The Sundering

by Walter Jon Williams

  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.

  THREE

  Perfect 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.

  “She and Martinez are trying to reform our entire tactical system based on lessons learned at Magaria,” Foote says. “Martinez places great trust in her, it seems.”

  Morgen raised a piece of flat bread to his mouth, then hesitated. “Martinez is consulting you on his tactics?”

  Morgen found it surprising that Lieutenant Captain Lord Gareth Martinez—who after all was famous—was consulting Delhi’s most junior lieutenant in the matter of maneuvering his squadron.

  Sula answered cautiously. “He asks my opinion,” she says.

  “Well,” Morgen said, chewing. “Maybe you’d better share it with the rest of us, then.”

  Sula didn’t feel up to delivering a lecture to her superiors, but she managed to stumble through a brief explanation without tangling up her thoughts too badly. Foote—who listened with great care and seriousness, and managed not to make a single sarcastic or offensive remark the entire time—turned the video wall to the Structured Mathematics Display and surprised Sula by calling up the formula she’d sent to Martinez the previous evening.

  “I cribbed this out of your message,” he explained.

  Morgen’s eyes scanned the formula quickly, then slowly went through it again, statement by statement.

  “Perhaps you’d better explain in more detail,” he said.
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br />   Sula gave Foote a sullen glare of weary resentment, then did as her acting captain requested.

  Martinez looked in wild fascination at the ten enemy engine flares registered on the display, and took an extra half-second to make certain that his voice was calm when he spoke.

  “Message to the squadron,” he said. “Cease acceleration at—” He glanced at the chronometer. “25:34:01 precisely.”

  Martinez returned to calculating trajectories. As Wormholes 1 and 2 were 4.2 light-hours apart, the Naxids had actually entered the system slightly over four hours ago, and were decelerating as if they intended to stay in the Hone-bar system. It was impossible to be precise about their current location, but it appeared they were heading slightly away from Martinez’s force, intending to swing around Hone-bar’s sun and slingshot around toward the planet. They would, in time, see Martinez’s squadron enter hot, with blazing engine flares and pounding radars, and know the new arrivals for enemies.

  Martinez’s squadron wasn’t heading for Hone-bar either, but rather for a gas giant named Soq, on a trajectory that would hurl them toward the system’s sun, on screaming curves around three more gas giants, and then back through Wormhole 1 again and on to Zanshaa. They were heading for the sun at a much more acute angle than the Naxids, and if neither changed course Martinez would cross his enemy’s trail on the far side of the sun.

  But that wouldn’t happen. The Naxids would pass behind the sun and swing toward Hone-bar and the squadron, and then antimatter would blaze out in the emptiness of space and a great many people would die.

  Gradually, as he studied the displays, Martinez realized that his message had not been repeated back to him.

  “Shankaracharya!” he said. “Message to squadron!”

  “Oh! Sorry, lord elcap. Repeat, please?” Shankaracharya’s communications cage was behind Martinez, so Martinez couldn’t see him, only hear his voice over his helmet earphones.