back against his warmth.
He had taken her to a series of clubs in the Lower Town, and on their return had encountered a group of street performers presenting their act on the wide apron before the lower terminal of the funicular railway. Surrounded by torches, Cree drummers had beaten a rhythm while Daimong acrobats balanced atop chairs or barrels or each other; and nocturnal Torminel, huge eyes wide in the semidarkness, had performed a slapstick routine. The air was heavy with the scents of roasting chestnuts and ears of maize produce shipped up from Zanshaa’s southern hemisphere, sold by vendors from portable charcoal braziers. Now a Terran girl barely in her adolescence was mastering the flying knives with an intent stonefaced courage that left Sula dry-mouthed with admiration.
“Here,” Martinez said. “Try one of these.”
In one hand he held a crystalized taswa fruit just purchased from a vendor. Sula bit down on it, and bright sparks of sugar exploded on her tongue, followed at once by a tartness that flooded her mouth with flavor.
“Thank you,” she said as the acid puckered her lips.
The juggler was a blur of motion now, the bright knives whipping around her. Sula could hear the sound of her soft leather soles on the flagstones. The juggler bounded into a twisting somersault, landing on her feet just outside of the knives’ danger zone. Her hands were a blur as she snatched the steel from the air. Metal clacked on metal. And then the girl was motionless, the knives bunched in her hands, and in the absolute silence she drew her feet together and bowed.
The audience, a hundred or so drifting toward the High City from their evening in the Lower Town, burst into applause and cheers. Sula cheered wildly with the rest, applauding till her palms grew red, and when one of the Torminel came by with a little portable terminal for contributions, she keyed in a generous contribution.
Another act followed, a mournful-looking Terran whose performance consisted entirely of bouncing a ball on the pavement, but doing it in surprising ways. Martinez’s arms were still around Sula. She took another bite of the candied taswa fruit.
I am sitting in a circle of torches watching a grown man bounce a ball,Sula thought, and I am feeling… what?
Happiness…The surprise was so strong that she took a sudden astonished breath of the charcoal-scented air.
Happiness. Bliss. Contentment.
The thought that she might be happy was so startling that she had to probe the thought carefully, as if it might explode. She found herself suspicious of the very idea. Moments of happiness had been rare in her life, and nonexistent since she’d stepped into the role of Lady Sula. She had not thought happiness possible, not when her whole life was an imposture and when she had to remain constantly on guard against the lapse that could expose her.
The man with the ball reacted to an unexpected bounce, and Sula laughed. She hugged Martinez’s arms to her. Lazy pleasure filled her mind.
Happiness.
What a shock.
“No,” said Lord Tork. “Never. Abandon the capital? Such a thing can never happen.”
Lord Chen feigned a curiosity he did not feel. “Both my sister and Lord Squadcom Do-faq have endorsed the plan. What is your objection?”
“Zanshaa is the heart of the empire!” Tork chimed. “The capital cannot be surrendered!”
“To defend Zanshaa is to stake everything on a battle where the odds are against us from the start,” said Chen.
“If the governmentcan be moved—” began Lady Seekin.
“The government will not move,” Lord Tork said. “Lord Said would not permit such a radical step.”
We’ll see about that, Lord Chen thought grimly. He would seek a personal appointment with the Lord Senior.
The eight members of the Fleet Control Board sat around their broad black-topped table in their large, shadowy room in the Commandery. Someone had forgotten to tell the staff to remove the ninth chair, the one suitable for cradling the long breastbone of a Lai-own, and it sat empty as a reminder of Lady San-torath, flung from the rock of the High City two mornings ago.
“I would like to further remark,” Tork continued, “that it is not the place of a junior captain to submit these kinds of memorials to the Board. It is the task of junior captains to carry out the tasks assigned them in silence, and to spare us their opinions.”
Lord Chen suspected that he was stepping into a trap, but a need for clarification demanded he speak. “I beg your pardon, lord fleetcom,” he said, “but it was not a junior captain who submitted this plan to the board. It was myself.”
Knowing there was prejudice against Martinez on the board, he had told them only that it was the product of two officers who had brought it to his attention.
Tork turned his white, round-eyed face to Lord Chen. A strip of dead flesh dangled from his chin like a large, twisted whisker as he spoke. “Squadron Commander Do-faq submitted the memorial to me this morning, and identified Captain Martinez as the author.”
“Martinez!” cried Junior Fleetcom Pezzini, as if some terrible private theory had just been confirmed, and slapped his hand on the table in annoyance.
Lord Chen would have mentioned Lady Sula as the coauthor, but he suspected he would only blacken her name.
“Captain Martinez has a habit of submitting memorials to his superiors,” Tork continued as disapproval rang in his words. “He has offered a radical tactical theory to Do-faq, and Do-faq has given it to your sister. Now they are both engaged in maneuvers that are detrimental to the traditions and practice of the service.”
“Will his interference never cease?” Pezzini said, just as Chen was about to reply. “Just a few days ago he blackened the name of a client of mine, a perfectly sound young man who revered him—revered him against my advice, I must point out.”
“I fail to see where any of this is improper,” Lord Chen said. “Captain Martinez submitted his suggestions to his superiors with proper regard for rank and with all deference. And nowyour own commanders see merit in these proposals.”
“The rot has spread far,” Tork said. “I trust that Lord Fleetcom Kangas will halt the infection and restore discipline. Only the tactics of our ancestors, adhered to with utmost inflexibility, can possibly save the capital.”
“Let Martinez rot in his damned training school,” Pezzini said. “That should cool his ambitions.”
Chen, his face expressionless, felt his insides twist with growing contempt.You people know nothing but how to lose a war, he wanted to shout.You’ve been offered a way to win, and you can’t see it.
But he kept silent. He knew that protest was useless in the face of Lord Tork’s rigidity, and his private lobbying with other board members hadn’t yet reached the stage where they would support a vote against the chairman.
He would send the Lord Senior a message requesting an immediate meeting. And then hope for the best.
Martinez, in high heart, stepped into the foyer of the Shelley Palace twirling the ribbon of the Golden Orb medal around his index finger. As he prepared to bound up the stairs to his room, he was approached by one of the maidservants—a thick-legged, homely woman, the type his sibs hired so that the Martinez sisters would always be the most beautiful women in the room.
“Captain Martinez,” the woman said. “Lord Roland asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you in his office.”
In his memory, a girl snatched flying knives from the air. Martinez caught his medal in his hand with a sigh and said, “Very well, thank you.”
He found Roland behind his desk, talking to someone—a Torminel—on his display. “We hoped you could attend,” he said, “as you’ve been so kind to us since our arrival.”
The Torminel, whomever she was, accepted the invitation, whatever it was, with pleasure. Roland signed off
