The Praxis (4 page)

And I'm the bully,
Martinez thought.
I'm the wicked superior officer who torments his helpless underlings just to assuage his own pathetic feelings of inadequacy.

Foote, Martinez realized, had him pegged just about right.

Still, he thought, if he were going to be the villain in this little drama, he might as well do it well.

“Parker should learn that you won't always be there to rescue him from his own stupidity,” he said to Foote. “But since you've chosen to express an opinion, suppose you tell me whether Chee's maneuver will succeed.”

“She shan't succeed, lord,” Foote said promptly.

“
Shan't
she?” Martinez said, mocking. “And
whyever shan she not?
”

Foote's tone didn't change. “V11's satellite has altered course, but Chee didn't see it because it was on the far side of the moon at the time. She'll be too late to correct when she finally sees her error.” Foote's tone had grown almost intimate. “Of course, Captain Blitsharts seems to have allowed for that possibility. His acceleration isn't as great, but he's allowing himself more options.”

Martinez looked at the number one boat and saw the famous Blitsharts glossy black paintwork with its ochre-yellow stripes. Blitsharts was a celebrated and successful racer, a glit of the first order, famous not only for his victories, but for the fact that he always raced with his dog, a black retriever named Orange, who had his own acceleration bed in
Midnight Runner
's cockpit next to his master's. Blitsharts claimed the dog enjoyed pulling hard gees, and certainly Orange seemed none the worse for his adventures.

Blitsharts also had a reputation for drollery. He was once asked by a yachting enthusiast why he called the dog Orange. Blitsharts looked at the man and lifted surprised eyebrows above his mild brown eyes. “Because it's his
name,
of course,” he said.

Oh yes, Martinez thought, there was rare wit in the yacht clubs all right.

“You think Blitsharts will win?” Martinez asked.

“At this stage, it's very likely.”

“I don't suppose Blitsharts is a relative of yours, is he?” Martinez asked.

For the first time, Foote hesitated. “No, my lord,” he said.

“How generous of you,” Martinez said, “to mention his name in conversation,” and was rewarded by seeing the cadet's neck and ears turn red.

Chee crashed into V11's atmosphere, her craft trailing a stream of ions as it cut through the moon's hydrocarbon murk. She saw her target's change of course too late, altered her heading and burned antimatter to try to make her mark. Her bones must have groaned with the ferocious gees she laid on, but she was a few seconds too late.

Blitsharts, on the other hand, hit the atmosphere with his usual impeccable timing, burned for the satellite, and passed it without breaking a sweat. And then kept accelerating, his torch pushing him onward past his mark.

“Perhaps, Cadet Foote, you will favor us with an analysis of Blitsharts's tactics
now
,” Martinez said.

“Of course, lord. He's…” Foote's voice trailed away.

Blitsharts's boat stood on a colossal tail of matter-antimatter fire and burned straight out of the plane of the ecliptic. Foote stared at the screen in confusion. Blitsharts seemed to be heading away from his next target, away from
all
his targets.

“Blitsharts is…he's…” Foote was still struggling for words. “He's…”

“Shit,” Martinez said, and bolted for the door.

O
perations Command wasn't in the Terran wing of the Commandery, but Terrans were on duty at this hour, none aware of any emergency until Martinez burst through the door. The duty officer, Lieutenant Ari Abacha, lounged with his feet on his console, a perfect corkscrew apple peel falling from his paring knife onto the napkin spread over his lap, while the three duty techs dozed over the screens that helped them supervise the automated systems that routed routine traffic.

Martinez batted Abacha's legs out of the way as he rushed for an unoccupied console. The screw of apple peel spilled to the floor, and Abacha bent to pick it up. Footballers careened over a brightly lit field in one of his displays—he was a big Andiron supporter, Martinez recalled.

“What's the problem, Gare?” Abacha said from somewhere near the floor.

“Vandrith Challenge race. Yacht's out of control.” Martinez dropped onto a seat that had been designed for a Laiown and called up displays.

“Yeah?” Abacha said. “Whose?”

“Blitsharts.”

Abacha's eyes widened. “Shit,” he said, and leaped from his seat to look over Martinez's shoulder.

Telemetry from
Midnight Runner
had been lost, so Martinez had to locate the yacht by using the passive detectors on Zanshaa's accelerator ring. Blitsharts's yacht had cut its main engine and started tumbling. From the erratic way the boat lurched, it appeared that maneuvering thrusters were still being fired. It was possible that Blitsharts was trying to regain control, but if so, he was failing. Any input from the thrusters just seemed to add to the chaos.

And all this, Martinez reminded himself, had happened over twenty-four minutes ago, with the time-lag increasing as
Midnight Runner
raced toward galactic south.

Martinez asked the computer to calculate how many gees the acceleration had inflicted on Blitsharts's body. A maximum of 7.4, he found, deeply uncomfortable but survivable, especially for a yacht racer in peak condition. Blitsharts might still be alive.

A communicator buzzed on Abacha's console. He stepped toward it and linked it to the display on his uniform sleeve. “Operations. Lieutenant Abacha.”

The voice came out of Abacha's sleeve. “My lord, this is Panjit Sesse of Zanshaa All-Sports Networks. Are you aware that Captain Blitsharts's yacht
Midnight Runner
is tumbling out of control?”

“We're working on that, yes.”

Martinez was only vaguely aware of this dialogue. He told the computers to guess where
Midnight Runner
would be in half an hour or so and to paint the area with low-energy ranging lasers aimed from the ring. That might make it easier for rescuers to track the boat.

The reporter's voice went on. “
Who
is working on it, my lord?”

Abacha looked over Martinez's shoulder at the displays again. “Right now we've got Lieutenant Martinez.”

“Only a lieutenant, lord?”

“He's aide to Senior Fleet Commander Enderby.” Abacha's tone showed impatience. A pair of Peers were dealing with the situation. That should be enough for anybody.

Martinez called up a list of every ship within three light-hours of Vandrith. The closest to Blitsharts were the yacht racers, but they were still engaged in their race, and none of them were suitable as a rescue vehicle. While they'd almost certainly noted Blitsharts's exit, they probably were too busy to analyze the meaning of his trajectory, beyond being pleased to have one less competitor. The large tender that had brought the yachts to Vandrith would need to recover the other yachts before it did anything, and it was built more for comfort than for maneuver and heavy accelerations. And it would take twenty-four minutes for Martinez's request to reach them, during which time Blitsharts would continue south.

Martinez scanned the display and found what he was looking for: Senior Captain Kandinski in the
Bombardment of Los Angeles,
one of the big bombardment-class heavy cruisers. It had just finished a refit on the ring dockyards and was now accelerating at a steady 1.3 gravities toward the Zanshaa 5 wormhole gate, heading for the Third Fleet base at Felarus. For the next 4.2 standard hours a rescue boat launched from the
Los Angeles
could take advantage of at least some of the cruiser's speed in its acceleration toward
Midnight Runner.
Not an ideal position for a rescue launch, but it would have to do.

Kandinski was something of a yachtsman himself—
Los Angeles
was a well-polished ship, shiny inside and out, with a white and powder blue paint job Kandinski had paid for out of his own deep pockets. Even the cruiser's pinnaces and missiles had the same glossy light blue finish. Maybe he would feel an affinity for Blitsharts and his shiny yacht.

Martinez reached for the communications console, linked it to his sleeve display. “Transmission to
Los Angeles,
” he instructed. “Code status: clear. Priority: extremely urgent, personal to the captain.”

“Identify?” the automated comm system wanted to know.

“Gareth Martinez, lieutenant, aide to Lord Commander Enderby.”

A brief moment's pause, then, “Approved.”

“Can you tell me what steps are being taken?” Sesse's voice nattered in Martinez's ear from Abacha's sleeve display. Martinez ignored it.

Another chime from the communicator; someone else needing to talk. “We're very busy right now,” Abacha said. “Good-bye.”

“Can you just let us
listen?
” Sesse said frantically.

Martinez took a moment to run fingers through his dark hair, then twitched his collar to make certain it was in place. “Transmit, video and audio,” he said.

He waited for the flashing orange cue in his sleeve display to let him know that transmission had started, then looked at the sleeve button camera and spoke.

“Captain Kandinski, this is Lieutenant Gareth Martinez on Lord Commander Enderby's staff. The yacht
Midnight Runner
with its captain, Ehrler Blitsharts, is tumbling out of control, heading southward from Vandrith. There is no telemetry, and there has been no communication from Captain Blitsharts since before the situation started. He may still be alive but unable to recover command of his boat. If your situation permits, I should like to request that you launch one or more pinnaces on a rescue mission. I will send you the latest course data. Please advise Command your course of action as soon as possible. Data follows.”

The message, Martinez knew, was already being pulsed toward
Los Angeles
by powerful military communications lasers, but it would still be over twenty-four minutes before the red-shifted signal reached the cruiser, and at least that much time again before he would know Kandinski's decision.

Martinez added Blitsharts's real and projected course to the end of the message and closed the transmission. He tried to lean back, then swayed as he almost toppled from the Laiown chair. Abacha was talking to yet another questioner whom he cut off in mid-sentence. “Receive military communications only,” Abacha told his console. “Log others for reply later.”

Abacha turned to Martinez. “What now?”

Martinez rose from the chair and kicked it away. “We wait an hour or more for a reply, while you field calls from every Blitsharts fan on the planet.” Then a thought struck him. “Oh,” Martinez added. “I suppose we should inform Lord Commander Enderby.”

 

M
artinez was busy trying to analyze the way Blitsharts's boat was tumbling so that any rescue mission might better know how to dock with it when Enderby arrived at Command. The ring's optical trackers caught only reflections of Zanshaa's sun flashing on the glossy black surface of the yacht, hardly ideal data for an analysis. Even the 3D displays at Operations would be too small for the kind of detail he needed of a small vessel that far away, so Martinez got a headset out of storage and projected a virtual environment onto the visual centers of his brain. His mind flooded with an infinite, empty darkness that seemed to extend light-years beyond the limits of his skull, and he built a simulation with a picture and specifications of the craft he'd snagged, using Enderby's priority code, from the files of Vehicle Registration. Once he had the model of
Midnight Runner,
he created a virtual sun at the appropriate angle and of the appropriate intensity, then sent the model tumbling over and over again in a lengthy series of simulations until it began to resemble the flashing visual he was getting from the ring's optical detectors. It could be refined later, after he began getting reflections back from the ranging lasers he'd pulsed out along Blitsharts's presumed track.

Under normal circumstances, a Fleet pinnace should be able to rendezvous with a yacht like
Midnight Runner
with little trouble. The boats were approximately the same size, and were built for nearly the same purpose: carrying a single passenger very fast, through abrupt accelerations and decelerations and changes of course. In Blitsharts's case, this was to enable his boat to make the changes in vector necessary to win a yacht race; in the case of the Fleet boat, it was to avoid destruction long enough to accomplish its mission.

It occurred to Martinez that no one had ever performed a rendezvous like this. The yacht's rolling was wildly complex, as if designed on purpose to baffle anyone attempting to dock with it, and he couldn't imagine that Blitsharts could remain in that tumbling craft for long and remain conscious. There was only one hatch on
Midnight Runner,
and it was rolling over and over in a chaotic series of gyrations. It was forward of the center of gravity about which the yacht was tumbling, and there was no way a rescue craft could dock to it. It would be like docking with the end of a stick being waved in the air by an erratic child.

Martinez worried at the problem, his mind spinning as frantically as the tumbling yacht. He built a model of a standard Fleet pinnace and tried to maneuver it near the yacht, only to see it batted away again and again, one potentially crippling collision after another.

It seemed that if he worked really hard, he could help kill
two
pilots, Blitsharts and his rescuer both.

It was the scent of a bruised apple that brought him out of the depths of his study—Abacha's apple, or perhaps just the peel, lying somewhere nearby and reminding him that he hadn't eaten since his noon meal, over half a day ago.

He saved his simulation and pulled off the headset. “Ari,” he said, turning toward Abacha's console. “Got any of that apple left? Or any food at all?”

It was then he realized that the person he'd sensed standing behind him had far too much braid on his uniform to be a mere lieutenant.

“My lord!” He leaped to his feet, his chin snapping back. Agonizing pain clamped on his crotch, which had been perched on an alien chair for over an hour.

Fleet Commander Enderby gazed at him with mild eyes. “Carry on, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Yes, my lord.”

Enderby looked at the displays, which had been showing Martinez's solution. “A difficult problem, is it not?”

“I'm afraid so, my lord.” Martinez clenched his teeth against the pain. Whatever passion had seized Enderby during their last interview had passed: the Fleet Commander was his usual self again, keeping himself informed of what was occurring in his command, but content to let lesser beings work out the details. Martinez had never quite made up his mind whether this was a result of Enderby being profoundly stupid or profoundly wise.

“I fear Blitsharts has run his last race,” Enderby said. “I'm certainly not permitting a Fleet vessel to batter itself to pieces attempting a hopeless rescue.” Distant regret tracked across Enderby's features, then he looked at Martinez again. “Call the commissary and order something, if you want. Use my authority.”

“Yes, my lord.” He reached for his sleeve display, then hesitated. “Will you have anything, my lord?”

“No. I have dined. Thank you.”

Martinez realized he was ragingly hungry. He ordered soup, a salad, some sandwiches, and a pot of coffee. Trying not to hobble, he removed the Lai-own chair and replaced it with one designed for humans. Gingerly, he sat down and looked again at the simulation frozen in the displays.

His nostrils twitched to the scent of apple, and he turned toward where Abacha sat at his own console, looking at his own displays. The stiffness of Abacha's spine and neck, and the ostentatious way he went about his business, showed his awareness that the commander of the Home Fleet was standing behind him.

Abacha's handkerchief sat on the long console between them, the screw of apple peel lying discarded on it. Without thinking, Martinez reached for it—it was a reflex action for him to keep the Fleet commander's vicinity tidy—and he looked for someplace to throw it.

His eyes alighted on the handkerchief, the perfect corkscrew peel lying coiled on the white surface, and he froze.

“Lord commander,” he said slowly, “I think I know how this can work.”

 

T
he woman called Caroline Sula fought her way back from nightmare, from a sensation of being smothered with a pillow, the soft pressure filling her nose, her mouth, the screaming pressure in her chest building as she tried to bring in air…

She came awake with a cry, hands flailing at an invisible attacker. Then she realized where she was, strapped into the command seat of her pinnace, and fought the darkness more rationally, clenching her jaw and neck muscles to force oxygenated blood to her brain. The darkness that swathed her vision retreated just enough so she could see the cockpit displays directly in front of her. A total stranger looked at her and said, “You're going to have to
screw
it in,” and then the main engine fired again, the boat groaned in response, and panic flared in her as darkness once more flooded her mind.