Praxis def-1

by Walter Jon Williams

  The pair fired, and the next pair, all firing normally.

  Martinez decided to put more distance between himself and any detonating antimatter. “Engines, high gravity warning.” The sirens wailed.

  “High gee warning, my lord.”

  Martinez ordered a resumption of the six-gravity acceleration.

  Now we’ll see how they react, he thought as the leaden weights of gravity were added one by one to his chest.

  The Naxids must have seen his missile launches, and known thatCorona had teeth. They had to understand that their dense-packed formation of eight offensive missiles would be obliterated byCorona’s counterfire. But it wasn’t too late to save their barrage: they could send orders to the individual missiles to diverge, to separate so they couldn’t all be knocked out at once.

  But they didn’t.Corona’s first pair of missiles exploded right in the middle of the enemy salvo, destroying them all in the plasma fireball created when the exploding antihydrogen hit the tungsten surrounding the warhead. A wild, furious cloud of radiation erupted betweenCorona and Magaria, preventing eitherCorona or the Naxids from seeing what was happening on the other side.

  The radiation gradually cooled and faded. The first objects the sensors could detect, through the weakening shroud, were the burning tails of missiles five and six heading for the ring; the second thing were missile tails as well, the second salvo of eight fired fromFerogash.

  “Twenty-four minutes till impact, my lord.”

  That gave Martinez a comfortable amount of time to deal with them. It wasn’t until four of those minutes had passed thatCorona’s radars finally detected missiles three and four falling toward the enemy with their torches extinguished, speed increasing as they were drawn toward Magaria by the invisible threads of gravity.

  “The enemy salvo is still flying bunched up, my lord.”

  The Naxids, their attack having failed once, were trying the same thing all over again. Martinez could only hope they’d keep this up.

  As he stared at the displays he realized that both he and the Naxids were improvising. Standard fleet tactics assumed that both sides would be moving fast, perhaps at a significant fraction of the speed of light, on courses more or less converging. Tactics assumed that the largest problem would be to detect the exact location of enemy ships, since ships could alter their trajectory significantly from the moment any radar or ranging laser detected them until the signal returned to the sender. Since the distances involved made ship-killing lasers useless-at.3c, it did not take a lot of maneuvering to evade a beam of light that, however fast, moved only in a straight line-offensive action was taken with intelligent missiles that, with guidance, could chase their targets down. Lasers were relegated to last-ditch point-defense weaponry to be aimed at missiles homing in on a target. Missiles were maneuvered en route to the target, both to anticipate the target’s evasions and to avoid countermeasures, and they would maneuver behind exploding screens of antimatter that hid them from the enemy, and hid friendly squadrons as well.

  So far as Martinez knew, no one had ever developed tactics based on one side running away, from a standing start, while the other stood still, firing missiles at what amounted to point-blank range, barely exceeding a light-second. The irony was that the tactical problem was so dead easy that all the sophisticated tactics developed over the centuries were useless. What the situation called for were ship-killing lasers, since the range was so short that evasion was impossible, but those big lasers didn’t exist. What remained was a slagging match, pure and simple, a giant and a dwarf hammering each other with fists from a range of a few inches.

  In order to survive, Martinez thought, the dwarf had better think fast and stay nimble.

  He configured two missiles to destroy the enemy salvo, then hesitated. One missile might be enough to do the job.

  He had six reloads for each missile battery, making ninety-six altogether. He’d just burned six. He didn’t know how many missiles the enemy squadrons held, but there had to be thousands, with more stored in the huge magazines of Magaria’s ring station.

  It might be that he couldn’t afford to spend more than one missile on the attacking salvo. The Naxids could fire eight missiles to his one and stay well ahead.

  He decided to fire only the one missile.

  “Two more missile tracks, my lord.”

  These, Martinez decided, were aimed at his own fifth and sixth missiles, the ones targeted on the ring. He had anticipated these missiles being targeted and wasn’t upset at losing them. Instead he plotted the intersection points to make sure they could be useful to him. He fired his own missile and timed it to intercept the oncoming salvo before the enemy’s interceptors would hit his own missiles five and six.

  At which point, now concealed from detection by the vast cloud of radiation shooting outward from the destruction of nine antimatter missiles, he fired his decoy, altered course twenty-three degrees to port, staying within the plane of the ecliptic, and pushed his acceleration to ten gees.

  When the concealing cloud began to disperse, the enemy interceptors hit his own missiles five and six, providing two more concealing clouds that maskedCorona for several more minutes. When the radiation began to disperse, Martinez cut his own engines and drifted.

  What the Naxids saw now on their screens was the decoy-a missile configured to reflect a radar image of approximately the same size asCorona — burning at a steady six gees acceleration onCorona’s own course. Their radars would also seeCorona, of course, but Martinez hoped they wouldn’t find him interesting. If he was just a symbol on their screens, they might not consider him worthy of investigation, not like the decoy that was so obviously attracting attention to itself. They might think he was a piece of debris, and only if they configured their sensors to show the actual size of the radar blip would they see thatCorona was the size of a frigate.

  Throughout all this, Martinez remembered, missiles three and four were falling, silently, unobtrusively, toward Magaria. Lawn-green projectiles with deadly white footballs painted on the nose.

  While he was waiting for the Naxids to respond, he made a general announcement and told everyone to get into their vac suits, only to receive a reply from Maheshwari.

  “The engine room crew is already suited, my lord.”

  It was the first word he’d had directly from Maheshwari sinceCorona had departed its berth.

  “Very good,” Martinez said, for lack of anything better, then unstrapped to wrestle himself into the suit that had been hanging in Command’s suit locker all this time. As he was ripping off his trousers he encountered the pistol belt, and hesitated.

  His crew, his little kingdom of nineteen souls, had followed him on this mad enterprise. Perhaps it was because of the habit of following orders, perhaps because of his calm pose of authority in a confusing situation…and maybe it was because they were afraid he might use the pistol. But they were all committed now, one way or another, and the pistol was a clumsy thing that had already scored a bruise on his hip.

  He rolled up the pistol belt and stuffed the weapon into the suit locker.

  He was partway through attaching the sanitary gear in the lower half of the suit when Clarke, who continued to watch the screens while her partner suited, gave a sudden shout.

  “Missile tracks! Lots of them! FromFerogash, fromKashma, fromMajesty — they’reall firing, my lord!”

  Martinez kicked himself into the suit and lunged for the command cage, then called up the sensor screens. Each ship in the Naxid squadrons had fired a salvo at exactly the same moment.

  “Any of them headed forus? ” Martinez demanded.

  “Ahh…it’s too early to tell, my lord.”

  Martinez hung in the cage and continued to attach the sanitary gear while the situation developed, and it was soon obvious that the decoy hadn’t worked. Of the 164 missiles that had been fired, too many were heading directly forCorona, and too few for the decoy.

  But the Naxids had made a mistake in
firing so many all at the same moment. Although the weapons directors on the individual ships were taking care to maneuver their missiles from the start and not to let them fly in formation asFerogash had, still they were coming in one broad wave, and Martinez was able to tailor his defense to swat large numbers of enemy missiles out of the void with each interceptor he sent.

  The Naxids would have done better to have each ship fire a salvo ten seconds apart, he thought. Then he would have had to use up a lot more missiles to intercept them.

  Radiation clouds bloomed in the displays asCorona’s counterfire wiped out most of the Naxid onslaught. Fourteen enemy missiles survived, all of which were killed byCorona’s point-defense lasers. Cadet Kelly proved to have a knack with the lasers, anticipating the missiles’ jinks and knocking them down regardless.

  By then the crew in Command were suited andCorona was under acceleration again, six gees for Wormhole 4. Martinez had eighty-one missiles left.

  And he still had the two missiles falling toward Magaria’s ring, both of which he watched on the monitors with burning interest. If just one of them got home, the rebellion was over, along with the lives of about four or five million sentient beings.

  Apparently, the Naxids eventually noticed at least one of the two missile-sized packages falling toward them, because missile four was hit by a defensive laser and destroyed, its antimatter contents spraying out in an uncontrolled fan, never quite managing a large explosion but creating a spectacular radiation cloud. The cloud must have confused enemy sensors, or their operators, because missile three was able to drift closer before it fired its engine and oriented on its target, the Fleet’s ring station.

  Defensive lasers were tardy in responding, and caught the incoming missile only a few seconds from detonation. The missile blew anyway, just north of the ring station, causing a fireball nearly as powerful as if the missile had detonated normally. Martinez watched in knuckle-gnawing suspense as the radiation cloud engulfed the ring station like a wave flinging itself over the shore.

  “Fire battery one,” Martinez ordered. Eight missiles leaped from the rails, oriented on the ring, and ignited. Martinez sent their targeting data as they sped on their way.

  Again he gnawed a knuckle as he watched the radiation cloud slowly disperse from the ring station. The Magaria ring remained intact, a thin, brilliant silver band rolling around the planet without any sign of damage, without any visible fires or gaping holes in its structure.

  What failed to occur was retaliation. The Naxids’ missile batteries remained silent.

  It was the ring’s point-defense lasers that blew away theCorona’s eight-missile barrage, destroying all of them before they could endanger the ring.

  But through it all, no ships fired. Martinez wondered in pure dazzled surprise if somehow he’d killed them.

  Hours passed. Without the prospect of imminent death to focus his mind on escape, Martinez remembered his intention to get word out to the rest of the empire. The civilian ships in the system had just witnessed a spectacular combat, and were no doubt wondering whether they would be embroiled in the terrifying situation they had just seen engulf the Fleet and Magaria’s ring. Martinez sent messages to each of them via comm laser, explaining that Naxid mutineers had seized the ring station and the fleet, that the wormhole relay stations were also compromised, and he asked the ships’ captains to inform the nearest Fleet element as soon as they left the Magaria system.

  It was fully five hours before Martinez found out the enemy weren’t all dead.Majesty of the Praxis, Fanaghee’s flagship, fired a full twelve-missile salvo, each missile taking a wildly different track towardCorona. The different tracks meant they arrived at different times, and provided plenty of time for Kelly and Martinez, working together, to hit them all with the defensive lasers-all save one, which targetedCorona’s hitherto useless decoy and blew it up.

  The missiles, fired from a standing start, never gained enough speed en route to successfully evadeCorona’s defenses. Knocking them down became sport: Martinez found that he enjoyed the kind of synchrony into which he and Kelly fell as they chose and destroyed the targets; and he enjoyed her broad grin as she aimed and fired, and her little contralto yelp of triumph when she scored a hit.

  After the missiles were disposed of, Martinez ordered the acceleration reduced to half a gravity and called the cooks to ask ifCorona’s victory feast was salvageable. The cooks’ opinion was that the captain’s and officers’ suppers, with their delicate sauces applied liberally to the kitchen walls during the period of zero gee, were probably beyond hope, but that the heartier meal intended for the crew was probably capable of resuscitation. Martinez told them to get busy in the kitchen, and when they reported success, told the crew they could take off their vacuum suits and go in shifts to dinner.

  He ate on the second shift himself, after appointing Vonderheydte officer of the watch and leaving him strict instructions to call if anything changed. There were only eight crew eating on the second shift, served by the three cooks, and all ate in the enlisted mess, officers and enlisted together. The few diners made a lot of noise, however, and the mood was exuberant, the crew loudly thankful they’d evaded danger. Martinez noticed only one quiet crewman among the others, the captain’s secretary, Saavedra, who spoke little, frowned into his meal, and chewed with solemn deliberation.

  Martinez sat opposite Kelly. The lanky cadet was still wearing the broad grin she’d displayed when splashing oncoming missiles, and Martinez found himself reliving the escape with her, missile for missile, shot for shot. Exhilarated with relief and the memory of shared terror, they diagrammed shots in the air with their hands and talked in a rush, each sentence tumbling over the one before.

  I’m alive!Martinez thought. For the first time he allowed himself to bask in this miracle.I’m alive!

  “I was terrified you wouldn’t use the key when I tossed it to you,” Martinez said. “I was afraid you’d stand on regulations and refuse.”

  “When eight missiles were heading for us?” Kelly laughed. “I’m as devoted to the regs as anyone, but devotion can only go so far.”

  Alive!Martinez thought. Joy bubbled through his blood like champagne.

  He joined Kelly in the elevator that took them to Command deck. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for working so well with me.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and then added, “my lord.”

  The elevator stopped and Martinez began to step out, then hesitated. Wild impulse fluttered in his chest. “I don’t mean to offend,” he said, “but would you like to drop another deck with me and, ah, celebrate our survival?”

  The recreation chambers were one bulkhead below their feet. Kelly looked at him in surprise. “Aren’t our tummies a little full right now?” she said.

  “You could get on top,” Martinez explained. “I wouldn’t have my weight on you that way.”

  She barked a short, incredulous laugh, and gazed out of the elevator to the corridor outside, as if expecting an audience for this surprising comedy routine. “Well, Lord Lieutenant,” she said, “I have a guy on Zanshaa, and it seemsCorona’s going back there.”

  “I understand.”

  “And it’s a bad idea to get involved with a senior.”

  “That’s wise,” Martinez nodded.

  She looked up at him. Her black eyes glittered and her broad grin was still plastered to her face. “You know what?” she said. “The hell with all that. We’vealready broken all the rules.”

  “That’s right,” Martinez agreed, “we have.”

  The “biological recreational chambers”-so infamous outside the Fleet, and the subject of endless jokes both inside the Fleet and out-originated not in the lustful mind of some Fleet holejumper, but as an unstated confession of bewilderment by the Great Masters themselves. The Shaa, after their conquest of Terra, were perplexed by the varieties of sexuality displayed by their new conquests, and had wisely made no attempt to regulate any of its variety. Instead they’d i
nsisted, in the most unsentimental, practical way, on minimizing the consequences: every Terran female had to be given a contraceptive implant at some point during her fourteenth year. Any woman having reached twenty-two, the age of maturity, could have the implant removed at any time by a physician, while younger women required the permission of a parent or guardian. The number of unwanted children, though not eliminated altogether, was at least brought within manageable levels.

  The Fleet’s attitude toward sexuality was even less sentimental, if possible, than that of the Shaa. Though officially the Fleet claimed it didn’t care who coupled with whom, customs had developed over the centuries to restrain at least a few of the crew’s impulses. Division chiefs were discouraged from relations with their subordinates, because of the danger of coercion or of playing favorites. Relations between officers and enlisted were likewise discouraged, at least if they belonged to the same ship-Martinez’s connection with Warrant Officer Taen was well within the Fleet’s range of tolerance. And relations between the captain and any of his crew was not only considered a violation of custom, but bad luck as well.

  A loophole served the officers, however, since they were allowed servants, with whom recreationals were unlimited. But this happened less often than an observer might expect: Martinez suspected that living with a paid companion in the close confines of a warship was too much like the least attractive aspects of a marriage-all the boredom and constraint of living intimately with a person one simply couldn’t escape, and all without the relaxation and charm of getting away from routine to visit a lover in her own place.

  Coronahad eight recreation tubes, two of them forward and reserved for officers. Martinez properly logged himself into the recreation chamber so that Vonderheydte could page him if he was needed. Martinez was expecting missile launches or some other emergency any second, and there was little time for preliminary caresses or endearments. He was surprised at the desperate quality of his own desires, the unexpected fury of his lust. Kelly mirrored his urgency, lost in explosive pleasure nearly from the start, clutching at him with the little red-knuckled fists at the end of her long, slim forearms.Alive! he thought.Alive!