Just before the pinnace oriented for the next deceleration, Sula triggered the boat’s radars to give her a better view of her tumbling target. Then the pinnace swung around, aligned its engines very precisely, and began the deceleration burn.
Again she felt the suit gently closing around her arms and legs, forcing the blood to her brain. Again the weight of many gravities compressed her chest. Again she felt the darkness gathering around her vision, the light narrowing to a tiny tunnel bearing only straightforward.
Again she felt the pillow pressing down on her face, throttling her half-formed scream.
Blitsharts,she thought,you’d better fucking well be alive.
Enderby had gone to bed hours ago. With dawn, a new shift arrived-not humans but Lai-owns, members of a flightless avian species. They were taller than humans, covered with gray featherlike hair mottled with black, and with vicious peg teeth in an elongated muzzle.
The Lai-owns had provided the Fleet with the only space battles in its long history. Every other species in the dominion of the Shaa had been bombarded into submission by overwhelming forces operating from the safety of space. Even those who managed to develop sufficient technology to get into space, like the primitive human tribe-nations on Earth, did not possess an armed presence sufficient to halt the Shaa for even a few seconds.
But to the flightless Lai-owns, space was just an extension of their natural environment, the airy realms where their ancestors had flown. They had spread throughout their home star system, and possessed the fleets to protect their settlements. Had they been able to discover and develop the wormholes that orbited their star, they might have been the first to contact the Shaa, not the other way around.
As it was, the Lai-owns gave the Shaa squadrons a bloody nose when the conquerors poured in through the system’s wormhole. They were natural tacticians, their avian brains adapted to operating in a three-dimensional environment. And the wars they had fought among themselves gave them a tactical doctrine based on experience. Their only disadvantage was the light, hollow bones that permitted their ancestors to fly but wouldn’t stand the ferocious accelerations of space combat.
The Shaa calculated on destroying resistance in a matter of hours. Instead it took six days to obliterate the last Laiown warship and issue a demand for surrender. One of the Lai-own innovations that had surprised the Fleet was the use of the pinnace, a small vessel that would shepherd attacking missiles toward the target and update their instructions faster than could the larger ships, which might be lurking back light-minutes out of contact.
The pinnaces were valuable tactically, but few had survived actual combat. In the years since the Lai-own war, however, cadets had begun to compete for the right to wear the silver flashes of the pinnace pilot, and it became both a status symbol and an entree to the fashionable and glamorous world of yachting.
It was a matter for debate how many of these cadets would have competed so eagerly to be pinnace pilots if there had actually been a war going on. Martinez suspected there would be relatively few.
As he sat with the avians in Operations, he found himself wishing that it had been the Lai-owns who crewed theLos Angeles, and not humans. A Lai-own would be able to use his complex plan for rescuingMidnight Runner with little problem, and with no chance of rendering himself unconscious.
Instead, an unknown human would do the job, almost certainly an inexperienced cadet. Martinez almost regretted having worked out a plan-if he hadn’t, the rescue pilot wouldn’t be in jeopardy.
During his long wait, he received two messages. The first was fromLos Angeles, announcing that, per the lord commander’s request, a pinnace had been launched on a rescue mission. The second was from the pinnace itself, a brief announcement, audio only, that his message had been received.
Cadet Caroline Sula.Martinez had heard the name Sula but couldn’t recall where. He had seen a Sula Palace in the High City, which meant the Sulas were an old family, Peers of the highest rank. But he hadn’t heard about any members of the family, either in government, civil service, or the military, unusual for a family ranked that high. He wondered if this cadet was the last of them.
He hesitated a moment, then used Fleet Commander Enderby’s code key to call for her file. Enderby might want a report on the pilot.
Oh my.Martinez, slumped with weariness in his chair, straightened to get a better view of Caroline Sula’s face as it materialized on the display. It was extraordinary-pale, nearly translucent skin, emerald-green eyes, white-gold hair worn collar-length. The picture had caught her with a quirk of humor at the corners of her lips, as if she were about to make an ironic remark to the cameraman. And the camera clearly adored her-Martinez threw the picture into 3D and rotated it, and Sula didn’t have a single bad angle.
Hope she’s not married,was his first thought. His second was that he didn’t much care if she were.
And then he noted the title that graced her official records. Caroline,Lady Sula. Why hadn’t he heard of her?
He paged through her service records. Unmarried-well, good. Her birth as a Peer had guaranteed her a slot in a military academy, and her record there was mixed-low grades the first year, better the second, top marks the third. After graduation she’d received good reports from her superiors-the words “intelligent” and “efficient” showed up a lot-though there were two comments regarding her “inappropriate sense of humor.” She had volunteered for pinnace training after her first year, and again won top marks as a pilot-her marks for high-gee and disorienting environments were good, and made Martinez feel more easy about sending her on this mission.
It seemed she was trying very hard to be a good, even outstanding, officer. But Martinez had to wonder why. The higher ranks of Peers considered it bad form to work this hard at anything. Someone with a palace in the High City should rise through the ranks without effort.
He thought to check Sula’s family, and there found his answer.
Both of Caroline Sula’s parents, high officials in the Ministry of Works, had been found guilty of conspiring to steal millions from government contractors. Nine years ago they and their associates had been publicly flayed and dismembered at the public execution ground in the Lower City. Their property was confiscated, and the remaining family banished from Zanshaa.
Martinez gave a slow, silent whistle. Sula Palace didn’t belong to the Sula family anymore.
Maybe nothing did.
Cadet Caroline Sula watched Captain Blitsharts’s yacht roll and tumble against the cold velvet darkness. She illuminated it with floodlights, and watched it carefully as it yawed and spun. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong withMidnight Runner, no obvious damage, no clue as to why it had run out of control. Not even a nick on its shiny paint.
Whatever was wrong was on the inside. Damn it.
She nudged her pinnace to a position on the axis of theRunner’s spin, the line along which she would have to creep in order to mate with the runaway craft. Proximity alarms blared, and Sula cut them off.
Maybe the alarms were right. The view didn’t look encouraging from here, with the yacht’s spinning bow lunging toward her with every beat of her heart.
She decided not to be stupid and to take some meds to inhibit motion sickness. She’d be sleepy after the adrenaline wore off, but that was better than being sick.
Or dead.
She charged a med injector with the Fleet’s standard antinausea drug and placed the injector to her neck, over the carotid artery. And hesitated.