Praxis

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 theMidnight 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 Delhihad lost its captain, its second and third lieutenants, and everyone else in Command. The forward third of the ship had been decompressed, there were only a dozen missiles left in the magazine, and only one pinnace remained-Sula’s.

But Sula reminded herself thatDelhi 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 ofDelhi’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 examswould 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.

Coronaand 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 thatCorona, 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 theDelhi, 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 ofCorona, 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 entertaining 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 theEnd 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.

The eight ships had finished their long, long deceleration burn and reentered the system, swinging in a leisurely orbit about the brown dwarf and its outer planets. They knew where the wormhole was now, but showed no sign of wanting to pass through it. Whatever plans they’d once had were now altered.

The Naxids had been reinforced. Two more warships, and a pair of fat cargo vessels that had chucked large containers into orbit around the sun for the warships to pick up, containers that Severin suspected held food and fuel. The cargo ships had then gone on to rendezvous with the two message relay stations and occupy them. Severin wouldn’t be getting messages out of the system anytime soon.

The Naxids had fired decoys: an elaborate pattern had been sent in orbit around the Protipanu system. Anyone entering would have a confusing time sorting real targets from false, perhaps a fatal time.

The Naxids were up to something. Severin watched everything on his displays and made notes.

The enemy had plans. And Severin was going to work out what they were.

If only he could keep from freezing.