The Sundering (7 page)

“This is Martinez,” he said, turning on the comm display. Kamarullah’s square face appeared, his eyes directed somewhere behind Martinez’s right ear.

“Captain Martinez, I’m sorry to interrupt your meal break.”

“That’s all right, lord captain. What can I do for you?”

Martinez kept his eyes directed toward his desktop, where he was looking at a report in regard to the replacement of an erratic turbopump used in the engine cooling system. The relevant cooling line would be offline for an estimated ten hours while the work was done by robots operated remotely by crew from their acceleration couches; or six hours if the repair were done by hand. Martinez put his stylus to the desktop, and authorized the robotic repair.

Corona
wouldn’t have six hours under light enough gees to make a hand repair safe.

“My lord captain,” Kamarullah said, “I wonder if I might beg from you a clarification.”

Martinez gazed at the next report, which had to do with the condemnation of supplies damaged by high accelerations, and said, “How may I be of service, my lord?”

“I wonder who it was who issued the order separating this squadron from that of Lord Commander Do-faq?”

Martinez cast his mind back to the orders he’d received that afternoon from Do-faq. “The orders originated with the Fleet Control Board,” he said.

“And not with the lord commander?”

“No, my lord.”

There was a moment’s silence. “In that case, lord elcap,” Kamarullah said, “I must inform you that, as the senior officer present, I am now in command of this squadron.”

Surprise sang through Martinez’s veins, but his reply was automatic, and quick.

“Not so, my lord.”

“But we’re now under Control Board orders,” Kamarullah said, “and no longer under the command of Lord Commander Do-faq. His order placing you in command is no longer in effect. Therefore the senior officer now commands the squadron, and that senior officer is me.”

Martinez tried to set his face in an expression of mild interest as he sorted this out.

With his stylus, he condemned the stores. Another report flashed onto his desk.

“The Control Board knew full well that I had been placed in command of this squadron,” he said finally. “They did not countermand the squadcom’s order, and therefore I remain in command.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the frown form beneath Kamarullah’s gray mustache. “A countermanding order wasn’t necessary,” he said. “In the absence of an order from a superior officer, the senior officer is always in command of an independent detachment.”

“But we
have
such an order, dating from when the squadron was formed.”

Kamarullah affected patience. “But the squadron is no longer part of Faqforce. We’re operating under Commandery orders. We’ve been removed from Do-faq’s command, and his decisions no longer apply.”

The squadrons had barely separated. Do-faq, at this instant, was only a few light-seconds away. It was absurd to think that Do-faq’s orders no longer pertained.

Martinez turned to look directly into the camera. “If you insist,” he said, “we can refer this matter to the nearest superior officer.”

Kamarullah stared stonily out of the display. “That senior officer’s preferences no longer apply.” He made a visible effort to seem at ease, to force a highly artificial smile onto his face. “Come now, my lord,” he said. “You know as well as I that Lord Do-faq’s order superceding my command was arbitrary and a result of sheer prejudice. You have a new command and a new crew, and I’m sure you’ve got enough work without taking on the job of a squadcom.” The effort to maintain a friendly tone grated in Kamarullah’s words. “You know as well as I that the strain has been showing. I say nothing against your abilities, but I’ve been with my crew for almost two years, and surely you can see that I can give the job of squadcom my full attention, without having to spend most of my time whipping my crew into shape. Don’t you think the job deserves that?”

Martinez took a bite of his sandwich, tasting the heat of mustard across his tongue, then chewed as he contemplated the merits of Kamarullah’s argument. The problem was that the merits were considerable: Kamarullah
had
been treated unjustly, and Martinez
had
been jumped over his head in a piece of rank favoritism. Kamarullah
was
a more experienced officer with a highly experienced crew.

But, he thought. But…

Kamarullah had been insufferably superior when it came to
Corona
’s deficiencies in the maneuvers. He had been wrong when it came to the tactical lessons of Magaria, and would never consider Martinez’s new system.

Plus, Squadron Commander Do-faq was an officer who obviously knew how to hold a grudge, as witness his treatment of Kamarullah in the first place. If Martinez willingly surrendered a command to which Do-faq appointed him, and furthermore to a man Do-faq despised, Martinez could hardly expect preferment from Do-faq ever again.

Let alone mercy.

And besides, my lord, Martinez thought as he looked at Kamarullah, I just…don’t…
like
you.

“I’m willing to refer the matter to higher authority,” he said, “but until that time I will consider myself commander of this squadron.”

Anger drew Kamarullah’s graceless smile into a snarl. “If that’s the way you want it, my lord,” he said. “I’ll compose a message to the Control Board.”

“No, my lord, you will
not,
” Martinez said. “
I
will compose the letter.
I
will send a copy to you and another to Lord Commander Do-faq…for hisfiles.”

Kamarullah’s color had deepened with rage. “I could just
take
command,” he said. “I’ll wager most of the captains would follow me.”

“If you tried, Lord Commander Do-faq would blow you to bits,” Martinez said. “Please remember he’s not that far away.”

After he signed off, Martinez dictated a letter that stated the situation as simply and baldly as possible, then sent it to his secretary, Saavedra, to attach the appropriate headings and salutations. “Copies to the files, to Captain Kamarullah, and to Lord Commander Do-faq,” he instructed, and Saavedra gave a disapproving, purse-lipped nod. It wasn’t possible to tell if Saavedra was offended on Martinez’s behalf, or on
Corona
’s, or whether he was offended generally with the world. Martinez suspected the latter.

A few hours later came a signal from Do-faq that the heavy squadron was ceasing acceleration temporarily, as the captain of
Judge Solomon
had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as a result of constant high accelerations. It was the sort of thing that could happen even to young recruits in the peak of physical condition, and Martinez was thankful that no one had yet stroked out aboard
Corona.
In wartime there was very little that could be done for the luckless captain: he’d be taken to sick bay and given drugs and treatment, but acceleration would have to be resumed before long and it was very likely that
Judge Solomon
’s captain would die or suffer crippling disability.

Thus it was that a day and a half later when
Corona
and the light squadron leaped through Wormhole 1 into the Hone-bar system, they were twenty minutes ahead of Do-faq’s eight ships. The message sent to the Fleet Control Board had not arrived on Zanshaa as yet, and Martinez was still exercising command.

The Hone-bar system seemed normal. The system was peaceful, loyalists were in charge of the government, and there seemed no immediate enemy threat. Civilian traffic was light, and the only ship in the vicinity was the cargo vessel
Clan Chen,
outward bound through Wormhole 1 at 0.4
c
.

The Hone-bar system even had a warship, a heavy cruiser that was undergoing refit on the ring, but the refit wouldn’t be completed for at least another month, and until then the cruiser was just another detail.

Martinez had no plans to go anywhere near Hone-bar itself. Instead he’d plotted a complex series of passes by Hone-bar’s primary and by three gas-giants, the effect of which would be to whip the squadron around the system and shoot it back out Hone-bar Wormhole 1 at top speed.

The crew was at combat stations, as was standard for wormhole transit in times of unrest. Martinez’s acceleration cage creaked as the engines ignited, driving
Corona
on a long arc that would take it into the gravitational field of the first of the system’s gas giants. He fought the gravities that began to pile on his bones, and tried to think of something pleasant.

Caroline Sula, he thought. Her pale, translucent complexion. The mischievous turn of her mouth. The brilliant emerald green of her eyes…

“Engine flares!” The voice in his earphones came from Tracy, one of the two women at the sensor display. “Engine flares, lord captain! Six…no, nine! Ten engine flares, near Wormhole Two! Enemy ships, my lord!”

Martinez fought to take another breath.

Oh dear, he thought. Here’s trouble.

P
erfect porcelain glazes floated through Sula’s mind, the blue-green celadon of
kinuta seiji,
the
gros bleu
of Vincennes, the fine crackle of
Ju yao.
Fine porcelain was a passion with her, and she often drifted to sleep with illustrations of pots and vases and figurines projected in random order on the visual centers of her brain.

The forms soothed her, as the touch of the real objects delighted her fingertips. And the ancient words used to describe porcelain—
ko-ku-yao-lan, Muscheln, Faience, deutsche Blumen, Kuei Kung, rose Pompadour, Flora Danica, sgraffito, pâté tendre
—evoked exotic places and ancient times, the courts and lime-shaded byways of old Earth.

Her tongue silently formed the words, curling itself around each syllable in sensuous delight. Her silent chant evoked a timeless perfection that was removed from her current situation: unwashed, weary, fighting for every breath. The crew of
Delhi
barely spoke: they climbed in and out of their couches only to shovel in nourishment and perform necessary labor, and the rest of the time they lay on their couches, in the stink of their suits, and fed into their minds the mindless entertainment that might lighten their burden, the comedies that were no longer funny, and the tragedies that seemed trivial compared to what they had already endured. The high gravities had gone on far too long.

The deceleration alarm sang, and Sula reluctantly opened her eyes and let the porcelain fade from her thoughts. She dragged herself out of her suit, then to the shower, then into a clean coverall. Supper’s flat food was eaten in silence. Foote lacked the energy to gibe at her, and she was too exhausted to provoke him.

Sula stuck a med patch behind her ear to help her through the next acceleration, then dragged on her vac suit while wincing at the sharp scent of the spray disinfectant she’d used to try to scrub out some of the odor. She would stand—or lie—the next watch in Auxiliary Control while her superiors tried to sleep, but unless the Naxid fleet arrived, or the Shaa came again, there would be little for the watch to do except stare at the displays while the preprogrammed work of the ship went on.

Twenty minutes into the next weary watch a message light glowed on Sula’s displays, and she answered to discover a message from Martinez in which he unveiled an entire new system for fleet combat.

Her weariness faded as she devoured the contents of the message. The mathematical equations on which the new formations were based was sound. As were the tactics, at least as far as they went.

Sula’s impression, though, was that they didn’t go far enough. Martinez’s ships would fly at a safer distance from each other, and the effective fields of fire of their defensive weaponry would overlap, but their formation was still strict. Martinez had replaced a close rigid formation with, in effect, a looser but still rigid formation. Sula sensed that it could, and should, be looser still.

She gnawed at the problem for long moments, then called up a math display. She started with the equation Martinez had sent her and then elaborated on it, filling the display with figures, symbols, and graphs in her tiny, precise hand, symbols immediately translated into larger numbers on the display.

She let the computer check her work, fed different experimental numbers into the variables to make certain everything computed correctly. As she worked there rose in her a growing sense of power and delight, a joy in the revelations she was making to herself. These numbers and the reality they described, she thought, had waited for ages to be revealed; but it was she who incarnated them, not another. Just as, thousands of years ago, someone had discovered the perfect curves of a Sung vase, a form that had always existed in potential.

When the fever of discovery passed, Sula sent the work to Martinez.

“This is my first pass at it,” she told him. “What I’ve done is add chaos to your formation—chaos in the mathematical sense, I mean. The enemy will see constant formation changes that appear locally stochastic, but instead your ships will be following along the convex hull of a chaotic dynamical system—a fractal pattern—and provided they all have the same starting place, each of your own ships will know precisely where the others are.”

Sula had to pant for a few breaths in order to get enough wind to continue, and she vowed to be a little more careful with her air. “What you have to do is designate a center point for your formation. The point can be your flagship, the ship in the lead, any enemy vessel, or a point in space. Your ships will maneuver around that center point in a series of nested fractal patterns, which should make their movements completely unpredictable to the enemy. You can alter the variables depending on what range you find suitable.”

She took another few breaths. “I hope Foote’s working at his little censorship duties right now and sends this on without delay. The math’s beyond him, I’m sure, but it’s hardly subversive. I’ll send more when I’ve had time to think, and a little more leisure.”

She sent the message, and then took a few more sips of air. The oxygen content had been boosted to keep the mind and body alive during acceleration, and in a world in which a free breath was becoming the most important currency of existence, the taste of it was like alcohol to the drunkard. Sula glanced over Auxiliary Command, which had been quietly humming along while she’d been dealing with Martinez’s equations, apparently without having missed her attention.

And then her eyes lit on the flashing alarm lights on the displays of Pilot/2nd Annie Rorty, and annoyance began to bubble in her blood. “Mind that course change, Rorty!” she called.

Rorty didn’t respond. Sharing the cage with Rorty was Navigator First Class Massimo, who was probably also asleep.

“Massimo! Give that lazy bitch a shove!”

Massimo gave a start that confirmed that he, too, had been drowsing. “Yes, my lady!” he croaked in his sandpaper voice, and reached to the next couch to shove Rorty’s shoulder. “Officer wants you, pilot.” He waited for a response, then shoved again.

There was a long moment of silence, and then in a frenzy of frustration and anger Sula called up the life support data that was supposedly being fed into computer memory by Rorty’s vac suit. There
was
no data. It wasn’t that Rorty had flatlined, it was that there was no input at all.

“I think there’s something wrong, my lady,” Massimo growled, redundantly.

“Navigator! Make that course change yourself!”

“Yes, my lady.” Massimo’s gloved hands fumbled to move Rorty’s data to his own board.

“My lady,” said the communications officer, “I have a query from
Kulhang.
They want to know why we haven’t made the scheduled course change.”

“Zero gee warning!” Sula called. The alarm rang out. “Engines, cut engines.”

“Engines cut, my lady.”
Delhi
’s spars groaned as deceleration ceased, as the vibration and distant roar of the engines faded. Sula’s cage gave a creak of relief as gravities eased.

“Massimo, rotate ship.”

“Ship rotating.”

“Comm,” Sula said, “inform
Kulhang
that our acceleration will be reduced due to the sudden illness of an officer.”

“Very good, my lady.”

Sula’s calling a pilot second class an officer was less than truthful, and many commanders wouldn’t have halted an acceleration for a life that didn’t have a commission attached to it, but
Delhi
’s crew had been so reduced that any of the survivors were precious.

Besides, Sula wasn’t going to lose any crew she didn’t have to.

Sula’s cage sang as it swung, the ship rotating around it.

“New heading,” Massimo said. “Zero-eight-zero by zero-zero-one absolute.”

“Normal gravity warning,” Sula said. “Engines, burn at one gravity.”

Sula’s acceleration cage creaked as the engines fired, and her couch swung to the neutral position. Spars and braces moaned, and shudders ran the length of the ship. “Comm,” Sula said, “page the pharmacist and a stretcher party to Auxiliary Control.” And she flung off her webbing and walked across the deck to Rorty’s cage and stared through the faceplate of the pilot’s helmet.

The young woman’s freckles stood out as the only spots of color on her pale, dead face. Though she knew it was hopeless Sula wrenched off Rorty’s helmet, revealing the plug that Rorty had forgotten to attach to the suit’s biomonitor that would have alerted the officer of the watch and the acting doctor to any number of common medical anomalies.

Sula tore off her own helmet and gloves and felt for a pulse. There was none. The flesh of Rorty’s neck was still warm.

“Massimo! Help me get her on the deck!”

Auxiliary Control had very little room between the cages, unlike the more spacious control room that had been incinerated along with
Delhi
’s captain. Massimo and Sula got Rorty out of her couch and sprawled on the black rubberized deck, arms and shoulders and dangling limbs clanging against the spinning cages. A heave of Massimo’s broad shoulders detached the top of the suit, and Sula pulled it off over Rorty’s head as Massimo, bulky in his own suit, straddled her thin body.

Without waiting for orders Massimo began chest compressions. Sula flung the suit top away, knelt, tilted the head back, cleared the tongue with her fingers, and pressed her mouth to the dead girl’s lips.

As she breathed for Rorty, Sula felt her own heart throb weakly in her chest. She had to pant for her own breath in between forcing air into Rorty’s lungs. A wave of vertigo eddied through her skull. She remembered bending over another girl six years before, a girl who fought ineptly but persistently for life in defiance of the logic that proclaimed that she die. Sula remembered her own eyes scalding with hot tears. She remembered begging the other girl to die.

She remembered putting her in the river later, the chill swift water that rose over the pale, mute face, the golden hair that briefly brightened the water before it vanished into the darkness.

Delhi’s
doctor had died at Magaria, incinerated along with the sick bay and most of the ship’s medical supplies, so it was a Pharmacist First Class who answered Sula’s call. He was competent enough, though; got a breathing mask on Rorty’s face and cut open Rorty’s tunic to get an electrical heart stimulator onto the pilot’s pale chest. The cottony taste of Rorty’s mouth was on Sula’s tongue. When the pharmacist got out a med injector to fire a stimulant straight into Rorty’s carotid, Sula had to turn away as nausea burned an acid path up her throat.

She hated med injectors. Sometimes injectors figured in her nightmares. That’s why she used patches.

The pharmacist unfastened the cap that held Rorty’s earphones and virtual array, then put a sensor net over the pilot’s head to get an image of her brain. He studied the display for a moment, then began to switch off his gear. “Every beat of the heart,” he said, “just spills more blood into the brain.” He turned off the respirator. “You did very well, my lady,” he told Sula. “You were just too late.”

The stretcher party arrived and stood in the doorway while the pharmacist packed away his gear and twitched Rorty’s jumpsuit closed over her chest. Sula fought the sickness that was closing on her throat with velvet fingers. When she thought she could stand, she reached for the cage stanchions and pulled herself upright, then retrieved her helmet and gloves and returned to the command cage.

Rorty was put into the stretcher. “Let me know when you’ve…stowed her,” Sula said. “Then we’ll resume higher gee.”

“Very good, my lady,” one said.

She looked at Massimo, who stood with arms akimbo, a thoughtful look on his unshaven face as he watched Rorty’s body being strapped onto the stretcher.

“Massimo,” she said, “that was good work.”

He looked at her, startled. “Thank you, my lady. But—if I hadn’t dozed off—I might.”

“Nothing you could have done,” Sula said. “She forgot to connect the helmet monitors to her suit.”

Massimo absorbed her words, then nodded. If we’d got warning, Sula thought, Rorty might be a cripple instead of a corpse.

“Can you do both piloting and navigating duties till the end of the watch?” Sula asked.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Better get busy plotting our return to the squadron, then.” The squadron had altered course to swing around Vandrith, one of the Zanshaa system’s gas giants, and they’d have to pull some extra gees to catch the planet in time.

The stretcher-bearers had to tip the stretcher on end to walk it down the narrow lanes between acceleration cages. Sula thought about erratic blood pressure throughout the squadron, arteries eroding, blood spilling into brain tissue or the body cavity. Rorty had been twenty and in perfect health. Many more months of this and half the ship might be stricken.

Sula looked at the helmet in her hands and realized she absolutely could not put the helmet on her head, that if she couldn’t draw free breaths of cabin air she would scream. She stowed the helmet and her gloves in the elastic mesh bag rigged to the side of the couch, and then resumed her seat. With the back of her hand she tried to scrub Rorty’s taste from her lips.

She tried to think of vases and pots, of smooth celadon surfaces. Instead she thought of gold hair shimmering, fading, in dark water.

No matter how many pieces of porcelain she piped into her dreams tonight, she knew, they would all turn to nightmare.

The next day, heavy-lidded and ill, Sula declined her breakfast and confined herself to sips of Tassay, a hot milky carbohydrate and protein beverage flavored with cardamom and cloves. The aromatic spices soothed her sleepless, jangled nerves; the nutrition would keep her conscious, if not exactly sparkling.

“Have I mentioned that Lieutenant Sula is exchanging mathematical formulae with Captain Martinez?” Foote said to the acting captain, Morgen.

Morgen didn’t appear very interested. There were deep black blooms beneath his eyes, and lines in his face that hadn’t been there a month before. “That’s nice,” he said.