This is an excerpt from Moth & Cobweb Book 6, Tithe to Tartarus, now the #1 New Release in Children’s Supernatural Books.The entire Moth & Cobweb series, beginning with Swan Knight’s Son, is now available via Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
Yumiko was unwilling to step onto the catwalk because she could not see why a winged man would use one to reach a door four stories in the air. Instead, she swung gracefully in and used her glider wings to break her speed just enough that she could drive two knives, one in each hand, into the plywood boards covering the windows. Weighing less than a pound, she could hang from one hand or flip herself up and balance on her boot toes on the knife hilts. The dizzying drop to the empty factory floor was below her. The railing was next to her, as was the odd, archaic door.
She had seen such a door in the magic shop where Winged Vengeance left his tuxedo. It was similar in shape, but it was not the same wood, the same size, or clasped with the same ornate hinges. The knob was sapphire, not ruby. But it was clearly a brother to that other door.
She looked down. The brown mat had letters on it. They spelled out GO AWAY.
Yumiko put on boot on the catwalk handrail and reached out with her hand.
The glass doorknob turned. The door was unlocked.
A thrill of suspicion trickled up her spine to her neck. What sort of vigilante left the secret door to his hidden sanctum unlocked?
Warily, Yumiko drove another knife into the plywood further away and perched on it. With her back to the plywood, she expanded her bowstaff, extended to twice its normal length, and used the far tip to prod the door open.
She waited warily for an explosion or an attack by poisonous asps. Neither came.
Closer she crept again, clinging weightlessly to the plywood, and peered around the doorjamb. At that moment, the flare was exhausted. The light fluttered and failed.
Darkness closed in. Yumiko drew her flashlight. In its beam she saw the eight-sided chamber beyond the strange door, paneled in dark wood, dark beneath a high, octagonal dome.
Weightlessly, she swooped into the chamber, landing in a crouch with no more noise than a falling cherry blossom petal. Here on a table in the middle of the carpet was the same phone on the same table she had seen before.
She waited, wondering whether it would ring.
The phone remained silent. She sent the flashlight beam left and right to inspect the eight walls.
Last time, the arched door had opened, not onto a catwalk inside a deserted factory uptown, but onto a brick wall. Last time, the arched door had been opposite three windows in three walls looking out on the churchyard of a deserted church downtown. The three walls were there, but now two of them were pierced by narrow doors. The wall between them was a niche holding a photographic portrait draped in black. To either side of the photograph were flowers in vases and twigs of incense in holders.
Yumiko shined her beam on the picture. Her sob caught in the throat, heavy with emotion, before her brain consciously recognized the clear features, green eyes, raven-black hair. It was her mother. Stepping nearer, she saw that these smaller doors both sported brass handles, but neither knob nor lock. Behind each was a blank brick wall.
Next, she looked at one of the cabinets. It was also unlocked, but, as before, it also opened up on a blank wall. She pushed back the top of the rolltop desk. Empty.
She walked a circle, slowly inspecting the eight walls. Then, she turned her flashlight up. A wooden dome made of eight curving panels was above. As when last she stood here, the chamber was like a stage setting, not a real room. What was she overlooking?
She directed her beam downward, seeing how obvious were the trail of triangular prints her boot toes made in the thick dust and the tiny, sharp imprints of her heel. Her brow creased. Did Winged Vengeance never sweep the carpet? Perhaps that had been her job. But where were his boot prints?
Kneeling, Yumiko ran a finger along the fibers. She inspected the dust on her fingertip. It was a white powder. The alert light in the corner of her vision flashed. Toxic environment.
Yumiko shivered, remembered that her supersuit had clamped shut, airtight, the last time she had entered this chamber. At that time, she had not known how to turn on the warning messages from the suit’s hidden instruments. Despite this, the suit, or whatever thoughtful paranoiac had designed it, had saved her life.
But she also remembered taking off her mask during her last visit. Why had the toxin coating the carpet not acted on her then? She tried to remember the exact order of events. Yumiko stood, stepped over to the pole lamp, and switched it on.
In the bright light, the dust stain on her fingertip looked dull gray. The warning light in her lenses winked out. The air registered as safe to breathe. She turned the pole lamp off again. The dust turned from gray to white. The warning flashed. Toxic environment.
What kind of material could change its properties when struck by light and turn from lethal to harmless instantly? Whether it was elfin alchemy or human super-science, it was astounding.
And astoundingly stupid to use. How did Winged Vengeance make sure, when he left the room and stepped into a dark place, a closet, unlit corridor, or out into a moonless night, he had no small gray stain overlooked on his elbow, or boot sole, or clinging to the hem of his cape which would instantly suddenly turn white and lethal again? In fact, how had she left this room of death safely?
She could not remember. But surely she had twisted the ring to render herself weightless before exiting since there was no other exit but the window. Could the mist of the elfs disperse the dusty poison?
Yumiko twisted the ring twice widdershins.
The mist thickened about her, rendering her unseen to human eyes. Immediately, her hands began to tremble. Her fingers were cold. She bit on the switch inside her mask to increase the oxygen flow, but she still seemed unable to breathe. Yumiko turned the flashlight left and right, wildly, looked for the source of the threat. No one was here.
Then, she switched the flashlight off. There was a man hanging by his neck from a rope descending from the shadows of the eight-sided dome. An arrow pinned a note, written in blood, to his chest, and protruded from his back. His eyes were terrible pits of emptiness opening into a universe larger and darker than the universe of stars the Earth’s tiny globe spun through. A second man, eyeless, bound, and hanged, was next to the first, also impaled by an arrow. A third man, hanging by the neck, arrow-stabbed, had his wrists tied behind him by his bootlaces. A fourth hung head downward.
She looked over her shoulder. There were more behind her and more to either side, like grisly fruit hanging from a rich tree. One looked as if he had been run over by a truck before being hanged and impaled. Another, as if he had been burned. Yet another had huge bites torn out of his bound arms and legs, as if he had been lowered into a pit of savage animals before dying.
With a creak of ropes, the corpses now all rotated so that their bloated, blackened, torn, and desiccated faces all faced her.
Yumiko screamed in shock and terror. She had let go of the flashlight and covered her mask with her gloves. Gritting her teeth, she forced her cold fingers to move. She grabbed and twisted the ring. Once, twice, thrice, and once more again.
Her longbow and short sword snapped out to their full length, and her cape unfolded into glider wings, knocking the phone off the table. Bolo and boomerang and dozens of knives, barbed and throwing stars jumped out of their belt pouches and fell to the carpet.
The metallic clamor of the dropped weapons rang in her ears. The echo hung in her ears a moment, and silence came.
Fear vanished.
The ghosts of the slain were gone.
A light as clear and subtle as starlight was streaming from the ring in all directions, glinting like Procyon on a clear winter night.
Yumiko stared at the ring in awe, but this time, it was the awe of wonder, not of terror. The woman’s face in the intaglio of the ring had changed again, and now her features were those of a stern and bright-eyed angel crowned with rays.
Inflicted with amnesia, Yumiko Ume Moth has managed to discover the identity of the lost love she cannot remember. She has also learned the bitter truth of her mother’s murder. And the party responsible for the absence of the one and the death of the other is the same: the Supreme Council of Anarchists.
Now Yumiko hopes to rescue the brilliant young man who may or may not be her fiance while seeking vengeance for the Grail Queen, her mother. But her only allies are a scatter-brained fairy and the Last Crusade, which despite its grand name consists of a young knight and his dog. Nevertheless, the Foxmaiden will not turn from her path, though all the dark forces of Tartarus stand in her way.
John C. Wright is one of the living grandmasters of science fiction and the author of THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, and IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY, to name just three of his exceptional books. He has been nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and his novel SOMEWHITHER won the 2016 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel at Dragoncon. The first book in the Moth & Cobweb series, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON, was a finalist for the 2017 Dragon Award for Best Young Adult Novel.
A strange, painful sensation of hope came across her then. It was like a sick, hot feeling boiling in the pit of her stomach. Maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe those who sought her life were not nigh. What if this were merely the night nurse, walking softly so as not to wake a sick patient?
She lowered her eye to the gap between the curtain hem and the floor. Her cheek touched the floor tile, and she realized it was linoleum. It was good for footing: resilient, and splinter free. And if she were horribly wounded, there would be no delay to getting her to a hospital, would there be?
That stray thought produced a second: where was the hospital staff? Who had brought her here? Why hadn’t he stayed to look after her?
The sight of the figure bent over the bed drove all other thoughts away. He wore a red cap with a white owl’s feather atop his shaggy head, and a long green coat over his broad back, but beneath the lower hem of the green coat were not sterile and comfy shoes favored by doctors. He wore knickerbockers buckled at the knee and was barefoot.
His seemed to have a skin condition: his feet were covered with clumps of hair, and strands were even growing up between his toes. His feet were too long and thin. She wondered if a bone disease in his feet had disfigured them. His toenails were an inch long, half an inch thick, and yellow as horn.
Not a nurse. Not a normal person with healthy feet.
He lowered his head toward the empty bed. She heard a soft noise. A snort. A snuffle.
He was sniffing. The stranger with the bad feet was sniffing her bedsheets!
She was waiting for him to be far enough into the room that she might have a chance to slip out behind him and race out the door.
That hope was quashed when she heard the rustle of two other people entering the room. She heard the creak of the door being eased shut, and heard a slither of steel and then the click of a padlock shutting.
She was locked in the room with three of them.
Laignech Faelad
Her mind went blank. There was no other exit, no escape.
The first man was still sniffing the bed. He spoke without turning his head. “The ring was here, but the scent is confounded! Phaugh! My nose be filled with starch and stink, ammonia and disinfectant!”
A second man stepped into her view. He was bald, stocky, and dark skinned, wearing a green leather motorcycle jacket and steel-toed workboots. In his hands he carried a chain. He held it with his hands apart so that the chain was taut and the links would not rattle. He also wore a red cap. “The moon is near the earth. Let us take up our true forms.”
The second man shrugged out of his jacket, tossed the chain on the bed, and began undoing his belt and trousers.
The third was not a man. He stood on two legs and had arms and hands like a man, but his head was the head of a goat. His knees bent backward, and his hoof was split. He was over seven feet tall, thick of chest and broad of shoulder to match. Except for his own natural pelt of brown and black, he was naked. A barnyard smell came from the monster. Between his ram horns was perched a red peaked cap with a white owl’s feather. In his hands was a long trident, whose tines scraped against the ceiling tiles.
The monster spoke in a strangled voice, like a man sounds when he speaks while breathing in. “Here as yet, I wager, missy? Here as yet?”
The monster clip-clopped to the closet and yanked open the door, brandishing his trident as he did so. “We are come to crack your bones and lap the marrow!”
Inside were a small toilet and sink. The goat-man’s ears drooped.
The butt of his weapon brushed against the wheeled bed stand and knocked it over. The remote control for the TV bounced on the floor and came to rest a foot or so from her hand.
The second man had his trousers about his knees and was scowling and unlacing his boots. His face turned darker and began to elongate, and hair sprouted from his bald head as well as from his cheeks, jaw, neck, naked back, and shoulders. His ears were getting larger and standing out from his skull, like the ears of a dog.
The first man, the barefoot one, was beginning to turn his head as he looked to the other corners of the room. He was about to turn his head far enough to see her. She pushed the red button on the remote.
The noise of the television overhead, and the light from the screen, were startling in the quiet gloom. All three flinched and looked up. The barefoot man stepped backward and thus was half a step closer to her.
It was close enough. Instinct moved her limbs. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she had vaulted toward the barefoot man, selecting him as the most immediate target.
She heard the echo of a voice in her memory: In fighting a man, a girl is less in strength, reach, speed, and spirit. Your bones are more easily broken. Your heart more easily frightened. This does not mean victory is his! Use his strength against him. Use his speed against him. Use his skill against him.
The first man turned and rushed at her. She saw that he was an amateur fighter, one who tries to punch or tackle before judging his distance properly. She stepped closer, inside his swing, bobbing her head. His fist flew past her ear.
She snap-kicked, using her shin rather than her foot to land the blow. His legs guided the blow to his groin, and his strong forward momentum gave it force. Had he been a weaker man, moving less quickly, he would not have injured himself. But he was very strong.
On the backstroke on her same kick, she drove her instep down his shin and brought the heel of her bare foot onto his strangely narrow foot hard enough that she heard a cracking noise.
The echo said: If a man cannot walk, he cannot fight.
He doubled over in pain. He tried to grab her, but missed.
While he was doubled over, she gripped her own wrist and twisted her upper body to drive the corner of her elbow into his temple. He stumbled and fell.
The second man, the one who had been bald but was now halfway transformed into a wolf-creature, swung at her with a limb that was neither a man’s arm nor a forepaw. But because the limb was still in the midst of changing length, it neither struck nor clawed her.
She grabbed the hairy wrist with one hand and drove her palm into the elbow joint. It is usually an easy joint to damage, but the man simply grunted in pain and swung at her with his other hand. With his trousers binding his knees, he was off balance. But he still had quick reflexes and he was blindingly fast.
She deflected his blow with both her forearms and let the force of his blow pull her inside his reach. His reflexes had betrayed him: now she was inside his guard.
She straightened both of her arms and struck at his face, one hand to either side of his nose. The index finger was extended, and the other three fingers were bent underneath in support, lest her index finger break from the blow. The curves of the face naturally guide the blow into the eye sockets.
The echo said: If a man cannot see, he cannot fight.
When he instinctively drew his hand back to his face to protect it, she drove her knee into his floating rib where his arms were no longer in place to block.
He doubled over. She did an acrobatic flip across his back and landed on the bed, picking up the chain as she did so. A second somersault carried her to the strip of floor between the foot of the bed and the bathroom door.
She was close enough to the goat-man now to strike at his long nose with the chain. He tried to parry with the haft of his trident, but the chain wrapped around it and struck him on the soft snout. Breaking a man’s nose in a fight prevents him from drawing air. She hoped this held true for goats as well.
The echo said: If a man cannot breathe, he cannot fight. Before she could follow up, the goat-man struck at her with the butt of his weapon, and, moving unexpectedly fast for someone his size, he vaulted backward until his rear hoof touched the door. She blocked the blow with her knee, but his strength was such that even the partial blow had force enough to fling her, stumbling, across the room. She tripped, did a back handspring, and regained her footing but she had lost the chain, her only weapon.
Goborchend
Her gaze was on the goat-man’s monstrous form crouching by the door. She now saw how they had locked the door with no lock. One of them had inserted a metal strip between the door and the jamb, and padlocked a sliding clamp in place. She did not like the fact that they had evidently prepared this attack.
The goat-man said, “You hurt my hounds! But you will find a Goborchend is not overcome so readily as the Laignech Faelad!”
She was trembling with fear and rage. The other two men were now both on the ground, in convulsions. She dared not take her eyes from the goat-man, but in the corner of her eye she saw—or thought she saw—hair turning to fur and spreading over their flesh, faces stretching, writhing and changing shape, and limbs shriveling from human hands and feet into wolf paws. Both were howling, but whether this was from the pain of their wounds or the rage of their transformation, she did not know.
She backed up. There was a lightweight chair next to her, and she felt the Venetian blinds brush her backside.
She picked up the chair in her hands and turned sideways, crouching.
Blindingly quick, the goat-man lunged with his three-headed spear. She parried with the chair legs, deflecting the tines high. The tines became tangled with the blinds, and he pulled the whole curtain rod off the wall when he recovered from the lunge. The three windows stood in one frame. They were old-fashioned, from the days before the invention of air conditioning, nothing more than glass panes held in wooden sashes.
She was sweating freely now. He was taller and stronger, she was backed into a corner. There was no retreat. He was tall enough, and his trident long enough, that he could strike her anywhere in the room.
The two others rolling on the floor now grew less agitated. The bed blocked her view of them.
The goat-man shifted his weight and struck again.
His forward hand, which was constantly in motion, weaving and bobbing, guided the trident, and his rear hand, arm and shoulder, gave weight to the blow. With three spear blades instead of one, he could strike three places at once. And with each twitch of his hands, he switched the trident blades from vertical to horizontal and back again.
This time, she managed to deflect the blow to her left. The tines penetrated the glass and stuck in the wood of the frame. He roared and yanked. The whole window frame came out of the wall and fell into the room in a spray of splinters, nails, and clouds of powdery dust.
She saw a narrow stone ledge, less than nine inches wide, flush with the lower lip of the sill.
The only way to overcome a more skilled opponent is by doing the unexpected, something for which his reflexes are not primed to counter.
The monster took a moment to kick the wooden debris free from the head of his trident. That moment was her only chance. Up she vaulted, and slid out the window, in one smooth and reckless move, nimbly as a gymnast.
25 years after the end of the Cold War and the publication of the ninth volume of THERE WILL BE WAR, Dr. Pournelle revived his classic science fiction series with Castalia House. THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X continued the tradition of combining top-notch military science fiction with first-rate real-world analysis by military experts. The Cold War may have ended, but as recent events everywhere from Paris to Syria have demonstrated, war has not. THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 18 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battle Station” by Ben Bova, “Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai, “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke, and the eerily prescient “The Man Who Wasn’t There” by Gregory Benford. Volume X also includes timely essays on “War and Migration” by Martin van Creveld, “The 4GW Counterforce” by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, and “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control” by CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN, which was awarded the 2015 Literary Award by the Surface Navy Association for “the best professional article in any publication addressing Surface Navy or surface warfare issues.”
Editor’s Introduction to: FLASHPOINT: TITAN by Cheah Kai Wai
Arthur C. Clarke said that if the human race is to survive, for most of its history the word ship will mean space ship. I will add to that the obvious implication that Navy will soon mean Space Navy. The Space Navy will certainly keep many of the traditions and practices of the wet navies, for the same reasons that they developed in the first place.
Navy stories are as old as going to sea in ships. The heroines of those stories are often ships as well as their crews. Here a story of a heroic ship and her crew.
FLASHPOINT: TITAN by Cheah Kai Wai
Something was wrong. Somewhere in the sea of data before him, there was a shark swimming amidst a school of fish. Commander Hoshi Tenzen of the Japanese Space Self Defense Force narrowed his eyes, studying his ship’s combined sensor take on his console.
The console displayed the data as a three-dimensional hologram. In the center of the display, Takao was a blue triangle pointing towards a bright yellow mass. That was Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system, ten thousand kilometers away. Other yellow dots indicated satellites, orbital structures and shuttles with Titanian registration. White tracks indicated civilian space traffic. A number of small green dots orbited Titan, each representing American orbital patrol ships. Each contact carried a unique tag, displaying vector, velocity, name and other critical information.
There was too much data. He was drowning in it. Leaning back, he studied the big picture, looking for patterns of activity. Ships came to Titan, dropped off cargo, picked up other cargo, and left. It was their purpose in coming here.
But there were ships that did not fit this pattern.
Four of them. Their beacons claimed they were merchant ships registered to Clementine Space Transport Services, headquartered in Ceres. They were burning at five milligees, their vectors pointed at deep space.
But there was nothing of interest beyond Titan. The only other significant human activity past the moon was the gas mines at Uranus, which were almost completely automated.
So why were these ships accelerating?
Hoshi opened a new window, studying the radar track history. For the past week, the quartet had plodded steadily towards Titan on deceleration burns. They arrived three hours ago, entering the ten thousand kilometer orbit at a velocity of two klicks per second. An hour later, they flipped around and burned their engines. And they hadn’t stopped since.
His console chirped. Prometheus, the largest colony on Titan, was hailing Takao on the laser communications array. They had a message for Takao’s ears only.
He accepted the hail on his implants. A broad Midwestern accent flooded his skull. “Takao, this is Prometheus Control. Welcome to Titan. I wish I could greet you under more auspicious circumstances, but we need your help.”
“Copy, Prometheus Control,” Hoshi replied in English. “What kind of help do you need?”
“Takao, I want to draw your attention to Cloud Nine, Summer Squall, Autumn Lightning and Blue Jasper. They just pinged the laser launch array, the space elevator and the colony with lidar. They claim they are testing their instruments, but I’ve never heard of merchies that need military-grade lidar. We think they’re up to something.”
Hoshi looked for the ships. They were the same four ships he had flagged. Takao had designated them S-547 through S-550. They had formed a box, each ship separated by two hundred and fifty kilometers. He’d never known civilian freighters to take up such a formation in orbit.
But he knew warships did prior to a bombing run.
“Prometheus Control, understood. If these are Q-ships, we are ready to provide assistance. Be advised, we are carrying a full war load.”
Q-ships were warships disguised as merchant vessels. They couldn’t match the performance of real warships, but they could remain concealed until they released their weapons, making them the favorite of pirates and terrorists.
“Thank you kindly, Takao. We’re going to run an emergency drill, clear the airspace, and launch the alert squadron. Our plan is to lock down the ships and board ’em for surprise inspections. Give us a half hour and we’ll be in place.”
“Roger, Prometheus Control. If the suspect ships attempt to resist or escape, we will provide fire support.”
“Much obliged, Takao. Let’s do this.”
Hoshi typed a command on his console. Throughout the ship, a klaxon sounded. He keyed the ship-wide intercom and said, “All hands, sentou youii. All hands, sentou youii.”
The crew rushed to assume their battle stations. Around him, the duty personnel in the Combat Information Center tensed. Other spacers streamed in, taking their places.
Hoshi buckled himself into his seat and summoned a window that tracked the ship’s status. One by one, the boxes representing each deck and department turned green. He patted down his blue skinsuit, checking for holes. Two minutes later, the ship was at maximum readiness.
Lieutenant Kamishiro Takeshi, whose place as Executive Officer was in the astrogation deck above Hoshi, called him. “Sir, the ship is battle ready.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Hoshi turned off the klaxon, brought his officers into a conference call, and briefed them.
“Gentlemen, this is no longer a shakedown cruise,” he concluded. “Remember: everyone back home is watching. Do not screw up.”
Only Kamishiro had the courage to snicker over the line. “Ryoukai!” Roger! “We won’t let you down.”
No one was watching him, so Hoshi allowed himself a momentary smile. “Sensors, extend telescopes and track the bogies. If they pull in their radiators, inform us immediately. Intelligence, assume the bogies are Q-ships and develop a threat profile. Weapons, create a solution for long-range engagement. Astrogation, plot an interdiction vector at full thrust.”
Hoshi and his Astrogation head, Lieutenant Sato Koichi, went back and forth until they were satisfied. Then Ensign Tanaka Michi, the Engineering officer, got on the intercom.
“All hands, accelerating, accelerating.”
The Japanese Space Self Defense Force called Takao a multimission patrol ship, the first of her class. But that was a misleading misnomer. Takao was truly a torch ship.
Mobilizing her gyroscopes,Takao rotated in place. Once vector-aligned, the fusion drive roared, accelerating the ship at one-third gravity, faster than any warship ever built. As Takao ate up the distance to Titan, Ensign Subaru Ryuto, the Weapons chief, hailed Hoshi.
“Sir, I have a solution.”
Subaru’s solution called for engaging the threats with Takao’s main laser from standoff range, then finishing them with missiles. Her point defense lasers and railguns would handle counterfire.
“Very good, Subaru. But while use of the laser is as per doctrine, there are Chinese forces a week out from Titan, and the Americans don’t need to know our capabilities. Set the lasers to ultraviolet-A. Then launch two sunrays and program them for the same frequency. Boost the sunrays to a deep space vector that enables us to make broadside shots against the bogies.”
Lieutenant Junior Grade Nakamura Makoto was next in line, ready with the threat profile. “Captain, the ships are registered as independent merchant vessels, displacement of twelve hundred tons each. They have deuterium-tritium drives, maximum acceleration of five milligees. They have a payload of five hundred tons each, mounted on external cargo pods. They claim to be carrying a shipment of ice from Ceres. Assuming these are Q-ships, I expect the pods to be filled with missiles and possibly drones.”
“Nakamura, did you say five milligees?”
“Yes sir. The reactor is either pretty small or pretty underpowered.” Nakamura hesitated. “Or they are concealing their actual acceleration profile.”
“Let’s assume the latter,” Hoshi said. “If they are Q-ships, they must suspect something by now. Titanian airspace is being cleared, the orbital patrol is converging on them, and our drive capabilities are as plain as day. Why haven’t they attacked yet?”
Nakamura took a moment to think it through. “Sir, they must be waiting for all their targets to enter their engagement envelope. That means the orbital patrol squadron, the laser launch array…and us.”
Hoshi’s blood chilled. Maybe they pinged the colony and pulled a burn so that everybody would come running into their sights. If Takao closed with an enemy too fast, she would be setting herself up for a point-blank missile swarm—one even she could not dodge in time.
“Thank you, Nakamura. Tanaka, halt acceleration.”
The drive cut off. Hoshi contacted Prometheus Control and passed on his men’s thoughts.
“Thank you very much, Takao,” Control said. “We’re moving slow too. We don’t want to spook them into doing something stupid. Way I figure, they will want to wait until we launch the alert squadron before striking.”
“Roger. What’s the plan for Q-ships?”
“Our priority will be to protect the Elevator, the colony, and the laser launch array, in that order. We will aim for impactors first, drones second, missiles third, and the Q-ships last.”
“Copy. We will target the Q-ships, drones and missiles in order of decreasing importance. We will also try to trash enemy weapons, but we don’t want to splash you by mistake.”
“Much obliged, Takao. If you don’t mind, let us handle impactors. That should prevent friendly fire. Also, let us know if you have to fire kinetics and I’ll get my birds out of your way.”
“Roger that, Prometheus Control.”
Subaru contacted Hoshi as soon as he closed the connection. “Sir, sunrays are good to go.”
Hoshi checked the solution and nodded. “Thank you, Subaru. Stand by.”
Hoshi brought up the radio controls, tuning it to the guard channel. “Attention all stations, attention all stations. This is JS Takao. We will be launching laser-propelled probes shortly. Please maintain separation of one hundred kilometers from my vector.”
Space warships launched probes so often that nobody would think twice about the announcement. Hoshi repeated the announcement three times, then said, “Launch sunrays.”
Powerful gas generators kicked the two Type 99 missiles into space. Takao trained a point defense laser bank on the nozzles of both missiles. Each of her lasers housed two independent turrets. The turrets picked a sunray each, and ignited the solid propellant in the missiles’ nozzles. Subaru’s solution would place the sunrays just over a thousand kilometers from the suspect ships when the operation was slated to begin.
Hoshi called up the telescope feed. Ensign Mori Arata, the Sensors officer sharing the CIC with Hoshi, was tracking the four-ship formation with his telescopes. The ships were still making steady burns, barely deviating from their predicted paths.
White dots bloomed from Titan’s surface. The Americans were launching on schedule. The rest of the orbital patrol closed in on the bogies.
Hoshi tapped his fingers against the console. If the bogies continued to behave themselves, all would be well. Yes, Hoshi would have to explain expending two Type 99 mirrors, but they were replaceable. On the other hand, if the bogies…
“Sir, Sierras 547 to 550 are retracting their radiators!” Mori called.
Radiators, being the primary means of shedding heat in space, were the most vulnerable and critical component of a ship. Ships only ever retracted them to prevent them from being harmed—or shot off. Over a colonized world, pulling in radiators was tantamount to a declaration of war.
He hailed the ships on the guard channel. “Attention, attention. This is JS Takao. You are in orbit over an inhabited surface. Retracting your radiators is against international law. Extend your radiators or you will be fired upon. This is your only warning.”
“Sir, we’re being pinged by multiple lidar sources,” Mori said. “They’re from the bogies.”
“Subaru, what’s the status of the main laser?”
“Captain, the capacitors are fully charged and the firing solution is ready.”
Clusters of cylindrical objects decoupled from each of the spaceships and fired tiny chemical rockets, burning towards the moon.
“Sir, bogies have ejected cargo pods,” Mori reported. “They are increasing acceleration to fifty milligees and are taking an escape vector.”
With fifty milligees of acceleration they could outrun most ships. But to Takao, they were slower than slugs.
“Subaru, initiate solution.”
“Initiating solution, ryoukai.”
Takao sent an encoded laser pulse to the sunrays. Their boosters kicked out their payloads, and the smaller projectiles inflated their smart-matter mirrors. The mirror modules discharged their onboard capacitors, energizing the lenses to alter their shape and molecular structure to reflect UV-A beams. Takao unshuttered her main laser, situated in her nose, and unleashed a stream of pulses. Bouncing off the mirror, the invisible pulses drilled into Sierra 547.
The two main laser turrets alternated their fire, pausing just long enough to recharge their ultracapacitors. The lasers burned through the Q-ship’s engine. A ball of hot plasma erupted from the target’s rear. Secondary explosions followed, then tertiary explosions, and the ship broke apart. Hoshi blinked. Ships do not blow up like that, not unless the laser punched all the way into the reactor. Takao’s laser couldn’t do that, not at this angle of attack.
But that didn’t matter now. He had a fight to win.
Prometheus Control sent lasers snapping skywards, destroying as many pods as they could. The orbital patrol ships launched volleys of missiles, then closed into laser range. But there were too many pods and they could not get them all. The pods split open, dispersing their payloads.
In Hoshi’s display, huge numbers of red triangles popped into existence around the Q-ships, clustered so thick they formed a scarlet blanket. An alarm sounded.
“Captain, threat radar!” Mori called. “Ninety-eight strikers and twenty buzzards are locked on to us!”
“Chikusho!” Hoshi swore. “All hands, full guard, full guard!”
At the call, the entire crew snapped into action, following pre-established protocols. All non-essential systems and compartments shut down. Sato plotted the safest vector. Subaru directed his men to activate the point defenses. Nakamura activated the electronic warfare suite. Mori fed data to everybody as needed.
Powered by miniature nuclear reactor engines, ninety-eight missiles sped in at a quarter gravity. As they closed in, Tanaka yelled, “All hands, side kick! Side kick!”
Takao spun her gyroscopes, pointing her skywards. Her chemical maneuvering rockets fired, adding velocity to the turn, then fired again to cancel her momentum. The ship accelerated, burning for a higher orbit.
The missiles turned, trying to keep up. But the real threat was the twenty incoming drones. Fitted with nuclear gas-core rockets, they screamed in at one gravity, turning faster than Takao could, and fired barrages of smaller missiles from their coilguns.
“Sir!” Nakamura called. “Buzzards match profile of Tiannu drones!”
The Tiannu drone was an armed drone employed by the Chinese Space Forces. It was also obsoleted a few years ago, and its sensors were vulnerable to modern electronic warfare.
Some of the drones went berserk, firing blindly into empty space and chasing phantom targets. The point defense lasers burned down the rest. Takao continued spinning, giving her lasers a chance to cool off and recharge. The lasers fired low-powered pulses, melting sensors, electronics and payloads, sacrificing power for rate of fire. Many of the struck missiles detonated prematurely. More missiles spiraled away, confounded by the white noise in the air.
But dozens of threats survived to enter Takao’s kinetic engagement envelope.
The ship rumbled. Twenty-four Type 82 missiles leapt from her missile banks. Scorching towards the threats, the warheads detonated into sprays of tungsten cubes, each striking with the force of a small bomb.
Then Takao’s 60mm railguns fired. The guns churned out a barrage of fragmentation shells, placing an ocean of steel between Takao and the threats. The unguided flechettes disintegrated. The missiles tried to dodge. At this range, if the shells forced the missiles off a threat vector, it was as good as a kill.
But it was not enough. There were still too many missiles.
Takao still had reserves. If he launched them Hoshi was certain Takao would survive. Unscathed, even. But he had his orders, and his duty was absolute. The weapons could only be fired under exceptional circumstances, and a counter-piracy mission was, by definition, not exceptional. He could not use them, even if it meant the death of his ship and his crew.
He would not use them even to save his own life.
“Sir!” Subaru called. “Lasers have overheated!”
“Tanaka, divert all available coolant to point defense! All hands, brace for impact!”
Even as he spoke, twelve missiles survived to engagement range and detonated.
The lasers shut down completely. The railguns continued firing. They drew power from explosively pumped generators and had a separate coolant store, but were far less accurate than the lasers. Hoshi clenched his fists, watching tens of arrows close in on his ship.
Long seconds later, the lasers returned to life. Together with the railguns, they plucked the darts from the sky. Tanaka pulled one last trick, firing the engine and maneuvering rockets. The superheated exhaust consumed every flechette that entered the plumes.
But it was not enough.
The lasers dropped their shutters. The guns got off a final barrage. Then dozens of flechettes crashed into the ship. Tortured metal screamed. The blasts slammed Hoshi into his seat. Sirens went off. Alerts popped up on his console.
“Kamishiro,” Hoshi said, “damage report.”
The XO took a moment to check his boards. “Whipple shields compromised, no hull breaches. Forward missile cells damaged. Point Defense Laser Two reports damaged shutters, but not the turrets. No crew casualties.”
Hoshi heaved a sigh of relief. The enemy had loaded up with general-purpose flechettes. Hundreds could fit inside a warhead, but they lacked the punch to penetrate Takao’s armor.
He checked the display. The red blanket was rapidly dispersing. At some point, Sierra 549 had died in the hail of fire; she was now little more than debris and plasma. But the orbital patrol had been obliterated too, and so had the sunrays. And Sierra 548 and 550 were about to leave Titan orbit.
Hoshi wanted answers. At this angle, Takao’s lasers could punch through the enemies’ engines and into their reactors. But even civilian-grade compartment bulkheads would stop hypervelocity munitions.
“Tanaka, extend radiators. Subaru, target the enemy ships’ engines with muskets.”
Takao launched eight Type 83 missiles. These were fitted with anti-ship warheads, not the light flechettes Takao had endured. Her point defense lasers sent them soaring at the threats at three-quarters of a gravity.
The Q-ships couldn’t hope to outrun the missiles. But they had one last surprise. Hidden panels retracted, revealing automatic railguns. Two per ship.
“Nani?” Hoshi muttered. What?
Even as he spoke, the leading ship rained heavy metal down on the colony, while the other blasted at Takao and her missiles.
“Tanaka, evasive maneuvers. Subaru, snipe the railguns with lasers,” Hoshi said. “Prioritize the ones firing on Prometheus.”
Takao’s main laser discharged. Four shots later, the railguns blew apart. Then the point defense lasers kicked in, destroying the shells threatening Takao.
Prometheus didn’t take the insult lightly either. A lance of light carved through the heart of Sierra 548. Another speared Sierra 550. Shortly after, the four surviving muskets fired their payloads, spewing clusters of segmented-rod penetrators optimized for defeating armor.
The threats tried to turn their drives on the incoming flechettes, but they were too slow. The darts slammed into their engines, blowing them out.
Mori said, “Sir, bandits have ceased acceleration. No escape pods. No further targets. We have a grand—”
The telescopes blanked out.
“—slam?” Mori finished. “What the hell?”
The telescopes cleared. Sierras 548 and 550 were now rapidly expanding balls of plasma.
“Nakamura? What the hell happened?” Hoshi demanded.
“Looks like a reactor failure, sir. Mori, what’s in the vapor?”
“Lieutenant, laser spectroscope is picking up deuterium, tritium and heavy metals. Definitely a catastrophic reactor failure.”
“How likely is that to be from combat damage?” Hoshi asked.
“Our penetrators shouldn’t have damaged the reactor deck,” Subaru said. “Maybe the Americans?”
“Negative,” Mori said. “Spectroscope did not pick up fusion fuels following the laser strikes.”
“Suicide trigger then?” Nakamura wondered. “But that doesn’t make sense. Pirates aren’t suicidal. Even most terrorists aren’t that crazy these days. They’d rather surrender if they can’t maneuver.”
Hoshi thought again of Sierra 547. The secondary explosions were plausible, if the laser had struck a capacitor bank. But tertiaries? Ships were compartmented to prevent just that. It shouldn’t be possible, unless someone, or something, deliberately induced a reactor failure.
But now wasn’t the time and place to ponder such things.
“Gentlemen,” Hoshi said, “I’m sure we have plenty of questions. For now, we will secure from battle stations and clean up the skies.”
He had a very strong suspicion that this was not over. Not by a long shot.
25 years after the end of the Cold War and the publication of the ninth volume, Dr. Pournelle has revived his classic science fiction series with Castalia House. THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X continues the tradition of combining top-notch military science fiction with first-rate real-world analysis by military experts. The Cold War may have ended, but as recent events everywhere from Paris to Syria have demonstrated, war has not. THERE WILL BE WAR Volume X is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 18 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battle Station” by Ben Bova, “Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai, “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke, and the eerily prescient “The Man Who Wasn’t There” by Gregory Benford. Volume X also includes timely essays on “War and Migration” by Martin van Creveld, “The 4GW Counterforce” by William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, and “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control” by CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN, which was awarded the 2015 Literary Award by the Surface Navy Association for “the best professional article in any publication addressing Surface Navy or surface warfare issues.”
THERE WILL BE WAR Volume Xis free today and tomorrow. The following is an excerpt from “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control” by CDR Phillip Pournelle. The introduction was written by his father, Jerry Pournelle.
Editor’s Introduction to:
THE DEADLY FUTURE OF LITTORAL SEA CONTROL
by Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy
The United States has always been a maritime power, and freedom of the seas has been our policy since the founding of the Republic. We have known since President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the Barbary Coast pirates that blockade might not be enough. Sometime you must control the coastal areas and send the Marines to the shores of Tripoli.
The control of littoral areas generates different fleet requirements than controlling the high seas. Commander Phillip Pournelle has been involved with the future of naval requirements, including fleet structure, for years. This article was recently published by the United States Naval Institute and is reprinted here by permission of the institute. The opinions in the article are, of course, his own.
There is a lively debate about the future of the Navy, and how the Fleet should be structured, in Naval circles. Those interested in it should consult the Naval Institute Proceedings, where the various features of the force, including submarines, carriers, surface vessels, information warfare, and the Marines, are discussed. This essay concentrates on an important part of the debate.
When I was in the aerospace industry, I used to say that “the opinions expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of the Aerospace Corporation or the United States Air Force, and I think that’s a damn shame.” The opinions expressed here are those of Commander Pournelle, and not necessarily those of the United States Navy.
And I think that’s a damn shame.
THE DEADLY FUTURE OF LITTORAL SEA CONTROL
by Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy
In an age of precision-strike weapon proliferation, a big-ship navy equals a brittle fleet. What is needed is a revamped force structure based on smaller surface combatants.
The U.S. Navy is building a fleet that is not adapted to either the future mission set or rising threats. It is being built centered around aircraft carriers and submarines. Surface ships are being constructed either as escorts for the carriers or as ballistic-missile-defense platforms. While the littoral combat ship (LCS) was originally intended for sea-control operations in the littoral environment, its current design is best employed as a mother ship for other platforms to enter the littorals. The result of all this is a brittle—and thus risk-adverse—fleet that will not give us influence, may increase the likelihood of conflict, and will reduce the range of mission options available to the national command authority.
This trend is not unique to the Navy. Like other services, it has been operating since the end of the Cold War in unchallenged environments. For the last 12 years in particular, the United States has been operating against opponents who do not have the means to seriously challenge it in multiple arenas such as the air, sea, cyber, space, and other domains. However, due to the proliferation of precision-strike-regime (PSR) weapons and sensors, these domains are increasingly being contested, and the sea, particularly in the littorals, may become one of the most threatened of all these domains.
Sea control is the raison d’être for a navy. The littorals have become, and will increasingly be, critical to the global economy and joint operations. To be relevant a fleet must have the ability to secure the littorals, dispute them, or just as importantly, exercise in them, in the face of an enemy who will contest them. Different platforms perform each of these tasks, some more effectively than others, which should drive fleet architectures. As the proliferation of weapons changes the littoral environment, the U.S. Navy will be forced to reexamine fleet architectures and make some significant changes to remain viable. This is due to the poor staying power of surface vessels in relation to their signature in the face of these rising threats. This new deadly environment will have tactical, operational, and strategic implications for the fleet, and will require significant changes if the fleet wishes to remain effective.
Sir Julian’s Three Elements
What is sea control? As the Royal Navy puts it, it is “the condition in which one has freedom of action to use the sea for one’s own purposes in specified areas and for specified periods of time and, where necessary, to deny or limit its use to the enemy. Sea control includes the airspace above the surface and the water volume and seabed below.”
Without sea control, all other attributions and capabilities for a fleet are irrelevant. As noted by the classic naval strategist Sir Julian Corbett, control (he used the word “command”) of the sea is fleeting and “the only positive value which the high seas have for national life is as a means of communication.” Given the fleeting status of command/control then, accomplishing it must be in support of further goals. Corbett breaks down his concept of control of the sea into three distinct areas: securing command, disputing command, and exercising command. Where securing enables exercising command, disputing may deny, or at least reduce, the ability of an opponent to use the sea for his own purposes.
So it would appear a navy unable to accomplish Corbett’s three elements is unbalanced, particularly if it cannot do so in the critical littorals. Execution of Corbett’s three areas can roughly be translated into three current mission areas: scouting, maritime-interception operations (MIO), and destruction. Enemy forces, and merchant ships, must be located through scouting. While ships and merchants could be simply swept from the sea, more often than not there is a need to be present to shape events and conduct visit, board, search, and seizure (VBSS) or MIO in support of sanctions, proliferation reduction, or other operations short of unrestricted warfare. VBSS/MIO is critical when there is a need to confirm the identity or contents of a vessel.
The characteristics of different platforms drive their strengths and weaknesses within these three mission areas. In the past, aircraft carriers were the best platforms to secure command of the sea. That role is being contested in anti-access/area-denial environments created by competitors. The air wing provided excellent scouting capabilities, but the U.S. Navy has determined land-based maritime-patrol aircraft (MPA) are best capable of searching large volumes of water, as long as the airspace is not being contested. The carrier is an inefficient vessel for VBSS. It is only used in the most extreme circumstances and limited in capacity. Further, because so many other mission capacities are tied up in one platform, using the carrier for VBSS (or humanitarian aid/disaster relief, for that matter) denies these capabilities to other missions during the duration of the operation. The carrier air wing is currently the best platform for destruction thanks to the volume of fire it can produce, and the mobility of the carrier as a home base, though it can be argued surface ships could be more cost-effective in this role. MPA can be effective in destruction but are limited by the fixed operating location of their airfield.
Submarines are poor scouting platforms with limited perception of the area around them, but they can enter anti-access areas often denied to surface ships and carriers. While they are poor VBSS/MIO platforms and have not been used in that role, submarines have an oversized impact on destruction. Their weapon of choice, as seen in the Falklands War, can be extremely deadly, and the psychological shock of an unlocated submarine can neutralize an enemy fleet.
Surface ships are good scouting platforms, particularly if equipped with helicopters and/or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). They are good platforms for destruction if armed with appropriate weapons. The U.S. Navy has long vacillated back and forth regarding arming them with Harpoon or other antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) mostly because of target-identification challenges. Surface ships are the best platform for conducting VBSS/MIO, if there are sufficient numbers of ships. Today Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are conducting VBSS/MIO off the coast of Africa and other locations.
Given the cost and other mission capabilities, does it really make sense for these air-defense destroyers or other large capital ships to conduct VBSS/MIO?
This is an excellent article on wargame design, “Simulating the Art of War”, that Jerry Pournelle originally published in The General, and which he graciously permitted us to reprint four decades later in Riding the Red Horse. It is perhaps worth noting that Castalia House will be publishing the book mentioned below, The Strategy of Technology, in a new hardcover edition this winter.
SIMULATING THE ART OF WAR by Jerry Pournelle
The title of this article is a misnomer. Although I have had some experience simulating the art of war, nothing would be duller for a game; so far as I can tell, the closer the simulation, the less playable the result. The best simulation of land warfare I have ever seen takes place at Research Analysis Corporation (RAC). an Army-related think tank in Virginia. At RAC, they have three enormous war-rooms, each equipped with a wargames table some twenty feet square, each table having elaborate terrain features at a scale of about one inch to the kilometer. ln the Blue room, only Blue units and the Red units located by reconaissance are shown; in the Red room, the opposite, while the only complete record of all units in the game is in the Control room.
Each team consists of an array of talent including logistics and supply officers. intelligence officers, subordinate unit commanders, etc. Orders are given to a computer, which then sends the orders to the actual units, while members of the Control team move them rather than the players Both teams send in orders simultaneously, so that the computer is needed to find which units actually get to move and which are interfered with. The last time I was involved with a RAC game, as a consultant to feed in data about how to simulate strategic and tactical air strikes, it took six months playing time to finish a forty-eight hour simulation—and that was with about ten players on each side, a staff of twenty referees, and a large computer to help. The game, incidentally was one which eventually resulted in the US Army’s evolving the Air Assault Divisions, now known as Air Cav.
The point is that although an accurate simulation—it had to be. since procurement and real-world organization decisions were based in part on the results—the “war game” at RAC was unplayable, and, one suspects, even the most fanatical wargames buff would have found it dull after working at it full time for months.
Yet. What makes a wargame different from some other form of combat game like chess? What is there about the wargame that can generate such enthusiasm? Obviously, it is the similarity to war; the element of simulation which is lacking from other games. Consequently, the game designer must know something about simulation. and must make realism his second goal in design.
There are two ways of making a wargame realistic. The first, which by and large has been exploited well, is “face-realism”. That is, the game designer attempts to employ terrain features similar to a real world battle or war; designates units that either really were in a battle, or might have been; calls the playing pieces “armor” and “infantry”, or “CCA”, or “42nd Infantry Regiment” and the like. He tries, in other words, to give the appearance of reality. He may also, as is often done, make the rules complex, usually by adding optional rules to bring in such factors as “air power” or “supply”, or “weather”
The second way of making a wargame realistic is much more difficult, and has seldom been tried. This method is as follows: the designer abstracts the principles of war as we know them, and designs a game in which only the correct application of those principles brings success. There are, as I said, few of those games. I am tempted to say none, but this would be incorrect; many Avalon Hill games partially meet this goal.
The second kind of simulation is admittedly far more difficult. To some extent it may even interfere with the “realism” of the first kind, in that some rather unusual moves may be required. In this and succeeding articles I shall attempt to analyze the principles of war which should be simulated, and the rules which may introduce “functional simulation” to the art of wargaming. Tactics or Strategy?
The first decision is a key one: do we simulate tactics or strategy? This is compounded by the problem that no really satisfactory definitions of strategy and tactics exist, and neither is very well understood in the United States. For example, there is nowhere in this country a good work on modern tactics, and the study of tactics has largely been neglected for the study of something which we call strategy, but which is often not that either. This is a large subject, and not one to be settled in a single essay; the interested reader might refer to The Strategy of Technology, by S. T. Possony and J. E. Pournelle, University Press of Cambridge, Mass. for a fuller exposition on what I mean by that statement.
The average game of strategy, in any event, would be too complex, and simulation is extremely difficult because strategy operates against the will of the opponent rather than his means. Because there is no more penalty to a wargamer for losing utterly than there is for losing at all, it is difficult to make him surrender until his means of combat have been eliminated. I suppose rules could be devised in which a point system is employed, with a penalty to be paid for the number of points lost by the loser less those which he has gained against the winner, but then another difficulty arises: in the real world there are usually factors operating which make the victor anxious to accept the surrender of his enemy, in war games there is almost none, and consequently a player who is winning would be most reluctant to allow the loser to stop the war until the maximum number of points had been extracted. It is all a very difficult matter. and one which deserves more thought than we have time for in this article.
Consequently, we will discuss tactics more than grand tactics, and grand tactics more than strategy. The subject is, I think, large enough for our purposes.
Which Principles of War?
The next problem is, which principles of war do we wish to emphasize? For that matter, which list of principles will we accept? Every serious student has his own set of “the” principles of war, and few lists are alike. Again, for our purposes, we will have to be satisifed with an arbitrary set of principles which seem appropriate for gaming, leaving the question of which are the correct principles of war to another discussion.
It seems to me that the most important principle of war neglected in popular games is the Principle of Surprise. Surprise has probably won more battles than all the other factors combined. Certainly it has provided most clear wins by a side which should reasonably be expected to lose. Consequently, let us examine the characteristics of surprise as it operates in real battles, and how it might be simulated in games.
Surprise consists of doing what the opponent is certain you will not or cannot do. Classical examples are: night marches, attacks by inferior forces, the use of equipment, troops, or weapons in totally unexpected ways, attacks through “impassable” terrain, and “secret weapons” which quite often have not been secret in the sense of being unknown, but secret in the sense of a capability previously unexpected, such as when infantry has been trained to make forced marches at speeds not thought possible.
Many of these kinds of surprise are impossible in gaming. There is no way, at least none known to me, in which we can unexpectedly increase the striking radius of the gaming pieces, or change the terrain rules in the middle of the game, or combine forces in such a way that together they have a higher combat factor than they do separately. Certainly we could do any of these things, possibly by some kind of card drawing or random number system; but the resultant would not be the mind-numbing shock of the totally unexpected, because the opponent would know from the rules that such things were possible. The true effect of surprise goes beyond the immediate effect to a paralysis of the opponent’s will; if he could do that, then what else might he be able to do? Wars have been won by exploiting that kind of surprise.
We can, however, introduce surprise by imperfect intelligence; allow a player to do, if not the totally unexpected, then at least something which the opponent has dismissed as highly unlikely. The best way to achieve this at the game board, in my judgment, is through the matchbox system. In this system, each player has a certain number of headquarters-type pieces, and for each such piece a matchbox or envelope. At any time a player may move a certain number of combat pieces up to the headquarters and take them off the board to be placed in the corresponding matchbox. The HQ then moves on the board, and the combat pieces are considered to be stacked on top of it, or, in non-stacking games, in the squares through which the headquarters has last moved. Obviously, by judicious moving of the headquarters units together and then apart, a player can create confusion as to just what units are in any given formation containing headquarters pieces, so much so that what appears to be a minor raid might well be a full armored army, while what seems to be a major attack might be a reconaissance in force. The matchboxes are used to keep the players honest; only those pieces in the matchbox can be claimed to be with the on-board HQ.
This rule alone can produce a major effect on wargames; I have seen the emergence of an army in a totally unexpected place bring about a paralysis of will that brought defeat to an otherwise winning player. I have also seen the fear of surprise attack stop an advance even though there was in fact no real strength opposing it. In my judgment the rule should become a standard rule in all board-type wargames.
The second most neglected factor in wargaming is the principle of Economy of Forces, the judicious combination of units of different types to bring about a force sufficient for the objective set. Again, the really great exploitations of this principle are denied the gamer. We cannot change the rules in the middle of the game, or discover a new use for infantry-cavalry combinations unknown to the opponent. We can, however, provide a rich variety of really different units, each with a special capability. This was discussed at great length in my previous article on “The Decisive Arm” and cannot be repeated here. Therefore, we will only examine some possibilities open to the wargamer.
First, it seems to me, we will need complexity, and complexity is generally the enemy of playability. ln this case there is no help for it and what we must do is strive to make our complexities such that we do not lose ourselves in them. What we need is a variety of kinds of units which have some really fundamental differences between them, not merely differences in strength and mobility.
For example: in Waterloo, the artillery should be allowed to stack without limit. This means that a player who has husbanded his artillery can bring an enormous concentration of force against a single point-much as Napoleon was able to do. The P-A-A player, on the other hand, should be prevented from stacking dissimilar units, and in particular forbidden to place Prussians with Allies. Adding this rule and the matchbox rule produces a game of Waterloo entirely different from the standard game, and one which I think is more interesting. It automatically provides a role for cavalry as well—reconnaissance becomes absolutely necessary, with cavalry making sweeps to locate the enemy artillery prior to setting up a defensive position or mounting a major attack. Without such knowledge, the player is nearly blinded and can be surprised. In modern games, armor can have unique stacking capabilities, as infantry, or infantry-armor combinations, can stack.
The last principle we shall examine in this article is the Principle of Uncertainty: No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. It is the first maxim that the aspiring commander must learn. This was, to some extent, brilliantly incorporated into the original Avalon Hill combat results tables. It has been less and less so as time went on, and I fear the results when the new non-random combat results rules become universal as they seem destined to do.
In simulation, you can never eliminate uncertainties. There is always a chance that a small unit, ordered to die to a man, will in fact repulse a much larger unit ordered to attack without quarter. The chance may be small, but it is there, and the really great generals have been those who understood this and made contingency plans for unlikely events. If we are to keep realism in our wargames, we must have uncertainty.
At the same time, there is no question but that the old, rigid combat tables were wrong. The defense should have the option of bugging out to save his forces, and the attacker should have the option of making feints rather than full-scale attacks. On the other hand, the uncertainties need to be preserved. A withdrawal in the face of a cavalry attack, for example, can be very difficult and might even result in greater losses than an attempt to hold the position. The possibilities are easy to speculate on. harder to simulate.
Still, simulation is not impossible. Better combat tables could be devised by spending a lot more time analyzing what happens in particular situations and adjusting the probabilities accordingly. Other future articles will analyse the Principle of Pursuit, the Principle of the Objective, the Principle of Unity of Command, Logistics and Supply, and the Center of Gravity, a European concept almost totally neglected in U.S. military analyses.
Jerry once told me that if in early 1951 General MacArthur had said, “Boys, it’s time to clear out the nest of traitors in the White House. Who is going with me?” he would have been on the first flight to Washington with his hero.
After Korea, Pournelle went to West Point for a while, was a Communist briefly, and earned numerous advanced degrees in a variety of hard and soft subjects. He became an aerospace engineer at Boeing and several other companies and spent 1964 writing a Dr. Strangelove-style study for the Air Force on how a nuclear war would be fought in 1975.
He pored over satellite photos of the Soviet Union, counting the ratio of trucks to horse-drawn carts, eventually concluding that rather than the wave of the economic future, the U.S.S.R. represented “Bulgaria with nuclear missiles.” With his mentor, Viennese spymaster Stefan Possony of the Hoover Institution, Jerry wrote The Strategy of Technology, arguing that the way to win the Cold War was to turn it into a high-tech competition over who could innovate faster….
Besides being an engineer and a college professor, Jerry ran political campaigns. When I was a seventh grader, I used to write lengthy letters haranguing my new congressman, Barry Goldwater Jr., and getting dutiful replies in return. I only learned recently that the poor scion of the 1964 Republican nominee had never much wanted to go into politics. Goldwater Jr. had been perfectly happy as a stockbroker dating Warner Brothers starlets until Jerry had enlisted his famous name to run for the House.
Jerry also managed Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty’s epic 1969 reelection victory over the moderate black challenger Tom Bradley.
Jerry’s breakthrough into science fiction came when he teamed up with an established author, Larry Niven (Ringworld), to write the 1974 hard sci-fi novel The Mote in God’s Eye, an immigration-policy allegory of astounding intellectual depth.
Just a reminder that THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. II is still free today. An excerpt from my second favorite story of the collection, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu.
The silent hall was cold. From behind walnut walls, the air conditioner hummed quietly. A stately crowd of spectators radiated bristling energy from the rigid square rows of seats. They sat against the walls, their attention fixed on the dramatic events at the center of the room. Giant video screens high on each wall gave them the elegant details.
The heavy brown drapes and plush burgundy carpet absorbed the excess vitality from the atmosphere. They imparted a dignified solemnity to the ritualistic proceedings and infused the imperatives of business with a sense of duty. Two huge cables hung from the ceiling, suspending old-fashioned horizontal fans with broad, lazy blades and globular white lights at their hubs.
Beneath the sleepy fans, Wendell Chong Wei repressed the surge of elation that threatened to rock his relentless control. He studied the video screen right before him, and his fingers danced on the console to maintain the non-stop pace. Victory should be certain now, but only if he remained clear of mistakes. He drew sharply on the depths of insecurity for a renewal of killer instinct.
On the other side of the complex, out of sight, his opponent sat before her own screen, drawing back her cavalry, hoping that Wendell would allow his own cavalry charges to overextend themselves. No chance.
“Remember, in reality the Seljuks actually circled, and took the baggage and non-combatants. Leave St. Gilles there, even now. Curthose continues to rally well; Tancred’s charges will carry the day. That’s right—restraint. We’re outnumbered; keep together.”
Richard nodded in the back of Wendell’s mind and stopped talking. The smell of blood and dust and lathered horses arose to envelop Wendell’s sensibility as he regrouped the members of the First Crusade, now victorious at Doryleum on the road to Antioch. Frustrated, the Seljuk Turks remained on the horizon, taunting the Crusaders to break ranks.
Wendell refused. In the center of the screen, a digital clock appeared over the words “Victory Conditions, First Crusade. End game.” The screen blanked.
St. Gilles was dead once more. Bohemund was dead again. The Saracens and Crusaders had returned yet another time to their desiccated graves in the sand.
Wendell swallowed, and rose on weak knees to scattered clapping. His opponent, also looking infirm at the moment, stood and offered her hand without comment, and they shook perfunctorily. Wendell eased himself away from the chair, shaking, suddenly reeling in the sweat and nervousness that he always forgot in the heat of gaming itself. His twenty-nine years seemed far too few to account for this.
An attendant rushed over to escort him away “Nice work,” said Richard.
“Same to you,” Wendell thought back. He wiped his palms on the sides of his chocolate-brown suit jacket. “But, uh, how did you know Robert Curthose could hold fast? In the middle of that retreat? His record’s not so good, back in Normandy.”
The attendant showed Wendell to a comfortable reception room with loungers and plenty of refreshments. When he had gone, Richard said, “He really did that, you know.”
“No, I didn’t. But I learned to listen to you a long time ago.”
“More than that, though, it was deep in his psychological makeup. That’s how I could count on it. If he—” The door opened, and Richard stopped. Wendell collapsed into a lounger. He despised receptions. People scared him. They scared Richard even worse. The ones entering now were the contractors for the two recent opponents, and his erstwhile opponent herself. The contractors were all bustling with talk and laughter. Wendell was too exhausted to tell them apart, and couldn’t remember all their names anyway. His latent bitterness with the whole business kept him from caring.
An excerpt from my favorite story in my favorite TWBW volume, Vol. II, which is free today. Those who have read my story in Forbidden Thoughts, “The Amazon Gambit”, will no doubt recognize from whence the inspiration came. But don’t worry about spoilers no matter which you read first. Although the setups are similar, the plot twists are entirely different. “Cincinnatus” is an excellent mil-SF short story written by one of my early writing heroes, Joel Rosenburg. As it happens, my first attempt at a novel was an imitation of his Sword and Flame books. Spacebunny and I had the good fortune to go shooting with him and his wife one evening, after which we had dinner, and he roared with laughter when, after a few glasses of wine, I shamefacedly admitted as much to him.
The log cabin was drafty, and cold; I moved a bit closer to the open fireplace, and took a deep draught from the stone tankard. It was real Earth coffee, black and rich.
The old man chuckled, as though over some private joke.
“What the hell is so funny?” I didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of my voice. I’d travelled for over seven hundred hours to reach Thellonee and find Shimon Bar-El; and every time I’d try to bring up the reason I’d come from Metzada, the old bastard would just chuckle and change the subject, as though to tell me that we’d discuss business at his pleasure, not mine.
“You are what is so funny. Tetsuki. Nephew.” Bar-El sat back in his chair, shaking his head. He set his mug down, and rubbed at his eyes with arthritis-swollen knuckles. It’s kind of strange, that: I bear the first name of one of our Nipponese ancestors—Tetsuo Nakamura, my g’g’g’g’g’grandfather—but he has the epicanthic folds. Me, I look like a sabra.
“And why am I so funny? Uncle?” You traitor. There isn’t a nastier word in the language than that. Metzada is dependent on credits earned offworld by the Metzadan Mercenary Corps, the MMC, and that depends on our reputation. There hadn’t been any proof that Bar-El had taken a payoff on Oroga; if there had, he would have been hanged, not cashiered and exiled.
Although, the argument could be made that hanging would have been kinder—but, never mind that, the suspicion alone had been enough to strip him of rank and citizenship.
I would have given a lot if we didn’t need him now.
“Well,” he said, setting his mug down and rubbing at the knuckles of his right hand with the probably just-as-arthritic fingers of his left, “you’ve been here all day; and you haven’t asked me if I really did take that payoff.” He cocked his head to one side, his eyes going vague. “I can remember when that was of some importance to you, Inspector General.” The accent on Inspector was a dig. Unlike Bar-El, I’ve always been a staff officer; the only way I could get my stars was through the IG rank— there simply aren’t any other generals in the MMC that don’t command fighting forces.
“I… don’t really care. Not anymore.” I had trouble getting the next words out. “Because we’ve come up with a way for you to earn your way back home.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that. You’ve never understood me, Tetsuo Hanavi—but I can read you. Like a book. There’s a contract that’s come up, right?”
“Yes, and—
“Shut up while I’m speaking. I want to show you how well I know you—it’s a low-tech world, correct?”
I shrugged. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “And why do I think I’m so smart? Let me tell you more about the contract. It’s high pay, and tough, and it looks like there’s no way to do whatever the locals are paying the MMC to do.”
I nodded. “Right. And we’re short of low-tech specializing general officers. Gevat is off on Schriftalt; Kinter and Cohen are bogged down on Oroga; and my brother’s still home, recovering from the Rand Campaign. So—”
Concern creased his face. “Ari’s hurt?”
“Not too badly. He took a Jecty arrow in the liver. It’s taking a while to regenerate, but he’ll make it.” He nodded. “Good. He’s a good man. Too good to be wasted on quelling the peon revolts.” Bar-El snorted. “Did you know that Rand was settled by a bunch of idiots who wanted to get away from any kind of government?”
I didn’t, actually. I’d just assumed that the feudocracy there had always been there. Ancient history bores me. “No—but we’re getting off the subject.” I spread my hands. “The point is, that you’re the only one who’s ever generated a low-tech campaign who’s available.”
He pulled a tabstick out of a pocket, and puffed it to life. “If I’m available. What’s in it for me?”
I tapped at my chest pocket. “I’ve got a Writ of Citizenship here. If you can salvage the situation, you can go home.” I waved my hand around the room. “Unless you prefer this… squalor.”
He sat silently for a moment, puffing at his tabstick. “You’ve got my commission in another pocket?”
“A temporary one, yes.” I shook my head. “I’m not offering to have you permanently reinstated, traitor.”
Shimon Bar-El smiled. “Good. At least you’re being honest. Who’s the employer?”
“The lowlanders, on—”
“Indess. So, Rivka manipulated them into asking for me.”
“What do you mean?” He was absolutely right, of course, but there was no way that he should have known that. The Primier had kept the negotiations secret; outside of the lowlanders’ representatives, I am the only one who knew how Rivka Effron had suckered them into a payment under-all-contingencies contract, with Bar-El in command.
He shrugged. “I know how her mind works, too. If anyone else were to fail—regardless of what the contract says—it’d be bad for Metzada’s reputation. But, if they’d asked for Bar-El the Traitor, insisted on him—at least, that’s the way the transcript would read—it’d be on their own heads. Right?”
He was exactly right. “Of course not.” But my orders were specific; I wasn’t to admit anything of the sort. Shimon Bar-El was a sneaky bastard—it was entirely possible that our conversation was being taped, despite the poverty of the surroundings.
Bar-El drained the last of his coffee. “I’ll believe what my own mind tells me, not words from a staff officer.” He said that like a curse. “Of course, it’s out of the question. I’m sorry that you had to come such a long way, but I’m happy here. No intention of leaving; not to be the sacrificial lamb.” He set his tankard down. “I don’t bleat any too well.”
“You arrogant bastard.” I stood. “Think you’re unique, that I’ll offer you a permanent commission if you’ll take this one on.” I picked up my bag. “Well, we’re going to take this contract, anyway. The offer’s just too good to pass up—I’ll handle it myself, if I have to.”
He spat. “Don’t be silly. You don’t have the experience. A lot of soldiers would die, just because—”
“Shut your mouth, traitor. You’re wrong. Maybe I don’t have any field experience, but nobody does, not against cavalry. And—”
“Cavalry? As in horses?”
“No, cavalry as in giant mice—of course it’s horses.”
He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t see the problem— you just set up your pikemen, let them impale their critters against your line. Take a bit of discipline, even for Metzadans, to hold the line, but—”
I sneered. “That’s fine for a meeting engagement, where they have to come to you—but how about a siege? All they have to do is use their cavalry to harass our flanks, and we can’t ever get the towers up. And we’ve got to use towers: there’s no deposits of sulfur available, so there’s no way we can make gunpowder. Not with what the Thousand Worlds will let us bring in. Low-tech world, remember?”
“You’ve got the tech reports in your bag?”
“Of course I—”
“Let me see them.” He held out a hand. “We’re both going to have to study them.”
“Both?” I didn’t understand. Then again, I’ve never understood my uncle.
“Both.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “Me, ’cause I’m taking this. And you, because you get to be my exec.” As I handed him my bag, he took the blue tech report folder out, and started spreading papers around on the floor. “We’re going to get you some field experience, we are.” He studied the sheets silently for a few moments. “I’ll want all the equipment special-ordered, make sure it gets through inspection. You got that, Colonel?”
“Colonel?”
“You just got demoted, nephew. I don’t like to see stars on anybody’s shoulders but mine.” He picked up a topographical map. “Cavalry, eh?
The CEO of Restoration Hardware reaches the same conclusion as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble: online advertising accomplishes nothing. More at Zerohedge.
I’ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.
We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that’s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they’re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.
I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don’t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn’t get it.
And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don’t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I’m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don’t we get the data and then let, review the data?
And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there’s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?
And they said, well, we’ve found out that 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?
Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they’re going to Restoration Hardware and there’s a Pottery Bam there, they’re already squatting, okay? It doesn’t mean they’re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale’s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn’t mean they’re going to go to Zale’s and buy a diamond.
I mean, I can’t believe how many companies buy their own name and they’re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They’re going to look at their investments. They’d go, maybe we don’t need to buy our own name.
I’ve seen absolutely ZERO benefit to buying Google ads or Facebook ads myself. I’ve never bothered with Twitter ads or any other social media advertising. I’ve seen very, very moderate success buying Amazon ads. What has been far more successful is a) the Castalia House email lists, b) blogging about and excerpting books, c) the book carousels on the sidebar, and d) Tweeting about new books.
Of course, I’ve always been skeptical about digital advertising. Except for the way it can amplify word of mouth, it’s always struck me as a dubious proposition. You’ll notice that I’ve never been very prone to permitting anyone else to advertise here either, for just that reason.
Jerry Pournelle died on Friday, peacefully in his sleep. With his death, America lost an important figure… But Pournelle didn’t just write fiction. His 1970 book with Stefan Possony, The Strategy of Technology, outlined a strategy for winning the Cold War (with among other things, an emphasis on strategic missile defense) that was largely followed, and successfully, by the Reagan administration. He was a driving force behind the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy in the 1980s that helped lay the groundwork for today’s booming civilian space launch industry. And, for me, his wide-ranging columns in Galaxy Magazine, back when it was edited by star editor James Baen, were particularly influential.
I was a kid in the 1970s, which was not a great era to be a kid. We had Vietnam and Watergate, the Apollo space program quit abruptly, oil prices skyrocketed and so did inflation. Even a hamburger was expensive.
And while that was going on, the voices in the media were all preaching gloom and doom. Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, in his book The Population Bomb, was predicting food riots in America due to overpopulation. A group called The Club of Rome published a report titled The Limits to Growth that suggested it was all over for Western technological civilization. Bookstore displays were filled with books like The Late Great Planet Earth that announced the end times. And if that weren’t enough, most people figured we were heading for a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. It looked like we were headed for some sort of apocalyptic future in which Charlton Heston would be the only survivor besides a few apes or mutants.
But Jerry Pournelle never bought it. In his Galaxy columns — eventually collected and published in book form, and still in print — he actually did the math. The fact was, he reported, we could not only survive but, in his words, survive with style.
Castalia House is republishing The Strategy of Technology later this year. Also, today and tomorrow, we are giving away my favorite volume in the entire There Will Be War series, namely, Volume II. It is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions”, an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.
These stories are great and many of them remain relevant today. Just last month, Castalia House was contacted by a U.S. military war college and asked for permission to give out copies of There Will Be War Vol. II to the officers in the class, which permission we obviously granted.
That is what real influence looks like. Most of the authors and the editor are gone now, but the beauty of the written word is that it provides the author with a voice even after death.
This is an excerpt from Moth & Cobweb Book 6, Tithe to Tartarus, now the #1 New Release in Children’s Supernatural Books. The entire Moth & Cobweb series, beginning with Swan Knight’s Son, is now available via Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
