The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez paused the message as he heard a knock on the door. He told Alikhan to come in, and as his orderly entered, said, “What’s between Do-faq and Kamarullah?”

  Alikhan paused for a moment, then silently slid the door shut behind him. “That would date from the maneuvers back in ’seventy-three, my lord,” he said. “There was a misunderstanding of an order that led to the maneuver being spoiled. The Fleet blamed Do-faq, and Do-faq blamed Kamarullah, who was tactical officer on the Glory at the time.”

  And now I’m in the middle, Martinez thought. The thought failed to depress him.

  Nor did the thought of his new and untried crew, the officers he didn’t know, the prospect of captains angry at being passed over, and the certain wrath of Kamarullah. He felt instead the onset of exhilaration, the tingle of blood and mind as he began to grapple with the challenges implied by Do-faq’s offer.

  “Thank you, Alikhan,” he said. And after Alikhan left, he told the comm board, “Reply, personal to Squadron Commander Do-faq,” and pressed the cipher key.

  The light came on that showed he was being recorded, and he gazed into the camera with a face that he hoped broadcast sincerity.

  “Though I fear you’re giving me far too much credit,” he said, “I am nevertheless honored to accept the appointment. I and the squadron will await your orders.”

  He had almost said my squadron, but had stopped himself at the last second.

  That, he decided, would be conceit.

  The next call came from Lieutenant Captain Kamarullah. He had a squarish face, a mustache, and the graying temples that suggested Do-faq’s wrath must have genuinely harmed his career—lieutenant captains were generally promoted well before their hair had a chance to go gray.

  “You could refuse the command,” Kamarullah said.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Martinez said, “but you know that Do-faq would just appoint someone else.”

  “You could all refuse,” Kamarullah urged. “If the squadron stood united against him, he’d have no choice.”

  “I regret the situation,” Martinez said, “but I’ve accepted the lord commander’s offer.”

  Kamarullah’s lips twisted. “Regret,” he repeated. “No doubt.”

  Martinez looked at the man coldly. “Captain’s breakfast meeting on Corona at 0601,” he said. “You may bring your senior lieutenant.”

  He’d get the Golden Orb out of its box, he thought, the real one, to demonstrate his authority.

  And if that didn’t work, he’d use it to clout Kamarullah on the head.

  Two hours before his breakfast meeting, Martinez was awakened by a messenger who had his sealed orders from the Fleet Control Board. He put on his dressing gown, signed for the orders, broke the seal, and read his squadron’s destination.

  Hone-bar. Do-faq was taking two squadrons to Hone-bar, over a month away. That would give him time to work up his ship and his squadron, to have both ready by the time they all arrived.

  He paged his steward and ordered coffee.

  And then he began to make plans.

  The Home Fleet continued its colossal acceleration runs, making circuits of Zanshaa and Vandrith, then swinging wider still to include other planets and Shaamah, the system’s sun. It was joined by the Daimong squadron from Zerafan, which was already at speed when it arrived, and was integrated with Jarlath’s forces without trouble.

  Do-faq’s Lai-own squadron from Preowin arrived, which would serve to protect the capital while the Home Fleet was away. After a month of punishing accelerations mixed with planning sessions with his staff and (by video) with his captains, after endless simulations of the attack, Jarlath no longer even considered holding his armed avengers back. The thought that all the work and pain might go for nothing was too outrageous to contemplate. He asked permission to attack Magaria, and permission was gladly given.

  Forty-four days after departing Zanshaa, traveling at .56c, the Home Fleet swung around Vandrith for the last time and headed for Zanshaa Wormhole 3 en route to Magaria. It would continue accelerating all the way and should be traveling in excess of .7c when it first slammed into Fanaghee’s fleet.

  Jarlath was weary and in pain, but content with his plans. He knew he was in for a hard fight, but all doubts were gone, and he knew that victory would be his.

  What he and everyone else privy to his intentions failed to realize was that the Home Fleet’s plans counted upon the enemy making mistakes, or having suffered critical personnel or equipment losses, or of being unable to fully crew or refit their ships.

  All these were dangerous assumptions to make, particularly when one remembered that the Naxids had been planning their rebellion for a long, long time.

  Fanaghee had done well with the time she’d been allotted. Martinez’s near-miss with his missile had hit her hard, but not fatally. The electromagnetic pulse from the explosion had raced through the communications net on the ring station and slagged it. All ships but Ferogash had been in their berths and connected via cables to station communications, and the EMP had burned along the cables and blown the ships’ comm rigs too.

  The military communications net was supposed to be hardened against such an attack, and the station had been hardened when it was built. But centuries of maintenance shortcuts had bypassed many of the safeguards, and the results left the Naxid command literally speechless.

  The secure design of Ring Command had been compromised more recently, in a retrofit that left a coolant pipe connected to the outside without proper safeguards against flash. Though Ring Command was surrounded by slabs of radiation shielding that should have kept everyone safe, the coolant reservoir and radiator was outside Command proper, and had no defenses against the wall of neutrons and energetic gamma rays generated by Martinez’s antimatter missile. The coolant was instantly vaporized, flashed into Ring Command, and scalded to death every person present, including Senior Captain Deghbal. The catastrophe was discovered many hours later, when Naxid personnel, unable to raise Ring Command after they had repaired their own comm systems, broke into the hardened facility and discovered Deghbal and her crew sprawled where the erupting poison had caught them.

  This was the worst of it, however. The station was on alert, all essential personnel were in hardened shelters either on the station or aboard ship, and none of the other shelters were subject to the same design errors that made Ring Command vulnerable. The radiation casualties consisted of a few stray civilians, prisoners from the captured vessels who had been herded to the base skyhook and were awaiting transport to the surface, and their guards. Ferogash lost its sensors but not its communications, though since there was no one to answer, its messages soon took on a plaintive cast.

  Fanaghee herself suffered nothing more than humiliation. She was in a skyhook car racing from the planet to the ring when its controls were knocked out, stranding her without communication in Magaria’s troposphere for eleven hours.

  But communication among the rest of her fleet was restored within hours. Within days the three ships charted by Premiere Axiom of Naxas docked at the ring station, disgorging hundreds of Naxid personnel to crew the captured vessels. They tended to be young and relatively inexperienced, or seniors drafted out of retirement, and had been told only hours earlier that they now served not the Commandery or the Convocation, but the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis.

  By the time the recruits arrived, gangs were already working at converting the captured ships to Naxid use. This was more than tearing out chairs and replacing them with sofas: the radiation-hardened rooms that would shelter the crew during combat had to be completely redesigned to accommodate the Naxid form.

  Fanaghee and her original two squadrons separated from the station two days after her reinforcements arrived, and from then on she controlled affairs from her flagship, Majesty of the Praxis. She and her squadrons began a series of heavy accelerations between Magaria, Barbas, and Rinconell, intending to provide a bulwark against any retaliation from the Home Flee
t at Zanshaa. The two squadrons under Elkizer joined, already traveling fast. And, one by one, the captured squadrons finished their refits and joined Fanaghee in her defensive circle.

  The squadrons from Felarus and Comador were committed elsewhere, but Naxas sent one-half of its ten-ship squadron to Magaria, reserving the others to defend the capital, and some small, individual ships joined from where they had been on detached duty, giving Fanaghee a total of seventy ships. She calculated that Jarlath at Zanshaa probably had fifty-five or so, if he had called in the Daimong from Zarafan, and she considered taking the offensive. The murder of the Naxid convocates had greatly offended her, and she wanted revenge upon the rioters who the enemy proclaimed as heroes, and had in mind for their punishment something more colorful than being thrown off a cliff. The only thing that held her back was the refitted ships, which hadn’t had time to match the speed of her other forces—once she had them all moving at the same rate, she would petition the committee for permission to seize Zanshaa.

  In the meantime she readied her defenses. Decoys were fired and echeloned to impersonate entire squadrons—to someone entering the system and gazing at a radar display, the space between Rinconell and Barbas would at first seem to be filled with a fleet three times its actual size. All ships were instructed to proceed without radar—if a newcomer was going to find them, he would have to wait for a radar pulse to reach them and then reflect back, a process that could take hours. Fanaghee arranged her squadrons in their looping trajectories so that any enemy emerging from Wormhole 1 would be sandwiched between two fires, one squadron ahead, another behind.

  The captured ships with their new crews gradually built speed. Fanaghee was within a day of petitioning the Committee for permission to launch her strike at the capital when word came from the relay station on the far side of Wormhole 1 that the Home Fleet was on its way, and coming fast.

  Scant hours later, the Home Fleet had arrived, and Fanaghee’s plans were put to the test.

  FIFTEEN

  Sula fought her way out of unconsciousness with an urgent tone bleating in her earphones and panic in her heart. For a moment she flailed, feeling the smothering pillow pressed to her face, and then her mind cleared and she realized she was in her pinnace, with the computer demanding a decision. She clenched jaw muscles, forced blood to her brain, and tried to focus her reviving consciousness on the displays. She’d gone virtual with her primary navigation display, and it looked as if the universe had been painted on the inside of her skull, a curiously empty universe with a single sun and a few planets and asteroids, and with little abstract, colored blips here and there that represented ships, next to packages of floating data representing heading, velocity, mass, and acceleration rate.

  To her surprise, she floated weightless in the straps. Her boat’s engine had shut off. She blinked, shook her head to clear it, tried to make sense out of what the computer was telling her.

  Decoys. She and her barrage of twenty-four missiles had been fired at decoys, and her computer, analyzing the increasing loads of data pouring in from the sensors, had only just figured that out.

  Damn. If she were to die—a highly likely occurrence—she would have liked to take a few of the enemy with her.

  Before her hung the flight of missiles, their greater acceleration assuring that they were continuing to fly from her even though their drives had shut off when the deception was discovered. They were querying her for instructions. She scanned the displays and tried to find another target. A bewildering number of possibilities swam before her vision. How many of them were real?

  The sour smell of her own body had become a permanent presence in her vacuum suit. Nearly two months of constant acceleration had battered and bruised her, drained her energy and left her listless. (The other cadets made jokes about her applying the acceleration drugs via patches instead of firing them into her neck; “Patch Girl,” they called her.) Fortunately, Jarlath had decreed two days of near weightlessness at the end of the long acceleration toward Magaria, a chance for Home Fleet personnel to gather wit and strength for the upcoming battle. Sula had alternated between obsessively rechecking the diagnostics of her pinnace and simply, blissfully, floating in her rack, feeling her muscles and ligaments, taut as twisted rope, slowly begin to slacken, a process almost as painful as the accelerations had been.

  They were hardly slack now, not after the hours of acceleration burns that led to the Fleet’s leap through the Magaria wormhole, only to be followed by the remorseless, only slightly less than lethal acceleration that followed her launch from Dauntless. Now that weightlessness was sending blood through her body, her limbs were wakening to their pain. She tried to ignore it and instead apply her mind to the displays, but it was difficult to focus on the bewildering swarm of data.

  The last time she’d been in a pinnace, she was locked for endless days with a dead man. It was hard to forget that even under the present circumstances. It had taken an act of will to enter the pinnace and close the hatch behind her.

  She forced her mind to the displays.

  Cruiser Squadron 2, nine heavy cruisers that included Dauntless, led the Home Fleet’s assault and was now well clear of the expanding plasma field created by Jarlath’s initial covering barrage—missiles fired through the wormhole to explode ahead of the Fleet and make a hash of enemy radar screens. The barrage served a dual purpose: to prevent rebel missiles from locking on, and to conceal the last minute maneuvering he hoped would catch the Naxids by surprise. Jarlath had wanted firepower in the lead, so the heavy cruisers of Squadron 2 were followed by the ten older cruisers of Cruiser Squadron 1, just now emerging from the radiation cloud on a slightly diverging course from Squadron 2. Behind them, still in the process of emerging from the expanding plasma cloud, the rest of the Home Fleet, marked by the towers on flame on which stood Battleship Squadron 1, the six giant Praxis-class ships with which Jarlath hoped to overwhelm the enemy.

  Ahead were the Naxids, a bewildering array of formations cutting across and through each other’s paths between Barbas and Rinconell. As yet, only a few appeared clearly: the Naxids weren’t using active radar themselves, and the Home Fleet loyalists had to wait for their own radar to find the enemy and reflect back before they could get a clear indication of their foe.

  Most of what they detected seemed to be decoys, just like those Sula had been sent to chase. She paged the sensor images back through time and found that her set of decoys had been maneuvering just as Dauntless and the other cruisers had emerged from the plasma screen, and she and her missile barrage had been fired at what looked like a squadron of small ships setting up to make a run at their flank.

  The Home Fleet’s radars were slowly revealing formations of the enemy, and Sula calculated trajectories to the nearest of these. But the two lead cruiser divisions were already hurling missile barrages at those enemies, and for her to add her own force to these seemed the height of redundancy. She decided to continue on her course and wait for an opportunity. The only order she gave was for her pack of missiles to rotate and make a short burn that would drift them toward her instead of away.

  From her point of vantage she saw the battle develop, saw more enemy squadrons appear on the displays, saw clouds of hot plasma and blazing gamma ray bursts as missiles began to explode. Saw ships and formations of deadly missiles maneuver behind the curtains of expanding radiation. Saw missiles emerge from behind the clouds and saw the flashes as antiproton beams flashed across the intervening distance.

  The two heavy cruiser squadrons maneuvered ponderously nearer the enemy, two Naxid squadrons that Sula’s sensors now recognized as the eighteen ships commanded by the Home Fleet defectors, Elkizer and Farniai. The opposing forces were on courses that would intersect, both heading for Barbas to slingshot around the big planet and head for the inner system.

  “Starburst,” Sula found herself muttering. “Starburst now.” But the cruisers maintained their formation, and so did the enemy. The space between the converging
squadrons was a continual boil of radiation through which the opposing radars sought in vain. The flashes of antiproton and laser beams became a steady pulse of fire, like strings of fireworks flashing in the sky.

  “Starburst now.”

  As if they heard her, the cruisers began to separate, the ships rotating, engines burning in different directions. Sula didn’t see the final missile barrage coming, only the brilliant flashes that burned out all sensors on her boat’s starboard side. Most of the symbols on her display faded, replaced by less brightly colored symbols representing a purely theoretical position. To Sula it was as shocking as a slap to the face. When part of the schematic universe in her head faded, it was as if half her brain had died.

  “Computer: superimpose radiation counter!” she said. She detected a hint of panic in her own voice and tried to fight it down.

  The radiation counter, at least, was still working, and it showed repeated waves of gamma rays, neutrons, and short-lived pi-mesons, the strange fruits of collision between antihydrogen and normal matter. A succession of peaks as missiles exploded, dozens of them altogether.

  She waited for the radiation to die back, then switched on alternate detector arrays—the designers of the pinnace had assumed she’d lose sensors and thus provided multiple redundancy. The sensors showed that her pinnace was engulfed by the ferociously hot, expanding cloud of plasma caused by multiple missile strikes. There might be other vessels in the cloud, but if so, they were hidden by the electromagnetic storm that surrounded her.

  Her pulse throbbed in her ears as she tried to force her senses by sheer willpower to penetrate the cloud. Surely there were survivors. Surely there were friendly ships in the cloud, ships that had perhaps lost their sensors or other electronics but with crew still safe in their hardened shelters…