He gave a grim nod. “We’re pretty well shot up,” he said. “You’ll be needed on damage control, if you’re not hurt.”
“I need some shoes,” Sula said, “and then I’m with you.”
Bombardment of Delhihad lost its captain, its second and third lieutenants, and everyone else in Command. The forward third of the ship had been decompressed, there were only a dozen missiles left in the magazine, and only one pinnace remained—Sula’s.
But Sula reminded herself thatDelhi was in better shape than all but five other ships of the Home Fleet.
For two days she worked constantly at patching, refitting, replacing, and testing. Toward the end of the second day her party succeeded in recompressing the area around Command and in breaking into Command to retrieve the bodies of Captain Foote and the others. They had died due to fire—not from asphyxiation, because they had their helmets on, but due to fierce heat. Nothing in Command was flammable, but even steel will burn if it gets hot enough, and Command had grown very hot indeed. A rain of molten metal had streaked the walls like tears.
The crisped remains of the dead, little husks of carbon curled like a fetus, were bagged and carried out to the cargo airlock. Sula felt oddly at home amid the dead. She looked at the charcoal on her palms. Take the water out, she thought, and that’s all we are.
She found the realization comforting.
“Life is brief, but the Praxis is eternal,” the first lieutenant read from the burial service. “Let us all take comfort and security in the wisdom that all that is important is known.”
The dead were blown into space. Afterward, the premiere took Sula aside and told her that the squadron commander had promoted her to sublieutenant in order to fill one ofDelhi’s vacancies.
Really, she thought, I am rewarded for the most extraordinary things.
A day later, lying exhausted in her rack, she overheard one of the other cadets talking about test scores. The cadet had done well and was pleased that she’d soon be promoted and no longer had to be envious of Sula.
Sula looked at the woman and thought she remembered her.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Didn’t you take the exams with me at Zanshaa? The ones that didn’t signify?”
The cadet looked at her in surprise. “Didn’t you get the announcement? The board decided the examswould count. They need officers too badly. Instead of the exam on the Praxis, they’re relying on testaments of loyalty from superiors.”
“Ah. Ha,” Sula said.
She flung herself to the nearest computer display, called up the results, and found out she had achieved her first.
She thought of Caro Sula sliding into the Iola, the cold brown waters rising up about her, choking her nose and mouth, and she wondered if the equation was balanced now. Did an exemplary career and a couple thousand dead Naxids equal one dead, useless rich girl?
All important things are known.Somehow this didn’t seem to be one of them.
Later that day she was supervising a party that was rereeving bundles of electric cable that had shorted out during the battle. They’d had to pull up a whole corridor of Captain Foote’s parquet flooring to get at the utility space underneath, and then had to be very careful when balanced on the deck beams, to avoid contact with the pipe of superheated coolant that ran alongside the cable bundles. The coolant that carried the engines’ heat to the compressors and heat exchanger.
Midday came and the job wasn’t completed. Sula sent her party to their dinner, then lowered herself onto one of the beams. The heat rose from the pipe and brought a prickle of sweat onto her face. She balanced there for a moment and looked at her right hand, at the whorls of Gredel’s traitorous, dangerous fingerprints.
Sweat trickled down her cheek. She took a deep breath, bent down, and pressed her right thumb to the pipe.
I tripped on the beams and fell, she rehearsed.It was an accident .
She kept her thumb on the pipe until she could smell the burning flesh, and only then did she permit herself to scream.
The censors weren’t used to adversity, and didn’t know how to handle the news from Magaria. The initial report Martinez received said the battle was a glorious triumph in which Magaria had somehow not been captured, and that caused Zanshaa to mobilize to the utmost. He sent a message to the Fleet Control Board telling them that, as a squadron commander engaged in offensive action, he needed to know what really happened.
They told him. After he recovered from his shock, he did some calculations and worked out how long it would take the Naxids to arrive at Zanshaa. They would have to decelerate and dock with the Magaria ring to take on new armament and fuel, then accelerate again.
Three months. Three months, perhaps a little longer, before the Naxid fleet could begin the Battle of Zanshaa.
Coronaand its Light Squadron 14 was more than halfway to Hone-bar. It would take too long to decelerate and return, so instead the squadron would swing around Hone-bar’s sun and major planets and slingshot its way back to the capital.
And arrive just ahead of the Naxids, apparently. Whose known ships outnumbered the entire loyalist fleet.
He sent a message urging Roland and his sisters to book passage on the next ship for Laredo, then concentrated on the management of his squadron. He had decreed a whole series of virtual maneuvers, the crews of each ship simultaneously wired into the same scenario. He matched them against each other, against hypothetical Naxid squadrons. He worked them very hard, hard enough that Kamarullah began complaining about him to the other captains. Perhaps the other captains could take comfort from the fact thatCorona , with its new crew unused to the ship or their officers, usually failed to distinguish itself in these exercises, performing poorly enough to set Martinez to grinding his teeth. Nor was he the only Corona so affected: he overheard Ahmet complain to Knadjian about the damned newcomers bungling everything, getting in the way and making the ship look bad.
If only Dalkieth were a more driving, ambitious sort of lieutenant. If only Shankaracharya and Vonderheydte had more experience. If only he weren’t so torn between managing the ship and bossing the squadron.
Capping it all was Saavedra’s discovery that two tons of flour intended for the mess, which Martinez had signed for, was in fact used machine oil badly in need of recycling. Someone was making a nice profit, apparently, selling Fleet supplies, but that person wasn’t Martinez.
Martinez briefly lost his mind. His roars of anger as he marched from his office to the food store and back sent even hardened crouchbacks dodging out of the way and looking for a place to hide until he stomped past.
When he made his evening entry in the log, he saw the message light blinking and found to his surprise that it was a video from Sula.
She wore a sublieutenant’s shoulder boards, he saw; she must have passed her exam. One hand was bandaged and cradled in the opposite arm.
Her complexion was lightly flushed, and flawless, and took his breath away. There was a strange intensity in her green eyes, a kind of fever. Perhaps she was in pain.
“So,” she said, “I lived. I’m the only survivor from my ship. I got picked up by theDelhi , and they lost a lot of people too.” She paused, and with a shock Martinez realized that she must have been the pinnace pilot who destroyed an entire enemy squadron. The report he’d received from the Fleet hadn’t mentioned any names.
Sula’s pointed tongue licked her lips for a second, and then she continued.
“So here’s what I’ve learned: I’m the second luckiest person in the universe. And do you know who’s the luckiest?” The intense green eyes glittered. “You are,” Sula said. “You are, Gareth Martinez. You. Commander ofCorona , recipient of the Golden Orb. You.” Her lips tightened in a smile.
She hasn’t even heard I’m a squadron commander, it hasn’t been announced.Martinez managed this thought through his wonderment.
“When I realized this, I decided to make some resolutions,” Sula said. “So here’s the first:no more whining. No more complaining about my superiors or my lack of patronage or the fact that I don’t have much money compared with every other officer in the Fleet. No more whining about—” She hesitated. “—about my past. Why
