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 aboardIllustrious, 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.
THIRTEEN
As 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 hadalways 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 hasalways 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.