"The Sundering" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter Jon)

ONE

The defeated squadron was locked in its deceleration burn, the blazing fury of its torches directed toward the capital at Zanshaa.Bombardment of Delhi groaned and shuddered under the strain of over three gravities. At times the shaking and shivering was so violent that the woman called Caroline Sula wondered if the damaged cruiser would hold together.

After so many brutal days of deceleration, she didn’t much care if it did or not.

Sula was no stranger to the hardships of pulling hard gee. She had been aboard theDauntless under Captain Lord Richard Li when, a little over two months ago, it had joined the Home Fleet on a furious series of accelerations that eventually flung it through a course of wormhole gates toward the enemy lying in wait at Magaria.

The enemy had been ready for them, and Sula was now the sole survivor of the crew of theDauntless. Delhi, the heavy cruiser that had pulled Sula’s pinnace out of the wreckage of defeat, had been so badly damaged that it was a minor miracle it survived the battle at all.

All six survivors of the squadron were low on ammunition, and would be useless in the event of a fight. They had to decelerate, dock with the ring station at Zanshaa, take on fresh supplies of missiles and antimatter fuel, then commence yet another series of accelerations to give them the velocity necessary to avoid destruction should an enemy arrive.

That meant evenmore months of standing up under three or four or more gravities, months in which Sula would experience the equivalent of a large, full-grown man sitting on her chest.

The deceleration alarm rang, the ship gave a series of long, prolonged groans, and Sula gasped with relief as the invisible man who squatted on her rose and walked away.Dinnertime, a whole hour at a wonderfully liberating 0.6 gravities, time to stretch her ligaments and fight the painful knots in her muscles. After that, she’d have to stand a watch in Auxiliary Command, which was the only place shecould stand a watch now that Command was destroyed, along withDelhi ‘s captain and a pair of lieutenants.

Weariness dragged at her eyelids, at her heart. Sula released the webs that held her to the acceleration couch and came to her feet, suddenly light-headed as her heart tried to make yet another adjustment to her blood pressure. She wrenched off her helmet—she was required to spend times of acceleration in a pressure suit—and took a breath of air that wasn’t completely saturated by her own stink. She rolled her head on her neck and felt her vertebrae crackle, and then peeled off the medicinal patch behind her ear, the one that fed her drugs that better enabled her to stand high gravities.

She wondered if she had time for a shower, and decided she did.

The others were finishing dinner when, in a clean pair of borrowed coveralls, Sula approached the officers’ table while sticking another med patch behind her ear. The officers now ate in the enlisted galley, their own wardroom having been destroyed; and because their private stocks of food and liquor had also been blown to bits they shared the enlisted fare. As the steward brought her dinner, Sula observed that it consisted entirely of flat food, which is what happened to anything thrown in an oven and then subjected to five hours’ constant deceleration at three gravities.

Sula inhaled the stale aroma of a flattened, highly compressed vegetable casserole, then washed the first bite down with a flat beverage—the steward knew to serve her water instead of the wine or beer that were the usual dinner drink of the officer class.

Lieutenant Lord Jeremy Foote was in the chair opposite her, his immaculate viridian-green uniform a testament to the industry of his servants.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I bathed, my lord,” Sula said. “You might try it sometime.”

This was a libel, since probably Foote didn’t enjoy living in his own stench any more than she did, but her words caused the acting captain to suppress a grin.

Foote’s handsome face showed no reaction to Sula’s jab. Instead he gave a close-lipped, catlike smile, and said, “I thought perhaps you’d been viewing your latest letter from Captain Martinez.”

Sula’s heart gave a little sideways lurch at the mention of Martinez’s name, and she hoped her reaction hadn’t showed. She was in the process of composing a reply when the acting captain, Morgen, interrupted.

“Martinez?” he said. “Martinez of theCorona?”

“Indeed yes,” Foote said. His drawl, which spoke of generations of good breeding and privilege, took on a malicious edge, and it was carefully pitched to carry to the next table of recruits. “He sends messages to our young Sula nearly every day. And she replies as often, passionate messages from the depth of her delicate heart. It’s touching, great romance in the tradition of a derivoo singer.”

Morgen looked at her. “You and Martinez are, ah…”

Sula didn’t know why this revelation was supposed to be embarrassing: Lord Gareth Martinez was one of the few heroes the war had produced, at least on the loyalist side, and unlike most of the others was still in the realm of the living.

Sula ate a piece of flattened hash before replying, and when she did she pitched her voice to carry, as Foote had done. “Oh, Martinez and I are old friends,” she said, “but my Lord Lieutenant Foote is always inventing romances for me. It’s his way of explaining why I won’t sleep withhim. ”

That one hit: she saw a twitch in Foote’s eyelid. Again the acting captain suppressed a smile. “Well, I hope you’re saying good things about us,” he said.

Sula fixed Foote with her green eyes and replied in tone-perfect imitation of his drawl. “Mostof you,” she said. She took a drink of water. “By the way,” she said, “I wonder how Lord Lieutenant Foote comes to know of my correspondence?”

“I’m the censor,” Foote said. His smiling white teeth were perfectly even. “I view every torrid moment of your outgoing videos.”

“There’s still censorship?” Sula was surprised by the inanity of it. “Doesn’t Foote have better things to do?” They crewed a wrecked cruiser, with most of its officers dead, few of its weapons functioning, and the forward third of the ship a half-melted ruin, torn open to the vacuum of space. Surely one of the few remaining officers could find better use for his time than poking into her correspondence.

Morgen’s round face took on a solemn caste. “Censorship is more important now than ever, my lady. We’ve got to keep word of what happened at Magaria from spreading.”

Sula hastily washed down a piece of flat bread in order to unleash her reply. “Spreading towhom?” she said. “Theenemy? The enemy knowperfectly well they massacred forty-eight of our ships! They know we only have six ships left in the Home Fleet, and they’ve got to know theDelhi ‘s a wreck.”

Morgen lowered his voice, as if encouraging Sula not to spread this news to the enlisted personnel, who knew it perfectly well. “We have to prevent panic from spreading in the civilian population,” he said.

Sula gave an acid laugh. “No, we can’t have the civilians panicking. Not thewrong civilians, anyway.” She gave Foote a cynical look. “I’m sure our honorable censor’s family is panickingright at this very moment. The only difference between them and the general population is that Clan Foote is going to panic their way into aprofit. I’m sure their money’s moving all over the exchanges, and it’s being converted into…” Her invention failed her. “…into, ah, convertible things, to be carried to the safer corners of the empire to await a brighter dawn. Perhaps they’re even being carried in the current Lord Foote’s very own pillowcase.”

“My lord great-uncle,” Foote said quietly, “is too ill to leave his palace on Zanshaa.”

“His heir, then,” Sula said. “The point of the censorship is that we Peers are going to have a monopoly on the information necessary to survive whatever’s coming. Everyone who doesn’t belong to our order is expected to continue their normal lives, making money for the Peers, right up to the point where a Naxid fleet shows up and starts raining antimatter bombs out of the sky.Then maybe they’ll be allowed to notice that the media reports were less than candid.”

The acting captain pitched his voice even lower. “Sublieutenant my Lady Sula, I think this is not a suitable topic for the dinner table.”

Sula felt her lips quirk in amusement. “As my lord wishes,” she said. Probably Morgen’s relations were going to do well out of this, too.

Sula’s relations would not, for the simple reason that she didn’t have any. She was in the nearly unprecedented position of being a Peer without any money or influence. Though the title of Lady Sula made her the theoretical head of the entire Sula Clan, therewas no Sula Clan, no property, and no money save for a modest trust fund that had been set up by some friends of the late Lord Sula. She had only got into the Fleet because her position as a Peer gave her automatic place in one of the academies. She had no patron either in the service or outside it.

Deplorable though it was, her position nevertheless gave her a unique insight into how the Peers actually worked. The alien Shaa, who had bloodily conquered the Terrans, Naxids, and other species who made up the empire, had created the order of Peers as an intermediary between themselves and the great mass of their subjects. Now that the last of the Shaa was dead, the Peers were in charge—and had managed to land-crash into a civil war within bare months of their last overlord’s demise.

Sula was surprised it had taken them that long. So far as she could tell, the Peers acted exactly as one might expect from a class who had a near monopoly on power, their fingers in every profitable business, and who with their clients owned almost everything. The only check on their rapacity was the Legion of Diligence, who would massacre anyone whose avarice became too uninhibited—as, in fact, they had massacred the last Lord and Lady Sula.

The Peers, Sula observed, seemed to act out of naked self-interest. But for some reason it was impolite to actually say so.

Sula finished her flat food, then called a chronometer onto her sleeve display and wondered if she had enough time to look at her mail before suiting up to stand her watch.

She decided she had enough time.

Sula returned to her cabin, one that had originally belonged to a petty officer who had been killed at Magaria, and which still contained most of his belongings. She snapped on the video display with her right thumb, an action that caused a sudden sharp sting. She snatched her hand away, and as the display flashed on she inspected the thick scar tissue on the pad of her thumb. After the battle, in the course of conducting urgent repairs, her thumb had come into contact with a pipe of superheated coolant, and though the wound had healed, a wrong movement could still send pain shrieking along the length of her arm.

She tucked the thumb carefully into her palm and paged through menus with her index finger until she found her mail.

Only one message, from Lieutenant Captain Lord Gareth Martinez, three days in transit via powerful communications lasers. She opened the message.

“Well,Corona managed to bungle another exercise,” he said wearily. His broad-shouldered figure was slumped in a chair—he, like Sula, had been suffering from many days of high gee, and his weariness showed it. His viridian uniform tunic was unbuttoned at the throat. He had a lantern jaw, thick brows, and olive skin; his provincial accent was heavy enough to send razor blades skating up Sula’s nerves.

When they had first met, before the war, they had come together briefly, then came explosively apart. It was all Sula’s fault, she felt: she’d been too panicked, too paranoid, too far out of her depth. She’d spent the next several months hiding from him. A conceited son of privilege like Foote was someone she could cope with; Martinez was something else again.

If they were lucky enough to come together once more, she wasn’t going to let them blow apart ever again.

“I said byzero-one-seven!” Martinez said. “What’s thematter, there?”

“Sorry, my lord!” Fingers punching the display. “That’s zero-one-seven, my lord.”

“Pilot, rotate ship.”Corona was already a little late.

“Ship rotated, my lord. New heading two-two-seven by zero-one-seven.”

“Engines, prepare to fire engines.”

“Missile flares!” called the two sensor operators in unison. “Enemy missiles fired!”

“Power up point-defense lasers.”

“Point-defense lasers powering, lord elcap.”

Martinez realized he’d been sufficiently distracted by the announcement of the enemy missiles that’s he’d forgotten to order the engines to fire. He leaned forward in his couch to give emphasis to the order, and his command cage creaked as it swung on its gimbals.

“Engines,” he said. “Fire engines.”

And then he remembered he’d forgotten something else.

“Weapons,” he added, “this is a drill.”

After the drill was over, after the virtual displays faded from Martinez’s mind and the leaden sense of failure rose yet again in his thoughts, he looked out over Command and saw the crew as silent and miserable as he was.

Too many of them were new. Two-thirds ofCorona ‘s crew had been on board for less than a month, and though they were taking to their new jobs reasonably well, they were far from proficient. Sometimes he wished he’d had only his old crew—the skeleton crew with which he’d savedCorona from capture during the first hours of the Naxid revolt. When he now looked back on that escape—the tension, the uncertainty, the hard accelerations, the terror induced by pursuing enemy missiles—all that now seemed painted in the warm, familiar tones of nostalgia. In the emergency he and the crew had reacted with a brilliance, a certainty that neither he nor they had matched since.

The old crew were still here, among all the newcomers, but Martinez couldn’t rely on them alone. The new people all had to be trained, had to fit into their roles and perform as proficiently as if they’d been in their places for years.

There was a whirring in his vac suit as the cooling units cut in, flooding the suit with chilled air and the faintest whiff of lubricant.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll have another drill after supper, at 26:01.”

Despite the fact that the crew were in their white-and-viridian vac suits, he could detect in the angle of their heads and shoulders a slumping attitude of defeat.

In a manual written for officers that he’d found on the frigate’s computers, he’d read of the old formula: praise-correct-praise. First, the manual recommended, you praised them for what they did right, then you corrected what they did wrong, then praised them for their improvement. In his mind he rehearsed the formula as it related to the current situation.

1. You didn’t screw up as badly as last time.

2. You still screwed up.

3. Try not to screw up any more.

The only problem was that his crew had a perfect right to answer,You first, my lord.

Martinez, too, was learning on the job, and had discovered that his performance was erratic. Nothing in his training had ever suggested that war was a business filled with such desperate improvisation.

The voice of his junior lieutenant, Vonderheydte, came over his headphones.

“Captain Kamarullah, my lord, on intership net. I believe it’s the beginning of the debriefing.”

This was all Martinez needed. Kamarullah was the senior captain in Light Squadron 14 and would normally have been in command, all save for the fact that he’d once been blamed for a botched maneuver—and blamed by Junior Squadron Commander Do-faq, who was now in overall command of both the light and heavy squadrons, Faqforce, now heading for Hone-bar. In an act of pure autocratic malevolence, Do-faq had removed Kamarullah from command of the light squadron and replaced him with the most junior captain present.

Martinez.

Granted that Martinez had accepted the appointment with alacrity. Granted as well that there was some modest justification for this act of despotism: Martinez was the only one of the captains present with actual combat experience. But that experience consisted of stealingCorona and fleeing at top speed from the overwhelming enemy force at Magaria; it hadn’t consisted of commanding and maneuvering a squadron, the skill sets that Martinez needed at present, and which he was desperately trying to acquire.

It was fortunate that the chance of encountering enemies on this mission was small. Faqforce had been ordered from Zanshaa to Hone-bar before the disaster at Magaria, and when word of the defeat came they had gone too far to turn around. When Martinez’s squadron reached its destination, it would swing around Hone-bar’s sun and head straight back to the capital to aid in its defense.

It wasthen, most likely, thatCorona would need its combat skills.

None of which altered the sad fact that Kamarullah was now on the comm, wanting to exult over his own ship’s flawless performance in the drill.

“Tell him to stand by,” Martinez said. Instead of speaking to Kamarulla he paged his senior lieutenant, Dalkeith, who had spent the maneuver in Auxiliary Command. While he and his crew in Command had been maneuvering a virtual squadron through an exercise, Dalkeith had commanded the actual frigateCorona, keeping it on its steady 2.3 gravity acceleration for the wormhole that led to Hone-bar.

The second-in-command’s voice lisped in Martinez’s ear. “This is Dalkeith.” He had been startled on first acquaintance with his premiere to discover that she possessed a child’s high-pitched voice in the body of a middle-aged, gray-haired woman. Lady Elissa Dalkeith was one of the officers who had joinedCorona a little over a month ago on Zanshaa, and was considered old to have gone so long in the Fleet without promotion, a fact that argued either incompetence or a lack of patronage among her superiors. Martinez hadn’t found her incompetent, but uninspired: she performed every task well enough, but without any particular enthusiasm, and without volunteering anything new, efficient, or interesting. He had hoped to have someone younger and more energetic, someone who would relieve Martinez of some of his work, but youth and energy both had been beaten out of Dalkeith over the years of neglect by the Fleet, and Martinez’s workload remained daunting.

“The maneuver’s over, my lady,” Martinez told her. “We will resume command of the ship.”

“Very well, lord elcap. We are prepared to relinquish command.”

“Stand by.” Martinez shifted his channel to broadcast to the crew in Command. “We are taking control of the ship…now.” His gloved hands tapped his display, and the screens on every board in Command shifted to showCorona ‘s true situation.

“You may stand down,” Martinez told Dalkeith.

The crew in Command all reportedCorona ‘s situation as it was reflected on their displays, and then Martinez heaved a sigh against the gravities that weighed him down. There was no alternative to Kamarullah and the debriefing.

He told Vonderheydte to patch him into the intership channel and set his display to virtual. The square command room, with its suited figures hanging in their accelerations cages, vanished from his sight, to be replaced at once by Kamarullah’s square, graying head. Fortunately Kamarullah was not alone—most of the other captains had joined the link in the meantime, as well as Lord Squadron Commander Do-faq, who commanded the two squadrons that made up Faqforce. Do-faq was a member of the Lai-own species, flightless birds taller than a human. Their hollow bones couldn’t stand the heavy accelerations that were possible for humans; but because their ancestors had flown through the sky, their brains were supposed to be better configured for three-dimensional maneuvers, and they were considered a race of master tacticians.

At least the virtual presence of the squadron commander, his bitter enemy, would prevent Kamarullah from beingtoo smug in public.

“My lords,” Martinez greeted.

“Lord captain,” said Do-faq, flashing the peg teeth in his carnivore muzzle. He was young for his advanced rank, as demonstrated by the dark feathery hair on either side of his flat-topped head, hair that Lai-own lost on full maturity. His manner was businesslike without being brusque. Martinez had never actually met him in person, and had little feel for him as a personality, but Do-faq’s history with Kamarullah suggested that Martinez would disappoint the avian only at his peril.

The faces of the remaining captains appeared one after another in the virtual display. Do-faq began by summarizing the events of the virtual maneuver in which they’d all participated, and then went on to a detailed critique of each ship’s performance.Corona was cited for tardy transmission of orders to the other ships in the light squadron, as well as ragged performance of those same orders.

“Yes, my lord,” Martinez said. There was little point in offering excuses.

He could see the quiet exultation in Kamarullah’s eyes as Do-faq admitted in a brisk tone that his ship had done well.

Do-faq had ordered a maneuver almost every day, the ships flying in close proximity to one another and linked by communication lasers to provide a shared virtual environment. The maneuvers themselves were highly scripted, and taken from the bottomless archive of Fleet maneuvers that went back millennia. Do-faq called for maneuvers in which the heavy and light squadrons battled each other, or fought side-by-side against a computer-generated enemy; or participated as smaller elements in a larger fleet. No independent action was intended, or contemplated: each ship was judged on how well it followed its orders rather than how well it did against the “enemy.” The side the scenario intended to win was always victorious, and thus demonstrated the superiority of proper Fleet doctrine against tactics that were less proper, and less doctrinaire.

Coronahad consistently ranked low in the standings generated after each set of maneuvers, and the only reason it didn’t permanently occupy last place was that other ships were as ill-prepared asCorona. Maneuvers weren’t very common in the Fleet—they were a dreadful inconvenience, taxing the officers’ capabilities and taking the crew away from important duties such as polishing brass, waxing floors, and keeping the engine spaces sparkling clean in the event of an inspection. In a service that hadn’t fought a war in thirty-four hundred years, social virtues had come to seem at least as important as military ones, and there were crews in Do-faq’s command that had never participated even in a virtual maneuver before joining Faqforce.

Martinez had to give Do-faq credit for realizing that the war had changed everything. He was intent on turning his command into a proper fighting force, and the daily maneuvers and debriefings were a part of it. Martinez commended this industry on the part of a superior even as he winced at his own ship’s performance.

“My lords,” Do-faq said in conclusion, his golden eyes shifting from one virtual face to the next. “I am pleased to report that the Fleet Control Board has at last agreed to my repeated requests to send me the records of the Battle of Magaria. I am going to transmit them, coded, to each ship under my command. A captain’s key will be required to open the file. I admonish you to view these records in private, and to be careful with whom you share them.” His transparent nictating membranes closed solemnly over his eyes. “Tomorrow’s maneuvers will be conducted by your senior lieutenants from your Auxiliary Command centers. During that time we will confer again and see if we can discover what the battle teaches us.”

Martinez felt suspense tingling in his nerves. The government had never officially admitted defeat at Magaria, but instead issued an incessant series of clarion calls that urged every loyal citizen to Do His Utmost in the Crisis, to Repel Seditious Thought, to Uphold the Praxis, and to Unceasingly Fight for the Future of the Empire, a barrage of desperate slogans that argued for considerable panic behind the scenes. Martinez had managed to wangle the raw data out of the Fleet Control Board, and had been stunned by the fact of forty-eight of the Fleet’s finest warships blown into radioactive debris along with their commander. What he hadn’t known washow those forty-eight ships had been lost.

A few hours later, lying in his own bed after supper while the acceleration went on, he called up the overhead display and witnessed exactly that, and he was appalled by the battle’s fury. The number of missiles launched by each side was uncountable: whole squadrons on both sides were annihilated at once, or within seconds, by the blazing fury of antimatter warheads.

Particularly useful recordings had been made by a pinnace that had been launched by a cruiser in the lead squadron, and which had somehow avoided destruction for the entire battle, shepherding its barrage of antimatter missiles through the entire fight until they could be used to effect against the enemy, destroying five ships that blocked the retreat of the Home Fleet’s six survivors. The pinnace had been in an ideal position to witness most of the battle, from the glorious charge of Cruiser Squadron 2 to the rout of the fleet’s battered remains.

Martinez wondered how Caroline, Lady Sula, had felt as she watched the doom of the Home Fleet from her lone pinnace.

Whatever her feelings, they hadn’t altered her skill as a pilot. Not only had she destroyed five enemy ships, but she had followed the act of destruction by a broadcast on the all-ships channel, a hoarse-voiced cry of defiance against the enemy:

“Sula!It was Sula who did this!Remember my name! ”

The words sent a shiver up Martinez’s spine. He had just wondered how Sula had felt on watching the Home Fleet die—and now heknew how she felt. In her words Martinez heard the despair, the fury, and the loss that lay behind the defiant shout.

He felt an overwhelming need to wrap Sula in his arms and lie with her in some silent, unspeaking realm, a place where he could bring peace to the terrors he heard in that desperate, challenging voice.

Which was ridiculous, because he hardly knew her. And when he’d tried to get close to her, she’d fled.

With an act of will he dismissed Sula from his thoughts, and looked through the recordings again. Again and again he watched the squadrons maneuvering against at each other at significant fractions of the speed of light, the missile tracks that connected them, the blossoms of furious radiation in which they died.

A conviction began to harden in him. Martinez reached for his sleeve display and called for the one person on the crew he trusted without reservation.

“Page crewman Alikhan.”

“My lord.” The answer came quickly, and Alikhan’s stern face appeared in the chameleon-weave display on Martinez’s left sleeve. Alikhan had retired from the Fleet as a thirty-year man, a weaponer first class, and wore the curling mustachios and goatee favored by many senior petty officers. Martinez had brought him back into the service as his orderly, and as a fund of wisdom and practical information on the service.

Alikhan was wearing his vac suit and helmet, and lying on an acceleration couch.

“Are you alone?” Martinez asked.

“I’m in the weapons bays, my lord, for the maneuver.”

Martinez gave himself a mental demerit for forgetting he’d scheduled a drill for 26:01, after supper. He checked the chronometer on the wall and saw that he had a few minutes before the exercise was scheduled to begin.

His presence wasn’t strictly necessary: this was a drill he’d scheduled on his own, withCorona ‘s crew alone, in the hopes of sharpening them for tomorrow’s fleet maneuver. He’d tell Dalkeith to run it instead, with her crew in Auxiliary Command. She’d be in charge during tomorrow’s drill anyway, so she’d need the practice more than Martinez did.

Martinez looked at the image of Alikhan in his sleeve display. “I’d like you to go virtual and look at a file. You aren’t to show this to anyone. I want you to look at it closely and see what conclusions you can draw.”

“A file, my lord?”

Martinez told him what was in it. Alikhan’s eyes widened.

“Very good, my lord,” he said.

Martinez then paged Dalkeith and told her that she was in charge of the upcoming drill. “Find something in the files involving two squadrons maneuvering against each other—the sort of thing Do-faq would pick. Give your people some practice, because Do-faq intends that you command in tomorrow morning’s fleet maneuver.”

One of the advantages of having an unimaginative premiere, Martinez observed, was that nothing seemed to surprise her. Or perhaps all things surprised her equally.

“Very well, lord elcap,” she said.

Martinez’s left arm had grown very tired of being held aloft in the heavy gravity, and when the chameleon weave of the sleeve display shifted to its normal dark green, Martinez thankfully lowered the arm to his side. He would be more comfortable in an acceleration couch, but the couches were all in public areas, and he wanted the privacy of his own cabin. The scent of tomato and oil wafted toward him from his table, where the remains of his supper waited to be cleared during the next moment of standard gravity. Soft light glowed on the dark wood paneling that had been installed byCorona ‘s previous captain.

That captain, Fahd Tarafah, had been one of the Fleet’s most extreme football fanatics, and had gone so far as to paintCorona ‘s hull the lawn green of a football pitch, complete with a white midfield stripe running the length of the ship and a motif of soccer balls bouncing down the ship’s flanks. Tarafah’s cabin had previously been decorated with sports memorabilia, trophies, pictures of his winning teams and of Tarafah with famous players, along with a muddied pair of athletic shoes preserved by rare gases under a glass bowl.

Tarafah, his winning team, and most of his officers and crew had been captured in the opening moments of the Naxid rebellion, leaving Martinez in command ofCorona. Martinez could only hope that wherever Tarafah was, he was taking comfort in the fact that the Coronas, in their last moments of freedom, had beaten theBombardment of Beijing four goals to one.

Tarafah’s pictures and other personal effects had been cleared away and sent to Tarafah’s family, but Martinez hadn’t had time to replace any of them with objects personal to himself. The bare walls now had a desolate look, relieved only by a picture Alikhan had copied from a news report, framed, and mounted: the picture showed Martinez addressing the Convocation, the supreme legislative body of the empire, after he’d been awarded the Golden Orb for savingCorona from the rebels.

His great moment in history. It had been all downslope from there.

The final moments of the Battle of Magaria were frozen in the display over his head, an abstract display of blips, traces, heading and speed indicators, all marred by the deadly radio blooms of antimatter explosions. Martinez shifted the display’s t-axis to the beginning of the battle and ran the display again. Caroline Sula intruded again on his thoughts, and he found himself unable to concentrate.

Perhaps Sula had sent him a message. He checked and discovered that she had, one that had been three days crossing the empty space between them.

Anticipation sang through him as he called up the video.

Absurd, he told himself. He hardly knew her.

Sula appeared in the air before him. He paused for a moment in appreciation of her pale, translucent complexion, the pale gold hair and brilliant green eyes, elements of a staggering beauty marred only slightly, at this moment, by signs of weariness and pain. And the brain hidden under that remarkable exterior was at least as remarkable as her looks—Caroline Sula had won a First, had scored highest of all candidates in her year for the lieutenants’ exams, and had then gone on to blow up five enemy ships at the Battle of Magaria.

Still, it wasn’t her mind that Martinez was admiring at the moment. Simply gazing at her was like being hit in the groin with a velvet hammer.

Sula looked at him and spoke. “Another nineteen days of deceleration before we reach—” And then there was the annoying white flash, with the Fleet symbol, that indicated censorship, before Sula appeared again, apparently undisturbed by the interruption. “Everyone’s tired. Nobody on this ship bathes nearly enough, and that includes me.

“I’m sorry to hear about your misadventures on the exercise. Working up a new crew can’t be any fun.” Her lips twitched in a suggestive smile, a flash of sharp white teeth. “I’m sorry not to be there to help you whip them into shape.” The smile faded, and she shrugged. “Still, I’m sure you’ll manage it. I have confidence in your ability to warp all others to your imperious will.”

Well, Martinez thought,that was good. At least hesupposed it was good.

Sometimes Sula’s choice of phrase was too ambiguous for his tastes.

“Still,” she went on, “you can’t be enjoying yourself, not when every other captain in the Fleet is jealous of you and will pounce on your least misstep. I hope you have at least a few friends on board.”

Her expression changed subtly, a mask falling into place behind her eyes. “And speaking of friends, an old acquaintance of ours has been given the task of censoring these messages. That would be Sublieutenant Lord Jeremy Foote, who I believe you encountered when he was a mere cadet. So if any pieces of these messages are missing, for instance—” Martinez laughed at the appearance of a white space, knowing that Sula was deliberately filling the air either with military secrets or candid, scatological judgments of superior officers. The long empty moment ended, and Sula returned wearing another of her ambiguous smiles. “—then you’ll know it was due to the intervention of a friend.” Sula raised her hand to wave farewell, then winced. “The burn is better,” she added, “thanks for asking. But sometimes I move too suddenly, and the little bastardbites. ”

The orange End Transmission symbol filled the air.

Jeremy Foote,Martinez thought. A big blond oaf with a cowlick, a rich boy whose arrogance and assumption of privilege skated the line of insubordination and contempt. Martinez had loathed him on first meeting him, and subsequent acquaintance hadn’t improved Martinez’s opinion.

Foote hadn’t bothered with the lieutenants’ exams in which Sula had scored her First—that sort of work was beneath the dignity of a Foote. He’d been promoted straight into theBombardment of Delhi by its captain, his yachtsman uncle, and no doubt subsequent promotions were assured by other relations and friends in the service. Perhaps Foote had suffered a setback when the yachtsman uncle had died along with half his crew, but Martinez doubted that Foote’s star would fade for very long. The higher-ranking Peers looked after each other very well.

At least Sula seemed as fond of Lord Jeremy as was Martinez, a fact in which he could take comfort.

He squirreled Sula’s message away in a file that could be opened only with his captain’s key, then told the software he would reply. He looked at the camera and donned what he thought of as his official face, the imperturbable mask of a commander.

“You can only imagine my delight on learning that it was Lieutenant Foote who censors your messages,” he said. “I know, of course, that my superior rank means that he can’t censorme, and that he won’t seethis message unless you show it to him.

“Permission to do this is now granted. As you know, I now command a squadron that is being sent on…” He paused for deliberate effect. “A hazardous mission. I’ve recently reviewed the records of the battle at Magaria, including the records made by your pinnace. As I may soon be leading ships into combat myself, I’m interested in your assessment of that action.”

He gazed sternly—nobly, he hoped—into the camera. “Please reply with your most candid appraisal of our performance, and that of the enemy. You may respond fully, and I hope without censorship—I intend this message should make it clear to Lieutenant Foote that there is no need to keep the facts of the battle from me, as I already know them. I know that all but six of our ships were lost, thatBombardment of Delhi suffered the death of its captain and considerable damage, and that what remains of the Home Fleet are returning to Zanshaa in hopes of defending the capital.

“So,” he said, looking at the pickup with what he hoped was stern confidence, “I hope that your analysis of the battle will be able to aid my mission and help to restore the rule of the Praxis and the peace of the empire. End transmission.”

Let Foote swallowthat one, he thought.

He queued the message in the next burst of the communications lasers, then turned the display again to the battle at Magaria. Again he watched the Home Fleet fly to its death, and he tried to keep track of the waves of missiles, the increasingly desperate counterfire, the sudden collapse as entire squadrons vanished into the expanding burning plasma shells of antimatter bombs.

A chime sounded on the comm. He answered on his sleeve display.

“This is Martinez.”

The face that appeared on Martinez’s sleeve was that of his orderly. “I have done as you instructed, lord elcap.”

“Yes? Any conclusions?”

“It’s really not my place, my lord.”

Martinez ignored this disclaimer, a habit with Alikhan. One didn’t prosper for thirty years in the weapons bays by telling officers what one actually thought. If Martinez had stated his own opinion first, then Alikhan would have agreed with him and kept his own thoughts to himself.

“I’d very much appreciate your opinion, Alikhan,” Martinez said.

Alikhan hesitated for another moment, then caved in. “Very well, my lord. It seems to me that…that the squadrons were flying in too close a formation, and for far too long.”

Martinez nodded. “Thank you, Alikhan.” And then he added, “It happens that I agree with you.”

It was useful to know that someone else supported his position, even though the person was not anyone he could bring to a captains’ conference.

He signed off and watched the recordings of the battle again. Commanders kept their ships close together in order to maintain control of them for as long as possible, and in order so that their defensive fire could be concentrated on any incoming attack. Though Fleet doctrine assumed that at some point a formation would have to break up—to “starburst”—in order to avoid being overwhelmed by salvos of enemy missiles, the commanders at Magaria had been reluctant to order such maneuvers till the last possible moment, because it meant losing control of their ships. Once control was lost, it would be impossible to coordinate friendly forces in the battle. Each ship would be on its own.

Squadron Commander Do-faq, and Martinez himself, were training their crews in exactly the sort of formations and maneuvers that had brought about the disaster at Magaria.

Nowthat, Martinez thought, bore thinking about.