The Praxis (43 page)

This was the worst of it, however. The station was on alert, all essential personnel were in hardened shelters either on the station or aboard ship, and none of the other shelters were subject to the same design errors that made Ring Command vulnerable. The radiation casualties consisted of a few stray civilians, prisoners from the captured vessels who had been herded to the base skyhook and were awaiting transport to the surface, and their guards.
Ferogash
lost its sensors but not its communications, though since there was no one to answer, its messages soon took on a plaintive cast.

Fanaghee herself suffered nothing more than humiliation. She was in a skyhook car racing from the planet to the ring when its controls were knocked out, stranding her without communication in Magaria's troposphere for eleven hours.

But communication among the rest of her fleet was restored within hours. Within days the three ships charted by Premiere Axiom of Naxas docked at the ring station, disgorging hundreds of Naxid personnel to crew the captured vessels. They tended to be young and relatively inexperienced, or seniors drafted out of retirement, and had been told only hours earlier that they now served not the Commandery or the Convocation, but the Committee for the Salvation of the Praxis.

By the time the recruits arrived, gangs were already working at converting the captured ships to Naxid use. This was more than tearing out chairs and replacing them with sofas: the radiation-hardened rooms that would shelter the crew during combat had to be completely redesigned to accommodate the Naxid form.

Fanaghee and her original two squadrons separated from the station two days after her reinforcements arrived, and from then on she controlled affairs from her flagship,
Majesty of the Praxis.
She and her squadrons began a series of heavy accelerations between Magaria, Barbas, and Rinconell, intending to provide a bulwark against any retaliation from the Home Fleet at Zanshaa. The two squadrons under Elkizer joined, already traveling fast. And, one by one, the captured squadrons finished their refits and joined Fanaghee in her defensive circle.

The squadrons from Felarus and Comador were committed elsewhere, but Naxas sent one-half of its ten-ship squadron to Magaria, reserving the others to defend the capital, and some small, individual ships joined from where they had been on detached duty, giving Fanaghee a total of seventy ships. She calculated that Jarlath at Zanshaa probably had fifty-five or so, if he had called in the Daimong from Zarafan, and she considered taking the offensive. The murder of the Naxid convocates had greatly offended her, and she wanted revenge upon the rioters who the enemy proclaimed as heroes, and had in mind for their punishment something more colorful than being thrown off a cliff. The only thing that held her back was the refitted ships, which hadn't had time to match the speed of her other forces—once she had them all moving at the same rate, she would petition the committee for permission to seize Zanshaa.

In the meantime she readied her defenses. Decoys were fired and echeloned to impersonate entire squadrons—to someone entering the system and gazing at a radar display, the space between Rinconell and Barbas would at first seem to be filled with a fleet three times its actual size. All ships were instructed to proceed without radar—if a newcomer was going to find them, he would have to wait for a radar pulse to reach them and then reflect back, a process that could take hours. Fanaghee arranged her squadrons in their looping trajectories so that any enemy emerging from Wormhole 1 would be sandwiched between two fires, one squadron ahead, another behind.

The captured ships with their new crews gradually built speed. Fanaghee was within a day of petitioning the Committee for permission to launch her strike at the capital when word came from the relay station on the far side of Wormhole 1 that the Home Fleet was on its way, and coming fast.

Scant hours later, the Home Fleet had arrived, and Fanaghee's plans were put to the test.

S
ula 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 from
Dauntless
. 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. “Starburst
now
.” 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 had
assumed
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 was
Dauntless.

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 be
glittering,
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 were
hot
: 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 marked
Dauntless
'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.