Walter Williams - The Sundering

As she breathed for Rorty, Sula felt her own heart throb weakly in her chest. She had to pant for her own breath in between forcing air into Rorty’s lungs. A wave of vertigo eddied through her skull. She remembered bending over another girl six years before, a girl who fought ineptly but persistently for life in defiance of the logic that proclaimed that she die. Sula remembered her own eyes scalding with hot tears. She remembered begging the other girl to die.

She remembered putting her in the river later, the chill swift water that rose over the pale, mute face, the golden hair that briefly brightened the water before it vanished into the darkness.

Delhi’sdoctor had died at Magaria, incinerated along with the sick bay and most of the ship’s medical supplies, so it was a Pharmacist First Class who answered Sula’s call. He was competent enough, though; got a breathing mask on Rorty’s face and cut open Rorty’s tunic to get an electrical heart stimulator onto the pilot’s pale chest. The cottony taste of Rorty’s mouth was on Sula’s tongue. When the pharmacist got out a med injector to fire a stimulant straight into Rorty’s carotid, Sula had to turn away as nausea burned an acid path up her throat.

She hated med injectors. Sometimes injectors figured in her nightmares. That’s why she used patches.

The pharmacist unfastened the cap that held Rorty’s earphones and virtual array, then put a sensor net over the pilot’s head to get an image of her brain. He studied the display for a moment, then began to switch off his gear. “Every beat of the heart,” he said, “just spills more blood into the brain.” He turned off the respirator. “You did very well, my lady,” he told Sula. “You were just too late.”

The stretcher party arrived and stood in the doorway while the pharmacist packed away his gear and twitched Rorty’s jumpsuit closed over her chest. Sula fought the sickness that was closing on her throat with velvet fingers. When she thought she could stand, she reached for the cage stanchions and pulled herself upright, then retrieved her helmet and gloves and returned to the command cage.

Rorty was put into the stretcher. “Let me know when you’ve…stowed her,” Sula said. “Then we’ll resume higher gee.”

“Very good, my lady,” one said.

She looked at Massimo, who stood with arms akimbo, a thoughtful look on his unshaven face as he watched Rorty’s body being strapped onto the stretcher.

“Massimo,” she said, “that was good work.”

He looked at her, startled. “Thank you, my lady. But—if I hadn’t dozed off—I might.”

“Nothing you could have done,” Sula said. “She forgot to connect the helmet monitors to her suit.”

Massimo absorbed her words, then nodded. If we’d got warning, Sula thought, Rorty might be a cripple instead of a corpse.

“Can you do both piloting and navigating duties till the end of the watch?” Sula asked.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Better get busy plotting our return to the squadron, then.” The squadron had altered course to swing around Vandrith, one of the Zanshaa system’s gas giants, and they’d have to pull some extra gees to catch the planet in time.

The stretcher-bearers had to tip the stretcher on end to walk it down the narrow lanes between acceleration cages. Sula thought about erratic blood pressure throughout the squadron, arteries eroding, blood spilling into brain tissue or the body cavity. Rorty had been twenty and in perfect health. Many more months of this and half the ship might be stricken.

Sula looked at the helmet in her hands and realized she absolutely could not put the helmet on her head, that if she couldn’t draw free breaths of cabin air she would scream. She stowed the helmet and her gloves in the elastic mesh bag rigged to the side of the couch, and then resumed her seat. With the back of her hand she tried to scrub Rorty’s taste from her lips.

She tried to think of vases and pots, of smooth celadon surfaces. Instead she thought of gold hair shimmering, fading, in dark water.

No matter how many pieces of porcelain she piped into her dreams tonight, she knew, they would all turn to nightmare.

The next day, heavy-lidded and ill, Sula declined her breakfast and confined herself to sips of Tassay, a hot milky carbohydrate and protein beverage flavored with cardamom and cloves. The aromatic spices soothed her sleepless, jangled nerves; the nutrition would keep her conscious, if not exactly sparkling.

“Have I mentioned that Lieutenant Sula is exchanging mathematical formulae with Captain Martinez?” Foote said to the acting captain, Morgen.

Morgen didn’t appear very interested. There were deep black blooms beneath his eyes, and lines in his face that hadn’t been there a month before. “That’s nice,” he said.

“She and Martinez are trying to reform our entire tactical system based on lessons learned at Magaria,” Foote says. “Martinez places great trust in her, it seems.”

Morgen raised a piece of flat bread to his mouth, then hesitated. “Martinez is consulting you on his tactics?”

Morgen found it surprising that Lieutenant Captain Lord Gareth Martinez—who after all wasfamous — was consultingDelhi ‘s most junior lieutenant in the matter of maneuvering his squadron.

Sula answered cautiously. “He asks my opinion,” she says.

“Well,” Morgen said, chewing. “Maybe you’d better share it with the rest of us, then.”

Sula didn’t feel up to delivering a lecture to her superiors, but she managed to stumble through a brief explanation without tangling up her thoughts too badly. Foote—who listened with great care and seriousness, and managed not to make a single sarcastic or offensive remark the entire time—turned the video wall to the Structured Mathematics Display and surprised Sula by calling up the formula she’d sent to Martinez the previous evening.

“I cribbed this out of your message,” he explained.

Morgen’s eyes scanned the formula quickly, then slowly went through it again, statement by statement.

“Perhaps you’d better explain in more detail,” he said.

Sula gave Foote a sullen glare of weary resentment, then did as her acting captain requested.

Martinez looked in wild fascination at the ten enemy engine flares registered on the display, and took an extra half-second to make certain that his voice was calm when he spoke.

“Message to the squadron,” he said. “Cease acceleration at—” He glanced at the chronometer. “25:34:01 precisely.”

Martinez returned to calculating trajectories. As Wormholes 1 and 2 were 4.2 light-hours apart, the Naxids had actually entered the system slightly over four hours ago, and were decelerating as if they intended to stay in the Hone-bar system. It was impossible to be precise about their current location, but it appeared they were heading slightly away from Martinez’s force, intending to swing around Hone-bar’s sun and slingshot around toward the planet. They would, in time, see Martinez’s squadron enter hot, with blazing engine flares and pounding radars, and know the new arrivals for enemies.

Martinez’s squadron wasn’t heading for Hone-bar either, but rather for a gas giant named Soq, on a trajectory that would hurl them toward the system’s sun, on screaming curves around three more gas giants, and then back through Wormhole 1 again and on to Zanshaa. They were heading for the sun at a much more acute angle than the Naxids, and if neither changed course Martinez would cross his enemy’s trail on the far side of the sun.

But that wouldn’t happen. The Naxids would pass behind the sun and swing toward Hone-bar and the squadron, and then antimatter would blaze out in the emptiness of space and a great many people would die.