The Praxis

by Walter Jon Williams

  Jarlath reclined on his acceleration couch aboard Glory of the Praxis, while the Fleet Control Board’s holographic images floated before his eyes. Suffering from four days’ hard acceleration, his bleached-white fur by now showing its black and gray roots, Jarlath knew he hardly presented his best face to his superiors.

  “The enemy outnumbers us,” he said. “Once the Zerafan squadron joins, I’ll have fifty-four ships. Once Elkizer joins Fanaghee, she’ll have fifty-nine, and we can assume that squadrons from Naxas or Felarus will join as well.”

  “You assume that Fanaghee will be able to convert all the captured squadrons to Naxid use by the time you arrive.”

  “My lord,” said Jarlath, “I cannot afford to think otherwise.”

  “And you also assume that she’ll be able to crew all her captured ships.”

  A headache thudded dully behind Jarlath’s eyes. He had been over this with his own staff a dozen times.

  “Her personnel will be overworked and overstrained, but it can be done,” he said. “If she strips much of the ring station of its personnel, she’ll have adequate fighting crews, though her damage control won’t be as efficient as ours.”

  “But if she strips the ring station personnel,” Tork replied, “she won’t have enough dock workers to refit her captured ships.”

  “She can bring workers up from the planet. Most of the inhabitants of Magaria are Naxids, and we have to presume they’ll sympathize with the enemy council.”

  “You forget that you have the battleship squadron.”

  Jarlath closed his weary eyes. “I have not forgot.”

  “You have six Praxis-class ships to the enemy’s one.” A metallic bray of triumph entered Tork’s voice. “Each battleship is the equal of a squadron!”

  Then let’s send the battleships by themselves and win a glorious victory, Jarlath thought viciously, but he suppressed his anger. His weary muscles dragged his eyelids apart. “A hit by an antimatter missile will destroy a battleship as easily as it will destroy a frigate,” he said.

  “You are being too cautious, my lord commander.”

  Jarlath let the two-gravity acceleration drag his lips from his fangs. Enough was enough. “If your lordships give me a direct order to attack immediately,” he said, “an order in writing, I shall of course obey.”

  There was a long silence from the board members. Then Lord Chen spoke.

  “I ask you to understand that there is much anxiety in the Convocation. The fall of Magaria has effectively cut us off from a third of the empire. Many of us have friends, clients, and other interests in the area controlled by the rebels.”

  Lord Chen looked more than a little anxious himself. Jarlath remembered that he owned a shipping company, one that presumably had many ships and cargoes in enemy-controlled space.

  “I too have friends on the other side of Magaria,” Jarlath said. “Throwing away the Home Fleet will do them no good.”

  After the meeting came to an end, Jarlath wondered if he were wrong and the others right. One great strike at Magaria might well end the rebellion. The Naxids might not be ready. Jarlath wanted to make that strike. But the odds gave him caution.

  Eight days later, engines burned fire and piled on the gees as Jarlath swung his ships around Vandrith for the return journey to Zanshaa. He was traveling one-fourteenth of the speed of light, and would continue accelerating and performing slingshot maneuvers around the system’s planets until he was traveling at least .5c, fast enough to avoid immediate destruction from any of Fanaghee’s ships tearing out of Magaria at eighty percent of the speed of light.

  It was then that word came from Corona and Lieutenant Martinez. Having escaped from Magaria to the Paswal system, Martinez was at last able to send his report through a wormhole relay station that Fanaghee didn’t control.

  The Convocation responded to the news with raptures. Martinez, Corona, and its crew were voted the Thanks of the Convocation. Every crew member would be decorated, and Martinez himself would receive the Golden Orb, the empire’s highest military decoration, which had not been awarded in eight hundred years. Martinez and his descendants were awarded the right to have their ashes entombed in the Couch of Eternity, alongside the Great Masters. And a Corona monument would be dedicated somewhere in the High City, its location yet to be determined.

  The Convocation also reconsidered the matter of Captain Blitsharts’s rescue, and decided that Martinez’s participation was worthy of the Medal of Merit, First Class. As this decoration was not within their gift, they recommended that the Fleet Control Board award the decoration.

  The Convocation also passed on to the Fleet Control Board its recommendation that Lord Gareth Martinez be promoted immediately and given a command commensurate with his new rank.

  “Well,” Lord Chen said, “we can confirm him in Corona. There’s a vacancy, after all.”

  “But have you heard him talk?” objected Lord Commander Pezzini, the only other Terran member of the board. “He sounds like such a—an unsuitable person for command rank. An accent like that belongs in the engine bays.”

  “He is a Peer, however he talks,” pronounced Lord Commander Tork, “and all Peers are equal beneath the Praxis.”

  Pezzini made a sullen face at this, but he had learned not to dispute Tork on the subject of the Praxis. Tork’s ideas of the Praxis were, like the Praxis itself, firm, unchanging, and unyielding, and very much like Tork’s ideas about everything else.

  “Besides,” Lord Chen said, “I see from his record that his last superior, Lord Commander Enderby, recommended him in his final testament for promotion. It’s the custom of this board, as I understand it, to follow such recommendations whenever possible.”

  “It would be awkward,” said another voice, “if we don’t promote him. How could anyone employ him then? What captain is going to want a lieutenant who holds the Golden Orb?”

  “Let us vote on the recommendations of the Convocation and of Lord Commander Enderby,” Tork said. “Let it be moved that Lieutenant Lord Gareth Martinez be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Captain, effective from the date of the rebellion.”

  There were no dissenting votes, though Pezzini wearily raised his eyebrows. “None of his ancestors have ever risen this far in the Fleet,” he said. “We’re setting a precedent here.”

  Tork raised a hand, wafting to the board the faint scent of his perpetually rotting flesh. Chen raised a hand meditatively to his chin and surreptitiously inhaled the cologne he’d applied to the inside of his wrist.

  “Shall we then vote on whether Lieutenant Captain Martinez shall be given Corona?” Tork asked. “Or shall there be further discussion?”

  “Let’s give him the ship, if we must,” said Pezzini. “But can we station him away from the capital? I don’t want to hear that voice again, not if I can avoid it.”

  The others ignored this comment and voted in the affirmative.

  The Control Board dealt swiftly with other business. Lord Chen tried to vote with the board members who had been in their places the longest, even though he was beginning to develop the suspicion that they too didn’t quite understand what they were doing.

  The suspicion was doubled for Lord Chen, because unlike most of the Fleet officers on the board, he sat in Convocation as well. The Convocation had been in almost continual session ever since the day of the rebellion, and significant bills were being passed almost every hour. The Legion of Diligence and the local police forces had been given massive powers of arrest and interrogation. The Antimatter Service and the Exploration Service had both been militarized and placed under the Fleet, which was pleased to increase its administrative heft but hadn’t as yet made up its mind what to do with its new departments. Huge sums were being awarded in new military contracts, not only for providing supplies and maintenance to ships, but for building new ships to replace those already lost and the losses that would inevitably follow from battle. The building of so many new ships required expansion and maintenance of ol
d yards, plus creating new facilities for training the crews that would have to be put aboard the new ships. In addition, new maintenance facilities would be needed for the new ships, and workers to maintain the maintenance facilities, and a lot of work formerly done by Naxids would now have to be done by someone else, all of which would result in a lot of new hires.

  The Fleet had barely begun to cope with all this largesse. Large amounts of money were going somewhere, and all Lord Chen could be certain of was that none of it was ending up with him. He owned shipbuilding facilities perfectly capable of making warships, but they were all in the part of the empire presumed to be under the control of the Naxids. The world he represented in Convocation was now commanded by rebels, as were most of his clients and property.

  If Jarlath didn’t get the Home Fleet moving soon and recapture all that was lost, Lord Chen knew he was looking at something like ruin.

  “May I raise the matter of the petitions we’ve been receiving from my clients and constituents?” asked Lady San-torath. She was the sole Lai-own on the board, and represented the Lai-own home world of Hone-bar in Convocation.

  “Hone-bar is as close to Magaria as it is to Zanshaa,” Santorath said. “The inhabitants of Hone-bar are desperate to remain loyal to the Praxis, but fear the enemy. The Fleet has done nothing to protect them—there is only one warship in the Hone-bar system, a light cruiser that is undergoing a rebuild and will not be ready for three months.”

  “If we defend Hone-bar, we weaken Zanshaa,” Tork said.

  “If Hone-bar falls without a fight,” said the Lai-own, “the confidence of all the people in the Convocation and its administration—and the confidence of the Lai-owns in particular—will be badly shaken.”

  “It’s not just Hone-bar,” said Lady Seekin. “If Hone-bar falls, then the Hone Reach is vulnerable.”

  Lord Chen felt a chill prickle the skin on his back. Clan Chen had long been invested heavily in the Hone Reach, and he was patron to several of its larger cities. If the Hone Reach were lost, then Clan Chen was in for a huge fall.

  “The Reach must be protected,” Lord Chen said automatically. “We can’t let Hone-bar go.”

  “We have no indication that the rebels are moving on Hone-bar,” someone pointed out.

  “How would we know until it happens?” said Lady San-torath. “The rebels aren’t going to send us a message telling us where they’re going next.”

  “They could capture Hone-bar with a single ship, and the Reach with a small squadron,” said Lady Seekin. “Surely we can spare a few ships for its defense, especially since Lord Commander Jarlath isn’t doing anything with them.”

  It occurred to Lord Chen that Lady Seekin, the Torminel congregate, was from Devajjo, within the Hone Reach itself. He realized that he and she were natural allies, along with Lady San-torath.

  Who else? he wondered. Who else can help us defend the Hone Reach?

  Lord Commander Pezzini, he realized. The lord commander’s nephew, the current Lord Pezzini, was patron to at least one of Devajjo’s cities.

  “I think we should require Lord Commander Jarlath to defend the Hone Reach,” Lord Chen said. “Particularly since he’s not going to attack Magaria anytime soon.”

  Pezzini agreed, loyal to his family, though he brought no more of the board with him. Though four votes wasn’t enough to carry the nine-member board, Tork nevertheless agreed to carry the board’s concern to Jarlath.

  “If the rebels detach ships to the Hone Reach, they weaken themselves at Magaria,” Jarlath pointed out. He spoke to Tork during a meal break, when Glory’s acceleration had been reduced to .8 gravities, and relief warred in his body and mind with weariness and pain. He sat in a comfortable chair in his palatial dining room, eating in blessed solitude, a fine meal of lean meat with a side of liver and another of diced kidney, served warmed to body temperature in its own steaming blood.

  Tork appeared in holographic form above Jarlath’s right shoulder, an annoying little wraith. Even more annoying was the three-minute time lag between Tork’s words and his own responses. He got to watch Tork fidget as Tork in turn watched Jarlath gobble raw meat. It wasn’t comfortable for either of them.

  “The rebels may be weak at Magaria as it is,” Tork said. “Lieutenant Martinez came within an ace of hitting Fanaghee’s whole fleet with a missile. He may have caused critical damage to her.”

  “There is no certain evidence of that.”

  Tork didn’t wait to hear Jarlath’s reply before anticipating it and adding his own postscript. “Fanaghee’s force did not reply to Martinez’s attack for days. None of the ships undocked.”

  “When they finally acted, they fired over two hundred missiles,” Jarlath said. “That isn’t the act of a crippled force.”

  “It was only Fanaghee’s two original squadrons that fired. The captured ships weren’t ready.”

  “We can’t assume they’re not ready now.”

  By the time Lord Commander Tork’s answer came, Jarlath had finished his meal and gone on to dessert, some meaty marrow bones. He sucked out the contents and crunched the remainder with his back molars. His teeth were still strong, he thought; he had a lot of years left.

  “Lord Commander Jarlath.” There was an ominous, discordant chime in Tork’s voice. “You must do something. I have served the Fleet for over forty years, and I understand your reasons even if I disagree with them. But the convocates don’t think as we do. They want action now, and if you don’t provide it, they may order it, and who knows what form their orders will take? The vulnerability of Hone-bar has some of them panicked, and I’m afraid that some of the people—even the people on the Board—may not be thinking straight. This afternoon they were within a single vote of ordering you to detach part of your fleet to guard Hone-bar.”

  Tork leaned toward the camera pickups, his fixed, gray expression mournful, but his voice chiming with suppressed passion.

  “Hone-bar may declare for the rebels out of sheer terror, and the Reach will follow if Hone-bar defects. For pity’s sake, detach a squadron to defend the Reach, or launch the attack on Magaria and trust your Praxis-class ships to annihilate the enemy. I would prefer the latter, but I’ll leave it up to you.”

  Jarlath considered this appeal as his molars crushed a particularly delectable marrow bone. The blessedly low gravity and fine meal had given him a feeling of well-being, and he thought he might as well leave Tork with the feeling he had accomplished something.

  “I want to question Martinez myself about any damage he may have done,” he said. “In the meantime I’ll order a harder acceleration. If I’m going to Magaria, then I’m going to go in fast.”

  Jarlath gave the orders, unaware that he had just crossed an invisible line, the line between refusing absolutely to go to Magaria and a willingness to contemplate the attack.

  Once he had crossed that line, Jarlath found it increasingly difficult to return.

  THIRTEEN

  Most of Corona’s transit to Zanshaa was rather pleasant. There was some suspense at the start, when Martinez sent his report to the repeating signal station at the far side of the Paswal system and requested all the recent news. It was many hours before bulletins of the failed revolt at Zanshaa arrived, along with information that the Home Fleet still stood between the Naxids and the capital.

  Corona had a home to return to. Once he knew that, Martinez felt he could enjoy himself in his new command.

  He set watches and kept the ship at partial gravity for the first six days, allowing everyone a chance to recover from the exhaustion of fifteen days’ desperate acceleration.

  Except for the lonely crews of the two wormhole maintenance and relay stations, Paswal was an uninhabited system, dead planets surrounding a bright energetic star in the midst of a globular cluster. It had never been determined exactly where Paswal was in relation to anywhere else in the empire: wormholes could lead anywhere in the universe, and to practically any time. The video views of the outside were specta
cular, the cluster’s million stars so closely packed that they looked like a shining wall of diamonds. Paswal didn’t experience anything like true darkness, only a kind of twilight, with the near stars great fiery gems amid the background of brilliants. Martinez sometimes slept with a virtual rig projecting the exterior view into his mind, so that falling asleep and waking were both marked by the blazon of the night, and a million stars walked through his peaceful dreams.

  It was three days before he succumbed to the temptation to look at his confidential records. Tarafah’s key opened these, as well as those of everyone else, and it occurred to him that if he was to be the captain of Corona, he should be familiar with the records of his crew. So, virtuously, he began with the cadets, then worked his way through the warrant and petty officers and on to the recruits. There were few surprises, though it did startle him to discover that Cadet Vonderheydte had been married and divorced twice in his brief service career, which barely added up to three years.

  After this display of rectitude, Martinez called up his own records, and discovered that Tarafah had described him as “an efficient officer, diligent in his duties, though needing more polish in social situations.” The estimate nettled him. When had he ever been in a social situation with the captain? he wondered. Where had Tarafah formed that judgment? He thought about erasing the last bit, then decided it was too dangerous. Someone might look at the time stamp and discover that the report had been modified on a date when Tarafah was in the hands of the enemy.

  Vexed, he went on to Enderby’s report, which was longer and more detailed. “An officer of exceptional talent and ability,” it concluded. “He will have an excellent career if he can restrain his ambition from scheming for awards that would fall to him naturally in the fullness of time.”

  Now that, he had to admit, was fair.

  Martinez glowed, however, when he read Enderby’s final testament, in which he requested that the Fleet Control Board promote Martinez as soon as a suitable command became vacant. The old man had liked him, had done his best to assure that he’d be promoted…in the fullness of time. Perhaps even the transfer to the Second Fleet aboard Corona was aimed at assisting his chances: vacancies tended to occur more often on the more remote stations. In charity with all the universe, Martinez decided this had to be true.