A Matter of Oaths

by Helen S. Wright

  Only Sajan, aboard Tariya, was showing any sense, and in her position at the back end of the convoy, she was handicapped in her attempts to gain speed by the ships in front, who wailed to Noromi whenever Tariya ran up to their tails. In Noromi’s place, Rallya would have used Sajan to force the others to increase speed, instead of giving her a warning about convoy formation whenever the wails became too loud. In fact, she had offered Bhattya’s services to perform the same function; a patrolship creeping inexorably up your rear end was a powerful incentive to accelerate. The hell with Noromi’s veto; if things did not improve soon, she would do it anyway.

  The view on the small screen altered as Rafe focused on the large cluster of asteroids in the trojan point of one of the system’s gas giants, altered again to scan to the limits of Bhattya’s sensors. He learned well, Rallya thought approvingly. Aware of the obvious, but not concentrating on it to the exclusion of other possibilities. The asteroids would make a good hiding place for one or two raiders. Noromi was aware of that and had positioned both of the other patrolships to cover it. Bhattya, above the plane that held asteroids and convoy, was equally well placed to meet an attack from the asteroids or from the three other sectors within her reach.

  Rallya narrowed her eyes as she calculated how well placed they were. They had gradually moved out from the position she had left them in at the end of her shift, three hours ago. Accident, or Rafe thinking ahead? The latter, she conceded grudgingly. As she watched, he continued to flick between the long range scan and the asteroids.

  “Rafe showing off again?” Elanis said quietly from behind her seat. He had learned not to make such comments for everyone to hear—Joshim had reduced him to incoherence with a few well-chosen words the first time that he did so—but he continued to make them to Rallya in private, taking her sparring with Rafe as encouragement.

  “Trying to emulate his father,” Rallya suggested. Rafe had not mentioned Sajan’s information since that day, made no attempt to discover what Rallya knew. It would be interesting to see how he reacted to this pestilent aristo apparently knowing more than he did, and she could rely on Elanis to use what she told him.

  “His father?” Elanis rose to the bait beautifully.

  “Some aristo in the New Empire. Commander Buhklir. Sajan, aboard Tariya, knew him before she came across the Zone.” Rallya smiled happily. “Did you know he was an aristo too?”

  “He’s never mentioned his past,” Elanis said stiffly. “No doubt he’s an unacknowledged son.”

  “Ask him,” Rallya suggested. “If he is, that’s another advantage he has over you. Looks, skill, intelligence and he isn’t an aristo. What more could anybody ask for?”

  Elanis fell silent, lacking the wit to respond in any way that would not be insubordinate. Rallya had not yet forgiven Joshim for moving Churi from her team into Rafe’s and replacing him with a lazy lump of bone and blubber; the first opening that Elanis gave her, he would be off Bhattya. Joshim had filed a request to transfer him the day after he arrived, but Rallya would not rely upon the goodwill of some assignment clerk. She would push him into insubordination sooner or later; he did not have Rafe’s fine judgement of where the line lay. She grinned, admitting to herself that the line for Rafe was not in the same place as it was for everybody else. She had not had so much fun with her clothes on in years, and she would not hamper Rafe with rules.

  Rafe’s main view had changed again, picking out a lone asteroid above and to one side of the convoy. Rallya stiffened as he tightened the focus and switched to a large scale mass-contour chart. Yes, that discrepancy could be a raider, well hidden and waiting to pick off the tail-end ship of the convoy with a tight tractor-beam before a preset jump; that was how she would do it in their place.

  As she pushed herself out of her seat, the primary alert sounded and she swore. No time to get into the web; Vidar would have to handle it alone. No, not Vidar, Rafe. The teams could not switch roles now, not without wasting seconds that would let the raider escape. As she sat down again, still cursing, Rafe started the tight turn that would take Bhattya after the raider.

  Joshim displaced Lilimya from the seat beside Rallya, blatantly disregarding the alert; he had not been in the web-room when it sounded, should have stayed where he was. The raider was moving away from the asteroid, trying to get out of its mass shadow in order to jump. A beautiful ship, built for speed and stealth. Rallya cursed the historians, for their failure to identify the source of such a ship, and the diplomats, for their repeated failure to make peaceful contact. If they could do their jobs properly, there would be no need for this.

  Rafe had calculated the turn beautifully, second-guessing the direction that the raider would choose to escape. The only questions were the timing and the range of the raider’s weapons. Rafe did not have the shields up, could not put them up before the turn was complete without risking the loss of the steering vanes. If they completed their turn before they were within the raider’s range, and if the raider was unable to jump before they were within Bhattya’s range … Rallya ran the calculations in her head and came up with a question mark.

  “If Rafe snaps one of the vanes, Vidar will be furious,” she remarked for the benefit of her audience. Rasil tittered until Fadir hushed him.

  They were coming out of the turn now, the vanes that had been flattened against the hull straightening, restoring the spherical symmetry of the drive field. Vidar’s team were easing into control of more and more functions, careful not to disturb the working of Rafe’s team but relieving them of background tasks and allowing them to concentrate on weapons, shields and timing. Rallya sustained the effort necessary not to hold her breath until Rafe raised the shields.

  He did it later than she would have done, perhaps making his own balance between the slight loss of speed and the increased safety, and perhaps catching the first signs of the raider preparing to fire: the temperature increases along their hull, the minor adjustments in orientation. When the raider did fire, he resisted the temptation to fire back immediately, letting the shields take the battering they were designed to take, using the time to decrease the range. Yes, Rallya urged. They must stop firing and lower their shields before they jump. Wait for that moment, when there is nothing to confuse your aim, neither their fire nor the backwash of your own, and nothing to protect them except the favour of their gods.

  He waited, as if he could hear her, and at the moment that the raider prepared to jump, he fired. One shot, as if he would do it neatly or not at all. A square hit, and where there had been a shining hull, there was a spreading mess of metal. Fadir gave a whoop of triumph.

  “Fadir, go calculate how many crew that ship could carry.” Rallya snarled the order without taking her attention from the screens. Rafe had switched again to long range scan. Emperors, as if he had done this hundreds of times before, Rallya thought disbelievingly. He should have been reacting like Fadir, exulting in his victory, not immediately wary of another attack. How in hell was he managing to do everything so right?

  “I’ll take my team up,” Joshim decided, standing up. “We can be ready to relieve them as soon as Rafe gives the signal.”

  Rallya grunted agreement. “I’ll bleep Jualla and her team, send them up too.” The messager alarm was flashing insistently. “Congratulations from our Convoy Commander and his grateful charges,” she predicted. “Wonderful how fast they’ve all started to move now.”

  “Rafe down?” Rallya asked Vidar as he entered the rest-room.

  “Yes. In the web-room, drinking alcad.” Vidar chuckled. “I’m surprised you weren’t out there to jump on him as soon as he came down.”

  “Why should I want to do that?”

  “I can’t imagine. He didn’t do a thing wrong, but that doesn’t usually stop you.” Vidar was in a high good humour.

  Rallya ignored the jibe, knowing when Vidar was teasing. “And now he’s basking in applause from everyone who knows no better,” she predicted.

  Vidar shook his head.
“He stopped that just as soon as it started. Asked Churi how many people he’d helped to kill today. Everybody else took the hint. Except Elanis. He accused Rafe of being an Outie sympathizer. Got most upset when Rafe reminded him that his family had been Outies three generations ago. Called Rafe an upstart chance-child whose only talent was for bending his back in the Webmaster’s bed.” Vidar had obviously relished the confrontation, was repeating it word for word.

  “So you put him on a charge?” Rallya said hopefully.

  Vidar shook his head. “Wasn’t necessary,” he said gleefully. “Rafe apologized for beating him into Joshim’s bed and wished him better luck with you. Elanis was laughed out of the web-room.”

  Rallya grinned broadly. “With his tail tucked firmly between his legs and likely to stay there.”

  She stretched gently, reflecting that the seats in the rest-room got lower every time that she sat in one, and more difficult to get up from. So Rafe was sharing Joshim’s bed, was he? That took a lot of doing. Joshim was too good a Webmaster to have a string of casual liaisons in the web-room, the way that Vidar did; nor did he do what a lot of Webmasters did, regularly taking every member of the web-room to bed as part of the process of monitoring their physical and emotional states. In fact, to Rallya’s certain knowledge, Joshim had only shared a bed aboard Bhattya with herself or with Vidar, and that infrequently. Although she had often teased him about it, she had to admit that it saved a lot of trouble in the web-room; his judgement had never been questioned on the grounds of pique or favouritism, and in eight years nobody had brought a problem to herself or to Vidar that should have been taken to Joshim first.

  “Just as well you didn’t put Elanis on a charge,” she told Vidar. “He’d have yelled favouritism so loud they’d hear it in Imperial.” She frowned suddenly. “Did you know about Joshim and Rafe?”

  “No.”

  “Which makes it the only pairing aboard this ship that you haven’t known about since the day it happened,” Rallya concluded.

  “True, but neither of them is the sort to post the news on the notice board.”

  “That doesn’t usually inconvenience you too much.” Rallya pressed her lips together. “If you didn’t know, how did Elanis?”

  “Lucky guess? Maybe Rafe makes a habit of it.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Rallya said irritably. “If you don’t know Rafe well enough to know that isn’t true, you should know Joshim well enough to know he’d recognize somebody like that.”

  “I’ve never known him when he was in love,” Vidar pointed out. “He could be as stupid as the rest of us in that state.”

  “Speak for yourself. And if he is in love, you’d better start worrying. Rafe will be ready for a Commander’s berth within a few years. Any guesses what Joshim will do then?”

  Vidar whistled. “We could lose him.”

  “We probably will,” Rallya said gloomily. There were not many established Threes who would consider an Oath-breaker as Commander, but the Guild might give a new ship to an established Webmaster with a reputation like Joshim’s and a new Commander with Rallya’s recommendation … She would give Rafe that recommendation, she admitted; he was too good for her to withhold it. And if she did withhold it, they would still lose Joshim. Hell’s teeth though: if Rafe thought that his relationship with Joshim would win him any concessions from Rallya while he was aboard this ship, he was going to get a nasty shock

  * * *

  It was not hard to guess who was knocking at his cabin door, Rafe thought wearily; he was only surprised it had taken her so long to arrive.

  “Come in, ma’am,” he called, turning to face the door but not standing to greet her.

  She halted just inside the door and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the room. “Pleased with yourself?” she challenged.

  “Should I be?”

  She picked up the reck nearest to her on the desk, looked at the label, tossed it back. “You didn’t make many mistakes today.”

  What would you say, ma’am, if I told you that I made no mistakes at all? That everything I did was the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons? And that it was all there in my memory: juggling speed against safety, judging the moment to raise the shields, the moment to fire. Even my web remembered the sensation of being in control of a ship’s web during combat!

  Rafe controlled another wave of nausea. He was not really remembering those things; it was the identity-wipe playing tricks with him again. He had witnessed another person in a similar situation; was not allowed to remember that person; could only recall what he had seen as though it was something he had done himself. They had explained it to him when he was still asking for explanations, in the early days. Maybe if he had asked them, they would have explained why he could remember how it felt. And why it made him sick to think about it.

  He realized that Rallya was watching him closely, as if she could see his thoughts written on his face.

  “Did you come to tell me about the mistakes I did make?” he asked with an effort.

  “No.” She tried the edge of the bed and sat down. “There were things that I might have done differently, but the result is what matters.” She looked at him measuringly. “Will you be able to do it again? Or do you not like the thought that you killed twenty people today?”

  “The time to worry is when I stop not liking it.”

  “Did Buhklir teach you that?”

  Rafe’s stomach lurched another warning. “I worked it out for myself.” He jammed his hands in his tunic pockets. “Was that all you came to ask, ma’am?”

  “No.” Rallya stood up and crossed the room to look down at him. “You’re shaking,” she remarked, lifting his chin with a single finger. “Reaction to combat? Or to thinking about your father?”

  Rafe pulled away. “None of your business.”

  “None of your business, ma’am.” She replaced her hand under his chin, turning his face up to the light. “And if it’s reaction to combat, it is my business.”

  “If you don’t let go of me, I shall be sick over you. Ma’am.”

  “Nonsense.” She released him anyway. “You’ve got too much pride, and the self-control to support it.”

  And I have been sick so many times since escaping from the web-room that my stomach is empty, Rafe thought ruefully; the only thing I have left in it is the urge to be sick. “There was something else you wanted to ask,” he prompted.

  “I came for your thoughts about that raider,” she said, taking the empty chair. “Did you notice anything that isn’t on record?”

  “Their cannon range.” Rafe seized the change of subject. “The estimates I’ve seen were twenty percent too low.”

  Rallya nodded agreement. “Must have been a third of their mass just powering those cannon,” she commented. “And if they were intending to carry another ship through jump with them, they’d need another third for the tractors. Not a lot left for drive, is there? Either they had no margin for error, or they came from somewhere just one or two jumps away.”

  “They may not have intended to hold the ship with tractors during jump,” Rafe speculated. “If they cast a wide enough jump-field, they could carry it through in their wake. That would have allowed them to get away with half the power for their tractors.”

  “They’d have to be hellishly confident about their jump capabilities. Get that stunt wrong and you lose yourself for good.”

  “The F’sair used it regularly,” Rafe pointed out. “Took a lot of ships before the cargoships learned to flick their own jump-field on to turn the jump wild. That stopped the raids within half a year. For the F’sair, dying in battle is a lucky death: their gods carry them straight to heaven; but if they get lost during jump, their gods can’t ever find them and they’re condemned to hell.” He balled his fists in his pockets, forcing fingernails into palms, a futile effort to drive away the vivid images of the interior of a F’sair warship, of a meal shared with a F’sair war-leader. Impossible. Imagina
tion, not memory, he told himself desperately.

  “Useless set of gods they’ve got,” Rallya commented. “I doubt our Outsiders share the same ones, but the thought about the wild jumps is worth passing on. Buhklir had you taught well.” She raised both eyebrows. “Did you know that you turn a fetching shade of grey whenever I mention his name?”

  “I’m glad you find it amusing, ma’am,” Rafe managed.

  “Interesting, not amusing,” she corrected him. “Is it part of the conditioning that goes with identity-wipe?”

  Rafe shrugged. “I presume so, ma’am, although I haven’t experienced it before.”

  “You haven’t had any knowledge about your past before,” she pointed out. “And it has to be something that operates very infrequently, or you’d be useless as a webber.” She rose to her feet. “You’d better get some sleep. You look like death, and you’re due back in the web in five hours.” She grinned. “I’ll send Joshim down, shall I? In his capacity as ship’s surgeon, of course. The shape you’re in, you’ll have no other use for him.”

  * * *

  “Into bed with you,” Joshim said firmly, as soon as an ash-coloured Rafe closed the door behind him.

  Rafe gave him a tight smile. “What for? We both know I won’t sleep. Or only long enough to wake up yelling.”

  “Bed,” Joshim repeated. “This is your Webmaster speaking.” He gave Rafe a gentle push in the right direction. “Is it just nausea?”

  “What did the Commander say?”

  “That I should come and hold your hand while you threw up.” Joshim frowned. “Are you fit to web your next shift?”