ordered both the station and the lifeboat destroyed, as either could conceivably track the squadron for a barrage of missiles.
It would take ten hours for Michi’s message to reach Station 2, and nearly ten hours for any response to return. After the first few hours, when it was clear that no Naxid force was lurking behind the system’s swollen red sun, Michi reduced the squadron to a lower level of alert, and Martinez left Command with suspense still humming in his nerves.
The squadron had been out of communication for nearly four months, and during that time the cause for which they fought could have died. The Naxids could have won a crushing victory over the remnants of the Home Fleet, or the loyalist cause simply collapsed in the wake of the fall of Zanshaa. It was a matter of conjecture whether Chenforce would have a home to return to.
Martinez was in Command at the earliest possible hour that he could expect a reply from Wormhole Station 2. It was early in the morning, before his usual hour for rising, and he clutched a cup of coffee in one hand, sipping as he listened to the routine chatter.
“Message from Station Two, my lord!” The joy in Acting Lieutenant Qing’s voice was answered by a leap of Martinez’s heart. “The message is in the proper code for the day. Decoding now…”
A pale Daimong face, set in a frozen expression of horrified surprise, appeared on Martinez’s displays.
“Welcome to Enan-dal, Lady Michi,” the Daimong said. “I am Warrant Officer Kassup of the Exploration Service. We have been told to await you. Word of your arrival has already been sent to the Fleet. I am sending a digest of the latest news, and I will forward your mail and any instructions from the Fleet as soon as they arrive.”
Martinez felt the easing of a tension he didn’t know he had. He half listened to Michi’s polite reply, then waited for a moment to see if she had any orders for him. She didn’t.
Michi finished the report of her raid, with its account of the battles at Protipanu, Arkhan-Dohg, and Alekas, its lists of casualties, the status of her seven ships, the totals of enemy ships destroyed, the description of the ring’s destruction at Bai-do, plus the details of the deaths of Captain Fletcher, two lieutenants, and four petty officers. The report was wrapped in several layers of cipher and sent to the Fleet Control Board by way of Station 2.
An instant later the crew’s personal messages, already in the queue, were sent, and with these went Martinez’s long serial letter to his wife Terza and shorter letters to his father, his mother, to his father-in-law Lord Chen, and to the two sisters who were still speaking to him. He also sent his father a scan of his portrait.
Martinez wasn’t needed. He returned command of the ship to Qing, went to his bed, and slept dreamlessly for many hours, well past his normal time for waking.
Alikhan, wisely, let him sleep.
Four days later Chenforce sped through Enan-dal Wormhole 2, and half a day later received its mail. Martinez gave the entire crew two hours free time to catch up with the news from home.
He took advantage of his own offer and retired to his office and shut the door. He opened his desk display and scanned the long list of mail. There was no communication from Caroline Sula. He hadn’t expected anything, but managed to notice its absence anyway.
He wondered where she was and what she was doing.
Martinez looked for the very last item by date, sent eleven days earlier. It was a video file from Terza, and he opened it.
Lady Terza Chen was quite visibly pregnant now—nearly seven months, he calculated. She stood in the camera’s range, draped in a long dark violet gown that emphasized the paler beauty of her face and of the hands that rested lightly on her pregnant belly. Her hair was long and black and worn in a pair of long tails, threaded with ribbon, that fell past her shoulders. Her lovely face bore the serenity that had always seemed slightly unreal to Martinez and had led to uneasy thoughts concerning what exactly was happening behind the tranquil mask.
With a shock he recognized where she was standing. It was a study in his family’s palace on Laredo, the long, elegant building of white and chocolate marble that stood in the center of the capital. He recognized the hulking, scarred old shelves of dark wood, the equally battered light fixtures.
The room had once been his. The half-open door behind Terza led to the bedroom in which he’d slept until he left for the academy at the age of seventeen, the room to which he had never returned. His parents must have put Terza in his old room—it was just the sort of sentimental gesture that would have appealed to his mother.
Martinez hoped she wasn’t too appalled by the old furniture, so badly knocked about by a houseful of active children.
And he maintained a devout wish that Terza would not discover the nude pictures of an old girlfriend, Lord Dalmas’s daughter, that he’d hidden in the back of the wardrobe that summer before he left for the academy.
“Hello,” Terza said. She turned to give a profile to the camera and smoothed the folds of her gown over the outline of her pregnant belly. “I thought I’d send a video so you could have an update on the status of your son.”
Son.Martinez felt his heart give a lurch. That the child was a boy hadn’t been clear when Chenforce had departed for its raid.
“He’s becoming rather an active child,” Terza said, “and is growing fond of exploration. We’ve been considering names, and in light of his conduct and in the absence of any instructions from the father, we’ve decided we rather like Gareth.” She turned to face the camera, a slight smile on her face. “I hope you approve.”
“As long as they don’t called him Junior,” Martinez found himself saying aloud, but he felt a warm surge of pride flush through his blood.
Terza drew back a chair from the battered old desk, rearranged her gown again, and sat. The camera, which was not without its own intelligence, followed her.
“As you can see,” she said, “I’m still on Laredo. Your parents and Roland”—the brother Martinez wasn’t speaking to, at least not when he could help it—“are dealing with, ah, a great many important guests, who are going to be feted and celebrated and generally fussed over until they give Roland and your father what they want.”
The very important guests, Martinez knew, were the members of the Convocation, which had fled Zanshaa for a world as far away from the Naxids as they could find. Their location was a state secret—though presumably everyone on Laredo knew—and Terza couldn’t mention them by name without triggering one of the algorithms at the Office of the Censor, which might have stopped the correspondence dead.
In any case, the Convocation was now completely in the hands of Lord Martinez, Roland, and the rest of the family. If their incompetence hadn’t caused the war in the first place, Martinez would have felt sorry for them.
“I’ve been playing my part as a kind of auxiliary hostess,” Terza said, “which is less tiresome than you’d think, and gives me something to do other than languish in the nursery. I’ve known many of these guests all my life. And since my father isn’t here, I’m handling Chen business as well as representingyou, though it’s hard to say at this point how any of that’s going.”
Martinez paused the video and wondered why Lord Chen wasn’t present along with the rest of the Convocation. Terza wasn’t in mourning, and she didn’t seem sorrowful when she spoke of him, so he wasn’t dead or somehow disgraced.
Perhaps he was on a mission of some sort.
Probably that information was on one of the communiques he’d skipped. Martinez triggered the video again.
Terza gave him a significant look. “I obviously can’t go into details,” she continued, “but I’ve been around some important people, and I’ve seen some interesting reports. The material side of the war is encouraging, and time is not on the Naxids’ side.”
She raised a hand. “I hope you’re raising a lot of mischief but otherwise staying out of trouble. Come back to me and young Gareth as soon as you can.”
The orange end-stamp appeared on the screen. Martinez stared at it, his mind swimming.
She had decided to name their son after him. Perhaps that meant she was thinking of remaining in the marriage even after her father and his enterprises ceased to require a massive Martinez subsidy.
Perhaps the woman his family had bought for him, and with whom he’d spent all of seven days before being parted by the war, had decided to remain a fixture in his life.
