The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Biswas called back almost immediately, but she didn’t take his call or any of the other calls that followed. She replied with print messages, saying she was sorry she’d been out when he called, but she was spending a lot of time in the library cramming.

  That wasn’t far from the truth. Requirements for the service academies were posted on the computer net, and most of the courses were available in video files, and she knew she was deeply deficient in almost every subject. She worked hard.

  She only answered one call, when she happened to be home, listened to the answerware, and realized the caller was Sergei. She answered and called him every filthy name she could think of, and once her initial anger was spent, she began to choose words more carefully, flaying him alive with one choice phrase after another. By the end he was weeping, loud gulping honks that grated over the speakers.

  Serve him right, she thought.

  Lamey had her worried more than Sergei or Jacob Biswas. Every day she half expected him to burst down the door and demand that she produce Earthgirl. He never turned up.

  On her final day on Spannan, Biswas insisted on meeting her, with other members of his family, at the skyhook. She cut her hair severely short, wore Cheng Ho undress uniform, and virtually plated her face with cosmetic. If she looked to Biswas like a different girl, no wonder.

  He was kind and warm and asked no questions. He told her she looked very grown-up and was proud of her. She thanked him for his kindness and for looking after her. She hugged him and the daughters he’d brought with him.

  His wife, Sergei’s sister, had the sense to stay away.

  Later, as the skyhook carried her to Spannan’s ring, and its steady acceleration pressed her into her seat, she realized it was Caro’s Earthday, the real one.

  The Earthday that Caro would never see.

  Sula jerked awake from a shivering dream, and for a moment Caro’s scent seemed to fill the pinnace. There were tears in Sula’s eyes, and when she wiped them away, she saw something new on her displays.

  Five somethings, swinging around from the far side of Barbas. Five ships were burning hard gees, coming around the big planet at an unusual angle. Sula wondered if they were heading for Magaria. No—they burned well past that point.

  “Ah. Ha,” she said.

  They were looping around Barbas to fly toward Rinconell. And now Sula saw what they intended.

  They were going to come between Wormhole 1 and the six survivors of the Home Fleet. There would be a blazing collision as their paths crossed, and the last of the Home Fleet would be annihilated. The five Naxid ships might die as well, if the loyalists had enough missiles remaining, but in any case the last of the Home Fleet would be destroyed.

  Frantically, Sula began calculating trajectories. Her own missiles were a third of a light-minute ahead of her, and it would take time for her instructions to reach them. She didn’t want them to maneuver where the enemy could see them, and the only way to do that was to fire their engines when they were behind the huge gas giant Rinconell.

  It took Sula almost three hours to calculate the trajectories, triple-check the work, and transmit the missiles’ instructions via communications laser. Then she calculated her own trajectory and her own burn. Because she couldn’t pull the massive gees of her missiles, she couldn’t lay herself on the same track—she’d be a spectator again, whatever happened.

  And then she waited. It was nine hours before the tawny gas giant Rinconell became a great crescent on her displays, before her eighteen missiles executed precise pivots and made the furious burn that set them on their new trajectories. And more seconds passed before her own engine punched her and dropped her into nightmare sleep.

  But the wait was worth it. On their mad swing around Barbas, the Naxid ships emerged with a velocity of nearly half the speed of light. The missiles coming at them were traveling in excess of .7c. The closing velocity was so enormous that the Naxids were probably never aware of what was coming at them and had a few seconds’ warning at most, not enough to activate their defenses.

  Wild, angry joy sang in Sula as she watched the eighteen missiles explode in and among the Naxid ships. Nothing was left of the enemy but stripped ions that glowed fiercely and briefly in the deep, empty night, and then went out.

  She reached for the comm unit and punched on the radio, broadcasting on the intership channel to the Naxids, the fleeing Home Fleet survivors, the scattered, cooling atoms that had been Dauntless and Glory of the Praxis, and all the others strewn and lost in the death and fury of Magaria.

  “Sula!” she shouted into the transmitter. “It was Sula who did this! Remember my name!”

  She programmed her own burn for the wormhole, and escape.

  SIXTEEN

  Five hours after transiting Magaria Wormhole 1, Sula’s pinnace was recovered by the Bombardment of Delhi. She pulled herself wearily out of the little boat, and as the riggers helped her climb into the ready room, she saw in the dim emergency lighting that someone waited for her. Her heart surged as she recognized Martinez, and then she realized that a memory had imposed itself on her exhausted mind, a memory of the time Martinez had met her after the Midnight Runner rescue.

  The person before her stepped forward, and before her she saw a different memory, that of Jeremy Foote.

  “You,” she said, and began to laugh.

  Foote looked at her with impatience. He was considerably less immaculate than when Sula had last seen him, at the party he’d thrown to celebrate his promotion: he was without his uniform jacket, and his shirt was grimy and torn. His cowlick was greasy. His sleeves were rolled up, and there was a smear of something on one forearm, a smear that had an echo on his forehead where he’d wiped away sweat.

  The riggers took her helmet and unsealed her gloves.

  “I’ll need your data foils,” Foote said, his drawl a little more clipped than usual. “The premier sent me.”

  “I forgot them in the boat,” Sula said. “Sorry.” She turned to return to the docking tube.

  “I’ll get them,” Foote said. “Never mind.”

  He dropped into the docking tube and was gone for a few moments. The riggers shoved Sula’s arms over her head and pulled off the upper half of her suit. Her nose wrinkled at the acrid odor of her own body, all the stale sweat and terror and burned adrenaline. The riggers began work on the lower half of her vac suit.

  Foote popped up from the access tube. “Turn your back,” Sula told him.

  Foote looked resentful. “I’ve seen women before,” he said.

  “You’ve never seen me,” Sula said, “and you’re not going to.”

  “That’s ‘Turn your back, my lord,’ ” Foote drawled, but he turned anyway. The silent riggers stripped away Sula’s suit and handed her a pair of sterile drawers.

  “I forgot about your promotion, my lord, sorry.” Sula stepped into the drawers and tied the string waistband. “It must have been the excitement of seeing you again.”

  She was rewarded by a crack in the facade of the riggers’ deadpan faces. She winked at the nearest of them, and was further rewarded by a startled grin.

  Foote cast an annoyed look over his shoulder, saw she was clothed, and turned to face her. “The premier says he’s putting you in for a decoration,” he said. “He says you saved us.”

  “Give him my thanks,” Sula said. “But isn’t it the captain who does the recommending?”

  “The captain’s dead,” Foote said shortly.

  The dead captain would have been Captain Foote, the yachtsman, who would have ensured young Jeremy’s continual promotion.

  “Sorry about your uncle, Foote.”

  He gave a grim nod. “We’re pretty well shot up,” he said. “You’ll be needed on damage control, if you’re not hurt.”

  “I need some shoes,” Sula said, “and then I’m with you.”

  Bombardment of Delhi had lost its captain, its second and third lieutenants, and everyone else in Command. The forward third of the ship had be
en decompressed, there were only a dozen missiles left in the magazine, and only one pinnace remained—Sula’s.

  But Sula reminded herself that Delhi was in better shape than all but five other ships of the Home Fleet.

  For two days she worked constantly at patching, refitting, replacing, and testing. Toward the end of the second day her party succeeded in recompressing the area around Command and in breaking into Command to retrieve the bodies of Captain Foote and the others. They had died due to fire—not from asphyxiation, because they had their helmets on, but due to fierce heat. Nothing in Command was flammable, but even steel will burn if it gets hot enough, and Command had grown very hot indeed. A rain of molten metal had streaked the walls like tears.

  The crisped remains of the dead, little husks of carbon curled like a fetus, were bagged and carried out to the cargo airlock. Sula felt oddly at home amid the dead. She looked at the charcoal on her palms. Take the water out, she thought, and that’s all we are.

  She found the realization comforting.

  “Life is brief, but the Praxis is eternal,” the first lieutenant read from the burial service. “Let us all take comfort and security in the wisdom that all that is important is known.”

  The dead were blown into space. Afterward, the premiere took Sula aside and told her that the squadron commander had promoted her to sublieutenant in order to fill one of Delhi’s vacancies.

  Really, she thought, I am rewarded for the most extraordinary things.

  A day later, lying exhausted in her rack, she overheard one of the other cadets talking about test scores. The cadet had done well and was pleased that she’d soon be promoted and no longer had to be envious of Sula.

  Sula looked at the woman and thought she remembered her.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Didn’t you take the exams with me at Zanshaa? The ones that didn’t signify?”

  The cadet looked at her in surprise. “Didn’t you get the announcement? The board decided the exams would count. They need officers too badly. Instead of the exam on the Praxis, they’re relying on testaments of loyalty from superiors.”

  “Ah. Ha,” Sula said.

  She flung herself to the nearest computer display, called up the results, and found out she had achieved her first.

  She thought of Caro Sula sliding into the Iola, the cold brown waters rising up about her, choking her nose and mouth, and she wondered if the equation was balanced now. Did an exemplary career and a couple thousand dead Naxids equal one dead, useless rich girl?

  All important things are known. Somehow this didn’t seem to be one of them.

  Later that day she was supervising a party that was rereeving bundles of electric cable that had shorted out during the battle. They’d had to pull up a whole corridor of Captain Foote’s parquet flooring to get at the utility space underneath, and then had to be very careful when balanced on the deck beams, to avoid contact with the pipe of superheated coolant that ran alongside the cable bundles. The coolant that carried the engines’ heat to the compressors and heat exchanger.

  Midday came and the job wasn’t completed. Sula sent her party to their dinner, then lowered herself onto one of the beams. The heat rose from the pipe and brought a prickle of sweat onto her face. She balanced there for a moment and looked at her right hand, at the whorls of Gredel’s traitorous, dangerous fingerprints.

  Sweat trickled down her cheek. She took a deep breath, bent down, and pressed her right thumb to the pipe.

  I tripped on the beams and fell, she rehearsed. It was an accident.

  She kept her thumb on the pipe until she could smell the burning flesh, and only then did she permit herself to scream.

  The censors weren’t used to adversity, and didn’t know how to handle the news from Magaria. The initial report Martinez received said the battle was a glorious triumph in which Magaria had somehow not been captured, and that caused Zanshaa to mobilize to the utmost. He sent a message to the Fleet Control Board telling them that, as a squadron commander engaged in offensive action, he needed to know what really happened.

  They told him. After he recovered from his shock, he did some calculations and worked out how long it would take the Naxids to arrive at Zanshaa. They would have to decelerate and dock with the Magaria ring to take on new armament and fuel, then accelerate again.

  Three months. Three months, perhaps a little longer, before the Naxid fleet could begin the Battle of Zanshaa.

  Corona and its Light Squadron 14 was more than halfway to Hone-bar. It would take too long to decelerate and return, so instead the squadron would swing around Hone-bar’s sun and major planets and slingshot its way back to the capital.

  And arrive just ahead of the Naxids, apparently. Whose known ships outnumbered the entire loyalist fleet.

  He sent a message urging Roland and his sisters to book passage on the next ship for Laredo, then concentrated on the management of his squadron. He had decreed a whole series of virtual maneuvers, the crews of each ship simultaneously wired into the same scenario. He matched them against each other, against hypothetical Naxid squadrons. He worked them very hard, hard enough that Kamarullah began complaining about him to the other captains. Perhaps the other captains could take comfort from the fact that Corona, with its new crew unused to the ship or their officers, usually failed to distinguish itself in these exercises, performing poorly enough to set Martinez to grinding his teeth. Nor was he the only Corona so affected: he overheard Ahmet complain to Knadjian about the damned newcomers bungling everything, getting in the way and making the ship look bad.

  If only Dalkieth were a more driving, ambitious sort of lieutenant. If only Shankaracharya and Vonderheydte had more experience. If only he weren’t so torn between managing the ship and bossing the squadron.

  Capping it all was Saavedra’s discovery that two tons of flour intended for the mess, which Martinez had signed for, was in fact used machine oil badly in need of recycling. Someone was making a nice profit, apparently, selling Fleet supplies, but that person wasn’t Martinez.

  Martinez briefly lost his mind. His roars of anger as he marched from his office to the food store and back sent even hardened crouchbacks dodging out of the way and looking for a place to hide until he stomped past.

  When he made his evening entry in the log, he saw the message light blinking and found to his surprise that it was a video from Sula.

  She wore a sublieutenant’s shoulder boards, he saw; she must have passed her exam. One hand was bandaged and cradled in the opposite arm.

  Her complexion was lightly flushed, and flawless, and took his breath away. There was a strange intensity in her green eyes, a kind of fever. Perhaps she was in pain.

  “So,” she said, “I lived. I’m the only survivor from my ship. I got picked up by the Delhi, and they lost a lot of people too.” She paused, and with a shock Martinez realized that she must have been the pinnace pilot who destroyed an entire enemy squadron. The report he’d received from the Fleet hadn’t mentioned any names.

  Sula’s pointed tongue licked her lips for a second, and then she continued.

  “So here’s what I’ve learned: I’m the second luckiest person in the universe. And do you know who’s the luckiest?” The intense green eyes glittered. “You are,” Sula said. “You are, Gareth Martinez. You. Commander of Corona, recipient of the Golden Orb. You.” Her lips tightened in a smile.

  She hasn’t even heard I’m a squadron commander, it hasn’t been announced. Martinez managed this thought through his wonderment.

  “When I realized this, I decided to make some resolutions,” Sula said. “So here’s the first: no more whining. No more complaining about my superiors or my lack of patronage or the fact that I don’t have much money compared with every other officer in the Fleet. No more whining about—” She hesitated. “—about my past. Why should I complain? I’m the second luckiest person in the empire.”

  She leaned toward the camera. “And you shouldn’t complain either. You’re very e
ntertaining when you do it, and I laugh, but you didn’t have any reason before, and you damn well don’t have any now. You’re the luckiest person in the universe, so what do you have to complain about?”

  She leaned back, and the motion must have pained her, because she gave a little wince and cradled her injured hand more carefully. She gave the camera an unreadable look.

  “My second resolution,” she said, “is to come looking for you the second fate and the Fleet permit. Two lucky people like us, what can’t we do?” Her eyes turned a little off-camera and she said, “End transmission.”

  Slow to master his thoughts, Martinez watched the End Transmission symbol for a long time. He reached out a hand to recue the video and run it again, then drew the hand back.

  Then he thought about replying, but he had no idea what he’d say.

  The comm unit bleeped at him. “This is Martinez,” he said, and looked into Kelly’s harassed face.

  “It’s a complete shambles in the weapons bay, my lord. Chau has totally buggered up one of the robots during a reloading, and now he’s under arrest for busting Tippel in the chops, and we still don’t know what to do with the robot, it’s blocking everything and it’s just too big to shove out of the way.”

  And what in hell am I supposed to do about it? Martinez wanted to scream.

  But then he thought, No whining, and rose from his desk and went to his work.

  The Maw gaped wide and red, and tinged with a hint of blood the fine lace of the frost that had climbed halfway up the lifeboat’s cockpit window. Warrant Officer Severin had got used to the cold, got used to his breath frosting in front of him and the fact that his nose ran all the time. He had got used to wearing layers of clothing even in bed, and wrapping himself in a thermal blanket whenever he rose so that he looked like an ambulatory tent. He was used to the moisture condensing on the lifeboat’s walls, and to the activities of the Naxid squadron in the Protipanu system.