The irony being that the two most efficient ships among the new Laredo cruisers were the two fully or partially crewed by Naxid veterans.

  Sula hadn’t appointed a tactical officer in part because all the officers in the division had more useful employment, and in part because of her considered opinion that she could do the job better than any of them.

  Lepp raised a hand to his glossy waved hair, as if to make certain it was in perfect order. “Still,” he added, “morale is good, and the crew are eager to avenge Squadron Commander Nguyen and the dead of Felarus.”

  “Thank you,” Sula said. “Are there any other comments from the captains of the Light Squadron?”

  The Naxid captain surprised everyone by speaking. “Only this, my lady,” she said. Her black-on-red eyes glittered. “I wish to state that I am grateful to be given this opportunity to demonstrate my loyalty to the empire, and that I and my crew shall give their utmost in defense of the Praxis.”

  “Well spoken, my lady,” said Sula, and then winced as pain lanced her skull. She paused and took a breath, then asked for comments from the captains of the Heavy Division. She could see from their expressions that they wished they’d been the first to make a noble little speech about giving their utmost in defense of the Praxis and were a little sorry that the Naxid had spoken first.

  Last she turned to Dr. Gunaydin, who sat on her left. “A report from the medical department?” she said.

  “Medical supplies are adequate,” Gunaydin said, and touched a finger to a corner of his mustache. “We have qualified pharmacists aboard all ships,” he said. “The pharmacists, and many of the damage control specialists, have taken basic and intermediate first aid courses. They can take care of routine medical emergencies.”

  He frowned.

  “Unfortunately, I remain the only physician in the division, and if there are significant numbers of casualties, it is inevitable that I will be overwhelmed. I hope that in that event, the Combined Fleet will send us doctors to deal with the situation.”

  Gunaydin and Sula both knew that it was far more likely that entire ships’ crews would be incinerated in a single blazing instant. Antimatter warheads didn’t just knock people around like a conventional explosive, it flashed them into subatomic shrapnel.

  Yet there had been cases of ships surviving, not a direct hit, but a hit on a nearby ship or a miss close enough to melt part of the hull. In that case there would be casualties, and a lot of them.

  “The Combined Fleet has an adequate supply of doctors,” she said. “I’ll do my best to make sure they’re available.”

  Gunaydin gave her a grave smile. His shaven head gleamed softly in the indirect light. “I would be grateful, Lady Sula.”

  Sula turned toward her other guests, and again winced as pain exploded in her head.

  “I, ah—” she began, and then gathered her words. “If there are no more comments, then I think we can begin our breakfast.”

  As the servants came in with their plates, Sula looked at the chronometer on the wall.

  In less than four hours, she saw, Division Nine would enter the Toley system, appearing in Do-faq’s flank and rear—presumably, she surmised, to the enemy’s dismay.

  The Fleet Train had supplied the Combined Fleet a perfectly absurd number of missiles, and there was no reason, Martinez thought, not to use them all.

  When Do-faq came through the wormhole into Toley, he would find himself under assault from at least six directions, including from behind the wormhole itself. Since Do-faq was almost certain to order his ships into last-minute maneuvers that would make it difficult to predict the time of his transition into the Toley system, Martinez decided to send the missiles late instead of early—the enemy would have more warning, but they wouldn’t have the chance to destroy missiles that arrived prematurely while they reacquired a target.

  Do-faq’s maneuvers brought him through the wormhole half a minute later than expected, which made Martinez glad he’d held back his attack. From the moment of transition, the enemy was completely lit by the Combined Fleet’s sensors, making them ideal targets. Do-faq’s own radars and laser rangefinders flogged space in search of something to shoot at, and found them in terrifying numbers just as the lead missiles were making final course adjustments prior to their run.

  No sooner had the enemy fleet appeared than it was surrounded by a brilliant sphere of light as countermissiles and point-defense beams detonated incoming missiles. Radio hash formed an impenetrable wall between the combat and the sensors of the Combined Fleet, and so it was impossible to tell how Do-faq’s fleet was faring, but the sheer number of detonations was impressive.

  The fight went on for nearly six minutes as different flights of missiles arrowed in, and then the flashes died away, and after several minutes Do-faq’s fleet appeared out of the expanding overlapping fireballs.

  Martinez had watched the entire combat from his office while sipping a cup of coffee—he was such a distance from the fight, there was no reason to be in the flag officer’s station—and he strained his eyes as he looked at the ships appearing on the displays. Their formations were ragged, and there were holes where ships—or decoys—had once been. At least one ship was tumbling slowly end over end. Do-faq had been hit hard.

  When the analysts aboard Wei Jian’s flagship reached a conclusion, they announced that Do-faq had lost 42 ships, leaving Do-faq with a total of 153, with a couple dozen of the survivors damaged.

  The Restoration now possessed numerical superiority, at least once Sula’s division was added to the Combined Fleet.

  Martinez rubbed his long jaw while satisfaction warmed his bones. He had been invited to dine with the wardroom the next day, and now he and the lieutenants would have a great deal to cheer about.

  “My lady? Lady Sula?”

  Through her vac suit, Sula felt a soft touch on her arm. She opened her eyes and viewed her signals, lieutenant Viswan looking down at her through the faceplate of her helmet.

  “Yes?” Sula said.

  “I thought you should know. We’ve successfully transited to Toley.”

  “Ah. Hah.”

  Apparently she’d fallen asleep while awaiting the transition. Blinking gum from her eyes, Sula shifted her gaze to the displays locked down inside her acceleration cage. Division Nine shone in a corner of one display, the ships still sorting themselves out after the transition. The division now seemed much larger, for each of the warships had fired a pair of decoys just before diving through the wormhole. With luck, the enemy wouldn’t have time to sort ship from decoy before the battle started and would waste missiles on the decoys that would better be aimed directly at Sula’s vitals.

  Across a distance of empty space was Do-faq’s fleet, already arrayed for battle, the ships spiraling in the intricate knots of Ghost Tactics, with the Combined Fleet beyond. Toley was a largely barren system, with many asteroids and rocky planetoids, but no gas giants or places capable of supporting life. It was as empty a battlespace as anyone could desire, and it would be more than a day before the engagement would begin.

  Sula felt weariness dragging at her eyelids. “I’m going back to sleep,” she said. “Let me know if anything happens.”

  “Yes, my lady.” Viswan withdrew as quietly as her boots permitted. Splendid gave a little graceful swoop as it maneuvered to avoid any enemy beam weapons, and to Sula it felt as if the ship were rocking her to sleep.

  Sula supposed that her dropping into slumber during a crucial evolution might be a story that would soon escape the flag officer’s station and become current in the Fleet. Quite a cool head on that Lady Sula, they might say, going after the enemy while taking a nap. Whereas the reality had nothing to do with sangfroid but instead involved her own exhaustion and the fact that she really had nothing important to do, and wouldn’t for hours.

  Sleep cast its net over her and drew her into a darkness untroubled by dreams.

  Chapter 7

  From the displays in the wardroom, Martinez watched the appearance of Sula’s division with more unease than he would have wished. When Sula had been far away, remote in a vast emptiness threaded together by a tenuous trail of wormholes, he had been able to keep his turbulent feelings in some kind of order. Now that her command was within sight, he felt a threat to his precarious emotional balance.

  It would be worse, of course, after battle, when he would be obliged to see Sula socially. Perhaps he could see her in person without imagining a smoking pistol in her hand or without the cold, imperious glimmer in her emerald eyes.

  Or perhaps not.

  The lieutenants who were playing host in the wardroom burst into applause when Sula’s ships shot through the wormhole to arrive on Do-faq’s flank. Earlier in the day they’d seen the enemy fleet torn by antimatter bursts as it entered the system, and—between Do-faq’s battering, Sula’s arrival, abundant food, and even more abundant alcohol—they were inclined to be merry. That within two days they would all be facing death in the battlespace was not something they were inclined to contemplate.

  The premiere lieutenant raised her glass. “To Lady Sula’s timely arrival,” she said.

  Martinez raised his glass to his lips and drank without tasting the wine.

  Sula was in his life again, whether he wanted it or not.

  “Lady Sula,” said Lord Nishkad. His rheumy black-on-red eyes gazed at Sula from one of her displays on her acceleration cage. “I hope this message hasn’t added too much to the burdens of your busy day.” He inhaled deliberately, his lungs fighting against nearly two gravities’ deceleration as Sula’s ships shed momentum so as not to engage prematurely.

  “I wished only to express my confidence in your capabilities,” he said, “and my belief that Division Nine will triumph in the coming battle. Your gifts are of a high order, my lady, and I hardly think the enemy can match you.”

  He raised a black-scaled hand. “Fortune attend you. End message.”

  A rising elation swept through Sula. She had been looking at the eighteen ships that had been sent to bar her path and trying to work out a way to bring her own forces into an engagement on anything like favorable terms. She was slowly coming around to the idea that she shouldn’t engage at all—if she kept threatening the enemy rear without actually getting into a fight, she’d be keeping eighteen enemy ships out of battle, and her fourteen would suffer no losses.

  Lord Nishkad’s message had come at exactly the right moment to buoy her hopes. And he hadn’t added to the burdens of her busy day, because her day was now almost leisurely. Everything and everyone was ready for combat, but the battle hadn’t started. She couldn’t order maneuvers or an exercise within full sight of the enemy, and all she needed to do was to catch up on her sleep, because when the battle started, she would be very busy indeed.

  And for some reason she found it easy to sleep in the flag officer’s station. The featureless gray walls, broken only by consoles and displays, were soothing. Her signals officers spoke only in hushed tones and padded quietly around her acceleration couch when they came and went.

  And, more importantly, nightmares didn’t come when she was drowsing on her acceleration couch. Maybe it was the presence of other people in the room that kept her from diving deep into the ocean of nightmare, or maybe it was the activity on the displays, or the miniwaves that pulsed through the couch that relaxed her taut muscles as well as prevented blood pooling under acceleration. Whatever it was, she was grateful.

  Sula sent Nishkad thanks for his kind message, then closed her eyes and let herself fall into half-sleep, her breath regular, her awareness suppressed . . .

  And then she thought, Oh!, and realized that she might have a way of dealing with those eighteen enemy ships.

  From the point of view of Bombardment of Los Angeles, the Combined Fleet was speeding toward Harzapid, their engines flaring in a continuous deceleration in order to let Do-faq overtake them and bring about a battle. The enemy followed, decelerating themselves, but at a slower rate.

  Remote off the enemy’s flank and rear, Sula’s division sped toward an interception point. She was traveling fast in relation to the two fleets, as Sula needed to cover a greater distance to arrive at a rendezvous, and unless she did a hard, long deceleration burn, she would overrun Do-faq’s fleet.

  The start of any battle would depend heavily on timing. If Sula arrived prematurely, she would find herself facing the entire enemy force on her own, and if she arrived late, she could miss the entire fight. Orders went out from Wei Jian’s flagship carefully regulating everyone’s decelerations.

  In the meantime, the Combined Fleet and Do-faq’s force mirrored each other. Do-faq had duplicated Wei Jian’s battle order of van, main body, rear, and reserves. The enemy’s units had already adopted the shifting, stochastic-seeming dance of the Martinez Method, and Wei Jian had responded by ordering her formations to begin their own maneuvers.

  Martinez thought it was like prizefighters dancing and ducking before closing the range and beginning the bout.

  Except he could already start punching. Martinez launched one attack after another toward the enemy, accelerating missiles from remote corners of the system. None caused any damage, but each presumably sent alarms shrilling through the enemy ships and sometimes resulted in frantic jinking.

  Do-faq made the first alteration in the order of battle, as he detached three squadrons, two from the reserve and one from the main body, and formed them into a wall between Sula and the rest of his fleet. The enemy squadrons were depleted but still amounted to eighteen ships against Sula’s fourteen. The odds were more heavily against Sula than the numbers suggested, since three of Sula’s ships were converted transports, and most of the rest had inexperienced crews. Martinez felt anxiety gnaw at his vitals with little rodent teeth. He had no way to help her.

  The next alteration wasn’t ordered by either commander. Martinez was sleeping when it happened and was awakened by a banging on the door and the voice of Lalita Banerjee telling him to look at the display now. His heart lurched wildly as he lunged from his bed, then shouted at the display to switch on.

  “Banerjee!” he shouted. “Send me the feed!”

  “It’s already on Feed Seven!”

  Martinez ordered Feed Seven onto the display and collapsed back onto his bed, expecting the video to show some catastrophe: missiles arrowing in from some unexpected direction, Rivven and An-dar defecting back to the enemy, Chandra Prasad engaging in ship-to-ship combat with Wei Jian . . .

  What he saw was that one squadron of five ships had detached itself from Do-faq’s main body and begun a high-gee acceleration in a direction orthogonal to the enemy’s course, flying by itself into the emptiness of system north.

  “Do we have any transmissions?” Martinez asked. There was no answer: Banerjee had returned to her place in the flag officer’s station. He shrugged into his uniform tunic, triggered the sleeve display, and told it to contact Banerjee.

  “Do we have transmissions from that enemy squadron?” he asked.

  Banerjee gasped for breath, apparently having just run from Martinez’s door to her station.

  “Nothing yet, my lord,” she wheezed.

  “Are we overhearing anything?”

  “All ciphered, my lord.”

  Martinez padded to his office, where numerous displays waited, and called up several views of the tactical situation.

  Unless the squadron was engaged in some arcane tactical maneuver that Martinez had yet to comprehend, he had to assume that the five ships were in the act of deserting the enemy fleet. He hoped they would manage their escape, but he thought not. The rogue squadron was outnumbered thirty to one.

  His heart sank as he realized that there was nothing he could do to assist. The Combined Fleet was too far away to engage the enemy, and the fleeing ships were entirely on their own.

  For a moment, he thought about sending one of his distant packs of missiles racing for the enemy fleet, and at least distract them from what would soon turn into a very one-sided fight. Yet so far it wasn’t a fight, and he didn’t want to do anything that would send the enemy into a state of combat readiness if by some unlikely chance they hadn’t yet noted the little squadron’s escape.

  Martinez remembered his own dash from the Second Fleet at the start of the Naxid War, in the stolen frigate Corona, and all the frantic methods he’d used for deceiving and delaying the enemy while he burned for the nearest wormhole. He imagined that happening in the fleeing squadron, the squadcom sending out a series of increasingly unconvincing messages explaining why his command was taking this unorthodox action.

  An alert popped onto his screens, and he saw that one of the packs of missiles he had hidden in the system had received a command to burn for the enemy fleet at maximum acceleration. Wei Jian, who shared the codes that were able to activate the missiles, had undoubtedly sent them in the direction of the enemy.

  Well, here we go, Martinez thought.

  In the end the missiles made no difference. Do-faq’s fleet began shooting at the breakaway squadron before Wei Jian’s signal even reached the missiles, and suddenly both sides were launching missiles and countermissiles, and the ships were flinging themselves in all directions to avoid beam weapon attacks. Fireballs bloomed in the darkness between Do-faq’s fleet and the escaping ships.

  Banerjee’s voice interrupted the silent action. “Message in the clear, my lord,” she said, and put it over the video without waiting for Martinez’s order.

  “This is Squadron Commander Draymesh of Light Squadron Twenty-Two.” Martinez could tell from the sonorous tones that Draymesh was a Daimong. “We have left the Unified Fleet in hopes of joining the Restoration, and now we are being fired upon. We request immediate aid from Wei Jian and others in service to the Restoration.”