“Yes, my lady.”
“I’d like to see him.”
Because all pallets and stretchers were required for the wounded, Casimir lay in the morgue on cold floor tiles. He wore only the bandages from his first operation and the twisted blue pastel sheet. The small holes on the right side, where the doctor’s equipment went in, had been neatly sealed by circles of pink plastic that looked like a child’s toy suction cups.
One-Step’s beads were wrapped around his hand.
Sula knelt by the body and looked down at the heavy-lidded eyes fallen shut for the last time. A vast storm of sheer feeling boiled through her, emotions rising strong and unbounded to the surface only to fall again before she could identify them.
I would have made you a lord, she thought. We would have gone through the High City like an angry wind, and if you had died then, it would have been because everyone was afraid of you, and of me.
I don’t know if I have the strength to do it on my own.
I don’t know if I’ll want to.
She bent to kiss the cold lips and to breathe his scent for the last time, but Casimir didn’t smell like himself anymore. It was this that brought the tears to her eyes.
Sula rose abruptly and turned to the surgeon’s assistant. “I’ll claim the body later,” she said. “Right now I have a war to direct.”
“Yes, my lady.”
One way or another she would be with Casimir again. Either she would come for the body and bring it to a glorious funeral—a cliqueman’s extravagance with a greenhouse’s worth of flowers and a Daimong chorus and a hearse drawn by white horses—or she would lie bloodless with him here on the cold tiles.
At the moment she didn’t care which.
One-Step and the Torminel bodyguard followed her out of the morgue. She turned to the Torminel.
“What’s your name?”
“Turgal, my lady.”
“You’re working for me now, Turgal.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“Dead, my lady.”
Sula hesitated. “Sorry,” she said.
“My lady,” the Torminel said, “I have Mr. Massoud’s will.”
She made the adjustment to her sleeve display. “I’m set to receive,” she said.
You’re going to need the money,he’d said, knowing he was dying. He wanted her to cut a figure in the High City once the war was over.
Maybe she would. Or maybe she’d convert it all to precious stones and hurl them off the High City to the people below.
Macnamara’s voice came to her headset as she was walking down the steps at the front of the hospital.
“My lady.” There was a strange urgency in his voice. “I know you want to be at the hospital, but I really think you should head for the Commandery.”
Sula told him that she was on her way, and asked him why.
“We didn’t have the expertise to handle the equipment in the Commandery once the Naxids were gone,” Macnamara explained. “But some of the techs from the ministry have been over there, and it looks as if there’s something going on. Something in space.
“It looks as if the Fleet is coming.”
TWENTY-NINE
The Battle of Zanshaa was preceded by skirmishes on a number of fronts. On seizing Zanshaa, the Naxids had also occupied all eight of its wormhole relay stations. They then hopped armed teams through the wormholes to seize the stations on the other side, giving them a view of all systems, friendly and enemy, that surrounded Zanshaa.
Since possession of these stations would also give them a splendid view of the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet as it burned toward Zanshaa, and allow them to estimate its course, velocity, numbers, wormhole through which it would pass, and its approximate arrival time, Supreme Commander Tork decided to take the wormhole stations back before they could supply information to the enemy.
Accordingly, before the Orthodox Fleet had even left Chijimo’s system, attack craft carrying highly trained and motivated assault teams launched for the five wormhole stations leading into systems still loyal to the Convocation. The teams were intended not simply to capture the relay stations on the friendly side of the wormholes, but to move through them and capture the stations on the Zanshaa side, thus providing Tork and the Orthodox Fleet with fresh intelligence concerning the numbers and location of the Naxid enemy.
The assault teams were equipped with the latest in zero-gravity weaponry designed to minimize damage to the stations—plastic bullets that would deform before punching through station walls, projectors to flood an area with fast-hardening foam to trap any enemy and render him immobile and incapable of resistance and flèchettes to penetrate gaps in body armor and inject a neurotoxin fatal to Naxids but somewhat less lethal to other species. The teams wore heavily armored vacuum suits with maneuvering rigs for maximum tactical advantage in a zero-gravity environment. They flew assault craft with specially designed airlock access doors that would override any internal airlock control, or could burn through station walls to create a new airlock if necessary.
If a station was damaged, the assault craft were equipped with repair facilities and enough bottled air to resupply the station in the event of decompression. The assault team members were cross-trained not only in zero-gravity assault, seizure, and other forms of mayhem, but in repair and in the operation of a wormhole station once it was emancipated from Naxid control.
The assault teams were the finest the Fleet could provide—dedicated, intelligent, and indoctrinated fully in obedience to the Praxis. Their officers were level-headed, capable, and flexible. They were packed into their assault craft already in their armor, injected with drugs to aid them in high-gee, high-stress situations, and sent racing for the wormhole stations at accelerations of nine gravities or more.
It was expected that the Naxids in the wormhole stations would see them coming. When in fact they did, they reported the blazing deceleration torches to their superiors. In response, the Naxid fleet at Zanshaa fired missiles that sped through the wormholes at ever-growing velocities, located the assault craft, intercepted and vaporized them.
So it was that Tork’s approach to Zanshaa Wormhole 8 was observed by the Naxids after all. Perhaps Tork had expected it and thought the high-stakes gamble with the assault teams worth the risk. His approach showed his commanders that he had at least learned a few of the lessons taught by Chenforce. The Orthodox Fleet was screened by over two hundred decoys, all resembling real ships, all ready to intercept any enemy missiles flung through Zanshaa’s wormhole at relativistic speeds.
Hundreds of other decoys appeared in other systems at the same time, all vectoring for the wormhole gates to Zanshaa. To Naxid observers, it would look as if five Orthodox Fleets were racing toward them on a mission of vengeance and annihilation.
The Naxids had nearly five days to work out which fleet was the real one, and though they might have, no relativistic missiles were fired.
They were saving their missiles for battle.
The first loyalist elements in the system were its own relativistic missiles, a long stream fired days earlier from the ring stations at Zarafan, Chijimo, and Antopone. They flashed through Zanshaa’s neighboring systems without having to make a single correction burn, thus assuring that they would arrive at Zanshaa undetected. They weren’t intended to destroy enemy ships, but to saturate Zanshaa’s system with furiously blue-shifted radar and laser bursts, their echoes revealing enemy formations to the Orthodox Fleet as soon as they arrived in-system.
Tork’s command burst through Wormhole 8 at the same hour that the decoy fleets from four other systems arrived through their own wormholes. The Naxids had been expecting them and their radars were turned off. No antimatter torches were visible—apparently, the enemy were moving in zero gravity, hiding somewhere in the system with their engines off. No ranging laser painted the Orthodox Fleet as it arrived, but there was no need—the Naxids knew perfectly well where they were.