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“I wonder,” he said, “if this would be your advice as well.”
    Lord Chen struggled to master his thoughts. “Your brother…does he give reasons for his opinion?”
    “No. Though perhaps he considers the defeat at Magaria a self-evident enough reason.”
    So Gareth Martinez wasn’t handing out military secrets to his family, a breach of discretion that would have set Lord Chen to worrying about how confidential his connection to the Martinez clan was likely to remain.
    “I would say,” he said with care, “that there is reason for concern, but there is no need to evacuate at present.”
    Lord Roland nodded gravely. “Thank you, Lord Chen.”
    “Not at all.”
    He reached forward and touched Lord Chen lightly on the hand. Lord Chen looked in surprise at the touch.
    “I know that you have no fear for yourself,” Lord Roland said, “but a prudent man should take no chances with his family. I want you to have the comfort of knowing that should you ever decide that Lady Chen and Terza should leave Zanshaa, they are welcome at my father’s estate on Laredo—and in fact they are welcome to travel with my sisters, in our family cruiser.”
    Let’s hope it won’t ever come to that, Lord Chen thought, appalled. But instead he smiled again and said, “That’s a kind thought, and I thank you. But I’ve already arranged for a ship to be standing by.”
     
    “The fault of the Home Fleet at Magaria,” Captain Kamarullah said, “is that they failed to maintain a close enough formation. They needed to mass their defensive firepower to blast their way through the oncoming missiles.”
    Martinez watched the other captains absorb this statement. The virtual universe in his head consisted of four rows of four heads each, and smelled of suit seals and stale flesh. Martinez couldn’t read Do-faq’s face very well, or those of his eight Lai-own captains, and the two Daimong captains had expressionless faces to begin with, but the four humans, at least, seemed to be taking Kamarullah’s argument seriously. “How close should we get?” one of them even said.
    Martinez looked at the sixteen virtual heads that floated in his mind, took a deep breath, and ventured his own opinion. “With all respect, my lord, my conclusions differ. My belief is that the squadrons didn’t separate early enough.”
    Most turned curious eyes to him, but it was Kamarullah who spoke.
    “You call for a premature starburst? That’s a complete loss of command and control!”
    “My lord,” Martinez said, “that’s hardly worse than the loss of command and control that results when an entire squadron is wiped out. Now, if your lordships will bear with me, I’ve prepared a brief presentation…”
    The others watched while he beamed them selected bits of the Magaria battle, along with estimates of the numbers of incoming missiles, missiles destroyed by other missiles, by point-defense lasers and antiproton beams.
    “A defensive formation works well only up to a point,” Martinez said, “and then the system breaks down catastrophically. I can’t prove anything yet, but I suspect that antimatter missile explosions, with their bursts of heavy radiation and their expanding plasma shells, eventually create so much interference and confusion on the ships’ sensors that it becomes nearly impossible to coordinate an effective defense.
    “You’ll observe,” running the records again, “that the losses during the first part of the battle were equal, very sudden, and catastrophic for both sides. It was only when both sides had lost twenty ships or so that the enemy advantage in numbers became decisive, and then the attrition of our ships was steady right to the end. Lady Sula’s destruction of five enemy cruisers was the only successful attack made by the Home Fleet without equivalent or greater loss.
    “My conclusion,” looking again at the sixteen heads in their four rows, “is that our standard fleet tactics will produce a rough