“I’m glad I thought to put you on the scene,” Martinez said. “But still, I could have got you killed.”
Alikhan put the shoe down and tapped the inactive communications display on his left sleeve. “I had Maheshwari on the comm. He would have aborted any accelerations if we’d still had anyone in the weapons bay.”
Martinez nodded slowly. The senior petty officers had their own networks, their own intelligence, their own way of surviving the officers who the Fleet had placed over them.
If you can find a master specialist who isn’t a drunk, isn’t crazy, and who retains most of his brain cells,Martinez’s father had told him,then grab him.
Martinez blessed his father for the advice, and helped himself to whisky from his private stash, the dark-paneled cabinet under his narrow bed. On taking command, Captain Tarafah had repaneled the officers’ quarters—and his own—with rich, dark mahogany, complemented by brass fixtures and dark tile with a white and red geometric pattern. Officers’ country was now scented faintly with lemon oil, at least when it didn’t whiff of brass polish.
Martinez needed the whisky, having just finished a double shift, standing watch in Command whileCorona picked up its pinnaces and spent missiles, and Tarafah and the senior lieutenant shuttled to the flagship for a debriefing with the other captains and the fleetcom. The neat whisky scorched Martinez’s throat, and he could feel his bruised muscles begin to relax.
“I’m glad we’re not in a real war,” he said. “You would all have been shot through with gamma rays.”
“In a real war,” Alikhan said, “we would have stayed safe in our bunker and used a different bank of missiles.”
Martinez fingered his chin. “Do you think the captain will find out what happened?”
“No. The jammed robots were repaired as soon as we secured from quarters. The damaged missile will be written off the inventory somehow—there are all sorts of ways to make a missile disappear.”
“I take no comfort in this knowledge,” Martinez said. He took another sip of whisky. “Do you think the captainshould find out?”
By which Martinez meant,Do you think the captain should find out that wesaved him during the maneuvers?
Alikhan looked sober. “I’d hate to end the career of a thirty-year man just short of retirement. And it’s the master weaponer who’d be blamed, not the footballers.”
“True,” Martinez said. He hated the idea of doing something clever and no one ever finding out. But getting the master weaponer cashiered would not endear him to Alikhan, and he found Alikhan too valuable to offend.
“Well,” he shrugged, “let it go. Let’s hopeCorona doesn’t get into a war before the master weaponer retires.”
“Hardly likely, my lord.” Alikhan brushed his mustachios with the back of a knuckle. “Coronahas survived worse commanders than Tarafah. We’ll get her through it, never fear.”
“But willI get through it?” Martinez asked. He sighed, then reached into the mahogany-paneled hutch beneath his bed and withdrew another bottle of whisky. “This might help your cogitations,” he said. “Don’t share it with anyone in the Weapons Division.”
Alikhan accepted the bottle with gravity. “Thank you, my lord.”
Martinez finished his drink and decided not to pour himself another, at least not yet. The example of the master weaponer was a little too strong. “Too bad it’s the only reward you’re going to get for saving the captain from disgrace.”
“It’s more than I usually get,” Alikhan remarked—and, with an ambiguous smile, braced in salute and left.
Two days later, after the last of the meetings in which the commanding officers refought the maneuver, Fleet Commander Fanaghee announced a Festival of Sport that would take place at Fleet facilities. Teams from every ship in Fanaghee’s command would participate, andCorona’s football team would face Magaria’s own champions from theBombardment of Beijing in a special match. Tarafah announced an intensified program of training for his team, beginning immediately, before the ship even docked.
When Martinez crawled off his watch that night, he didn’t stop at one drink. Or at two.
EIGHT
The bank was built of granite, a miniature Great Refuge complete with dome, probably to suggest permanence, but now, in the absence of the Great Masters, perhaps suggesting something else. Wesley Weckman, the trust manager, was a young man with a prematurely grave manner, though the style of his glossy boots and his fashionable bracelet of human hair suggested that his life outside the bank was not as sedate as his working hours.
“Interest has stayed at three percent in the years since you entered the academy,” he said. “And since you’ve returned most of your allowance to the bank since that time, I’m pleased to report that the total sum now exceeds 29,000 zeniths, all of which I can put in your hands when your trust fund matures on your twenty-third birthday.”
Which was in eleven days. Which made her, in Terran years—she had once known someone who calculated “Earthdays”—just past twenty.
Sula briefly calculated what 29,000 zeniths might buy her. A modest apartment in the High City, or an entire apartment building in a decent section of the Lower Town. A modest villa, with extensive grounds, in the country.
At least a dozen complete outfits from the most fashionable designers of Zanshaa.
Or one perfectly authentic rose Pompadour vase from Vincennes dating from four centuries before the conquest of Terra, conveniently up for auction at the end of the month.
Given prices like that, Sula figured the antimatter bombs had broken a lot of porcelain.
It was a ridiculous fantasy to spend her entire inheritance on a vase, but she felt she’d been working hard for a long time now and deserved a moment of complete irrationality.
“What do I have to do to get the principal?” she asked.
“A small amount of paperwork. I can do it now, if you like, and it will take effect on your birthday.”
Sula grinned. “Why not?”
Weckman printed out the papers in question, and handed them to Sula along with a fat gold-nibbed pen. Then he activated the thumbprint reader and pushed it across his desk.
“You’ve got my thumbprint?” Sula asked in surprise. “From all those years ago?”
Weckman looked at his screens to make certain. “Yes. Of course.”
“I don’t remember giving it.” She crossed her legs, laid the papers on her thigh, and read them carefully. Then she put the papers on the desk, raised the pen above the signature line, and hesitated. “You see,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the money.”
“The bank employs several investment counselors,” Weckman said. “I can introduce you to Miss Mandolin—I see that she’s at her desk.”
Sula capped the pen. “The problem is, I’m in transit. I don’t even know what my next assignment is going to be.” She put the pen on the desk before Weckman. “Maybe I’ll just leave it in the trust fund, at least till I make Lieutenant.”
“In that case, you need do nothing at all.”
“Is it all right if I keep the papers?”
“Of course.”
She rose, and Weckman bowed as he showed her out of his office.
What would she do with a vase anyway? she thought. She didn’t even own any flowers to put in it.
She decided to visit the auction house again, and say good-bye.
She should have known better than to permit herself certain dreams.
“Put him in the river,” Gredel said. “Just make sure he doesn’t come up.”
Lamey looked at her, a strange silent sympathy in his eyes, and he put his arm around her and kissed her cheek. “I’ll make it all right for you,” he said.
No you won’t, she thought,but you’ll make it better.
The next morning, Nelda threw her out. She looked at Gredel from beneath the slab of gray healing plaster she’d pasted over the cut in her forehead, and she said, “I just can’t have you here anymore. I just can’t.”
For a moment of blank terror Gredel wondered if Antony’s body had come bobbing up under Old Iola Bridge, but then realized that wasn’t it. The previous evening had put Nelda in a position of having to decide who she loved more, Antony or Gredel. She’d opted for Antony, unaware that he was no longer an option.
Gredel went to her mother’s, and Ava’s objections died the moment she saw the bruise on her cheek. Gredel told her what happened—not being stupid, she left out what she’d asked Lamey to do—and Ava hugged her and said she was proud of her.
Ava worked with cosmetics for a long time to hide the damage, then she took Gredel to Maranic Town, to Bonifacio’s for ice cream.