The Sundering (35 page)

The exercise, run the next day, was a success. However obscure the workings of his mind, Fletcher knew his job:
Illustrious
performed throughout with efficiency and precision, and so did the rest of the squadron. Martinez found himself envying Chenforce’s trained, disciplined crews, and wished he’d had these people aboard
Corona
when he was in command.

Of course, Chenforce was composed of crews that had already won a victory, on the day of the rebellion, in the vicious battle waged at point-blank range with antiproton beams by ships mostly in dock. It gave the crews a certain grim esprit, and a confidence that whatever they encountered next, it couldn’t be as bad as what they’d already overcome.

Chenforce also employed the new looser tactical formations that Martinez had developed, and with apparent success. Do-faq, Michi Chen confided, had sent her a complete recording of the experiments he had conducted, and she’d begun experimenting with them on her own.

Buoyed by this expression of confidence, Martinez created a more elaborate experiment for the following day. Chenforce again performed well. The third day there was no exercise, since Captain Fletcher chose the day for a personnel inspection so comprehensive that it took most of the day. Martinez, who was not under Fletcher’s command, was not subject to the captain’s keen eye; but that night, with his meal, he received a report from Alikhan, who had been present when his own compartment was visited by the captain.

“The lord captain’s quite an enthusiast for musters and inspections, my lord,” Alikhan said. “
Illustrious
is given a full inspection every six or seven days, and one department or other is mustered and examined on a daily basis.”

“Does the lord captain find much?” Martinez said.

“A surprising amount, my lord. Dust in corners, untidy personal gear, bits of his murals getting chipped off…he’s very thorough.”

“I imagine the chipped murals must annoy him.”

Alikhan was quite expressionless. “He keeps a painter on his staff, my lord, to make repairs.”

“Upholding his dignity,”
Martinez muttered to himself.

Alikhan raised an eyebrow. “My lord?”

“Nothing,” Martinez said.

The fourth day, after another successful exercise, Martinez was the supper guest of the wardroom. The lieutenants were eager for a description of
Corona
’s escape from the Naxids on the day of the rebellion, and of the Battle of Hone-bar, and Martinez—who’d had a degree of experience in these anecdotes by now—obliged. Fulvia Kazakov, with a new pair of ivory chopsticks thrust through the knot of hair behind her head, was a meticulous hostess, satisfying her lieutenants’ curiosity without giving Martinez the sense he was being overwhelmed by a pack of eager juniors. Chandra Prasad, to Martinez’s surprise, was quiet—he remembered her as boisterous in gatherings. When he permitted himself to look at her, he saw her studying him with her long dark eyes.

Toward the end of the supper, Chandra received a page from Lord Captain Fletcher, and quietly excused herself. There followed a moment of awkward silence, in which the lieutenants scrupulously avoided one another’s eyes, and then the conversation continued.

When he and Chandra had met, Martinez reflected later, they had shared the same problem: neither had any patronage in the Fleet. Martinez had found himself benefactors in the Chens, but he suspected Chandra hadn’t found anyone to take this role—no one, perhaps, except Senior Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher.

While there was no outright regulation against relations between a captain and one of his officers, service custom was dead against it. Aside from concerns about sexual exploitation, everyone dreaded a captain who played favorites among his subordinates, and a sexual relationship was favoritism of a particularly tangled kind. If an officer couldn’t do without companionship for the length of a voyage, he or she was usually at liberty to bring a comely servant on board for the purpose.

Well, Martinez thought charitably, perhaps it was love.

He decided to forego video and wrote letters to Terza daily. In order that she might know what to expect at her destination he wrote his reminiscences of Laredo, where
Ensenada
was bound, along with descriptions of his parents, their homes, and the history of his family. He hadn’t seen Laredo in nearly twelve years, but the memories rose to his mind with surprising clarity: the summer home Buena Vista on the lower slopes of the Sierra Oriente, surrounded by the maples that turned to flame in the autumn; the palace of white and chocolate marble in the capital, with its water gardens; and the tall fieldstone home set in the subtropical delta of the Rio Hondo, where the family spent its winters, and its magnificent alley of massive, twisted live oaks on which Martinez climbed as a child. His father, an exuberant man with a collection of custom aircraft and cars, and his mother, who read romantic poetry aloud to the family at night.

The letters, transformed to digital images, took days to reach Terza through the wormhole relays, but once she started receiving them she began responding in kind. Through her neat calligraphy he learned of her harp teacher Mr. Giulio, with his sharp nose and heavy knuckles; the pyramid-shaped Chen villa in the Hone Reach, built by the first Chen to reach convocate rank; and her reaction to an old Koskinen drama, a recording of which she’d found on
Ensenada.
She spoke of her pregnancy and the changes that were embracing her body.

Martinez pictured her on the love seat in her room, bent over a notebook with her hair thrown back over her shoulders and a calligraphy pen in her long, graceful hand.

He wrote that he missed her, and that she shouldn’t be concerned if his letters suddenly stopped for a while. That didn’t mean a battle, necessarily, that just meant he was busy or the squadron was moving.

He wrote
Love, Gareth
at the end of his letters, and found that the words didn’t seem awkward. He was surprised at that, and then, as one letter followed another, the surprise began to fade.

Martinez finally rated a dinner with the captain, though this was in the context of Lady Michi and her entire staff being invited to dine. The murals in the captain’s suite had actually been painted on, instead of being mounted like wallpaper. Fletcher was a gracious host, and kept up a flow of light conversation for the entire evening. Chandra Prasad was not in evidence.

Martinez dined with Michi regularly, and was a frequent guest of the wardroom. He began to feel that he should return this hospitality, and received the squadcom’s permission to use
Daffodil.
He invited Lady Michi, and then the lieutenants, and finally the lieutenants along with their captain. Espinosa and Ayutano stood by the docking port with white gloves to help the guests onto the yacht. All but the captain praised Perry’s cooking, but even Fletcher praised the wine, the vintages that had actually been shipped from the Chen cellars by Terza, and which Martinez had blindly loaded aboard without even looking at the labels.

After that
Daffodil
became a kind of club for the younger officers. Martinez frequently invited them for drinks or games, events where they wouldn’t have to wear full dress. Despite the informality Martinez made a point of never being alone there with Chandra, or indeed with any female crew member.

Illustrious
fell into routine. The Naxids seemed unaccountably tardy in seizing the capital that had been abandoned to their mercy. When Martinez had first come aboard, the Naxids had been expected any day. But the days rolled past, and the Naxids refused to show themselves.
Illustrious
went on with its series of drills and musters and inspections. Martinez suggested to Lady Michi that the number of drills be cut back: he didn’t want the crouchbacks to overtrain and lose their edge. She agreed, and a drill was now scheduled for every third day.

Still the Naxids didn’t come. Martinez could feel boredom twitching at his nerve ends. One day he encountered Lord Captain Fletcher in the corridor, walking with Chandra. Martinez braced in salute.

“Ah, Hoddy,” Fletcher said amiably. “I call you Hoddy.”

“My lord?”

Fletcher waved a hand in a vaguely beneficent gesture. “You are Hoddy. Hoddy I call you, and Hoddy you shall be.”

Martinez blinked. “Yes, my lord,” he said.

The captain and Chandra passed on, and Martinez hurried to his cabin, where he called up a dictionary and looked up “Hoddy.” He found no entry, not even in the collection of slang.

Fletcher never called him Hoddy again. The incident remained a mystery.

Another heavy cruiser joined Chenforce, one damaged in the mutiny at Harzapid and since repaired. Chenforce now mustered eight ships, half of them heavy cruisers. The new arrival was worked into the tactical system through a series of exercises, but beyond that nothing changed. After forty days aboard
Illustrious
, Martinez and Chenforce seemed to have fallen into a pleasant trance, a wide orbit about Seizho’s primary that might well last forever. The Naxids became a distant, receding dream.

The dream ended one afternoon while Martinez was writing to Terza. He answered a call, and found Lady Michi’s grim face looking out of his sleeve display. “They’re moving,” she said. “My office at once.”

Martinez sprang to his feet, dodged around his desk and dashed into the corridor, only to find Captain Fletcher ahead of him, moving at a saunter. Martinez tried not to tread on Fletcher’s heels in his impatience as he followed the captain to Michi Chen’s office.

“I’ve just received a flash from Zanshaa,” she said, as they braced for salute. “Wormhole stations report the flares of forty-three ships leaving Magaria and accelerating toward Zanshaa. Considering the length of time it took the message to reach us, the Naxids should reach Zanshaa wormhole Three in about two and a half days. At ease, by the way.”

Martinez relaxed only slightly. “Forty-three,” he said. “That leaves a few unaccounted for.”

“We can hope the others are guarding Magaria and Naxas,” Lady Michi said. “And if not, and if we encounter them”—she shrugged, and Martinez saw a surprising, superior smile touch her lips—“we’ll fight and we’ll win. I have every confidence in our crews.”

“Thank you, my lady,” Fletcher said, as if he’d been personally responsible for all the crews in question.

Michi looked at the map she’d called onto the surface of her desk. “I’ll want everyone suited up for the change of course to Protipanu,” she continued, and then looked up. “Captain Martinez, there will be time for a squadron drill between now and then. Let’s sharpen our sword one last time, shall we?”

“Yes, my lady.”

The squadron commander looked over her shoulder and called into the next room. “Vandervalk?”

Michi’s orderly came in with three small glasses on a silver tray. Golden fluid shone through a sheen of condensation on the glasses. Michi, Fletcher, and Martinez each took one. Martinez passed the glass under his nose and scented Kailas, a buttery-sweet dessert wine.

Michi raised her glass. “To our hunt, my lords.”

Martinez felt the pull of a feral smile on his lips. On the back of his neck he felt the cold fingers of some primal ancestor, some forebear who crouched over his prey and raised stained hands to the sky in a celebration of blood and death.

“To our hunt,” he said, and raised his glass.

Less than half an hour later, the ships of Chenforce swung onto a new heading and fired their engines. Gee forces began to build.

Martinez felt a growing exultation even as he felt the weight piling on his ribs.

Our hunt.
The Martinez Plan was under way.

A
s Goddess of the Records Office, Sula worked to cover her every track that she could find. Her primary identity, the Jill Durmanov who inhabited the cozy apartment in Grandview, had been so thoroughly compromised by the Military Constabulary that Sula decided to make Jill Durmanov less substantial. Durmanov was the proprietor of the company that owned crates of cocoa and coffee, and Sula altered the records to make the proprietor Lucy Daubrac, the woman who lived in the communal apartment in Riverside. Sula made the change retroactive: Lucy had
always
owned the company, and Sula backdated the company itself, changing the record to indicate that it had been in existence for twelve years.

While she was at it, she had the Records Office send password updates to Lucy’s hand comm, not to Jill’s.

Change the key, change the lock. And write on the lock the words “This has
always
been the lock.”

The next night she was back in the Records Office computer. She had realized that if another intrusion into the executive file were detected, or something else went amiss with the file, it would be reloaded from a backup and she’d have to act fast so as not to lose her access. Lady Arkat’s passwords gave her access to the backup file, and Sula—using the same tricks she’d used with the primary file—successfully wrote her own executive file over the backup.

Summer grew warm and the heat rose in waves from the pavement. Flowers trailed in red and orange cascades from window boxes, and the streets remained crowded well into the night. The Naxids declined to invade. Sula wondered if they’d lost their nerve.

With no enemy to fight, she and her team wandered over the Lower Town, listening. They entered cafés and bars and markets and spoke to whoever would speak to them. Sula wanted to learn what she could about the people around her.

The results were not encouraging. Most people thought that the flight of the Convocation, and the departure of the Fleet, marked the end of the war. They didn’t find the prospect of domination by the Naxids particularly threatening. In any case they were willing to give the Naxids the benefit of the doubt. “You think they could be worse than the Shaa, beauteous lady?” as One-Step remarked.

“There are a lot more Naxids than there ever were Shaa,” Sula answered him. “Billions. They’re going to get all the top jobs—and the best middle jobs, too.”

One-Step shrugged. “You got to have a job for any of that to matter, lovely one.”

As the summer wore on the most popular song was “Season of Hope,” by the Cree performer Polee Ponyabi, a song about giving up one’s cares and anxieties and returning to a simple life of love and joy. Sula heard the soulful but catchy melody from windows, from vehicles, from clubs. The inhabitants of Zanshaa seemed willing to follow Ponyabi’s advice: the restaurants and clubs were jammed, lines waited outside theaters for tickets, and the war seemed very far away.

Thus it was that when the enemy came, they seemed to come from the depths of some half-remembered dream. While taking a siesta on a hot afternoon, the windows open to bring a drift of sultry air over her skin, Sula felt the atmosphere throb with the deep basso rumble of the tocsin, the automatic horns that were normally blown only in case of flood or extreme weather. Sula jumped from her bed and told the video wall to turn itself on.

A grave announcer informed the population that news had flashed along the chain of wormhole relay stations, and it was now known that the Naxid fleet was coming. It would be another day before they arrived in the Zanshaa system, and the public was urged to remain calm. All clubs and theaters were ordered closed until further notice, and all other businesses were ordered closed after noon on the following day.

Just enough time for some fine scenes of panic in the food stores, Sula thought, and so it proved. The local Covered Market was open well into the night, and closed only because every item had been sold.

Her own supplies had already been laid by. Thoughtfully she stroked the finish of a bookcase that Macnamara had made for her, then touched the trigger that opened the secret compartment and revealed the butt of a pistol. She drew the pistol out and felt its firm solidity in her hand.

No, not a dream.
The Season of Hope was about to come to an end.

A short while later she found herself in the communal apartment, where Spence already waited as the video wall repeated the same news over and over. Macnamara drifted in shortly thereafter. It was as if they all wanted each other’s comfort as the world turned to night.

The next afternoon they moved onto the roof, which had an unobstructed view of the Zanshaa ring. Sula kept her hand comm on, tuned to a news channel. There were a few people there already, sitting in chairs with drinks in their hands, and the numbers grew as the day waned until it seemed the entire population of the city had become refugees, taking shelter on the roofs from an advancing flood. Sula saw even the building’s Daimong janitor on the roof, pale-skinned and sinister among the drifting tide of Terrans.

The tocsin moaned out again in the late afternoon as the Naxid fleet flashed into the system, drowning out Sula’s hand comm and the words of Governor Pahn-ko, who broadcast an assurance to the invaders that neither the ring nor the planet of Zanshaa would offer resistance.

The same was not promised of the horde of decoy missiles that still orbited the system, and as night cloaked the city Sula could see bright flashes amid the early stars that marked the decoys’ annihilation. The scent of hashish drifted from one roof to the next. The crowds cried
aah
and
ooh
as if they were watching a fireworks display. With intoxication and night and the crowds, the roofs began to take on a kind of party atmosphere. A few young people began dancing to music.

It was then that Governor Pahn-ko came onto Sula’s comm, and hers was one of many voices that call for silence.

“Naxid missiles have been fired in the Zanshaa system,” the governor reported. He was an elderly Lai-own, his head nearly bald over his orange eyes, his muzzle bright with implant replacement teeth. He wore the deep red uniform of a convocate, with the ribbon of his office across his keel-like breastbone.

“We have reason to fear for the Zanshaa ring,” Pahn-ko said. “I ask all citizens to remain calm in the event that the ring is attacked. In the event that the ring is in danger of destruction, I have ordered engineers to demolish it in such a way as to prevent any danger to the inhabitants of the planet.”

“Brilliant,” Sula breathed into the sudden fearful silence of the stricken crowd. Without actually saying so, the lord governor had implied that if the ring were to be destroyed, it would be the Naxids who were at fault.

“I thank you for your loyalty in the past,” Pahn-ko went on, “and I have every trust that you will remain loyal in the future. Remember that the Convocation will return, and any who cooperate with the criminal Naxid government will be brought to account.”

And how many believe
that
? Sula wondered.

About twenty minutes later the tocsin sounded for the third time, and the Zanshaa ring was destroyed, mourned by the groaning horns seemed to rumble from deep in the protesting bones of the earth. Bright flashes illuminated the night along the great arc of the ring; strobe-light painted the upturned faces of the population with silver. Sula heard a scream, and sobs, and she watched in fascination as the last-ditch plans of the old, long-dead engineers came to fruition, and the broken remnants of the ring began slowly to separate.

She had not actually believed they would destroy the ring, not until she saw it happen.

The upper ring must have been braked and locked down, because its remains didn’t separate and fly away. What happened instead was that the ring fragments rose in slow, stately silence into the night, so slowly that the fragments’ separation wasn’t apparent for some time. The fragments wouldn’t leave Zanshaa altogether, Sula knew, they didn’t have nearly enough energy; but they would rise to a higher orbit, dragging their cables behind them. Much of the fragments’ mass, eventually, could be scavenged in the event the ring was rebuilt.

The tocsin fell silent, and the crowd watched, sickened and suddenly sober, as the great symbol of Zanshaa’s prosperity and dominion floated from their reach.

When the Zanshaa ring had been built, the human race had been divided into primitive nation-states whose populations were happily engaged in bashing each other over the head with lengths of iron. Now that great monument of civilization and peace was no more.

Zanshaa was on its own.

Lights began to go out over the city. Much of the planet’s electricity was generated from matter-antimatter reactions on the ring and sent to Zanshaa on the cables, or beamed by microwave to great rectenna fields in deserted corners of the world. Sula, as an employee for the Logistics Consolidation Executive, had arranged for large quantities of antimatter to be taken to the surface for power generation, but no more antimatter was coming, perhaps for years, and electricity rationing was an inevitability.

People began to drift away in the pale glow of the few remaining emergency lights. Sula remained, gazing upward, catching out of the corners of her eyes the bright flashes as more decoys were destroyed.

And then the deep awe she felt in her soul began to be replaced by swelling satisfaction.

Her plan.
They had carried out
her plan.

What can the Naxids be thinking now? she wondered.