After checking her work several times, Sula produced a program that would do a number of jobs in sequence.
Turn off the broadcast node’s logging, so there would be no record of what followed.
Turn off the function that appended an identification tag to the message.
Turn off the function that copied the message to the censor.
Broadcast a message.
Turn on the function that copied messages to the censor.
Turn on the identification function.
And turn on the logging again.
After which the program would remove itself from the node.
She tested her program by sending herself a message—“The information you requested is not available at this department”—and found that it worked. No record of her message, or any of the other tasks she had triggered, appeared in any of the Department logs.
She could send a message now, if she could only work out who to send it to and what the message was.
Before Sula cut the connection and turned off the computer, she checked Rashtag’s message for the next day and found that his word was“Expedite!”
Exactly, she thought.
Spence had long ago gone to bed, but Sula had drunk too much coffee to sleep. She leaned out the window and took a deep breath of warm midsummer air.
The traffic was gone, the stalls and pushcarts carried away. Energy restrictions had turned off all signs and illuminated only every third streetlight. Under the nearest, a street away, she could see a few figures engaged in intense conversation, their arms gesturing broadly.
She grinned. It was so late that the hustlers could hustle only each other.
Sula left the apartment through the rear door off the kitchen, onto the building’s back stair, and climbed to the roof. The roof access had been wedged open for the benefit of some tenant’s cat, and she stepped soundlessly onto the flat roof, her shoes silent on the epoxide roofing material. Normally the city’s glare permitted only a few stars to be seen, but now the city’s subdued glow revealed a blazing spray of brilliants strewn across the night’s velvet canopy.
Across the sky gleamed a series of silver arcs, each separated from the next by the starry darkness. These were the silent, empty remains of the accelerator ring that had once circled the planet, that had created the antimatter that fueled its economy, that had berthed its ships, warehoused its goods, and supported the lives of eighty million people. When it had been clear that the Naxids were going to capture Zanshaa, the ring was evacuated and then destroyed, its fragments separating as they rose to a higher orbit.
The ring had circled the planet for over ten thousand years, the greatest and most glorious technical achievement of the Shaa Empire, and it had survived the death of the last Shaa by less than a year. The fragments hanging in the sky, visible from all quarters of the planet, were a silent, reproachful reminder of the fragility of civilization, and of the uncertainty and violence of war.
And it was all my idea.It had been Sula who first suggested destroying the ring, as a way of making it hard for the Naxids to rule the planet they had conquered. Somehow the credit for the idea had lodged with someone else, and somehow Sula herself had gotten lodged on the planet with Hong’s action group, instead of flying away with the rest of the Fleet.
I should be upthere, she thought as she looked at the stars. In a warship driving deep into enemy territory, bringing the war to the Naxids, instead of living a hunted existence on the surface of the planet, scurrying from one bolt-hole to the next.
She thought of one person she knew was flying among the stars with the Fleet, and a lump formed in her throat.
Martinez,she thought,you bastard.
TWO
He could touch the silk of Sula’s pale, perfect skin, feel the warmth and soft weight of her hair on his flesh. Her brilliant emerald eyes gazed at him fondly. He scented the rich fragrance of Sandama Twilight, her perfume. He tasted her lips. He felt the warmth of her breath as she whispered in his ear, and strained to catch the words.
The words remained forever beyond his grasp. Lord Gareth Martinez woke with a cry in the darkness of his cabin, and reached with a hand to catch at the phantom that had already fled.
He heard the steady roar of the cruiser’s engines, the engines that were propellingIllustrious from the Bai-do system. He heard the whisper of air through the ducts. He heard the tread of a pair of shoes outside the cabin door, and felt sweat drying on the back of his neck.
Martinez undid the elastic web that kept him from floating out of his bed during occasional periods of weightlessness, and put his bare feet on the cool parquet floor. He rose from the bed and passed out of his sleeping cabin and into his office. He sat heavily in his chair and gazed down at his desk, at the images he’d set in its display, images of Lady Terza Chen, his wife.
Terza was beautiful, intelligent, accomplished, cultured, and heir to the Chen clan, a clan of the highest possible social standing. In normal circumstances she would be far beyond the reach of someone like Martinez, who came from an affluent but provincial clan, and who spoke with a barbarous accent he’d been unable to polish away. Terza’s father served on the Fleet Control Board that determined Martinez’s professional future. Her aunt was Martinez’s commander. Their families had arranged their marriage just hours after the argument that had destroyed his relationship with Caroline Sula, and they had spent a bare seven days together before his duty called him away.
During those seven days she had conceived his child.
He gazed down at the images of Terza and knew that he didn’t deserve her. He didn’t desire her either.
He touched a hand to his lips. He could still taste Caroline Sula.
“Lights,” he said. He blinked in the sudden brightness, then blinked again at the sight of the wall murals, which for some inconceivable reason were of naked, winged children. He called up the navigation plots for the wormhole jump from the Bai-do system to Termaine.
Chenforce, seven ships of war commanded by Terza’s aunt Michi Chen, had bypassed the Naxid fleet securing their conquest at Zanshaa, and had now driven deep into enemy-controlled space. They had wiped out a detachment of ten enemy warships at Protipanu, then raced through a series of systems, destroying merchant shipping, wormhole relay stations, and uncompleted warships.
And several billion people. The raid had worked brilliantly until Chenforce had come to Bai-do, where the Naxids in command had refused Michi Chen’s orders and launched missiles from the planet’s accelerator ring. In response, Squadron Commander Chen had ordered Bai-do’s ring destroyed.
Tens of millions of people lived on the ring, and nearly five billion on the planet below. The great mass of the ring dropping onto the planet must have killed millions outright and imperiled the rest. Clouds of dust and debris rising high into the atmosphere from the impact would shroud the sun and smother the food crops. Without the elevators from the ring to the surface, there would be no way to deliver significant amounts of foodstuffs to the planet.
Most of those who had survived the ring’s fall would die a slow, cold death from starvation.
One nightmare like Bai-do was bad enough. What was worse was that there could be more.
In a few days Chenforce would jump through one of Baido’s wormholes into the Termaine system. Termaine was a wealthy world packed with industry and rich farmland that produced an overabundance of exports. Under normal circumstances Termaine’s ring would host a hundred merchant vessels at a time. Naxid warships would probably be found under construction in its shipyards.
And if those warships fired at Chenforce from the ring, as had happened at Bai-do? The ring would be destroyed, along with the billions below it.
Martinez looked down into the depths of the three-dimensional navigation plot, at the little blue sphere, ringed with silver, that represented Termaine. He recalled the sight of the blue sphere of Bai-do as its doomed ring oscillated and then fell with slow, tragic majesty into the atmosphere. He remembered the sight of the impacts, the antimatter sparkling amid the great plumes of steam and dust and ruin.
