Moment passed, he thought. Moment survived.
He followed her. Alikhan stood by the corner of the table, immaculate in dress uniform, white apron, and white gloves.
“Master Weaponer Alikhan!” Sula smiled. “How are you?”
Alikhan beamed from behind his curled mustachios. “Very well, my lady. You’re looking well.”
“You’re very kind.” She allowed Alikhan to draw out a chair for her. “What are we eating tonight?”
“I believe we’re starting with a toasted rice paper packet stuffed with a filling of whipped krek-tuber, smoked crystallized sausage, and spinach.”
“Sounds lovely.”
Sheltered beneath Alikhan’s benign presence, Martinez and Sula managed a civil, pleasant meal. The conversation remained on safe, mostly professional topics, though over dessert he finally managed to deliver an outburst on the subject of Tork. He’d had a lot of practice by now, and his diatribe was exceptionally eloquent.
Sula shrugged. “The war returned certain people to power,” she said, “and they were the people who had no use for us to begin with. What did you expect? Gratitude?”
“I hadn’t expected to be treated so badly.”
“We both have our captain’s rank, and our seniority. Even under the best of circumstances we wouldn’t be promoted to squadcom for years, so we’ve done better than we could otherwise have expected.” She sipped her coffee. “They’ll need us again, for the next war.”
Martinez looked at her in surprise. “You think there’ll be another war?”
“How can there not be?” She flung out a hand. “The Shaa put us all in the hands of a six-hundred-member committee. How effective do you think such a group could be in running something as big and complicated as the empire?”
“Not very,” Martinez said. “But they’re going to have the Fleet, aren’t they?”
“Maybe. ButI think that the only thing a six-hundred-member committee can agree on is that they should all have more and more of what they’ve got already. In the past the Shaa kept a lid on the avarice of the lords convocate, but the Shaa are dead. I think we’ll have war within a generation.” She placed her coffee cup carefully in its saucer and examined it in the light. “Gemmelware,” she said. “Very nice.”
“Fletcher had good taste,” Martinez said, “or so I’m told.”
“Fletcher had good advisers.” She put the saucer and its cup on the table and looked at him. “I hope you’re getting good advice, Martinez.”
“About porcelain? I depend entirely on your expertise.”
She gazed at him for a moment, then sighed. “A lot of it hangs on what you like,” she said. “You’re going to have to choose.”
Sula stood in her miserable metal office, looked at the pair of guns mounted on the wall behind her desk and counted the dead in her life. Caro Sula, PJ Ngeni, Casimir.
Anthony, her almost-stepfather. Richard Li, her late captain, and the entire crew of theDauntless.
Lamey, her lover on Spannan, who was almost certainly dead.
Thousands of Naxids, who almost didn’t count because she knew none of them personally.
Each death was a roll of the dice. Against the odds, each time she had come up a winner. For others, luck had not been so generous.
Now Martinez was coming again into her orbit, and she wondered if he realized how much danger he was in. He was the luckiest man she knew—the luckiest in the universe, she had once told him. She wondered if his luck could possibly overcome the ill luck that she seemed to carry for others.
Certain calculations could be made. Fertile Martinez had done his duty, and sired a boy on the Chen heir. Perhaps that meant that his family were done with Martinez, at least for the present.
She wondered how Clan Martinez would take the news if Martinez were to divorce the wife he’d known for all of seven days. Clan Martinez had most of what they wanted, access to the highest levels of the High City, and a Chen heir with Martinez genes. Sula also wondered if Lord Chen would object if his parvenu son-in-law were to decamp and leave him free to marry his daughter to someone with a more suitable pedigree.
Michi Chen also figured in Sula’s calculations, but she had been sent into obscurity by the Supreme Commander and had lost both her ability to reward and punish. She had become irrelevant to the situation.
Even if Clan Martinez proved an obstacle, there were other ways. Sula now knew people who specialized in such ways.
She pictured herself the perfect, doting stepmother, dandling the young Gareth on her knee, letting his tiny fingers play with her medals. Replacing the mother he barely knew, the one who had died so tragically…
Sula basked in that picture for a long, sunny moment, then rejected it. Bloodletting was not a suitable way to begin a new relationship. One wanted to begin with hope, not slaughter.
And besides, she never wanted to put herself in the debt of someone like Sergius Bakshi. Only the worst could come of that.
If things were to proceed, they would have to move in a more conventional fashion, with drama and rage, anger and passion, sorrow and betrayal.
With her at the center of the storm, rolling the dice and letting them fall where they would.
The two ships raced on, accelerating at a steady one gravity. Decks and walls were painted or polished. Meals were cooked and consumed. Parts were maintained and replaced on a regular schedule. Drills were held occasionally, just so the crews didn’t forget how to do their jobs. For the most part life was easy.
Communication with the outside went only so far and no farther. The wormhole relay station destroyed by the Orthodox Fleet, at Bachun between Magaria and Zanshaa, had not been replaced, and neither had other stations destroyed elsewhere in the empire by Chenforce and Light Squadron 14. Communication was perfect within the part of the empire formerly held by the Naxids, and that sphere was ruled absolutely by Lord Tork, from his new headquarters at Magaria. To reach any area outside that zone a courier missile was required, and the two ships generated no news of sufficient importance to justify sending one.
The halfway point was reached, and the ships spun neatly about and began the deceleration that would take them to Zanshaa. Shortly afterward they entered the Magaria system and rendered passing honors to the Supreme Commander on the Magaria ring. A staff officer sent a routine acknowledgment, and that seemed to be that.
Until, a day later, an order was flashed from Tork’s headquarters.
The message consisted of new orders for Sula. After testifying before the elite commission on Zanshaa, she was to take Fleet transport to Terra, where she would begin a term as captain of Terra’s ring.
It was intended aspunishment, Sula realized with delight. Exile for two or more years to an obscure, backwater planet, off the trade routes, which coincidentally happened to be the home of her species.
Terra. Earth. Where she could see with her own eyes the venerable cities of Byzantium, Xi’an, SaSuu. Where she could caress ancient marbles with her own hands and touch the most venerable porcelains in the empire. Where she could bathe in the oceans that had given birth to all the planet’s myriad forms of life.
Where she could walk among the carved monuments of Terra’s history, with the dust of kings clinging to the bottoms of her shoes.
And this was apunishment.
Sula could only laugh.
If Tork only knew, she thought. If he only knew.
Martinez floated through his days in a haze of calculation. Or perhaps fantasy. In the ritualized artificial worlds that wereIllustrious andConfidence, it was getting hard to tell the difference.
Sula was present, and tangible, and beautiful, and he desired her. He saw her every two or three days, but they were never completely alone. If he should kiss her, or even touch her arm for too long a time, someone on the ship—Michi, Chandra, a servant—would see, and within hours everyone on board both ships would know. When they were in company, he tried to avoid looking at her, so that he would never be betrayed by a spellbound gaze.