Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  During the dinner break, when deceleration was reduced to a single gee, Martinez sent Michi a confidential message detailing Prince Huang’s behavior during the battle. “You could court-martial him and have him shot,” Martinez said, “but I’d be just as happy if you kicked him out of the Fleet and let him wreak havoc on some other elements of the population.” He took a breath. “And in the meantime, I need a real tactical officer.”

  He hoped that for a tactical officer Michi might this time look outside her own family.

  Severin drew the sleeve of the puppet up his forearm. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but I decided to build a Lorkin.”

  He brandished the puppet, his fingers tugging at the network of interwoven strings that triggered the movement of the tentacles around its head. He aimed the mouth at Lady Starkey.

  “I’m just a harmless life-form,” he said in a plaintive, rather dim-witted voice. “I don’t even have a skeleton! Please don’t drop a bomb on me!”

  Lady Starkey smiled. “You realize you’ve just turned the Great Masters’ biggest secret into a play toy.”

  “It’s better than the Great Masters playing with the Lorkins by turning them into radioactive dust,” Severin said. “Would you like some more chocolate?”

  “Not now, thanks.” She looked at the puppet and its dancing tentacles. “How do you make the tentacles work?”

  Severin explained that there was a kind of mesh net inside the puppet, and that tugging on the strings with his fingertips produced random movements in the tentacles. “The movements look more purposeful than they are,” he said. “And of course the fingers have to manipulate the mouth as well.”

  “May I try it?”

  “It may take a little practice.” He took the puppet off his hand and passed it to Starkey. She undid her cuff buttons, rolled the sleeve of her tunic up her forearm, and put the Lorkin over her hand. She experimented with manipulating the tentacles, then pointed the mouth at Severin, bobbed the puppet up and down to simulate movement, and adopted a squeaky voice.

  “I’m as pretty as a flower! Watch me bound over the green fields of my native land!” She stopped, then feigned surprise. “What are those big gray beings come down from the sky?” she said. “I wonder if they’ll be my friends!”

  Severin found it charming that her mobile face unconsciously adopted the same expression she was attempting on the puppet.

  “Very nice,” Severin said. “But you’re closing the mouth when you speak instead of opening.” He demonstrated with his fingers. “You must e-nun-ci-ate. Make the vowel sounds biiig.” He held open his fingers by way of example.

  “Oh.” Starkey blinked. “Sorry.”

  “No worries. Lots of people make that mistake.”

  Severin had just given a dinner to the captains of his squadron. Michi Chen had promoted him to squadron commander, first grade, the highest rank in the Exploration Service and equivalent to the Fleet’s rank of senior squadron commander. This was particularly generous of her, because five of his eight-ship squadron belonged to the Fleet, not the Exploration Service. He had wondered if the Fleet officers would resent his being placed over them, but they were all lieutenants who had been promoted to lieutenant-captain and given their first commands, and they seemed so overwhelmed by their new responsibilities that it hadn’t yet occurred to them to take offense at his superior status.

  Their attitude, however, might change over time, and so Severin worked hard to place himself beyond resentment. He had a lot to learn about combat and maneuvers—the ships of the Exploration Service were so often on detached duty that Severin hadn’t had to worry about unit formations since the last war, and at that time he was a lieutenant and had only to follow orders, not give them.

  He had a lot of catching up to do, especially as Lady Sula, who now commanded the entire Fourth Fleet during Michi Chen’s recovery and Gareth Martinez’s absence, was ordering daily drills. The Fleet, minus the two Cree squadrons that had not yet completed conversion, was advancing to a rendezvous with Martinez at a steady one gravity. There was no reason to hurry, and the leisurely pace allowed for a lot of time for training.

  Lady Starkey dropped her hand and rubbed her wrist. “It’s hard to keep my hand in that position for long,” she said.

  “Puppetry is pain,” Severin said cheerfully. He poured himself another steaming cocoa, and filled her cup as well.

  Dinner with his captains had gone well. Severin had reminisced about his own surprising promotion to the officer class—he’d been a warrant officer first class when Michi Chen had promoted him lieutenant for his service in the Naxid War, and he’d moved from the world of the commoner into the grand milieu of the Peers. His shock was not unlike those of his newly promoted captains at finding themselves removed from the clublike atmosphere of the wardroom to lonely positions of command, and he tried to offer them the benefits of his experience. The Exploration Service was a good deal less formal than the Fleet, where the officers were expected to be uniform, obedient, correct, and more or less interchangeable; and the Service’s informal traditions allowed Severin to offer a degree of support that would have been alien amid the pomp and ceremony of the Fleet.

  The other captains returned to their ships after dinner, but Lady Starkey had asked to see the puppets, and Severin had taken her into his office. The puppets and their theater had been packed away against heavy accelerations, and he’d had to dig them out of boxes. She’d enjoyed seeing the characters from his Alois series, and also some of the characters that he’d been developing for a new serial that had been interrupted by the war.

  “But I haven’t been thinking about that story much,” Severin said. “I’ve been thinking of developing a satirical series based on the war.”

  Starkey was surprised. “Our war?” she asked.

  “Well, yes. The opposition, mostly.” He took a Daimong puppet from one of his boxes and drew it over his arm. “Let’s say this one is Supreme Commander Tork.” He then dipped his free hand into another puppet, this time a Lai-own, and brought the puppet up to face the Daimong. He adopted a worshipful tone.

  “Supreme Commander, how do you plan to defeat the Terran insurgency?”

  Severin rounded his tones to imitate the melodious voice of a Daimong. “I am the greatest commander in the history of the Fleet! There will be a vast and bloody battle, and I will achieve victory by being one of the very few survivors!”

  He returned to his Lai-own voice. “Isn’t Michi Chen a more successful commander? After all, she wiped out a Naxid fleet and took very few casualties.” He clacked his teeth together to imitate the sound that Lai-own sometimes made when they clapped their mouths shut and their peg teeth snapped against each other.

  Severin raised his voice to the grating roar of Tork in full tirade. “I’m far superior! I can easily take three times the casualties of Michi Chen!”

  Lady Starkey was laughing. “You’ve got Tork’s voice exactly!” she said. “Not to mention his attitude.”

  “He’s an easy target,” Severin said. He raised the Lai-own puppet. “Let’s say this one’s Lady Tu-hon.” He raised his voice to a well-bred screech. “This war is taking too long! How many Terrans do we have to kill before I can stop paying taxes!”

  This time Starkey’s laughter was less enthusiastic. “That’s a little too close to reality,” she said.

  “I could argue that keeping close to reality is the whole point of satire,” Severin said.

  Starkey still seemed dubious. “At least you’re making vicious fun of our enemies.”

  “Unfortunately any series would be unlikely to be seen in Zanshaa,” Severin said. “Where it would do the most good.”

  “You could at least show it to our side,” Starkey said. They discussed the possibilities of the series for a while, and Starkey made a few suggestions, including a scene featuring Zanshaa’s minister of finance, Lord Minno, who—according to Gareth Martinez—had before the war been part of an illegal pump-and-dump sch
eme. The scene featured Lord Minno trying to hide stolen cash during a visit by Lady Gruum, the Lady Senior—who, fortunately, was too haughty and well-bred to notice the sacks of money stuffed under the sofa cushions.

  “That would work,” Severin judged. “I’d give you cowriting credit, if it wouldn’t put you on Minno’s enemies list.”

  Starkey shrugged. “We’re on that list already, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose we are.”

  “It seems perfectly just that we mock the people who are trying to kill us.” She took her cup from Severin’s desk and sipped her cocoa. “Very frothy,” she judged.

  Severin looked at her. “You know,” he said. “I—we, if you like—could create a few shows for the amusement of the Fleet. If we can find the spare time to do it.”

  “Let Tork rant on at greater length.”

  “Yes. A full comic scene would require more than a couple jokes.”

  She smiled. “I’m willing to help, but I have no experience in puppetry or drama.”

  “You could contribute scenarios and jokes—I’d work them into a story.”

  “I’m not much of a joke writer, either. But I’ll do my best.”

  They discussed satire and its possibilities for a while, and Severin ordered another pot of frothy cocoa. Lady Starkey tried on a series of puppets and enjoyed learning to manipulate the special triggers on some of the puppets—the components that would roll the puppet’s eyes, or make its eyebrows wriggle, or cause its hair to stand on end.

  Severin’s clock gave a discreet chime to signal the change of a watch. Lady Starkey looked surprised.

  “It’s late,” she said. “I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time.”

  “It was a pleasure,” Severin said.

  She stood, and Severin rose from his chair and maneuvered around the desk and the boxes to his office door. Suddenly in the crowded office they seemed very close together.

  “You’re still wearing Alois,” Severin pointed out.

  “Oh. Sorry.” He took the puppet by its head and drew it off her arm. She looked up at him with attentive eyes. Her breath was scented with chocolate.

  “I can’t ethically kiss you good-bye,” he said. “I’m your superior officer. Whereas—”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him fiercely. A gentle shock passed along his nerves. As he responded to the kiss, a stray thought wandered across his consciousness.

  Well. This is a pleasant surprise.

  “After we thrash Tork,” said Lord Naaz Vijana, “we’ll have to purge the Convocation. We can execute those who led the war against us, and others we can threaten with execution if they won’t resign. Whatever happens, we need to keep a Terran majority in Convocation, otherwise we’re done for in the long run.”

  “I urged our political leadership to consider dictatorship,” Sula said, “but they were reluctant.”

  Vijana looked impatient. “Why win a war and then give away the spoils?”

  Sula was playing host to the Fourth Fleet’s captains, one squadron at a time. Vijana, on the strength of his slaughter of the primitive Yormaks, had been raised to the command of Light Squadron Six, eight frigates with a light cruiser as a flagship. Counting Sula, that made ten officers around the table, which made dinner more intimate than Sula would have liked. The captain on her left was fond of broad gestures that threatened to upset Sula’s crystal glasses. The captain on her right, Lord Ahmad Husayn, wore a scent that made him smell like an entire grove of patchouli.

  The formal gatherings were traditional and probably even necessary, but she didn’t enjoy having to endure so many, one every day in which she played host to one or another group of officers, or in which she was invited to dine on another ship, or in the company of Defense’s wardroom. She now cherished her time alone more than ever, and she counted the minutes until she would be free of the cloud of patchouli.

  “I think there will be plenty of spoils,” Sula said.

  “No doubt,” Vijana said. “Though that’s not why I’m fighting. I just want to put the animals in their kennels.” Fury burned in his eyes.

  Sula couldn’t understand why Vijana, or anybody, would waste so much energy on hatred, particularly for whole classes of people he’d never met. She had hated very few people in her life and preferred to despise or dismiss those who got in her way. When she’d killed people, it was because they were trying to kill her, or because they were stupid and useless and obstructing something that was necessary.

  She’d hated Caro Sula, but the hatred had faded. At the end, with Caro lying dead on the couch, and Caro’s money shifted into Sula’s account, all Sula had felt was weariness that warred with a determination to see the thing through.

  And so she’d seen it through, and now here she was, at a gathering of glittering high-caste officers she was leading to war. She rubbed the scar tissue on her right thumb.

  “Let’s have one last toast,” she said, “and then you can return to your ships. Remember we’ll be having a drill tomorrow.”

  A drill in which the Fourth Fleet would face off against Tork’s augmented Home Fleet, which would outnumber them nearly two to one. Sula imagined that even with the best tactics, her side would not fare well.

  “To the Restoration,” Sula said and raised her lemonade. The others raised wineglasses, and they all drank. Then Sula rose, and the others rose with her. “I’ll walk with you to the airlock,” she said.

  Sula’s rank entitled her to a smart little cutter, currently mated to Defense, and she’d sent the cutter to pick up the other captains and offer them hospitality on the way. Trailing the scent of patchouli, the party walked down a companionway that took them down two decks, and then to the airlock that an honor guard held open.

  “Good night, my ladies. My lords.”

  First through the airlock was a portly captain who had been promoted from being a portly lieutenant. Since the cutter’s airlock was small, and the portly captain was a little drunk, and exiting the cutter’s small airlock involved turning around and making one’s way down a ladder to the deck below, the operation took a while, and the others had to wait.

  “I hope the exercise doesn’t take too long tomorrow,” said Naaz Vijana. “They’re executing Colonel Dai-por in the afternoon, and I want to watch it live.”

  Sula had seen enough executions in the last war, when she’d forced herself to watch the deaths of her colleagues in Military Governor Pahn-ko’s stay-behind army.

  “I expect I’ll be enjoying a nice shower,” Sula said. “And maybe tea and cake afterward.”

  “At least that imbecile Kai finally caught the man,” Vijana said. “It took him long enough.”

  Sula smiled inwardly. “Oh, Kai found him quickly enough,” she said. “Dai-por was kept under observation for several weeks so that we could track his network.”

  Vijana seemed nettled, perhaps because he’d thrown away his hatred on an unworthy target.

  “There were less than thirty arrests,” Sula continued. “Dai-por couldn’t persuade very many people to join his cause, which is good news for us.”

  “The other species aren’t entirely stupid,” Vijana said. “They know it’s absurd to fight when there’s a fleet in the sky above them. They’ll wait till our backs are turned before they stab us.”

  “Let’s guard our backs, then,” Sula said. It was finally Vijana’s turn to go through the airlock, and he wished Sula good night and stepped over the sill. The honor guard closed the airlock door. Sula let out a long breath, unbuttoned her collar, and turned to make her way back to her own cabin when she saw another officer standing quietly in a corner of the room. The officer was looking toward the airlock with an expression of fixed hatred, her jaw grinding in anger.

  “Is something wrong, Lieutenant Gao?”

  Gao’s hazel eyes were frozen, unblinking in their hatred.

  “Vijana,” she said, and then she seemed to shake herself out of her fury and realized who she was talkin
g to. She braced. “Apologies, my lady,” she said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you with my personal concerns.”

  “If there’s a problem with one of our officers,” Sula said. “I need to know it.”

  Lady Xia Gao was a middle-aged woman and the second officer aboard Defense. She had served fifteen years in the Fleet, but lack of patronage had obstructed any hope of promotion, so she’d resigned her commission and sought work in the civil service. The Naxid War had brought her back into the Fleet, where she’d commanded a tender ferrying supplies to the warships of Tork’s fleet, but she’d resigned after the war and returned to her job with the Ministry of Forestry and Fisheries. Now she was back in harness again, serving in a Fourth Fleet where traditional restrictions on place and promotion were relaxed.

  She was an officer with a lifetime’s experience, and a background in both the military and civilian realms. She didn’t seem the sort of person to hate someone without a reason.

  Sula could see calculation speeding behind Gao’s hazel eyes. “I’m reluctant to share my opinion, my lady,” Gao said. “Squadron Commander Vijana is a decorated hero of the empire.”

  “All the more reason—” Sula began, and then the words Ministry of Forestry and Fisheries rose to her mind, and she understood.

  “Ah. Hah,” she said. “You were on Esley.”

  Again rage hardened Gao’s features. “He killed my people,” she said.

  Sula nodded. “You were one of those assigned to look after the Yormaks.”

  Gao nodded. “The Yormak Bureau. I spent years with the Yormaks, studying and surveying, learning their language. I protected them from other species who wanted to take their lands and poach their game—the other species blamed the Yormaks’ special status for Esley’s lack of development and economic progress.” Her lip curled. “Vijana shot them down from aircraft. He dropped bombs that killed their cattle and left them to starve over the winter.”

  Sula considered this and found herself unsurprised. “The Yormaks were supposed to have rebelled,” she said.