The Sundering by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

other red wine he’d ever tasted.
    “I’m glad you like it,” he said.
    “So should we starburst earlier?” Kelly asked as she drew her cuffs forward over exposed bony wrists. “Is that what you’re after?”
    “Sort of,” Martinez said, and explained his vague ideas. Kelly listened, her head tilted to one side.
    The lanky, black-eyed pinnace pilot had been weapons officer during Corona ’s escape from the Naxids, a job at which she’d shown unexpected talent. Subsequently, in flight toward desperate pleasure from a host of incoming terrors, she and Martinez had shared a frantic few moments in one of the frigate’s recreation tubes. Those moments had never been repeated—common sense had reasserted itself in time—but they were moments which Martinez, at least, could not bring himself to regret.
    “So not a starburst, exactly,” she clarified, “but a very spread-out formation.”
    “I don’t know,” Martinez confessed. “I know that I don’t want to lose the defensive advantages of a formation, and I don’t want everyone to get so dispersed the battle will turn into a melee.”
    “How do you coordinate movement and formation changes?” Dalkeith wondered. “You’ll only be guessing where your ships will be, so it will be sheer chance if you hit them with a comm laser. And if you broadcast on radio, the enemy will hear it, and their computers have the same software that ours do, and plenty of computing power, so they might be able to decode it.”
    Martinez had been thinking about this since the captains’ conference. Before the war his specialty had included communication, and he thought he’d worked out the solution. “Using radio’s not a problem,” he said. “First, you have each ship repeat the message to all others once it’s received, to make certain that each ship receives its orders. Then you devise a very thorough code describing any maneuvers necessary for the fleet, and your computers cipher the codes using a one-time system. The one-time system means that even if the cipher is broken, it won’t help the enemy read the next message. And even if they can read the cipher, all they get is a code they can’t read without a key.” He shrugged. “You can make it more elaborate than that, but that’s all that’s really necessary.”
    The others considered this while Alikhan appeared and placed upon Captain Tarafah’s mahogany table the first course of his improvised meal, which on inspection proved to be white beans on a bed of greenish-black vegetable matter, with a splash of ketchup for color.
    It could be worse, Martinez thought, and picked up his fork.
    “How far can we spread out the ships?” Vonderheydte wondered aloud. “Our superior officers like to see smart maneuvers, with every ship rotating and changing course at the same moment. Obviously this is going to be a good deal more ragged.”
    Martinez cared less about ragged formations than the fact that this would make the new tactics harder to sell to his superiors. A formation in which all orders were not instantly and smartly executed would not be an attractive picture to the average Senior Fleet Commander.
    “My lord,” murmured Sublieutenant Nikkul Shankaracharya into his wineglass, “there should be a formula, I mean a mathematical set of formulas, that will tell us how far we can safely set our formation.”
    His voice was so low that Martinez could barely make out the words. Shankaracharya was a shy youth with a lieutenancy of less than a year’s seniority, and his posting to Corona was the result of direct intervention by one of the few divinities recognized by the service—in this case a clan patron who served on the Fleet Control Board. That Corona was then handicapped by the presence of two very junior lieutenants with little time to learn their jobs, who were supervised by a lackluster, nearly superannuated senior in Dalkeith, was beneath the notice of the divinity in question.
    A further complication