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 communiqués 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.
His sleeve comm chimed. He answered, and saw the chameleon weave on his sleeve resolve into Michi’s image.
“Yes, my lady?”
“I thought I’d let you know that we’ve just received orders to head for Chijimo. That’s where we were told to rendezvous with the Home Fleet in our original orders.”
“Things can’t have changed much in our absence then,” Martinez said.
Michi hesitated. “I’m not sure. Our orders were signed by Senior Fleet Commander Tork, Supreme Commander of something called the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance.”
Martinez took a moment to absorb this. “Tork?” he said. “Not Kangas?”
“No, not Kangas. And I don’t know what that means either.”
“Tork hates me,” Martinez said. “You told me so yourself.”
She raised her eyebrows and said nothing. After a while Martinez sighed.
“Terza sends her love,” he said, speaking on the assumption that love would be sent somewhere in Terza’s messages, even if it hadn’t been on the one video he’d had a chance to view so far.
“How is she?”
“Doing very well, apparently. Maintaining Chen interests on Laredo in the absence of her father.”
“Maurice isn’t on Laredo?” It was Michi’s turn to be surprised.