The Praxis (5 page)

An unknown amount of time later she woke gasping for breath, fighting the ton of lead that pressed on her rib cage. Sensors in her pressure suit monitored her condition: the computers on her pinnace were instructed to keep her
alive,
but the programming said nothing about
comfortable.

In the blackness of her vision there was a hole through which a little light came. Sula focused the hole over the engine display and found that the pinnace was accelerating at a steady 6.5 gravities, which the computer had apparently decided was the optimum both for keeping her alive and getting her to where she was going.

The darkness retreated a little from her vision. Sula panted for breath. She badly wanted to pee.

She wrenched her gaze to the speed indicator. It felt as if she had to crowbar her eyeballs around their sockets. She discovered she was traveling .076
c
.

Too bad. It meant that this wouldn't end anytime soon.

 

T
he brutal deceleration finally came to an end. The pressure exerted by Sula's suit, soft as foam but firm as steel, withdrew from her arms and legs, bringing them tingling back to life as the blood surged to the muscles. The tingling on her back, caused by the miniwaves pulsed through the acceleration couch—to prevent blood pooling and to prevent bedsores—faded as she floated free in her harness. The soft darkness retreated from her perceptions, and she could fill her lungs with air.

She checked her own vital signs, found elevated heart rate and blood pressure, but not in the critical ranges. She hadn't stroked out during the acceleration—which sometimes happened even to the fittest young cadets—nor had she given herself some kind of weird heart murmur or arrhythmia.

The composite organics of the ship's hull cracked and snapped as they reacted to the end of the relentless acceleration. Sula scanned the displays, then raised a hand to send a message both to the
Los Angeles
and to Operations on Zanshaa.

“Cadet Sula reporting. Diagnostics report optimal conditions following deceleration.”
Thanks for not killing me,
she added mentally.

She stretched in her acceleration couch, forcing sluggish blood to her reluctant muscles. The cockpit of the pinnace was tiny, with Sula in her pressure suit taking up most of the available volume. There was even less room than normal, because she was flying a two-seated trainer in case she had to take Blitsharts aboard.

Funny. She'd volunteered for pinnace duty in part because it meant getting time to herself, away from ship quarters where the cadets were crammed together, each living in the other's armpit. What she discovered was that even here, alone in the infinity of space, there wasn't room enough to so much as stretch her arms above her head.

A light glowed on her communications board, the signal that messages had been recorded for her. She'd noted the light since deceleration ceased, but hadn't felt up to interacting with the command structure till now. She triggered the display and discovered a continuous stream of tracking data from Zanshaa's ring sensors showing Blitsharts's tumbling craft. Another was a communication from Operations Command, a message the pinnace had received directly, followed by a copy of the same message forwarded by the communications officer aboard
Los Angeles.

Sula played the recorded message. A dark-browed, lantern-jawed young man looked out of the display. There were staff tabs on his collar, the sign of a lord commander's pet, and Sula found herself loathing him on sight.

The lieutenant spoke. “Lieutenant Martinez at Operations to any rescue pilot. I have analyzed the way in which the target boat is tumbling, and the results don't look very promising.” A simulation of
Midnight Runner
filled the display, and Sula leaned forward, studying the fix Captain Blitsharts had got himself into.

The voice went on. “I can't see any way to dock with the boat's hatch, which is too far forward. At best you'd get knocked around badly; at worst you'd kill yourself, Blitsharts,
and
his dog Orange.”

Har har, Sula thought. The lord commander's pet had a sense of humor. Wonderful.

“I've worked out a way you can dock with the yacht, if not with the hatch,” Martinez went on. “You'll have to exactly duplicate with your own boat the precise fashion in which Blitsharts is tumbling, then slip inside his rolling motion to dock.” A pinnace appeared in the simulation, rolling and pitching just as Blitsharts's boat was doing, and then the two moved together to mate, the pinnace fitting carefully into a whirlwind corkscrew cone formed by
Midnight Runner's
off-center spinning nose.

“You're going to have to
screw
it in,” Martinez said, and Sula felt a surge of memory. She'd heard the message, live, as she received it—only she'd been unconscious through most of it.

“You can't access the hatch from this position,” Martinez continued, “but once you're clamped onto him, you can use your own maneuvering thrusters to damp down the movements of Blitsharts's boat. When you've got his boat under control, you can shift your own boat forward to mate with Blitsharts's hatch.”

Sula frowned at the simulation, which showed exactly that. It looked possible, but experience had shown her that a simulation was not necessarily cognate with reality.

The picture cut to Martinez.

“There are two problems,” he said. “The first is that
Midnight Runner's
thrusters still occasionally fire, which may make the tumbling more chaotic by the time you arrive.”

Oh great, Sula thought. She could do everything perfectly, and then Blitsharts's thrusters could cut in and cause a collision.

“The second problem—” Martinez took a breath, “—will be staying conscious. If you attempt to match the movements of Blitsharts's boat, you'll be subjecting yourself to an unforgiving pattern of accelerations, followed by a chaotic combination of roll, pitch, and yaw. You will be in severe danger of blacking out.”

“Oh. Great.” Sula closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against her helmet pads.

Martinez's closing words echoed in her helmet earphones. “You are the pilot on the scene. It will be entirely up to you whether you attempt this maneuver. I am to tell you from the lord commander of the Home Fleet that no blame will attach to you if you decide the rescue is too risky.”

Sula opened her eyes.
Lord commander of the Home Fleet…

It wasn't like there was any pressure or anything. She'd only be performing—or demonstrating cowardice or killing herself or fucking up beyond all possible redemption—in front of the individual who commanded the largest division of the Fleet, the defenses of the capital, and of course her own personal future.

Thanks a lot.

Martinez's image gazed steadily at her from the displays. “I'll keep sending updates from our sensors here, though of course anything you'll receive from
me
will be an hour out of date. I'm afraid there is very little assistance I can offer. You're truly on your own. Good luck.”

The image faded, replaced by the orange
End
Transmission symbol.

Sula's fist hovered over the transmit button. “Thank you for sending me on a mission that gives me the choice of suicide or disgrace. Why don't you come and do it yourself if you're so smart?”

She held the fist there for a long moment, hit the transmit button and said, “Cadet Caroline Sula to Lieutenant Martinez, Operations Command. Your message received. Thank you.”

She hadn't got as far as she had by being stupid.

 

S
ula managed to stay conscious through the next long deceleration burn, as her pinnace swooped over Vandrith's north pole to fire her south, directly on Blitsharts's trail. Her jaws ached from keeping her teeth clamped.

She started getting data from the ranging lasers tracking
Midnight Runner,
and she was able to update Martinez's simulation of the tumbling craft. There was an extra wobble in its roll—sure enough, the yacht's maneuvering thrusters must have fired and added an extra little complexity to the acrobatics.

She wondered what could be causing them to fire at random that way. It didn't make any sense. If an automated pitch-and-yaw program had been initiated to stabilize the craft, the thrusters would be firing more regularly and deliberately, which would have dampened the oscillations, not increased them.

Could Blitsharts be making brief attempts to solve his problem? Coming out of unconsciousness briefly to fire a thruster, but so disoriented he only made his situation worse?

That didn't precisely make sense either, but it was the best guess she could make.

She studied the simulation. She ate some ration bars. She took a brief nap. And, because she finally couldn't stand the pressure in her bladder any longer, she urinated into her suit.

Elimination was the thing she hated most when living in a vac suit. She knew that the crotch of her suit was packed full of absorbent material chock-full of hydrostatic screens and mindlessly happy bacteria that would process the urine into demineralized water and harmless salts; that it would clean her up and leave her “fresher than before,” which were the words actually used in the suit manual.

Before
what?
she wanted to snarl. Before she was crammed into this giant, unwieldy, vacuum-resistant
diaper?
But if the service could only provide her with an honest-to-god
toilet,
she would have much preferred to handle the freshening business herself, thank you very much.

Just before the pinnace oriented for the next deceleration, Sula triggered the boat's radars to give her a better view of her tumbling target. Then the pinnace swung around, aligned its engines very precisely, and began the deceleration burn.

Again she felt the suit gently closing around her arms and legs, forcing the blood to her brain. Again the weight of many gravities compressed her chest. Again she felt the darkness gathering around her vision, the light narrowing to a tiny tunnel bearing only straightforward.

Again she felt the pillow pressing down on her face, throttling her half-formed scream.

Blitsharts,
she thought,
you'd better fucking well be alive.

 

E
nderby had gone to bed hours ago. With dawn, a new shift arrived—not humans but Lai-owns, members of a flightless avian species. They were taller than humans, covered with gray featherlike hair mottled with black, and with vicious peg teeth in an elongated muzzle.

The Lai-owns had provided the Fleet with the only space battles in its long history. Every other species in the dominion of the Shaa had been bombarded into submission by overwhelming forces operating from the safety of space. Even those who managed to develop sufficient technology to get into space, like the primitive human tribe-nations on Earth, did not possess an armed presence sufficient to halt the Shaa for even a few seconds.

But to the flightless Lai-owns, space was just an extension of their natural environment, the airy realms where their ancestors had flown. They had spread throughout their home star system, and possessed the fleets to protect their settlements. Had they been able to discover and develop the wormholes that orbited their star, they might have been the first to contact the Shaa, not the other way around.

As it was, the Lai-owns gave the Shaa squadrons a bloody nose when the conquerors poured in through the system's wormhole. They were natural tacticians, their avian brains adapted to operating in a three-dimensional environment. And the wars they had fought among themselves gave them a tactical doctrine based on experience. Their only disadvantage was the light, hollow bones that permitted their ancestors to fly but wouldn't stand the ferocious accelerations of space combat.

The Shaa calculated on destroying resistance in a matter of hours. Instead it took six days to obliterate the last Laiown warship and issue a demand for surrender. One of the Lai-own innovations that had surprised the Fleet was the use of the pinnace, a small vessel that would shepherd attacking missiles toward the target and update their instructions faster than could the larger ships, which might be lurking back light-minutes out of contact.

The pinnaces were valuable tactically, but few had survived actual combat. In the years since the Lai-own war, however, cadets had begun to compete for the right to wear the silver flashes of the pinnace pilot, and it became both a status symbol and an entrée to the fashionable and glamorous world of yachting.

It was a matter for debate how many of these cadets would have competed so eagerly to be pinnace pilots if there had actually been a war going on. Martinez suspected there would be relatively few.

As he sat with the avians in Operations, he found himself wishing that it had been the Lai-owns who crewed the
Los Angeles,
and not humans. A Lai-own would be able to use his complex plan for rescuing
Midnight Runner
with little problem, and with no chance of rendering himself unconscious.

Instead, an unknown human would do the job, almost certainly an inexperienced cadet. Martinez almost regretted having worked out a plan—if he hadn't, the rescue pilot wouldn't be in jeopardy.

During his long wait, he received two messages. The first was from
Los Angeles,
announcing that, per the lord commander's request, a pinnace had been launched on a rescue mission. The second was from the pinnace itself, a brief announcement, audio only, that his message had been received.

Cadet Caroline Sula.
Martinez had heard the name Sula but couldn't recall where. He had seen a Sula Palace in the High City, which meant the Sulas were an old family, Peers of the highest rank. But he hadn't heard about any members of the family, either in government, civil service, or the military, unusual for a family ranked that high. He wondered if this cadet was the last of them.