A Matter of Oaths (33 page)

Joshim’s presence in the web was so light that it was
possible to forget he was there. Until he flicked you a warning that your web
control was slipping. Or decided that you were fading and swapped you out to
filtered standby to snatch some sleep in the shub. He had better think
carefully before he tried that with
her
.
She had designated him as her backup because he had insisted she choose one. He
was the best Webmaster she had worked with in years, and an adequate tactician
for Outsider encounters. He was not a Commander. Especially not a Fleet
Commander.

[Fleet Group Six in position for jump. All Commanders report
ready and counting.]

[Acknowledged. Five minute warning.]

The alert confirmed what everybody knew, that jump and
combat were imminent. Rallya felt the telltale shift in concentration
throughout the web as minds and bodies tensed in anticipation. She sent a test
signal down her direct channels, to the sensors team, the drive team, the
weapons team, the shields team. Ritual more than routine, a final reassurance
for her and for them that they were in contact, that she was in control of the
ship, that
Bhattya
was part of her body
as the fleet would never be, although they took her orders too.

[One minute warning.]

The drive team signalled readiness; the parameters for the
jump were locked into the system ready to be activated. Rallya put the shields
on triggered standby; they would be raised as soon as they came out of jump. She
switched her primary input to the wide scanner, for an instant overview of
Central when they emerged.

[Activating jump.]

She rode it with her inputs open, shedding the chaotic data
that flowed in for the no-time they were in jump space. As the shields came up
and the vanes moved out to restore the drive field, she drew the wide scan
matrix into herself, looking for threats, immediate and deferred.

The fleet had come through in perfect formation, a slowly
contracting sphere focused on Central. There were several ships in dock, others
forming a ragged shell between the station and the fleet. Ten… eleven of them. Patrolships
by their sleek lines and the heat patterns on their hulls. Patrolships with their
shields up and their weapons primed but still taken by surprise by the fleet’s
arrival, their weapons targeted on the station, outnumbered two to one by the
incoming ships.

[Fleet broadcast,] Rallya flashed to Vidar. [Status one.] Which
was fire only when fired upon, by the code she had agreed with the other
Commanders. [General broadcast: Invitation to surrender. To Central: Query
situation.] To the sensor team, she sent [Identify all hostile ships.]

Some of Carher’s ships were moving away from the station,
sacrificing its shelter to give themselves more room in which to fight. Or run,
if they could escape the station’s mass-shadow. No Commander who deserved their
berth would like such uneven odds. Their web-rooms would probably prefer to
surrender if they were given the choice. Most of them would be cut off from the
comm circuits, deaf to everything that their Threes did not want them to hear,
but their sensors would show them what was going on. It would not take them
long to work out what their chances were and nothing crippled a ship more
effectively than discord in the web.

[Message from Central,] Vidar notified her. [Station secure.
Long range comms damaged. Unable to assist.]

Not with four armed patrolships looking down their throats,
Rallya agreed grimly. Stations were never armed, could not be shielded, were
too complex and fragile to invite being fired upon. And the ships in dock could
not move without jeopardizing the station. Unless some of them were hostile,
but there was no sign of activity among them. It looked as if she had
interrupted an attempt to capture the station. As if none of Carher’s ships had
reached dock or they had been forced out by the station’s resistance. Where was
Carher? On one of the ships preparing for action, or still clinging to the
shelter of the station? At least she did not have control of the station; that
was the bloodiest of the scenarios that Rallya had planned for.

[General broadcast,] she told Vidar. [All ships to hold
current position or be fired upon. Fleet broadcast: status two.] Select targets
and prepare to fire on signal.

The sensors team were feeding her names for Carher’s ships
and for their Threes; the station must be broadcasting the data, doing as much
as they could to help. Carher’s name was tagged to
Keldir
, hugging the station within
Bhattya
’s field of fire. Rallya marked her down as the prime target
for the weapons team. There were other names that she recognized, names that
held no surprises. Most of the Old Empire aristos in the Guild had swarmed to
Carher, like flies to a dung heap. She saw Meresya’s name on one of the
outbound ships, and Dhanar’s. Thirty-five years ago they had both slipped
through the Council’s ineffective net. But not this time.

[Message from
Keldir
,]
Vidar sent. [Withdraw, or we will fire on station. Also coded broadcast, same
source.]

Instructions to her other ships, as Rallya was instructing
hers. [Fleet broadcast: code five,] Rallya responded. Fire on any ship that
tries to jump. [No reply to
Keldir
.]

Carher was bluffing. Outnumbered and caught in Central’s
mass-shadow, she was hoping to negotiate a way out of the trap, trying for time
to regroup and try again. As long as she believed she had a chance of winning,
she would try to preserve Central and the secrets it held: the formula for
R-K-D and the drugs that deactivated a web, the navigation libraries, all of
the other keys to the power that she needed to survive. And she was gambling
that Rallya would not risk crippling the Guild by endangering Central’s
records. Hellishly stupid to have kept them in one place, Rallya thought
fleetingly; that would have to change. After she had seen Carher’s bet.

[Lock on target,] she ordered the weapons team.

[Acknowledged.]

One of the outbound ships folded its vanes and dropped its
shields in a single well-planned move. Then it was debris, hit by fire from two
directions as it tried to jump.

[We have surrenders,] Vidar reported almost immediately. [Four.
Now six.]

It had taken those web-rooms long enough, Rallya thought
angrily. Gods knew if the webbers who had just died had been the most fanatic
or only the most stupid…

[Nonnegotiable conditions,] she sent. [Dropped shields,
folded vanes, cold weapons. Skeleton team in each web, the rest of the web-room
in suits on the hull. Group One Commander to take possession. One ship from
each group to assist.] And gods help anybody who got in the line of fire if
Carher made a break for it, friend or enemy. [Fleet broadcast: status two.] There
were still four ships to deal with. [General broadcast: will open fire in five
minutes.]

[Message from
Keldir
:
will surrender at station.] There was a ripple of disbelief in Vidar’s signal,
an unnecessary flicker of warning from Joshim.

[Negative. Conditions for surrender have already been
stated. Remaining ships will move away from station before surrender will be
accepted.]

Nobody willing to double-cross Julur would fold so easily. Carher
had something planned; every length she moved away from Central reduced the
danger that the station would be caught in the crossfire when she tried it. Though
gods knew what it was:
Keldir
was too
deep inside a mass-shadow to try for a jump, too outnumbered to fight free. Surrender
was the only sane option, but it still was not believable.

[Conditions accepted,] Vidar reported.

As Rallya watched suspiciously,
Keldir
lowered its shields and edged away from the station, tamely
copied by the other three ships.

[Message to
Keldir
:
we will approach you,] she told Vidar, angling
Bhattya
’s vanes to take them out of formation. The weapons team was
still locked on target. The sensor team fed her a heat scan of the approaching
ship: shields lowered, cannons cooling, no more activity from the drive than
could be explained by the gradual movement. Nothing apparently out of place. Even
the vanes were…

Space rippled with the stress of a ship jumping inside a
mass-shadow. Rallya grabbed for the drive controls, slammed
Bhattya
in
Keldir
’s wake. The web convulsed in a struggle to adjust; dimly she
was aware of Joshim damping the shock waves to allow her to work. The cannons
were still primed and aimed where their target had been. She bypassed the
weapons team, praying that they had come out of the jump in the right
orientation, that
Keldir
was the
blurred image in the sensors that had survived. She fired. The blur scattered
into a sparkle of fragments. As it did, somebody — Vidar? — took the ship back
into jump space, back through the hole that was closing behind them, back to
the fading echoes of their departure.

There was utter silence in the signal circuits as the web
steadied, as if nobody quite believed what had happened, neither
Keldir
’s insanity, jumping inside a
mass-shadow, nor Rallya’s, riding the wake. Gods knew, nobody could expect to
survive such insanity twice in a lifetime, Rallya thought, pulling herself
together. Luckily, once had been enough. But it had been earned luck, she told
herself exuberantly, the luck of having the right team in the web and the right
kind of suspicious mind. Although if they drifted much longer in a battlefield,
half-blind and congratulating themselves, they would deserve something else.

Not that there was a battle still going on. Not that there
had been a battle at all, only a swift but conclusive skirmish, but the histories
would call it a battle, and the web-rooms of the her fleet would boast about
having taken part in it. Let them, Rallya thought resignedly. Only two ships
lost, and those both the enemy’s: it was more to be proud of than a bloody
fight with heavy casualties on both side. There was still clearing up to do,
guilt to determine in the web-rooms of the ships that had surrendered, but it
was a good beginning.

[Query comms,] she sent crisply to Joshim. First priority
was a situation report, to confirm what she was getting from the sensors that
were left. The growing activity in the web told her that Vidar was already busy
collating a damage report that he would hold against her for years. [Casualty
report,] also to Joshim. The damage control teams would have taken a battering
in those two rapid jumps. [Well done,] to the rest of the web.

[No casualties,] Joshim replied. [Message from Group One
Commander. Situation stable. All hostile ships being boarded. Fleet moving to
defensive formation.]

Situation stable? Huh. It would be a long time before the
situation in the Guild was stable again. [Query Central.]

[From Central: sending tug to assist us to dock. Council
waiting for you earliest opportunity.]

[Advise accept assistance,] Vidar added accusingly. [Eighty
percent sensor loss, sixty percent vane loss, total shield loss. Other minor
damage.]

[Accept,] she sent to Joshim. She could imagine what the
Council — or what was left of it — wanted. Help to sort out the chaos their
incompetence had brought down on their heads. Well, if that was so, they would
take it on her terms or not at all. She had not risked the lives of every
webber in
Bhattya
’s web-room to see
the Council throw away what they had won.

[Take key,] she told Vidar, relinquishing control of the web.
Carher had lost because she had not been given enough time to win; the Council
were going to learn the same lesson. Hit them now with what was required of
them, while they were still reeling from the shock of Carher’s defection, and
the Guild would come through this a hell’s length stronger than it had ever
been.

To all ships and stations:

The coup instigated by ex-Councillor Carher has been
decisively suppressed in a brief battle at Central… Commander Rallya of
Bhattya
and the Old Empire has been
co-opted onto the Council…

“The work would go faster if you had help.”

Rafe glanced across the floor at Braniya’s feet, all that he
could see of her from under the antique web’s casing. “I don’t need help.” He
pulled another circuit out of its mounting and inspected it carefully for
visible signs of damage.

“You don’t want to endanger anybody,” Braniya corrected him.

“It would be a waste,” Rafe agreed. “Especially since you
won’t find a tech who knows anything about this.” Not even within the Guild,
unless one of the historians had come across something similar in the records…

“Not even the little that you know?” Braniya asked. “Perhaps
not, but would an extra pair of hands not be useful?”

“This,” Rafe said, sliding out from under the casing and
standing up to place the circuit in the test-rig that he had found with the
web, “was designed for a single person to maintain and use. An extra pair of
hands would just get in the way.”

What else it had been designed for, he had been unable to
discover. Self-contained, even to its power-source, it had no sensors, no
control linkages, only a bank of comms circuits to connect it to the world
outside. There was a single couch covered by a full-length hood, with
web-contacts that would fit his and provision for a nutrient feed. For
amusement, Julur had said; somebody had had a damned solitary vice.

“The Emperor is concerned that your web-cramp is occurring
more frequently and with greater severity.”

“The Emperor is not the only one.”

The test-rig displayed the symbol for test-in-progress, then
the symbol for test-complete-without-errors. They were the same symbols that
the Guild’s test-rigs used, produced by equipment of an age Rafe could not
guess. The area where the web was installed had been vacuum-sealed; when the
guards had unsealed it, it looked as if it had not been visited for centuries. And
the web itself — the principles of its construction were familiar, if all the
materials were not, but for it to have survived so long without deteriorating… Unless
the test-rig was faulty — and he had to trust that it was not — every circuit
that Rafe had checked was functioning perfectly.