“On Zanshaa, however, the arrangement will be slightly different.” Hong marched to the front of the verandah and gazed down at his command with his hands clasped behind his back and his chest thrust out, a picture of confidence and mastery. “Zanshaa is already under a military governor,” he said. “When the Naxids come, Fleet Commander Pahn-ko and his entire staff and council move into a secret facility now being prepared for them. The fleetcom will remain in command of our units and much of the civil administration. So you can rest assured that any order you receive from me will have the direct authority of the governor. And you should know that your efforts on behalf of the Praxis will be brought to the lord governor's attention for commendation and promotion.”

  He withdrew a fist from behind his back and brandished it, waist-high, to emphasize the importance of this statement. Sula hadn't actually been worried on this score, but now she began to think that worry might have been the appropriate reaction all along. It was unclear how an elderly fleetcom in hiding was going to control all these elements of society without making himself conspicuous, especially considering that the Naxids were going to be looking for him anyway.

  Let's hope Pahn-ko never meets anyone face-to-face, Sula thought. Let's hope they have all the codes worked out. Let's hope that nobody up the line has a complete list of all of us written out with our names and addresses.

  Thus inspired by Hong's speech, the trainees were then given a false backup identity, and then left the Villa Fosca for Kaidabal, a city of two million south of Zanshaa. They were split up into three-person Action Teams, eleven of which made an Action Group-Sula was amused to see that the organization charts manifested the old Shaa love for prime numbers. Sula's Action Team 491-another prime-consisted of herself as leader, Engineer/1st Shawna Spence as technician and demolition specialists, and Macnamara as a runner and general backup.

  The city was distracted by the First Fruits Festival, and amid the crowds of celebrants the teams experienced no difficulty as they took on their cover identities and practiced hiding, infiltrating, communicating through cutouts, and assembling at certain places, at certain hours, in order to conduct mock operations. The pace was somewhat more relaxed than at Villa Fosca, and Sula took a few days to travel to Zanshaa and create a small, privately held company under her cover identity, one that dealt in used machine parts. Ownership of her crates of cocoa, tobacco, and coffee were transferred to this company, and the crates themselves shifted to new warehouses. En route the labels on the boxes were changed, and now read: Used machine parts-for recycling. She couldn't think of any label less likely to raise curiosity or encourage theft.

  No one recognized the businesslike, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman as Lady Sula. Not even when she put on her uniform, took off her dark contacts, put the black hair under a uniform cap, and went to her bank to withdraw all her remaining funds in cash. The bank clerk, no doubt used to cash withdrawals by now, stifled a yawn as she handed Sula her money.

  It was then that Sula produced her special warrant from the military governor. “Now,” Sula said, “I want you to erase my thumbprint from your records.” Anyone on an Action Team was authorized to order any critical records erased-loans, bank accounts, lines of credit, and especially the thumbprint that would present conclusive and legal identification.

  The clerk blinked. “My lady?”

  “I'm closing the account. You have no reason to retain my print, and I'd like to see you erase it. In fact,” showing her special warrant, “this requires you to erase it.”

  “That's not our procedure,” the woman said. “We keep everything.”

  “Do it now,” Sula said, but the clerk had to call her manager, who viewed Pahn-ko's order and then shrugged his shoulders.

  Sula watched as Caro Sula's old print vanished into electric oblivion, and took comfort that another piece of the past was safely buried.

  The Action Group moved to Zanshaa City, where they continued to conduct exercises. A rather amazing amount of specialized assassination equipment and explosive went into storage lockers all over the city. Team 491 was placed in a middle-class corner apartment in a Terran district of the Lower Town, a neighborhood called Grandview. They were on the top floor of a four-story building, with a small terrace and windows looking out over two street. It was a pleasant enough place, plainly furnished, and once all the gear was tidied away to Sula's satisfaction, the furniture rearranged, and the place given a general cleaning, she began to feel a growing optimism about her mission.

  The Naxids rather obstinately did not come. Sula wished she'd known they would take their time: she would have managed a much less chaotic evacuation of the Zanshaa ring.

  One morning the door chimed, and Sula answered to find the concierge, an elderly man named Greyjean. Both his upper incisors were missing and he suffered from a consequent habit of misplacing certain consonants.

  “Are you finding everything suitable, my lady?” he asked.

  “Everything's fine.” Sula, remembering her cover identity, added, “You don't have to call me 'my lady.' I'm a commoner.”

  The old man seemed surprised. “My mistake, miss. I got a different impression from the constabulary.”

  A warning bell sang a clear note in Sula's mind. “Constabulary?” she asked. “What constabulary?”

  “The military constabulary who evicted the previous tenants,” the concierge said. “They said they needed this apartment for some Fleet VIPs.”

  Sula stared at the old man. “Ah. Ha,” she said.

  We are in such fucking trouble, she thought.

  * * *

  ELEVEN

  « ^ »

  Steadied by the arm of the rigger who helped him rise, Martinez dragged himself out of the boarding tube into the airlock, then braced briefly to answer the salute of the lieutenant who stood before him. She was nearly as tall as Martinez, and had a heart-shaped face and brown hair drawn into a knot behind the head and twined around a pair of gold-enameled chopsticks.

  “Captain Martinez reporting aboard Illustrious,” he said.

  “Welcome to Illustrious, lord captain,” she said. “I'm the premiere here, Lady Fulvia Kazakov.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Martinez offered her his hand, and she took it.

  Alikhan pulled himself out of the tube behind Martinez, placed his feet carefully on the deck, then braced in salute. “My lady,” he said.

  “This is Alikhan,” Martinez said. “My orderly.”

  Kazakov briefly returned the salute, and nodded to the rigger. “I'll have Turnbull here show your servants to their quarters, and to yours,” she said. “But I know that the squadcom would like to meet you now, if that's convenient for you.”

  “Certainly,” Martinez said. If it hadn't been for the month of acceleration, his transit to Illustrious aboard the Daffodil might almost have been pleasant. Daffodil had been designed to pamper high company officials, and there were showers, a laundry, private cabins, a large range of entertainments, and a full kitchen stocked with delicacies by Perry, the recruit who had been forced to leave Ari Abacha's service, and who had joined Martinez despite the ominous prospect of ship duty. Perry had done the cooking, and judging by the exclamations of the others had done it extremely well.

  “The others” constituted Martinez's full allotment of servants . The third, Espinosa, was a rigger, and the last, Ayutano, a machinist. Martinez hadn't intended to use these two as servants at all, and they had been brought more or less as a gift to Illustrious' s captain, as Martinez had observed that ships that had been away from the dockyards for a while could always do with extra machinists and riggers.

  After leaving the airlock Martinez followed Kazakov up a companionway toward officers' country. The heavy cruiser Illustrious had six times the volume of Martinez's old Corona, with nearly the four times the number of crew. The quarters were more spacious, with corridors broad enough for four humans to march abreast.

  From the first sight of Illustrious framed in Daffodil's ports, it had been clear that the captain had spared to no expense to turn his ship into a masterpiece of style. The exterior hull had been painted with a complex geometric pattern in pink, pale green, and icing-sugar white. Inside, the corridor walls had been tiled with a distinctive, complex pattern, golden-yellow and dark red accented with white and black. Occasionally the tile pattern would open to reveal a trompe l'oeil niche or window painted with a scene from nature, a riot of greenery in which capered fanciful beasts or birds.

  The rooms which Martinez passed on his way to Lady Michi's quarters were each distinctively designed, with abstract patterns which favored turquoise and red and yellow ochre, or with more trompe l'oeil, cabins painted so that they seemed to be opening to some fantastic landscape, or to a series of elaborately decorated rooms. The style and scale of it made the aesthetics of Corona's old captain Tarafah, with his football motif, seem like those of an amateur.

  All this, Martinez knew, had been created, supervised, and paid for by Lord Gomberg Fletcher, the captain of Illustrious. Martinez had never encountered Fletcher, but he knew that this offspring of the highly-placed Gomberg and Fletcher clans was not only considered the Fleet's leading aesthete, but was the owner of one of the empire's greatest art collections, some elements of which were on display in Illustrious's more public areas.

  And furthermore it was all immaculate. Martinez's practiced eyes saw no dust, no grime, no scars. The crew he encountered were spotlessly turned out and alert, leaping out of Martinez's way as soon as they saw him, braced against the walls, chins high.

  “As long as we've passing by my office,” Kazakov said, “Let me take care of your captain's card.”

  Kazakov's office seemed to be the wardroom, the walls mellow with scenes of men and women reclining on couches while eating and drinking. One of the lieutenants and a steward leaped to the salute as Martinez entered. “As you were,” he told them.

  There were computer displays along one wall, and Kazakov dropped into a chair and took Martinez's captain's key. Martinez wondered briefly why Kazakov was working in the wardroom, and then realized that it was because he, himself, had probably taken her actual quarters for himself.

  A ship's tactical officer was normally a lieutenant assigned the duty by the captain; but in a flagship the squadron tactical officer was appointed by the flag officer and considered a part of her staff. Such an officer was usually still a lieutenant, if a favored one, but it wasn't completely unknown for a staff officer to have higher rank.

  As a full captain, however, Martinez was the third most senior officer on the ship, and the premiere lieutenant had probably had to shift her quarters to make room for him. This would have created a cascade, with each officer bumping the one below.

  There was nothing like kicking every junior officer out of bed to make a favorable impression. Martinez hoped he hadn't made the junior lieutenant bunk with the cadets.

  Kazakov handed him his captain's card. “You're in the ship's computer now,” she said, “though you'll have to get the lady squadcom to give you the passwords for the tactical computer. I'm sending a map of the ship to your mail buffer, where you'll be able to download it to your sleeve displays.” A bit of printout whispered from a slot, and Kazakov handed it to him. “There's the combination to your safe. I'd change it if you want to be absolutely secure, since there's at least one officer aboard who knows it.”

  “I'm sorry if I've taken your quarters,” Martinez said.

  Kazakov smiled. “I'll manage, my lord. Put your thumbprint here, please, and sign.”

  Martinez did so, and Kazakov led him on to the squadron commander.

  Lady Michi Chen's office was a masterpiece of bronzed, fluted ornamental pillars, walls painted with a fabulous landscape through which floated classically balanced, lightly clad Terrans, and a pair of genuine bronze statues, smiling naked women holding out overflowing baskets of fruit.

  Squadron Leader Chen did not greatly resemble the bronze fruit girls who flanked her desk: she was a handsome, middle-aged woman, somewhat stocky, with graying black hair cut short at the jawline and in straight bangs over the forehead. Her complexion was sallow, though that was probably a result of her spending months aboard her flagship without a jot of genuine sunlight.

  Martinez braced to the salute. “Captain Martinez reporting, my lady.”

  “Captain Martinez,” she said, rising. “Welcome to the family.” His spirits rose, and he took the extended hand.

  “I'm very happy to be here,” he said.

  “Terza and Maurice are well?”

  “Yes. Both getting used to shipboard life, last I heard.”

  “You can catch up shortly, I've been getting your messages for the last several days.” She resumed her seat. “Please take a chair, lord captain.” She glanced up at the senior lieutenant. “Thank you, Kazakov.” The premiere withdrew.

  Chenforce was no longer in the Zanshaa system: once the two great transport ships carrying the Lords Convocate had vanished into Wormhole 2, the fleet guarding the system had followed, leaving the system to the mercies of the Naxids. Chen's squadron had remained with the Convocation until their escape could be declared certain, then separated from the rest of the fleet and swung through a series of wormhole gates to arrive at its present location, the Seizho system.

  Martinez's journey had been more direct: he was able to head from Zanshaa straight to Seizho, accelerating all the while, and found Chenforce waiting for him there, and decelerating at a modest one gravity.

  Given that the squadron was in Seizho, Martinez thought he could guess why Chenforce was reducing its velocity.

  Time would tell if he was right.

  “I imagine you're tired,” Lady Michi said, “and that you'd like to square your gear away and get some rest, but I wanted to greet you and to invite you to join me for supper tonight.”

  “I would be honored, my lady,” Martinez said.

  “Why don't you give me your captain's card,” Lady Michi said, “and I'll get you into the tactical computer.”

  For the second time, Martinez gave up his captain's card. Lady Michi slotted it, gazed for a moment at the display, then tapped at her display.

  “Thumbprint and signature please, Captain Martinez,” she said. “Supper will be at 25:01.”

  “Thank you, my lady.”

  Martinez took his card, braced, walked to the door, and hesitated.

  “You cabin will be to your right,” Lady Michi said. “Your name will be on plate by the door.”

  Martinez thanked the squadcom and made his way out. It wasn't difficult to find his cabin: his orderlies were still in the process of installing his baggage. Martinez supervised this task, particularly the stowing of the various wines and delicacies that had been brought across on Daffodil.

  Afterward Martinez inspected his four servants' own quarters, and made certain they had no complaints. Though it was very unusual for captains to decorate the rooms of the enlisted-usually a slap of new paint would do-the crew quarter of Illustrious were, like the rest of the ship, a work of art. Martinez slipped Alikhan enough money to cover any dues for the petty officers' lounge, then headed one deck forward-or “above,” in the current deceleration-to his own quarters.

  At the top of the companionway he was surprised to encounter an old friend, but then he saw that Chandra Prasad was accompanied by an older man in the uniform of a senior captain, and Martinez snapped to the salute, staring the recommended hand's breadth above the captain's head.

  “Captain Martinez, lord captain,” he said.

  Senior Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher took his time about replying. “Yes,” he judged. “Apparently you are he. You may stand at ease.”

  The Fleet's most celebrated aesthete was a thin-faced man with carefully waved silver hair and ice-blue eyes set in deep, craggy sockets. His uniform was soft and well tailored and immaculate, and the silver buttons gleamed.

  “Captain Martinez,” Fletcher said, “may I present Lieutenant the Lady Chandra Prasad?”

  “Her ladyship and I are already acquainted,” Martinez said.

  “Ye-es,” Chandra said. There was a mischievous gleam in her long brown eyes, and Martinez did his best not to respond to it. He and Lady Chandra had done a two-month communications and cipher course some years ago, on a long hot summer on Zarafan, and the summer had been all the hotter for the two of them being together.

  Chandra's hair had gone auburn in the years since-Martinez recalled it being brown-but the pointed chin and the full, amused lips were exactly as Martinez had stored them in his memory.

  Martinez dragged his eyes away from Chandra, and decided that the situation merited the tribute direct. “My lord,” he said. “Please allow me to compliment you on the appearance of your ship. It's the most complete vision I've ever seen.”