Ship schematics, data from the Imperial Ship Registry, flashed on the board's displays. Lord Chen, who owned ships, leaned closer to take a careful look. A lean merchant craft, he saw, with small capacity for cargo. It would be useful, he supposed, for carrying high-value, high-priority cargo, but otherwise could scarcely be operated at a profit.

  Built to carry urgent war materiel, he thought, from one base to another, and given the capacities of the engines, to carry it fast. The cargo would be missiles, perhaps, or key replacement personnel, or information so critical that it could not be trusted to the usual channels&and at that point his imagination flagged.

  “It was the limitations of the new vessels that intrigued me,” said Lieutenant Kijjalis. The Torminel was no doubt very warm with his full uniform over his fur, and there were probably hidden cooling units in his tailoring.

  “The ships' cargo capacity is small,” she said, “and the engines large for such a small ship. And their modular construction, which would enable the owners to reconfigure their crew and cargo areas, is unnecessarily expensive. And then I realized that the ships were never meant to be cargo vessels.”

  Chen's heart gave an unexpected lurch as he looked again at the schematics. It would take a relatively brief stay at a dockyard to strip away the modular cargo and crew sections, he saw, and to replace them with missile batteries, expanded crew quarters, and action stations with enough radiation shielding to insulate them from the blasts of antimatter missiles.

  Lord Chen looked at the Torminel lieutenant in a fever of sudden calculation. “And how many of these ships did you say there were?”

  “Ten, my lord.”

  “Ten warships.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Ahn-kin interrupted, taking the reins of the discussion. “Once they are retrofitted with weapons and crew, we estimate they would be the equivalent of a medium-sized frigate, with twelve to fourteen missile launchers, one or two pinnaces, half a dozen or so point-defense lasers, and a crew of approximately eighty.”

  “Ten frigates&” breathed Lord Mondi. For once the Torminel forgot his careful diction and lisped like a child.

  Frigates were the smallest class of true warship, certainly, but once they were added to the formidable enemy fleet concentrated at Magaria, the implications were horrific.

  “Do you realize what this means?” Lord Pezzini demanded. His face was red. “This means&”

  “My lord,” interrupted Lord Tork forcefully. “I must ask everyone here to refrain from speculating in the presence of these officers. Until the briefing is finished, please confine your remarks to questions and comments related to Captain Ahn-kin's presentation.”

  There was a formidable silence, broken by Lady Seekin.

  “How certain are you?”

  The officers from the Intelligence Section looked at each other, hesitant to make too definite a commitment before this august audience. It was Lieutenant Kijjalis who answered. “I am absolutely convinced that my analysis is the correct one. But insofar as I must admit the possibility that I may be in error, let me say that my confidence is on the order of ninety percent.”

  “I concur,” said Ahn-kin.

  “And so do I,” said Lord Chen. The board members looked at him. “I own ships,” he pointed out, “and I'm familiar with ship design.” He tapped the display in front of him. “These are warships in everything but armament and proper shelters for the crew, and a Fleet dockyard can remedy that in a short time.” He looked at Ahn-kin. “Do you have an estimate for the completion of these vessels?”

  “At least two should be complete by now,” Ahn-kin said. “These would be the two building at Loatyn, which were undergoing trials when the rebellion broke out. Since Loatyn submitted to the enemy soon after, I think we can safely say that these have almost certainly completed their refit and joined the enemy fleet. Probably three more should be joining any day now.” Estimates flashed on the screen. “The remaining five could be completing about now, but since three of these would have to fit out at Naxas, they're still two months or more from the main enemy concentration at Magaria.”

  Lord Chen felt a chill in his blood as he thought suddenly of Lord Saïd's deception strategy, the phony messages from dissidents that the Lord Senior was confident were delaying the rebel attack. Whether the Naxids believe the messages or not, it wasn't the alleged conspiracy that was delaying their attack, they were delaying because they were waiting for the ten newly minted frigates that would give them overwhelming power against the defenders.

  The Naxids would soon be able to bring forty-five ships against the twenty-five defending the capital, and the number of attackers rose to fifty-three if the eight ships from Protipanu were included. No matter how brilliantly Lord Fleetcom Kangas maneuvered, he could not hope to win against those odds. The loyalists would be overwhelmed and annihilated.

  There were a few stunned, hopeless questions from the board before the officers from the Intelligence Section were sent away, and then a long, numb, despairing silence before Lord Tork spoke.

  “My lords,” he said slowly, “I think it is now obvious that we can't hope to hold Zanshaa. We must adopt another plan.”

  “The Martinez Plan?” Chen said pointedly, and felt a mean little stab of satisfaction at seeing Pezzini wince.

  Lord Tork turned his pale face toward Chen. “Lord Saïd, when he spoke to me about your visit the other day, referred to it as the Chen Plan. Perhaps it should retain that designation.”

  Lord Chen, who now realized that Tork knew that he'd gone behind his back to the Lord Senior, resolved that he refused to be embarrassed by the knowledge.

  “Your lordship gives me too much credit,” he said.

  Lord Tork's mournful face turned to the others on the board. “I shall demand an immediate interview with Lord Saïd,” he said. “I trust you will all attend?”

  Lord Chen, as he rose from his chair, thought back to the desperation of the last few days, his frantic lobbying efforts aimed at getting the government to adopt the plan that Lord Tork and the other die-hards had just accepted without question&and then it occurred to him to wonder:

  The Martinez luck. Is it working already?

  Walpurga walked through her wedding with a half-curious, half-thoughtful expression on her face, as if she were observing with considerable interest the quaint rites of a tribe of Yormaks.

  PJ Ngeni, on the other hand, looked as if he were attending his own funeral.

  At the climax of the marriage ritual Walpurga sat on the edge of a bed, her legs dangling over the side, while the groom sat on the floor with her feet in his lap as he removed her slippers. Perhaps in most homes this ceremony took place in an actual bedroom, but in the Shelley Palace-as in the Yoshitoshi Palace two days before-a large bed had been moved into a drawing room for just this purpose.

  The guests at Walpurga's wedding were a small fraction of those at Vipsania's. The circumstances of the marriage seemed to call for a smaller celebration, and each family had invited only intimates, a total of about fifty people.

  The ribbons of one slipper untied, PJ paused, his long face drawn with melancholy, to permit pictures to be taken. Lord Pierre Ngeni stood near his cousin, arms folded on his chest, to make certain PJ went through with it. Roland, rather more confident of the outcome, smiled easily in the background.

  Martinez, watching with more sympathy than he'd perhaps intended, wondered what expression the picture-takers would find on his own face, at his own nuptials two days hence.

  PJ completed the ritual to polite applause. Walpurga's toenails had been lacquered a brilliant shade of crimson to compliment her wedding gown of red and gold tissue. The two rose and kissed, again as cameras hummed about them.

  A sudden anger flashed through Martinez. Let my wedding not be such a farce, he violently thought.

  Afterward, after Walpurga put on her slippers once again and the crowd began to disperse, Martinez approached Terza, who had been watching with a kind of serene smile that Martinez would have found eerie had he not, already in their brief acquaintance, learned that this was an habitual expression of concealment.

  Terza saw him walking toward her, and her gaze shifted to him while the smile altered, he hoped, to something more genuine. He had been trying to spend as much time as possible with his bride-to-be, though with so many last-minute arrangements on the part of both families this had amounted only to a few hours. With her father occupied exclusively with the Convocation and the Control Board, her mother refusing to have anything to do with the proceedings, and many of her relatives fleeing the capital, Terza was forced to plan her own wedding, and on only a few days' notice.

  You've got to get her pregnant, Roland had urged him that morning. Tell her you want children right away, that she should get her implant removed and take Progestene or something to induce ovulation. And when an annoyed Martinez had asked him why in hell he should do that, Roland had patiently explained. When the Chen family's back on its feet after the war, Daddy Chen may try to make his daughter divorce you. I want you to have fathered a couple of bouncing baby heirs by that point-and if Chen tries to disinherit them in favor of children by some other parent, Clan Martinez will serve him with a lawsuit that will nail his ears to the wall.

  It had not cheered Martinez to discover that Roland was already thinking ahead to his divorce.

  “Shall we walk in the garden?” Martinez suggested.

  “Certainly.”

  The garden in the Shelley Palace courtyard was old and overgrown, shadowed by the rambling structure of the palace, which had been built over many centuries and in different styles. The two stood for a moment before an allegory of The Triumph of Virtue over Vice, the two central figures so old and weathered that their faces had become nearly identical abstractions, corroded blind eyes over hollow, mournful mouths.

  “Who is that person?” Terza asked, indicating an elderly Terran woman in a light summer frock who walked amid straggling forsythia. “She's not dressed for a wedding.”

  “I'm not certain who she is,” Martinez said. “But we have only the front part of the palace, you know. Shelley relatives and clients and pensioned servants live in the back-there's a regular crowd of them, and I haven't been here long enough to know them.”

  “Sometimes I have the same problem at our properties,” Terza said, “though of course I'm supposed to know them, they all work for us.”

  Martinez took Terza's arm and drew her away from the corroded statues and along an old, uneven brick walk, where the sound of their heels was muffled by moss. “I imagine it's hard work being the Chen heir,” he said.

  “Not yet,” Terza said. She glanced at him. “My father's given me some of his clients to look after, and some properties. But it's nothing like real work-I have plenty of time for my music and for a full social schedule.”

  “Perhaps he wants you to enjoy your freedom while you're young.”

  Terza looked thoughtful. “That might be part of it. But I think he wanted to know who my husband would be before he charted my course, so that he and I could compliment each other in the way of our goals.”

  Martinez looked at her. “That's odd.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You'll be Lady Chen one day. Your husband will be Lord Chen only because of you. He should fit himself to your ambitions, not the other way around.”

  Her heavy silks rustled. Terza gave a close-lipped smile and looked down at the moss-covered walk. “That's a generous thought. So if I elected to pursue a career in the Ministry of Works, you'd resign your commission to join me in my postings?”

  Martinez felt his heart shift into a faster, far more uneasy tempo. “Let's hope neither of us ever has to make such a decision,” he said.

  Her downcast smile widened. “Let's hope not.” She turned her cool brown eyes to his. “But in all seriousness, you wouldn't object to my having a career?”

  “No, not at all. But isn't being Lady Chen a career in itself?” His own father had never worked at anything other than being Lord Martinez of Laredo, and it had seemed very much a full-time job.

  “I suppose,” Terza said. “But some administrative experience would come in handy, for dealing with family enterprises and clients, and later for the Convocation.”

  She wouldn't have any anxiety on that last score, he knew. The head of Clan Chen was always coopted into the Convocation, along with the heads of around four hundred other families, a fact of history that less privileged Peers like Lord Martinez had always resented.

  “And of course we're at war,” Terza added. “I want to do what I can to-oh.”

  “Hold still.” Martinez went down on one knee and disentangled her trailing gown from an intrusive hydrangea. He looked up at her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You're welcome.”

  There was a moment's silence as Martinez knelt at her feet, and then Terza gave him her hand and helped him rise. He could feel the warmth of her hand through the soft, paper-thin leather of her glove as they continued along the garden path.

  “Perhaps I'll try for a post in the Ministry of Right and Dominion,” Terza said, naming the civilian ministry that, under the Fleet Control Board, governed and supported the Fleet and smaller, related services. “That way I could aid both my father and my husband.”

  “That's a&worthy idea,” Martinez said. She heard the hesitation in his tone and raised an eyebrow.

  “You don't quite approve?”

  “No, not that.” Martinez searched his mind for the best way to phrase the thought that had flown on chill wings into his mind. “Perhaps you should choose another ministry, that's all,” he said. “If the Naxids win, they might be more likely to&leave you alone.”

  Sadness touched Terza's lips. “I've decided it's useless to guess what the Naxids might do,” she said.

  A chord sounded plangent along his nerves. Ah, Roland, Martinez thought, have you considered we might be getting this girl killed?

  They came to another statue grouping, representing an allegory harder to read than the first. A woman poured water from a jug into a pool, and a man with a mustache and tall peaked hat watched while strumming a bulbous stringed instrument. The figure of a large, self-satisfied bird perched on the woman's left shoulder. In the air floated the freshness of water and the moist scent of mosses and lilies.

  Before the statuary Martinez took both Terza's hands. He could see the pulse beat in her throat. She looked up at him for a moment, her eyes inquiring, and then she tilted her face toward him to be kissed. Her lips were warm and pliant.

  He hadn't kissed her before, not really. There had been formal kisses when the engagement was announced, but that had been for the benefit of an audience. This was for the two of them alone.

  Martinez couldn't help but think of the excitement he'd tasted on Sula's lips, the way her kiss had always seemed to promise fire and passion&That fervor was absent here-instead there was a gracious acquiescence mixed with a kind of hopeful curiosity.

  He decided that this was not a bad place to start. He put his arms around her. He breathed the warm scent of her hair. Water splashed and chuckled from the stone woman's jug.

  His sleeve comm chimed. He gave an apologetic laugh, disentangled himself, and answered. He looked at the display to see the face of Vonderheydte, Corona's former junior lieutenant.

  “My lord,” Vonderheydte said.

  “Lieutenant,” Martinez said in surprise. “How are you doing?”

  “Very well, my lord, thank you.” Vonderheydte paused, licked his lips, and then broke into a bright grin. “In fact, my lord, I'm getting married tomorrow. I thought I'd extend you an invitation.”

  Laughter burst from Martinez. The marriage motif was being repeated a few too many times. Solemnity, then farce, followed now by parody. At this rate his own nuptials would barely rate a footnote.

  A sobering thought struck Martinez. “Just a moment,” he said. “Haven't you been married twice before?”

  “Yes,” Vonderheydte admitted, “but Daphne is different. This time I've found the right woman.”

  “I'm pleased to hear it,” Martinez said. “I would be honored to attend, if I can.”

  “Empire Hotel, lord captain,” Vonderheydte said, “Empyrean Ballroom, 16:01 hours.”

  “Very good,” Martinez said. “I'll be there unless something urgent calls me away.”

  Martinez blanked the screen and looked at Terza. “One of my officers,” he said, then corrected, “my former officers.”