A Matter of Oaths (10 page)

The view on the small screen altered as Rafe focused on the
large cluster of asteroids in the trojan point of one of the system’s gas
giants, altered again to scan to the limits of
Bhattya
’s sensors. He learned well, Rallya thought approvingly.
Aware of the obvious, but not concentrating on it to the exclusion of other
possibilities. The asteroids would make a good hiding place for one or two
raiders. Noromi was aware of that and had positioned both of the other patrolships
to cover it.
Bhattya
, above the plane
that held asteroids and convoy, was equally well placed to meet an attack from
the asteroids or from the three other sectors within her reach.

Rallya narrowed her eyes as she calculated how well placed
they were. They had gradually moved out from the position she had left them in
at the end of her shift, three hours ago. Accident, or Rafe thinking ahead? The
latter, she conceded grudgingly. As she watched, he continued to flick between
the long range scan and the asteroids.

“Rafe showing off again?” Elanis said quietly from behind
her seat. He had learned not to make such comments for everyone to hear —
Joshim had reduced him to incoherence with a few well-chosen words the first
time that he did so — but he continued to make them to Rallya in private,
taking her sparring with Rafe as encouragement.

“Trying to emulate his father,” Rallya suggested. Rafe had
not mentioned Sajan’s information since that day, made no attempt to discover
what Rallya knew. It would be interesting to see how he reacted to this
pestilent aristo apparently knowing more than he did, and she could rely on
Elanis to use what she told him.

“His father?” Elanis rose to the bait beautifully.

“Some aristo in the New Empire. Commander Buhklir. Sajan,
aboard
Tariya
, knew him before she
came across the Zone.” Rallya smiled happily. “Did you know he was an aristo
too?”

“He’s never mentioned his past,” Elanis said stiffly. “No
doubt he’s an unacknowledged son.”

“Ask him,” Rallya suggested. “If he is, that’s another
advantage he has over you. Looks, skill, intelligence and he isn’t an aristo.
What more could anybody ask for?”

Elanis fell silent, lacking the wit to respond in any way
that would not be insubordinate. Rallya had not yet forgiven Joshim for moving
Churi from her team into Rafe’s and replacing him with a lazy lump of bone and
blubber; the first opening that Elanis gave her, he would be off
Bhattya
. Joshim had filed a request to
transfer him the day after he arrived, but Rallya would not rely upon the
goodwill of some assignment clerk. She would push him into insubordination
sooner or later; he did not have Rafe’s fine judgement of where the line lay.
She grinned, admitting to herself that the line for Rafe was not in the same
place as it was for everybody else. She had not had so much fun with her
clothes on in years, and she would not hamper Rafe with rules.

Rafe’s main view had changed again, picking out a lone
asteroid above and to one side of the convoy. Rallya stiffened as he tightened
the focus and switched to a large scale mass-contour chart. Yes, that
discrepancy could be a raider, well hidden and waiting to pick off the tail-end
ship of the convoy with a tight tractor-beam before a preset jump; that was how
she would do it in their place.

As she pushed herself out of her seat, the primary alert
sounded and she swore. No time to get into the web; Vidar would have to handle
it alone. No, not Vidar, Rafe. The teams could not switch roles now, not
without wasting seconds that would let the raider escape. As she sat down
again, still cursing, Rafe started the tight turn that would take
Bhattya
after the raider.

Joshim displaced Lilimya from the seat beside Rallya,
blatantly disregarding the alert; he had not been in the web-room when it
sounded, should have stayed where he was. The raider was moving away from the
asteroid, trying to get out of its mass shadow in order to jump. A beautiful
ship, built for speed and stealth. Rallya cursed the historians, for their
failure to identify the source of such a ship, and the diplomats, for their
repeated failure to make peaceful contact. If they could do their jobs
properly, there would be no need for this.

Rafe had calculated the turn beautifully, second-guessing
the direction that the raider would choose to escape. The only questions were
the timing and the range of the raider’s weapons. Rafe did not have the shields
up, could not put them up before the turn was complete without risking the loss
of the steering vanes. If they completed their turn before they were within the
raider’s range, and if the raider was unable to jump before they were within
Bhattya
’s range… Rallya ran the
calculations in her head and came up with a question mark.

“If Rafe snaps one of the vanes, Vidar will be furious,” she
remarked for the benefit of her audience. Rasil tittered until Fadir hushed
him.

They were coming out of the turn now, the vanes that had
been flattened against the hull straightening, restoring the spherical symmetry
of the drive field. Vidar’s team were easing into control of more and more
functions, careful not to disturb the working of Rafe’s team but relieving them
of background tasks and allowing them to concentrate on weapons, shields and
timing. Rallya sustained the effort necessary not to hold her breath until Rafe
raised the shields.

He did it later than she would have done, perhaps making his
own balance between the slight loss of speed and the increased safety, and
perhaps catching the first signs of the raider preparing to fire: the
temperature increases along their hull, the minor adjustments in orientation.
When the raider did fire, he resisted the temptation to fire back immediately,
letting the shields take the battering they were designed to take, using the
time to decrease the range. Yes, Rallya urged. They must stop firing and lower
their shields before they jump. Wait for that moment, when there is nothing to
confuse your aim, neither their fire nor the backwash of your own, and nothing
to protect them except the favour of their gods.

He waited, as if he could hear her, and at the moment that
the raider prepared to jump, he fired. One shot, as if he would do it neatly or
not at all. A square hit, and where there had been a shining hull, there was a
spreading mess of metal. Fadir gave a whoop of triumph.

“Fadir, go calculate how many crew that ship could carry.”
Rallya snarled the order without taking her attention from the screens. Rafe
had switched again to long range scan. Emperors, as if he had done this
hundreds of times before, Rallya thought disbelievingly. He should have been
reacting like Fadir, exulting in his victory, not immediately wary of another
attack. How in hell was he managing to do everything so right?

“I’ll take my team up,” Joshim decided, standing up. “We can
be ready to relieve them as soon as Rafe gives the signal.”

Rallya grunted agreement. “I’ll bleep Jualla and her team,
send them up too.” The messager alarm was flashing insistently. “Congratulations
from our Convoy Commander and his grateful charges,” she predicted. “Wonderful
how fast they’ve all started to move now.”

“Rafe down?” Rallya asked Vidar as he entered the
rest-room.

“Yes. In the web-room, drinking alcad.” Vidar chuckled. “I’m
surprised you weren’t out there to jump on him as soon as he came down.”

“Why should I want to do that?”

“I can’t imagine. He didn’t do a thing wrong, but that doesn’t
usually stop you.” Vidar was in a high good humour.

Rallya ignored the jibe, knowing when Vidar was teasing. “And
now he’s basking in applause from everyone who knows no better,” she predicted.

Vidar shook his head. “He stopped that just as soon as it
started. Asked Churi how many people he’d helped to kill today. Everybody else
took the hint. Except Elanis. He accused Rafe of being an Outie sympathizer.
Got most upset when Rafe reminded him that
his
family had been Outies three generations ago. Called Rafe an upstart
chance-child whose only talent was for bending his back in the Webmaster’s bed.”
Vidar had obviously relished the confrontation, was repeating it word for word.

“So you put him on a charge?” Rallya said hopefully.

Vidar shook his head. “Wasn’t necessary,” he said gleefully.
“Rafe apologized for beating him into Joshim’s bed and wished him better luck
with you. Elanis was laughed out of the web-room.”

Rallya grinned broadly. “With his tail tucked firmly between
his legs and likely to stay there.”

She stretched gently, reflecting that the seats in the
rest-room got lower every time that she sat in one, and more difficult to get
up from. So Rafe was sharing Joshim’s bed, was he? That took a lot of doing.
Joshim was too good a Webmaster to have a string of casual liaisons in the
web-room, the way that Vidar did; nor did he do what a lot of Webmasters did,
regularly taking every member of the web-room to bed as part of the process of
monitoring their physical and emotional states. In fact, to Rallya’s certain
knowledge, Joshim had only shared a bed aboard
Bhattya
with herself or with Vidar, and that infrequently. Although
she had often teased him about it, she had to admit that it saved a lot of
trouble in the web-room; his judgement had never been questioned on the grounds
of pique or favouritism, and in eight years nobody had brought a problem to
herself or to Vidar that should have been taken to Joshim first.

“Just as well you didn’t put Elanis on a charge,” she told
Vidar. “He’d have yelled favouritism so loud they’d hear it in Imperial.” She
frowned suddenly. “Did you know about Joshim and Rafe?”

“No.”

“Which makes it the only pairing aboard this ship that you
haven’t known about since the day it happened,” Rallya concluded.

“True, but neither of them is the sort to post the news on
the notice board.”

“That doesn’t usually inconvenience you too much.” Rallya
pressed her lips together. “If you didn’t know, how did Elanis?”

“Lucky guess? Maybe Rafe makes a habit of it.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Rallya said irritably. “If you don’t know
Rafe well enough to know that isn’t true, you should know Joshim well enough to
know he’d recognize somebody like that.”

“I’ve never known him when he was in love,” Vidar pointed
out. “He could be as stupid as the rest of us in that state.”

“Speak for yourself. And if he is in love, you’d better start
worrying. Rafe will be ready for a Commander’s berth within a few years. Any
guesses what Joshim will do then?”

Vidar whistled. “We could lose him.”

“We probably will,” Rallya said gloomily. There were not
many established Threes who would consider an Oath-breaker as Commander, but
the Guild might give a new ship to an established Webmaster with a reputation
like Joshim’s and a new Commander with Rallya’s recommendation… She would give
Rafe that recommendation, she admitted; he was too good for her to withhold it.
And if she did withhold it, they would still lose Joshim. Hell’s teeth though:
if Rafe thought that his relationship with Joshim would win him any concessions
from Rallya while he was aboard this ship, he was going to get a nasty shock

* * *

It was not hard to guess who was knocking at his cabin
door, Rafe thought wearily; he was only surprised it had taken her so long to
arrive.

“Come in, ma’am,” he called, turning to face the door but
not standing to greet her.

She halted just inside the door and stood with her hands on
her hips, surveying the room. “Pleased with yourself?” she challenged.

“Should I be?”

She picked up the reck nearest to her on the desk, looked at
the label, tossed it back. “You didn’t make many mistakes today.”

What would you say, ma’am, if I told you that I made no
mistakes at all? That everything I did was the right thing, at the right time,
for the right reasons? And that it was all there in my memory: juggling speed
against safety, judging the moment to raise the shields, the moment to fire.
Even my web remembered the sensation of being in control of a ship’s web during
combat!

Rafe controlled another wave of nausea. He was not really
remembering those things; it was the identity-wipe playing tricks with him
again. He had witnessed another person in a similar situation; was not allowed
to remember that person; could only recall what he had seen as though it was
something he had done himself. They had explained it to him when he was still
asking for explanations, in the early days. Maybe if he had asked them, they
would have explained why he could remember how it
felt
. And why it made him sick to think about it.

He realized that Rallya was watching him closely, as if she
could see his thoughts written on his face.

“Did you come to tell me about the mistakes I did make?” he
asked with an effort.

“No.” She tried the edge of the bed and sat down. “There
were things that I might have done differently, but the result is what matters.”
She looked at him measuringly. “Will you be able to do it again? Or do you not
like the thought that you killed twenty people today?”

“The time to worry is when I stop not liking it.”

“Did Buhklir teach you that?”

Rafe’s stomach lurched another warning. “I worked it out for
myself.” He jammed his hands in his tunic pockets. “Was that all you came to
ask, ma’am?”

“No.” Rallya stood up and crossed the room to look down at
him. “You’re shaking,” she remarked, lifting his chin with a single finger. “Reaction
to combat? Or to thinking about your father?”

Rafe pulled away. “None of your business.”

“None of your business, ma’am.” She replaced her hand under
his chin, turning his face up to the light. “And if it’s reaction to combat, it
is my business.”