conversation; a dizzying sense of deja vu gripped Ng as Wyrchyrski announced,
“No beacon, sir.”

She responded without hesitation. “Tactical skip, now.”

Ng’s mind flickered through scenarios. Harimoto would have
deployed a new beacon immediately after taking care of the Rifters. Had
Prabhu
Shiva
left the system before Eichelly reached it? But assuming Eichelly
destroyed the beacon as soon as he arrived, Treymontaigne should have sent a
ship to investigate in the thirty-odd hours since?

Moments later SigInt reported, “All sensors functional.”
Good.
Ran the check faster this time.
“Ship signatures working, negative.”

“Tactical, take us to threat-level two.”

Rom-Sanchez’s acknowledgement was followed instantly by
other station echoes, led by Fire Control: “All ruptors to standby. Skipmissile
activated, holding at precharge level.”

Up on the main screen, a plot of the Treymontaigne system
based on their assumed position windowed up as Rom-Sanchez anticipated her next
request. The flaring red of maximum probability centered on the nearest k-zone,
twelve light-minutes away.

Ng tabbed her console and started a ten-minute countdown.

As Commander Krajno monitored the multiple reports flooding
the bridge while the ship came up to level two, he muttered, “Harimoto’ll be
furious at missing this chance, even if he did get away from hand-wiping
Treymontaigne.”

Ng’s answer died unspoken when Ensign Wychyrski at SigInt
looked up. “Captain, I’ve got a large object about twelve light-minutes in,
relative velocity about five hundred kays.” She stopped, worked her console for
a moment, then frowned, all her characteristic humor gone. “The readings are
confusing. I’m getting a thermal reading at the million-degree level, and some
gravitational disturbances as well.”

The bridge had gone quiet. That was the unmistakable
signature of a shipwreck, resulting from destabilized spin reactors and drives.

Then they did catch up with Eichelly. But why hasn’t the
beacon... ?
Ng’s thoughts splintered as Wychyrski’s next words destroyed
that hypothesis.

“But I read its mass at about ten-power-twelve tons. There’s
an awful lot of debris—thermal scattering—around it, too.”

Way too big for a destroyer.
Ng looked at Krajno, who
shrugged and shook his head. “No ideas here, Captain.”

And not quite big enough to be a battlecruiser.
A
startling thought. No battlecruiser had ever been lost in action against
Rifters. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that. Perhaps Eichelly had run into an
asteroid while fleeing the
Prabhu Shiva
, as unlikely as that was.

“Give me a visual. Maximum enhancement. Navigation, bring us
about for maximum array effectiveness.”

At this distance, the optical array formed by the sensors on
the
Grozniy
’s hull could resolve details down to less than twenty
meters, as long as the ship was oriented correctly.

The tactical plot dwindled into a corner of the screen as
the starfield began to slew in response to her order. The screen blinked and a
blur of light slid into view, gradually sharpening as the ship’s motion ceased.
Then the enhancers cut in and Ng’s ears rang with shock.

Mercilessly clear, the details hardly concealed by the
limits of resolution, the shattered hulk of a battlecruiser blazed silently.

One third of its length was gone, torn away by some
unimaginable force; in its shattered interior a blue-white glare pulsed,
emitting sheets and sprays of fluorescing gas as the dying engines yielded up
their energies into space. As the hulk rotated, the distance-blurred form of
Shiva Nataraja came slowly into view, his lower body obliterated, his four arms
still upraised in the eternal dance of creation and destruction.

Mzinga’s quiet report felt like a detonation in the silence.
“Position confirmed, sir. Treymontaigne system, absolute bearing 252.6 mark 1.1,
plus 53 light-minutes.” The tactical plot on another screen rippled.