Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Thank you.” Sula hung the rifle over her shoulder on its strap. She stepped on something soft and looked down to discover that she had just put her foot on a flayed Daimong arm, presumably that of the bomber. Her stomach turned over, and she looked away.

  Through the shock of revelation Haz’s words were perceived dimly. “I had to kick your door down to get your gun. But other than the broken door, I think your suite suffered no damage.”

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  They walked to the sturdy, scarred doors of the hostel, which had survived surprisingly well. Spence and Macnamara followed, along with the two cadets, who apparently could think of nothing more useful to do.

  “Lady Sula! Wait!”

  Sula turned to see Captain Naaz Vijana hurrying toward them. He wore a helmet and body armor and carried a rifle over one arm.

  “You were part of the counterattack?” she asked. Vijana was a warship commander and had never served in the constabulary so far as Sula knew.

  “I sort of led it,” Vijana said. “I have some experience, after all.”

  He had fought in the capture of the Striver, and before that had annihilated the Yormak uprising along with most of the Yormaks. Sula supposed he was as experienced at this kind of warfare as anyone who hadn’t served in the Secret Army.

  “Thank you for rescuing us, then,” Sula said.

  “You were in the hostel?”

  Sula gestured toward Rahul’s Cafe. “I was across the road,” she said. “Setting up a cross fire.”

  Vijana was impressed. “Good work, my lady,” he said. “I wondered how so many bodies ended up on that side of the road.”

  “Macnamara is a very good shot,” Sula said.

  Vijana viewed the constable. “I know. I’ve seen him at work.” He glanced over the scene, the bright overhead light outlining his sharp features. “We’ve got three wounded prisoners,” he said with satisfaction. “Once they’ve been stitched back together, we’ll find out who they are and who’s behind it.” He snarled. “I’ll interrogate them myself, if I can stand the stink.”

  “There are professionals for that.”

  “The professionals?” Vijana grinned. “How good can they be, if they didn’t stop us from taking the Fourth Fleet?”

  Sula didn’t have an answer for that. Vijana glanced over his shoulder at the ambulances.

  “One of the Kangas twins was wounded,” he said. “Now we won’t have so much trouble telling him apart from his brother.”

  “Does his brother know?”

  “They were together in the ambulance.”

  Sula’s nerves leaped at a pair of shots that echoed down the road, and the constables all instantly went on guard, their weapons trained in the direction of the sound. Vijana busied himself with his communications systems, then turned to Sula with a look of apology.

  “Shooting at phantoms, probably,” he said. “But I’d better go calm them down.”

  “See you at the meeting tomorrow,” Sula said.

  Vijana was surprised. “Meeting?”

  “There’s bound to be one.”

  He laughed. “True.” He waved good-bye and trotted off.

  “You know,” said Alana Haz, “I think Vijana enjoys this sort of thing too much.”

  “Some people do.” Sula knew that she’d have nightmares about this for weeks, her dreaming senses choked with the acrid reek, the hard edges of rubble gleaming in the blazing light, the flayed arm of the bomber.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “And then get started on my report, because someone’s going to ask me for one. Then I’ll be asked for recommendations, all of which will be ignored.”

  Haz looked at her. “You seem to have a very good grasp of Fleet procedure,” she said.

  “I wish it didn’t have such a grasp on me,” Sula said, and she reached for the scarred hostel door.

  Chapter 6

  “Some may say that I am too young to accept this appointment as lady governor of Harzapid.” The blue-eyed Torminel, visible on Severin’s sleeve display, glanced out over an audience that was out of the camera’s frame. “But I am not too young,” she said, “to fight for the Restoration!”

  She paused while applause washed over her. She was dressed in a governor’s formal purple robes, brilliant with gold-and-scarlet brocade that glittered in video lights. Behind her stood a row of solemn officials, representing a cross section of all the species beneath the Praxis. Severin wondered how many of them actually wanted to be there.

  “Some claim we are rebels!” the new governor said. “We disdain and reject the term!”

  More applause. Captain Shushanik Severin glanced from the sleeve display to the entry port twenty paces away.

  In most ring stations the Exploration Service used the Fleet dockyards for their ships and paid the Fleet for their support, but Harzapid was large enough for the Exploration Service to have a dockyard of its own. Station crew bustled around one of the entry ports, readying it for traffic. One gray-haired woman peered at a screen while manipulating a joystick, guiding the docking tube to Explorer’s main personnel hatch. A pair of armed guards stood waiting to check the passes of anyone boarding the ship. The walls were covered with artwork featuring the Exploration Service surveying new worlds, or crewing the wormhole relay stations that knit the empire’s communication network.

  “The Restoration seeks to return the empire to the Peace of the Praxis!” said the new lady governor. “We wish to reinstate our proper government, and to drive out those who have usurped power in Zanshaa!”

  More applause rang from Severin’s sleeve display. He adjusted the collar of his dark blue dress Exploration Service uniform, then stretched in his seat. He waited in an electric car painted in the viridian green of the Fleet, and which he’d borrowed from the other service. As he relaxed from his stretch, he absently rubbed his wrists and hands and popped every finger joint.

  When he had taken up puppeteering, the unnatural hand positions produced aching joints and muscles. Since his Expedition had blown up the cruiser Beacon at Rol-mar several months ago, Severin had been continually occupied in keeping his wounded ship alive on the journey to Harzapid—and once he’d arrived, in putting his ship through a major refit in the briefest time imaginable. As the refit had approached its conclusion, he’d found himself thinking of his puppets again and longing to work out some of the stories that had come to him before the fight with Beacon. So he’d unpacked the trunks in which he’d stored his puppets and begun to develop a new serial, with predictable effects on his tendons.

  His working out of plot and dialogue, refreshingly free of any pressures from the real world, had been a welcome, relaxing change from the frenzy of work.

  At least until he’d received a message from the inbound ship Explorer, and the ship’s captain—Lihua, Lady Starkey—had told him that she needed an urgent conference on her ship as soon as she docked and would not explain why.

  “I don’t want a whiff of this to get out,” she said. “I daren’t even send it in code. I’m going to request that you come on board Explorer and receive a briefing—” She offered a nervous smile. “After which, as the senior officer, you can decide what to do with the information.”

  Explorer had been on a seven-month voyage exploring what was coming to be known as the Terran Reach. Terra had long lived on the fringe of the empire, the home world of the human race but a backwater planet. It had only a single wormhole gate connecting it to civilization, and so it was literally a dead end in the wormhole network. Over the centuries billions of its natives had emigrated to more prosperous parts of the empire, and Terra itself had languished in a kind of shabby neglect. But six years before, a new wormhole gate had been discovered in a distant corner of the system, and that gate was discovered to lead to two more systems that contained a total of three habitable planets, all now in the early stages of survey and development. The new discoveries could only be reached through Terra’s system, which
had now turned from a dead end into a gateway.

  Explorer had gone beyond the newly discovered worlds and was literally returning from the unknown.

  “Lady Starkey,” Severin said, “this concerns something you found in one of the new systems?”

  “I don’t want to say, my lord,” Lady Starkey said. “Please come aboard as soon as you can. I can only say that this is very . . . disturbing. I’m not allowing any of my crew off the ship until we can come to some kind of resolution about—well, you’ll find out in the briefing.”

  “Does this have any bearing on the war?” Severin asked.

  Starkey looked uncertain. “I don’t think so. Nothing direct, anyway. Not unless there are weapons and warships that we don’t know about.”

  Well, that was ominous enough. So now, rubbing his aching forearms, Severin sat in his car, listened to the inauguration of Lady Governor Koridun, and waited for the crew around the entry port to signal that Explorer and its docking tube had finally mated.

  Severin watched as the tube was pressurized and the crew ran tests to make certain that the seals were holding. The tests were successful, and floodlights came on to illuminate the port. The name Explorer appeared on a display above the door. Severin turned off his sleeve display, cutting off Lady Koridun in the midst of a tirade on the perfidy of the enemy, and then eased himself out of the car and made his way to the gate.

  As the planetary ring spun to generate gravity, Explorer was actually docked nose-in below Severin’s feet. The entry port led to a very large elevator, inset with mirrors and polished brass ornament, capable of transporting forty crew at a time. This descended to the level of the docking tube, which itself was quite plain.

  An entry party saluted Severin as he stepped off the docking tube into the ship. The air on the cruiser had a stale odor, which told Severin that Explorer was not yet receiving its air from the dockyard.

  Lihua, Lady Starkey was the result of a successful marital merger between the Hua and Starkey clans, both of which had long histories of providing officers to the Exploration Service. When her mother had died in the Naxid War, she had inherited the Starkey title when she was still in her teens. A lifelong commitment to the Service was a part of her heritage, but the timing was less than ideal: the war left Lady Starkey junior to all those officers who had advanced during the conflict, including Severin. Despite generations of Service tradition in both branches of her family tree, she had only received this, her first command, ten months ago, and then only because the Exploration Service was undergoing a major expansion as the empire was opening new worlds to settlement.

  Lady Starkey was a small, lithe woman with an expressive face and dark hair worn past her shoulders. After Severin told her and her party to stand at ease, she introduced her officers and led Severin to her dining room, where the air carried the scent of spiced coffee.

  “Please be seated, my lord,” she said. “We’ve arranged a presentation for you.”

  Severin was not a Peer, but all officers were called “my lord” out of courtesy, since just about all of them were. Severin’s wartime field commission made him about as exotic an officer as the Service possessed, a commoner with what had by now become high seniority.

  “Thank you, Lady Starkey,” he said. “May I have some of that coffee? The scent is tempting.”

  “Of course.”

  Stewards in white gloves served coffee and tea in fine porcelain, the cups so thin and delicate as to make Severin wonder how they had survived any kind of acceleration. The porcelain was the deep blue of the Service uniforms, with gold ornament in the form of linked Hua and Starkey crests. The dining room itself was richly paneled, with polished brasswork and portraits of Lady Starkey’s ancestors in their blue uniforms. The chairs were covered with soft, velvety aesa leather and adjusted themselves to their occupants. The room seemed like it belonged in a private club on Zanshaa, one of those to which Severin would normally not be admitted. Fortunately Lady Starkey was more broad-minded than the doorman at the Seven Stars.

  “Would you like any other refreshment, Lord Captain?” asked Starkey.

  “No, thank you. I’ve just eaten.”

  Lady Starkey ventured a smile. “I’m very glad to see you, my lord. I was worried I’d find you in prison after the fight at Rol-mar.”

  “I managed to record my dealings with Captain Derinuus,” Severin said. “And the recordings were enough to exonerate me. And also—” He picked up his coffee. “When Lady Michi assumed command of the Fourth Fleet and our Service’s dockyard, she dismissed all the officers senior to me. So as the senior officer remaining, I was able to exonerate myself. Fortunately Lady Michi agreed with my decision.”

  The other officers seemed uncertain whether it was proper to laugh. Lady Starkey raised her eyebrows. “Very sensible of her, my lord.”

  “I’d like to think so.” He sipped the coffee—it was excellent, the perfect combination of spice and bitterness, and if it was a foretaste of Lady Starkey’s kitchen, he might regret turning down her offer of a meal. The Exploration Service traditionally ate well, a compensation for long voyages and many months crewing wormhole relay stations.

  He put down his cup. “Well,” he said, “let’s see this presentation.”

  Starkey’s premiere called a map onto the wall display, showing Terra with its newly discovered gate, the two systems and three worlds that lay beyond, and the wormhole, at a considerable distance from its primary, through which Explorer had plunged into the unknown.

  “We thought we’d struck it lucky, my lord,” Starkey said, “because we’d only been in the system four days before we found an ideal planet.” The planet itself appeared on the display, blue oceans, polar caps, swirling white clouds, green land. “It orbits a main-sequence star. Twenty-two percent oxygen in the atmosphere, almost all the rest nitrogen. Three-eighths of the planet’s surface is open water. Life is obviously abundant.” She looked at the planet with a kind of wistful admiration, as if she were recalling a hope that had faded over time. “The wormhole was so far out that it took us almost a month to reach the new world—we had a catalog name for it, but we were calling it Garden.”

  “The name seems apt,” Severin offered.

  “Well, I suppose it is. But we should have called it Trouble.” She frowned. “Because on our approach, we found this.”

  Severin recognized it at once—a boxy structure with mooring for ships, lacy solar panels, the jagged structures, reminiscent of battlements, that could lock additional counterweights to the station if they were needed, and most importantly the long black foreshortened cable descending to the planet below.

  “A space elevator,” Severin breathed. Through his shock he looked at Lady Starkey. “You found a civilization?”

  Lady Starkey met his eyes. “We found the remains of a civilization,” Starkey said. “There hasn’t been intelligent life on that world for thousands of years.”

  Severin stammered. “They—what?—they evacuated?”

  “We think most of them died,” said Morales, the blond premiere lieutenant. “But the Great Masters all left.”

  Severin stared at him, mind flailing.

  “The terminal looks like one of ours because it is one of ours,” Morales said. He gestured at the elevator terminal parked for eternity in geosynchronous orbit. “There are four of them still, and we think there was a fifth that was destroyed or was released somehow.”

  If the wealth of the world justified it, the five skyhook stations would have been expanded to make a planetary ring to generate the antimatter that powered Shaa civilization. Apparently the Shaa hadn’t been in residence long enough to take that step.

  “The stations are no longer functional,” Lady Starkey said. “The solar panels are perforated by micrometeorites, power storage is dead, the seals failed long ago, and there’s no longer any atmosphere. But we suited up and explored them all, and we documented the search with video.”

  What followed was video patched tog
ether from recordings made by helmet and handheld cameras. Lady Starkey led a party to one of the station’s personnel airlocks, which lacked power but was cranked open manually by a pair of crew sweating and panting in their vac suits. The surface of the station was pitted, and if there had been any labels or instructions on any of the entry ports, they had long faded from sight, or had been obliterated. But once inside the station, the labels, information, and warnings were all visible and were perfectly familiar. Each was written in the Shaa alphabet, and the words were in the language of the Great Masters themselves. The cavernous corridors were built to accommodate the monumental bodies of the Shaa, nearly twice the height of a human.

  Lady Starkey led her party right to Station Command, because Station Command was in the same place in all the older stations in the empire. There were two sets of controls, one sized to the mammoth Shaa and the other to a smaller species. A shaking camera zoomed into a plaque set on one end of Command, with an incised inscription.

  Lorkin Elevator Terminus Number One

  Proudly Dedicated in This, the Year of the Praxis Six

  “Year of the Praxis Six?” Severin said. “Year One was the establishment of the Great Masters on Zanshaa. So this place—Lorkin?—was settled at the same time as Zanshaa?”

  “We think this place was earlier,” Starkey said. “We think the Year One was declared here first, and then the Shaa altered the calendar once they settled on Zanshaa and declared a new Year One. We think this place was written clean out of our history.”

  According to the official story, the primitive tribal Naxids were the first species to be conquered by the Shaa, in Year 437. Certainly there was no mention of another species before the Naxids, nor any adjustment to the calendar.

  “What happened here?” Severin said.

  “We’ll walk you through it, my lord, if you don’t mind.”

  The elevator terminal was bare of ornament compared to Harzapid’s ring, but still there were murals on some of the walls, not faded at all, showing the vast forms of the Shaa directing labor. The laborers were mostly other Shaa, though there was another species so strange-looking that Severin at first took them for some kind of plant, or possibly just an ornamental motif.