“Well, here he is,” Terza said. Her smile was weary but not without pride. “He’s given no trouble at all. The doctor said it was the easiest delivery he’d ever seen. We both send our love, and we hope to see you soon.”
Martinez’s heart melted. He watched the video half a dozen times more, then proclaimed a holiday on the ship, the crew excused from normal duties except for watchkeeping. He ordered Toutou to open the spirit locker and share out a drink to the crew. Again he split a bottle of champagne, this time with Michi.
Myson’s going to be the head of yourclan, he thought.
A few days later he was invited to a reception on Fleet Commander Kringan’s flagship. The invitation specified undress, so he left the Golden Orb and the white gloves in his cabin. Michi usedDaffodil to ferry all her other captains to Kringan’s flagship, so they arrived a little late. The air aboardJudge Kasapa tasted of Torminel rather than Terrans.Kasapa was a sixty-year-old ship, old enough to have gained the dignity that comes with age—the allegorical bronzes in their niches were polished smooth and bright by the hands of generations, and the geometrical tiles had lost a bit of their original brilliance and faded to a more mellow shade.
The officers were grouped in the fleetcom’s dining room, from which the long table had been removed to make room. Smaller buffet tables had been set on either end—lest Torminel eating habits spoil anyone’s appetite, the marrow bones and bloody raw meat were across the room from the food intended for other species. Tork, busy planning his next conquest, wasn’t around to spoil the party. Kringan, wearing braid-spangled viridian shorts and a vest over his gray fur, chatted amiably in his adjoining office with a group of senior officers. Martinez got a whisky from one of the orderlies and held a plate with some kind of fritter in the other hand. He was pleased to encounter a Torminel captain he had once commanded in Light Squadron 14, who had been given command of one of the new cruisers, and Martinez chatted for a moment about the new ship and its capabilities.
And then the grouping of officers shifted and a sudden awareness of Sula crawled across his skin on scuttling insect legs. She stood about five paces away, talking to a Terran elcap Martinez didn’t know. She stood straight and slim in her dark green uniform, and there was a slight smile on her face. Whatever words Martinez was about to offer his former captain died on his lips.
“Yes, my lord?” the Torminel said.
From a stiffening of Sula’s spine and the way the smile caught on her face, Martinez knew that she was aware of his presence. He tried to continue his conversation, but his mind was awhirl and his heart lurched in his chest.
This was impossible. He should at least try to be civil.
“Excuse me, my lord,” he said, and stepped toward her, awkward with the fritter sitting like an offering on his plate.
Sula likewise disposed of her companion and turned to face him. She was so lovely that her beauty struck him like a blow. Her hair was a shade more golden than he remembered, and shorter. Her scent was something muskier than the Sandama Twilight he remembered. Her green eyes examined him with something that might be calculation, or malevolence, or contempt.
“Congratulations on your promotion,” he said.
“Thank you.” She cocked her head to one side and studied him. “You deserve congratulations as well, my lord,” she said. “I hear your wife has spawned.”
A blast of furnace anger flashed through his veins, but even in his fury he felt an icy sliver of rationality amid the flame, and he clung to it.
He could hurt her now. And she had just given him the justification.
“Yes,” he said. “Terza and I are very happy. And you?”
Her mouth pressed into a firm line. Her eyes were stone. “I haven’t had the leisure,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Martinez said. “You seem to have made a wrong choice or two, somewhere in the recent past.”
He saw a shift in her eyes as the blow struck home.
“True,” she said. “I made a bad decision when I first met you, for instance.”
She turned and marched away, heels clicking on the tiles, walking away from him as she had at least twice before; and Martinez felt the tension suddenly drain from him. His knees wavered.
Honors about even, he thought. But she was the one who fled.
Again.
Feeling a need for support, he went to the buffet in order to have something to lean against. There he found Michi gazing at the food without much interest. He offered her his fritter.
“May I order you something to drink, my lady?” he asked.
“I’m trying not to drink,” she said. “Torminel toilets don’t agree with me, and it’s a long walk back to the airlock andDaffodil .”
Martinez could see Sula out of the slant of his eye. She was turned away from him, her back arrow-straight as she spoke to a Lai-own captain.
He bolted his whisky. Michi raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll take my chances with the toilets,” he said.
“Fucking imbecile,” Sula told Lord Sori Orghoder. “Next time try following my instructions.”
Lord Sori had grown accustomed to this sort of abuse by now, like the rest of Sula’s captains, and his furry Torminel face was resigned.
“Apologies, my lady. I thought I was—”
“You’re supposed to be following the hull of a chaotic dynamical system, not driving a runaway tram through a parking lot!”
Lord Sori’s face gave a tremor, then subsided. “Yes, my lady.”
Peers, Sula knew, weren’t used to be talked to this way. Her savagery had at first stunned them—and then, perhaps because they had no idea of anything better to do, they had obeyed. Sula’s talent for invective had produced results. Light Squadron 17, under the lash of her tongue, was becoming proficient in Ghost Tactics.
She would never have dared speak to her army this way. Volunteers could all too easily have walked away. The Peers who commanded her ships were stuck with her, and perhaps they were too wedded to their notions of hierarchy ever to protest a tongue-lashing from a superior.
Sula worked them hard. She called them idiots and dunces. She criticized their ancestors, their education, and their upbringing. She even censored their correspondence—which was, she learned, remarkably dull.
Without her, she decided, they were nothing. A bunch of coddled aristocrats without an idea in their collective head. But she was going to be the making of them.
“We are going to storm the Naxid citadel,” she told them. “And I know we can do it, because I’ve done it before.”
One of the advantages of not caring about anything, she had decided, was that she could decide to care about any particular thing. She had decided she was going to care about Light Squadron 17. Her command would become immortal in the eyes of the Fleet.
She was particularly vicious at the moment because of her meeting with Martinez the previous evening. She felt the encounter had shown her at her worst. Not because she’d tried to cut him down, which he thoroughly deserved, but because she’d done it out of anger and surprise. She should have slashed Martinez to ribbons coolly and dispassionately, but instead had blurted out a few feeble insults and then run for it.
She had shown that she was vulnerable. She had demonstrated that she, who cared about nothing, still cared about him.
It was her officers who paid for this discovery with their dignity.
“Have some brain food with your dinner,” she told Lord Sori, “and we’ll try another experiment, starting at eighteen and one.”
She broke the connection with Sori—and with the other captains who had been watching with properly impassive faces—and then unwebbed herself from her acceleration couch.
“Secure from general quarters,” she said. “Send the crew to their dinner.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Lieutenant Giove.
While Giove made the announcement to the ship’s crew, Sula swung forward to put on her shoes, which she’d kicked off and dropped on the deck. The advantage of the Ghost Tactics experiments—radical tactics performed in a shared virtual environment while her actual ships soared innocently in the close formations Tork
