“One minute.”
He could feel eddies in his inner ear telling him that Corona was yawing slightly, more precisely aligning the engine for the burn.
“Fifty-one seconds.” Half a Shaa minute.
Martinez enabled the automatic controls and kept his eyes on the plot.
“Nineteen seconds.”
At zero the engines increased their burn, and Martinez felt gravities increase. He took strong, deliberate breaths. Darkness pulsed at the edges of his vision. Corona, the ship, now traversed the actual corona of the sun, drawing a burning line through the outer envelope of the star. And then, as the sun passed between Corona and Conformance, he saw the signal that Laredo was away, its track separating from Corona until it reached a safe distance and its own powerful engine could ignite. Martinez’s eyes shifted to the virtual cockpit as he watched displays shift to the telemetry coming in from Laredo.
The pressure on his chest gradually eased as Corona flashed past Contorsi. Laredo was decelerating at a furious rate, the gees building—six, nine, fifteen. He knew that the jury-rigged system in the engine compartment had been braced against such accelerations, but he felt worry gnaw at him. Something could break loose, some wiring come undone . . . twenty, twenty-two. Always keeping the star between Conformance and the yacht.
Nothing went wrong, and the yacht continued along its programmed course. Martinez felt his anxiety decrease by what seemed a microscopic amount. There were still so many places where it could go wrong.
In a half circle around Laredo’s antimatter container was the jury-rigged array of microwave emitters, all ready to be powered by another Howe container scavenged from Captain Kelly’s racing yacht. If any of the improvised gear broke under the stress of acceleration, the mission would fail.
If Laredo’s guidance failed, or contained an error, the mission would fail with it.
If Conformance chose an unconventional path around the sun, and Laredo failed to intercept, the mission would fail.
If the improvised proximity fuse didn’t perform as expected, the mission would fail.
When the proximity alert gave the signal, the DM-5 scavenged from Kelly’s yacht would fire a great burst of energy through the microwave array. If the DM-5 failed to trigger, or if it had been hooked improperly into the system, or if it flooded the microwave array with too much energy and blew it apart, the mission would fail.
The microwave array aimed at Laredo’s DM-5 might not work, or it might be misaligned. In which case the mission would fail.
And last, if the microwave burst was insufficient to destabilize the antihydrogen chips in the DM-5, then the DM-5 would assume it was under attack and release enough radiation to wreck Laredo. There would be no enormous release of energy, and the mission would fail.
But if everything went right, a strong overload current would destabilize the chips, and the antihydrogen flakes would hit the silicon wall and all their energy would be released at once. Which would be enough to destabilize the antimatter in Kelly’s power unit, and the two would go off together.
And then, if Conformance was within range of the blast, it would be destroyed, and the mission would succeed.
It would be the better part of an hour before Conformance began its own burn, and during that time Martinez stayed in the simulator while anxiety gnawed at his insides, and he played every failure mode over and over again in his mind. He could smell the sweat that was soaking his armpits and sousing his back.
He looked at the pistol he’d brought into the simulator with him. If the improvised missile failed, he thought he might record a few last messages to his family, and then kill himself before Conformance caught up with them.
Assuming, of course, he could actually pull the trigger. He could use radiation weapons to destroy ships and their crews between the stars, but he didn’t know whether he had the nerve to put the gun to his head.
He watched as Conformance vanished behind Contorsi and reappeared a few seconds later, its engine pointed directly at Corona and burning brilliant white. He had to keep reminding himself that what he was watching had happened nearly four minutes ago, and that whatever was going to happen had already happened.
Laredo was no longer decelerating, but accelerating along its intercepting course. And then there was another white flare, and Martinez felt his heart stop.
The confirmation was in the radiation counter, a double spike—the two Howe units on Laredo going up simultaneously, and then a tiny fraction of a second later all the fuel on Conformance detonating, creating a nova flare that for a brief instant burned brighter than the star, a flare that marked the death of a ship and its nearly three hundred crew.
Martinez felt his heart lurch into motion. He let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, and took in air.
“Well,” he said aloud. “Now we really are the Terran criminals.”
Chapter 22
Sula stared at the monitor in Striver’s Command as Conformance burned bright as a star, and then transformed into a bubble of hot expanding plasma.
How in hell . . . ? Sula wondered. Corona was a civilian ship. It was defenseless.
Yet somehow Martinez seemed to have developed the ability to explode enemy warships by remote control.
A useful trick, she decided.
“Pitch over the ship,” Sula ordered. “We’re going to start our deceleration. Maintain our course for the wormhole, and sound the warning for engine start.”
As the alert rang through the ship, Sula considered sending Martinez a message of congratulations, then decided against it.
It would only make him more smug.
Twenty-two days later Corona transited into the Harzapid system, and Martinez sent a coded message to Michi Chen. Seventeen hours later, he received a reply.
Michi’s video showed her tired and aged, her bangs gray now, her face jaundiced and drawn. Her uniform tunic was buttoned up to her throat, as if she were warding off infection.
“You’re very welcome to the Fourth Fleet, Captain Martinez,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve arrived, because we have a lot to talk about.”
After twenty-nine more days of brutal deceleration, Striver finally docked at Harzapid’s ring. Most of the ships of the Fourth Fleet were moored around her, though two Terran squadrons were already in orbit around the system’s star, preparing to defend the system against attackers.
Sula had spent days in consultation with Michi Chen since entering the Harzapid system, and most of her group of officers and enlisted had already received their new assignments. Michi had taken the non-Terran vessels by surprise, captured and disarmed the officers and crew, and was now converting the ships to Terran use as quickly as she could.
In the last few hours before docking, Striver had reduced acceleration, and Sula had taken a long, lingering shower and put on clean clothes. After the heavy gees, her body was a mass of cramp and pain, and it pitched a little to the right as she walked.
She would schedule a massage as soon as she could and hope it could relieve some of her aches.
But first there were formalities. No sooner had Striver docked than Fleet crew came aboard to take possession and relieve Sula of her responsibilities. The two captive Legion recruits were marched away to detention on the station. Sula picked up her Sidney Mark One and led her party down to the common room, and out the passenger access hatch.
Only Alana Haz was in uniform, because she was the only passenger traveling as a Fleet officer. The rest wore civilian gear and were accompanied by Lady Koridun, who startled in a glittering Chesko gown accessorized with Lord Arrun Safista’s gun belt and sidearm. Free of heavy gravities, Koridun was practically skipping as she danced through the hatch, and her blue eyes glowed with delight as she looked forward to the sequel to her adventure.
Sula was aware of the sensational picture they made, the fighters carrying their rifles, their Sidneys, their shotguns and pistols. Victors in a merciless, close-quarters battle with a fanatical
enemy. Hard-fighting veterans of a war that had barely started.
Sula stiffened as she saw the reception party: Michi Chen, Gareth and Roland and Vipsania Martinez, Nikki Severin in his blue uniform, and assorted Martinez clients and underlings. Lord Durward Li’s stray wife, laughing and dressed in canary yellow and with her arm linked with that of a small fair-haired officer.
And Lamey. Lamey. She would have been surprised, if she weren’t so tired.
At least Terza Chen hadn’t turned up with the Martinez brats.
The group waiting at the end of the gangway were not just a welcoming committee, they were a political faction. They had come to draw Sula to their rebellion, to the embrace of their glittering, rising family, to make use of her skills and talents to smash their enemies and clear a path for them to rise.
Whatever might happen to Sula in the coming conflict, she knew Gareth Martinez would somehow end up looking good.
Well. Maybe she could find a way to carve out a faction of her own, along with a share of the glory.
Sula straightened as she approached the Martinez group, and she thought of a derivoo singer who broadcast defiance while staring into the hungry jaws of inexorable fate. Of choices made, choices spurned, consequences endured. Of the triumph of her plan for taking Striver, and of waking up night after night with her senses flooded by the smell of blood and a shriek bottled in her throat.
She walked up to Michi Chen and braced at the salute, her chin high.
“Lady Fleetcom,” she said. “Here I am.”
A Note on the Calendar
The Shaa “year” is, so far as anyone knows, an arbitrary period of time unconnected with the orbit of any planet, or the measurement of anything in the natural world. It consists of 0.84 Earth years, or 306.6 Earth days. Caroline Sula, twenty-three in Shaa measure, is twenty by the reckoning of old Earth.
Planets within the empire of the Shaa have their own local calendar by which they chart the local year and seasons. But all official business is conducted in reference to the imperial calendar rather than the local.
The Shaa year is divided into equally arbitrary units that demonstrate the Shaa love for prime numbers. The Shaa year is divided into eleven months of 27.9 Earth days each, and each month is divided into 23 Shaa days, each 1.21 Earth days. The Shaa day is divided into 29 hours, each of 59.98 Earth minutes; and the hours are divided into 53 minutes, each 67.9 Earth seconds long. A Shaa minute consists of 101 seconds, each of 0.67 Earth seconds.
There is no Shaa equivalent of the “week,” though many planets have such a period in their own local calendars.
Measurements of time in this work, unless otherwise noted, are exclusively in Shaa measure. Readers may take comfort in the fact that, though the Shaa day is a little longer than Earth’s twenty-four-hour day, the hours and minutes are roughly equivalent.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Steve Howe for details of antimatter containment, Oz Drummond for economics lessons, and the 2017 edition of the Rio Hondo Workshop for their accustomed intelligence and advice.
About the Author
WALTER JON WILLIAMS has been nominated repeatedly for every major science fiction award. He lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife.
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Also by Walter Jon Williams
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The Accidental War
The First Books of the Praxis: Dread Empire’s Fall
The Praxis
The Sundering
Conventions of War
Investments
Impersonations
Novels
Hardwired
Knight Moves
Voice of the Whirlwind
Days of Atonement
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Metropolitan
City on Fire
Ambassador of Progress
Angel Station
The Rift
Implied Spaces
Quillifer
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Quillifer the Knight (forthcoming)
Divertimenti
The Crown Jewels
House of Shards
Rock of Ages
Dagmar Shaw Thrillers
This Is Not a Game
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The Fourth Wall
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To Glory Arise
Brig of War
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the accidental war. Copyright © 2018 by Walter Jon Williams. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Digital Edition September 2018 ISBN 978-0-06-246703-4
Print ISBN 978-0-06-246702-7
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