The driver kept off the limited-access expressways, taking the smaller streets. Even so, he managed to get stuck in traffic. The van inched forward as the minutes ticked by, and then the driver cursed.
“Damn! Roadblock ahead!”
In an instant Sula was off Casimir’s lap and peering forward. She could see Naxids in the black-and-yellow uniforms of the Motor Patrol. Their four-legged bodies snaked eerily from side to side as they moved up and down the line of vehicles, peering at the drivers. One vehicle was stopped while the patrol rummaged through its cargo compartment. Their van was on a one-way street, its two lanes choked with traffic; it was impossible to turn around.
Her heart was thundering as it never had when confronting Sergius or Lady Mitsuko. Ideas flung themselves at her mind and burst from her lips in not quite complete sentences. “Place to park?” she said urgently. “Garage? Pretend to make a delivery?”
The answer was no. Parking was illegal, there was no garage to turn into, and all the businesses on the street were closed at this hour.
Casimir’s shoulder clashed with hers as he came forward to scan the scene before them. “How many?”
“I can see seven,” Sula said. “My guess is, there are two or three more we can’t see from here. Say ten.” She pointed ahead, to an open-topped vehicle partly on the sidewalk, with a machine gun mounted on the top and a Naxid standing behind it, the sun gleaming off his black-beaded scales.
“Starling,” she said to Macnamara. “That gun’s your target.”
Macnamara had been one of the best shots on the training course, and his task was critical since the gunner had to be taken out first. The Naxid didn’t even have to touch his weapon, just put the reticule of his targeting system on the van and press theGo button: the gun itself would handle the rest, and riddle the vehicle with a couple thousand rounds.
And then the driver of the Naxid vehicle would have to be killed, because he could operate the gun from his own station.
A spare rifle had been brought for Sula, and she reached for it. There was no spare suit of armor, and she suddenly felt the hollow in her chest where bullets would strike.
“We’ve got two police coming down the line toward us. One on either side. You two”-she indicated the driver and the other man in the front of the van-“pop them right at the start. The rest of us will exit the rear of the vehicle-Starling first, to give him time to set up on the gunner. The rest of you keep advancing-you’re as well-armed as the patrol, and you’ve got surprise. If things don’t work out, we’ll split up into small groups-Starling and Ardelion, you’re with me. We’ll hijack vehicles in nearby streets and get out as well as we can.”
Her mouth was dry by the time she finished, and she licked her lips with a sandpaper tongue. Casimir was grinning at her.
“Nice plan,” he said.
Total fuckup,she thought, but gave what she hoped was an encouraging nod. She crouched on the rubberized floor of the van and readied her rifle.
“Better turn the transponder on,” Casimir said, and the driver gave a code phrase to the van’s comm unit.
Every vehicle in the empire was wired to report its location at regular intervals to a central data store. The cliquemen’s van had been altered to make this an option rather than a requirement, and the function had been turned off while the van was on its mission to Green Park. An unresponsive vehicle, however, was bound to be suspicious in the eyes of the patrol.
“Good thought,” Sula breathed.
“Here they come.” Casimir ducked down behind the seat. He gave Sula a glance-his cheeks flushed with color, his eyes glittering like diamonds. His grin was brilliant.
Sula felt her heart surge in response. She answered his grin, but that wasn’t enough, and lunged across the distance between them to kiss him hard.
Live or die,she thought. Whatever came, she was ready.
“They’re pinging us,” the driver growled. One of the patrol had raised a hand comm and activated the transponder.
The van coasted forward, then halted. Sula heard the front windows whining open to make it easier to shoot the police on either side.
The van had a throat-tickling odor of tobacco and terror. From her position on the floor she could see the driver holding a pistol alongside his seat. His knuckles were white on the grip. Her heart sped like a turbine in her chest. Tactical patterns played themselves out in her mind.
She heard the footfalls of one of the patrol, walking close, and kept her eyes on the driver’s pistol. The second it moved, she would act.
Then the driver gave a startled grunt and the van surged forward. The knuckles relaxed on the pistol.
“She waved us through,” the driver said.
There was a moment of disbelieving silence, then the rustle and shift of ten tense, frightened, heavily armed people all relaxing at once.
The van accelerated. Sula’s breath sighed slowly from her lungs and she put her rifle carefully down on the floor of the vehicle. She turned to the others, saw at least six cigarettes being lit, laughed and sat heavily on the floor.
Casimir turned to her, his expression filled with savage wonder. “That was lucky,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She only looked at him, at the pulse throbbing in his neck, the slight glisten of sweat at the base of his throat, the fine mad glitter in his eyes. She had never wanted anything so much.
“Lucky,” he said again.
In Riverside, when the van pulled up outside the Hotel of Many Blessings, she was careful not to touch him as she followed Casimir out of the van-the others would store the weapons-and then went with him to his suite, keeping half a pace apart on the elevator.
He turned to her then, and she reached forward and tore open his shirt so she could lick the burning adrenaline from his skin.
His frenzy equaled hers. Their blood smoked with the excitement of shared danger, and the only way to relieve the heat was to spend it on each other.
They laughed. They shrieked. They snarled. They tumbled over each other like lion cubs, claws only half sheathed. They pressed skin to skin so hard that it seemed they were trying to climb into one another.
The fury spent itself sometime after midnight. Casimir called room service for something to eat. Sula craved chocolate, but there was none to be had. For a moment she considered breaking into her own warehouse to satisfy her hunger.
“For once,” he said, as he cut his omelette with a fork and slid half of it onto Sula’s plate, “for once you didn’t sound like you came from Riverside.”
“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.
“And you didn’t sound like Lady Sula either. You had some other accent, one I’d never heard before.”
“It’s an accent I’ll use only with you,” she said.
The accent of the Fabs, on Spannan. The voice of Gredel.
Lady Mitsuko signed the transfer order that morning. Transport wasn’t arranged till the afternoon, so Julien and the other eleven prisoners arrived at the Riverside station late in the afternoon, about six.
Sergius Bakshi had a longstanding arrangement with the captain of the Riverside station. Julien’s freedom cost two hundred zeniths. Veronika cost fifty, and the Cree cook a mere fifteen.
Julien would have been on his way by seven, but it was necessary to wait for the Naxid supervisor, the one who approved all the ration cards, to leave.
Still suffering from his interrogation, Julien limped to liberty on the night that the Naxids announced that the Committee to Save the Praxis, their own government, was already on its way from Naxas to take up residence in the High City of Zanshaa. A new Convocation would be assembled, composed both of Naxids and other races, to be the supreme governing body of their empire.
“Here’s hoping we can give them a hot landing,” Sula said. She was among the guests at Sergius’s welcome-home dinner, along with Julien’s mother, a tall, gaunt woman, forbidding as a statue, who burst into tears at the sight of him.
Veronika was not
present. Interrogation had broken a cheekbone and the orbit of one eye: Julien had called a surgeon, and in the meantime provided painkillers.
“I’llgive them a welcome,” Julien said grimly, through lips that had been bruised and cut. “I’ll rip the bastards to bits.”
Sula looked across the table at Sergius and silently mimed the word “ten” at him. He smiled at her, and when he looked at Julien, the smile turned hard.
“Ten,” he said. “Why stop there?”
Sula returned the smile. At last she had her army. Her own team of three plus a tough, disciplined order of killers who had decided, after all-and after a proper show of resistance-to be loved.
TWENTY
Time passed. Martinez dined with Husayn and Mersenne on successive days, and the next day spent eight hours in Command, takingIllustrious through the wormhole to Osser. Squadrons of decoys were echeloned ahead of the squadron, in hopes of attracting any incoming missiles. Pinnaces flew along with the decoys, painting the vacuum ahead with their laser range finders. Every antimissile weapon was charged and pointed dead ahead.
Chenforce made some final-hour maneuvers before passing the wormhole, checking their speed and entering the wormhole at a slightly different angle, so as to appear in the Osser system on a course that wouldn’t take them straight on to Arkhan-Dohg, the next system, but slightly out of the direct path.
Martinez lay on his acceleration couch, trying not to gnaw his nails as he stared at the sensor displays, waiting for the brief flash that would let him know that missiles were incoming. His tension gradually eased as the returning radar and laser signals revealed more of the Osser system, and then a new worry began to possess him.
The Naxids would have to wonder why Chenforce had changed its tactics, particularly when they hadn’t met any genuine opposition since Protipanu, at the very beginning of their raid. If the Naxids analyzed the raiders’ maneuvers, then reasoned backward to find what the tactics were intended to prevent, they would be able to see that Michi Chen and her squadron was concerned about a missile barrage fired at relativistic velocities.
If the tactic hadn’t yet occurred to the Naxids, Chenforce might now be handing them the idea.
But that was a worry for another day. For the present it was enough to see that the ranging lasers were finding nothing, that more and more of the system was being revealed without an enemy being found, and that Chenforce was as safe from attack as it was ever going to be.
Eight hours after they entered the new system, Martinez finally asked permission from Michi to secure from general quarters, andIllustrious dropped to a lower level of alert. He returned to his paperwork, but it was all he could do to avoid calling the officer of the watch every few minutes to make certain the squadron wasn’t flying into jeopardy.
Days passed. Martinez conducted regular inspections to learn his ship and crew and to confirm the information reported on the 77-12s. He dined in rotation with Lord Phillips, who was scarcely more talkative than at their previous meeting; with Lieutenant Lady Juliette Corbigny, whose nervous chatter was a contrast to her silence in the presence of the squadcom; and with Acting Lieutenant Lord Themba Mokgatle, who had been promoted to the vacancy left as Chandra shuttled to Michi’s staff.
Late one day, as Martinez sipped his cocoa and gazed at the painting of the woman, child, and cat, he realized that there was another figure, a man who sat on a bed opposite the fire from the woman and her baby. He hadn’t noticed him because the painting was dark and needed cleaning, and the man wasn’t illuminated by the fire. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next Martinez suddenly saw him, head bent with a stick or staff in his hands, appearing like a ghost from behind the painted red curtain.
He couldn’t have been more surprised if the cat had jumped from the picture into his lap.
The dim figure on the canvas was the only discovery Martinez managed during that period. The killer or killers of Captain Fletcher remained no more than a phantom. Michi grew ever more irritable, and snapped at him and Garcia both. Sometimes Martinez caught a look in her eye that seemed to say,If you weren’t family …
In time, after the first breathless rush of taking command was over, he was reminded that there were too many captains’ servants on the ship. He had Garcia take Rigger Espinosa and Machinist Ayutano into the Constabulary, with the particular duty of patrolling the decks on which the officers were quartered. Buckle the hair stylist was sent to aid the ship’s barber. Narbonne was taken onto Martinez’s service as an assistant to Alikhan, a demotion that Narbonne seemed to resent.
That left Baca, the fat, redundant cook that no one seemed to want, and Jukes. Baca was eventually taken on as an assistant to Michi’s cook, a post he wasn’t happy about either, and that left Martinez with his own personal artist.
Martinez called Jukes into his office to give him the news, and the man turned up in Fleet-issued undress and managed to brace rather professionally in salute. Martinez decided that tonight he must have gotten to Jukes before Jukes got to the sherry.
“I’ve been playing with a design forIllustrious, ” Jukes said. “Based on folk motifs from Laredo. Would you like to see it?”
Martinez said he would. Jukes downloaded from his sleeve to the wall display, and revealed a three-dimensional model of anIllustrious, covered with large, jagged geometric designs in violent shades of red, yellow, and black. Nothing more unlike Fletcher’s subtle, intricate pattern of pink, white, and pale green could be imagined.
Martinez looked in surprise at the cruiser, which was rotating in the display, and managed to say, “That’s very different.”
“That’s the point. Anyone looking atIllustrious is going to know that Captain Martinez is on station, and that he’s a bold skipper who’s not afraid to stand out from the common run of officers.”
Martinez suspected that he already stood out more than was good for him. He knew that Lord Tork, head of the Fleet Control Board, was not about to forgive him for achieving such prominence so quickly, not when the Fleet’s whole style was based on letting family connections quietly work behind the scenes to further elevate those who had been already elevated from birth. As far as the board was concerned, any further glory won by Martinez would only be at the expense of more deserving Peers, that he should have taken his promotion and decoration and been happy to return to the obscurity from whence he’d come.
Flying that gaudy red and yellow design anywhere within Tork’s domain would shriek his presence aloud in the ears of a superior who never wanted to hear his voice again. It would be like buying media time to advertise himself.
But Tork was already a lost cause,Martinez thought. A little advertising wasn’t going to change anything. So why not?
“Have you considered interiors?” he asked.
Jukes had. Martinez looked at designs for the office and dining room, both as brazen as the exterior designs, one dominated by verdant jungle green and the other by dark reds and yellows that suggested sandstone cliffs standing over a desert.
“Keep working along these lines,” Martinez said. “And if another theme occurs to you, feel free to work it out. We’ve got a lot of time.” It would be ages beforeIllustrious saw a dock or underwent a refit-the raid into Naxid space would last at least another couple months, and then the Fleet would have to reunite to retake Zanshaa.
There was a whole war betweenIllustrious and any new paint job.
Still, Martinez saw no reason not to plan for a grand triumph and its aftermath, in which he could decorateIllustrious as if it were his private yacht. For the odds were that either he would experience a grand triumph or be blown to atoms, and for his part, he’d rather assume the former.
“I should mention at this point, my lord,” Jukes said, “that Captain Fletcher was paying me sixty zeniths per month.”
“I looked up the captain’s accounts, and he paid you twenty,” Martinez said. “For my part, I propose to pay you fifteen.”
As Martinez spoke, Jukes’s expres
sions went from smug confidence to chagrin to horror. He stared at Martinez as if he’d just turned into a creature with scales and fangs. Martinez tried not to laugh.
“I don’tneed a personal artist,” he explained. “I’d rather have a rigger first class, but I don’t expect I’ll get one.”
Jukes swallowed hard. “Yes, my lord.”
“And I was thinking,” Martinez said, “that when things become a little less busy, you might begin a portrait.”
“A portrait,” Jukes repeated dully. He didn’t seem to be thinking very well through his shock, because he asked, “Whose portrait, my lord?”
“The portrait of a bold skipper not afraid to stand above the common run of officers,” Martinez said. “I should look romantic and dashing and very much in charge. I shall be carrying the Golden Orb, andCorona andIllustrious should be in the picture too. Any other details I leave to you.”
Jukes blinked several times, as if he’d had to reprogram part of his mind and the blinks were elements of his internal code.
“Very good, my lord,” he said.
Martinez decided he might as well pay Jukes a compliment and take his mind off his misfortunes. “Thank you for changing the pictures in my cabin,” he said. “The view is now a considerable improvement.”
“You’re welcome.” Jukes took a breath and made a visible effort to reengage with the person sitting before him. “Was there a piece you particularly liked? I could locate other works in that style.”
“The one with the woman and the cat,” Martinez said. “Though I don’t think I’ve seen any painting quite in that style anywhere.”
Jukes smiled. “It’s not precisely typical of the painter’s work. That’s a very old Northern European piece.”
Martinez looked at him. “And North Europe is where, exactly?”
“Terra, my lord. The painting dates from before the Shaa conquest. Though I should say theoriginal painting, because this may be a copy. It’s hard to say, because all the documentation is in languages no one speaks anymore, and hardly anyone reads them.”
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