The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  She hadn’t got as far as she had by being stupid.

  Sula managed to stay conscious through the next long deceleration burn, as her pinnace swooped over Vandrith’s north pole to fire her south, directly on Blitsharts’s trail. Her jaws ached from keeping her teeth clamped.

  She started getting data from the ranging lasers tracking Midnight Runner, and she was able to update Martinez’s simulation of the tumbling craft. There was an extra wobble in its roll—sure enough, the yacht’s maneuvering thrusters must have fired and added an extra little complexity to the acrobatics.

  She wondered what could be causing them to fire at random that way. It didn’t make any sense. If an automated pitch-and-yaw program had been initiated to stabilize the craft, the thrusters would be firing more regularly and deliberately, which would have dampened the oscillations, not increased them.

  Could Blitsharts be making brief attempts to solve his problem? Coming out of unconsciousness briefly to fire a thruster, but so disoriented he only made his situation worse?

  That didn’t precisely make sense either, but it was the best guess she could make.

  She studied the simulation. She ate some ration bars. She took a brief nap. And, because she finally couldn’t stand the pressure in her bladder any longer, she urinated into her suit.

  Elimination was the thing she hated most when living in a vac suit. She knew that the crotch of her suit was packed full of absorbent material chock-full of hydrostatic screens and mindlessly happy bacteria that would process the urine into demineralized water and harmless salts; that it would clean her up and leave her “fresher than before,” which were the words actually used in the suit manual.

  Before what? she wanted to snarl. Before she was crammed into this giant, unwieldy, vacuum-resistant diaper? But if the service could only provide her with an honest-to-god toilet, she would have much preferred to handle the freshening business herself, thank you very much.

  Just before the pinnace oriented for the next deceleration, Sula triggered the boat’s radars to give her a better view of her tumbling target. Then the pinnace swung around, aligned its engines very precisely, and began the deceleration burn.

  Again she felt the suit gently closing around her arms and legs, forcing the blood to her brain. Again the weight of many gravities compressed her chest. Again she felt the darkness gathering around her vision, the light narrowing to a tiny tunnel bearing only straightforward.

  Again she felt the pillow pressing down on her face, throttling her half-formed scream.

  Blitsharts, she thought, you’d better fucking well be alive.

  Enderby had gone to bed hours ago. With dawn, a new shift arrived—not humans but Lai-owns, members of a flightless avian species. They were taller than humans, covered with gray featherlike hair mottled with black, and with vicious peg teeth in an elongated muzzle.

  The Lai-owns had provided the Fleet with the only space battles in its long history. Every other species in the dominion of the Shaa had been bombarded into submission by overwhelming forces operating from the safety of space. Even those who managed to develop sufficient technology to get into space, like the primitive human tribe-nations on Earth, did not possess an armed presence sufficient to halt the Shaa for even a few seconds.

  But to the flightless Lai-owns, space was just an extension of their natural environment, the airy realms where their ancestors had flown. They had spread throughout their home star system, and possessed the fleets to protect their settlements. Had they been able to discover and develop the wormholes that orbited their star, they might have been the first to contact the Shaa, not the other way around.

  As it was, the Lai-owns gave the Shaa squadrons a bloody nose when the conquerors poured in through the system’s wormhole. They were natural tacticians, their avian brains adapted to operating in a three-dimensional environment. And the wars they had fought among themselves gave them a tactical doctrine based on experience. Their only disadvantage was the light, hollow bones that permitted their ancestors to fly but wouldn’t stand the ferocious accelerations of space combat.

  The Shaa calculated on destroying resistance in a matter of hours. Instead it took six days to obliterate the last Laiown warship and issue a demand for surrender. One of the Lai-own innovations that had surprised the Fleet was the use of the pinnace, a small vessel that would shepherd attacking missiles toward the target and update their instructions faster than could the larger ships, which might be lurking back light-minutes out of contact.

  The pinnaces were valuable tactically, but few had survived actual combat. In the years since the Lai-own war, however, cadets had begun to compete for the right to wear the silver flashes of the pinnace pilot, and it became both a status symbol and an entrée to the fashionable and glamorous world of yachting.

  It was a matter for debate how many of these cadets would have competed so eagerly to be pinnace pilots if there had actually been a war going on. Martinez suspected there would be relatively few.

  As he sat with the avians in Operations, he found himself wishing that it had been the Lai-owns who crewed the Los Angeles, and not humans. A Lai-own would be able to use his complex plan for rescuing Midnight Runner with little problem, and with no chance of rendering himself unconscious.

  Instead, an unknown human would do the job, almost certainly an inexperienced cadet. Martinez almost regretted having worked out a plan—if he hadn’t, the rescue pilot wouldn’t be in jeopardy.

  During his long wait, he received two messages. The first was from Los Angeles, announcing that, per the lord commander’s request, a pinnace had been launched on a rescue mission. The second was from the pinnace itself, a brief announcement, audio only, that his message had been received.

  Cadet Caroline Sula. Martinez had heard the name Sula but couldn’t recall where. He had seen a Sula Palace in the High City, which meant the Sulas were an old family, Peers of the highest rank. But he hadn’t heard about any members of the family, either in government, civil service, or the military, unusual for a family ranked that high. He wondered if this cadet was the last of them.

  He hesitated a moment, then used Fleet Commander Enderby’s code key to call for her file. Enderby might want a report on the pilot.

  Oh my. Martinez, slumped with weariness in his chair, straightened to get a better view of Caroline Sula’s face as it materialized on the display. It was extraordinary—pale, nearly translucent skin, emerald-green eyes, white-gold hair worn collar-length. The picture had caught her with a quirk of humor at the corners of her lips, as if she were about to make an ironic remark to the cameraman. And the camera clearly adored her—Martinez threw the picture into 3D and rotated it, and Sula didn’t have a single bad angle.

  Hope she’s not married, was his first thought. His second was that he didn’t much care if she were.

  And then he noted the title that graced her official records. Caroline, Lady Sula. Why hadn’t he heard of her?

  He paged through her service records. Unmarried—well, good. Her birth as a Peer had guaranteed her a slot in a military academy, and her record there was mixed—low grades the first year, better the second, top marks the third. After graduation she’d received good reports from her superiors—the words “intelligent” and “efficient” showed up a lot—though there were two comments regarding her “inappropriate sense of humor.” She had volunteered for pinnace training after her first year, and again won top marks as a pilot—her marks for high-gee and disorienting environments were good, and made Martinez feel more easy about sending her on this mission.

  It seemed she was trying very hard to be a good, even outstanding, officer. But Martinez had to wonder why. The higher ranks of Peers considered it bad form to work this hard at anything. Someone with a palace in the High City should rise through the ranks without effort.

  He thought to check Sula’s family, and there found his answer.

  Both of Caroline Sula’s parents, high officials in the Ministry of Works, had
been found guilty of conspiring to steal millions from government contractors. Nine years ago they and their associates had been publicly flayed and dismembered at the public execution ground in the Lower City. Their property was confiscated, and the remaining family banished from Zanshaa.

  Martinez gave a slow, silent whistle. Sula Palace didn’t belong to the Sula family anymore.

  Maybe nothing did.

  Cadet Caroline Sula watched Captain Blitsharts’s yacht roll and tumble against the cold velvet darkness. She illuminated it with floodlights, and watched it carefully as it yawed and spun. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Midnight Runner, no obvious damage, no clue as to why it had run out of control. Not even a nick on its shiny paint.

  Whatever was wrong was on the inside. Damn it.

  She nudged her pinnace to a position on the axis of the Runner’s spin, the line along which she would have to creep in order to mate with the runaway craft. Proximity alarms blared, and Sula cut them off.

  Maybe the alarms were right. The view didn’t look encouraging from here, with the yacht’s spinning bow lunging toward her with every beat of her heart.

  She decided not to be stupid and to take some meds to inhibit motion sickness. She’d be sleepy after the adrenaline wore off, but that was better than being sick.

  Or dead.

  She charged a med injector with the Fleet’s standard antinausea drug and placed the injector to her neck, over the carotid artery. And hesitated.

  Seconds passed. When she took the injector away, her hand was trembling.

  Not like this.

  She put the injector back in the med kit and took out a pair of med patches. She took off her helmet, peeled away the clear polymer backing of the patches, and placed one behind each ear. It would take longer for the patches to work, but at least she wouldn’t have nightmares afterward.

  Her mouth had gone dry. She took a drink of water from the tube built into her seat back, donned and closed her helmet, and reached toward the comm board so she could transmit her decisions to Operations Command.

  Then she thought better of it. She was alone. They had sent her out here alone. It would take half an hour for her signal to reach Operations at the speed of light, hours for a reply to return. They couldn’t help her do her job any more than they already had.

  You’ve got to screw it in. The words floated into Sula’s mind, and she laughed.

  Right, Lieutenant Martinez, whoever you are. This is for you.

  She touched Transmit, sending audio and video both. “Cadet Sula to Lieutenant Martinez, Operations Command. I am about to attempt rendezvous with Midnight Runner. I will send telemetry throughout the maneuver.” She hesitated, then twitched her eyebrows toward the camera. “Please bear in mind that I haven’t ever screwed in quite this way before.”

  She ended the transmission, arranged to send a continuous broadcast of vehicle telemetry and radar data to Zanshaa’s ring, and pointedly avoided sending any data from inside the pinnace—visuals or vital signs from the monitors in her suit. If she passed out, said or did something stupid, shit her pants, or abandoned herself to a fit of screaming terror, at least Lord Commander Enderby wouldn’t be watching.

  Sula took a deep breath of the canned air in her vacuum suit. Her mouth was dry again.

  She decided to go virtual for a better view of the outside environment. The close confines of the cabin vanished from her visual receptors, replaced by the crisp visuals of the outside monitors, with heads-up displays of critical ship systems and controls superimposed on the outside view. At once she thought she’d made a mistake. The view of Midnight Runner, through the hyperreality of the virtual world—the sense that all this was happening inside her skull—was more frightening than if she’d been peering out a window at the same sight. She could sense the mass of that prow coming around like a bludgeon every heartbeat, and feel pure malevolence in the way it seemed to reach for her…

  Get a grip, she told herself. She fought the fear that pulsed through her veins, took deliberate breaths to lower the triphammer beating of her heart. Reached for the maneuvering controls on the arms of her chair. Tried to time the swing of Midnight Runner’s bow. And triggered her thrusters.

  One plane at a time. Maneuvers were calibrated in roll, pitch, and yaw. She started with roll, nudged the control in her left fist. Vertigo shimmered through her inner ear as it sensed her craft starting to tumble, but she mastered it. Midnight Runner’s motion shifted relative to her own, began to seem less eccentric. She kept her attention focused not on the runaway yacht, but on the heads-up display and the roll indicator. She kept nudging the boat’s roll higher till she saw it match the number that the simulation had predicted for Blitsharts’s yacht.

  Good. But that was the easy part. Her inner ear could adapt well enough to spinning on one axis, but when she began to alter pitch and yaw, the cockpit—which was well forward in the boat, like that of Blitsharts’s—would swoop and spin through a series of freakish arcs, as if stuck on the end of an erratic pendulum.

  Sula began to nudge the pitch control in her right hand. At first the sensation was barely distinguishable, but as pitch increased and the bow of the pinnace swooped in larger and larger circles, the vertigo built. Fear shivered through her mind. She might not be able to do this for long, possibly not for the length of time it would take to gradually increase her pitch and yaw.

  Do it all at once, she thought. She added yaw to her movements, both hands working now. She kept her gaze focused fiercely on the Runner, trying to ignore the wildly spinning stars in the background. The yacht’s complex motions began to moderate relative to her pinnace, until Midnight Runner finally stood still in her vision, the bow no longer lunging at her but simply hanging there against the pirouetting star field.

  Vertigo swam through Sula’s mind in a series of surges, like an inexorable flood tide. Her suit clamped gently on her arms and legs, forcing blood out of her extremities. Her vision was beginning to narrow. She knew it was time to get this over with.

  She nudged the controls to back her boat, stern first, toward the yacht. It felt as if her bowels were trying to climb up through her throat—Sula swallowed hard and shook sudden tears from her eyes. She was only a few seconds from grappling, and then she could wrestle both boats to a standstill.

  And then Sula saw whiteness blossom in the spotlights that illuminated the scene, and sudden horror surged through her veins. Maneuvering thrusters had just fired—Blitsharts’s thrusters. The yacht’s bow began to swing. In terror, Sula shoved both controls forward, trying to get clear—and then there was a sudden massive lunge as tons of yacht shouldered into her pinnace, followed by a horrid rumble and a hideous scraping sound that shivered along the hull. A howling alarm jolted her nerves. For several terrible seconds she felt the prolonged contact in her bones, and then she was free, away from Runner’s embrace.

  Her vision had contracted almost to nothing. She fought the ship’s pendulum motion by feel alone, battling the vertigo that swam her mind. She was only certain she had stabilized the ship’s motion when the blackness began to retreat from her vision and she saw the virtual world again with its displays.

  Bile stung her sinus. She shut off the collision alarm, turned off the virtual displays to bring her cockpit back in her vision again, then lay in her acceleration couch and drew one shuddering breath after another while she tried hard not to throw up. Probably the only thing that stopped her was the thought that her suit was much less efficient at coping with vomit than with urine.

  Eventually the urge to vomit faded, as did the thunderous crash of her heart. Sula opened her helmet and wiped sweat from her face, and only then remembered that she should have checked hull integrity before opening her suit to the environment.

  She went over the displays, triggered her pinnace’s diagnostics and found no sign of damage. Then she checked the exterior displays and found the long scratch on the pinnace’s hull where Blitsharts’s boat had contacted her ow
n, the light blue paint that had been Kandinski’s pride scraped down to the pale resinous hull.

  Sula mopped her face again. She shifted the exterior displays to Midnight Runner, which was slowly drifting away while still tumbling. The yacht’s motion was different now: the collision, plus Blitsharts’s thrusters, had added more complexity to Runner’s movement.

  Damn. She mopped her face again and hoped she was presentable for video, that her next message wouldn’t show Enderby a wild-eyed, panicked junior.

  She triggered the comm board and tucked in her chin to keep her jaw, and her voice, from trembling. “Cadet Sula to Operations Command. The rendezvous failed, due to Blitsharts firing thrusters during the maneuver. There was a collision, but hull integrity is uncompromised and ship systems undamaged. I will evaluate Midnight Runner’s current motion and try to discover whether it is possible to attempt another rendezvous.”

  Sula ceased transmission, watched Runner spin away through the void, and slowly came to the realization that she was now off the hook. The vehicle telemetry she’d sent to Operations would show Blitsharts’s thrusters firing and ruining the rendezvous. She could hardly be blamed for not attempting rendezvous again, not with a target that was tumbling in a more dangerous pattern.

  The mission had failed, and it wasn’t her fault. All she had to do was take a close look at Midnight Runner’s new, more complex tumbling pattern, then decide it was too dangerous to attempt.

  And the failure would be Blitsharts’s fault. No blame will attach…For once, perhaps for the only time in her service career, that statement would actually be true.

  She was free to abandon the mission.

  For a long moment Sula listened to the air circulate through the cockpit and wondered why she didn’t feel like celebrating.

  She nudged the controls and sent her pinnace after Midnight Runner. She parked again along the axis of the Runner’s spin, and slowly eyeballed the yacht as it tumbled. Yes, the movement was more complex. More dangerous.