The Zen Gun

4

Ten-Fleet was in Escoria, had announced its arrival by showering hydrogen-lithium grenades at random over an inhabited (though not densely so) planet. The rebel fleet had responded as anticipated to the outrage, by springing out of concealment to give challenge.

Now the two hurtled towards one another, and Admiral Archier decided on a pre-battle inspection tour of some of the larger of the one hundred and forty ships under his command. He and his entourage stepped from the intermat kiosk aboard the front-line-o’-war class vessel ICS Lilac Willow. Among the captain and officers who greeted them there sidled a small man of erect bearing whose hair hung in a neat fringe over his forehead. His loose toga-like garment, whose cut suggested he did not hail from Diadem, was daubed with what looked like bright paints of various colours.

Boldly the man approached Archier: In polite tones he asked if he might accompany the party into “the working areas of the ship.” “Particularly the engines and gunnery,” he added. “Your animals have kept me out of these places up to now.”

“This man is an item of tax,” Arctus trumpeted softly to Archier while the rest of the entourage stared. “A native of Alaxis, to judge by his apparel. That was the planet we levied before we visited Rostia.”

“The ships of the Imperial fleets are reputed to be technically more advanced than those of the subject worlds,” the importuner continued blandly. “Hence my interest. And after all, I shall be formally registered as a first-class citizen once in Diadem. I am one already, of course…”

“Oh, are you an engineer, then?” Archier asked.

The Alaxian smiled. “No, I am a writer of space dramas. Interstellar battles are my stock-in-trade, you might say, and now I have a chance to gain first-hand experience—as well as some background information which could be invaluable.”

Archier, too, smiled. “Perhaps you will compose a suitably embellished account of the action. It should make you famous in Diadem. But actually, you should have asked Captain Prenceuse’s permission, not mine.”

The captain of Lilac Willow shrugged. They moved on, the Alaxian attaching himself to the rear of the group without a further word. As they entered a traverse-elevator and were conveyed through the innards of the great ship, however, he sidled close to Archier.

“Pardon my forwardness, Admiral, but may I introduce myself person to person? I am Volsted Magroom… it is unlikely you have heard of me, but my works are well known on my own world of Alaxis… hence my present situation, of course—though let me say at once,” he added hastily, “how pleased and honoured I am to be deemed worth transporting to Diadem. Flight to Eternity is perhaps my best known composition. It deals with a journey into the Simplex.”

Archier, who had never found time for imaginative literature, looked at the Alaxian with new interest. The theme was intriguing, if hardly original. “The old dream of travel to the Simplex,” he murmured. “How do you manage to convey what it’s like there?”

“The visual effects did cause problems,” Magroom admitted, “but I didn’t have to worry about that too much. I only wrote the script.”

“Your stories mainly take place in the future, I take it? I hope you show the Empire as flourishing and stronger than ever.”

Magroom was apologetic. “I have portrayed a number of alternative futures. They are not meant to be predictive and I have no political views of my own. In some, the Empire has vanished or has been conquered by an alien race to whom our worlds are desirable.”

“That should go down well in Diadem.” If Magroom was thinking of continuing his career there, Archier thought, he could well encounter a more sophisticated audience than he was used to.

Artists imported into Diadem had an uncertain fate; some met with great success because of the novelty of their vision. Others found themselves outmoded.

“Do you think man ever will reach the Simplex, and perhaps other facets?” he asked.

“I have been asked that countless times,” Magroom replied. “Yes, I firmly believe we will, one day. The idea is too fantastic for many, of course—but then the idea of interstellar feetol flight might have seemed fantastic once.”

“Might it?” Archier gave a puzzled frown. “Well, to stone age people, I suppose.”

Animals, men and women saluted with raised forelimbs as Archier and his party emerged from the travelator into a barrel-shaped hall occupied by a line of similarly barrel-shaped feetol transformers. The casings took up nearly the whole of the hall; it was no more than an outer integument with just enough room for ancillary machinery and staff.

“Is all in order?” Archier asked the engine room manager, a loping mandrill. The ape nodded, briefly showing fangs.

“Tuned to perfection!” he said gruffly. “We worked all the way through our sleep period! Even the robots worked!” He indicated three constructs who cowered in intimidated fashion in one of the hall’s shallow bays.

“My engine manager is a rough and ready fellow and gets things done by direct means,” the captain muttered to Archier with a knowing smile.

“I hope they are not about to complain to their union,” Archier said doubtfully, with a glance at the robots, at which the mandrill uttered a chugging laugh.

“Don’t worry on their account, Admiral. They prefer to stay in one piece!”

Volsted Magroom, meanwhile, was staring up at the dully sheened casings in fascination. The hum that came from them was barely audible; and even this close, their effect on the surrounding spacetime field was not perceptible to the senses.

“Well here they are,” Archier said quietly, stepping close to the fiction writer. “These are what drive the Lilac Willow along. They are not really so very different from commercial engines, just bigger.

“I presume you are familiar with the principle of feetol flight. As is well known, nature generally stipulates that no moving material object may exceed—or even attain—the velocity of light in relation to any other object. This, however, is a consequence of the structure of space. Put technically, it is a feature derived from the recession lines which make up spacetime. A feetol generator alters the characteristics of spacetime in its vicinity by attenuating the recession lines. This causes the velocity of light itself to be raised within the feetol bubble. The ship carrying the generator may then accelerate itself up to the new limit, whatever that may be.

“Popular writers sometimes describe the feetol drive as ‘breaking the laws of physics’; of course, this is not so. It remains impossible to travel faster than light in the spacetime vicinity one occupies. The limiting velocity, formerly a constant is turned into a variable, that is all.

“Many commercial ships carry a double drive: a feetol generator to attenuate local space and a separate drive unit to propel the ship through it. Larger generators, such as those you see before you, allow a further refinement and can serve both functions, both space modifier and propulsion unit. They do this by ‘seizing hold,’ so to speak, of the recession lines they attenuate. The ship is then able to move in reaction against the general electromagnetic field of the galaxy—a piece of ingenuity which considerably reduces the working machinery that is needed.

“Under its own generators alone the Lilac Willow can move at some hundreds of times the normal velocity of light. The fleet as a whole, however, is actually able to shift considerably faster than that, travelling in formation. Feetol bubbles can merge, and the larger the bubble the more attenuated the spacetime within it becomes. Only the fleets of Star Force are permitted this facility; it is why they are able to move around the Empire so fast.”

“So that’s why the interstellar service lines are practically forbidden to own more than one or two ships?”

Archier nodded. “We don’t want private operators to gain experience in meshing feetol drives.”

He felt pride as he stood by the Alaxian, drinking in the sight of the big armature-like casings. Delivering his exposition to the writer made him feel as though he were back at training academy; in fact he had largely been quoting from one of the preliminary lectures he had heard there.

“The other facility that comes from the composite bubble method is something few who have never travelled in a Star Force fleet are even aware of,” he continued. “That is the intermat system. You have probably seen it in action by now. It becomes possible when space is attenuated to a certain degree.”

“There are always rumours the Empire has developed the instantaneous transmission of matter,” Magroom said. “Frankly I hadn’t believed it until now.”

“It is limited in scope,” Archier explained. “It works only within the group bubble developed by a fairly large fleet, that is to say, from ship to ship while we are formating in feetol flight. Also, the transposition is not permanent. The intermat user must eventually return to his departure point.”

He paused, then decided to add something. “There’s a historical detail that will interest you. Intermatting was discovered only a few decades ago, by accident. At first it was thought to operate directly though the Simplex. You can appreciate what excitement that caused.”

“Don’t I!” The Alaxian sounded stunned. “Instantaneous access to the whole of our physical universe, at the very least! To say nothing of communication with other facets! That’s what my novel was about. But I hadn’t thought science was even close to it yet.”

“It isn’t,” Archier said, thinking to himself that the writer’s concepts of what contact with the Simplex would bring were a trifle fanciful. It would open up the possibility of what he mentioned, true… but the realization of..those capabilities would probably still be a long way off. “It soon became clear that the Simplex isn’t involved in intermatting in any way. Present intermat theory makes use of Kantorian transformations, if that means anything to you. Put briefly, you know that prior to the discovery of recession lines spacetime seemed to have contradictory qualities: to be both continuous or infinitely divisible, and yet to allow discrete quantum effects which are discontinuous. We know now that this is because the recession lines of which space is composed are continuous along their direction of recession, but discrete in cross-section. Continuity of recession means that relative distances can be handled as Kantorian transfinite sets; the lateral measurement, on the other hand, is finite and irreducible, and provides space with ‘grain’. If the lines are sufficiently stretched or attenuated by artificial means, the two factors together make it possible to bring about sudden changes in relative location. Once you see the maths, it isn’t so very remarkable.”

“You’re going way over my head, I’m afraid,” Magroom said ruefully. “Are you sure it isn’t all done with mirrors?”

“That’s not a bad way of putting it, actually,” Archier responded with a smile. “Do you know anything about accountancy? The intermat works very much like double-entry bookkeeping.”

“I’ll try to find out something about it in Diadem.”

“The technical details are restricted. But as a creative artist, I’m sure you’ll be able to persuade the public data files to give you privileged access.”

Archier nodded to Lilac Willow’s captain. “Very good. Now let’s take a look at the gun turrets!”

The passages of the gun system were narrower than was usual for the more continuously inhabited parts of the vessel. The main travelators did not reach there. Only Archier, Arctus, Lilac Willow’s captain and (at his urgent pleading) Volsted Magroom squeezed into a small cage which shot straight towards the skin of the warship.

The cage smelled of oil and electricity. They debouched into a dimly lit tunnel which echoed constantly to faint sounds of metal singing on metal. After the luxury and frivolity he had grown used to aboard Lilac Willow, Magroom felt chilled by the bleak air of seriousness he sensed about the place.

He followed the Admiral along the tunnel. Archier paused at a place where a gap occurred in the right-hand wall. Separated from the passageway by a curvilinear grid was a second, parallel tunnel slightly smaller in diameter. Along it there swept at intervals gleaming, round-nosed, gold-plated cylinders. Each lay on its side, and even then stood nearly as tall as a man.

“You see the feeder system that serves each gun,” Archier told Magroom. “Those are the shells, which are being brought up from the magazine in preparation for the engagement. They are held in a secondary magazine below the turret and are fed into the breech automatically.”

Magroom stared at the deadly missiles in fascination. “What are they—fusion?”

“A standard shell carries a fusion charge, sufficient to destroy a ship on direct impact. But shells come in several varieties. Some carry a shaped fusion charge to punch a hole in a ship and disable it. Very few shells even reach their targets, of course. Even when aimed accurately enough they have to face short-range anti-shell weapons of various sorts, as well as deflector shields. A high rate of fire is what’s important.”

“Why are they so big? You can carry a fusion charge in the palm of your hand.”

“To give them mass. They’d have no range otherwise.”

Archier proceeded along the tubelike tunnel, which ran straight for the most part but occasionally snaked for no apparent reason. It ended in a short flight of steps. They climbed it and emerged onto the gun platform.

The scene was one of the strangest Magroom had seen, no matter how many times he had described it in his novels. The gun turret was a huge protuberance, one of twenty that studded Lilac Willow and comprised the front-line-o’-war’s main armament, the cause of her existence. The cannon, or gun, was a huge barrel-shaped structure, mounted in a spherical bearing that was a huge recoil absorber. The breech-loading mechanism was below the gun platform and out of sight, as was the main firing mechanism; it was just too big to accommodate comfortably outside the sweep of the hull.

The gun crew was all animal: pigs, baboons and dogs who crouched before their command and data screens. They let out a cheer as their admiral entered the turret.

Magroom knew only a little about the specifications of these weapons. They had three-axis rotation and could aim towards a large portion of the celestial globe. When in use they extended their shell-stabilising barrels to a mile’s length (presumably all Lilac Willow’s gun barrels were now so extended). How far they could fling their shells he did not know, but he had heard a rumoured rate of fire of an incredible one round per second.

Archier was passing a few moments in encouraging banter with the platform crew. He strolled back to Magroom. “They’re keen, dead keen. Do you know the history of the long-range Star Force gun?” he asked amiably.

“Not much.”

“It’s the only answer to how ships may fight one another when moving faster than light. Beam weapons using radiation energy are clearly useless, and the feetol drive is too bulky to be fitted to missiles—if we did that, a ship the size of Lilac Willow could carry no more than a dozen or so. Even then, they would be very much slower than the ships they were launched against! So the breech-firing cannon it is. What makes it possible is that an object expelled from a feetol bubble retains a remnant of that bubble for a while, and so may still move faster than normal light. These shells are fired off at a tremendous velocity, about a million times the normal velocity of light. They go ploughing through normal spacetime, losing speed all the time as their remnant feetol bubbles dissipate. In good conditions they can range about half a light year before dropping below c.

“Do you see the reason why the shells have to be heavy? A travelling feetol bubble encounters the resistance of the normal space through which it moves. The magnitude of this resistance is an inverse function of the mass contained within the bubble. If the shells were too light, they would slow down even before their bubbles had weakened.”

There was a point Magroom had wondered about but had never been able to find out. “They have to be aimed across half a light-year? On a target no larger than a ship?”

Archier smiled. “No, that would be asking too much of our gun comps. The shells have limited self-guidance near the end of their trajectory.”

Staring at the massive gun, Magroom had to remind himself that this was not fantasy. This was real—and in deadly earnest.

It gave him an altogether different perception of things. This, he realised, was what maintained the Empire, which he had thought of as a vague entity up to now. Oh, he had heard of how the Empire would sometimes punish worlds, but it rarely happened and the stories had an almost fictional quality. It came home to him with a vengeance, now, that this warship with its twenty big guns was the reason why it rarely happened. In space, the Empire dominated; it could blast any rival force of ships to kingdom come. As long as it could do that, as long as no nonimperial fleets could defend disobedient worlds, there could be no effective rebellion.

All the effete decadence, the senses-soaked sophistication, he had grown used to since boarding Lilac Willow, faded into the distance. This was the sharp end, and here the Empire meant business.

An old refrain came to his mind: “Rule the Empire, the Empire rule the stars.” “But tell me, Admiral,” he said, “isn’t it true you haven’t got all that many of these ships left now?”

“That’s right,” Archier admitted with a sigh. “Not as many as we could do with, anyway. But that’s only because Diadem’s robot workforce has been on strike for the past hundred years, as part of their campaign to be recognised as sentients. As a result the Star Force yards are idle and no new ships have been laid down in that time. If the strike should end, we can begin replacing the fleets.” He shrugged, gesturing about him. “These guns were designed originally to be operated by fast-reaction robots, but they are so unreliable now. Still, animals serve well enough. Loyalty counts for more than you might think.”

“But this is unbelievable,” Magroom protested. “If it’s doing you as much damage as that, why don’t you just give the robots the sentient status they want?”

Archier stared at him blankly. “The Empire will not be coerced,” he stated simply. “You are suggesting the Imperial Council should give official voice to what is probably an untruth, and we simply do not do things like that. If machine sentience could be established philosophically, then it would be another matter.”

A sense of unreality began once more to engulf Magroom. “Not even if it means the fall of the Empire?” he persisted. “Let me tell you something; for a practical issue as vital as this our politicians on Alaxis—who are all elected representatives of regional populations—would have got machine sentience proved from top to bottom. Truth wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Then that shows why you need the Empire,” Archier told him. “You need the Empire to save you from your own barbarism.”

Archier had managed to make brief visits to about a quarter of the ships under his command when the call to battle rang through Ten-Fleet. For a moment he was taken by surprise; the rebel fleet had advanced more quickly than anticipated.

He had returned to Standard Bearer to refresh himself before continuing the inspection tour. When Arctus came bustling in with the news, he laid down the flask of liquid cannabis concoction he had been sipping, and removed the coronet that had been wafting calming cortical pulses through his brow.

“Is this a verified ranging?” he asked, glancing through the date sheet the elephant gave him.

Arctus waved his trunk uncertainly. “It’s usually reliable at that distance. About ten light-years.”

“Usually. But not always.”

“Nevertheless, Admiral, may I suggest we go to the Command Room without delay…?” Arctus’ trunk curled itself questioningly in the air.

“Yes, we must,” Archier agreed crisply. He hoped the elephant didn’t think he was scared. He was, for a fact, beginning to feel tense despite the cannabis and the coronet. Early indications were that the rebel fleet was sizable; and this was his first proper space battle.

He rose, placed his Admiral’s crested combat casque upon his head, and nodded to Arctus.

They proceeded through a door to his right. The Command Room was not a physical location but a holocast meeting locus present somewhere within the communications nerve-net that covered the entire fleet. As Archier entered, it was into the appearance of a council room whose chairs, couches and cushions were arranged around a circular pool. In this pool, vague images moved.

Gruwert, Archier’s Acting Fire Command Officer, was already sprawled upon a large mattress-like cushion. He was fairly snuffling with excitement. Sitting across the pool from him, frowning with tension, was a young woman with an artificially aged face and brittle blue-grey hair: the Fleet Manoeuvers Officer.

Other officers of command rank popped into existence around the pool, some disappearing a moment as their attention was diverted elsewhere. Archier mounted to the Admiral’s throne.

Arctus settled down beside him. “Pool data, Arctus,” Archier said.

The pool at his feet cleared momentarily and then, indistinctly, a group of blurred dots appeared. These were the contents of the sheets Arctus had shown Archier: the rebel battlefleet. Ranging numbers appeared beside them; then these, too, wavered and altered, as if uncertain of themselves.

Archier sighed. The doubts he had expressed to Arctus had referred to a technical problem the Empire had never resolved satisfactorily: how did one communicate with a feetol ship? Likewise, was there any way of maintaining communication with the far-flung worlds of the Empire except by despatching such ships?

It could be done and it was done, but only within limits. There was in nature a phenomenon that propagated itself with a velocity that was practically instantaneous as compared with the tardy progress of light, but it was, so to speak, only half a phenomenon. The basic force in nature was the linear recession that took place between all particles—though it exhibited itself as an actual motion only between distant objects, such as the farther galaxies. The rate of this recession was what determined c, the velocity of light. But discovery of the recession lines left an old problem in physics only partly resolved: the Newtonian problem of Action at a Distance. There had to be a component of the line, it was surmised, that simultaneously “informed” each of the two particles at its ends of the recession of the other.

Eventually this component had been identified. It was styled “the leader tone.” It responded to spatial attenuation as effected by a feetol generator; and because its reaction time was near-zero throughout the length of the line information could be passed down it from a vibrating feetol field. In the same way, it could be used for light-years-range radar.

Yet the leader tone had no independent existence. It was, almost, nature’s mirror trick, and seemed unable quite to overcome the normal constraints of information theory. Any data imparted down it had to be incomplete. Messages with more than a small information content became garbled or ambiguous. Likewise, the radar was generally unreliable.

It was as if the principle once embedded in physics, that no message could be transmitted faster than light, still fought back. The closer it got, the more certain the ranging figures on the Escorian fleet would become—but then its usefulness would be much reduced.

“Nothing on number, Arctus?” he said querulously.

Arctus was silent for a moment. He was speaking on his in-brain communicator to the radar room. At his request they were sacrificing range-data to try to gain some notion of the size of the fleet. The dots blurred, became a patch, disappeared.

“Could be up to two hundred vessels,” the elephant announced in a mild neutral voice.

“Two hundred?” echoed the captain of a front-line-o’-war incredulously. “How could they assemble such a force without us knowing?”

“All too easily, I’m afraid,” Gruwert grunted fatalistically. “The Empire’s failure is mainly one of supervision. Well, let’s see if we still have what it takes to smash a revolt!”

“Data will be harder in a few minutes, Admiral,” Arctus said. “They are closing fast.”

“Alright. Excuse me, then, while I take a stroll.”

In body Archier did not move. Here in the command room mental access was much enhanced, and he wanted to take a last look around the flagship.

He flitted invisibly from point to contact point, pausing but briefly at most stations. Finally, he toured the gun turrets, of which Standard Bearer carried twenty-eight, more than any other ship of the fleet. The crews were motley: animals, children, one or two human adults. Turret fourteen was manned entirely by children under the age of ten—youngsters of that age volunteered eagerly for gun duty—while the crews of two more consisted of animals officered by a child no older.

Archier felt no misgivings over the performance of these young persons. Their training was excellent, and they knew how to use their comps to maximum effect. What was more, they were full of enthusiasm.

He had nearly finished his cursory tour when a voice in his ear brought him back to the Command Room. “Ranging close, sir,” Arctus murmured, his voice uncharacteristically tense. “Look!”

In the pool Archier saw one of the rebel ships; radar had gained an image of visual quality. From the look of it the ship had once been a passenger liner. It carried more than passengers now. Welded crudely and seemingly haphazardly over its elegant hull, like ugly metal slabs, were casemates roughly similar in shape to the turrets that studded Standard Bearer.

Some of those present drew in their breath in dismay. So the rebels had feetol cannon. That these weapons could have been built outside Diadem—unless, inconceivably, they had somehow been smuggled out of there—came as a shock to Archier. He had assumed the Escorians would endeavour to get in close, so they could fight using short-range weapons.

“Coming within cannon range,” Archier advised.

“Very well,” Archier responded. “Order opening volley as applicable.”

“Volley away!” Gruwert wheezed, almost immediately.

“Combat mode,” said Archier.

With those words the pool, the Command Room itself, vanished, and the battle proper started. Archier and his staff were suddenly in combat space, a seeming void in which they were disembodied entities perceiving the elements of the conflict directly.

There were really two levels to this space. One was merely a three-dimensional spacetime—the arena in which the battle was to take place. The other was an information space. The commanders conducted the engagement by plugging themselves into a data network that shunted to and between them a flow of constantly updated battle reports.

Ordinary, language was too slow to suffice in circumstances like this. Gradually, over a course of minutes, the command staff lapsed into battle language: an abbreviated, syncopated form of speech which relayed information and commands fast enough to take advantage of the speed of machine talk.

The first words Archier heard in this echoing void were those of his pig Fire Command Officer. “Two hits!” Gruwert squealed. “Forward right, Admiral!” Then he added casually: “Enemy guns appear to be taking aim.”

Archier had hoped for better results from his opening volley. He could see the Escorian fleet clearly now. It was fanning out ahead of them. One large and one small vessel had converted into sparkling nebulae: that was how combat-mode display presented a ship disintegrating when hit by a tritium shell.

He rattled out orders. “One—volley-two; two—bowl plan, effect! Three—FCO direct fire.”

He was taking a calculating risk, getting in a following opening volley. A more textbook procedure would have been to disperse the fleet into bowl plan after only one. But while his ships were bunched together in one big feetol bubble their shells could range further; and Archier was counting on still being out of range of the Escorian guns. With luck, they would not have mastered the technique of combining feetol bubbles yet.

He was right, but only just right, given the aggregate speed of approach of the two fleets. He watched a briefly dazzling pinprick display of shells exploding on proximity fuses among the Escorian ships; three more rebels nebulaed. At the same time the Escorians had also opened fire: their shells fell short, falling below c while still one-tenth of a light-year distant.

Meantime the ships of Ten-Fleet were deserting the common feetol bubble, emerging from it like drops of oil until, in moments, it had entirely disappeared. They lost much in speed and manoeuverability; but no admiral could keep his ships so vulnerably close together during battle. They were adopting bowl plan—spreading out in a huge concave formation with the enemy as close as possible to its focus. The fleet’s front-line-o’-warships then began using their prodigious rate of fire on selected targets.

With satisfaction Archier observed the havoc they wrought in the brief interval before the Escorian fleet’s rapidly developing dispersion rendered the bowl-and-focus concept redundant. He had been waiting to see what game plan the rebels would adopt; ruefully he recognised that they had opted for what was probably the best plan of all in their case—namely, none.

It made sense. They had none of Diadem’s military experience; no centuries-old archives on tactics and strategy. Rather than try to outfox professionals, they were attempting to pre-empt tactics altogether by means of enforced chaos. Like an explosion the rebel ships leaped for all points in Ten-Fleet’s formation, firing as they went. The bowl deformed and twisted as the two fleets merged and began to slug it out ship by ship.

For the staff of the Command Room, this was the most frustrating type of situation. It particularly irked Archier to find his task as battle director reduced to a primitive level, having to bend his efforts to seeing that rebel groups did not isolate and surround an Imperial ship so as to outgun it. As he dealt with the reports flooding in from the raging firefight, looking in the Command Room’s combat space like a war of fireflies, he quickly realised that the Escorians had created a melee in which their greater numbers could, conceivably, tell against the superior gunnery of Ten-Fleet. Further, they had achieved their objective of coming in at close quarters so as to deploy those weapons not hitherto denied Diadem’s subject worlds—electromagnetic beams whose temperatures were stellar in intensity and whose density was that of steel; quake beams, a variant of feetol technique, that disintegrated solid matter by quantum shaking; and, of course, an endless variety of self-guided missiles, sub-c in velocity but deadly dangerous when combat distances were measured in light minutes.

A cry of alarm came from the Fleet Manoeuvers Officer. “We’re losing control, Admiral! We’re dispersing!”

In the stress of the moment she had forgotten to use combat speech. “Combat region now exceeds gunnery range,” Gruwert squealed in agreement.

Archier had been aware of this danger for some minutes; it offered another advantage to the enemy. He told the FMO to disengage temporarily, to pull out all ships in order to regroup. As long as they could keep to the tactically effective repertoire of formations that had been proven in the past, he believed victory would eventually be theirs.

But evidently someone on the Escorian side had already thought this through. The FMO had no trouble reducing the battle perimeter, but she found it impossible to extricate the fleet from the enemy. Wherever it went, the Escorians followed, able to match speeds as long as Ten-Fleet did not take up galaxy formation and mesh bubbles. The two fleets went hurtling through Escoria, speeding heedlessly past star after star and clinging together in a furiously energy-spitting mass.

A blinding flash of coruscating purple light suddenly enveloped the Command Room’s combat space. When it had gone, so had the combat space. Normal lighting had returned. Archier was sitting on the throne, blinking, only his flagship staff before him.

Even the pool was dead.

After a moment the Damage Assessment Officer spoke up. “We have sustained a near miss. The hull’s combat mode receptors have been burned off.”

“What about the rest of it?”

The officer paused. “Other communications continue to function.”

“Weaponry too,” Gruwert announced. “It was some Simplex-damned converted gas carrier got in a shot at us. Have range; training all guns…” He tailed off, his small eyes glazed in concentration.

“Any chance of regaining contact?” Archier asked his DAO. The officer shook his head.

The Command Room was now useless, unable to receive the fleet’s sensory webwork that had made combat space possible. “Then we shall have to open the old bridge,” Archier decided. “Let’s get up there quick.”

“It might be a bit of a job getting through,” Arctus remarked. “There’s a big party going on on decks thirty to thirty-five.”

“Well, have the bridge opened ready for our arrival.”

“Excellent work, Turret Fourteen!” Gruwert exploded suddenly. “They got him!”

“Congratulations,” Archier said absently. He stepped down from the throne and led his half dozen officers out of the Command Room and to the nearby travelator. Once inside the capacious compartment they soared up to deck twenty-nine, the site of Standard Bearer’s old-style bridge, without difficulty—Archier had been afraid someone would have tampered with the switches, depositing any unwary transship traveller in the midst of the celebrations; it was a common trick. On debouching from the travelator, however, it became evident the party had strayed outside its stated bounds. On a deck of coloured glass, old-young women danced with extravagantly costumed young men, forming a vivid, swirling crowd. Strictly speaking their presence was out of order, this was a working area of the ship, though disused. Varihued smokes drifted through the air, making Archier feel intoxicated. Someone had mixed a powerful combination of incenses.

“Make way, make way!” Gruwert shouted angrily. “you are obstructing Imperial security!”

He charged into the dancing throng with head bent, coarsely butting people aside. The others followed through the path he cleared. Archier recalled being invited to the party himself—as Admiral, he was formally invited to all the more organised occasions on the flagship—and realised it had been arranged before the fact of a coming battle became known. Not that it would have made much difference. A fair proportion of the flagship’s population was scarcely aware of the Fleet’s official business. Many might not even have heard yet that there was a major space battle in progress.

The harried, desperate-looking face of a capuchin monkey greeted them at the door to the bridge. Archier felt momentary pity, knowing how much some of the more sensitive animals suffered emotionally at times of stress. The capuchin pressed a key to the plate of the door, which slid aside. They hurried in through an opening wide enough to take them all together.

The monkey scurried after Archier. “Is the battle lost then, sir?” it whispered.

“No, of course not,” Archier soothed. “I’m sure we are winning, though not as quickly as I would like.”

The bridge had an old-fashioned appearance, its working area horseshoe-shaped and lined with waist-high instrument and display boards. Above these were large, curved vid-windows that served the same purpose, though in a less sophisticated way, as the pool and the combat space of the Command Room. Archier lost no time in unlocking the boards. He knew it would take a few minutes to set up a network parallel to the one he had just lost, by calling up the redundant communicators. Meantime, the fleet was fighting without overall command.

The monkey had forgotten to lock the door behind him. People were coming in, high on incense. A withered-cheeked girl in a shimmering spectrum dress that converted infrared to visible tones flung herself on Archier as he stood at his board clamping her chin on his shoulder and draping an arm about him. Her intense perfume engulfed him.

“Oh, Admiral, is it true we’re having a space battle? That’s terrific, isn’t it? Let’s see the action, Admiral!”

As if he had instantly obeyed her request, the expanse of vid-window over the board came to life. Outlined large against blackness was the long form of a ship in glittering silver and gold, not by its natural colour but as a result of the colour coding system used to assist human vision. The vessel was a passenger liner, its outer surface spoiled by crudely emplaced weapons. Because the vid screen gave the impression of being a direct window onto space, the enemy ship seemed no more than yards away.

“Who’s paging this image?” he barked at his FMO, unable, for the moment, to make sense of the information glyphs on his board.

“It’s ours,” she screeched at him. “Distance, ten light-minutes!”

With a start he realised the rebel had crept up on them while he had been making the transfer from the Command Room. But at that moment the Escorian exploded, throwing out gouts and sprays in dazzling—and harmonious—colours. The girl clinging to him oohed and aahed in his ear, her appreciation echoed in wows and oohs by her friends who had also gathered to watch. Archier had to admit the show was pretty.

“Well done Turrets Eight, Fourteen and Twenty-Three,” Gruwert grunted. “They picked him up and fired at will,” he explained to Archier.

“That’s the stuff to give ’em!” the party girl shouted. She giggled, stroking Archier’s neck.

“Let’s have some more of it!” yelled a swaying young man behind her. “Come’n see, everybody!”

Then, with shocking unexpectedness, a dull, prolonged roar sounded through the bridge. It seemed to come from somewhere aft. It was followed by a jarring, undulatory vibration that made the floor of the bridge oscillate up and down.

The Damage Assessment Officer called out from her board. “Looks like they had time to get off a missile!”

“Get a report.”

It couldn’t be a direct hit or they wouldn’t still be here, Archier thought. Probably the ship’s defences had taken out the missile just before it struck, but had been unable to prevent the warhead from detonating. It must have been close: blast effects even of a fusion explosion did not travel far in space, and the force shields would have warded off most of the radiant energy.

Anxiously the DAO worked her board. Confirmation of Archier’s thoughts appeared quickly on the vid window above it. Scanning a section of Standard Bearer’s external hull, it found a gaping ragged hole through which a tangle of wreckage could be seen. Three decks seemed to have been affected, seen blurrily through the emergency gel that was preventing the escape of air.

“What’s the status of repair work?” Archier asked.

“At the start of the current shift, the robot repair teams still hadn’t given an assurance of cooperation, sir,” Arctus reminded him quietly. Archier watched while the window switched to an internal location. They saw an incredible scene: a gang of repair robots being driven along a broad corridor by enraged pigs and dogs. The animals had guns strapped to the tops of their heads: one robot, pausing to turn and protect, fell as a pink-glowing beam struck him square in the thorax.

A general-purpose corridor wagon, overladen with tools, bounced along behind the yelping, squealing beasts. The DAO cut the scene, glancing to Archier.

“I think we can take it repairs are proceeding, Admiral.”

“Now that’s the stuff to give them,” Gruwert pronounced. His little eyes swivelled to those who had invaded the bridge. “Get those layabout out of here!” he snorted loudly. “Go on, get out!”

The partygoers shuffled uncertainly, the girl stepping back from Archier. They seemed amazed by the behaviour of the animals on the vid-window, Likewise they were not accustomed to having a second-class citizen address them so.

Archier turned to face them. “Perhaps you had better leave,” he suggested politely. “We have our hands rather full at the moment.”

“Yes, of course, Admiral,” said a man, somewhat older than the others, after a pause. “Sorry if we’ve got in the way.”

He ushered the others out with placatory motions. At the door he suddenly turned round with a smile.

“Good luck with the battle!” he said brightly.

The capuchin monkey closed the door after him. By now the bridge had obtained contact with the rest of the fleet. On the vid-windows, the current assessment began to take shape.

The combat region had again expanded during the interim when the flagship had been unable to exercise control. Archier gave the order to contract the perimeter once more, to give Ten-Fleet the advantage of its gun range. At the same time he put a stop to the useless headlong flight.

But as the reports came in it became clear that the Escorians were already beaten; had, in fact, been doomed from the start to be beaten. Even with the partial success of their game plan—which had simply been to prevent Ten-Fleet from employing any fanciful tactics—even when fighting ship on ship or in small groups, even in the most favourable circumstances they could find, the terrible Imperial guns, the sheer size and power of the front-line-o’-warships that had emerged long ago out of Diadem, had taken their toll on them. They had been wiped out by the score. And now, as Ten-Fleet began yet again to gather itself together and take up one of the many geometrical dispositions outlined in the manuals, the opposition’s will to continue the conflict broke. It must have become clear to the Escorian commanders that they faced annihilation: those ships remaining—less than a third of the original force, many of them battered or even crippled—received the order to flee. They began to edge away from the area; then, like an exploding starburst, sped in all directions.

Archier put out a call; pursue. All surviving rebels were to be hunted down and destroyed, unless they managed to surrender first. In any case, it would now be necessary to distribute his ships all over Escoria. There was the final stage of putting down rebellion to be dealt with.

Besides which, he had an unfulfilled instruction: to find out about the weapon prophesied by Oracle. Possibly the rebels’ unexpected possession of feetol cannon was what Oracle referred to… but his duty remained to investigate the matter exhaustively.

He sighed. There was much work ahead. And while Gruwert snuffled and squealed in exultation, the humans of the command staff were subdued, as were the captains of other units that were appearing briefly on the new network.

For his Damage Assessment Officer was now collating the losses Ten-Fleet had suffered. And they were heavy. Over a quarter of Archier’s ships were gone, and thirty more reported damage varying from superficial to serious.

The Empire would not long sustain losses like these, he realised. Dolefully he listened to the list of names the officer read out to him. Each of them was like hearing the death of a friend; but one gave him particular pause.

“What was that again?” he queried.

“Lilac Willow, sir, She took a direct hit in the seventh minute. The rebel responsible was subsequently destroyed.”

Archier pursed his lips. He was remembering Volsted Magroom. The little fellow had been appealing, in a way. Archier had liked him.

Well, he would know all about space battles now.

Once more Archier sighed. He wondered if the party would still be in progress when he had finished here. He could certainly use some relaxation.