Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Your coup, my lady,” Sula said, “was brilliant. How you managed it without a single casualty is beyond my imagination.”

  “I was lucky in my opponent,” said Michi. “Surang had no experience with conspiracies, either running his own or detecting mine.” She frowned for a moment, then looked at Sula. “Have you any more questions?”

  “Just one.” Sula turned to the twins. “What does ‘nonii’ mean?”

  They laughed. “It’s a quaint old word from our home world of Devajjo,” Paivo said. “Our ancestors lived for centuries in this remote mountain valley called Toimi, and we were all poor but virtuous. But then one of my ancestors discovered that we were sitting on huge deposits of praseodymium, and we all became rich, and my ancestor became the first Lord Kangas.”

  “You’re rich now,” Sula said, “but are you still virtuous?”

  “Of course!” Paivo said. “We are beyond reproach!”

  “But anyway,” Ranssu said, “nonii is just one of those old words from Toimi, and it means practically anything. It can mean ‘all right,’ or ‘hello,’ or ‘we’re ready,’ or ‘let’s get going.’”

  “Or ‘I agree,’” added Paivo. “Or ‘it’s about time,’ or ‘you’re right.’”

  “Or ‘Here we go,’” offered Ranssu. “Or ‘I’ll start now.’”

  They looked at each other. “There must be more,” Ranssu said.

  “On Terra there was a word like that,” Sula said. “It was ‘okay.’ It could mean ‘yes’ or ‘all right’ or ‘very good’ or ‘fair enough’ or ‘acceptable’ or ‘authorization’ or a number of other things. But the Shaa abolished it from the language because it meant too many things and offended their sense of exactitude.”

  “I guess the Shaa never visited Toimi,” said Paivo. “We still have our word, and a few others too.”

  “Nonii,” said Sula, and then clenched her teeth as a back muscle went into spasm. “If you’ll pardon me, Lady Fleetcom,” she said. “I have to get myself to a masseuse.”

  “By all means, Lady Sula.”

  The back spasm made Sula want to list to the left as she walked, but with an effort of will she kept her spine straight as she marched from the room.

  She was not going to give Martinez the satisfaction of seeing her in pain.

  Chapter 3

  “Well,” Martinez said to Michi a few moments later, “it seems that Lady Sula hasn’t mellowed with the years.”

  “No.” Michi glanced at the hatch through which Sula had disappeared. “That was a little sudden.”

  “She’s good at vanishing.” Sula had fled from Martinez no less than three times and left him with a gaping hole in his heart each time.

  “Maybe that’s why they call her the White Ghost,” Michi said.

  “Maybe.” He raised his glass to his lips and took a sip of his Kyowan and Spacey. Tart botanical flavors shimmered over his palate.

  Martinez had steeled himself for the meeting today and had managed to sit in the same room as Sula without twitching or breaking into a sweat or otherwise embarrassing himself. He hadn’t stammered either, but then maybe that was because he’d hardly spoken at all.

  Michi still stared thoughtfully at the hatch. She raised her coffee cup to her lips, looked down at the murky beverage, which over time had separated into cool, unappetizing clouds of brown and white, then dropped the cup again into her saucer. “Do you think Lady Sula’s right about Foote and Rukmin?”

  “Would you like me to check the original calculations?” Martinez said. “They were made before I arrived here.”

  “Of course. I’ll have them sent to you.” Michi looked at Martinez, then hesitated. “I’m torn. If it looks like Foote is in actual danger, I’d like to put you in charge of the expeditionary force. But you’re so damned useful here bringing crews up to the mark, I’d also like to keep you at Harzapid, and I should really give another officer the appointment, give him some seasoning.”

  Martinez suspected Michi was offering him a choice. He wanted to leap at any chance to win a victory over the enemy, but he thought he should at least pretend to consider the question rationally.

  “The senior officer in our two orbiting squadrons is Carmody, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “A brave officer. His Splendid did well at Magaria and Naxas.”

  “It did.”

  “And Foote served under him in Splendid. They might work well together.”

  Unspoken was the idea that ginger-whiskered Carmody was brave enough, but otherwise a mediocrity raised to his current status by family connections and an exchange of favors. If he encountered the enemy, his imagination would not extend beyond a straight-up fight, and though superiority in numbers would guarantee him a victory, he would take casualties that the Terran fleet could not afford.

  “If not me,” Martinez said, “who?”

  “Someone who’s worked with the Martinez Method,” said Michi. This was the tactical system that Martinez and Sula had developed during the Naxid War, and which had been employed in three victories. One might think that this might serve as evidence that the Fleet should adopt the Method as doctrine, but the conservative Supreme Commander Tork hated innovation and had done his best to write the Martinez Method out of history, and to punish any officer who advocated its use.

  Which was lucky, since Martinez hoped to use the Method against Tork and the Home Fleet when they arrived.

  “Chandra Prasad, perhaps?” Michi offered.

  “Chandra’s a lieutenant,” Martinez said. “Carmody might resent being superseded by a junior officer who’s never commanded a ship before, let alone a pair of squadrons.”

  “Naaz Vijana? He’s commanded a frigate and did well against the Yormaks.”

  “A drunken rigger with a shotgun could do well against Yormaks,” Martinez said. “How well does he know the Method?”

  Michi sighed. “Well, then. Elissa Dalkeith. She’s commanded a ship, and she’s employed the Method in two battles.”

  Martinez sipped his Kyowan and Spacey as he looked across the room at Dalkeith, who stood chatting with Alana Haz. She had been a middle-aged lieutenant when she’d come aboard his Corona as premiere, with no patronage and no hope of promotion; and after the victory at Hone-bar she had been made lieutenant-captain only as a compliment to Martinez, whose tactics had secured the victory.

  Martinez thought her personality bland, and it had to be admitted that she lacked drive and imagination. But neither had he any reason to think she would be deficient in any task assigned to her.

  “I say nothing against her,” he said.

  Michi looked at him sidelong. “Your ‘nothing’ nevertheless seems to mean something.”

  “I think she’ll be fine,” Martinez said. “But I would give her a hard-charging premiere.”

  Michi gave a tight smile. “It’s not like we have a lot of hard-charging lieutenants to spare, either.”

  “Well.” An aide floated by, and Martinez put his empty glass on her tray. “We’ll give it more thought. And if you’ll excuse me, I have another meeting to attend.”

  “Of course.”

  Martinez braced briefly in salute and then walked to the hatch and out. His steps boomed on temporary flooring, echoed off ductwork.

  He was already thinking about how he was going to beat Rukmin.

  Sula looked from Martinez to his older brother, Roland. The two brothers, big and olive-skinned and lantern-jawed, strongly resembled each other. They sat with Sula around a small round table covered with wooden gaming pieces, but the game they were playing seemed obscure.

  “I’m not sure how to do this,” Martinez said.

  “Oh, for all’s sake,” said Roland, “you just have to use a little more force.”

  With that he leaned toward Sula and shoved her, his palm striking her sternum. The breath went out of her in surprise and she felt herself toppling backward. There was an unnerving sense of weightlessness, and then a shock as she drop
ped into chill water. She hadn’t realized there was a tank or tub directly behind her.

  The water closed over her face. She struggled but Roland’s strong hand pinned her down. Stinging water flooded up her nose.

  She clutched at Roland’s wrist. The two brothers were perfectly visible through the shallow, shivering water that covered Sula’s face. Fire kindled in Sula’s lungs.

  Martinez peered down at her with a mild expression. “So that’s how it’s done,” he said.

  “It’s not just how,” said Roland, “but when.”

  Martinez shrugged. “I guess when is now,” he said.

  Pressure built within Sula’s ribs. She pounded at Roland’s arm, but he remained immobile. Both men looked at her with interest.

  “Any time now,” Roland said.

  Sula’s heart exploded in her chest. The air burst from her lungs, and she felt the agonizing inrush of the water as she drowned . . .

  Sula sat up in bed, her heart thrashing, her lungs dragging in air. She curled into a ball on the sweat-soaked sheets and shuddered until her pulse ceased to pound and her breathing returned to something like normal.

  She dreamed of drowning, she dreamed of smothering, she dreamed of blood. The dreams had slowly faded after the war, but after the battle on Striver she’d woken nearly every night with a shriek clawing its way out of her throat. During those last weeks of Striver’s escape, with the pressure of three gravities sitting on her chest, the dreams of smothering were almost real, and almost continuous.

  And now she was dreaming of the Martinez family killing her. She wondered how much to trust in this omen.

  The bed was a tangled mess, and the sheets smelled of sweat. She smelled, too, and her lip curled at her own stink, a stink she’d had to live with, pinned to her couch by gravity, all those long days aboard Striver. She rose, showered, and dressed in the nondescript garments she’d worn when she was calling herself Tamara Bycke and hiding from the Legion. She thought again about alcohol, rejected the idea, then padded into the kitchen to make herself some tea, trying to move as quietly as possible so she wouldn’t wake any of the other members of her military household. Her dreams had woken them too often as it was.

  Sula found tea already steeped, in a serviceable stoneware pot that waited on the table. One of her irregulars, Ming Lin, sat at the table, sipping tea and looking at figures on a portable display she’d propped against a sugar bowl. She looked up. “Join me?”

  “Thank you.”

  Sula poured the tea, and its floral aroma whispered into the room. Lin—who knew Sula’s tastes—took her portable display in one hand and offered the sugar bowl with the other. Sula put three spoonsful of sugar in her tea, then took a seat.

  “Can’t sleep?” Lin asked.

  “Not a whole night, usually,” Sula said.

  “All I did on Striver those last weeks was sleep and eat,” Lin said. “Now I’m at normal gravity, what I want to do is dance. I’ll probably be up for days.”

  Though Sula hadn’t met her then, Ming Lin had been a pigtailed teenage volunteer in Sula’s secret army during the Naxid War and specialized in hurling bombs into assemblies of Naxids, a skill that had proved useful during the fighting on Striver. After the peace, Lin had gone for a graduate degree at the Zanshaa College of Economics, and when Sula had been co-opted into the Convocation and stuck on the Committee for Banking and Exchange, Sula had hired her as a part-time adviser charged mainly with translating specialist financial jargon into something resembling understandable prose. Once the empire’s economy began to tip into collapse nearly two years ago, Lin had proved expert at predicting what shambling financial institution, or tottering sector of manufacture or trade, was going to collapse next. Neither she nor Sula had been able to prevent the worst from happening, but Lin’s clear-sightedness extended to opportunities for prospering amid the wreckage, and she’d made Sula a surprising amount of money while the empire’s economy crumbled into ruin.

  There was a lot of money to be made in catastrophe, Sula had learned. And in war, too.

  The symmetry of Ming Lin’s face was disturbed by a crooked, bumpy nose, the result of a fight with one of the Legion’s Torminel fanatics. Fast-healers had repaired the damage quickly enough, but between urgency, neglect, and heavy gravities, the nose hadn’t healed straight, and Lin now looked more like a street fighter than an academic.

  Adding to the hard-bitten affect was Lin’s hair, normally worn in a tangled rose-pink updo, but during the months of transit her dark brown roots had grown, and her hair now flopped around her ears. Maybe it was time for another style.

  How did the fashionable bomb thrower style her hair these days? Sula had no idea.

  Lin looked at the figures on her screen. “I’m trying to catch up with what the local markets are doing,” she said. “It seems to me that the situation is so unusual that all everyone can do is pretend that things are normal.”

  “That’s good,” Sula said. She sipped tea, let the sugar sweetness flow over her palate. “Do we really want them using their imaginations?” she asked.

  “Maybe not,” said Lin. “But we’d better use ours. We’re in a war now, and we’ve got to figure out a way to pay for it.”

  “We can’t just coin more money?” Sula said. “The banks have to do what we say, I assume.”

  “Creating money builds inflation, and the effects of inflation are always felt unequally. You wouldn’t want to be on a fixed income in that situation.” She brushed pink hair tips from her face. “Of course, it takes a while for the effect of inflation to be seen, so if we just create money out of nothing, we should hope for a very short war.”

  Sula waved a hand. “Raise taxes?”

  “Naturally.” Lin nodded. “But that’s always unpopular, and remember also that Terrans are only a minority here. Right now the other species seem to have adopted a wait-and-see attitude as far as the war goes, but if we start asking them to pay for it, they’ll get a lot less enthusiastic.”

  Sula rubbed her forehead. The middle of the night was not the ideal time for this conversation, a horrific nightmare followed immediately by a discussion of war finance. “Borrowing?” she ventured.

  “That way the people most concerned with the war’s outcome will have a chance to support it. But of course if you sell bonds or whatever, there has to be a reasonable expectation that at the end of the day the investors will get their money’s worth, and that will only happen if we win. You’d know better than I how those odds stack up.”

  “We have to hope,” Sula said, “that Terrans will be willing to pay a lot not to be reduced to second-class citizens. Or lumps of radioactive carbon, depending on what policy Zanshaa settles on.”

  “That,” said Lin, “would be a strong motivator.”

  Sula stared at her tea for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Could we talk about something else? I’m not sure I’m at my best right now.”

  “Of course.” Lin turned off her display and refreshed her cup of tea, then settled herself into her chair. “You’re going to get a command, of course, so you’ll be off fighting. What am I going to do with myself then?”

  “I’d hope you’d continue in an advisory capacity,” Sula said.

  “But where? You won’t need me on a warship, I’d just be in the way.”

  “The planetary government, perhaps?”

  Lin rubbed her broken nose. “I imagine they have their own economists.” She laughed. “Maybe I can actually do the author tour that I was supposed to do in the first place.”

  Lin was the coauthor of The Cosgrove Legacy, a history of the financial collapse that made good use of the insider knowledge available as Sula’s consultant. The book provided the only counternarrative to the government’s claim that the decline was the result of a conspiracy by Terran criminals, politicians, and financiers, and it had been a huge success across the empire. When she’d fled to Harzapid on the Striver, she’d traveled openly, as a wildly popular author on an appear
ance tour.

  “We’d have to make sure you have guards,” Sula said.

  Lin raised her eyebrows. “You have a way of making everything so cheerful,” she said.

  Sula waved a hand. “Sorry.” She sighed. “What else shall we talk about?”

  Lin laughed. “Well,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to ask. What is Gareth Martinez really like?”

  Sula managed to drowse for a while on the sofa before she was awakened by Constable First Class Gavin Macnamara, one of her servants. Tall, with a halo of curly brown hair, he was beginning his own day and was surprised to find her asleep on the couch. He apologized and backed out of the room, but she waved him back in and told him he might as well make breakfast.

  So she had breakfast with her little household, Macnamara, Ming Lin, and Engineer First Class Shawna Spence, who during the Naxid War had manufactured the bombs that Ming Lin threw at the enemy. They were the people Sula trusted the most—perhaps the only people Sula trusted. Macnamara and Spence had earned that trust in one deadly confrontation after another, and Ming Lin had earned Sula’s respect in the fight on Striver as well as for her war record and her financial expertise.

  Macnamara and Spence were her servants, and Ming Lin an employee, but Sula would rather share a table with them than anyone else, and Fleet protocol could go bite itself. She’d been to enough formal dinners anyway, particularly since she’d been co-opted into the Convocation.

  Sula had sweetened tea, sweet pastry loaded with sweet jam, and soft cheese covered with nuts and dripping with sticky syrup; and gradually she felt her better self emerge from the wreckage her twice-interrupted sleep had left behind. Her growing contentment was fractured when the door announced a caller, and Macnamara, looking at an image from the door cam on his hand comm, announced that Mr. Braga was waiting outside.

  “Oh hell,” Sula said. “Let him in. And make some more tea.”

  She took her tea to the front room to greet Hector Braga, whom she had known long ago as Lamey. He came into the room with his distinctive gliding gait, his thickening body clothed in a braided suit of shimmering green moiré silk, bright as a peacock, with a gold-threaded cravat and a handkerchief blossoming from his breast pocket like a frozen ice cream sculpture.