Sula couldn’t stand still any longer. She walked the two paces to the outside wall, then walked back again, then repeated the circuit. “There are two ways to take the High City,” she said as she walked. “One is with guns, and we’ll do that in two days. The other way is with the right name, and Sula is one of the right names. You haveno idea how ripe the empire is for plunder. The whole place is tottering, and not just because the Naxids have got greedy. I say we turn pirate and leave the place in smoking ruins. What doyou say?”
She stopped her pacing and grinned up at him. Astonishment and confusion and chagrin and reluctant understanding worked their way across his face, each in its turn.
“I think you could do it,” he said in a voice of soft surprise.
“Wecould do it,” Sula said. “I’d need help. I told you I’m lousy at being a Peer.”
“Life is such a strange adventure,” Casimir remarked, and shook his head. He held out his arms. “How can I say no to becoming a lord?”
She stepped into his arms and felt them close tight around her.
There was a little problem with the Peers’ Gene Bank that she would have to resolve, the drop of blood she was required to contribute if she ever married and which could prove her an imposter. The drop of blood that had come between her and Martinez.
But the gene bank was in the High City, and if she won her battle in the next few days, the genetic records of the Sula clan could vanish in the aftermath. Any barrier to marriage would vanish with them.
It wasn’t just the cliquemen, she thought, who were now fighting for love.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance grew to thirty ships, then thirty-five, then forty. The Naxids at Magaria were known to have thirty-five ships, and many Fleet officers wanted to launch at once for immediate battle, but Tork continued his orbit of Chijimo and his drills. Martinez had to concede that Tork was probably right—if he was going to use the stodgy old tactics against a fleet that had already won a colossal victory against just those tactics, it was best to have a massive advantage in numbers.
The Naxids were reinforced to thirty-seven, the Orthodox Fleet to forty-six. Still Tork didn’t move. Still he continued to drill his squadrons and hector his officers with demands for obedience and conformity. Still he bombarded the Convocation with demands for a vast new wave of ship construction, not simply warships, but support vessels, shuttles for landing troops, and the troops to be landed from the shuttles.
Then intelligence reports indicated that the Naxids numbered forty-two, which—since it happened to be the total number of ships they were absolutely known to possess—conceivably meant that the entire Naxid fleet might be at Zanshaa. The Orthodox Fleet had grown to fifty-two by then. Martinez found himself begin to itch for action. Engagenow, he thought, before the Naxids could replace those unfinished ships destroyed at the shipyards by Chenforce and Squadron 14.
Tork was apparently immune to such itches. The Naxids were reinforced to forty-eight, which meant they had shipyards producing warships in places that neither raiding squadron had reached, probably including Naxas and Magaria. Tork then gained four new frigates and four heavy cruisers of the newObedience class,Obedience, Conformance, Compliance, andSubmission.
From the tenor of the lineup, Martinez suspected that Tork now had a hand in the naming of ships. “Logically,” Martinez told Michi, “the next in the sequence will be ‘Surrender.’”
Despite the reinforcements, Tork still declined to launch for Zanshaa. Martinez began to receive hints from Michi Chen—which had apparently originated with her brother—that both the government and the Fleet Control Board had lost patience with Tork and were on the verge of taking action—if, that is, they could make up their minds whether the action would be to replace Tork with Kringan, formerly of the Fourth Fleet and now Tork’s second in command, or simply to order Tork to attack.
Possibly Tork heard these same hints, because he announced that he would move as soon as he had been reinforced by another three frigates from Laredo, ships that were already on their way. By the time that happened, the Naxids had received five ships, and Tork’s advantage in numbers had fallen from twelve to ten.
Tork delayed for another four days after the Laredo frigates arrived—long enough, Martinez observed, for a query to be sent to the Control Board on Antopone, and for the return of an adamantine response. At this point Tork finally committed himself. Orders were sent to his squadron commanders, to individual ships, and to other Fleet elements in other systems.
The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance kindled its mighty antimatter torches, echeloned its squadrons, took a last high-gee swing around Chijimo, and hurled itself for Chijimo Wormhole 1 and the foe that waited at Zanshaa.
Sula rode the first of several trucks into the High City and took the Ngeni Palace for her headquarters. Maps and equipment were spread out on the dining room table. Portraits of Ngeni ancestors looked down in shock.
In the palace courtyard, screened by trees and shrubbery and statues of more ancestors, the trucks were repainted in Fleet colors. A pair of earth-moving vehicles with huge plow blades and wheels taller than a Terran already waited on their trailers. Members of Sula’s advance team began fitting sheets of improvised plastic armor around the drivers’ compartments.
Shawna Spence and a pair of assistants ripped out the interiors of a pair of cars that she would later pack with explosive. An entire truck bomb, her calculations suggested, would be redundant for the jobs intended—the cars would do perfectly well.
PJ Ngeni wandered around trying to be useful and generally getting in the way.
Elsewhere in the great city, combat teams were assembling. Or so Sula had to hope.
The sun sank slowly into a pool of hemoglobin red, signaling the end of a perfect autumn day. The fragments of the Zanshaa ring glowed in the darkening sky. The scents of the city rose on the still air: uncollected trash, dying flowers, cooking. Sula had her people gather on the terrace behind PJ’s cottage and assemble the mountaineering gear, the long lines laid out in coils, the harnesses and ascendors that would carry people and gear up the cliff face.
Before the escalade began, Sula made a scan in either direction with light-enhancing binoculars. None of the Naxid guards at the Gate of the Exalted seemed interested in anything going on below.
Her sleeve comm gave a chirp. She looked at the display and saw a text message: WANT TO MEET TOMORROW AT THE BAKERY?
The party at the foot of the cliff was ready.
Sula sent a return message—WHAT TIME? — then gave the command to hurl the long ropes over the parapet. Each rope ended in a bundle that included a climbing harness and the end of a safety line that would be belayed by one of the advance team on the terrace.
The reply was: 1301. Which meant that all three ropes had hit the ground without being hung up on snags or brush. Less than three minutes later Sula heard the soft whine of an electric motor, and a few seconds afterward the first head crested the terrace wall. A white grin split the dark face.
“Hi, princess,” Patel said, and two of the advance team rushed forward to take him under the arms and lift him onto the terrace flagstones. His harness was efficiently stripped and sent back down under its own power. Patel loosened the strap of the rifle he’d been carrying and lowered his heavy pack. Sula pointed at the Ngeni Palace.
“Go through the courtyard to the big house. We have some food there.”
“Thanks, princess.”