touched his hair at the temple. “Chances are I’ll conceive soon, if that’s what we want.”
Martinez felt his skin flush as he was overwhelmed by a silent explosion of unexpected joy. “How wonderful,” he said, his tongue suddenly thick. As he kissed her he made a quiet resolution to himself. He would not treat this marriage lightly, or as an imposition. Terza was lowering herself in order to marry him, let alone to conceive his child, and he owed her the maintenance of her dignity. If he were to be a husband, he would be as sincere a husband as he could manage. His own self-respect demanded no less.
He drew the flowers from about her neck and kissed her throat and shoulders. Her skin was warm against his lips. He drew her down on the bed. Her face was pale amid the black flower of her hair. She watched him through half-veiled lids as he caressed her.
Sula was fire and passion, Amanda laughter and joy. Terza was something deeper, perhaps more profound. There was a center of serenity and poise that seemed to recede from him even as he reached for it. That was training, certainly, though perhaps it reflected as well her own essence, a kind of acceptance that was at the very heart of her.
Everything he did, he did to bring her pleasure. He strove with his hands and lips to unsettle that composed tranquillity that he had seen in her since that first day in the courtyard of the Chen Palace, and he found his reward as her breath quickened, as she gave an involuntary cry.
The sound inflamed him: so the core was not all composure after all. He increased his efforts; he matched his breath to hers. Her fingers dug into his arms, his shoulders, his back. She cried out again, the cry of the lost soul alarmed to find itself wandering in darkness, and he helped her find her way back to the light, where he waited for her, the partner of her bed and breath, her husband….
The singer’s whitened hands floated in the air like lovers whirling on the dance floor. Her voice clashed like swords, soared like eagles, or bled like a wound. The audience hung breathless on her every word, and thrilled at the controlled fury of her black-eyed stare.
Sula sat alone in the back of the club, a drink untouched on the table before her. She was seriously contemplating letting alcohol into her life.
She knew that Martinez’s wedding had gone off that afternoon; the society reports were full of it. Martinez and Lady Terza were abed by now, and Martinez was playing with his bride the same games he had played, only a few nights ago, with Sula.
Because the Chen family obviously handled the guest list without consulting the bridal couple, Sula had even been invited to the nuptials, though her work furnished her with an excuse not to attend. She had sent a nicely wrapped present, however, the pair of matched Guraware vases that Martinez had given her.
The Logistics Consolidation Executive, under the command of a Lai-own fleet commander called out of retirement for the duration of the war, was intended to resolve conflicts between various wartime demands on limited resources. Decisions had to be made concerning which arm of government was to have first call on assets, and those decisions were made by the executive.
The work was uninteresting and required long hours. Sula had no problem with that. The more hours she spent with work, and away from her thoughts, the better.
Sula picked up the little glass and felt the smooth chilled surface against her fingertips. Her nostrils flared with the sharp herbal scent. She had ordered iarogut, a liquor made by fermenting a root vegetable of Lai-own origin, then flavoring it with a kind of lemony weed. The result was faintly purplish in color and about fifty-five percent alcohol.
Nasty stuff, iarogut, but cheap and readily available. It was the liquor of choice for most of the serious alcoholics in the Fleet, all the crude old crouchbacks with the blackened eyes and the skinned knuckles and the broken veins in their noses that Sula, when she’d been assigned to her ship’s military constabulary, had rounded up from local jails and marched back to their ships for punishment.
If she were to drink, Sula thought, there was no point in starting on the high road, with the choice wines and the sweet liqueurs. The gutter was what she was after, and iarogut was what could take her there.
The derivoo singer gave a cry, a keen of anguish that broke off into a sob. Her man, the father of her children, had gone. The singer raised a hand, fingers curled as if around the hilt of a dagger. She was considering cutting the throats of her children in order to make her husband suffer.
Sula returned the glass to her table. The liquor trembled, lapping at the rim of the glass as if it were eager to escape. The invisible dagger seemed to gleam in the air.
Martinez had been playing a double game, that much Sula saw with perfect clarity. He’d always had Terza in reserve; and when Sula had balked, he’d shifted to his backup plan without missing a step.
But what, she wondered as she tapped the marble table with a fingertip, had Martinezreally been after? Perhaps his father would raise his allowance if he married. Maybe there was some choice appointment that depended on an officer having a wife.
Whatever the reason, it couldn’t have involved money or prestige or patronage in the Fleet, otherwise Martinez would have made Terza his first choice, not his second. There had to be some reason why he’d approached Sula first.
And then it occurred to her that there need be no reason other than a nasty little game that Martinez chose to play with the hearts of women. Months ago, the cadets in the duty room had told her of his success in love—was it possible to be a seducer without despising the object of seduction? Perhaps Martinez played Sula for his own amusement. It was Sula who resumed contact with Martinez after months of separation, and now she wondered if Martinez had viewed this as an opportunity for seducing one woman while quietly courting another.
The musicians struck a decisive chord: Sula’s eyes leaped to the stage. A moment of decision had been reached. The singer lowered the dagger, her hand trembling. Tears glittered in her eyes. Her lips caressed the names of her children.
Then the singer called out the name of her man, and the dagger flashed high again as another chord rang out.
And perhaps, Sula thought, the game had been Terza’s as well. Terza had seen Sula socially—had said sheadmired Sula. During that time, had Terza been aware of negotiations for the Martinez marriage? Or perhaps even initiated the negotiations?
Sula’s hand on the table formed a fist, the knuckles white. The tension in her arm made the liquid in the chilled glass tremble. Suppose, she thought, it was all Terza’s fault.
In Sula’s mind there formed the vision of a sumptuous bed, satin sheets, limbs interwoven and glowing in candlelight. For a moment she entertained the fantasy of bursting in the door, of committing massacre…
Another chord rang from the stage, and the singer’s hand lowered again, trembled, and then drove the imaginary dagger into her own belly. The derivoo cried out, stumbled, and died in song, with the name of her man on her lips.
The singer took her bows as applause rang out. A cold smile played across Sula’s lips. There was a difference, she thought, between truth and melodrama, and the singer had crossed it.
So had Sula.
She raised the chilled glass to her lips, inhaled the harsh fumes for a moment, then slammed the glass to the tabletop. Liquid splashed her fingers.
Sula rose, put money on the table, and walked out into the night.
TEN
That the Convocation was to take Wormhole 2 to Zarafan was a coincidence: Zanshaa’s place in its orbit currently made Wormhole 2 the closest of Zanshaa’s eight wormholes, and thus the Convocation was much more likely to be out of the system by the time the Naxids arrived.
But Zarafan was only ten days’ hard acceleration from Zanshaa, and too close for the Convocation’s safety: a Naxid expeditionary force might just decide to venture that way. It was then that Lord Chen fully earned every septile the Martinez family was paying him, by standing in the Joint Evacuation Committee (which included the Fleet Control Board) and moving that the Convocation simply keep on going once they reached Zarafan and continue all the way to Laredo.
Laredo was three months away at reasonably comfortable accelerations, and tucked into a fairly obscure corner of the empire. There were many more likely places for the Naxids to search for the Convocation than
