The Sundering Read Free

there?”
    “Sorry, my lord!” Fingers punching the display. “That’s zero-one-seven, my lord.”
    “Pilot, rotate ship.” Corona was already a little late.
    “Ship rotated, my lord. New heading two-two-seven by zero-one-seven.”
    “Engines, prepare to fire engines.”
    “Missile flares!” called the two sensor operators in unison. “Enemy missiles fired!”
    “Power up point-defense lasers.”
    “Point-defense lasers powering, lord elcap.”
    Martinez realized he’d been sufficiently distracted by the announcement of the enemy missiles that’s he’d forgotten to order the engines to fire. He leaned forward in his couch to give emphasis to the order, and his command cage creaked as it swung on its gimbals.
    “Engines,” he said. “Fire engines.”
    And then he remembered he’d forgotten something else.
    “Weapons,” he added, “this is a drill.”
    After the drill was over, after the virtual displays faded from Martinez’s mind and the leaden sense of failure rose yet again in his thoughts, he looked out over Command and saw the crew as silent and miserable as he was.
    Too many of them were new. Two-thirds of Corona ’s crew had been on board for less than a month, and though they were taking to their new jobs reasonably well, they were far from proficient. Sometimes he wished he’d had only his old crew—the skeleton crew with which he’d saved Corona from capture during the first hours of the Naxid revolt. When he now looked back on that escape—the tension, the uncertainty, the hard accelerations, the terror induced by pursuing enemy missiles—all that now seemed painted in the warm, familiar tones of nostalgia. In the emergency he and the crew had reacted with a brilliance, a certainty that neither he nor they had matched since.
    The old crew were still here, among all the newcomers, but Martinez couldn’t rely on them alone. The new people all had to be trained, had to fit into their roles and perform as proficiently as if they’d been in their places for years.
    There was a whirring in his vac suit as the cooling units cut in, flooding the suit with chilled air and the faintest whiff of lubricant.
    “Right,” he said. “We’ll have another drill after supper, at 26:01.”
    Despite the fact that the crew were in their white-and-viridian vac suits, he could detect in the angle of their heads and shoulders a slumping attitude of defeat.
    In a manual written for officers that he’d found on the frigate’s computers, he’d read of the old formula: praise-correct-praise. First, the manual recommended, you praised them for what they did right, then you corrected what they did wrong, then praised them for their improvement. In his mind he rehearsed the formula as it related to the current situation.
     
    1. You didn’t screw up as badly as last time.
    2. You still screwed up.
    3. Try not to screw up any more.
     
    The only problem was that his crew had a perfect right to answer, You first, my lord.
    Martinez, too, was learning on the job, and had discovered that his performance was erratic. Nothing in his training had ever suggested that war was a business filled with such desperate improvisation.
    The voice of his junior lieutenant, Vonderheydte, came over his headphones.
    “Captain Kamarullah, my lord, on intership net. I believe it’s the beginning of the debriefing.”
    This was all Martinez needed. Kamarullah was the senior captain in Light Squadron 14 and would normally have been in command, all save for the fact that he’d once been blamed for a botched maneuver—and blamed by Junior Squadron Commander Do-faq, who was now in overall command of both the light and heavy squadrons, Faqforce, now heading for Hone-bar. In an act of pure autocratic malevolence, Do-faq had removed Kamarullah from command of the light squadron and replaced him with the most junior captain present.
    Martinez.
    Granted that Martinez had accepted the appointment with alacrity. Granted as well that there