Walter Williams - The Praxis

“I’m going to try once again.” Sula looked composed enough in her vacuum suit, but this time there was no mischievous twinkle in her eye—she’d learned well enough that this was no laughing matter. Admiration for her courage warred in Martinez with despair over her foolishness.

But he had to admit she did it beautifully—faster this time. She’d learned her lesson, her boat dancing in all three planes at once. And then the docking, the battle against the tumbling inertia of the yacht, and finally the great triumph in which the two boats flew, linked, through the silent glory of space.

Martinez wanted to shriek and dance. He even found himself looking at Enderby, as if for permission—but the lord commander sat silent at his desk, a slight frown on his face, absorbed in whatever he saw on his own displays. Dancing was not going to be a part of the program.

Sula’s next transmission showed a woman exhausted, limp in her couch, with locks of her golden hair pasted by sweat to her forehead. Martinez could imagine the battle she’d been through. But the gleam in her eye was back, and this time it was a gleam of conquest.

“I am going on board.”

The battle was over; now there was only the inspection of the prize.

When news came that there was no air in Blitsharts’s cockpit, Martinez’s heart sank only a little. Having had hours in which to think about it, he’d concluded that it was unlikely that the yachtsman was alive.

The next report came after the silence in which the airlock door cut off Sula’s transmissions.

“Blitsharts and the dog are dead.” She was back in the cockpit of her pinnace, floating within close range of the cockpit camera. “There was a leak somewhere in the cockpit, and his faceplate was up and he’d turned off most of the cabin alarms. I suppose you shut off a lot of alarms when racing—proximity alarms, acceleration alerts—and when the depressurization alarm went off, he probably shut it off without noticing what it was. At some point he released the dog from its acceleration couch, but I doubt he was in his right mind by then—he’d probably lost it just before that long acceleration burn.” She seemed to shrug inside her vacuum suit. “I will follow this transmission with the recording I made aboardMidnight Runner. This is Cadet Caroline Sula, concluding her report.”

Martinez watched in fascination. The Caroline Sula who uttered these words seemed neither the mischievous pilotcadet nor the weary, triumphant warrior, but someone somehow lost…almost misplaced in time, both older and younger than her actual age. Older, because she seemed timeworn, almost frail. Younger, because there was a helplessness in her glance, like that of a wounded child.

Had she counted so much on Blitsharts being alive? Martinez wondered. Or perhaps sheknew him, even loved him…

He was tempted to replay the transmission, so he could better understand why her reaction seemed so exaggerated.

“Lieutenant Martinez,” Enderby said.

Martinez gave a start. “Lord Commander?”

“Please convey to Cadet Sula my congratulations on her successful maneuver. It required both skill and courage.”

Surprise swam through Martinez’s brain. “Yes, my lord.”

“I have decided to award her the Medal of Merit—” Enderby hesitated. “—Second Class. Please have the necessary documents on my desk by the end of shift.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Enderby had been watching all along, Martinez realized. Watching the transmissions while he sat at his desk, expressionless as always.

Another idea occurred to the lord commander. Enderby continued, “Compose a document for release to the Fleet News Service, then send it to me for review.”

“Very good, my lord.”

“Oh—another thing.”

“Yes, my lord?”

“In your message, please admonish Cadet Sula for the inappropriate nature of one of her remarks. Official communications are not to be used for levity.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Martinez realized he would miss the old man when he was gone.

Enderby sent Martinez and Gupta home early so he could attend the football match between the crews ofThe Glory of the Praxis andThe Sublime Truth of the Praxis, two of the goliath Praxis-class battleships that formed the core of the Home Fleet.

Fleet commanders were often as fanatic about sport as any cadet. Sport was the closest anyone in the Fleet was ever likely to come to real combat.

Martinez had attended the games as often as not, but today he wanted nothing so much as a shower, a bed, and—come to think of it—a drink to help relax the kinks in his muscles. He stopped by the junior officers’ club on his way out of the Commandery and encountered Ari Abacha, fortifying himself before his shift at Operations Control. Abacha waved him over to the bar as he entered, and Martinez took a chair, wincing at the pain caused by that inhuman seat in Operations.

“Buy you a drink?”

“Thanks, Ari. I’ll have some of that Sellaree.”

A glass of ruby wine was placed in front of Martinez. It was one of the Commandery’s special tulip glasses, rimmed with the same glossy white ceramic out of which the bar had been shaped, and with a stripe of the same pale green as the carpet, a color scheme intended to set off to advantage the darker green of the officers’ tunics.

“Isay. Gare…” Abacha’s words were unusually tentative.

Martinez looked at him. “Yes, Ari?”

Abacha gave a laugh. “I don’t know whether you’ll be annoyed by this or not—I think it’s amusing, actually—but it seems you’re famous.”

Martinez raised his heavy brows. “I? Famous?”

“I’m afraid so. Do you remember yesterday, when that fellow from All-Sports Network called Operations Control?”

Martinez scratched his two days’ beard. “Panjit something, wasn’t it?”

Abacha gave a nervous laugh. “Panjit Sesse, yes. Well—things were getting busy, you’ll recall—and I was going to cut the fellow off. But Ididn’t — hesuggested that I keep transmitting to him, and it appears that Idid. Without thinking about it. He heardeverything. ”

“Everything,” Martinez repeated, trying to remember if he’d said anything particularly embarrassing.

“Everything up till the time my shift ended and I left. Everything we did was broadcast on All-Sports Network.”

“And the censors didn’t…?”

“The censors seem to have taken the night off. Maybe they were watching the football match—it was Lodestone versus Andiron, you know.”

Martinez probed carefully, like a tongue exploring a painful tooth. “I—We—didn’t say anything that…”

“Oh no.” Abacha laughed. “Nothing that will haunt us. You were quite decisive, in fact—sent your message to Kandinski requesting a rescue mission before informing Lord Commander Enderby that a situation even existed.”

Martinez’s brittle laugh was a poor imitation of Abacha’s, and his head buzzed with calculation as he laughed.

Did Enderby know? If he didn’t, someone was sure to tell him. But of course Enderby knew thatsomeone must have requested a rescue mission from Kandinski.

If only Enderby’s informant wouldn’t rub his nose in it, wouldn’t jog him with an elbow at the football match and say, “By all the virtues, Enderby, you allow your aides a deal of latitude.”

But someone was bound to. The fleet sailed not so much in the starry void as on a sea of rumor, an incoherent mass of information, speculation, gossip, intrigue, interest, and collusion. Martinez, without seeking them out, was nevertheless privy to an outrageous number of secrets, some of which—if true—were blood-chilling. But it hardly mattered whether they were true or not, they were things that the Fleetknew. It wasknown that the Naxid Fleet Commander Toshueen, finding his son disappointing, had cut off the youngster’s head and eaten it; it wasknown that Squadron Commander Rafi had ordered cadets to tie and beat him, and as for Enderby’s wife…well, a lot wasknown about Enderby’s wife.