A lot of what he needed was communication, and the Ministry of Wisdom was full of communications specialists. Then he needed runners to make certain that units were doing what he’d told them to, and someone to keep track of supplies. Sula suggested starting with Sidney.
“I’ll do what I can, my lady,” Macnamara said.
She needed to be there, she thought, in her headquarters, building a staff herself, but found she couldn’t tear herself away. She walked back to Casimir’s ward, stopping every so often to talk to the casualties who were still lying in the corridors. Most were lightly wounded, in good spirits, and inclined to blame the Naxids for their trouble. Sula began to feel a faint stirring of optimism.
A Terran waited in Casimir’s ward, clad in the sterile robes of a surgical assistant, with the muffler lowered only partly from her face. Sula saw her, saw the concern and sympathy in her eyes, and felt her hope die.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “He died before we could finish prepping him. The doctor did his best for the next half hour but by that point there was really no chance.”
“Where’s the doctor?” Sula said. She wanted to hear it directly, from the motionless chiming lips.
“Still in surgery. He went on to the next patient.”
Bitter laughter rang in her mind. No point in interrupting the doctor before he had the chance to kill another wounded man.
“His name was Massoud,” Sula said. “Casimir Massoud. Make a note of that.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“I’d like to see him.”
Because all pallets and stretchers were required for the wounded, Casimir lay in the morgue on cold floor tiles. He wore only the bandages from his first operation and the twisted blue pastel sheet. The small holes on the right side, where the doctor’s equipment went in, had been neatly sealed by circles of pink plastic that looked like a child’s toy suction cups.
One-Step’s beads were wrapped around his hand.
Sula knelt by the body and looked down at the heavy-lidded eyes fallen shut for the last time. A vast storm of sheer feeling boiled through her, emotions rising strong and unbounded to the surface only to fall again before she could identify them.
I would have made you a lord, she thought. We would have gone through the High City like an angry wind, and if you had died then, it would have been because everyone was afraid of you, and of me.
I don’t know if I have the strength to do it on my own.
I don’t know if I’ll want to.
She bent to kiss the cold lips and to breathe his scent for the last time, but Casimir didn’t smell like himself anymore. It was this that brought the tears to her eyes.
Sula rose abruptly and turned to the surgeon’s assistant. “I’ll claim the body later,” she said. “Right now I have a war to direct.”
“Yes, my lady.”
One way or another she would be with Casimir again. Either she would come for the body and bring it to a glorious funeral—a cliqueman’s extravagance with a greenhouse’s worth of flowers and a Daimong chorus and a hearse drawn by white horses—or she would lie bloodless with him here on the cold tiles.
At the moment she didn’t care which.
One-Step and the Torminel bodyguard followed her out of the morgue. She turned to the Torminel.
“What’s your name?”
“Turgal, my lady.”
“You’re working for me now, Turgal.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“Dead, my lady.”
Sula hesitated. “Sorry,” she said.
“My lady,” the Torminel said, “I have Mr. Massoud’s will.”
She made the adjustment to her sleeve display. “I’m set to receive,” she said.
You’re going to need the money,he’d said, knowing he was dying. He wanted her to cut a figure in the High City once the war was over.
Maybe she would. Or maybe she’d convert it all to precious stones and hurl them off the High City to the people below.
Macnamara’s voice came to her headset as she was walking down the steps at the front of the hospital.
“My lady.” There was a strange urgency in his voice. “I know you want to be at the hospital, but I really think you should head for the Commandery.”
Sula told him that she was on her way, and asked him why.
“We didn’t have the expertise to handle the equipment in the Commandery once the Naxids were gone,” Macnamara explained. “But some of the techs from the ministry have been over there, and it looks as if there’s something going on. Something in space.
“It looks as if the Fleet is coming.”
TWENTY-NINE
The Battle of Zanshaa was preceded by skirmishes on a number of fronts. On seizing Zanshaa, the Naxids had also occupied all eight of its wormhole relay stations. They then hopped armed teams through the wormholes to seize the stations on the other side, giving them a view of all systems, friendly and enemy, that surrounded Zanshaa.
Since possession of these stations would also give them a splendid view of the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet as it burned toward Zanshaa, and allow them to estimate its course, velocity, numbers, wormhole through which it would pass, and its approximate arrival time, Supreme Commander Tork decided to take the wormhole stations back before they could supply information to the enemy.
Accordingly, before the Orthodox Fleet had even left Chijimo’s system, attack craft carrying highly trained and motivated assault teams launched for the five wormhole stations leading into systems still loyal to the Convocation. The teams were intended not simply to capture the relay stations on the friendly side of the wormholes, but to move through them and capture the stations on the Zanshaa side, thus providing Tork and the Orthodox Fleet with fresh intelligence concerning the numbers and location of the Naxid enemy.
The assault teams were equipped with the latest in zero-gravity weaponry designed to minimize damage to the stations—plastic bullets that would deform before punching through station walls, projectors to flood an area with fast-hardening foam to trap any enemy and render him immobile and incapable of resistance and flechettes to penetrate gaps in body armor and inject a neurotoxin fatal to Naxids but somewhat less lethal to other species. The teams wore heavily armored vacuum suits with maneuvering rigs for maximum tactical advantage in a zero- gravity environment. They flew assault craft with specially designed airlock access doors that would override any internal airlock control, or could burn through station walls to create a new airlock if necessary.
If a station was damaged, the assault craft were equipped with repair facilities and enough bottled air to resupply the station in the event of decompression. The assault team members were cross-trained not only in zero-gravity assault, seizure, and other forms of mayhem, but in repair and in the operation of a wormhole station once it was emancipated from Naxid control.
The assault teams were the finest the Fleet could provide—dedicated, intelligent, and indoctrinated fully in obedience to the Praxis. Their officers were level-headed, capable, and flexible. They were packed into their assault craft already in their armor, injected with drugs to aid them in high-gee, high-stress situations, and sent racing for the wormhole stations at accelerations of nine gravities or more.
It was expected that the Naxids in the wormhole stations would see them coming. When in fact they did, they reported the blazing deceleration torches to their superiors. In response, the Naxid fleet at Zanshaa fired missiles that sped through the wormholes at ever-growing velocities, located the assault craft, intercepted and vaporized them.
So it was that Tork’s approach to Zanshaa Wormhole 8 was observed by the Naxids after all. Perhaps Tork had expected it and thought the high-stakes gamble with the assault teams worth the risk. His approach showed his commanders that he had at least learned a few of the lessons taught by Chenforce. The Orthodox Fleet was screened by over two hundred decoys, all resembling real ships, all ready to intercept any enemy missiles flung
