Not caring helps, she thought. She could bet everything on a single throw of the dice because the results didn’t matter to her.
Perhaps she’d be accused of conspiring to murder Lady Trani.
Perhaps Lady Trani was but the first governor of Zanshaa she’d have to kill.
Perhaps she’d even be promoted to Captain. She was open to that sort of surprise.
Tork showed that he’d learned Sula’s lesson, and promoted her to Captain, though he couldn’t bring himself to do it in person—the message came from a staff officer. Sula sent to her tailor for new uniforms.
Her mastery of the Records Office computers proved a bonus. Fictional killers were created, their names proclaimed to the public at large, and police sent after them.
She decided to keep the back door into the Records Office after her term as governor ended. It was proving too useful.
She now was surprised to discover the existence of another loyalist force that had remained behind, one that she’d never guessed at.
There were small stay-behind intelligence teams in the fragments of Zanshaa’s demolished ring, floating weightless for months, listening to electronic communications and forwarding it to the Convocation and the Fleet, relaying it through stealthy, uncharted satellites placed on the far sides of the wormholes. Sula surmised that they must have been providing Lord Tork with very detailed knowledge of the Naxid Fleet throughout the enemy occupation of Zanshaa.
The teams asked Sula for relief. She wanted to oblige—particularly since the highest-ranking of them was a warrant officer and there was no danger of them trying to supplant her—but the only way she had of relieving them was to pick them up with shuttles, and since the only shuttles she had on the planet were configured for Naxid crews, she had to tell them to wait.
Perhaps, she thought, she’d overestimated Lady Trani. She hadn’t been reporting behind her back to Lord Tork, it had been the intelligence teams on the ring.
Two days after Lady Trani’s death, as frozen sleet pounded the High City, regular communication was opened between the empire and Zanshaa. Another wave of Tork’s commandos had been launched at the relay stations, and this time there was no Naxid fleet to vaporize them.
After months of silence, massive amounts of information began to flood into Zanshaa. Messages, held in some remote electronic buffers for ages, now poured into the private files of Zanshaa’s citizens: information about relatives and loved ones, births and deaths, money and markets. The capital went mad with rejoicing.
Sula received very little personal mail. A kind note from Lord Durward Li, a former client of the Sula clan whose son, Sula’s captain, had died at Magaria. A formal change of address notice from Morgen, who had been the senior surviving lieutenant of theDelhi, and who had been promoted to Lieutenant Captain.
Two queries from Lady Terza Chen, Martinez’s wife, asking where she was and how she was faring. Terza also happened to mention that she was pregnant with Martinez’s child.
Hatred exploded in Sula’s breast. She erased the messages and hoped that, through some kind of sympathetic magic, Terza would be erased along with them.
Among the news items was the information that the Convocation had appointed a new governor of Zanshaa, Lord Eldey, who had been in transit from Laredo to Zanshaa for nearly two months and would arrive in something like twenty days. Sula checked the capital’s copious data banks and found that the head of the Eldey clan was a sixty-one-year-old Torminel and had chaired the Power, Antimatter, and Ring Committee in the Convocation. Between that connection to extraplanetary matters and a nephew who was a captain in the Fleet, perhaps he would have a more sympathetic view of an upstart young officer than someone like Tork.
It seemed worth a try anyway. Sula sent him a complete report of the state of Zanshaa, along with a brief history of her activities and those of the secret army. She also enclosed advice on how to treat the army and the various interests that it represented.
The report, minus the advice, also went to the Convocation and to the Fleet Control Board. She wanted them to see her own words and her own achievements without being filtered through Tork.
To her immense surprise, a reply came from Eldey two days later. The camera showed him in an elaborate acceleration couch, brown leather and silver mountings, and he was dressed informally, in the simple vest that Torminel often wore to keep from overheating in their fur. His voice was very soft, with a bit of a hesitation. His fur was thinning with age. He looked like a slightly worn, much beloved stuffed toy.
“I take your point in regard to the army,” he said, “and I quite agree with your solutions. I will confirm all amnesties and awards under my own authority. I think you have done an extraordinary thing, and I will recommend to the Fleet Control Board that you be decorated. I can’t help but think you have a remarkable career ahead of you.”
This might have been flattery mixed with a careful politician’s appreciation of the possibilities for his own survival—perhaps he meant none of it at all—but at least the words were the right ones. Sula began to think the Convocation might have made a good choice.
If she’d known a few days earlier that someone like Eldey was on his way, perhaps Lady Trani wouldn’t have died. Perhaps the planet could have endured Trani’s presence for twenty-odd days.
On the scale of Sula’s regrets, however, Trani’s fate didn’t rate very high.
Since it appeared she wasn’t about to be killed on orders of higher authority, she began to consider her own future. She went to a pharmacy, donated a drop of blood, and had her genetic code read. Then, with the nonchalance she was developing as an absolute ruler, she marched into the Peers’ Gene Bank, an ornate building of brown stone squeezed between two government offices, and asked for a tour. A flustered Lai-own clerk showed her how the genetic records of every Peer on Zanshaa were collected when that Peer applied for a marriage license, and how these were recorded in the gene banks that went back to the founding of the empire. She showed Sula how the scanned genetic material would be compared for points of coincidence to determine ancestry, if there were ever a question about a given person’s genetic heritage.
“Is there a backup?” Sula asked.
“Yes. In the safe downstairs.”
Sula tried to suppress her amusement. The priceless genetic record of the Peerage and its only copy were kept in the same building, and could be subjected to the same accidents, a fact that revealed a confidence that the High City, and the empire, would stand forever.
“Let me see the backup,” Sula said.
The clerk took her to a room in the basement and opened the safe. Sula had pictured a small, perhaps antique safe, but in fact the safe was huge and magnificent, all gleaming, polished metal. She watched her distorted reflection ooze across the door as it swung open. She and the clerk stepped inside. The interior of the safe smelled faintly of lubricating oil.
The data store, and its operation, were identical to those of the primary computer on the ground floor.
“Show me how it works,” Sula said.
The clerk obeyed.
“Very good,” Sula said. “Now clear out.”
The clerk stared at her with wide golden eyes. “My lady?”
“Leave. Take an early lunch, and take everyone else with you. I need to extract genetic information on some wanted Naxid fugitives, murderous officials who are escaping punishment for their crimes.”
The clerk’s muzzle dropped open in shock. “My lady. We can do that for you.”
“No, you can’t. I can’t allow you to know their names. It’s a military secret.”
“But my lady—”
“You know,” Sula said, “I could save a lot of money for the administration just by shutting this place down. It’s not like any Peers have been getting married lately.”
There was a scurrying for overcoats and hats, and the clerks fled into the slate-gray winter day. Sula locked the front door and sat at the control station. After a pause to savor the moment, she deleted all Caro Sula’s ancestors going back some 3,500 years, replaced them all with herself, then shut down the terminal.
She did the same for the backup.
Perhaps, she thought, that would finally put Caro to rest.