“It’s appreciated.” His bodily weariness had vanished under a surge of blood, but his thoughts were still torpid and his skull was filled with cotton. He was painfully conscious that she stood before him, brilliant and rested and desirable, and that anything he said to her was likely to be stupid beyond all credence.
“Shall I join you on your ride to the surface,” Sula asked, “or do you have more business here?”
“My family is expecting me,” he said. Stupidly.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been in touch with them. They told me when you were arriving.”
He and Sula were hovering behind the doors of the Fleet Records Office, blocking traffic, and then Martinez remembered that he was the senior officer and that it was customary for him to walk through the doors first. He did so. Sula followed.
Alikhan was already standing by the car, shadowed by the door flung up like a wing. “To the skyhook,” Martinez said. There was a knowing smile beneath Alikhan’s curling mustachio as he handed Sula into the car next to Martinez.
Alikhan and the driver sat in the front, separated by a barrier that one of them tactfully opaqued. Martinez’s nerves tingled with the awareness of Sula’s perfume, a scent that urged his blood to surge a little faster. Sula looked at him as they settled into their seats. “The rumor—which is pretty well official, I’ll have you know—says that you did something spectacular, and are about to be decorated. But we’re not allowed to know what it was that you did.”
Martinez gave a snarl. “It’s satisfaction enough to know that I’ve served the empire faithfully,” he said.
Sula laughed. “I’ve worked out that you blew up a bunch of Naxids, and that our superiors don’t want the enemy to know it.”
“You’d think the Naxids would have worked it out by now,” Martinez said.
“How many enemydid you annnihilate, by the way?”
Confident that she would not be broadcasting to the enemy anytime soon, he told her. She raised her golden brows as calculation buzzed behind her eyes. “Interesting,” she said. “That means our cause isn’t necessarily lost.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, still glowering with resentment. Sula gave him a curious look.
“Why don’t you tell me how you did it?”
So he did. When he finished, he sensed a degree of disappointment behind her congratulations.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I hoped you’d be able to use my formula.”
“Well. As tothat …” He raised his left arm. “Set your display to receive. I’m about to violate another security regulation.”
Martinez beamed her the records of Do-faq’s series of experiments. “Analyze them to your heart’s content,” he said, “and let me know what you think.”
Sula looked at her sleeve display and smiled. “Yes. Thank you.” She gave him a searching look. “You should be pleased as hell about all this, but you’re not. So who’s pissed in your breakfast?”
A reluctant grin tugged at his lips. “I’ve lostCorona. That’s no cause for joy. And then there’s my next assignment.” About which he enlightened her.
She seemed startled. “What happened? Did you steal some fleet commander’s girlfriend?”
“Not that I know of,” Martinez said, and then found himself wondering if Kamarullah was by some chance a fleet commander’s girlfriend. The mental image caused him to smile. He turned to Sula.
“Andyour next assignment?”
She gave him an annoyed look. “I’m dealing with the ghost of Captain Blitsharts.”
Blitsharts had been responsible for their first meeting: Martinez had planned, and Sula executed, a perilous rescue of the famous yachtsman. Who, when rescued, had turned out to be dead.
“Blitsharts?”he said. “Why Blitsharts?”
“The Fleet Court of Inquiry determined his death was accidental. But his insurance company insists it was suicide, and there’s a civil trial coming up. I’m to give a deposition, and the Fleet has extended my leave till then.” She looked up at him. “After which I will be free. Just in case some celebrated captain wants to request me for his next ship.”
Which was an invitation to kiss her if anything was, and he put his arm around her and was about to lean in close when the car came to a halt and the doors popped up with a hydraulic hiss.
Damn. All he had got was a taste of her dizzying perfume and a tingling awareness of the warmth of her skin.
She gave a rueful smile as he withdrew. When he rose from the car, a score of Fleet pulpies snapped to the salute, throats bared. Anyone in uniform—even the Lords Convocate themselves—were required to salute the Golden Orb, which was why Martinez had chosen to carry it. He’d hoped to relieve his feelings of anger and resentment by abusing his privileges with as many senior officers as he could find.
Now the orb was a dreadful inconvenience. He was going to have to spend the day trying not to walk into stiff, braced figures murmuring “Stand at ease” and “As you were,” and attracting far more attention to himself and to the beautiful and celebrated Lady Sula than he wanted.
Sula and Alikhan following, Martinez progressed through the stone-stricken mass of Fleet personnel to one of the cars of the train that would take them to the ring station’s lower level—a lower level that, just to make things confusing, was actually above Martinez’s head.
The Fleet areas of the ring, resolutely unattractive but functional with their docking bays, storage facilities, barracks, schools, and shipyards, tended to obscure the fact that the accelerator ring was one of the great technological miracles of all time. It had been drawing a sun-silvered circle about Zanshaa for nearly eleven thousand years, a symbol of Shaa dominion visible from nearly everywhere on the planet. The lower level of the accelerator ring moved above the planet in geostationary orbit, tethered delicately to the world of Zanshaa by the six colossal cables of the planet’s skyhooks. Built atop the lower level was the ring’s upper level, which rotated at eight times the speed of the lower in order to provide its inhabitants with normal gravity.
Eighty million people lived on Zanshaa’s ring, housed for the most part in areas considerably more attractive than the Fleet districts, and there was room for hundreds of millions more. To these denizens of the upper level, pressed by centrifugal force to the outside of the station ring, the lower level was actually above them. In order to ascend, they boarded a train that was then accelerated down a track in time to be scooped up by a massive ramp and track that dropped with exquisite timing from the geostationary level. Once there, humming electromagnets braked the train to a stop, and the passengers, bobbing in one-eighth gravity and aided by a series of handrails, made their way along a series of ramps to the giant car that would soon drop through Zanshaa’s atmosphere to the terminal on its equator.
Without shame Martinez barged into the compartment reserved for senior officers—it was the Golden Orb, not Martinez’s modest rank, that provided access. The hoped-for privacy did not materialize. As Martinez entered he saw the baleful look given him from over the shoulder of the other passenger already strapped into his couch, and his heart gave a lurch as he recognized the hawk-nosed visage of the lord inspector of the Fleet, one of the most feared men in the empire.
“Forgive me if I don’t stand,” said Fleet Commander Lord Ivan Snow in a sandpaper voice. “I don’t fancy unwebbing right now.” He was in the first row, with a brilliant view through the huge glass window that made up most of the outside wall.
“That’s quite all right, my lord,” Martinez said. Ducking beneath the low ceiling, he and Sula took couches as far removed from the feared lord inspector as the modest compartment permitted.