Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez’s staff were deployed around the table, each with a cup of coffee or tea and a slice of Mangahas’s coconut sponge cake. Prince Huang, the supposed genius that Michi had assigned as his tactical officer, was small, with delicate, open features below a shock of black hair. Despite his being a graduate of the Cheng Ho Academy and his sublieutenant’s shoulder boards, he looked no older than fourteen. Martinez supposed that as he was a Peer, he would be styled “Lord Prince,” but that seemed too absurd.

  Lalita Banerjee looked as if she could be Prince Huang’s grandmother. Gray-haired, round-faced, and corpulent, she had served in the Fleet for thirty years, rising to warrant officer first class, as high as a commoner could expect, before retiring at the end of the Naxid War without having seen a shot fired in anger. She had returned to the colors soon after Michi had seized the Fourth Fleet, and Martinez promoting her to lieutenant had come as a surprise. Her officer’s tunic had been stitched together by machine just that morning and was uncomfortable and stiff. Her shoulder boards were bright, and she had looked surprised when Martinez had first addressed her as “my lady.” All officers were entitled to the compliment, whether they were Peers or not.

  Banerjee was only a few years younger than Alikhan, but Martinez had less concern for her suffering under high gees. Studies showed that overweight women handled acceleration better than anyone, even the fittest of young men.

  Sublieutenant Lord Aitor Santana was from Martinez’s home world of Laredo, a burly man with full, dark brows and a thick horseshoe mustache that dropped from the corners of his mouth straight to the jawline. He looked formidable enough to stand a chance against Squadron Leader Lokan in a wrestling match.

  Santana was just the age to have been inspired to join the Fleet by Martinez’s success in the Naxid War, which of course had been publicized more thoroughly on Laredo than elsewhere; but Santana had even less patronage in the service than Martinez and would probably never rise past lieutenant unless he found someone to look after him. Martinez was willing to be that person, if Santana proved good at his job.

  Santana watched the others carefully and spoke little, as if he were trying to work out how best to fit himself into this company. Just promoted to officer’s rank, he had been finishing a communication course on Harzapid when the war suddenly made his skills extremely valuable.

  “My lord, my lady,” Martinez said, looking at Santana and Banerjee. “I’m going to need you to practice signals with each other. The success of any engagement depends on prompt and understandable communication, and you’re going to have to communicate not with a single squadron, but with two, perhaps three.” He cleared his throat. “I’m going to send you recordings of actual Command room orders given during combat in the last war. Any responses by the signalers have been stripped out of the recordings, so I’ll want you to respond to those orders as if they were real. We’ll see how well and clearly you can transmit orders under extreme time pressure.” He picked up his cup of coffee. “Any questions?”

  “No, my lord.” Banerjee’s soft voice indicated how intimidated she was by this company.

  Santana looked somewhat doubtful, then spoke. “I haven’t trained this way, Lord Squadcom,” he said. “So I feel I should warn you that I’m not going to be very good at first.”

  That was honesty, at least. “We’ll be accelerating for weeks before there’s an engagement,” Martinez said. “If there actually is an engagement, I mean. I’d also like you to practice while the ship’s at high acceleration, because it’s unlikely we’re going to fight battles at a nice, steady one gravity.”

  “Yes, Lord Squadcom.”

  Martinez took a piece of coconut sponge cake, then turned to Prince Huang. “I’ve had Squadron Commander Carmody send me the records of his last three exercises. I haven’t had a chance to look at the records, so I’d appreciate your analysis.”

  “Yes, Lord Squadcom, of course.” Huang took a deliberate taste of his cake, then added, “If you think that’s the best use of my time.”

  Martinez paused in surprise. “You have a suggestion, Lord Lieutenant?”

  Huang’s answer was prompt. “I think I would be best employed in acquainting officers of a new tactical system based on employing an alternative fractal dimension. If you’d allow me to use one of the displays . . .”

  Without waiting for permission Huang shifted a presentation from his sleeve display to a larger screen, flanked by a pair of snarling Torminel wrestlers, on one of the walls. Martinez recognized the Structured Mathematics Display, and his eyes were dazzled by a series of complicated mathematical formulae as they scrolled across the screen.

  Huang darted a cursor around the display. “You see, my lord—” he began, and was then interrupted by the alarm for zero gravity.

  “Ten minutes to launch,” came the announcement. “All crew to prepare for null gravity followed by acceleration.”

  Martinez rose from his chair. “We don’t have time for a presentation now, Lord Lieutenant, and I very much doubt that we’ll have a chance to drill our ships in a new tactical system by the time we meet the enemy.”

  “It won’t take that long to learn,” Huang said. “It’s all in the formula, all you have to do is follow it.”

  “You can make a presentation to me later,” Martinez said. “In the meantime, I’d be obliged if you’d spend the next day or so analyzing Carmody’s exercises.”

  Huang seemed willing enough. “Certainly, Lord Squadcom.”

  Martinez addressed the whole group. “You can join me in the flag officer’s station or spend the acceleration in your beds. Entirely up to you. Dismissed.”

  The others rose from their chairs, braced in salute, and left the study. Alikhan came in to clear the table.

  “Will you be requiring your vac suit, my lord?” Alikhan said.

  “I hope not.” Martinez took a single forkful of the sponge cake, tasted coconut and citrus, and handed the plate and the fork to Alikhan.

  “I’ll just use sanitary fatigues,” Martinez decided. Acceleration was hard on the bladder. “I won’t be needing your assistance.”

  “Very well, Lord Squadcom.”

  Martinez changed into a jumpsuit, and with his groin gently cupped by miraculous hydrostatic technology, he left his sleeping cabin and crossed the hall to the flag officer station. Three decks forward of Command, where Dalkeith and her officers controlled the ship, Martinez’s oval-shaped station held just five workstations, of which only four would be occupied. From here Martinez would maneuver the squadrons Michi had placed under his authority—or would, once Los Angeles rendezvoused with Carmody’s force. At least the room had no mosaics of wrestlers—instead there were only bare walls of dark gray broken by large video displays. Martinez stepped through the rings on the acceleration couch, sat in his place, and let the couch swing on its gimbals once it took his weight. He reached over his head, drew down the displays, and locked them in place. As he switched the screens on, Banerjee and Santana entered and took their places.

  A one-minute alarm rang through the ship. Martinez turned his displays to views of the ship’s exterior—at the moment there was little to see but the long gleaming runway of Harzapid’s ring—from this perspective it looked completely flat—with warships moored nose-in on either side. The planet itself was hidden behind the ring, though its glow was visible on the north and south edges of the vast station.

  Another alarm clattered, and suddenly Los Angeles was free of the ring and floating into space—planetary rings were set just at escape velocity, so that anything released from the ring would drift into the void instead of falling toward the world below. Martinez felt a brief stab of vertigo, and then realized he was floating—he’d forgot to strap himself in. As he busied himself with his straps, he realized that he hadn’t been on a warship in nearly ten years, and that it wasn’t only the cadets and retirees who were going to need to polish their skills.

  Through the displays he saw Harzapid’s ring recede, and
the relative positions of the ships, installations, and the vast spreading solar collectors move as the ring rotated beneath Los Angeles. Then his inner ear eddied again as the ship altered its heading, and the rings on his acceleration couch sang as his seat swung.

  As Bombardment of Los Angeles drifted farther from the ring, Martinez could finally see Harzapid’s poles emerge from behind the ring, which gave him his first glimpse of the planet that played involuntary host to the Fourth Fleet. Harzapid was a glory of brilliant color, with blue-green oceans, white clouds, and green continents snaking with silver rivers. A whole bright, brilliant world, inhabited by billions of people, that Martinez had never visited despite his time in the system.

  Corona had docked nearly a month ago, but he’d spent all his time on the ring, almost all of it in the Fleet dockyard, in a frenzy of work.

  Well, the frenzy wasn’t going to stop any time soon.

  But still he felt a powerful longing to feel a world under his feet, to breathe air that hadn’t been recycled, to look up at clouds drifting overhead. His three-month journey on Corona had been luxurious, but he’d still been trapped on a small ship with the same people every day. Harzapid’s ring was a magnificent structure, but it was still a mass of corridors and artificial light and functional design, Corona made gigantic. The Fleet dockyard was a vast armory, bustling and purposeful, that was nothing more than a giant machine enclosing him—it molded him to its purpose, not the other way around.

  A sense-memory rose in him, the scent of his own garden on Zanshaa, the lu-doi blossoms in their sweetness.

  A pair of brief hisses told him that Banerjee and Santana were using their med injectors, and again he felt chagrin that he’d forgotten an important piece of procedure. He reached for the pistol-shaped injector in the pocket on the side of his couch, drew it out, adjusted the dose, placed it to his neck, and injected himself with stew of chemicals that would keep his brain alert, his heart steady, and his blood vessels supple in the face of high gravities.

  He returned the injector to its pocket just as the warning for accelerations blared out. He settled into his couch, and then felt a kick to his spine as the main engines fired. His couch swung to its deadpoint.

  The screens showed Harzapid falling away as Los Angeles accelerated toward Wormhole One, but by then Martinez was no longer paying attention.

  He was thinking of ways to beat the enemy.

  Sula walked into the meeting room at the Empyrean Hotel and only then realized how she’d been had. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder who exactly was on this committee onto which Lamey had dragged her. Roland Martinez she had expected, and even though she didn’t particularly like him, they’d worked together well enough in the Convocation—and she’d assumed Lamey and Lord Mehrang would be present, along with another Martinez sibling, Vipsania, who managed Imperial Broadcasting and its many outlets, and who she knew had arrived on Corona with the others. She assumed as well there might be local officials.

  But for some reason she hadn’t expected to find Terza Chen sitting perfectly composed behind the polished table, her brown uniform tunic immaculate, her black hair bound in a complicated knot behind her neck. The woman who had snatched Gareth Martinez from under Sula’s nose, and then got pregnant half a second into their marriage so as to have a child to hold over her husband . . .

  At the sight of Terza, Sula’s breath seemed to evaporate from her lungs, and she took a little gasp that she hoped no one heard. But she kept moving into the room without, she thought, a hitch in her step, until she stood next to Roland Martinez.

  The uniforms she’d ordered had arrived, and today she, like Roland, wore a wine-red convocate’s jacket. Unlike Roland’s, her jacket was cut like a Fleet uniform tunic, and she wore her Fleet shoulder boards and medals. She had more respect for some of her colleagues in the Fleet than she did for all the Convocation put together—now more so than ever, since the Convocation had fallen in line behind Lady Tu-hon’s coup to replace the Lord Senior with Lady Gruum, a more pliable figure who seemed willing to extend her grudge against the Martinez family to the entire Terran species.

  If you’d just lost your money in a financial crisis, it made a certain kind of sense simply to kill a lot of people and take their cash. That seemed to be the new government’s recovery plan.

  “Lord Roland,” Sula said. “May I present my aide, Ming Lin?”

  “Aide,” she thought, seemed a more impressive title than “employee.”

  “Very pleased to know you, Miss Lin,” Roland said. “I read your book with great interest.”

  He was mentioned in the book, of course, as one of those who had seen the crash coming and managed to profit from it, thus becoming a criminal in the eyes of Lady Tu-hon and her faction. Roland resembled his younger brother with the same broad shoulders, long arms, big hands, and olive complexion. Like his brother, he spoke with the provincial Laredo accent that marked him, to High City ears, as an incurable rustic. Still, he had wedged his way into the Convocation and was the head of an influential faction—or had been, until he thought it wise to flee.

  “Miss Lin has some interesting ideas about raising money,” Sula said. “I thought she’d be a valuable resource.”

  “I’m sure she will be,” Roland said.

  Lin was looking less like a pirate today, having donned an indigo-blue silk suit of the sort she had only recently been able to afford, with peaked lapels, padded shoulders, and a double row of gold buttons. A coiffeuse had made the most out of her pink-tipped hair, and gelled it into something resembling her old updo, with the pink tips dancing over her collar. She looked very much like a well-dressed executive prepared to take charge of an unruly meeting.

  The crooked nose, however, lent her a slightly sinister cast, as if she were a suspect in a Dr. An-ku mystery.

  “I am happy to listen to Ming Lin on the subject of raising money,” Roland said, smiling, “but I’m not sure if that’s on the agenda for today.”

  “Perhaps we should speak to whoever’s in charge of the agenda,” said Sula.

  Roland surrendered gracefully. “I believe you must be the one in charge, then. We’re really very informal here.”

  Roland introduced the other members of her committee. Lamey, still in his brilliant green suit. Lord Mehrang, an enormously tall, enormously obese, self-satisfied man with a pointed chin-beard and drooping mustache. Roland’s sister Vipsania, who had adopted her husband’s surname of Yoshitoshi, sat in an elegant brocaded gown with a high collar. Sula was moderately surprised that she hadn’t brought a camera crew with her.

  “And of course Lady Terza Chen,” Roland said, for Ming Lin’s benefit. He turned to Sula. “I assume you’ve met?”

  “Before the last war,” Sula said. She turned to Terza and did her best not to clench her teeth. “We met at a reception in the Li Palace, when we were all in mourning for the last Great Master.” She took a breath and quieted the flutter she felt building in her voice. “You played your harp beautifully.”

  Terza looked up at Sula, her face tranquil, surprising warmth in her brown eyes. “You are very kind to remember,” she said.

  Roland turned from Terza to introduce others. There were, as Sula had anticipated, some local officials; and the lord governor of Harzapid was present through a video link from the planet’s surface. His name was Binh, and he had been the secretary of public lands until—as a senior Terran in the planet’s administration—Michi Chen had repurposed him as lord governor, with the Fourth Fleet’s antimatter missiles to buttress his authority.

  Roland suggested they all sit. The meeting room was unlike the half-finished room on Perfection of the Praxis: it had probably been unchanged for hundreds of years, with indirect lighting, dark wood paneling accented with yellow chesz-wood, a massive arculé wood table, and over all the scent of lemon polish. Celadon vases held sprays of lu-doi blossoms. Sula chose a seat for herself where she wouldn’t have to look at Terza every second.

  “Our latest
member, Lady Sula,” Roland said, “wishes to raise a point, so I’ve agreed to let her have the floor.”

  “More than one point, I’m afraid,” Sula said. “Beginning with the question of what we call ourselves.”

  “Ourselves?” Lord Mehrang asked. “You mean this committee, or—?”

  “Our . . . movement,” Sula said. “Our cause. Our revolution.”

  Roland winced. “We can’t call it a revolution,” he said.

  “That would suggest we stand in opposition to the perfection of the Praxis,” said Vipsania.

  “It’s the worst word in our political vocabulary,” Roland said.

  “We’re going to hear a lot of bad words thrown at us,” Sula said. “Rebel. Bandit. Pirate. When they get tired of those, they can always go back to Terran criminal. My question is: What words can we throw back at them?”

  “We’ve always said that the Gruum government is illegitimate,” Vipsania said. “We’ve said that all we want to do is return to the government of Lord Saïd, and to a policy of equality between the species.”

  “Except, of course, for the Naxids and the Yormaks,” Sula said.

  “Well.” Vipsania looked uncomfortable for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Can we call ourselves the Saïdists?” wondered Lord Mehrang.

  “I think we might try to find something a little more universal than that,” Vipsania said. “I’m not sure whether we want to tie our movement to one particular politician.” Her voice was as polished as the arculé table—unlike her brothers, she had managed to drop her Laredo accent in favor of the fashionable accents of the High City.

  “We were Loyalists in the last war,” said Mehrang.

  “So were our enemies,” said Sula. “And they’re already using that word for themselves.”

  “The Purifiers,” said Lord Mehrang. He offered a grim smile. “The government could do with a little purification.”

  “A little too frightening, perhaps,” Roland said. “If I had no other stake in the matter, I know how I’d choose between a Loyalist and a Purifier.”