Praxis

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 fromDauntless. 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. “Starburstnow.” 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 hadassumed 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…

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 wasDauntless.

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 beglittering, 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 werehot: 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 markedDauntless ‘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, you 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, whoseMajesty 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. EachPraxis — 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.

Deathowed 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 cafe 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.

“Thank you,” she said. But she knew that once she was with Caro, it wouldn’t be long before Caro would grow bored with her, or impatient, or angry. Whatever she was going to do, it would have to be soon.

“I don’t know how often Lamey’s going to send for me,” she said. “But I hope it’s not on your birthday. I’d like you and I to celebrate that together.”

The scowl on Caro’s face was immediate, and predictable. “Birthday? My birthday was last winter.” The scowl deepened. “That was the last time Sergei and I were together.”

“Birthday?” Gredel said, in her Earth accent. “I meantEarth day.” And when Caro’s scowl began to look dangerous, she added quickly, “Your birthday in Earth years. I do the math, see, it’s a kind of game. And your Earthday is next week-you’ll be fifteen.” Gredel smiled. “The same age as me. I turned fifteen Earth years just before I met you.”

It wasn’t true, not exactly-Caro’s Earthday was in three months-but Gredel knew that Caro would never do the math, might not even knowhow to do it.

There was so much Caro didn’t know. That knowledge brought a savage pleasure to Gredel’s mind. Caro didn’t knowanything, didn’t even know that her best friend hated her. Caro didn’t know that she had stolen her money and her identity only an hour ago, and could do it again whenever she wanted.

The days went by, and were even pleasurable in a strange, disconnected way. Gredel thought she finally understood what it was like to be Caro, to have nothing that attached her to anything, to have long hours to fill and nothing to fill them with but whatever impulse drifted into her mind. Gredel felt that way herself-mentally, at least, she was cutting her own ties free, all of them, floating free of everything she’d known.

To save herself trouble, Gredel went out of her way to please Caro, and Caro responded. Her mood was sunny, and she laughed and joked, and dressed Gredel like a doll, as she always had. Behind her own pleasing mask, Gredel despised Caro for being so easily manipulated.You’re so stupid, she thought.

But pleasing Caro brought trouble of its own, because when Lamey’s boy called for Gredel, she was standing in the rain, in a Torminel neighborhood, trying to buy Caro a cartridge of endorphin analog-with Lamey’s businesses in eclipse, she could no longer get the stuff from Panda.

When Gredel finally connected with her ride and got to the place where Lamey was hiding-he was back in the Terran Fabs, at least-he’d been waiting for hours, and his patience was gone. He got her alone in the bedroom and slapped her around for a while, telling her it was her fault, that she had to be where he could find her when he needed her.

Gredel lay on her back on the bed, letting him do what he wanted, and she thought,This is going to be my whole life if I don’t get out of here. She looked at the pistol Lamey had waiting on the bedside table for whoever he thought might kick down the door, and she thought about grabbing the pistol and blowing Lamey’s brains out. Or her own brains. Or just walking into the street with the pistol and blowing out brains at random.

No, she thought. Stick to the plan.

Lamey gave her five hundred zeniths afterward. Maybe that was an apology.

Sitting in the car later, with her bruised cheek swelling and the money crumpled in her hand and Lamey’s slime still drooling down her thigh, she thought about calling the Legion of Diligence and letting them know where Lamey was hiding. But instead she told the boy to take her to a pharmacy near Caro’s place.

She found a box of plasters that would soak up the bruises and took it to the drug counter in the back. The older woman behind the counter looked at her face with knowing sympathy. “Anything else, honey?”

“Yes,” Gredel said. “Two vials of Phenyldorphin-Zed.”

She was required to sign the Narcotics Book for the endorphin analog, and the name she scrawled wasSula.

Caro was outraged by Gredel’s bruises. “Lamey comes round here again, I’ll kick him in the balls!” she said. “I’ll hit him with a chair!”

“Forget about it,” Gredel said wearily. She didn’t want demonstrations of loyalty from Caro right now. Her feelings were confused enough: she didn’t want to start having to like Caro all over again.

Caro pulled Gredel into the bedroom and cleaned her face, then she cut the plasters to fit Gredel’s bruises and applied them. Next day, when the plasters were removed, the bruises had mostly disappeared, leaving some faint discoloration easily covered with cosmetic. Gredel’s whole face hurt, though, and so did her ribs and her solar plexus where Lamey had hit her.

Caro brought her breakfast from the cafe and hovered around her until Gredel wanted to shriek.

If you want to help, she thought at Caro,take your appointment to the academy and get us both out of here.

But Caro didn’t answer the mental command. And her solicitude faded by afternoon, when she opened the day’s first bottle. It was vodka flavored with bison grass, which explained the strange fusil-oil overtones Gredel had scented on Caro’s skin the last few days. By mid-afternoon Caro had consumed most of the bottle and fallen asleep on the couch.

Gredel felt a small, chill triumph. It was good to be reminded why she hated her friend.

The next day was Caro’s phony Earthday.Last chance, Gredel thought at her.Last chance to mention the academy.

But the word never passed Caro’s lips.

“I want to pay you back for everything you’ve done,” Gredel said. “Your Earthday is on me.” She put her arm around Caro. “I’ve got everything planned,” she said.

They started at Godfrey’s for the full treatment-massage, facial, hair, the lot. Then lunch at a brass-railed bistro south of the arcades, bubbling grilled cheese on rare vash roast and crusty bread, with a salad of marinated dedger flowers. To Caro’s surprise, Gredel called for a bottle of wine, and poured some of it into her own glass.

“You’redrinking, ” Caro said, delighted. “What’s got into you?”

“I want to toast your Earthday,” Gredel said.

Being drunk might make it easier, she thought.

Gredel kept refilling Caro’s glass while sipping at her own, then took Caro to the arcades. She bought her a summer dress of silk patterned with rhompe birds and jennifer flowers, a jacket shimmering with gold and green sequins-matching Caro’s hair and eyes-and two pairs of shoes. She bought outfits for herself as well.

After taking their treasures to Caro’s place, where Caro had a few shots of the bison vodka, they went to dinner at one of Caro’s exclusive dining clubs. Caro hadn’t been thrown out of this club yet, but the maitre d‘ was on guard and sat them well away from everyone else. Caro ordered cocktails and two bottles of wine and after-dinner drinks. Gredel’s head spun even after the careful sips she’d been taking; she couldn’t imagine what Caro must be feeling. Caro needed a jolt of benzedrine to get to the dance club Gredel had put next on the agenda, though she had no trouble keeping her feet once she got there.

After dancing awhile, Gredel said she was tired, and they brushed off the male admirers they’d collected and took a taxi home.

Gredel showered while Caro headed for the bison vodka again. The benzedrine had given her a lot of energy, which she put into finishing the bottle. Gredel changed into the silk lounging suit Caro had bought her on their first day together, and put the two vials of endorphin analog into a pocket.

Caro was on the couch, where Gredel had left her. Her eyes were bright, but when she spoke to Gredel, her words were slurred.

“I have one more present,” Gredel said. She reached into her pocket and held out the two vials. “I think this is a kind you like. I really wasn’t sure.”

Caro laughed. “You take care of me all day, and now you help me to sleep!” She reached over and put her arms around Gredel. “You’re my best sister, Earthgirl.” In Caro’s embrace, Gredel could smell bison grass and sweat and perfume all mingled, and she tried to keep a firm grip on her hatred even as her heart turned over in her chest.

Caro unloaded her med injector, put in one of the vials of Phenyldorphin-Zed and used it right away. Her eyelids fluttered as the endorphin flooded her brain. “Oh nice,” she murmured. “Such a good sister.” She gave herself another dose a few minutes later. She spoke a few soft words but her voice kept floating away. She gave herself a third dose and fell asleep, her golden hair falling across her face as she lay on the pillow.

Gredel took the injector from Caro’s limp fingers. She reached out and brushed the hair from Caro’s face.

“Want some more?” she asked. “Want some more, Sister Caro?”

Caro gave a little indistinct murmur. Her lips curled up in a smile. When Gredel fired another dose into her carotid, the smile broadened, and she shrugged herself into the sofa pillows like a happy puppy.

Gredel turned from her and reached for Caro’s portable computer console. She called up Caro’s banking files and prepared a form closing the account and transferring its contents to the account Gredel had set up. Then she prepared another message to Caro’s trust account on Spannan’s ring, instructing any further payments to be sent to the new account as well.

“Caro,” Gredel said. “Caro, I need your thumbprint here, all right?”

She stroked Caro awake, and managed to get her to lean over the console long enough to press her thumb, twice, to the reader. Then Gredel handed the injector to Caro and watched her give herself another dose.

Now I’mreallya criminal, she thought. She had left a trail of data that pointed straight to herself.

But even so, she could not bring herself to completely commit to this course of action. She left herself a way out.Caro has to want it, she thought.I won’t give her any more if she says no.

Caro sighed, settled herself more deeply into the pillows. “Would you like some more?” Gredel asked.

“Mmm,” Caro said, and smiled.

Gredel took the injector from her hand and gave her another dose.

After a while she exhausted the first vial and started on the second. Before each dose, she shook Caro and asked if she wanted more. Caro would sigh, or laugh, or murmur, but never said no. Gredel triggered dose after dose.

After the second vial was exhausted the snoring started, Caro’s breath heaving itself past the palate, the lungs pumping hard, sometimes with a kind of wrench. Gredel remembered the sound from the time Caro had given herself too much endorphin, and the memory caused her to leap from the sofa and walk very fast around the apartment, rubbing her arms to fight her sudden chill.

The snoring went on. Gredel very much needed something to do, so she went into the kitchen and made coffee. And then the snoring stopped.

Ice shuddered along Gredel’s nerves She went to the kitchen door and stared out into the front room at the tumbled golden hair that hung off the end of the couch.It’s over, she thought.

Then Caro’s head rolled, and Gredel’s heart froze as she saw Caro’s hand come up and comb the hair with her fingers. There was a gurgling snort, and the snoring resumed.

Gredel stood in the door as cold terror pulsed through her veins. But she told herself,No, it can’t be long now.

And then, suddenly, she couldn’t stand still any longer, and walked swiftly over the apartment, straightening and tidying. The new clothes went into the closet, the shoes on their racks, the empty bottle in the trash. Wherever she went the snores pursued her. Sometimes they stopped for a few paralyzing seconds, then resumed.

Abruptly, Gredel couldn’t bear being in the apartment. She put on a pair of shoes, went to the freight elevator and took it to the basement, where she looked for one of the motorized carts they used to move luggage and furniture. There were a great many objects in the basement, things that had been discarded or forgotten about, and Gredel found some strong dedger-fiber rope and an old compressor, a piece of solid bronzework heavy enough to anchor a fair-sized boat.

She put these in the cart and pushed it to the elevator. As she approached Sula’s doors, she could hear Caro’s snores through the enameled steel. Gredel’s fingers trembled as she pressed codes into the lock.

Caro was still on the couch, her breath still fighting its way past her throat. Gredel cast an urgent glance at the clock. There weren’t many hours of darkness left, and darkness was required for what happened next.

Gredel sat at Caro’s feet and hugged a pillow to her chest and watched her breathe. Caro’s skin was pale and looked clammy. “Please,” Gredel begged under her breath. “Please die now. Please.” But Caro wouldn’t die. Her breaths grated on and on, until Gredel began to hate them with a bitter resentment. This was sotypical, she thought. Caro couldn’t evendie without getting it all wrong.

Gredel looked at the wall clock, and it stared back at her like the barrel of a gun. Come dawn, she thought, the gun goes off. Or she could sit in the apartment all day with a corpse, and that was a thought she couldn’t face.

Again Caro’s breath hung suspended, and Gredel felt her own breath cease for the long moment of suspense. Then Caro dragged in another long rattling gasp, and Gredel felt her heart sink. She knew that her tools had betrayed her. She would have to finish this herself.

All her anger was gone by now, all hatred, all emotion except a sick weariness, a desire to get it over. The pillow was already held to her chest, a warm comfort in the room filled only with Caro’s racking, tormented snores.

She cast one last look at Caro, thought,Please die at her one more time, but Caro didn’t respond any more than she had responded to any of Gredel’s other unexpressed wishes.

Gredel suddenly lunged across the sofa, her body moving without conscious command, the movement seeming to come from pure instinct. She pressed the pillow over Caro’s face and put her weight on it.

Please die,she thought.

Caro hardly fought. Her body twisted on the couch and both her hands came up, but the hands didn’t fight, they just fell across Gredel’s back as if in a halfhearted embrace.

Gredel would have felt better if Caro had fought. It would have given her hatred something to fasten on to.

Instead, through the closeness of their bodies, she felt the urgent kick-kick-kick of Caro’s diaphragm as it tried to draw in air, the kick repeated over and over again. Fast, then slow, then fast. Caro’s feet shivered. Gredel could feel Caro’s hands trembling as they lay on her back. Tears spilled from Gredel’s eyes.

The kicking stopped. The trembling stopped.

Gredel leaned on the pillow awhile longer just to make sure. The pillow was wet with tears. When she finally took the pillow away, it revealed a pale, cold thing that bore no resemblance to Caro at all.

Caro was weight now, not a person. That made what followed a lot easier.

Handling a limp body was more difficult than Gredel had ever imagined. By the time she got it onto the cart, she was panting for breath and her eyes stung with sweat. She covered Caro with a bed sheet and she added some empty suitcases to the cart as well. She took the cart to the freight elevator, then left by the loading dock at the back of the building.

“I am Caroline, Lady Sula,” she said aloud, rehearsing her story. “I’m moving to a new place because my lover beat me.” She would have the identification to prove her claim, and what remained of the bruises, and the suitcases plain to see alongside the covered objects that weren’t so plain.

Gredel didn’t need to use her story. The streets were deserted as she walked downslope alongside the humming cart, down to the Iola River.

The roads ran high above the river on either side, with ramps that descended to the darkened riverside quay below. Gredel rode the cart down the ramp to the river’s edge. This was the good part of Maranic Town, and there were no houseboats here, no beggars, no homeless, and-at this hour-no fishermen. The only encounters she feared were lovers sheltering under the bridges, but by now it was so late that even the lovers had gone to bed.

It was as hard getting Caro off the cart as getting her on it. But when she finally went into the river, tied to the compressor, the dark waters closed over her with barely a ripple. In a video drama Caro would have floated a while, poignantly, saying good-bye to the world, but there was none of that here, just the silent dark submersion and ripples that died swiftly in the current.

Caro had never been one for protracted good-byes.

Gredel walked alongside the cart back to the Volta. A few cars slowed to look at her, but moved on.

In the apartment, she tried to sleep, but Caro’s scent filled the bed, and sleep was impossible there. Caro had died on the sofa, and Gredel didn’t want to go near it. She caught a few hours’ fitful rest on a chair, and then the woman called Caroline Sula rose and began her day.

The first thing she did was send in the confirmation of her appointment to the Cheng Ho Academy.

She packed two suitcases, took them to Maranic Port and the hovercraft ferry that would take her across the Krassow Sea to Vidalia. From there she took the express train up the Hayakh Escarpment to the Quaylah Plateau, where high altitude moderated the subtropical heat of the Equatorial Continent. The planet’s antimatter ring arced almost directly overhead.

Paysec was a winter resort, but the snowfall wouldn’t begin until the monsoon shifted to the northeast, so she found good rates for a small apartment in Lus’trel, and took it for two months. She bought some clothes-not the extravagant garments that were sold in Maranic Town’s arcades, but practical country clothes, and boots for walking. She found a tailor, and he began to assemble the extensive wardrobe she would need for the academy.

She didn’t want Lady Sula’s disappearance from Maranic Town to cause any official disturbance, so she sent a message to Caro’s official guardian, Jacob Biswas, telling him that she found Maranic too distracting and had come to Lus’trel in order to concentrate on her preparation for the academy. She told him she was giving up the Maranic apartment, and that he could collect anything she’d left there.

Because she didn’t trust herself to impersonate Caro with someone who knew her well, she didn’t use video; she typed the message and sent it print only.

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 beenDauntless andGlory 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.