Read Online The Praxis by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online

focused not on the runaway yacht, but on the heads-up display and the roll indicator. She kept nudging the boat’s roll higher till she saw it match the number that the simulation had predicted for Blitsharts’s yacht.
    Good. But that was the easy part. Her inner ear could adapt well enough to spinning on one axis, but when she began to alter pitch and yaw, the cockpit—which was well forward in the boat, like that of Blitsharts’s—would swoop and spin through a series of freakish arcs, as if stuck on the end of an erratic pendulum.
    Sula began to nudge the pitch control in her right hand. At first the sensation was barely distinguishable, but as pitch increased and the bow of the pinnace swooped in larger and larger circles, the vertigo built. Fear shivered through her mind. She might not be able to do this for long, possibly not for the length of time it would take to gradually increase her pitch and yaw.
    Do it all at once, she thought. She added yaw to her movements, both hands working now. She kept her gaze focused fiercely on the Runner, trying to ignore the wildly spinning stars in the background. The yacht’s complex motions began to moderate relative to her pinnace, until Midnight Runner finally stood still in her vision, the bow no longer lunging at her but simply hanging there against the pirouetting star field.
    Vertigo swam through Sula’s mind in a series of surges, like an inexorable flood tide. Her suit clamped gently on her arms and legs, forcing blood out of her extremities. Her vision was beginning to narrow. She knew it was time to get this over with.
    She nudged the controls to back her boat, stern first, toward the yacht. It felt as if her bowels were trying to climb up through her throat—Sula swallowed hard and shook sudden tears from her eyes. She was only a few seconds from grappling, and then she could wrestle both boats to a standstill.
    And then Sula saw whiteness blossom in the spotlights that illuminated the scene, and sudden horror surged through her veins. Maneuvering thrusters had just fired— Blitsharts’s thrusters. The yacht’s bow began to swing. In terror, Sula shoved both controls forward, trying to get clear—and then there was a sudden massive lunge as tons of yacht shouldered into her pinnace, followed by a horrid rumble and a hideous scraping sound that shivered along the hull. A howling alarm jolted her nerves. For several terrible seconds she felt the prolonged contact in her bones, and then she was free, away from Runner’s embrace.
    Her vision had contracted almost to nothing. She fought the ship’s pendulum motion by feel alone, battling the vertigo that swam her mind. She was only certain she had stabilized the ship’s motion when the blackness began to retreat from her vision and she saw the virtual world again with its displays.
    Bile stung her sinus. She shut off the collision alarm, turned off the virtual displays to bring her cockpit back in her vision again, then lay in her acceleration couch and drew one shuddering breath after another while she tried hard not to throw up. Probably the only thing that stopped her was the thought that her suit was much less efficient at coping with vomit than with urine.
    Eventually the urge to vomit faded, as did the thunderous crash of her heart. Sula opened her helmet and wiped sweat from her face, and only then remembered that she should have checked hull integrity before opening her suit to the environment.
    She went over the displays, triggered her pinnace’s diagnostics and found no sign of damage. Then she checked the exterior displays and found the long scratch on the pinnace’s hull where Blitsharts’s boat had contacted her own, the light blue paint that had been Kandinski’s pride scraped down to the pale resinous hull.
    Sula mopped her face again. She shifted the exterior displays to Midnight Runner , which was slowly drifting away while still