The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Sula thought about that and decided that Spence was right. What Sula needed to do was become even more paranoid.

  Lord Mehrang, Vijana, and others had nearly wiped out the Yormaks, and they’d been richly rewarded for their actions.

  Maybe, she thought, Lady Tu-hon and her clique were intending to reward themselves in a similar way. Make the Terrans disappear, or a lot of them anyway, then redistribute their wealth.

  Wholesale murder might be Lady Tu-hon’s way of recovering any fortunes lost in the economic debacle.

  Sula cut acceleration entirely just before the next wormhole transit, having decided to enter the Contorsi system dark until she could complete an inventory of the ships in the system and assess them for threats. Transports appeared, and little mining settlements. And Corona with its transponder pinging away like a songbird.

  And mere minutes behind and closing the distance fast, a warship.

  A cold shimmer went up her spine as she realized that trouble had found Martinez, and that he and his merry band of yacht pilots were about to be faced with an enemy they couldn’t fight.

  If we stay dark, Sula thought, maybe they won’t see us.

  Maybe, she thought, they would be satisfied with killing Martinez and leave Striver alone.

  Corona had entered the system of Contorsi, a small, pale yellow sun. None of the eleven planets were inhabited, but many of their satellites were being exploited for mineral resources, water, gases, or chemicals. Corona was en route from Contorsi Wormhole Two to Wormhole Three when a bright engine flare appeared from the direction of Wormhole One.

  Corona was still twenty-five days from Harzapid and was decelerating at 1.2 gravities, hard enough to make a significant difference in transit time without overly inconveniencing the passengers, who grew used to carrying 20 percent more weight. Three of the racing yachts were hurling themselves into maneuvers with much higher gravities, as their captains trained for war. A racing yacht was very like a Fleet pinnace, a small boat with a big engine, and training in a yacht was the best way of preparing crew for the stresses of battle.

  The message came as soon as it could, given that the newcomer had to find Corona in the system before delivering its dispatch. Vipsania, already in the communications suite, viewed it, then summoned Roland and Martinez for a replay.

  The Lai-own captain glittered in her viridian dress uniform with its double row of silver buttons. She spoke quickly and formally, fixing the camera with her golden eyes. “Carrier Corona, I am Captain An-sol of the cruiser Conformance. I order you to continue your current course and maintain your current rate of deceleration. Conformance will maneuver to a rendezvous, and you will be boarded and searched.” The orange end-stamp filled the screen.

  “Well,” Roland said. He frowned at the screen. “That was perfectly clear. And unexpected.”

  Martinez looked at Roland in silent fury. At least your daughter isn’t here. Whatever happened to Conformance, Young Gareth would be a witness.

  To the execution of his father, very possibly.

  Vipsania replayed An-sol’s message, then viewed the Lai-own captain’s frozen image on the screen. “She put on a full dress uniform for a message of only a few seconds,” she said. “Call that a compliment to Gareth—she’d hardly put on full dress to send a message to some civilian captain.”

  “She knows we’re on board, then,” said Roland.

  It wouldn’t be hard to find out, Martinez thought. There would be records of who came up the skyhook to Zanshaa’s antimatter ring, and video of people moving on the docks. And since the Martinez family had all been named Terran criminals, people in the security services might have been keeping track of them anyway.

  “I’ll call Captain Anderson,” Martinez said, “and have him tell Conformance that we will comply with their directives.”

  He did so. Pneumatics sighed as Vipsania lowered herself, and her 20 percent extra weight, into one of the office chairs. “What do you know about this Captain An-sol?”

  “A protégée of Squadron Commander Esh-draq,” Martinez said. “Was his first officer in the Judge Solomon during the war. I’ve met her a few times, but we’re not friends.”

  “Is there anyone we can”—Roland searched for words—“approach to bring pressure on her?”

  “Esh-draq, possibly, but he’s serving under Do-faq in the Third Fleet at Felarus, and it would take ten or twelve days to get a message to there and back.”

  Martinez could see hard calculation cascading somewhere behind Roland’s eyes. “And Conformance will catch up to us sooner than that?”

  “I haven’t plotted our courses, but I’m going to assume so.”

  “Why don’t you make the plot, and we’ll consider other alternatives.”

  Martinez seated himself at a terminal and called up a navigation display. Corona didn’t have the sensor suite of a warship, let alone a trained crew to operate it, and for that reason hadn’t been tracking Conformance, or for that matter any other vessel in the system. Martinez didn’t have much data on the cruiser’s movements, so he called up a multispectrum telescope and told it to track the cruiser. While he waited for new data to appear, an idea struck him, and he realized his mind had been quietly working on another problem altogether.

  “I can tell you what this means,” he said. “It means that Michi’s succeeded in taking the Fourth Fleet. Or most of it, anyway.”

  Vipsania and Roland looked at him in surprise. “Yes?” Roland said.

  Even as stories of rebellion and mutiny had flooded the news services, there had been no word from Harzapid. Amid all the ranting, riots, and denunciation, and with so many stories of mutiny at other Fleet posts, the Fourth Fleet hadn’t been mentioned at all—Harzapid seemed to be a singularity in the new government’s story, a black hole from which no information emerged. As the days passed Martinez had found himself itching to use Lord Chen’s code to contact Michi Chen, but he’d always argued himself out of it. If the situation was delicate, he didn’t want to give the opposition evidence that Fleet Commander Chen was in contact with conspirators.

  But now it seemed clear. “If the Fourth Fleet were under government control,” he said, “we’d fly right into their arms, so there would be no need to send Conformance after us. But Conformance was sent after us precisely because our welcome at Harzapid would be friendly. The government is trying to keep Harzapid from getting reinforcements. I’m sure they looked at their tracking data and saw Corona, and then they wouldn’t have to do too much work to guess who’s aboard.”

  “That’s encouraging, I suppose,” Roland said, his eyes fixed on the screen frozen with An-sol’s image. “But I’m guessing you don’t expect that Michi’s going to charge to our rescue with a couple dozen warships.”

  “I’m not counting on it,” Martinez said. “She may not know where we are, depending on whether the government’s cut communication with Harzapid.”

  “In the last war,” Vipsania said, “the government and the Naxids were in communication all the time.”

  “But that didn’t mean that you and I could chat with the Naxid high command,” Martinez said. “All messages from unauthorized personnel stopped at the censors, or at the wormhole relay stations.” And he sighed. “We might as well send a coded message to Michi now. It probably won’t go through, but it’s not likely to do us more harm than has already been done.”

  Roland nodded. “If she’s our only hope of rescue, then do it.”

  They watched while Martinez coded the message on his hand comm and sent it to the relay station this side of Contorsi Wormhole Three. In the silence that followed, Roland looked at the comm unit in his brother’s hand.

  “You need to get rid of that before Conformance arrives,” he said. “If they find that code on you, that’s evidence.”

  “I know,” Martinez said. He’d chuck the hand comm out a port and let it be burned to atoms by Corona’s radioactive tail.

  Vipsania had been staring with a fierce expre
ssion at the exotic fish, as if they were an enemy she planned to overcome. “What if we run?” she asked. “Turn the ship around and start piling on acceleration?”

  “A carrier isn’t built to stand the kind of acceleration you’d see in a warship,” Martinez said. “And even if we could accelerate at the same rate as Conformance, we can’t outrun a missile.”

  “And there’s no way to knock the missile down?”

  Martinez spread his hands. “With what?”

  Roland cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose we could build a laser?”

  “Again—with what? It would have to be a damned powerful laser, and there’d have to be some way of mounting and aiming it, and tracking the incoming missile, and even if we blow up the missile, Conformance has thirty missile launchers and plenty of reloads . . .”

  There was a dark, morose moment of silence. “Any other ideas?” Martinez said. He could stick knives in his belt, as he had at the Corona Club riot, and maneuver the carrier to try to take Conformance by boarding. That would surprise Captain An-sol, and then she’d burst out in coarse laughter and fire the missile that would end his pirate days once and for all.

  There was a chime from the navigation display, and Martinez turned to find that it had gathered enough data on Conformance’s speed and trajectory to make a prediction about its future movements. Laying the plot against that of Corona, he saw that the cruiser would intercept the carrier in three to three and a half days, depending on how close An-sol chose to fly past the star Contorsi when making a course change. Corona would fly past Contorsi a few hours earlier and intended to use a gravity assist and a burst of acceleration to put her on a direct course for escaping the system at Wormhole Three.

  Not that this plan was even viable now.

  He looked at the plot, and suddenly his despair vanished and was replaced with a growing sense of wonder. He saw how he might save Corona.

  Or get everyone killed, including his wife and son.

  He decided not to mention his revelation, at least for now.

  Martinez walked into his suite and found Terza waiting for him on a chaise. She rose to greet him, elegant in an ankle-length dress of midnight-colored jersey, as if she were about to go to a formal reception—and that, he remembered, was what she had intended, before the appearance of Conformance had smashed everyone’s plans. She’d made arrangements to play her harp during a cocktail party hosted by Ari Abacha. Now the party would be replaced by a very sober meeting of all officers to discuss their options for somehow fending off Conformance.

  He approached, embraced, and kissed her cheek. Vetiver, the heart notes of her perfume, smoothed his senses. “Where’s Chai-chai?” he asked.

  “Drawing lessons with Lieutenant Garcia.” Young Gareth had been taken out of his school at midterm, and his parents and a series of volunteers were making sure his education progressed on schedule. Martinez had done his part—at lunch he’d been pleased to hear his son use the word deracinate.

  “It’s good Chai-chai’s elsewhere, because—” His mouth turned dry. “We need to talk.”

  Her jersey dress rustled as she took him by the hand and led him to a sofa. He looked at her face, lovely, framed by the black waterfall of hair, her impeccable serenity marred only by a slight hint of concern.

  Martinez was still sorting through his ideas when Terza spoke. “You’re afraid of being arrested,” she said.

  “I’m worried about being arrested,” he said. “I’m worried about being executed. What I’m afraid of is interrogation.” He tightened his hands around hers. “No one knows whether they’ll hold up under torture,” he said. “I could name your father. I could name Lord Oda, or Vipsania, or anyone. I could name you.”

  She absorbed this, and he saw himself reflected in her dark eyes. “You haven’t done anything illegal.”

  “That’s why they’ll have to make something up, and force me to admit to it.” He shook his head. “The best solution might be for Roland and me to commit suicide before we’re boarded. That way they might leave you alone.”

  “No.” The word wasn’t spoken in shock, or surprise, but as a confirmed resolution, as if she’d thought this out well ahead of time. “No. We won’t consider that. If we have life, we have a chance.”

  “I could kill us all,” Martinez said. Again he saw in his mind the solution that had flooded his thoughts as he looked at the navigation plot. “I could kill us all in more ways than one.”

  Something like a smile briefly touched the corners of Terza’s mouth, as if he were confirming something she had already known. “You have a plan,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But it’s very dangerous. If it goes amiss, Captain An-sol could decide to fire a missile, and we’d be defenseless against it.”

  This time, when the slight smile appeared, it lasted a little more than a fraction of a second. “A missile strike is very sure, and very quick,” she said. “It’s better than suicide, and it’s better than torture.” She took his arm, rested her cheek against his shoulder, and looked up at him. Her body’s warmth prickled his cheek. “And we’ll be together.”

  Her courage took his breath away. She had been bred to rule an empire, and here she was, at the very tail end of hope, willing to roll fortune’s dice and let them fall where they may. If it was a performance, it was brilliant. If she had given him a glimpse of her true self, it was even more impressive.

  Martinez put his arm around her. “Yes,” he said. “Whatever happens, we’ll be together.”

  The officers’ meeting was held in the pilots’ ready room, near the shuttle docks, a clean white space with clean white tables and chairs, a white counter with snacks and beverages served in clean white tableware, and excellent video and holographic displays, fortunately in a wider variety of color. When Martinez entered, he saw Chandra Prasad and Sabir Mersenne in an animated conversation at one of the tables, while a glum Ari Abacha sat by himself at another table contemplating a cup of coffee. Vonderheydte stood at a holographic display of Corona’s decks, making mysterious marks at various intersections. He saw Martinez arrive and braced to attention.

  “Captain on deck!” he called. The others braced.

  “As you were,” Martinez said. He looked at Vonderheydte’s marks on the Corona schematic. “What is this?”

  “Resisting any attempts to board, Lord Captain,” Vonderheydte said. He pointed to the marks he’d been making on the display. “We can block certain corridors to channel the boarders into kill zones covered by our small arms, or booby-trapped with homemade explosives.”

  Martinez viewed the schematic with interest. Vonderheydte seemed to have made an excellent start on his project, if it weren’t for the rather large factor he’d omitted from his calculations.

  “Don’t you think an antimatter missile might trump all that?” Martinez asked.

  Vonderheydte shrugged. “We work with what we’ve got, Lord Captain.”

  “I suppose we do.” Martinez went to the café and got a cup of coffee and a pastry made fresh that morning, topped with cream and dotted with raspberries. By the time he’d finished his pastry, Garcia, Husayn, and Dalkeith had arrived, completing Corona’s roster of Fleet officers. Martinez walked to an unused display and faced the others.

  “If I may have your attention,” he said. The officers straightened to a more alert posture, all save Ari Abacha, who continued to stare at his cold, half-empty coffee cup. Martinez looked from one to the next.

  “Lieutenant Vonderheydte just said that we fight with what we’ve got,” he said. “Conformance has missiles armed with antihydrogen. We have antihydrogen as well, but it’s confined to Corona’s propulsion units and to the yachts.” He spread his hands. “We don’t lack explosive punch, we lack a means of delivery.” He stood square to his audience and tried to maintain a posture of absolute confidence as he spoke the next words. “Therefore I thought I’d call you here today to discuss turning one of the yachts into a missile, and using it to destroy C
onformance. Any ideas?”

  For a moment they just stared at him, all but Abacha, who absorbed the idea into his solitary, all-encompassing gloom without changing expression.

  “Lord Captain,” said Sabir Mersenne. He was a plump man, with yellow-brown skin and short crisp hair that came down his forehead in a widow’s peak. His attitude was normally jovial, but Martinez’s idea had sent him into a state of alarm. “Lord Captain, they’ll see it coming, and they’ll blow it up.”

  “We’ll hide it,” Martinez said. “We’re scheduled to perform a deceleration burn around the star Contorsi in three and a half days. Conformance will do its own burn around the star later that day. We’ll hide our improvised missile behind the star, then send it on an intercept course.”

  On their faces he saw brief flares of hope, followed by looks that seemed more thoughtful, more troubled, as they mentally calculated trajectories and probabilities.

  “We’ll work out the details of that later,” Martinez said. “But right now I’d like to discover if we can actually turn one of the yachts into a weapon with a proper warhead.”

  Mersenne still seemed dubious. On Illustrious he’d been the propulsion officer, and antimatter drives were his specialty. “The yachts’ power comes from the Howe DM-5 unit,” he said. “It’s a very old, very reliable design. But—”

  Chandra Prasad jumped to her feet. “If we try to breach containment, the Howe will kill us!” she said. “The unit is protected by diamond/graphene armor and operated by an autonomous program that can’t be altered without a visit to the factory. If the program detects any threat to the integrity of the containment vessel, it will respond with a controlled radiation burst. Our equipment will be destroyed, the operators will be irradiated if not killed outright, and if we use enough power to try to break containment, the resulting explosion might well destroy Corona.”

  “I know,” Martinez said. He forced a smile onto his face. “That’s why we’ve got to work out a way of getting around it.”