Sula faced the squadcom and braced; Michi shook her hand and welcomed her aboard. A tall, bushy-haired orderly hovered behind her right shoulder, a young man Martinez would have been inclined to dismiss if it weren’t for the ribbon of the Medal of Valor on his breast. He was taken off to be a guest of the petty officers’ mess, and Martinez and Sula followed Michi up a companionway to her quarters.
“Interesting decor,” Sula said, eyeing one of the trompe l’oeil archways in the corridor.
“All installed by Captain Fletcher,” Martinez said. “The artist is still aboard.”
He figured she wouldn’t rip his head off if he stuck to the facts.
“That was a Vigo vase in that still life,” Sula remarked.
Michi glanced over her shoulder. “Are you interested in porcelain, Lady Sula?”
Which led to a discourse that took them to the dining room and into the first cocktail. Sula had a mixture of fruit juices, and the others Kyowan and Spacey. Martinez, standing with tingling tongue and feigned nonchalance by the drinks cart, felt Sula’s clinical glance burn like ice on his skin.
Michi turned to Sula. “Lady Sula, I was wondering if I could review the moment in the battle when you moved your squadron to engage the enemy heavies. I have some questions about how you knew which of the enemy to choose as your particular target.”
Sula explained. Illustration would make the explanation more comprehensible, so the party moved to Michi’s office, where they could use the holographic display built into her desk. The tension drawn between Martinez and Sula began to ebb as they reexperienced the fantastic degree of coordination they had felt in the battle, the balance of movement and fire, subtlety and force. Sula’s pale skin glowed. Her eyes danced. She looked at him and smiled. Martinez returned the gaze and found that his laughter matched hers.
The party moved back to the dining room and continued the battle while plates, bottles, and napkins were deployed on the table like ships of war. Michi and Martinez described the Battle of Protipanu, and Martinez talked about Hone-bar. Diagrams were drawn in gravy. Sula recounted her adventures on the ground in Zanshaa.
“Weren’t you afraid of dealing with the cliquemen?” Michi asked.
Sula seemed to calculate her answer for a half second or so. “Not really. I’d known people like them on Spannan, where I grew up, and—” There was another moment of calculation. “Well,” she said, “it’s like with everyone else. You have to calculate your common interests.”
Michi seemed dubious. “Weren’t you afraid that they’d betray you and…well, just take everything?”
Sula calculated again, then grinned. “Unlike good Peers like Lord Tork?”
Martinez burst into laughter. Michi’s laughter was more strained.
Still, Martinez thought, Sula wasn’t being completely candid about something. He wondered what it was.
The scent of coffee floated through the room. The conversation went on well past the tail end of dinner, well into the second pot of coffee. During the long course of the conversation, and with Sula’s agreement, Martinez told her honor guard to stand down—she could leave the ship informally, with no inconvenience. When she thanked Michi, rose, and collected her hat and gloves from Vandervalk, Martinez offered to accompany her to the airlock.
“If you’ll page Macnamara to meet me there.”
Martinez did so. He walked with Sula into the corridor. It was late and nearly deserted; most crew were asleep. Their heels rapped on Fletcher’s polychrome tiles.
Suddenly Martinez was afraid to speak. He was possessed of the certainty that if he opened his mouth, he’d spoil everything, all the intimacy that he and Sula had just rediscovered, and then the two would have no choice but to be enemies forever.
Sula was less shy. She gazed straightforward as she spoke, her eyes not meeting his. “I’ve decided to forgive you,” she said.
“Forgive me?” Martinez couldn’t help himself. “It was you who dumped me, remember?”
Her voice was flat. “You should have had more persistence.”
She came to the companion and dropped quickly down the stair to the deck below. Martinez followed, his heart throbbing.
“You were very insistent,” he said.
“I was upset.”
“But why?”
That seemed the point. He had asked her to marry him, and she had refused him—with anger—and marched off into the Zanshaa night.
Sula stopped, turned, looked at him. He could see the muscles strained in her throat.
“I’m not good at relationships,” she said. “I was afraid, and you wouldn’t let mebe afraid. By the time I got over the fright, you were engaged to Terza Chen.”
“My brother arranged that without telling me.” He hesitated, then spoke. “I called you all night.”
She stared at him for a blank second, then reeled as if he’d struck her.
“I was upset,” she said. “I was—” She shook her golden head. “Never mind what I was doing. I told the comm to refuse all calls.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Martinez felt as if an iron hand had seized his vitals and twisted them. It was like losing her all over again.
“I…forgive you,” he said.
He took a step toward her, but she had already turned and was walking away, heading for the next companion. Martinez followed.
At the bottom of the stair her orderly waited, properly braced. The airlock door was only a few paces away. The words that were on the verge of spilling from Martinez’s tongue dried up.
Sula turned and held out her hand. “Thank you, Captain,” she said. “I’ll see you again.”
He took her hand. It was small and elegant and warm in his ungainly paw. Her musky perfume caressed his senses, and his nerves leaped with the impulse to kiss her.
“Sleep well, my lady,” he said.
And dream of me…
That night Sula dreamed of nothing but the dead. She woke after a few hours with a scream bottled in her throat, and knew that she didn’t dare rest again.
She used her captain’s key to openConfidence ‘s databanks and edited out all references to the blood pressure spike that had shut down the engines during the Naxas battle. Instead she blamed the engine trip on a power spike in a transformer, a spike caused by radiation from a near miss. The transformer was scheduled to be replaced anyway.
There were anomalies in the cover story, and there would be her footprints in the record, but it would take a fair amount of detective work to find them, and she suspected that no one would ever be that interested.
The whole point of the elite commission, after all, was to bury everything that had happened onConfidence. She doubted anyone would look at the official records.
She resolutely refused to think of Martinez as she worked, and did her best to ignore a prickling of her neck hairs that told her he was standing right behind her, looking over her shoulder as she committed a lengthy string of electronic felonies.
I’ve done worse,Sula told the specter.
Martinez, she thought, strolled through life profiting from the death and misfortune of others.
She, on the other hand, was thebringer of death and misfortune. Make the two of them a couple, and the implications were chilling.
If we are ever together,she thought with a shiver,one or both of us will die.
She sent the revised database to bed. It was over an hour to breakfast, and she was still afraid to sleep. She sat up readingThe Greening of Africa, another of her Earth histories.
She still felt Martinez standing behind her, silent and reproachful as the dead.
Martinez spoke to each of his staff in turn to find out if they were willing to stay with him afterIllustrious went into refit. He was allowed to take servants with him from one posting to the next, but he wanted to make certain they were willing.