The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Minutes passed. Sula licked her dry lips with a sandpaper tongue. The expanding plasma cloud lost density and cooled, and her sensor range gradually increased. And then the pinnace burst out of the cloud, and the radar universe suddenly flared in her skull.

  Her heart surged as another vessel emerged from the cloud, on track to be one of Cruiser Squadron 2. The vessel was followed by another. Sula shifted from radar display to optics, tried to get as close a view of the two ships as she could. Her hope was strained as taut as her knotted muscles: surely one of these was Dauntless.

  Recognition eluded her. Optical details were vague: the computer was filling in speculative elements where the optics were lacking. There was something strange in the display. Both ships seemed to be glittering, as if they were trailing comet-tails of shimmering sparks.

  It was only when she switched to infrared that all became clear. The two cruisers were hot: heat-energy boiled off them, an abrupt contrast to the cold despair that began to chill her veins. She didn’t know the melting point of the cruisers’ tough, resinous hulls, but she suspected that it had been exceeded. If there were oxygen in space, the hulls would be on fire. Even if the crew were in their shelters, they had probably been baked alive as heat radiated inward.

  Sula gave a start as the lead ship blew up, the antimatter fuel spraying out another cloud of gamma rays. She got her sensors switched off in time to prevent damage, and when the radiation counter showed that the radiation had dropped, she cautiously switched them on again. The first ship had been obliterated, and the second had been hit by a large piece of debris, or perhaps just by the massive sledgehammer of gamma rays and neutrons, because it was now tumbling end over end.

  Nothing else emerged from the cooling plasma cloud but debris.

  No survivors, Sula thought. Nineteen ships of the Home Fleet had just been wiped out. That eighteen rebels had also been destroyed hardly seemed to matter.

  Sula floated in her webbing and tried desperately to process this information. She’d hardly got to know her shipmates in the few weeks she was aboard, with everyone strapped side by side into their acceleration couches and fighting for every breath. She couldn’t claim to have lost any friends. But still, Dauntless was the closest thing she had to a home, and now it was gone, along with its nearly four hundred crew.

  And Captain Lord Richard Li was gone. He was the nearest thing she had to a patron, and she could say farewell to the promised lieutenancy.

  He put me on my first pony, Sula thought, then gave a bitter laugh.

  Forget about ponies and lieutenancies. None of these would matter if she didn’t survive the next few hours.

  Even as she made this resolution, a part of her mind was making calculations. The Home Fleet’s fifty-four ships were now down to thirty-five. The enemy started with somewhere between sixty and ninety ships—with radar restricted to the speed of light, not all had yet shown up on the displays—and had now been reduced to somewhere between forty and sixty. Settle on fifty, then, as a mean.

  Fifty-four versus seventy were better odds than thirty-five versus fifty. Sula couldn’t shake off the feeling that she had just seen the Home Fleet begin its death agonies.

  Ahead, beginning its swing around Barbas, was a Naxid heavy squadron, featuring a suspiciously large blip that Sula suspected was the enemy flagship Majesty of the Praxis. They were decelerating now, with the obvious intention of letting the remaining Home Fleet overtake them and bringing on an engagement. Sula considered sending her missiles after them, but suspected it would be futile. She couldn’t attack an entire squadron on her own, and the Home Fleet was somewhere behind her, concealed by the expanding, cooling plasma cloud that marked Dauntless’s destruction.

  She programmed in a modest two-gravity burn for both herself and her missiles, intending to close on the Home Fleet while she tried to work out what to do next.

  While the burn was going on, two squadrons of small ships, frigates and light cruisers, shot out of the cooling plasma cloud behind her. Her sensors registered the pounding of their radars on her boat’s skin. Then a light cruiser hurled missiles into space. Chemical rockets flared and died; the bright antimatter torches ignited. Sula tracked their headings, and saw that one barrage was heading for the decoys that had initially been her target. Another barrage was heading for a different set of decoys.

  And a third was heading right for her.

  She gave a startled cry of protest as her heart thundered into overdrive. Without thought, she flung the pinnace around its center of gravity and opened the engine to a constant six gravities. The hull groaned as the engines fought inertia, and her suit clamped gently on her arms and legs. Only then did she send a message, via comm laser, to the firing ship, a light cruiser that was leading a division of frigates.

  “This is Cadet Lady Sula of Dauntless!” she said. “You’ve opened fire on me! Deactivate your missiles!” She tried to keep hysteria out of her voice but doubted she’d succeeded.

  The missiles kept on coming, closely packed in a furious acceleration that the retreating pinnace couldn’t match. More missiles flew from the squadron, aimed at anything the sensors could detect regardless of range. Whoever was acting as tactical control officer had clearly lost his head.

  Sula got busy, voice and hands giving orders to her own missiles. Three of her twenty-four began to burn hard to intercept the threat. Whoever was controlling them saw the danger to his barrage and ordered the attacking missiles to spread out. She countered, ordering the rest of her missiles to speed away from the Home Fleet, then commenced an acceleration she knew would leave her senseless. As gravity took her by the throat, she could feel her heart flail in panic. She managed to get her sensors off before both she and her terror lost the fight against unconsciousness.

  When her programmed acceleration was over, a vestigial memory of fear helped her to claw back from the velvet black depths of unconsciousness. Her suit gradually released her arms and legs. The radiation counter showed the aftereffects of massive explosions, and readings showed that the hull was very hot. Sula could hear the whirring of the cabin cooling system. Because she couldn’t view anything, she ordered another furious acceleration, and when she awoke again, both the radiation and heat had dropped. At this point she dared to activate some sensors, and behind her saw the vast hot bloom of an explosion that seemed to take up half of space. No missiles appeared to be following her out of the cloud, and the only missiles she could find on her display were her own.

  She kept her engine going until the cloud began to dissipate, at which point she shut it down in hopes that a pinnace without acceleration wasn’t worth being fired on. She could feel patches of sweat in her armpits and crotch and between her breasts, and her heart still throbbed within her chest as if urging her to run as fast as she could.

  The lead elements of the Home Fleet slowly appeared through the dissipating radiation fog. The cruiser flagship had been joined by its entire squadron in flinging out missile barrages, now toward the heavy Naxid squadron ahead. Sula didn’t think much of their chance of success, especially as the missiles were taking the long way around Barbas, following in the enemy’s wake instead of cutting the corner, which might actually have made sense.

  And then another flight of missiles leaped from the rails and fired.

  At Sula. Again.

  Grim, determined anger sang through Sula’s nerves as she again programmed her own missiles to intercept. This time her message was broadcast to every ship in the two light squadrons, sixteen ships altogether.

  “Listen, you fucking moron.” The words were forced from her diaphragm as gee forces built. “This is Lady Sula of the Dauntless, and you’ve just fired on me for the second time!” She glared into the camera and screamed, “Do I look like a fucking Naxid, you piece of rodent shit? Stop panicking, get a grip on yourself, and call off your missiles!” With one hand she thrust a vile gesture at the camera pickup. “I hope I live long enough for you to court-martial me over this, y
ou useless bastard!”

  She felt better for having vented the anger, but the missiles were still coming. She programmed a massive acceleration and turned off the sensors. As her head thudded against the padding in the back of her helmet and she felt the miniwaves drumming against her back, she clenched her teeth and fought the smothering blackness that started to creep over her mind…

  Consciousness returned more slowly this time, a slow rise from an oblivion akin to death. It took Sula a while to focus on the displays even though they were projected onto her visual centers. The radiation count was high, and so was the hull temperature, but neither were as hot as after the first barrage.

  Still, she was thankful for the slabs of radiation shielding that surrounded the cockpit.

  When she turned on the sensors, she saw the cloud of plasma behind her, again obscuring her view of the fight. No missiles were coming at her, and she had eighteen of her own left. When the clouds finally dissipated, the light squadrons seemed to have lost interest in her: now all the ships were firing on the Naxids ahead. The area on the far side of Barbas was a continual boil as Naxid missiles met those of the loyalists.

  Sula programmed her own swing around Barbas, but her wild accelerations away from the oncoming missiles had forced her out of the most efficient route. She swung wide and had to burn hard to get herself onto the line for Magaria’s sun, the next step on the loop around the system.

  It had been over two hours since she transited the wormhole. She allowed herself a drink of water and ate half a ration bar. It was flavored with some chemist’s idea of strawberry, and the taste didn’t encourage her to finish the second half. She had to open the faceplate of her helmet to eat, and the cabin’s interior smelled hot, as if someone had forgotten to turn off a stove burner.

  The two light squadrons, taking the inner track around Barbas, had pulled ahead of her. Behind them came Jarlath’s six huge battleships, and behind them a heavy and light cruiser division, both of which were dueling with pursuers, to judge by the missile bursts in their rear.

  The light squadrons were firing less regularly now, which argued that they might have realized their munitions were not unlimited, but the space between them and Fanaghee’s squadron was still opaque with detonations, one blaze of plasma after another.

  Disaster happened so quickly that Sula barely had time to register what was happening before the loyalist squadrons were engulfed in flame, a succession of colossal bursts in and among them.

  Nothing came out the other side of the expanding plasma spheres. Sixteen ships had just been blown to bits.

  Sula’s stunned amazement was followed by a burst of rage. She wanted to shriek, to pound a fist against the armored walls of the cockpit. But instead she forced her mind to work at what had just occurred.

  It seemed that missiles had flown through the plasma screen undetected. Then she decided that wasn’t what happened. The missiles hadn’t accelerated. They were launched, burned for a short time while their signature was obscured by plasma bursts, and then just lay in wait, drifting toward the oncoming ships. If the light squadrons had seen them at all, they’d seen what appeared to be debris. The missiles let the light squadrons overrun them and then detonated.

  That was how Martinez had hit Magaria’s ring, Sula remembered, let unpowered missiles drift in while no one was looking. Fanaghee had learned a trick from her enemy.

  The odds were horribly against the Home Fleet now, nineteen ships against something like fifty, and Jarlath had to know it. The Battleship Squadron broke into two divisions of three ships and began massive accelerations to overtake Fanaghee, whose Majesty supported eight heavy cruisers. Sula watched in awe as she calculated the growing velocity: everyone aboard the battleships had to be unconscious, with the computers doing the steering.

  What Jarlath was attempting seemed worthy of her support. The battleship division had to take out the enemy heavy squadron or no one was escaping Magaria alive. Sula programmed her own acceleration and burned an interception course for the Naxid squadron, her missiles spreading out in a wave in front of her. Again, the antimatter engines blazed, flattening her against the couch. Again, she fought against unconsciousness until it spun her into blackness.

  She was awakened by a bleating in her ears and a pain in her chest. As she gasped frantically for air, she realized that the pain was caused by trying to breathe against the weight of gravity.

  Gradually, awareness of her surroundings came back to her. She looked for the red lights on the displays, and saw they registered to her own life signs.

  Sula sat up with a curse, forgetting that the displays were in her head and she couldn’t get a better look at them by leaning forward. She waited for her head to clear, then read that acceleration had been shut down when her suit detected a blood pressure spike, well into the dangerous levels even for someone in good health. Her body was failing under the pressure of too many gravities.

  She looked at her current readings and found them well within the normal level. Weightlessness had brought the dangerous condition to an end, though she should certainly not press her luck with a high-gravity acceleration anytime soon. Then she checked the situation outside her craft and found her missiles still blazing ahead, toward the enemy.

  But her missiles seemed redundant now. Jarlath and the battleship squadron had already engaged the enemy, and they were hurling out immense waves of missiles. Each Praxis-class ship had over sixty launchers, and they were all firing, all pumping one tremendous salvo after another from their huge magazines.

  Fanaghee’s ships were shooting back. It was impossible to keep any kind of score of the missile tracks—there had to be hundreds of them, and on a hundred different trajectories, some direct, some looping around to attack from an odd angle.

  Sula told her missiles to cease acceleration. She’d reserve them for a final blow against the enemy, if such a thing were needed.

  The flanks of Jarlath’s ships pulsed with the blaze of antiproton beams, and the ships began to maneuver apart from one another. He had learned from the loss of his two squadrons, and anything that looked like debris in his path was getting blown up.

  Two of Jarlath’s ships died first, and Sula gave a cry of rage and despair as she saw the fireballs erupt around them. But Fanaghee’s flagship died next, buried in a wave of missile strikes, and three of the cruisers near her were destroyed in the same fiery salvo.

  After that, both sides lost the ability to defend themselves against the oncoming attacks. The missiles flooded in. Fury, triumph, sadness, and despair wrenched Sula as antimatter bursts obliterated friend and foe alike.

  In the end nothing was left. Battleship Squadron 1 had ceased to exist, and so had Fanaghee’s heavy ships. It seemed that only she was left, she and her eighteen missiles drifting toward Magaria’s sun.

  It was clearly time to quit the battle. There were at least forty Naxid ships remaining, and no more than thirteen survivors in the Home Fleet—maybe less, as there was a continual blaze of action behind her. She needed to swing around Magaria’s sun, then around Rinconell en route for Wormhole 1 and Zanshaa. Her only contribution to the battle, it seemed, would be to expend six of her missiles defending herself against a useless attack fired at her by her own side.

  Hatred of her own uselessness stung Sula’s throat. She blinked back tears of frustration and rage. All around her was death and ruin, to which she had not been a participant but an angry witness. In a way, that was worse than dying. Even annihilation had been denied her.

  The long hours went past. Sula ate ration bars to keep up her strength and drank an electrolyte supplement to replace what she’d sweated away. She skated the rim of unconsciousness in her burn around the sun, but managed to hang on to herself, to her bitter knowledge of her own uselessness.

  The battle behind her died away. Perhaps everyone concerned was running low on missiles. Her detectors showed six vessels of the Home Fleet surviving, pursued by a swarm of enemy.

  Six
ships, she thought, out of fifty-four. Whole worlds were ending this day.

  Including her own. She had hated the Fleet at least as much as she loved it, but it had provided assurance, stability, continuity, and tradition, in addition to mundane things like meals and a modest salary. All that was gone now. Sula was afloat in the void, surrounded only by a thin shell and preceded by a swarm of eighteen worthless, deadly missiles.

  Black despair closed in. She could feel its chill fingers touch her face. All that she had done, all that she had been, and it was only for this.

  Death owed her, she thought. Death owed her more than this solitary cruise, this lonely circuit around a wilderness of annihilation.

  She and Death had known one another for a long time. It seemed to her that Death should be a better friend than this.

  When Gredel returned from opening her account in Lady Sula’s name, she found Caro groping with a shivering hand for her first cup of coffee. After Caro took the coffee to the bathroom for the long bath that would soak the stale alcohol from her pores, Gredel replaced Caro’s wallet, then opened the computer link and transferred some of Caro’s money, ten zeniths only, to her new account, just to make sure it worked.

  It worked fine.

  I have just done a criminal act, she thought. A criminal act that can be traced to me.

  Whatever she may have done before, it hadn’t been this.

  After Caro’s bath, she and Gredel went to a café for breakfast, and Gredel told her about Lamey being on the run and asked if she could move in with Caro so that he’d be able to send for her. Caro was thrilled. She had never heard of anything so romantic in her life.

  Romantic? Gredel thought. It was sordid beyond belief.

  But Caro hadn’t been in the sultry little room in the Laiown quarter, the smell of ammonia in her nostrils while Lamey’s sweat rained down on her. Let her keep her illusions, Gredel thought.