Fleet Elements

by Walter Jon Williams

  “I’d better get on my shuttle,” she said.

  He helped her find her clothes while she dressed at speed. “I have a feeling we’re going to get chewed out,” he said.

  “No. Really?” Irony laced the words.

  “What did we do?” Severin asked.

  “Maybe she didn’t like that last show about the financial crisis.” She slipped on her shoes and kissed Severin on the cheek. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Right.” The door closed behind her. Severin looked around the room, still crowded with crates, stacked dining room chairs, and a half-disassembled puppet stage.

  So am I getting married now? he asked himself. He didn’t know the answer.

  He sighed, then picked up a stack of chairs and moved it to the dining room.

  “Well, see, I’d made the Lorkin puppet,” Severin said, “and so I thought I’d use it.”

  “The story needed someone to ask the important questions,” Lady Starkey said.

  “It’s a naïve voice,” said Severin. “It’s useful. The Lorkin can accept what someone like Lady Tu-hon says at face value, and then ask a follow-up question that makes Tu-hon look ridiculous.”

  Sula couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “So you just put the Lorkin in your playlets because it was useful? Or fun? You have no other agenda?”

  Severin looked blank. “Agenda?” he said.

  Sula tried to restrain her impatience. “The discovery of Lorkin has profound political consequences for the entire empire. Either the Shaa began their rule by destroying an entire intelligent species, or . . .” Sula suppressed a snarl. “There is no or. But was it a war, a deliberate massacre, a rebellion?”

  “We can’t know,” said Lady Starkey. “We can’t know until we can properly survey Lorkin. We’d need archaeologists and—”

  “I know you can’t know,” Sula said. “We can suppose that the Shaa had reasons for what they did, but we don’t know if they were good reasons, bad reasons, or reasons that were completely beyond our comprehension. But my point is that our entire civilization is based on the foundation the Shaa laid in the Praxis, and this is not the time to question whether or not the Praxis is based on massacres, equivocation, or lies.”

  Severin had been surprised at first, but as Sula continued he turned grim, skin taut over his high cheekbones, narrow eyes narrower still. “With all respect, Lady Sula,” he said, “we haven’t done anything like that. We told some jokes, and the jokes weren’t about the Praxis, they were all at the expense of the sad clowns that are trying to run the empire.”

  “You put a Lorkin in your videos. That’s making a statement about the Lorkins whether you know it or not.”

  Severin’s anger still simmered. “And what statement is that, exactly?”

  “It’s a statement,” said Sula, “that has a fleet commander demanding your arrest on a charge of subversion. And I don’t know whether justice in the Exploration Service is different than it is in the rest of the empire, but let me assure you that if you were arrested on that charge by an officer of the Fleet, the only thing that would delay your execution would be the amount of time it would take to put the correct signatures on the correct documents.”

  Defiance burned in Severin’s eyes. Lady Starkey looked horrified.

  “I am recommending against charging you,” Sula said. “But I’d advise you to drop the Lorkin from your plays and concentrate on ways to kill the enemy.” She lifted a hand. “You may return to your ships.”

  What have I become? Sula wondered after the two had left.

  She had always hated the sorts of officers who placed themselves in positions of moral superiority in order to deliver pompous lectures to their subordinates, and now it seemed that she was one of them. And with the threat of execution, no less.

  Way to make friends, she thought.

  “I’m afraid, my lord, that the good ship Lorkin has already left the dockyard,” Martinez said. “There are too many people, officers and enlisted, who have heard about Lorkin to enforce any kind of blockade now. And as for conducting some kind of purge while in the face of the enemy—” He waved a hand. “Well, that’s impossible.”

  He and Kung were at last in the same system, Shulduc in fact, though it would take Martinez’s transmission twelve hours or more to reach its recipient. Division Two was decelerating to allow the rest of the Fourth Fleet to catch up with it, after which Martinez would at last be united with his whole command.

  “Part of the problem,” Martinez continued, “is that so little is known about what happened on Lorkin that all sorts of disturbing rumors may be in circulation. In that case, a full disclosure of what is known may serve to quell the more outrageous speculations. I look forward to any views you may have on the matter.”

  He sent the message confident that he wasn’t the least bit interested in any of Kung’s opinions, but that in order to assure Kung’s future cooperation he was willing to humor the man as far as he could. He could only hope that Kung wouldn’t demand any heads.

  Since Los Angeles’s reappearance in Shulduc, thousands of queries and reports had flooded the flagship, and Martinez had set his staff to making sense of them all. Most were trivial, but each had to be assessed in some way, then answered. Martinez and his staff found themselves overwhelmed and ate their meals at their desks while trying to wrangle their correspondence.

  Martinez called up his queue, looked at the long list of queries that his staff had forwarded to him, and felt a vast weariness flood his being. He decided to ignore all his official business and view the day’s message from Terza.

  She appeared in her usual perfection, sharing a sofa with Gareth the Younger. She wore a long black jersey dress that Martinez remembered from their trip on the Corona, and he could almost smell the vetiver heart-notes of her perfume. Her message was cheerful and essentially free of content, a fact Martinez appreciated. Harassed every second by issues of war, life, death, and logistics, he was happy to bask for a few minutes in the inconsequential.

  He knew that Terza was working furiously to hold the Restoration together, but her messages mentioned this only in passing. Learning the details of Terza’s struggles would only add to Martinez’s anxiety—and possibly his indignation—and as he was weeks away from Harzapid there was nothing he could practically accomplish to relieve these sensations. Likewise he tried not to burden Terza with the frustrations of his own existence.

  After Terza’s message, Young Gareth reported on his day at school and sent copies of several of his latest drawings with long explanations of what, exactly, each picture was intended to represent. People who thought the Lorkins were strange, Martinez thought, had very little experience with the mind of an imaginative child.

  As he watched the video he reached into his desk drawer and drew out a bottle of Laredo whisky, poured himself a shot, and let the whisky fire ooze over his palate. The need to relax at the end of his working day was threatening to make him the best customer of his father’s distillery.

  A pleasant sense of well-being began to hum through his senses. He watched the video a second time, then put his bottle away and recorded a reply.

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned since the return to Shulduc,” he said, “it’s that a fleet this size needs a much larger staff. I’ve been sent over ten thousand messages just today, most of them requiring some kind of answer. My staff is trying to sort them out and forward only the most urgent, but when the captain of a warship needs an answer, it’s got to come from me.”

  His fingers itched to retrieve the bottle from his drawer. He repressed the impulse.

  “That’s averaging over thirty messages a day coming from each ship,” he said. “It’s complete madness, and it’s a waste of, well, me.” He raised his hands helplessly. “Yet I suppose you must be coping with similar problems, and you and your little committee have a whole planet to manage, along with a pack of other worlds. I shouldn’t even be mentioning this problem, except that it caught me so co
mpletely by surprise. And speaking of surprises . . .”

  He laughed. “Have you heard about Lorkins? They are being openly discussed here, and some of the senior officers are seriously upset.” He considered the matter for a moment. “Yet if you haven’t heard of Lorkins, that’s probably a good thing. You should pretend I haven’t mentioned them.”

  Martinez devoted a few moments to evaluating and praising his son’s artwork, then signed off and reached for the whisky again. There was a knock on the door from his dining room, and Alikhan entered, carrying the nightly cup of hot cocoa on a salver. Martinez returned the whisky to the drawer and took the cup.

  “Have you heard of the Lorkins, Alikhan?” he asked.

  Alikhan showed neither surprise nor interest. “No, my lord.”

  “Good.” Apparently the infection hadn’t yet reached Division Two. “Is there anything happening I should know about?” he asked.

  “Nothing requiring your attention, my lord. Though Captain Dalkeith will have some interesting disciplinary hearings tomorrow.”

  “Fighting,” Martinez asked, “or alcohol?”

  “Both together, my lord. Along with sex.”

  “Of course.” Martinez raised his cup in salute. “It could be worse,” he said.

  “Absolutely true, my lord. Will you be needing me for anything else tonight?”

  “I don’t think so. Thank you, Alikhan.”

  “Sleep well, my lord.”

  Alikhan withdrew. Martinez drank half the cocoa, then topped the cup with whisky. The results were not completely awful.

  In less than a week, Sula would be aboard his ship. He couldn’t imagine that ending well.

  “Earthgirl, you never answered my last call.”

  Lamey looked as if he’d just returned from a banquet or a fancy party, with his green-and-gold-striped coat thrown over the back of a chair, and his ruffled shirt half unbuttoned. “I hope to hell you’ve been selling some of my fine investments,” he said. “Mehrang’s on my back every minute, and nobody here is interested in long-term financing, like planetary development. With the economy here starting to boom again, everyone’s rushing after immediate profits. I hope it all goes bust again.”

  Sula wanted to laugh at Lamey’s woebegone expression. The proud fixer hadn’t been able to fix his way out of trouble.

  Lamey’s expression turned angry, and Sula felt the hairs on her neck prickle. She knew that anger, and when she’d been Lamey’s girlfriend she’d been on the receiving end of it.

  “Look, I need you to get on my side and sell some damn investments,” he said, “because I’m not going down alone. Understand?”

  Well. There was the threat direct.

  Clearly she was expected to make some kind of conciliatory response.

  Damned if she would.

  “Perhaps this message will find you sober,” she began, glaring at the camera. “I hope so. Because if you are, you might remember it’s not my job to sell investments. It’s my job to kill a lot of enemies and make sure we both stay alive. If I fail in my job, you won’t survive long enough to fail in yours.”

  She took a breath. “Assuming we both live through the next year, you might find me more useful in my role as a high-ranking Fleet officer and a member of the Convocation than as a salesman.” She smiled thinly. “It’s all up to you, of course.”

  She sent the message, and then wondered if Lamey would be so furious that he’d go straight to the authorities with a denunciation, and worry about the consequences afterward.

  Sula rubbed the scar tissue on her right thumb. Everything would all come down to who was more valuable, she decided. She was more valuable now; but after the victory, Lamey’s political skills might be of more use than an imposter in a uniform.

  She’d have to work on maintaining her value.

  Chapter 13

  The airlock door eased open, and Martinez gave a nod to the petty officer who served as band leader. She turned to her crew, raised a hand, and gave a downbeat. Los Angeles’s band crashed into “Glorious Arrival” from An-tar’s Antimony Sky. In the cruiser’s small anteroom the sound was enormous.

  Martinez had decided to give Sula a big welcome, and that included the ship’s glittering officers lined up in full-dress uniform, as well as the band, which unfortunately hadn’t had enough time for rehearsal. But they charged into the tune with enthusiasm and were backed by a small chorus of singing cadets, equally unrehearsed, in the corridor behind.

  At the sight of Sula he felt a tingling, inexorable tsunami flood slowly through his nerves. Sula wore an expression of bemused surprise as she stepped through the airlock door, and then she saw Martinez and braced in salute, her chin lifted, exposing her throat for any punishment her superior might see appropriate to inflict with his ceremonial knife.

  Sula had left her submachine gun in her baggage, just as Martinez had left his knife in his trunk—but after some internal debate he’d chosen to carry his Golden Orb. The Orb was an inconvenience, not for Martinez but for everyone else, because its presence required everyone to salute it. But then Martinez was the superior officer on the ship, so everyone had to salute him anyway, and the Orb wouldn’t make any difference, except that everyone would know that he had decided Sula was worth the most extravagant and formal welcome he could arrange.

  The Orb was a golden baton with a transparent ball on the end, a ball that contained a mixture of liquids, all different shades of gold, that swirled in beautiful streaked patterns like the clouds on a gas giant. Only two had ever been awarded in the last thousand years, one to Martinez, and the other to Supreme Commander Tork.

  Martinez intended to blow Tork’s Orb to atoms in the next few weeks.

  Sula was followed on board by her staff and her servants, all of whom braced in turn. Martinez recognized Spence and Macnamara, having met them in the last war. He might encourage Alikhan to make their acquaintance, and perhaps get a little information, from day to day, on Sula’s mood. He knew she would blow up sooner or later, and he preferred not to be in the vicinity when it happened.

  He made a benign gesture with his Orb to encourage the party to stand at ease, but even at ease they still had to wait for the song to end. Standing without being able to move or speak, Martinez felt a taut, invisible string stretched between himself and Sula, vibrating to whatever spiky music snarled between them.

  Martinez was relieved when the final chords thundered out, and he was able to step to introduce Captain Dalkeith—who knew Sula perfectly well, though the formalities had to be played out nonetheless—and Dalkeith then introduced her officers. Sula introduced her staff and then the welcoming party was dismissed, and Martinez and Dalkeith escorted Sula up two companionways to her quarters.

  “I hope you will be comfortable, Lady Sula,” Martinez said. “And I hope you will be able to join us for supper tonight.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Sula said, looking up at him with a fair approximation of sincerity, and then Martinez and Dalkeith left Sula, and Martinez—his taut nerves beginning to relax one by one—went up one deck to his cabin.

  Alikhan helped Martinez remove the full-dress uniform and put the Golden Orb in its case. Martinez had once served on a ship where formal dinners among the officers were customary, and he’d hated the rigid manners and the benumbed conversations. When he played host, he tried to keep his dinners informal and the wine flowing.

  Of course Sula wouldn’t be interested in the flowing wine, but then she was never at a loss for conversation, so it probably wouldn’t matter.

  He took a vow to restrict his own wine intake. No point in seeming a drunken fool in front of a smart, sober woman with a savage sense of humor.

  He was very glad he’d invited Dalkeith.

  The dialogue might require a referee.

  Sula wasn’t sure why Dalkeith had been invited. Sula had always found her insipid and thought she had been lucky in latching on to Martinez’s star early on to follow him up the line of promotion.
But Sula knew nothing against her, nothing but the childlike voice that just had to be endured.

  Martinez’s servant Alikhan had told Macnamara that supper wouldn’t be formal, so Sula knew to wear undress. She was glad to be free of the stiff collar and stiffer manners that had followed her through too many formal dinners on the Defense.

  As she left her cabin she felt her senses expanding through the environment, like a wary cat probing the air with its whiskers. She went up the curving stairs to the deck above hers and found Alikhan standing like a sentry outside Martinez’s door. He braced, then opened the door for her and ushered her inside.

  Cooking smells greeted her. Martinez and Dalkeith were already present, each with a goblet of something that sparkled, and both rose as she entered and braced.

  “Please sit,” Martinez said, and she took the seat reserved for her. The large banquet table that would normally fill the room had been broken up, and three leaves had been arranged in a triangular formation. Informal, she thought. There was no head of the table for Martinez to preside from, and as she wasn’t directly opposite she didn’t have to spend the whole meal looking at him. She wondered if he had deliberately arranged the room that way, and then invited Dalkeith as a chaperone, to testify to Terza that his virtue was secure.

  As if he hadn’t sold his virtue years ago, she thought. The Chens had a mortgage on his soul.

  Though even if she didn’t have to look at him every minute, he was still very difficult not to notice. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a body sculpted by the weight of fierce accelerations, and even if he wasn’t waving his Golden Orb, he was in authority here. Sitting, his big hands and long arms made him seem more imposing, and he wasn’t as ungainly as when he was standing atop his short-by-comparison legs. He had presence, and Sula could almost feel that presence prickling across her skin.