The Praxis (40 page)

Her blinding grin flashed out. “When? We're standing watches back-to-back.”

“That's true,” Martinez admitted, and added, “I'll help when I can.” He hesitated, then said, “It's unfortunate that with so many vacancies, I can't promote you to sublieutenant, but you just don't have enough experience.”

“Oh well.” She shrugged. “Too bad the rebels didn't wait another year.” She looked up at him. “Are you thinking of giving Vonderheydte a step?”

“I'm not sure I know him well enough. What's your opinion?” She'd been aboard
Corona
since her graduation, and she knew Vonderheydte better than he did.

“Von would make a good lieutenant,” she said. “He's conscientious enough, and he admires you.”

“Does he?” Martinez felt vanity give a little jerk to his head. Then he thought about Vonderheydte's two ex-wives, and said, “Do you know anything about his personal life? His marriages?”

“More than one?” Kelly was surprised. “He only talks about the latest, I guess.” She began to speak, then hesitated. “I'd rather not repeat anything he told me in confidence,” she said.

“I wouldn't ask you to break a trust,” Martinez said. “But nothing he's told you would mitigate against his promotion?”

She seemed relieved not to be pressed on the matter. “No, Lord Elcap,” she said.

“Right,” Martinez said. “Thank you.” And before he could think too much about it, he added, “We should probably talk. About the recreational we had some days ago.”

She smiled with her lips pressed together, as if to herself. “I was wondering if you were—well, go ahead.”

“If I was what?”

Kelly shook her head. “You start, my lord.”

He looked at her. “Well,” he said, “you want to do it again?”

This time the grin burst out, along with the incredulous bark of a laugh he'd heard when he asked her the first time. Then she composed her face into a solemn expression. “Well, Lord Elcap,” she said. “As I think I've mentioned, I have a guy on Zanshaa. And we're getting closer to him.”

“We are.”

“And you're the captain now, and…” She bit her lip. “That's different, isn't it?”

“It is.”

There was a space of silence. “Believe me, I'm tempted,” she said. “But we'd better not.”

Wounded vainglory warred in Martinez's heart with relief. He preferred to think himself irresistible, and disliked evidence to the contrary. He enjoyed Kelly, but having a lover on board was likely to be more complication than he really wanted. “You win on maturity points, I think,” he said.

Displays great maturity,
Martinez wrote later in her file. Exercising his powers of patronage for the first time, he also sent a recommendation to the Fleet that Kelly be decorated for coolness and gallantry in shooting down incoming missiles, and suggested the Award of Valor.

He still made no decision about the lieutenancy. Caroline Sula hovered in his thoughts. She needed promotion and a patron in the service, and her record was exemplary.

But it was hard to promote someone who wouldn't talk to you. He considered sending her the offer, but dreaded her refusal or, worse, her silence.

Eventually the Fleet forced his hand. He received word that they had assigned him a full complement, mainly old hardshells called out of retirement and new drafts fresh from the training schools, most of whom had not yet actually graduated. All were assembling now at Zanshaa and would come aboard as soon as he docked. Martinez knew nothing of two of the three lieutenants assigned to him, but he knew the third, Sibbaldo, with whom he had served as a cadet. He knew him to be a friendless, sarcastic, bullying man, ignorant of his duties and with a talent for making mistakes and then successfully laying the blame on others.

Martinez sent word to the Fleet that he had just promoted Cadet Vonderheydte into a lieutenancy, and though he would be happy to accept his new first and second officers, he regretted that he would have no place for Lieutenant Sibbaldo. Then he walked to Command to inform Vonderheydte of his new status.

That afternoon it was Vonderheydte who had to make a speech. Martinez enjoyed it immensely. He didn't open the spirit locker, but it turned out not to matter.

“I believe Zhou and Ahmet are operating a still, my lord.” Alikhan's report came the next morning, as he was folding Martinez's linen. “They're buying scraps and leftovers from the cooks and fermenting them.”

“Using the profits from their dice game.” Martinez had already been told about that venture.

“No doubt, my lord.”

“I wonder when they sleep.”

Martinez considered
Corona's
troublemakers for a moment. “Unless drunkenness becomes a problem, I'd suggest we don't find the still till near the end of the voyage. Then we mete out punishments and fines with a heavy hand, and the dice game's profits become part of the recreation fund.”

Alikhan's smile seemed approving. “Very good, my lord.”

“If you find a way to relieve the cooks of
their
illicit earnings, let me know.”

The smile broadened. “I shall, my lord.”

It was twenty-one days before the sphere of Paswal Wormhole 2 engulfed the
Corona,
and the latter part of the trip was spent in deceleration. Martinez was planning a much gentler return to Zanshaa than the departure he'd been forced to make from Magaria, and unless the Fleet ordered otherwise, he was going to make a pleasant one-gee deceleration the whole way.

From Paswal,
Corona
passed to Loatyn, an inhabited system with eight billion citizens spread out among two planets and three moons.
Corona
was in the system for only the eight days it took to cross between Wormholes 2 and 3, and for that brief moment was the only loyalist armed force in the system, since the frigate
Mentor
had left for Zanshaa at the beginning of the emergency.

During the last hour of the transit to Wormhole 2,
Corona
witnessed the enemy invasion, when eight warships appeared from Wormhole 1. The ships had actually arrived fourteen hours earlier—the distance from Wormhole 1 to 2 was slightly in excess of fourteen light-hours—and they were coming on fast, nearly forty percent the speed of light. A glance at a wormhole map showed that the newcomers must be the Naxid squadron from Felarus, the headquarters of the Third Fleet.

Censors had prevented news of what had happened to the Third Fleet from spreading, but now that Martinez saw the Naxid squadron, he felt he could guess.

Their arrival was a nasty shock, but he calculated that they could not catch him, not unless they followed him all the way to Zanshaa, in which case they'd find themselves in a fight with the Home Fleet, now building its velocity in frantic burns around the system. Through the wormhole relay stations he sent word of the Felarus squadron's arrival to Zanshaa.

Corona
dived into Wormhole 2 and found itself in Protipanu, another uninhabited system. Protipanu was a brown dwarf barely detectible in the visible spectrum. In its earlier, bloated, red giant stage it had gobbled its inner planets, turned the middle planets to rubble through gravitational stress, and boiled the frozen atmosphere off the outer four planets, leaving barren rocks. The result was an absolutely bare inner system, and scattered rings of rocks and ice in the far reaches.

The most impressive thing about Protipanu, however, was the brilliant red cloud, shading into purples and blues, that occupied fully a third of the sky. This was a supernova remnant expanding toward Protipanu and scheduled to arrive in another eight thousand years. The cloud formed a giant flaming hoop in the sky, like a mouth opening to consume the brown dwarf, and had been named the Maw.

Corona
was only in the Protipanu system for four hours, the brief time it took to transit the two wormholes. The personnel on the two wormhole relay stations were warned that the Naxids were coming, though only those at Wormhole 2, at the far end, would have a chance to get out of the system before the Naxids overran them. Martinez didn't know what the Naxids were doing with the relay stations, but he presumed they were occupying them when possible, to make use of the communications system that kept the empire together.

From Protipanu,
Corona
sped on, spending two days in Seizho before heading through Seizho Wormhole 4 to Zanshaa, the Home Fleet, and safety.

Martinez decided then that it was time to get serious about finding
Corona's
illicit still.

 

T
hey will be coming in thirty hours
, thought Shushanik Severin.
I have that long to prepare an unpleasant surprise
.

“This is Warrant Officer Severin at Protipanu Two,” he replied via comm laser. “Thank you for the warning, Captain Martinez. My congratulations to yourself and to
Corona
, and the very best of luck to you all.”

Severin could hardly blame Martinez from flying before an enemy squadron that outnumbered him eight to one. It was a pity, though, that he himself was left in the lurch.

Severin was twenty-eight years old and commanded the wormhole relay station. He and his staff of six maintained the powerful communications lasers that transmitted messages through the system, as well as the giant mass drivers that kept the wormhole stable. They normally spent four months on and four months off, and had just begun their new tour when the rebellion broke out. Now, schedules were so disrupted that it was unclear how long they would remain.

The wormhole stations were the domain of the Exploration Service, an organization with a glorious history but one that barely explored anything any longer, its budgets slowly reduced over the centuries as the Shaa grew old and died and lost interest in expanding their empire. Maintaining the wormholes and the communications system were now the Service's primary tasks, and the two remaining exploration craft were crewed by cadets who built their esprit by reenacting the heroic discoveries of the past.

Severin would like to have commanded a probe through a newly discovered wormhole, but his real reason for joining the Exploration Service was because of his aunt, a commander who could guarantee him quick promotion. The pay was good and he could save money easily, since he had no expenses during his four-month stretches in the station. It was a good service, small and efficient, and everyone based at Seizho knew and liked each other.

Severin didn't know how he felt about the service being militarized and annexed to the Fleet for the duration of the emergency. He reckoned he could live with it if he didn't have to take too many idiotic orders from a clutch of useless Peers.

Most wormholes, those strange remnants left over from the formation of the universe, were spherical, presenting the familiar inverted-starscape-in-a-goldfish-bowl appearance that was the standard illustration in elementary texts. Other wormholes were tetrahedral or octahedral or cylindrical. Protipanu 2 was the only torus-shaped wormhole, with a hole in the middle, that was actually in use. The famous yachtsman Minh had once repeatedly dived his yacht through the hole in the center, threading it like a giant buttonhole. Severin enjoyed looking through the broad windows of his command center at the strange sight, the weird hoop of another system's stars floating in space. He took a kind of pride in it, in being custodian of the most unique wormhole in the empire.

Still, now that there was an emergency, Severin found himself chafing to do his bit. In the old days, the Exploration Service would have been foremost in any action against rebels. So when
Corona's
signal told him that the Naxids were on their way and how long it would be before they arrived, he called a meeting of his staff.

“I think we should strike at the enemy,” he said. “I think we should do something worthy of the traditions of the Service.”

“Such as?” Warrant Officer/Second Gruust was skeptical.

Severin offered Gruust a bite of the spicy garlic sausage he'd been snacking on when the message came.

“I think we should move the wormhole,” he said.

Part of the task of the wormhole station was to keep the wormhole stable. Wormholes could be destabilized over time if more mass went in one direction through the hole than the other, a problem that hardly existed when all that passed through them was solar wind and the odd bit of cosmic dust. Ships, however, were another problem. If more ships passed through the wormhole in one direction, then the wormhole could deform, drift away, or even collapse.

Fortunately for the stability of the empire, the remedy was simple: you simply had to chuck enough matter in the other direction to reestablish balance. Each wormhole station was equipped with a mass driver that could fire colossal steel-jacketed chunks of asteroid material through the hole and into orbit around the other system's star, where they could be retrieved if necessary and fired the other way. The projectiles were so massive that the driver didn't move them very fast, but speed was hardly necessary—only a degree of timing was required, so that a ship heading for the wormhole didn't meet a rock going the other way.

“Move the wormhole?” Gruust asked. “Can we do that?”

“I expect we can.”

Gruust chewed meditatively on garlic sausage. “That would really wreck their schedule. They miss the wormhole, there aren't any planets out there to swing around. It would take them months to decelerate and return.”

Severin was already on to the next step. “Why don't you and the others get the lifeboat packed and I'll warm up the coils?”

The exams Severin had passed to earn his rank had featured a lot of wormhole theory, and he put it to use now. He began firing his heavy, slow-moving bowling balls toward the great torus, and only then started calculating where they would have to hit in order to skate the wormhole across the sky. He figured the first few shots would destabilize the wormhole only slightly and make the rest of his task easier.