In the middle of the night she heard the creak of a floorboard, then felt the pillow press down hard on her nose and mouth. She gasped for breath, but there was no air. She tried to claw the pillow off her face, but her hands were pinned.
She sat up with a cry half strangled in her throat, her hands clutching at her neck. Her pulse thundered in her ears like a series of gunshots. She stared blindly out into the dark, trying to see the shadow that was her attacker.
“Lights!” she called, and the lights flashed on.
She was alone in her room.
She spent the rest of the night with the lights on and the video wall showing a harmless romantic drama that Spence would probably have adored.
In the morning she rose and found that the road and the funicular had been reopened. Showing her identification and her receipt for a night’s lodging, she left the High City for the Lower Town. As she took a cab to Riverside, she saw a few copies ofResistance pasted to lampposts, each surrounded by clumps of readers.
Buying breakfast from a vendor near the communal apartment, she learned that the Naxids had ordered their remaining hostages shot, then sent the police out onto the streets to find more.
SEVEN
Chandra walked into Martinez’s office in the middle of the afternoon watch and slid the door closed behind her. She looked at the game of hypertourney he was playing on the desktop and said, “Well, I’m free of the bastard at last.”
Martinez looked up at her, his mind still filled with the game’s intricacies of velocities and spacial relationships. “Congratulations,” he said.
The color was high on Chandra’s cheeks and her eyes burned with fury. She paced back and forth in front of the desk like a tigress whose feeding had arrived half an hour late.
“I finally asked him!” she proclaimed. “I asked him if he’d get me promoted—and he said he wouldn’t!”
“I’m sorry,” Martinez said. The words came reluctantly. “Captains can’t promote lieutenants,” he added.
“This one can,” Chandra said savagely. “You know how those High City officers stick together. All he’d have to do is trade a favor with one of his cousin’s—Fletcher promotes the cousin’s cadet nephew in exchange for me getting my step.”
Martinez knew that was true enough—Fletcher could have traded a favor with someone. That was how the high-caste Peers kept everything in their small circle.
“Bastard wants me to stay in my place,” Chandra said fiercely as she paced. “Well, Iwon’t . I justwon’t. ”
“I didn’t understand how you got together with Fletcher in the first place.”
Chandra stopped pacing. Her eyes glared with contempt into time, gazing at her own past. “I’m the only officer on the ship who wasn’t Fletcher’s choice,” she said. “He had someone else picked for my place but he didn’t get to Harzapid before the war happened. When the squadron shipped out, I got sent aboard. I didn’t know anyone and—” She shrugged. “I tried to make myself agreeable to my captain.” Her mouth drew up in a sneer. “I’d never met anyone like him. I thought he had an interesting mind.” She barked out a laugh. “Interesting mind!He’s as dull as a rusty spoon.”
They looked at each other for a few brief seconds. Then Chandra took a half step closer to the desk, her fingertips drifting over the black surface, cutting through the holographic display of the hypertourney game.
“I could really use your help, Gare,” she said.
“I can’t promote you either. You know that.”
An intense fire burned in her eyes. “But your relatives can,” she said. “Your father-in-law is on the Fleet Control Board and Michi Chen is his sister. Between the two of them they should be able to work an overdue promotion for a lieutenant.”
“I’ve told you before,” Martinez said, “I can’t do anything out here.”
She looked at him levelly. “Someday,” she said, “you’re going to need a friend in the service, and I’m going tobe that friend. I’m going to be the best and most loyal friend an officer ever had.”
Martinez considered that Chandra’s friendship might come at a very high price.
Though, professionally speaking, he could think of no reason why she shouldn’t be promoted. Other than her erratic and impulsive behavior, of course, and her chaotic love life.
But how bad was that, really?he asked himself. Compared with some of the captains he’d known, Chandra was practically a paragon.
Misunderstanding his silence, she leaned forward and took his hand. Her fingers were warm in his palm. The hologram gleamed on her tunic. “Please, Gareth,” she said. “I really need you now.”
“I’ll speak to Lady Michi,” Martinez said. “I don’t know how much credit I’ve got with her, but I’ll try.”
“Thank you, Gareth.” She rested her hip on the desk and leaned across to kiss his cheek. Her scent flared in his senses. He stood, and dropped her hand.
“That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment out of her long eyes, and her look hardened. She straightened. “As you wish, Captain,” she said, her pointed chin held high. “With the captain’s permission?”
“You are dismissed,” Martinez said. His mouth was dry.
She went to the door and slid it open. “I meant what I said,” she said, “about being your friend.”
Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. Lord Shane Coen, Michi’s red-haired signals lieutenant, walked past and cast a curious glance into the room.
Martinez nodded at him in what he hoped was a brisk, military fashion, then sat down at the desk again and hypertourney.
It was a while before he could get his mind on the game.
WHO KILLED THE HOSTAGES?
The Naxids would have you believe that the deaths of over five hundred hostages are an inevitable result of actions by loyalist forces. But who rounded them up? Who ordered them shot? Who fired their weapons? Whose bullets struck them down?
The agents of an illegitimate government!
Sula paused with her stylus poised over her desk. Frustration pounded in her temples. She had the sense that her proper argument was evading her.
Worse, she could imagine Naxid counterarguments. It wasn’t as if the legitimate government, as embodied by the Shaa who founded the empire, had hesitated to take hostages. The Shaa had held entireplanets hostage. And furthermore they hadn’t hesitated to act: cities had been bombarded with antimatter weapons, and on one occasion an entire planet was wiped out in retaliation for the conspiracy of only a few people. The only legitimacy the empire had ever known was the threat of massive force.
Nor was the present war any different. Planets surrendered to one side or the other under fear of bombardment and destruction. Martinez had told her that the entire Hone Reach had almost gone over to the enemy out of sheer terror, without a shot fired, and that only the arrival of Faqforce—with their own missiles and promised destruction—prevented the defection.
Five hundred hostages were insignificant against such a history, let alone against the casualties of the war so far.
Sula continued her essay. She pointed out that the Naxids killed hostages because they couldn’t locate their enemies, whereas the secret government had gone after specific targets and killed them. She promised more and greater retribution to come.
She went over her text again, making small changes, and wished she were better at debate. Her verbal gifts, as both she and others had cause to regret, were more in the direction of sarcasm, and sarcasm seemed inappropriate as a tribute to five hundred butchered citizens.
The sad fact was that the Makish assassination might be Team 491’s last operation. The secret government and its operatives amounted only to three people, and if they kept risking themselves, they would be caught.
She knew that Team 491 had to recruit other operatives, which meant trusting other people, some of whom by their nature would be untrustworthy. Others would be captured and give up everything they knew under torture.
It might make more sense to cease all activity and wait for the Fleet to drive the Naxids away.
But Sula didn’t want to quit. Even as she looked at the piece of propaganda designed to take advantage of the
