She knew that her tools had betrayed her. She would have to finish this herself.
All her anger was gone by now, all hatred, all emotion except a sick weariness, a desire to get it over. The pillow was already held to her chest, a warm comfort in the room filled only with Caro’s racking, tormented snores.
She cast one last look at Caro, thought,Please die at her one more time, but Caro didn’t respond any more than she had responded to any of Gredel’s other unexpressed wishes.
Gredel suddenly lunged across the sofa, her body moving without conscious command, the movement seeming to come from pure instinct. She pressed the pillow over Caro’s face and put her weight on it.
Please die,she thought.
Caro hardly fought. Her body twisted on the couch and both her hands came up, but the hands didn’t fight, they just fell across Gredel’s back as if in a halfhearted embrace.
Gredel would have felt better if Caro had fought. It would have given her hatred something to fasten on to.
Instead, through the closeness of their bodies, she felt the urgent kick-kick-kick of Caro’s diaphragm as it tried to draw in air, the kick repeated over and over again. Fast, then slow, then fast. Caro’s feet shivered. Gredel could feel Caro’s hands trembling as they lay on her back. Tears spilled from Gredel’s eyes.
The kicking stopped. The trembling stopped.
Gredel leaned on the pillow awhile longer just to make sure. The pillow was wet with tears. When she finally took the pillow away, it revealed a pale, cold thing that bore no resemblance to Caro at all.
Caro was weight now, not a person. That made what followed a lot easier.
Handling a limp body was more difficult than Gredel had ever imagined. By the time she got it onto the cart, she was panting for breath and her eyes stung with sweat. She covered Caro with a bed sheet and she added some empty suitcases to the cart as well. She took the cart to the freight elevator, then left by the loading dock at the back of the building.
“I am Caroline, Lady Sula,” she said aloud, rehearsing her story. “I’m moving to a new place because my lover beat me.” She would have the identification to prove her claim, and what remained of the bruises, and the suitcases plain to see alongside the covered objects that weren’t so plain.
Gredel didn’t need to use her story. The streets were deserted as she walked downslope alongside the humming cart, down to the Iola River.
The roads ran high above the river on either side, with ramps that descended to the darkened riverside quay below. Gredel rode the cart down the ramp to the river’s edge. This was the good part of Maranic Town, and there were no houseboats here, no beggars, no homeless, and—at this hour—no fishermen. The only encounters she feared were lovers sheltering under the bridges, but by now it was so late that even the lovers had gone to bed.
It was as hard getting Caro off the cart as getting her on it. But when she finally went into the river, tied to the compressor, the dark waters closed over her with barely a ripple. In a video drama Caro would have floated a while, poignantly, saying good-bye to the world, but there was none of that here, just the silent dark submersion and ripples that died swiftly in the current.
Caro had never been one for protracted good-byes.
Gredel walked alongside the cart back to the Volta. A few cars slowed to look at her, but moved on.
In the apartment, she tried to sleep, but Caro’s scent filled the bed, and sleep was impossible there. Caro had died on the sofa, and Gredel didn’t want to go near it. She caught a few hours’ fitful rest on a chair, and then the woman called Caroline Sula rose and began her day.
The first thing she did was send in the confirmation of her appointment to the Cheng Ho Academy.
She packed two suitcases, took them to Maranic Port and the hovercraft ferry that would take her across the Krassow Sea to Vidalia. From there she took the express train up the Hayakh Escarpment to the Quaylah Plateau, where high altitude moderated the subtropical heat of the Equatorial Continent. The planet’s antimatter ring arced almost directly overhead.
Paysec was a winter resort, but the snowfall wouldn’t begin until the monsoon shifted to the northeast, so she found good rates for a small apartment in Lus’trel, and took it for two months. She bought some clothes—not the extravagant garments that were sold in Maranic Town’s arcades, but practical country clothes, and boots for walking. She found a tailor, and he began to assemble the extensive wardrobe she would need for the academy.
She didn’t want Lady Sula’s disappearance from Maranic Town to cause any official disturbance, so she sent a message to Caro’s official guardian, Jacob Biswas, telling him that she found Maranic too distracting and had come to Lus’trel in order to concentrate on her preparation for the academy. She told him she was giving up the Maranic apartment, and that he could collect anything she’d left there.
Because she didn’t trust herself to impersonate Caro with someone who knew her well, she didn’t use video; she typed the message and sent it print only.
Biswas called back almost immediately, but she didn’t take his call or any of the other calls that followed. She replied with print messages, saying she was sorry she’d been out when he called, but she was spending a lot of time in the library cramming.
That wasn’t far from the truth. Requirements for the service academies were posted on the computer net, and most of the courses were available in video files, and she knew she was deeply deficient in almost every subject. She worked hard.
She only answered one call, when she happened to be home, listened to the answerware, and realized the caller was Sergei. She answered and called him every filthy name she could think of, and once her initial anger was spent, she began to choose words more carefully, flaying him alive with one choice phrase after another. By the end he was weeping, loud gulping honks that grated over the speakers.
Serve him right, she thought.
Lamey had her worried more than Sergei or Jacob Biswas. Every day she half expected him to burst down the door and demand that she produce Earthgirl. He never turned up.
On her final day on Spannan, Biswas insisted on meeting her, with other members of his family, at the skyhook. She cut her hair severely short, wore Cheng Ho undress uniform, and virtually plated her face with cosmetic. If she looked to Biswas like a different girl, no wonder.
He was kind and warm and asked no questions. He told her she looked very grown-up and was proud of her. She thanked him for his kindness and for looking after her. She hugged him and the daughters he’d brought with him.
His wife, Sergei’s sister, had the sense to stay away.
Later, as the skyhook carried her to Spannan’s ring, and its steady acceleration pressed her into her seat, she realized it was Caro’s Earthday, the real one.
The Earthday that Caro would never see.
Sula jerked awake from a shivering dream, and for a moment Caro’s scent seemed to fill the pinnace. There were tears in Sula’s eyes, and when she wiped them away, she saw something new on her displays.
Five somethings, swinging around from the far side of Barbas. Five ships were burning hard gees, coming around the big planet at an unusual angle. Sula wondered if they were heading for Magaria. No—they burned well past that point.
“Ah. Ha,” she said.
They were looping around Barbas to fly toward Rinconell. And now Sula saw what they intended.
They were going to come between Wormhole 1 and the six survivors of the Home Fleet. There would be a blazing collision as their paths crossed, and the last of the Home Fleet would be annihilated. The five Naxid ships might die as well, if the loyalists had enough missiles remaining, but in any case the last of the Home Fleet would be destroyed.
Frantically, Sula began calculating trajectories. Her own missiles were a third of a light-minute ahead of her, and it would take time for her instructions to reach them. She didn’t want them to maneuver where the enemy could see them, and the only way to do that was to fire their engines when they were behind the huge gas giant Rinconell.
It took Sula almost three hours to calculate the trajectories, triple-check the work, and transmit the missiles’ instructions via communications laser. Then she calculated her own trajectory and her own burn. Because she couldn’t pull the massive gees of her missiles, she couldn’t lay herself on the same track—she’d be a spectator again, whatever happened.
And then she waited. It was nine hours before the tawny gas giant Rinconell became a great crescent on her displays, before her eighteen missiles executed precise pivots and made the furious burn that set them on their new trajectories. And more seconds passed before her own engine punched her and dropped her into nightmare sleep.
But the wait was worth it. On their mad swing around Barbas, the Naxid ships emerged with a velocity of nearly half the speed of light. The missiles coming at them were traveling in excess of.7c. The closing velocity was so enormous that the Naxids were probably never aware of what was coming at them and had a few seconds’ warning at most, not enough to activate their defenses.
Wild, angry joy sang in Sula as she watched the eighteen missiles explode in and among the Naxid ships. Nothing was left of the enemy but stripped ions that glowed fiercely and briefly in the deep, empty night, and then went out.
She reached for the comm unit and punched on the radio, broadcasting on the intership channel to the Naxids, the fleeing Home Fleet survivors, the scattered, cooling atoms that had beenDauntless andGlory of the Praxis, and all the others strewn and lost in the death and fury of Magaria.
“Sula!”she shouted into the transmitter. “It was Sula who did this!Remember my name! ”
She programmed her own burn for the wormhole, and escape.
SIXTEEN
Five hours after transiting Magaria Wormhole 1, Sula’s pinnace was recovered by theBombardment of Delhi. She pulled herself wearily out of the little boat, and as the riggers helped her climb into the ready room, she saw in the dim emergency lighting that someone waited for her. Her heart surged as she recognized Martinez, and then she realized that a memory had imposed itself on her exhausted mind, a memory of the time Martinez had met her after theMidnight Runner rescue.
The person before her stepped forward, and before her she saw a different memory, that of Jeremy Foote.
“You,”she said, and began to laugh.
Foote looked at her with impatience. He was considerably less immaculate than when Sula had last seen him, at the party he’d thrown to celebrate his promotion: he was without his uniform jacket, and his shirt was grimy and torn. His cowlick was greasy. His sleeves were rolled up, and there was a smear of something on one forearm, a smear that had an echo on his forehead where he’d wiped away sweat.
The riggers took her helmet and unsealed her gloves.
“I’ll need your data foils,” Foote said, his drawl a little more clipped than usual. “The premier sent me.”
“I forgot them in the boat,” Sula said. “Sorry.” She turned to return to the docking tube.
“I’ll get them,” Foote said. “Never mind.”
He dropped into the docking tube and was gone for a few moments. The riggers shoved Sula’s arms over her head and pulled off the upper half of her suit. Her nose wrinkled at the acrid odor
