Masters, where his duty lay.
Martinez had to suppress his admiration for the view while he was with the Fleet Commander. Enderby had a knack of making himself indifferent to all but the business at hand, but Martinez was more easily distracted. He could have dreamed out the window all day.
As the Fleet Commander’s communications officer, he supervised messages between Enderby and his extensive command, which included the dozens of ships that belonged to the Home Fleet; the installations on the ground on Zanshaa and elsewhere in the system; the paramilitary Antimatter Service, which serviced the accelerator ring; the installations, training facilities, docks, and stores on the ring itself; the elevators that ran personnel and cargo from the planet’s surface to the ring and back; communication with the Fleet Control Board, Enderby’s superiors; and handling the intricate communications net that webbed all this together.
Despite the size and complexity of his duties, however, Martinez usually had plenty of time on his hands. The Home Fleet ran on well-worn routine, established over the thousands of years of Shaa dominion. Most of the messages reaching him dealt with matters that scarcely required Enderby’s attention: routine situation reports, information on stores and requisitions, on maintenance, and on personnel entering and graduating from the training academies. These Martinez filed without ever sending them across the Fleet Commander’s screens. Flagged for Enderby’s attention were communications from friends or clients, reports on casualties from accidents—which always resulted in a personal note of condolence from the Fleet Commander—and, more important, appeals from the sentences imposed in the event of breaches of discipline or criminal activity. Enderby always paid close attention to these cases, and sometimes sent a series of painfully blunt questions to the accusing officer, which often resulted in charges being dropped.
Martinez felt relief whenever this happened. He had seen enough of service justice to know how rough it was, and how lazy the investigating officer could be. He knew that if he should ever be subject to the draconian penalties of the law, he’d want someone like Enderby reviewing the case.
During his time as the Fleet Commander’s aide, nothing like a real emergency had ever occurred to disturb the orderly flow of routine. Procedures were that well-honed. But the leisurely pace of his regular work was as nothing compared to the private business on which Enderby concentrated that day. Even though Martinez had worked with Enderby almost daily for months, he had no idea how complex the Fleet Commander’s life was.
Enderby had a thousand details to dispose of—bequests to friends, children, relatives, dependents, and subordinates. He was colossally wealthy, a fact Martinez hadn’t quite realized. Though the Fleet Commander stayed in modest lodgings in the Commandery, he owned a palace in the High City, which he’d closed, apparently, after his divorce. This was left as a bequest to his eldest daughter, who held a high post in the Ministry of Fisheries, though suites were left to other children for their lifetimes. Other property on Zanshaa and elsewhere had to be dealt with, along with the contents of bank and stock accounts, bonds, and a bewildering array of complex financial instruments.
Martinez sat at his desk in Enderby’s office and processed these bequests along with his normal signals traffic. Into the traffic he managed to insert a personal item, a request to Warrant Officer Taen, begging a postponement of their date.
Enderby’s secretary, an elderly sublieutenant named Gupta, who had been with him for years, was likewise kept busy, dealing with other aspects of a long, rich, complex life now being brought to a conclusion.
Commanders of fleet rank were allowed to recommend a certain number of promotions on retirement. But if a list existed, it did not cross Martinez’s desk, and he knew better than to ask Gupta if it had crossed his.
But he very much wished he knew whether his name was on it.
One personal message came to Martinez during the course of his day. Not from Warrant Officer Taen, unfortunately, but from his own sister, Vipsania. She looked at him lazily out of the desk display and tossed her dark hair with a studied gesture. “We’re having a party early next month.” Her tones were even more plummy, if possible, than when he’d last heard them. “We’d love for you to come, Gareth darling, but I imagine you’ll be too busy.”
Martinez didn’t send a reply. He knew his sister well enough to realize that he had just heard an order to be too busy to attend their party—the “Gareth, darling” was a clue he couldn’t miss.
Vipsania and the two other Martinez sisters, Walpurga and Sempronia, had turned up on Zanshaa just a few months after he’d begun his tour of duty. They rented half of the old Shelley Palace and plunged into Zanshaa society. Sempronia was supposedly attending university, with the others looking after her, but if there was any education going on, it did not seem to be from textbooks.
Martinez’s previous memories of his three sisters had been of children—annoying, intelligent, conniving, pestiferous children, admittedly, but still children. The formidable young women who held court in the Shelley Palace now seemed not only grown-up, but ageless—like nymphs gracing a fountain, they seemed eternal, strangely out of time.
They might have been expected to need Martinez’s help in establishing themselves in the capital, but they had come with letters of introduction, and in fact hadn’t needed him at all. If anything, they wanted him to stay away. They had lost their Laredo accents somewhere in the course of growing up, and his own speech was a reminder of their common provincial origins, one that might embarrass them in front of their new glit friends.
Sometimes Martinez wondered if he disliked his sisters. But what did fountain nymphs care if they were liked or not? They simplywere.
By the time Enderby finished his work, the sun had set and Zanshaa’s silver accelerator ring, half eclipsed by the planet’s shadow, was visible now only as a constellation of lights arcing across the night sky. Night birds hunted insects outside the curved window. Sour sweat gathered under Martinez’s arms and under the collar of his dark green uniform tunic. His tailbone ached. He wanted to shower and have Warrant Officer Taen massage his shoulders with long, purposeful fingers.
Fleet Commander Enderby signed hard copy of the remaining documents and thumbprinted them. Martinez and Gupta witnessed the documents where necessary. Then Enderby turned off his screens and rose from his seat, rolling his shoulders in a subdued stretch consonant with the dignity of his office.
“Thank you, my lords,” he said, then looked at Martinez. “Lieutenant Martinez, will you see that the invitations to the ship commanders are delivered?”
Martinez’s heart sank. The “invitations”—not the sort any commander would dare decline—were to a meeting concerning Fleet dispositions on the day of the Great Master’s death, and by service custom such requests had to be delivered by hand.
“Yes, my lord,” he said. “I’ll bring them up to the ring as soon as I can print hard copy.”
The Fleet Commander’s mild brown eyes turned to him. “No need to go yourself,” he said. “Send one of the duty cadets.”
A small mercy, at least. “Thank you, Lord Commander.”
Sublieutenant Gupta received Enderby’s thanks, braced in salute, and made his way out. Martinez put special thick bond paper into the printer—actual trees went into making this stuff—and printed Enderby’s invitations. When he finished putting them in envelopes, he looked up and saw Enderby gazing out the great curved window. The myriad lights of the Lower Town illuminated and softened his profile. There was an uncertainty in his glance, a strange, lost vacancy.
For once Enderby could stand in his office and contemplate the view. He had no duty awaiting him.
Nothing was left undone.
Martinez wondered if a man as successful as Enderby had any real regrets at the end of his life. Even granted that he was from a clan of the highest caste, he’d done well. Though his position had carried him through several promotions, no one wasguaranteed the rank of Fleet Commander. He was wealthy, he had added to the honor of his house, his children were all established in life and doing well. True, the wife was a problem, but the investigators had gone out of their way to make it clear that her peculations were no stain on the Fleet Commander.
Perhaps he loved her, Martinez thought. Marriages among the Peers were usually arranged by the family, but sometimes love happened. Perhaps, in a situation such as the commander’s, it was the love one regretted, not the marriage.
But this wasn’t the time to speculate on the Fleet Commander’s private life. Martinez knew this was the time for him to use his cunning, to use all the charm he’d intended to use on Warrant Officer Taen.
Now or never,he thought, and steeled himself.
“My lord?” he said.
Enderby gave a start of surprise, then turned to him. “Yes, Martinez?”
“You just said something. But I didn’t catch what it was.”
Martinez didn’t know how to begin this conversation, so he hoped to somehow come to a kind of mutual understanding that Enderby himself had begun it.
“Did I speak?” Enderby was surprised. He shook his head. “It probably wasn’t important.”
Martinez’s mind flailed as he tried to keep the conversation going. “The service is about to go through a difficult period,” he said.
Enderby nodded. “Possibly. But we’ve had sufficient time to prepare.”
“In the time to come, we’ll need leaders such as you.”
Enderby gave a dismissive twitch of his lips. “I’m not unique.”
“I beg to differ, lord,” Martinez said. He took a step closer to the commander. “I’ve had the honor to work intimately with you these last months, and I hope you’ll not take it amiss if I say that in my opinion your gifts are of a rare order.”
Enderby’s lips gave that twitch again, and he raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t worked with any other Fleet Commanders, have you?”
“But I’ve worked with a lot ofmen, my lord. And a great many Peers. And—” Martinez knew he was deep in the morass now. He could feel the slime rising to his armpits. He took a gulp of air, not daring to stop. “—and I’ve seen how limited most of them are. And how your own horizons are so much broader, my lord, so much more valuable to the service and to—”
Martinez froze as Enderby fixed him with a glare. “Lord Lieutenant,” he said, “will you please bring yourself to the point?”
“The point, Lord Commander—” Martinez said. “—the point is—” He reached into his shoes for his courage and dragged it quailing into the light. “The point is, I was hoping to convince you to reconsider the matter of your retirement.”
He hoped for a softening of Enderby’s glance, a sudden shock of concern. Perhaps a fatherly hand placed on his shoulder, a hesitant question: Does it really mean so much to you?
Instead, Enderby’s face stiffened and the older man seemed to inflate, his iron spine growing somehow more rigid, his chest rising. His lower jaw pushed out as he spoke, revealing an even white row of lower teeth.
“Howdare you presume to question my judgment?” he demanded.
Martinez felt nails bite into his palms. “Lord Commander,” he said, “I question the necessity of removing a superb leader at such a critical time—”
“Don’t you realize that I meannothing! ” Enderby cried. “Nothing!Don’t you understand that elementary fact of our service? We—all this—” He made a savage gesture toward the window with his hand, encompassing all beyond the transparency, the millions in the Lower Town, the great arc of the antimatter ring, the ships and wormhole stations beyond. “—it’s alltrash! ” His voice was an urgent whisper, as if overwhelming emotion had partially paralyzed his vocal cords. “Trash,compared to the true, the eternal, the one thing that gives our miserable lives meaning…”
Enderby raised a fist and for one horrified second Martinez feared that the Fleet Commander would strike him down.
“For the Praxis!”Enderby said. “The Praxis is all that matters—it is all that is true—all that is beautiful!” Enderby brandished his fist again. “Andthat is the knowledge for which our ancestors suffered. For which we werescourged! Millions had todie in agony before the Great Masters burned the truth of the Praxis into our minds. And if millions more—billions! — had to die to uphold the righteousness of the Praxis, it would be our duty toinflict those deaths! ”
Martinez wanted to take a step back to evade the scorching fire in the Fleet Commander’s eyes. With an effort of pure will, he kept his shoes planted on the office carpet, and tipped up his chin, exposing his throat.
He felt the commander’s spittle on his neck as Enderby raged on. “We must all die!” he said. “But the only death that gives meaning is one in service to the Praxis. Because I am who I am,at this perfect moment in time, I am privileged to havean honorable death, one that gives both myself and the Praxis meaning. Do you know how rare that is?” He gestured again out the window, at the
