Perhaps no one would. Certainly no one seemed very interested in Corona's journey-news of the Battle of Hone-bar had yet to be released to the public, and the dull-eyed Torminel petty officer who took the data foil seemed far from excited to be meeting one of the Fleet's heroes, and indeed seemed about to drop into slumber as he handed Martinez the receipt.

  Martinez, fury warring with his body's pain and great weariness, stuffed the receipt into a pocket and stalked through the translucent automatic doors that led to the anteroom.

  And there she was.

  The impulse at first was to stare, and then to stagger forward and wrap his arms around Sula's slim body like a shipwrecked mariner clinging to a mast. Fortunately for the dignity of his rank she wasn't receptive to an embrace: she was braced at the salute, shoulders thrown back, chin lifted to expose the throat, the sign of subordination enforced throughout their empire by the Shaa.

  He paused for a breathless moment to absorb her beauty, the erect body, the silver-gilt hair worn shoulder-length, framing the face with its pale, translucent complexion and its amused, glittering green eyes. Then he raised the heavy baton of the Golden Orb, topped with its sphere of swirling liquid, and bobbed it in her direction, acknowledging her salute.

  “Stand at ease, lieutenant,” he said.

  “Thank you, my lord.” Her brilliant smile showed a degree of conceit, her own smug amusement at the way she'd surprised him. “You met me, once, when I returned to the Zanshaa ring. I thought I'd return the compliment.”

  “It's appreciated.” His bodily weariness had vanished under a surge of blood, but his thoughts were still torpid and his skull was filled with cotton. He was painfully conscious that she stood before him, brilliant and rested and desirable, and that anything he said to her was likely to be stupid beyond all credence.

  “Shall I join you on your ride to the surface,” Sula asked, “or do you have more business here?”

  “My family is expecting me,” he said. Stupidly.

  “I know,” she said. “I've been in touch with them. They told me when you were arriving.”

  He and Sula were hovering behind the doors of the Fleet Records Office, blocking traffic, and then Martinez remembered that he was the senior officer and that it was customary for him to walk through the doors first. He did so. Sula followed.

  Alikhan was already standing by the car, shadowed by the door flung up like a wing. “To the skyhook,” Martinez said. There was a knowing smile beneath Alikhan's curling mustachio as he handed Sula into the car next to Martinez.

  Alikhan and the driver sat in the front, separated by a barrier that one of them tactfully opaqued. Martinez's nerves tingled with the awareness of Sula's perfume, a scent that urged his blood to surge a little faster. Sula looked at him as they settled into their seats. “The rumor-which is pretty well official, I'll have you know-says that you did something spectacular, and are about to be decorated. But we're not allowed to know what it was that you did.”

  Martinez gave a snarl. “It's satisfaction enough to know that I've served the empire faithfully,” he said.

  Sula laughed. “I've worked out that you blew up a bunch of Naxids, and that our superiors don't want the enemy to know it.”

  “You'd think the Naxids would have worked it out by now,” Martinez said.

  “How many enemy did you annnihilate, by the way?”

  Confident that she would not be broadcasting to the enemy anytime soon, he told her. She raised her golden brows as calculation buzzed behind her eyes. “Interesting,” she said. “That means our cause isn't necessarily lost.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said, still glowering with resentment. Sula gave him a curious look.

  “Why don't you tell me how you did it?”

  So he did. When he finished, he sensed a degree of disappointment behind her congratulations.

  “What's wrong?” he said.

  “I hoped you'd be able to use my formula.”

  “Well. As to that&” He raised his left arm. “Set your display to receive. I'm about to violate another security regulation.”

  Martinez beamed her the records of Do-faq's series of experiments. “Analyze them to your heart's content,” he said, “and let me know what you think.”

  Sula looked at her sleeve display and smiled. “Yes. Thank you.” She gave him a searching look. “You should be pleased as hell about all this, but you're not. So who's pissed in your breakfast?”

  A reluctant grin tugged at his lips. “I've lost Corona. That's no cause for joy. And then there's my next assignment.” About which he enlightened her.

  She seemed startled. “What happened? Did you steal some fleet commander's girlfriend?”

  “Not that I know of,” Martinez said, and then found himself wondering if Kamarullah was by some chance a fleet commander's girlfriend. The mental image caused him to smile. He turned to Sula.

  “And your next assignment?”

  She gave him an annoyed look. “I'm dealing with the ghost of Captain Blitsharts.”

  Blitsharts had been responsible for their first meeting: Martinez had planned, and Sula executed, a perilous rescue of the famous yachtsman. Who, when rescued, had turned out to be dead.

  “Blitsharts?” he said. “Why Blitsharts?”

  “The Fleet Court of Inquiry determined his death was accidental. But his insurance company insists it was suicide, and there's a civil trial coming up. I'm to give a deposition, and the Fleet has extended my leave till then.” She looked up at him. “After which I will be free. Just in case some celebrated captain wants to request me for his next ship.”

  Which was an invitation to kiss her if anything was, and he put his arm around her and was about to lean in close when the car came to a halt and the doors popped up with a hydraulic hiss.

  Damn. All he had got was a taste of her dizzying perfume and a tingling awareness of the warmth of her skin.

  She gave a rueful smile as he withdrew. When he rose from the car, a score of Fleet pulpies snapped to the salute, throats bared. Anyone in uniform-even the Lords Convocate themselves-were required to salute the Golden Orb, which was why Martinez had chosen to carry it. He'd hoped to relieve his feelings of anger and resentment by abusing his privileges with as many senior officers as he could find.

  Now the orb was a dreadful inconvenience. He was going to have to spend the day trying not to walk into stiff, braced figures murmuring “Stand at ease” and “As you were,” and attracting far more attention to himself and to the beautiful and celebrated Lady Sula than he wanted.

  Sula and Alikhan following, Martinez progressed through the stone-stricken mass of Fleet personnel to one of the cars of the train that would take them to the ring station's lower level-a lower level that, just to make things confusing, was actually above Martinez's head.

  The Fleet areas of the ring, resolutely unattractive but functional with their docking bays, storage facilities, barracks, schools, and shipyards, tended to obscure the fact that the accelerator ring was one of the great technological miracles of all time. It had been drawing a sun-silvered circle about Zanshaa for nearly eleven thousand years, a symbol of Shaa dominion visible from nearly everywhere on the planet. The lower level of the accelerator ring moved above the planet in geostationary orbit, tethered delicately to the world of Zanshaa by the six colossal cables of the planet's skyhooks. Built atop the lower level was the ring's upper level, which rotated at eight times the speed of the lower in order to provide its inhabitants with normal gravity.

  Eighty million people lived on Zanshaa's ring, housed for the most part in areas considerably more attractive than the Fleet districts, and there was room for hundreds of millions more. To these denizens of the upper level, pressed by centrifugal force to the outside of the station ring, the lower level was actually above them. In order to ascend, they boarded a train that was then accelerated down a track in time to be scooped up by a massive ramp and track that dropped with exquisite timing from the geostationary level. Once there, humming electromagnets braked the train to a stop, and the passengers, bobbing in one-eighth gravity and aided by a series of handrails, made their way along a series of ramps to the giant car that would soon drop through Zanshaa's atmosphere to the terminal on its equator.

  Without shame Martinez barged into the compartment reserved for senior officers-it was the Golden Orb, not Martinez's modest rank, that provided access. The hoped-for privacy did not materialize. As Martinez entered he saw the baleful look given him from over the shoulder of the other passenger already strapped into his couch, and his heart gave a lurch as he recognized the hawk-nosed visage of the lord inspector of the Fleet, one of the most feared men in the empire.

  “Forgive me if I don't stand,” said Fleet Commander Lord Ivan Snow in a sandpaper voice. “I don't fancy unwebbing right now.” He was in the first row, with a brilliant view through the huge glass window that made up most of the outside wall.

  “That's quite all right, my lord,” Martinez said. Ducking beneath the low ceiling, he and Sula took couches as far removed from the feared lord inspector as the modest compartment permitted.

  “The day isn't working out well,” Sula murmured in Martinez's ear as she bent over his couch.

  “Part of a ongoing pattern,” Martinez answered softly.

  “It may interest you to know,” said the chief of the Investigative Service, “that the cause of the breakdown in communications that occurred at Hone-bar has been discovered. At the same time that you, Captain Martinez, are being decorated and promoted in two days' time, seven traitors will die screaming.” Martinez could hear the quiet satisfaction in the lord inspector's voice. “Die screaming,” Lord Ivan repeated pleasantly. “I arranged the timing myself.”

  Martinez was for a moment at a loss for speech. Promoted? Finally he managed words.

  “Congratulations on&a successful investigation, lord inspector,” he said.

  “And congratulations to you, lord captain, on a timely and successful combat.”

  Promoted? He had known about the decoration, but this was the first time a promotion had been mentioned.

  Then Martinez felt his ire rising. The training school in charge of a full captain was even more absurd than in the hands of an elcap.

  He wondered if he dared mention the matter to the lord inspector. The words die screaming returned to his mind, and he decided he didn't.

  “There's not a lot of point in our talking,” Sula said quietly, as the huge elevator car was locked onto the cable. “Why don't you sleep? You look about dead.”

  “I feel&” He was about to say “fine” but he realized that the ease of low gravity, and the comfort of his couch, were about to make a liar out of him. So instead he said, “Good idea,” and closed his eyes.

  He was asleep before the car dropped out of the accelerator ring and into brilliant sunlight. The growing acceleration that pressed him into his couch was much less than he'd been enduring for the last two months and it failed to wake him. Below, the land blazed with color: brown mountains tipped with white, the light green of the land contrasting with the deeper, more profound green of the sea. The atmosphere was a faint blurring on the edges of the world. The whirlwind of a tropical storm, its white gyre of cloud edged with blue, was thrashing southward from the equator.

  Calculations spinning through her mind, Sula watched Do-faq's tactical experiments on her sleeve display.

  Martinez woke, his mind fresh, just as the car settled feather-light into its terminal, and the couch swung into its rest position, inverted from where it had been at the start of the journey. He and Sula stepped onto what had, when they'd boarded, been the ceiling, and let the fleet commander precede them from the car. He nodded civilly as he passed.

  “And congratulations to you as well, Lady Sula,” he said.

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  Martinez, as he followed the old man from the car, suspected that the congratulations may not have had anything to do with Sula's decoration.

  Reunited with Alikhan and Martinez's baggage, they took another train to the shuttle terminus, where they boarded the supersonic for the city of Zanshaa. Martinez traded the ticket he'd already reserved for an entire four-seat first-class compartment. Alikhan retained his original seat in second class.

  With the Golden Orb, which like a device out of a fairy tale had the power to turn others to stone, Martinez marched to his compartment, installed himself and Sula, and drew down the shades.

  Privacy at last.

  He sat next to her and tried not to melt beneath the gaze of those green eyes. Martinez took her hand.

  “I'm afraid to speak,” he said.

  She tilted her head. “Why?”

  “Because I'm not at my best right now, and I might say something wrong. And then&” He sought for words. “And then everything would be spoiled, and you'd walk out of this compartment and I'd never see you again.”

  He saw the blood rise in her translucent pale skin. Her perfume whirled through his senses. “I forgive you,” Sula said. “In advance.”

  He kissed her hand, her palm, her wrist. He leaned close to kiss her lips, then hesitated.

  “I'm not running away,” she said.

  He laid his lips to hers for the space of three heartbeats. She raised a hand to lightly cup the side of his head. He kissed her again, then had to break away because he realized he'd been holding his breath, and that his dizziness wasn't entirely a result of Sula's nearness.

  “What is that perfume?” he asked.

  Her lips turned up in a smile. “Sandama Twilight.”

  “What's so special about twilight on Sandama?”

  She ventured a little shrug. “Some day we'll go there and find out.”

  He inhaled deliberately. “I wonder how many pulse points you've applied it to.”

  Sula tilted her head back and with her hand swept a strand of golden hair from her throat. “You're welcome to find out,” she said.

  He feasted on her throat for a long, luxurious moment. A shiver ran along her frame. He kissed a path to her ear-bright and flaming-and reached up a hand to lazily undo the top button of her viridian tunic.

  Martinez heard the low chuckle as he kissed the hollow of her throat. “Make the most of it,” she said. “I think that's the only button you get to open today.”

  He drew back and looked at her at close range, so close that her long lashes fluttered against his. “Why? It's such a promising start.”

  Her speech warmed his cheek. “Because you've already admitted that you're not at your best. And I deserve the best.”

  “That's fair,” he admitted, after consideration.

  “And besides,” she said practically, “I see no point in losing my virtue in a train compartment when I've gone to all the trouble of acquiring such a nice large bed.”

  Martinez laughed, then kissed her again. “I'll look forward to the bed. But in the meantime I hope to convince you that train compartments have their advantages.”

  She smiled. “You're welcome to try.”

  He caressed her with his lips, brushing her cheek and mouth and throat. The train began a smooth acceleration, without bumps or lurches, that would take it to supersonic speed on its way to the capital. His hands floated over her body, and he was rewarded with a sudden intake of breath, a shuddering gasp, and she clutched his hand with her own. And then, as they lay side by side with the warmth of her white-gold hair soft against his cheek, he felt tension enter her body.

  “What's the matter?” he asked.

  She turned away, took his hand, and lay against his shoulder, placing his hand around her waist. Through the window he could see improbably green equatorial countryside blur past. “Forgive me,” she said. “I'm very nervous. I thought if I could meet you and&sort of take charge-”

  “It would be easier?”

  “Yes.”

  Martinez nuzzled her hair. “Take your time. I don't want you to run out that door.”

  She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. “That's not it. I promise I won't run again. But I've realized that you are going to have to take charge sooner or later, because I'm not going to know what to do.”

  His start of surprise was so violent that she sat up and turned to him. “You're a virgin?” he said.

  “Oh no.” Her tone was amused. “But it's been years. A very long time since I had a&”

  “A man?”

  “A boy.” Sadness entered her eyes. “A boy I didn't love. I think he's dead now.” She slowly turned away from him, and settled back against his shoulder. He caressed her hair.