He drew the flowers from about her neck and kissed her throat and shoulders. Her skin was warm against his lips. He drew her down on the bed. Her face was pale amid the black flower of her hair. She watched him through half-veiled lids as he caressed her.

  Sula was fire and passion, Amanda laughter and joy. Terza was something deeper, perhaps more profound. There was a center of serenity and poise that seemed to recede from him even as he reached for it. That was training, certainly, though perhaps it reflected as well her own essence, a kind of acceptance that was at the very heart of her.

  Everything he did, he did to bring her pleasure. He strove with his hands and lips to unsettle that composed tranquillity that he had seen in her since that first day in the courtyard of the Chen Palace, and he found his reward as her breath quickened, as she gave an involuntary cry.

  The sound inflamed him: so the core was not all composure after all. He increased his efforts; he matched his breath to hers. Her fingers dug into his arms, his shoulders, his back. She cried out again, the cry of the lost soul alarmed to find itself wandering in darkness, and he helped her find her way back to the light, where he waited for her, the partner of her bed and breath, her husband&.

  The singer's whitened hands floated in the air like lovers whirling on the dance floor. Her voice clashed like swords, soared like eagles, or bled like a wound. The audience hung breathless on her every word, and thrilled at the controlled fury of her black-eyed stare.

  Sula sat alone in the back of the club, a drink untouched on the table before her. She was seriously contemplating letting alcohol into her life.

  She knew that Martinez's wedding had gone off that afternoon; the society reports were full of it. Martinez and Lady Terza were abed by now, and Martinez was playing with his bride the same games he had played, only a few nights ago, with Sula.

  Because the Chen family obviously handled the guest list without consulting the bridal couple, Sula had even been invited to the nuptials, though her work furnished her with an excuse not to attend. She had sent a nicely wrapped present, however, the pair of matched Guraware vases that Martinez had given her.

  The Logistics Consolidation Executive, under the command of a Lai-own fleet commander called out of retirement for the duration of the war, was intended to resolve conflicts between various wartime demands on limited resources. Decisions had to be made concerning which arm of government was to have first call on assets, and those decisions were made by the executive.

  The work was uninteresting and required long hours. Sula had no problem with that. The more hours she spent with work, and away from her thoughts, the better.

  Sula picked up the little glass and felt the smooth chilled surface against her fingertips. Her nostrils flared with the sharp herbal scent. She had ordered iarogüt, a liquor made by fermenting a root vegetable of Lai-own origin, then flavoring it with a kind of lemony weed. The result was faintly purplish in color and about fifty-five percent alcohol.

  Nasty stuff, iarogüt, but cheap and readily available. It was the liquor of choice for most of the serious alcoholics in the Fleet, all the crude old crouchbacks with the blackened eyes and the skinned knuckles and the broken veins in their noses that Sula, when she'd been assigned to her ship's military constabulary, had rounded up from local jails and marched back to their ships for punishment.

  If she were to drink, Sula thought, there was no point in starting on the high road, with the choice wines and the sweet liqueurs. The gutter was what she was after, and iarogüt was what could take her there.

  The derivoo singer gave a cry, a keen of anguish that broke off into a sob. Her man, the father of her children, had gone. The singer raised a hand, fingers curled as if around the hilt of a dagger. She was considering cutting the throats of her children in order to make her husband suffer.

  Sula returned the glass to her table. The liquor trembled, lapping at the rim of the glass as if it were eager to escape. The invisible dagger seemed to gleam in the air.

  Martinez had been playing a double game, that much Sula saw with perfect clarity. He'd always had Terza in reserve; and when Sula had balked, he'd shifted to his backup plan without missing a step.

  But what, she wondered as she tapped the marble table with a fingertip, had Martinez really been after? Perhaps his father would raise his allowance if he married. Maybe there was some choice appointment that depended on an officer having a wife.

  Whatever the reason, it couldn't have involved money or prestige or patronage in the Fleet, otherwise Martinez would have made Terza his first choice, not his second. There had to be some reason why he'd approached Sula first.

  And then it occurred to her that there need be no reason other than a nasty little game that Martinez chose to play with the hearts of women. Months ago, the cadets in the duty room had told her of his success in love-was it possible to be a seducer without despising the object of seduction? Perhaps Martinez played Sula for his own amusement. It was Sula who resumed contact with Martinez after months of separation, and now she wondered if Martinez had viewed this as an opportunity for seducing one woman while quietly courting another.

  The musicians struck a decisive chord: Sula's eyes leaped to the stage. A moment of decision had been reached. The singer lowered the dagger, her hand trembling. Tears glittered in her eyes. Her lips caressed the names of her children.

  Then the singer called out the name of her man, and the dagger flashed high again as another chord rang out.

  And perhaps, Sula thought, the game had been Terza's as well. Terza had seen Sula socially-had said she admired Sula. During that time, had Terza been aware of negotiations for the Martinez marriage? Or perhaps even initiated the negotiations?

  Sula's hand on the table formed a fist, the knuckles white. The tension in her arm made the liquid in the chilled glass tremble. Suppose, she thought, it was all Terza's fault.

  In Sula's mind there formed the vision of a sumptuous bed, satin sheets, limbs interwoven and glowing in candlelight. For a moment she entertained the fantasy of bursting in the door, of committing massacre&

  Another chord rang from the stage, and the singer's hand lowered again, trembled, and then drove the imaginary dagger into her own belly. The derivoo cried out, stumbled, and died in song, with the name of her man on her lips.

  The singer took her bows as applause rang out. A cold smile played across Sula's lips. There was a difference, she thought, between truth and melodrama, and the singer had crossed it.

  So had Sula.

  She raised the chilled glass to her lips, inhaled the harsh fumes for a moment, then slammed the glass to the tabletop. Liquid splashed her fingers.

  Sula rose, put money on the table, and walked out into the night.

  * * *

  TEN

  « ^ »

  That the Convocation was to take Wormhole 2 to Zarafan was a coincidence: Zanshaa's place in its orbit currently made Wormhole 2 the closest of Zanshaa's eight wormholes, and thus the Convocation was much more likely to be out of the system by the time the Naxids arrived.

  But Zarafan was only ten days' hard acceleration from Zanshaa, and too close for the Convocation's safety: a Naxid expeditionary force might just decide to venture that way. It was then that Lord Chen fully earned every septile the Martinez family was paying him, by standing in the Joint Evacuation Committee (which included the Fleet Control Board) and moving that the Convocation simply keep on going once they reached Zarafan and continue all the way to Laredo.

  Laredo was three months away at reasonably comfortable accelerations, and tucked into a fairly obscure corner of the empire. There were many more likely places for the Naxids to search for the Convocation than Laredo, and if the enemy moved in that direction they would have to make a significant commitment of resources, there would be plenty of warning, and the Fleet would have time to counter the enemy advance.

  In addition, the small squadron of frigates being built at Laredo shipyards by Lord Martinez should be complete by then, and able to aid the Convocation's defense. The Convocation would be withdrawing toward its supports.

  Lord Chen's motion was passed by the committee. Lords Saïd and Tork insisted on secrecy, even from other members of the Convocation; and it was Lady Seekin who suggested that false rumors of the Convocation's destination should be spread.

  So it was that the next day the Convocation found itself voting to evacuate to a destination kept secret even from them. There was a good deal of grumbling, but a rumor that the Convocation was due to convene on Esley, with its spectacular vistas and luxurious resorts, helped to reconcile the lords convocate to their collective exile.

  At Lord Saïd's urging, the Convocation voted to evacuate in three days' time, and to declare that any convocate who remained behind would be declared a traitor. Each convocate was allowed two servants or family members, and the rest of the household would have to find their own transport.

  To Esley. Or to Harzapid, headquarters of the Fourth Fleet. Suddenly there were two rumors.

  Lord Chen, fortunately, had no worries about losing Terza in all the confusion. She would be flying to Laredo on her own, on Lord Roland Martinez's family yacht, unaware of the fact that her father would probably arrive ahead of her.

  It was on the day prior to departure, during a debate on finance, that Lord Chen managed his own personal triumph. The evacuation of Zanshaa meant that the war wouldn't end soon, with a huge battle that would crush the Naxids and reestablish order throughout the empire. Instead the war would continue, along with the appropriations necessary to keep it going. Thus far the empire had kept running through a series of emergency spending measures backed by currency reserves and special issues of bonds. But the reserves were gone, the price of bonds had crashed after the news of Magaria became general knowledge, and the government was now simply creating money on a day-by-day basis to meet its obligations. No revenue was expected from the third of the empire controlled by the Naxids. Inflation was heading toward double-digit levels. Once the empire was informed that the government had fled Zanshaa, who then was going to accept its currency? The bonds might well be worth more as wallpaper than at their face value.

  In normal times the government was run on a relatively small budget. The Peers took care of most minor matters at their own expense. The rest was paid for by rental of government property, distribution of energy from ring stations and other sources, sale of antimatter to private shipping, a tax on telecommunications, and an excise tax on interstellar commerce.

  All this was clearly inadequate, and had been from the first day of the war. But the alternative was to tax those who actually possessed wealth, and these were for the most part Peers and Peer-owned enterprises. Peers had always been reluctant to tax themselves; and for the most part they saw no reason why mere civil war should alter this condition. They pointed out that they already spent a great deal of capital in the public interest, maintaining roads, creating water and sewer projects, managing charities, sponsoring theatrical events, and the like. The lords convocate became desperate to raise money by any means other than direct taxation, the result being an erratic series of consumption taxes-on salt, on beverages, on use of warehouse space in government-controlled ring stations.

  That last intrusive decree had driven Lord Chen into a frenzy. As a shipowner he was already subject to a flat fifteen percent tax on the value of any cargo he discharged onto a ring station-to have to pay again, to store the same cargo, was ruinous.

  Yet most of the Convocation were not shipowners, and in their desperation tried to double the excise tax to thirty percent. At this rate of taxation interstellar commerce was simply unprofitable: no ships would fly. Lord Chen and every other convocate with shipping interests pointed this out repeatedly, and in the end staged a filibuster that managed to talk the subject to death.

  The impending evacuation of Zanshaa had removed the last of the die-hards' excuses for believing the war would be a short one, and in the Convocation's last session before its departure from the capital, a bill was placed before the house to pay through the war by means of an income tax of one percent. Traditionalists insisted that this was worse than revolution-even the Naxids, vile as they were, would not be so vicious and so radical as to place a tax on equity. Lord Saïd assured the lords convocate that the measure was a temporary one only.

  He pointed behind him with his ceremonial wand, through the transparent rear wall of the Hall of the Convocation to the terrace, from which rebel Naxids had once been hurled. “If we do not find a way to pay for this war,” he said, “we might as well throw ourselves from that cliff, because it will be a more merciful fate than what the Naxids will give us.”

  With the arch-conservative Lord Senior speaking for the measure, the tax passed with margin of sixty-one percent. One of the dissenters-a toothless old Torminel-thumped an angry fist on her desk and growled that, as the Convocation had forsaken the principles of civilization, she might as well remain on Zanshaa and wait for the Naxids, who seemed to have a clearer idea of decency and order than the members of the house.

  The Lord Senior politely suggested that perhaps the lady convocate had forgotten that such an action, as the Convocation had decided only two days before, constituted high treason. “I would regret extremely the necessity of ripping you limb from limb and hurling you from the High City,” Saïd said, “but alas, my lady, we are the servants of the law, not its masters.”

  Lord Chen barely heard this exchange: he was too busy rejoicing. Just a few hours ago, in committee, one of his ship-owning colleagues had slipped a rider onto the revenue bill abolishing the excise tax on cargoes. Very suddenly his business was profitable again, and even at the cost of one percent of his income he could expect colossal profits. Admittedly most of the money would be going to the Martinez family for the next five years, but after that Lord Chen could look forward both to increased profit and the end of his relationship with Clan Martinez.

  And, he thought in triumph, all those annoying revenue officers on the ring stations that had so harassed his captains and agents would now descend to the planets below, to harass everyone else.

  Even at the cost of one percent of his income, Lord Chen thought, this was welcome news.

  “Well, Gare, as it happens you've got a choice of transport.”

  Lieutenant Ari Abacha raised to his lips one of the Commandery's tulip glasses, with white and green stripes, and sipped his cocktail. He was a long-limbed man of superior social connections and a perfectly majestic brand of indolence, and he and Martinez had become acquainted when they were both on staff at the Commandery. Abacha was still on staff, as the red triangles on his collar showed, and now as Michi Chen's tactical officer, Martinez once again wore the red tabs himself.

  “I say, Gare, it's decent of you to take me to the senior officers' club,” Abacha said. He glanced over the barroom, his social antennae twitching, and then he leaned close. “That's Captain Han-gar over there, you know. Rumor has it that these days he's pissing on the doorstep of Squadron Commander Pen-dro&”

  “A dangerous business,” Martinez murmured. His eyes were fixed on the display glowing in the table, showing him one small Fleet craft after another.

  Not that one, he thought, that was nearly a pinnace. He didn't want to be strapped into a coffin for all that time.

  “It's dangerous only if his wife finds out,” Abacha said. “But Pen-dro has a habit of rewarding her lovers. Look what happened to Esh-draq.”

  Martinez did not encourage this line of conversation, being instead more interested in the variety of craft that might be employed in the task of uniting him with Michi Chen's squadron and his new appointment. With forty or fifty days of very nasty acceleration in the offing, he wanted at least a little comfort.

  “Say, Ari,” he said, “what do you think of this one?”

  The vessel in question was one of the craft that had been conscripted to defend Zanshaa in the aftermath of the Battle of Magaria. Optimistically called “picket ships,” they had consisted of a variety of small craft hastily outfitted with missile launchers and sent to patrol the system in the hope that they might somehow score a hit or two on the enemy before being annihilated. Once Chenforce had arrived to defend the system, the picket ships had been withdrawn.

  “Ah,” Abacha said as he looked at the design. “Nice boat. That was one of Exalted Flower's corporate yachts, built to shuttle their executives around their mineral concessions in the system. Nicely appointed. Said to have an excellent kitchen. A pity you won't have one of their chefs aboard.”

  The boat, which had retained its original corporate name of Daffodil, had docked with the ring station two days earlier and discharged what no doubt had been a highly relieved crew of four. After routine maintenance that would complete in four days, Daffodil would be available for further use, which would include taking Martinez to Michi Chen's flagship.