War in Heaven (33 page)

And so it was the Ringists who attacked, not the Fellowship. As the Sonderval had hoped, Salmalin led his fleet towards the gleaming web of ships spread throughout a thousand miles of space. But he did not lead them straight towards the Fellowship's centre, in the manner of iron-disciplined Romans marching foot by foot over a plain of hard earth. Space is three-dimensional, not two, and in any case the topology of the underlying manifold makes the idea of a straightforward approach in a single direction meaningless. It was always possible for the Ringist ships to fall out of windows to the flanks of the Fellowship fleet and behind them as well — and even hull to hull in their very midst. That few such point-exits existed in the segment of space where the Fellowship's fleet waited was no accident. The Sonderval had chosen his 'terrain' with all the care of a general examining a battlefield for boulders and depressions which his enemy might use to hide. He had calculated that Salmalin would not gamble his fleet on an approach through these few point-exits. Not for nothing was the Lord Pilot of the Order known as Salmalin the Prudent.

Salmalin the Prudent was also Salmalin the Stolid. He knew little of war and had the imagination for even less. The whole of his martial wisdom might have been encompassed by such maxims as 'never divide one's forces' and 'strike at the enemy's weakest point'. These he obeyed as dutifully as a novice bowing before one of his masters. And so when he fell out of the manifold in his new ship, the
Alpha Omega
(which had replaced the one that Bardo had stolen), his untutored eye looked out across a few hundred miles of space and picked out the weakest point of the Fellowship's fleet. There, at the centre of a great wheel of ships surrounded by fourteen other such wheels, floated the
Cardinal Virtue.
This distinctive ship with its long, sweeping lines occupied the point closest to the Ringist fleet. The other ships of the First Battle Group were arrayed around the Sonderval in a curious lens-shaped formation bulging out towards the Ringists. To Salmalin, it must have seemed that the arrogant Sonderval was courting glory by exposing himself so. In any case, this central group so near to the Ringist fleet — and so nearly isolated from the lightships and black ships of the other battle groups — clearly comprised the Fellowship's weakest point. And so there Salmalin ordered his cadres of ships to concentrate their attack.

At least six thousand Ringist ships leapt forwards towards the First Battle Group. The Ringist fleet had been ordered very differently to that of the Fellowship. Salmalin's four hundred and fifty-one lightships had been divided among twenty cadres, it being thought that the pilots of the Order would fight best among their own kind. Similarly, the ships from the Ringist worlds — from Arcite, Heaven's Gate, Thorskalle, Farrago and all the others — fought together with their worldmates in cadres as small as twenty ships and as large as five hundred. For this first strike against the Fellowship's centre, Salmalin chose five cadres of lightships and thirty cadres of lesser ships from thirty Ringist worlds. Thus his lightships outnumbered those of the First Battle Group one hundred and ten against twenty, and his other ships fell against the Sonderval's two thousand gold ships and black ships in a force more than three times its size.

In the opening seconds of the battle, it seemed that the Sonderval's trap might work as he had planned. Even if they had been ordered to do so, the ships of his battle group could not hold against the Ringists. Pilot fell against pilot, trying to force an enemy's ship into an open window and map it into a point-exit within Mara's Star. The pilots of the Ringist lightships slipped in and out of realspace like a hundred and ten diamond needles stitching a terrible pattern in black velvet. Where they encountered lesser ships — especially the cumbersome deep-ships — they quickly sent them to their deaths in this fiery hell. But sometimes lightship would fall against lightship. Sometimes, as when the Order's Yoko Jael tried to slay Lara Jesusa in the
White Lotus
, there would occur a wild, intricate dance in and out of the manifold as of light beams twining around each other. Three of the Ringist pilots perished this way when they made a mathematical misstep and their deadly dance carried them into the fire. But three of the Sonderval's pilots perished, too, including one of his finest, Zapata Karek, who had fought with Mallory Ringess in the Pilots' War and distinguished himself and his ship, the
Sagittarius Bridge.
And the Sonderval might have lost even more of his precious lightships if his pilots hadn't been under strict orders to fall back from the Ringist fleet. For pilots with as much elan as Arrio Blackstone or Valdemar Tor, such orders were like stone walls imprisoning them, for the essence of piloting a lightship is that one must always move freely where one must. Then too, it was hard for the lightship pilots simply to abandon the less skilled pilots of the lesser ships. But fortunately, the Sonderval had ordered these black ships and gold ships to fall back as well, and this they gladly did wherever they could.

And so the great lens of ships comprising the First Battle Group, under the fierce assault of the Ringists, began to buckle and bend backwards through space. The Ringist ships poured like a stream of glittering sand in towards the centre. And every moment or so, the black glass of space filled with flashes of light. Every time a lightship or gold ship opened a window to the manifold, light would flash out and illuminate the swarm of packed ships. Other lights lit up the night as well. Many of the Fellowship and Ringist ships had mounted laser cannon in preparation for this battle. Laser light was useless against the diamond hulls of the lightships or the black ships' extremely dense black nall. But some of the black ships — and especially the gold ships and fire-ships — were built so that the pit projected out of the hull's side like a clear bubble. Inside these pits, which were usually made of clary, the pilots floated and guided their ships by sight as much as interface with their ship-computers. Thus, when making planetfall or skimming above the mountains of some alien continent, they could see more easily. But this construction also left them vulnerable: a black ship mounting laser cannon might target a pilot alone in his clary pit and send a beam of killing light streaking through space to penetrate easily the thin clary bubbles. One pilot, Kasimir of Urradeth, claimed that after correcting for the diffraction angles through the curving clary pits, at a distance of a hundred miles, he could send a laser beam burning through the pupil of his enemy's eye. All pilots would be vulnerable to hydrogen bombs; however, these weapons played little part in the Battle of Mara's Star. Compared to laser light or the lightning movements of the ships flashing in and out of the opening windows, hydrogen missiles fired at an enemy ship were slow, hideously slow. Then, too, with the ships of both fleets at first packed so densely together, an exploding hydrogen bomb might easily incinerate the ship of friend as well as foe. During the entire course of the battle involving some seventy thousand ships, only fifty-five such missiles were fired, accounting for the destruction of only two gold ships and one black ship. In the black dome of space, the great blossoms of hydrogen-generated light provided a terribly beautiful fireworks display but little more.

With the Sonderval's First Battle Group thus engaged in the centre, and five groups waiting in the inner circle, the pilot-captains of the other groups on the rim of the Fellowship's fleet began the manoeuvre upon which the battle would hinge. At almost the same moment, the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth battle groups fell off through space and struck towards the Ringists' flanks. It was their hope to face the Ringist cadres and smash them. Apart from Bardo's Tenth Battle Group, however, only the Eleventh and Twelfth groups, led by Alesar Estarei and Cristobel the Bold, came close to executing this plan.

But the battle is to the swift and strong, and all the battle groups faced the problem of co-ordinating their ships as they fell through the manifold, which inhibited their speed. And all the groups except the lucky Eleventh and Twelfth found that, while most of the cadres they fought were composed of lesser ships, at least one lightship cadre strengthened the swarms of black ships falling against them. Only Bardo, of all the pilot-captains, succeeded in overcoming the two lightship cadres — and the many lesser cadres — arrayed against him. He owed his success to three things: first, except for the Sonderval, of all the seventy thousand pilots in their ships to look out at the red flames of Mara's Star, he was probably the finest. Secondly, he proved to be a great leader of women and men; his innate compassion enabled him to see the problems and fears of even the least of his pilots where the Sonderval would show only contempt. This most undisciplined of men in his personal life understood how to impose discipline on innocent pilots from Simoom and Vesper and other worlds and how to encourage them. And thirdly, he had an inborn genius for war.

It was Bardo's innovation to divide his group into twenty sets of a hundred ships each, and to appoint one of his lightship pilots as commander of each set. Almost everyone in the Fellowship's fleet considered that this would only hamper their mobility, destroying their ability to streak from star to star as they had in the Pilots' War and concentrating their force on the lightships arrayed against them. But Bardo gambled that any loss of mobility would be more than offset by an increase in strength. Being himself a very powerful man, he believed in strength as the foremost martial virtue. He also believed in the cultivation of knowledge. After all, before founding the religion that he now fought, he had been Master of Novices at the academy. As he had put it to one of his commander pilots, "If we don't teach these poor black ship pilots the noblest of arts, who will? And if a pilot takes to the pit of his ship, he should be a
pilot
, by God! Otherwise, he's as useless as a third leg on a whore."

And so Bardo had spent almost all his waking hours before the battle teaching his commanders how to teach the lesser pilots the noble art of falling through the manifold. And while it was impossible to take a gentle woman from Solsken and transform her overnight into a warrior-pilot like Lara Jesusa, there were many tricks and techniques that she might learn in order to use her black ship to greater effect. Two thousand such women — and men — as Bardo reasoned, in a great battle group of ships might vex even the finest lightship pilots.

When the battle finally came, Bardo spent almost every electrifying second helping his twenty commanders to help the lesser pilots in the sets that they led. That day on the 18th of winter in deep space, he accomplished what no other pilot-captain did: while leading his two thousand ships like a
kitikeesha
drake at the head of his flock, he kept flowing a simultaneous stream of communication with his set commanders. And then later, in the fire of battle with his group spread out over more than a million miles of realspace, he both led and inspired his commanders to fight. It was said that like some mythic subatomic particle he managed to be in two places at once, but it wasn't so. So quick and precise were the mappings of his lightship from window to window that it only
seemed
that the
Sword of Shiva
had a double streaking through space. One moment Bardo would appear to advise the rashest of his commanders, Odinan Rodas, not to overextend his set of ships, while the next moment would find him urging Yannis Helaku to take his set straight into a swarm of undisciplined black ships. And
between
these moments he might find help for some poor gold ship pilot unable to make a point to point mapping or even fight off a pair of Ringist lightships harassing his hard-pressed set. Three times during the first movement of the battle he fought one-on-one duels with other lightships. And three pilots of Neverness, including Dario of Urradeth in the
Infinite Dactyl
he slew. And the miracle of it was that he never abandoned his set commanders to their own fates or diverged from his purpose. Amidst streaking laser beams and exploding hydrogen bombs and windows to the manifold flashing open, that day the
Sword of Shiva
was the brightest light in deep space. In his brilliant diamond lightship, like some ancient god of war come to life, Bardo led his pilots and they followed. They cut into their enemy's ships with a rare fury, either dispersing them or destroying them altogether. In little time, the entire sunwards flank of the Ringist fleet collapsed. And then, as the Sonderval had hoped, Bardo led the Tenth Battle Group in a great wheeling movement to take the Ringists in their rear.

But he was the only one of the Sonderval's pilot-captains fully to complete this encircling manoeuvre. Alesar Estarei and Cristobel the Bold, leading the Eleventh and Twelfth battle groups (if 'lead' is the right word), did manage to turn the corewards flank. But they left undestroyed too many of their enemy's ships behind them, and too many of their own. In their wild dash around the Ringist fleet they simply abandoned the slower of their gold ships and black ships, which amounted to almost half their groups. They were very lucky not to encounter any Ringist lightships; if they had, they never would have fought free to circle around the Ringist flank. As it was, these two battle groups joined Bardo's attack on the Ringist rear much reduced in force. The Sonderval had calculated that of the nine battle groups attacking the Ringist flanks, four or five would win through to complete the encirclement. But with Bardo's mostly intact group and only half each of Alesar's and Cristobel's, only the equivalent of two full battle groups arrived to fall against the astonished Ringists.

It was not enough. Bardo's circling manoeuvre had taken his group near the three thickspaces from which the Ringists had emerged like a swarm of comets. In defence of these spinning thickspaces — and as a sort of rearguard — Lord Salmalin had left three cadres of lightships and fifty lesser cadres. While Bardo's two thousand battle-drunk pilots attacked them like thallows falling out of the sky, Alesar and Cristobel led their fragmented groups against the rest of the Ringist rear.