The Praxis (33 page)

The wailed cry of the acceleration warning sounded. “Very good, my lord.”

He increased
Corona's
acceleration to six gees while he tried desperately to think of a way to escape. The heavy gravity should have wearied him but his mind blazed with ideas—radical maneuvers, imaginative improvision of decoys, suicide pinnace dives into the ring station—all of them pointless. The only thing he'd succeeded at was slowing the rate at which the missiles were closing, and buying his crew a few more minutes' life.

“Twelve minutes, my lord.”

Martinez realized that his mind was racing too quickly to actually be of any use, and he tried to slow himself down, go through everything he knew step by step.

Garcia had told him that Koslowski never wore his lieutenant's key while playing football. Koslowski was the only one of
Corona's
officers who Martinez definitely knew wasn't wearing his key, so that meant he should concentrate on Koslowski.

The sensible place for Koslowski to put his key would be in the safe in his cabin, but Koslowski hadn't been that sensible. He hadn't put it in any other obvious place in his cabin either. So where else could he have gone?

Where else did
officers
go?

The wardroom. It was where the officers ate and relaxed. There was a locked pantry where the officers kept their drinks and delicacies.

But the wardroom was an insecure place, there were people in cleaning, and the wardroom steward and cook both had keys to the pantry. The wardroom seemed highly unlikely.

Perhaps Koslowski gave the key to someone he trusted. But the only likely candidates were on the team.

“Ten minutes, my lord.”

Fine, Martinez went on, but if officers weren't going to be wearing their keys, they were supposed to return them to their captain. So on the assumption that Koslowski did what he was supposed to do, where did Tarafah put it?

Not in either of his safes. Not in his desk. Not in his drawers. Not under his mattress or in a secret compartment in the custom mahogany paneling of his walls.

He put it…
around his neck
. Martinez's heart sank. He could picture it happening, picture Tarafah looping the elastic cord around his neck and tucking the key down the front of his sweats, to join his own captain's key nestled against his chest hairs…

No
. Martinez put the image firmly from his mind. The key had to be somewhere else.

“Nine minutes, my lord.” The words were spoken over a long, groaning shudder from
Corona's
stressed frame.

Would
Fanaghee accept
Corona's
surrender? Martinez wondered. He could safely assume that she would want the frigate back, certainly. But—perhaps of more vital interest—would Fanaghee accept
Martinez's
surrender?

Martinez thought not. His blood would probably still be decorating the walls of Command when Fanaghee put her new captain on board. Perhaps it would be easier on everyone if he just took his sidearm and blew out his own brains.

No.
Martinez put the thought out of his mind. Where was the
key?

He pictured Koslowski's cabin, exactly like his own…small, the narrow gimbaled bed, the washstand, the large wardrobe that contained the formidable number of uniforms required, the chests with the grand amount of gear an officer was expected to carry with him from one posting to the next. The shelves, the small desk with its computer access.

There just wasn't any room to hide something. A cabin was
small
.

He knew that the captain's sleeping cabin was larger, though he'd never been in it, but he couldn't imagine it would be very different.

And then there was the captain's office. The desk, with its computer access. The safe. The shelves, and all the football trophies.

The trophies
. The glittering objects, standing in his office and braced against high gee, that meant more to Lieutenant Captain Tarafah than anything else, including probably his command. The objects that he savored every day, that he probably caressed in secret.

Martinez was so transfixed by the memory of the trophies that he failed to hear the words that were spoken to him.

“Sorry?” he said absently. “Repeat, please.”

“I think I've configured the pinnace as you wished,” Kelly said.

“Right. Stand by.”

He paged Alikhan. “Did you check the
trophies?
” he demanded.

“My lord?”

“Did you look in the trophies? The Home Fleet Trophies are
cups,
aren't they?”

He could hear Alikhan's chagrin even through the strain that six gravities was putting on his voice.

“No, my lord. I didn't think to look.”

“Engines!” Martinez cried. “Reduce acceleration to one gravity!”

“Reducing acceleration to one gravity, my lord,” Mabumba repeated.

Corona's
beams groaned as the oppressive weight eased. Martinez gasped in air, grateful to breathe without labor. He took a half-dozen sweet breaths, then impatience drove him to demand information.

“What are you finding, Alikhan?”

“I'm trying to work the catch to the lid now, my lord.
There
…I'm reaching inside…”

In the silence that followed, even over the remorseless percussion of his heart, Martinez could hear the metallic scrape of Alikhan's fingernails whispering against the inside of the cup. And then he heard Alikhan's deep sigh, a sigh that to Martinez seemed filled with all the despair in the universe…

“Six minutes, my lord.” Tracy's words were leaden.

“I've got them both, Lord Gareth,” said Alikhan in a voice of quiet exultation.

For an instant the hopelessness still clung like a shroud to Martinez's mind, and then it was obliterated by an electric surge of triumph that almost had him whooping aloud.

“Activate the captain's desk display,” he said. “Insert his key. Prepare to turn on my mark.
Weapons! Kelly! Catch!
”

Cadet Kelly turned as Martinez fished in his pocket for Garcia's key. The expression on her face was luminous, as if with glowing eyes she were seeing Martinez descend from heaven on rainbow clouds.

The cadet stretched out her lanky arms, and Martinez tossed her the key.

“Insert and turn on my mark.”

“Very good, my lord!”

Martinez opened his tunic and pulled his own key off over his head. He inserted the key into the silvery metal slot on the command console before him.

“Weapons. Alikhan. Turn on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

Kelly gave a dazzled smile as the weapons board lit up before her eyes. Another light appeared on Martinez's board, indicating that the weapons were free.

“Alikhan, get to a rack and strap in.”

“Yes, my lord.”

And then, as frantic relief poured into his veins, Martinez turned to Kelly. “Power up point-defense lasers!” he called. “This is
not
a drill!” Such was his haste that he had to keep himself from screaming the words like a lunatic.

“This is not a drill,” Kelly repeated through a broad, brilliant smile. “Powering up point-defense lasers.”

“Activate radars aft.”

“Radars activated aft, my lord.”

“This is not a drill. Charge missile battery one with antimatter.”

“This is not a drill. Charging missile battery one with antimatter…missiles charged, my lord.”

The missiles had been charged with their antimatter fuel, each unit consisting of a solid flake of antihydrogen that had been carefully doped with an excess of positrons, which allowed it to be suspended by static electricity inside a tiny etched silicon chip. The configuration was stable and would last for decades, and the chips were so diminutive, well beneath anything that could be seen with a conventional microscope, that as a mass they flowed like liquid. The antihydrogen served both as propellant for the missile and as the warhead—any fuel that didn't get used up on the approach would go bang at the end of the journey.

The same antihydrogen fuel was used by
Corona
for its own propulsion, though larger ships used antihydrogen suspended in larger microchips, which provided more power to the engines.

“Screens,” Martinez asked, “what's the dispersal on that salvo?”

“They're clumped together, my lord,” Tracy responded.

Martinez pulled the radar tracks onto his own display. The oncoming missiles
were
clumped, flying as if in formation. One of
Corona's
missiles should suffice to knock them out, but he thought he should fire two just to be sure.

He pulled the weapons board into his own displays and began configuring the missiles. “We'll fire battery one in salvos of two,” he explained to Kelly. “The first two will take care of the oncoming missiles. The next two will accelerate till they're just short of the enemy missiles, then cut power and drift through the blast, coming out the far side, heading for the station but looking on the radars like debris—or so we'll hope. The next pair will burn straight in for the ring station and probably get shot down, but may distract them from the second pair. The fourth pair we'll keep in reserve.”

Kelly looked a little overwhelmed. “Yes, my lord,” she said finally.

“When you reload, load tube one with a decoy.”

Pressing keypads. “Yes, my lord.”

On a larger ship, there would be a tactical officer to take care of all these details. But as he spun his plans, as his fingers danced in the displays and tapped console pads, Martinez found that he was enjoying himself again, relishing the planning and the execution and, most of all, the little surprise he was planning to spring on the Naxids.

Blow everything
. Garcia's words echoed in his mind, and he felt his pleasure fade. It wasn't just rebel Naxids on the ships he planned to destroy, it was their captive crews, and the military installations on the ring were only a small part of the huge structure: millions of civilians lived there as well. All would die if his clever little plan succeeded.

He stared for a moment into a dark, cold imagining: the flash, the fireball, the spray of gamma rays. The ring station rent apart, spinning out of control, parts flung into space, others dragged to flame and impact on the planet's surface by the skyhook cables.

“Three minutes, my lord.” Tracy's words cut through his reverie, and with a deliberate resolve he put aside the horror of his vision.

“This is not a drill,” Martinez said. “Fire tubes one and two.”

“One and two fired, my lord. This is not a drill.” The gauss rails flung the missiles into space, and the missiles reoriented and ignited. “Missiles fired and running normally.”

Martinez watched them fly away through his displays. “Weapons, this is not a drill. Fire three and four.”

The pair fired, and the next pair, all firing normally.

Martinez decided to put more distance between himself and any detonating antimatter. “Engines, high gravity warning.” The sirens wailed.

“High gee warning, my lord.”

Martinez ordered a resumption of the six-gravity acceleration.

Now we'll see how they react, he thought as the leaden weights of gravity were added one by one to his chest.

The Naxids must have seen his missile launches, and known that
Corona
had teeth. They had to understand that their dense-packed formation of eight offensive missiles would be obliterated by
Corona's
counterfire. But it wasn't too late to save their barrage: they could send orders to the individual missiles to diverge, to separate so they couldn't all be knocked out at once.

But they didn't.
Corona's
first pair of missiles exploded right in the middle of the enemy salvo, destroying them all in the plasma fireball created when the exploding antihydrogen hit the tungsten surrounding the warhead. A wild, furious cloud of radiation erupted between
Corona
and Magaria, preventing either
Corona
or the Naxids from seeing what was happening on the other side.

The radiation gradually cooled and faded. The first objects the sensors could detect, through the weakening shroud, were the burning tails of missiles five and six heading for the ring; the second thing were missile tails as well, the second salvo of eight fired from
Ferogash.

“Twenty-four minutes till impact, my lord.”

That gave Martinez a comfortable amount of time to deal with them. It wasn't until four of those minutes had passed that
Corona's
radars finally detected missiles three and four falling toward the enemy with their torches extinguished, speed increasing as they were drawn toward Magaria by the invisible threads of gravity.

“The enemy salvo is still flying bunched up, my lord.”

The Naxids, their attack having failed once, were trying the same thing all over again. Martinez could only hope they'd keep this up.

As he stared at the displays he realized that both he and the Naxids were improvising. Standard fleet tactics assumed that both sides would be moving fast, perhaps at a significant fraction of the speed of light, on courses more or less converging. Tactics assumed that the largest problem would be to detect the exact location of enemy ships, since ships could alter their trajectory significantly from the moment any radar or ranging laser detected them until the signal returned to the sender. Since the distances involved made ship-killing lasers useless—at .3
c
, it did not take a lot of maneuvering to evade a beam of light that, however fast, moved only in a straight line—offensive action was taken with intelligent missiles that, with guidance, could chase their targets down. Lasers were relegated to last-ditch point-defense weaponry to be aimed at missiles homing in on a target. Missiles were maneuvered en route to the target, both to anticipate the target's evasions and to avoid countermeasures, and they would maneuver behind exploding screens of antimatter that hid them from the enemy, and hid friendly squadrons as well.