Martinez considered sending Sula a message to that effect. He could imagine her scorning the message on its arrival. He could imagine the contemptuous response that would burn across the intervening space between their ships.
But she had to do itnow . It would make a difference.
He was stumbling through his message, which he planned to illustrate with a frozen three-dimensional image of the battle with some hand-drawn arrows added, when he saw that Sula was beginning the movement on her own. She’d seen the opening.
“Cancel that message, Lieutenant Falana,” Martinez said.
Sula was doing just fine on her own.
As usual.
His own wedging was working. He isolated one enemy ship and hammered it till it vanished in a flash of plasma fire. He began moving to drive another wedge between a pair of enemy and the rest of the Naxid squadron.
At that point the squadron of converted transports fired again. The two Naxids that had been engulfed in the plasma storm from the destroyed ship failed to fire, but the remaining barrage was formidable enough, and it occupied much of his attention for the next several minutes.
When he next had the opportunity to view the battle, he saw that Sula and her entire squadron had vanished into a colossal fireball.
She had miscalculated. She had killed two of the enemy and then shifted the squadron’s center of mass toward a part of the oncoming plasma wall that she expected to cool and thin by the time she arrived, giving them all better sight lines of the enemy. But a salvo of Naxid missiles came racing out of a hotter part of the plasma wall and was hit by counterfire right in her path. She was flying toward a blazing hot, opaque, expanding sphere, and before long, Sula knew that she and the rest of the squadron would be blind.
Sensors from her own squadron showed nothing but a flaming hot wall in her path, butConfidence was still receiving sensor feeds from the other squadrons and the pinnaces. The feeds showed no threat, but any perspective on the engagement had its blind spots, and in any case the situation could change quickly.
Sula felt a growing obsession about the blind spots. She fired a volley of missiles into the hot spot anyway, in hope they would fly through the hash and find and locate any enemy missiles that might be about to plunge into the cloud from the other side.
Right. Fat chance.
For a moment she considered a starburst—areal starburst, each ship clawing for maximum distance from the others. That would reduce the chance of them all being hammered while cloaked in the plasma sphere, but on emerging they would have surrendered any advantages that Ghost Tactics gave them.
No, she thought. Just try to get to the other sidefast .
She ordered all ships to blast through the plasma sphere at acceleration of ten gravities. The acceleration began as soon as they entered the plasma.Confidence groaned as the weight came on. An invisible hand began to close on her throat. She watched the radiation readings rise, and the hull temperature with them.
Darkness encroached on her vision. She felt the pillow press over her face. Perhaps she cried out.
An instant later the darkness seemed to fade. She was floating in her harness. A persistent, irritating tone sounded in her headphones. She tasted iron on her tongue.
“I have command of the ship,” said a voice. Belatedly she recognized it as that of First Lieutenant Haz.
Someone touched her arm, her throat. She flailed at him.
“Are you all right, my lady?” There was an edge of panic in Ikuhara’s voice.
Sula pushed him away. She heard the twanging sound as he rebounded off the bars of her acceleration cage.
“Display!” she called. “Cancel virtual!”
The limitless space of the virtual display was replaced by the soft lights and close confines of Command. Ikuhara, clumsy in his vac suit, floated over her couch. His face was a mirror of concern mingled with a touch of fear.
Something dark floated in the air between them, something round and shiny like little marbles.
“What the hell’s going on?” Sula demanded.
“Acceleration canceled,” Ikuhara said. “Health risk to an officer.”
At quarters the state of the crew was constantly monitored by detectors in their sensor caps. Any threat to the health of the crew—any cerebral hemorrhage, blood pressure spike, or heart malfunction—was monitored, and action taken in accordance with a preset program. If enlisted crew stroked out during a battle or even an exercise, it was usually the pulpy’s hard luck; but a threat to an officer could shut down the engines.
“Who was it?” Sula said. She’d have him off her ship the second they could shuttle the invalid away to a nice safe desk job, preferably on the most distant planet available.
Ikuhara’s expression suggested that he was suffering some gastroenteric malady. “You, my lady,” he said. “Your blood pressure was extremely high and—”
“Right,” Sula said. “Get back on your couch, I’m fine now.”
“You have a nosebleed, my lady.”
She put a hand to her nose and felt the wet. A blob of blood detached itself from her nose and joined the others in the air, a formation of perfect spheres. She could taste the blood running—floating—down the back of her throat.
“I’ll deal with it,” she said. She looked at the displays before her. “Haz!” she cried.
“Yes, my lady.”
“Light the engines! What is thisinsanity about cutting the engines completely during a battle, for all’s sake?”
She groped for a tissue in the necessity bag webbed to the couch.
“It was programmed, my lady.”
“Engine startup in fifteen, my lady,” said Engineer First Class Markios.
“Accelerate at three gravities.” Sula jammed a tissue to her nose.
“I am in command, my lady,” Haz said in her ear. “Your blood pressure is still—”
“It isn’t, and you’re not,” Sula said. “Three gravities, Engines.”
“Yes, my lady,” Markios said smoothly.
She enlarged her biomonitor display and saw that her blood pressure was returning rapidly to something like normal. Her heart rattled in her chest with fear, but at least it wasn’t in the process of giving her a stroke.
This had happened to her once before, at First Magaria. There might, she thought with a burning resentment, be something wrong with her heart or its wiring that would make it impossible for her to stand high gees.
Make it impossible to do her job.
The engines caught and snarled. The droplets of blood in the air fell like hail, and spattered the breast of her vac suit.
Gravities swung Sula’s couch through a series of decreasing arcs. Her blood pressure elevated slightly with the gravities, but within acceptable limits.