"In short, the flockers are getting through the sand," Hobbes concluded.
Laurent Zai nodded.
"They always do. What's the projected attrition?"
Hobbes swallowed. These nervous ticks were unlike her, Zai thought. She had lost some confidence since the mutiny.
"Perhaps a tenth, sir. The other ninety percent are coming through."
"Ten pecent!" Zai glared down into the bridge main airscreen, where the long, thin needle of flockers hovered. Normally, the small and expendable drones were reduced to a small fraction of their initial numbers. He and Hobbes had expected the sand to be especially deadly at this speed. But instead, it had proved useless.
There were almost five thousand flockers in the first wave alone, more than enough to tear the Lynx to pieces. And they would arrive in some sixteen minutes.
"Did they use this single-column tactic in the last war?" he asked.
"No, sir. Perhaps a new evolutionary--" Hobbes began.
"Begging your pardon, Captain," interrupted the disembodied head and shoulders of Master Pilot Marx. His image floated in the captain's private airscreen, projected from a flight canopy in the Lynx's core.
"Yes, Master Pilot?"
"In a normal battle, forming into a single column wouldn't give flockers any advantage. Sand is ejected outward from hundreds of small delivery canisters, so any given sandstorm contains hundreds of different trajectories. The relative motion between sand and flockers is chaotic."
"So a column would offer no protection," Hobbes said.
"Correct." Marx's fingers came into view, gesturing through calculations. "But in this battle, our two drone fleets are moving through each other at three thousand klicks per second. The lateral, chaotic motion of the sand is erased by its relative insignificance to the overall motion. The flocker column punches through even the biggest sand cloud in a few thousandths of a second." Zai closed his eyes. He'd been foolish not to see it. Perhaps not this specific tactic, but the basic flaw in his plan: The Lynx's high speed of attack flattened events.
A quote from Anonymous 167 came to him too late.
"'Against a simple tactic, a simple response is often effective/" he muttered. The Rix had found that simple response.
"Pardon me, sir?" Marx said.
Hobbes nodded vigorously, translating the aphorism for Marx. "The high relative velocity between our two ships channels relationships into a single dimension: that of the approach axis. In effect, we've made this a single-variable battle."
"And the Rix have countered with a one-dimensional formation," Captain Zai concluded. "A line."
"The flockers will reach us in fourteen minutes, sir," the watch officer interjected.
Zai nodded calmly, but inside he seethed. The Lynx's rate of acceleration was pitiful compared to that of the tiny flockers. There was no way to maneuver out of this. They were defenseless.
He clenched his real hand. To have chosen life, to have thrown away honor, only to be extinguished by an idiotic mistake. Zai had broken his oath to see Nara again, but it looked as if his betrayal would come to nothing. Perhaps this was natural law in action: On Vada, they said that a knife found its way easily to the heart of a traitor.
He looked again at the airscreen representation of the flocker attack. The column was not exactly a knife. It was too long and thin, like some primitive projectile weapon. An arrow, or maybe . . .
An old memory surfaced.
"This has become something of a joust," Zai said.
"A joust, sir?"
"A pre-diaspora military situation. More of a ritual, really. In a joust 37 attack, a very long kinetic-contact weapon was propelled toward the enemy by animal power."
"Sounds unpleasant, sir," Hobbes said.
"Rather." Zai allowed his mind to drift back in time. He saw the constructs battling in his grandfather's great pasture on Vada. The horses were spectacularly rendered, their flanks gathering loam as the hot afternoon went on. The brightly festooned knights rode toward each other. Their steeds' hooves drummed the ground with a rhythmic shudder that rattled the nerves like the overflight of an armored rotary wing.
The long sticks--lances, they were called--striking against. . .
"Hobbes," Zai said, seeing an answer. "Are you familiar with the origin of the word shield?" Hobbes's Utopian upbringing had provided her only patchy knowledge of ancient weapons.
"I'm afraid not, sir."
"A straightforward device, Hobbes. A two-dimensional surface used to ward off one-dimensional attacks."
"Useful, sir." Zai could see Hobbes's mind struggle to follow him.
"Captain," Marx interrupted. "The first formation of flockers will reach the Lynx practically at full strength. More than four thousand of them! Our close-in defenses can't cope with so many at once."
"A shield, Hobbes. Prepare to fire all four photon cannon."
Marx began to protest, and Zai cut the man's sound off with a gesture. Of course--as the master pilot had been about to complain-- capital weapons like the Lynx's photon cannon were useless against flockers. It would be like hunting insects with artillery.
"What's the target, sir?" Hobbes asked.
"The Lynx," he said.
"We're firing at... ?" she began. Then, even as her fingers moved to alert the gunners, understanding filled her face. "I assume we can target the heat-sink manifold directly, sir?"
"Of course, Hobbes. No need to test the energy shunts."
"We'll be ready to detach the manifold on your order, Captain."
"Exactly, Hobbes."
He turned his attention to the flailing, voiceless Master Pilot.
"Marx, get back into the foremost scout," Zai commanded, then gave the man back his voice. "And my orders, sir?"
"Attack the Rix receiver array. With a sandcaster if you can find any alive."
The Master Pilot thought silently for a moment. Then he said, "Perhaps if there were an unexploded canister--"
"Do it," Zai commanded, and erased the man's image from the bridge.
"All cannon ready, sir. Targeting our own heat-sink array at twenty percent power."
Zai paused, wondering if there were yet another factor he hadn't considered. Perhaps he was making another idiotic mistake. He wondered if any Imperial shipmaster had opened fire on his own ship before, without self-destruction in mind.