The deceleration alarm sang, and Sula reluctantly opened her eyes and let the porcelain fade from her thoughts. She dragged herself out of her suit, then to the shower, then into a clean coverall. Supper’s flat food was eaten in silence. Foote lacked the energy to gibe at her, and she was too exhausted to provoke him.
Sula stuck a med patch behind her ear to help her through the next acceleration, then dragged on her vac suit while wincing at the sharp scent of the spray disinfectant she’d used to try to scrub out some of the odor. She would stand—or lie—the next watch in Auxiliary Control while her superiors tried to sleep, but unless the Naxid fleet arrived, or the Shaa came again, there would be little for the watch to do except stare at the displays while the preprogrammed work of the ship went on.
Twenty minutes into the next weary watch a message light glowed on Sula’s displays, and she answered to discover a message from Martinez in which he unveiled an entire new system for fleet combat.
Her weariness faded as she devoured the contents of the message. The mathematical equations on which the new formations were based was sound. As were the tactics, at least as far as they went.
Sula’s impression, though, was that they didn’t go far enough. Martinez’s ships would fly at a safer distance from each other, and the effective fields of fire of their defensive weaponry would overlap, but their formation was still strict. Martinez had replaced a close rigid formation with, in effect, a looser but still rigid formation. Sula sensed that it could, and should, be looser still.
She gnawed at the problem for long moments, then called up a math display. She started with the equation Martinez had sent her and then elaborated on it, filling the display with figures, symbols, and graphs in her tiny, precise hand, symbols immediately translated into larger numbers on the display.
She let the computer check her work, fed different experimental numbers into the variables to make certain everything computed correctly. As she worked there rose in her a growing sense of power and delight, a joy in the revelations she was making to herself. These numbers and the reality they described, she thought, had waited for ages to be revealed; but it was she who incarnated them, not another. Just as, thousands of years ago, someone had discovered the perfect curves of a Sung vase, a form that had always existed in potential.
When the fever of discovery passed, Sula sent the work to Martinez.
“This is my first pass at it,” she told him. “What I’ve done is add chaos to your formation—chaos in the mathematical sense, I mean. The enemy will see constant formation changes that appear locally stochastic, but instead your ships will be following along the convex hull of a chaotic dynamical system—a fractal pattern—and provided they all have the same starting place, each of your own ships will know precisely where the others are.”
Sula had to pant for a few breaths in order to get enough wind to continue, and she vowed to be a little more careful with her air. “What you have to do is designate a center point for your formation. The point can be your flagship, the ship in the lead, any enemy vessel, or a point in space. Your ships will maneuver around that center point in a series of nested fractal patterns, which should make their movements completely unpredictable to the enemy. You can alter the variables depending on what range you find suitable.”
She took another few breaths. “I hope Foote’s working at his little censorship duties right now and sends this on without delay. The math’s beyond him, I’m sure, but it’s hardly subversive. I’ll send more when I’ve had time to think, and a little more leisure.”
She sent the message, and then took a few more sips of air. The oxygen content had been boosted to keep the mind and body alive during acceleration, and in a world in which a free breath was becoming the most important currency of existence, the taste of it was like alcohol to the drunkard. Sula glanced over Auxiliary Command, which had been quietly humming along while she’d been dealing with Martinez’s equations, apparently without having missed her attention.
And then her eyes lit on the flashing alarm lights on the displays of Pilot/2nd Annie Rorty, and annoyance began to bubble in her blood. “Mind that course change, Rorty!” she called.
Rorty didn’t respond. Sharing the cage with Rorty was Navigator First Class Massimo, who was probably also asleep.
“Massimo! Give that lazy bitch a shove!”
Massimo gave a start that confirmed that he, too, had been drowsing. “Yes, my lady!” he croaked in his sandpaper voice, and reached to the next couch to shove Rorty’s shoulder. “Officer wants you, pilot.” He waited for a response, then shoved again.
There was a long moment of silence, and then in a frenzy of frustration and anger Sula called up the life support data that was supposedly being fed into computer memory by Rorty’s vac suit. Therewas no data. It wasn’t that Rorty had flatlined, it was that there was no input at all.
“I think there’s something wrong, my lady,” Massimo growled, redundantly.
“Navigator! Make that course change yourself!”
“Yes, my lady.” Massimo’s gloved hands fumbled to move Rorty’s data to his own board.
“My lady,” said the communications officer, “I have a query fromKulhang. They want to know why we haven’t made the scheduled course change.”
“Zero gee warning!” Sula called. The alarm rang out. “Engines, cut engines.”
“Engines cut, my lady.”Delhi ‘s spars groaned as deceleration ceased, as the vibration and distant roar of the engines faded. Sula’s cage gave a creak of relief as gravities eased.
“Massimo, rotate ship.”
“Ship rotating.”
“Comm,” Sula said, “informKulhang that our acceleration will be reduced due to the sudden illness of an officer.”
“Very good, my lady.”
Sula’s calling a pilot second class an officer was less than truthful, and many commanders wouldn’t have halted an acceleration for a life that didn’t have a commission attached to it, butDelhi ‘s crew had been so reduced that any of the survivors were precious.
Besides, Sula wasn’t going to lose any crew she didn’t have to.
Sula’s cage sang as it swung, the ship rotating around it.
“New heading,” Massimo said. “Zero-eight-zero by zero-zero-one absolute.”
“Normal gravity warning,” Sula said. “Engines, burn at one gravity.”
Sula’s acceleration cage creaked as the engines fired, and her couch swung to the neutral position. Spars and braces moaned, and shudders ran the length of the ship. “Comm,” Sula said, “page the pharmacist and a stretcher party to Auxiliary Control.” And she flung off her webbing and walked across the deck to Rorty’s cage and stared through the faceplate of the pilot’s helmet.
The young woman’s freckles stood out as the only spots of color on her pale, dead face. Though she knew it was hopeless Sula wrenched off Rorty’s helmet, revealing the plug that Rorty had forgotten to attach to the suit’s biomonitor that would have alerted the officer of the watch and the acting doctor to any number of common medical anomalies.
Sula tore off her own helmet and gloves and felt for a pulse. There was none. The flesh of Rorty’s neck was still warm.
“Massimo! Help me get her on the deck!”
Auxiliary Control had very little room between the cages, unlike the more spacious control room that had been incinerated along withDelhi ‘s captain. Massimo and Sula got Rorty out of her couch and sprawled on the black rubberized deck, arms and shoulders and dangling limbs clanging against the spinning cages. A heave of Massimo’s broad shoulders detached the top of the suit, and Sula pulled it off over Rorty’s head as Massimo, bulky in his own suit, straddled her thin body.