Women of War (24 page)

“Quite so. Michael, with Ghadir this time.”

Abood stepped aside. Ghadir unsheathed her sword and came to face Michael. They bowed, took their stances. Michael towered over his opponent this time. Even Ghadir's sword, as big as Michael's, made her look small.

“Begin!”

For a few seconds, neither fighter moved. Each watched the other's eyes. When Michael brought his sword down, Ghadir stepped away from the blow. Her blade swept back, rippled into a flowing shape that might have been Arabic calligraphy, and came forward in time to block Michael's side stroke. Again, metal rang on metal.

Ghadir's blade gripped Michael's. Michael's sword softened, and he stepped back. Ghadir's blade rippled with more calligraphy as Ghadir stepped to one side, then swept her blade in low. Michael's sword caught hers. The end of his blade snaked out, seeking a way past the block. Ghadir's blade seemed to knot around his near the hilt. The tip of her blade snaked toward the tip of his.

The sword tips were like the heads of two cobras, each seeking a way past the other. Ghadir's sword moved more elaborately, but the extra movement only added flourishes. Neither sword could get past the other.

Ghadir pulled her sword away, reformed it. Michael attacked. She parried. Attack. Parry. The blades rang, each time with a higher note. Ghadir's size disadvantage seemed to keep her on the defensive more and more. Michael advanced.

Lara called out, “Stop!”

The fighters bowed.

“Lieutenant? Who is the better fighter here? Who wins?”

“As before, they seem closely matched. But the man has the advantage in size and strength. He's wearing the woman down. To this point, it has been a draw. But if I had to pick a winner, I'd say he's the better.”

“No,” said the colonel. “This is Baeli Sword. She has defeated him.”

“You've been reading,” Lara said. That was why the colonel had seemed distracted.

“Yes. I've just read your report to the Primaries. The summary doesn't do it justice.” To her aide, she said, “Baeli Sword is far removed from its ancestral arts. If a fighter is struck, of course he loses the match. But anything short of that is a draw. Unless one fighter is ... more beautiful.”

Lara nodded. “All those flowing lines of Ghadir's sword, the sounding of her blade ... She moves her body and her weapon with grace and supreme artistry.” Lara turned to the fighters. “She kicked your ass, Michael.”

“She always does,” he said.

“Size and strength aren't unimportant,” Lara said. “But when a martial art is more a matter of developing the warrior than fighting the war, other aspects matter more. When I'm seeking pilots and crew for my battle fleet, I don't look for the biggest and the strongest. The ships are all the same size and strength. What I look for in the crew is some kind of mental mastery. In Sword, that mastery takes the form of beauty.”

“And you think that this is the way that the Scorchers think,” said Colonel Hodges.

“Something
like
this,” Lara said. “Their weapons are advanced, but perhaps their aesthetics are as well. A big difference with the Scorchers, though, is that they present their beauty first, before they use weapons. Our idea—-”

“Is that they would stop at that, if we matched their beauty with our own,” the colonel finished for her. “And you think that they scorch human planets because they are shaming us.”

“For being bad artists,” said Lara. “They don't kill the whole planet. The parts they kill with UV radiation make surface patterns. It's as if the planet is being branded. For all we know, they're writing graffiti that says, ‘You suck.' We think that if we answer their aesthetic with our own, that may be the extent of the fight. They may not scorch our surface.”

“
May
not,” the colonel said. “I'd still rather teach them a lesson on our own terms.”

“Let us try it our way. Stand down until you've seen how we have done.”

The colonel looked at her aide, who only raised her eyebrows. Colonel Hodges faced Lara again and said only, “We'll see.”

 

We'll see.
The words meant what Lara thought they meant. The marines rejoined their fleet. Lara went back to studying recorded Scorcher interactions and to rehearsal simulations with her pilots and crewmen, who were all still on the surface. Lara's own fleet of ships waited in low orbit, empty except for maintenance workers. And two days after the Sword demonstration, Fleet Intelligence pinged her. “Scorcher fleet emerging from the Hawking radiation,” the officer said. “They have formed up at 19 AU, but they aren't moving. We've scrambled your crews.”

Lara sub-vocalized the commands that would take her into the sensor net. Black silhouettes of Scorcher ships stood out against the Hawking glow. She said, “The marines?”

“Gone,” said the officer.

“On their way to intercept?” Damn. She sensed for them. Where were they?

“Gone, I don't know where,” the man reported. “They were in high orbit, and then they weren't anywhere. We don't sense them, but they must still be in system. It's only been a couple minutes. No red flash.”

“They may not make one, with their stealth,” Lara said, though she doubted that the marines had gone more than a few AU from the sun. “Civil defense has been alerted?”

“The alarm is going out. Citizens are taking shelter.”

Except for the ones who aren't, Lara thought. But most people would obey the order to go inside and opaque their windows, or even get underground if they could. “I'm on my way to the flagship.”

She called the president, told him what she knew so far. He said he'd be watching.

Fleet Commander Nikkono Chuen was waiting for her on the shuttle pad.

“Everything on schedule?” she asked him.

“Crews are on their way. We'll be the last ones up.”

During the noisy, vibrating climb into orbit, Lara called Fleet Communications. “I want to broadcast a message to the marines,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am. Uh, Madam Chief, we don't know where the marines are.”

“I know. So if I can't squirt to them, I'll broadcast. Squirt my message to the sensors and let them broadcast it as radio.”

A pause. “Ma'am, if you don't mind my saying so, won't that tell the Scorchers where all of our sensors are?”

“I'd be very surprised if the Scorchers wanted to hit our sensors.”

Dim letters formed in the middle of Lara's visual field.
Don't bother.

The comm officer couldn't be accessing Lara's text channel, and the president hadn't pinged her ...

Who the hell?
she messaged.

“Belay that,” Lara said. She disconnected from comm.
Where?
She was sure the marines were headed toward the Scorchers. That would preclude lightspeed communications.
Where are you?

Fleet Commander Chuen said, “Sensors are getting an analog broadcast from the Scorchers.”

“Let's hear it.”

The Scorcher music thumped and grated. Lara started to tap the dominant beat on her leg.

Ugh
, messaged the colonel.
Can't dance to that.

The colonel's text said,
Ha. Bet you can. We're not that different, you and I . . . That's a compliment, if you're not sure.

Lara laughed.

“What?” said the fleet commander.

“Nothing.”

The colonel's last words were,
Tally ho!
Then an end-of-transmission sigil appeared.

“All right, then,” Lara said under her breath. “Give them hell.”

 

The Scorchers started to move sunward just as Lara and the commander transferred from their shuttle to their flagship, the
Alpha.
Lara called up the sensor data. She could still feel the gentle tug of her seat restraints as the crew took the ship out of their planetary orbit and into a solar one. She still smelled the ship's interior, the air that was always a little stale in spite of the scrubbers. But what she saw was space. Blackness. Stars burned bright and steady. And far away, still at the distance of the gas giants, the Scorchers continued sunward. Data squirts from the sensors were letting her see all of this in real time. It would be more than two hours before ordinary light and radio signals made it this far sunward from the Scorcher location. Much of the crew saw some version of these images.

“Chief,” said Fleet Commander Chuen, “with the marines out there, do we stick to the script?”

He didn't have to defer to Lara, now that they were launched. She was, technically, a political office holder along for the ride. But the plan was Lara's, and she was glad that the commander wanted her advice.

The Scorcher ships formed an undulating line, a wave form that moved in time with a rising and falling whistle in their music.

“It's going to take a while to close with them,” Lara said. “The marines have a head start, maybe a big one. I doubt we'll cramp their style at our speed.”

“Form up all ships,” ordered the commander. “Helm, take us out.”

“Lights!” said a crewmember.

The Scorcher ships were flashing lights in time with their music.

“That's something we haven't seen them do before.”

“No surprise,” Lara said. “They like variety.” Every interaction, every Scorcher attack, had been different.

Lara sub-vocalized for the spectral data. The Scorcher lights flashing on and off were intense, but their radiation fell mostly between infrared and UV. This was not a weapon.

Scorcher ships reformed into a square array, nine ships by nine. They flashed lights again, creating geometric patterns on the nine-by-nine grid.

“Think that means anything?” asked a crew member.

No one answered. Who could say?

“Ship's artificial intelligence just mapped two of those patterns to the planetary scorch marks left in earlier encounters,” said someone else. The data officer, probably.

If the Scorchers had indeed written “You suck” in UV scorch marks on the surface of human worlds, they had just repeated the insult. If. So much was still guesswork.

The Scorcher ships contracted into a sphere, one of their favorite moves. Lara held her breath. This would be a good time for the marines to attack, if they were close enough.

The sphere expanded, flattened. The Scorcher ships moved in a way that reminded Lara of flocks of blackbirds, all ships changing direction and velocity at once, as if they had been printed on a turning page.

Then it was over. The analog broadcast stopped.

Still no attack. Either the marines had been out of range, or they had waited until the Scorcher ships had issued their challenge by playing their music and dancing their dance. For half a second, Lara thought that perhaps the marines would continue to hold back, would let Lara's fleet close with the aliens.

Space erupted with white light.

“Lord of lords!” someone said.

“What in all the vastness ...”

The intense brilliance gave way to blackness. Not ordinary blackness. Black blindness. The web of sensors closest to the Scorchers had been fried. There was a hole in the data stream.

“What was that?” Lara said. “Ours or theirs?” She still saw only blackness. No stars, even. Then more distant sensors began to stream their data. The visual resolution was poor, because they were so far away, but Lara saw that there were still Scorcher ships out there. There was hard radiation, too. “Atomics?”

“Analyzing,” said a crew member. “The radiation signature is similar to a traditional nuke, but not spot on. Extra particles in the soup. It went off right in the midst of the Scorchers, so I'm guessing it's not one of theirs.”

“Play,” Lara said. “Commander, give the order to the musicians. It might forestall retaliation. Something just hit the Scorchers, and we're the only thing they can see.”

The fleet commander gave the order. Aboard other ships of the fleet, musicians at soundboards began to play. Lara heard the analog broadcast of her fleet's own music. It had a beat like the Scorcher music, but more melody. She had guessed that the Scorchers would want some originality, but written according to what Lara's composers had been able to understand about Scorcher music theory.

There was another flash like the first. Then another.

There was no blackout this time as the light faded. The sensors closest to the event had already been taken out. Lara's visual resolution improved as more sensors redirected toward the empty area and contributed their output. In the dimming glow, Lara counted the Scorcher ships. Still eighty-one.