own station.
A spare rifle had been brought for Sula, and she reached for it. There was no spare suit of armor, and she suddenly felt the hollow in her chest where bullets would strike.
“We’ve got two police coming down the line toward us. One on either side. You two”—she indicated the driver and the other man in the front of the van—“pop them right at the start. The rest of us will exit the rear of the vehicle—Starling first, to give him time to set up on the gunner. The rest of you keep advancing—you’re as well- armed as the patrol, and you’ve got surprise. If things don’t work out, we’ll split up into small groups—Starling and Ardelion, you’re with me. We’ll hijack vehicles in nearby streets and get out as well as we can.”
Her mouth was dry by the time she finished, and she licked her lips with a sandpaper tongue. Casimir was grinning at her.
“Nice plan,” he said.
Total fuckup,she thought, but gave what she hoped was an encouraging nod. She crouched on the rubberized floor of the van and readied her rifle.
“Better turn the transponder on,” Casimir said, and the driver gave a code phrase to the van’s comm unit.
Every vehicle in the empire was wired to report its location at regular intervals to a central data store. The cliquemen’s van had been altered to make this an option rather than a requirement, and the function had been turned off while the van was on its mission to Green Park. An unresponsive vehicle, however, was bound to be suspicious in the eyes of the patrol.
“Good thought,” Sula breathed.
“Here they come.” Casimir ducked down behind the seat. He gave Sula a glance—his cheeks flushed with color, his eyes glittering like diamonds. His grin was brilliant.
Sula felt her heart surge in response. She answered his grin, but that wasn’t enough, and lunged across the distance between them to kiss him hard.
Live or die,she thought. Whatever came, she was ready.
“They’re pinging us,” the driver growled. One of the patrol had raised a hand comm and activated the transponder.
The van coasted forward, then halted. Sula heard the front windows whining open to make it easier to shoot the police on either side.
The van had a throat-tickling odor of tobacco and terror. From her position on the floor she could see the driver holding a pistol alongside his seat. His knuckles were white on the grip. Her heart sped like a turbine in her chest. Tactical patterns played themselves out in her mind.
She heard the footfalls of one of the patrol, walking close, and kept her eyes on the driver’s pistol. The second it moved, she would act.
Then the driver gave a startled grunt and the van surged forward. The knuckles relaxed on the pistol.
“She waved us through,” the driver said.
There was a moment of disbelieving silence, then the rustle and shift of ten tense, frightened, heavily armed people all relaxing at once.
The van accelerated. Sula’s breath sighed slowly from her lungs and she put her rifle carefully down on the floor of the vehicle. She turned to the others, saw at least six cigarettes being lit, laughed and sat heavily on the floor.
Casimir turned to her, his expression filled with savage wonder. “That was lucky,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She only looked at him, at the pulse throbbing in his neck, the slight glisten of sweat at the base of his throat, the fine mad glitter in his eyes. She had never wanted anything so much.
“Lucky,” he said again.
In Riverside, when the van pulled up outside the Hotel of Many Blessings, she was careful not to touch him as she followed Casimir out of the van—the others would store the weapons—and then went with him to his suite, keeping half a pace apart on the elevator.
He turned to her then, and she reached forward and tore open his shirt so she could lick the burning adrenaline from his skin.
His frenzy equaled hers. Their blood smoked with the excitement of shared danger, and the only way to relieve the heat was to spend it on each other.
They laughed. They shrieked. They snarled. They tumbled over each other like lion cubs, claws only half sheathed. They pressed skin to skin so hard that it seemed they were trying to climb into one another.
The fury spent itself sometime after midnight. Casimir called room service for something to eat. Sula craved chocolate, but there was none to be had. For a moment she considered breaking into her own warehouse to satisfy her hunger.
“For once,” he said, as he cut his omelette with a fork and slid half of it onto Sula’s plate, “for once you didn’t sound like you came from Riverside.”
“Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.
“And you didn’t sound like Lady Sula either. You had some other accent, one I’d never heard before.”
“It’s an accent I’ll use only with you,” she said.
The accent of the Fabs, on Spannan. The voice of Gredel.
Lady Mitsuko signed the transfer order that morning. Transport wasn’t arranged till the afternoon, so Julien and the other eleven prisoners arrived at the Riverside station late in the afternoon, about six.
Sergius Bakshi had a longstanding arrangement with the captain of the Riverside station. Julien’s freedom cost two hundred zeniths. Veronika cost fifty, and the Cree cook a mere fifteen.
Julien would have been on his way by seven, but it was necessary to wait for the Naxid supervisor, the one who approved all the ration cards, to leave.
Still suffering from his interrogation, Julien limped to liberty on the night that the Naxids announced that the Committee to Save the Praxis, their own government, was already on its way from Naxas to take up residence in the High City of Zanshaa. A new Convocation would be assembled, composed both of Naxids and other races, to be the supreme governing body of their empire.
“Here’s hoping we can give them a hot landing,” Sula said. She was among the guests at Sergius’s welcome-home dinner, along with Julien’s mother, a tall, gaunt woman, forbidding as a statue, who burst into tears at the sight of him.
Veronika was not present. Interrogation had broken a cheekbone and the orbit of one eye: Julien had called a surgeon, and in the meantime provided painkillers.
“I’llgive them a welcome,” Julien said grimly, through lips that had been bruised and cut. “I’ll rip the bastards to bits.”
Sula looked across the table at Sergius and silently mimed the word “ten” at him. He smiled at her, and when he looked at Julien, the smile turned hard.
“Ten,” he said. “Why stop there?”
Sula returned the smile. At last she had her army. Her own team of three plus a tough, disciplined order of killers who had decided, after all—and after a proper show of resistance—to be loved.
TWENTY
Time passed. Martinez dined with Husayn and Mersenne on successive days, and the next day spent eight hours in Command, takingIllustrious through the wormhole to Osser. Squadrons of decoys were echeloned ahead of the squadron, in hopes of attracting any incoming missiles. Pinnaces flew along with the decoys, painting the vacuum ahead with their laser range finders. Every antimissile weapon was charged and pointed dead ahead.
Chenforce made some final-hour maneuvers before passing the wormhole, checking their speed and entering the wormhole at a slightly different angle, so as to appear in the Osser system on a course that wouldn’t take them straight on to Arkhan-Dohg, the next system, but slightly out of the direct path.
Martinez lay on his acceleration couch, trying not to gnaw his nails as he stared at the sensor displays, waiting for the brief flash that would let him know that missiles were incoming. His tension gradually eased as the returning radar and laser signals revealed more of the Osser system, and then a new worry began to possess him.
The Naxids would have to wonder why Chenforce had changed its tactics, particularly when they hadn’t met
