Saïd considered this. “There is something in what you say.”

  “Michi Chen knows more about this than I do. She was part of the committee that implemented Lin’s policies, so you might contact her.”

  Martinez sipped his tea. It still tasted like tea.

  “Perhaps. Most importantly,” Saïd said, “we have to get rid of Tu-hon’s tax laws. She repealed the tax on income she so hated, and replaced it with the old tax on shipping. As a result, shipping came to a stop, and even in the High City there are shortages of imported items. We need to get the economy flowing again, and we need to bring in income to the government.”

  It was the Convocation that could change the law, Martinez knew, and Saïd was the Lord Senior of the Convocation. He didn’t need Martinez or the Fleet to do it, and Martinez wondered why Saïd was raising the issue.

  “The Convocation can change the law,” Saïd continued, “but the Convocation needs to be safe.”

  Martinez understood—three times were more than enough to drive the point home. “I will tell Wei Jian to make the constabulary her priority.”

  “Thank you, Lord Fleetcom.” Saïd’s benign brown eyes gazed at Martinez. “But for now, would you like more cake?”

  Lord Saïd’s request for more constabulary was relayed to Wei Jian, and the next wave of shuttles was packed with constables as well as Michi Chen and her suite. When the shuttles rocketed from Wi-hun and returned to the ring station, they carried Lady Gruum, Lady Tu-hon, and others of their clique to confinement on the ring. Martinez made a point of being present, so that he could see the leaders of the former government shuffling to the shuttle in fetters.

  Seeing the captives, he felt pleased and righteous at the same time.

  Michi was installed in the Commandery, which left Martinez with enough free time to consider his own situation in the High City. Lord Saïd had mentioned money and property being confiscated, and he decided it was high time he viewed his house. After all, his family was coming and would need a place to live.

  His palace was modest in size for the High City, with only twelve rooms, but it was perched on the northern edge of the acropolis, with a glorious view of the Lower Town below. The thought that the Tu-hon clique might have confiscated it and then sold it to one of their lackeys made Martinez grind his teeth.

  He called for three Hunhao sedans, packed them with constabulary, and set out for his home. To his relief, the house seemed unchanged, with its pale gold marble exterior and the contrasting green malachite pillars, but when he approached the front door he noticed some vases in the windows that weren’t his. The door wouldn’t open to his thumbprint, so he knocked. A Lai-own female in livery answered.

  Martinez pushed past her into the foyer. “I need to speak to the master or mistress of the house,” he said.

  “I will see if his lordship is available.”

  Martinez didn’t wait in the foyer, but followed the servant through the front rooms and into what had formerly been his office. Along the way he viewed the home and furniture with a critical eye. The pale marble was untouched, as were the carnelian pillars veined with red, but everything else had been changed, and for the worse. He and Terza had bought a building half-wrecked in the storming of the High City, and she had conserved and decorated the palace with superlative taste.

  Terza’s carefully chosen Devis mode furniture was gone, replaced with elaborately carved, vulgar pieces that seemed guaranteed to grow shabbier and sadder with each passing year. Valuable artwork had been replaced with commonplace paintings and the usual undistinguished portraits of ancestors. The palace’s most unusual feature, the brass star-shaped plugs that had been used to seal up the bullet scars from the High City battle, had been removed, and the scarred marble subject to dubious repairs or hidden behind paintings or tapestries.

  And people think I’m a parvenu, Martinez thought. I’ve got nothing on this fellow.

  Martinez hadn’t ever thought of himself as a snob, but apparently he was, at least where his own decor was concerned.

  The master of the house was a plump Lai-own who was found bent over his desk, inhaling a dy-chi intoxicant. He looked up in surprise as his servant entered.

  “Lord Dop,” said the servant in haste, “this gentleman has—”

  “This gentleman,” said Martinez, “is Lord Gareth Martinez, commander of the Grand Division of the Rear in the Combined Fleet.” He gave Lord Dop a glare. “You are in my house. Kindly remove yourself, your family, and your trash from my home.”

  Lord Dop rose from his chair, his inhaler still in his hand. “I am Lord Dop Kas-la,” he said, “and I purchased this house legally—”

  “From someone who had no right to the title,” Martinez said. “I suggest you ask for your money back.”

  “I purchased it from the government,” Lord Dop said. “At auction, for sixty-three thousand zeniths.”

  “You were robbed,” Martinez said. “As was I. Do you know what happened to my furniture?”

  Lord Dop stared with his golden eyes. “The house was empty when I bought it,” he said. “All except for some rubbishy old painting of a Fleet officer. I kept the frame and threw the rest out.”

  The painting, Martinez knew, was of himself, the young victorious captain of Illustrious. He stiffened with rage.

  “I’ll find out what became my possessions. In the meantime—” He waved a hand. “Push along, will you? I’ve got a building to get ready for my family.”

  Lord Dop stared for a few moments, then sat down in his chair with an emphatic gesture. His nictating membranes slid closed over his eyes. “I refuse to leave,” he said. “This is my palace. The title belongs to me—” He gave Martinez a triumphant look. “From the government.” As if that settled things.

  Martinez laughed. “You might consider whether you can buy a legitimate title from an illegitimate government.”

  “Leave at once,” said Lord Dop. “Or I’ll summon the police.”

  “Oh,” Martinez said. “The police? Allow me.” He called for a pair of military constables and pointed to Lord Dop’s chair. “Take this chair,” he said, “and throw it into the street. If Lord Dop remains in the chair, throw him into the street along with it.”

  The constables swung Lord Dop into the air and began to carry him toward the door. Dop’s inhaler clattered to the floor as he clutched at the arms of his chair.

  Lord Dop didn’t actually make it as far as the front door, because at that point his wife appeared, uttered a series of shrieks, and hurled herself at one of the constables. Servants and children clustered about, gobbling. A loud, chaotic scene followed that could end only one way, given that one party had guns and stun batons and the other didn’t. Lord Dop, his family, and his household ended up outside on the sidewalk, watching while military police carried all their belongs out into the street. Lord Dop eventually conceded and hired some vehicles to take his stuff away.

  In the meantime, Martinez called Aitor Santana and asked him to find out what had happened to his furniture. “It must be on record somewhere,” he said.

  It was. The furniture had been consigned to a warehouse in the Lower Town belonging to a company called Stellar Properties. Martinez put guards on the door of his palace to keep Lord Dop from creeping back in, put the rest of the constables back into the Hunhao sedans, and sped to the Lower Town.

  The warehouse had its own guards who faded away as soon as they realized who had just appeared on their doorstep. When Martinez entered the building, he stopped in his tracks and gazed in wonder at the cornucopia stretching out before him. The place was full of furniture, paintings, sculptures, carpets, and ornamental bits of architecture—cornices, caryatids, capitals, medallions, grotesque faces, roundels, carved flowers and ferns—possibly rescued from demolished buildings but perhaps just ripped from façades.

  Light flashed from dozens of grand mirrors. A procession of chandeliers hung from the metal roof beams. Sideboards, buffets, and cabinets were stuffed with porcelain, gold and silver plate, glassware, and cutlery.

  There were several large safes lined up in one part of the warehouse, and Martinez had no way of knowing what they contained. Jewels, he thought. Possibly bonds or some other form of tradable asset. It wouldn’t be gold or silver because the gold and silver were lying in plain sight.

  Martinez hadn’t been in the warehouse long before he realized that he wasn’t viewing items stowed away by their owners, but a vast pile of someone’s loot. Someone had used the government to confiscate wealth and transfer it to Stellar Properties.

  He called Santana and told him to find out who owned Stellar Properties. In the meantime, he went to the warehouse office and told the manager to locate all his property. The manager, a powerfully built Daimong who smelled liked a ten-day-old corpse and looked as if he might have stolen some of the items himself, viewed the constabulary with their sidearms and batons and complied with great speed and efficiency.

  Sula had argued for a military dictatorship, and Martinez was beginning to see her point. It made for efficiency in getting things done.

  Martinez set the warehouse workers to carrying his belongings to the heavy trucks parked in the warehouse lot. Several of the firm’s drivers were present, and Martinez had the manager summon more. While this went on, Martinez called the Ministry of Right-Mindedness, spoke to Lord Ngeni, and reported the warehouse and its contents.

  “I imagine this will be the first warehouse of many,” Ngeni said. Martinez could imagine the scowl on Ngeni’s round cannonball head.

  “They left a fairly easy trail for us,” Martinez said. “If you follow the bureaucratic trail of where confiscated material goods were sent, I imagine you’ll find any number of these places.”

  Ngeni gave a sigh. “I’m not sure I have the personnel for any of this. Personnel I can trust, I mean.”

  “I understand.” It was the Ministry of Right-Mindedness that had confiscated the goods in the first place, and perhaps some of the police had profited from their actions.

  “The Fleet might be able to help,” Martinez said. “Let me give it some thought.”

  He left guards in the warehouse when he led the convoy of trucks and Hunhao sedans back to his house. En route he received a message from Aitor Santana concerning the ownership of Stellar Properties.

  “The principal shareholder is someone named Simone Beckwith,” he said.

  “Wait,” said Martinez. “She’s a Terran?”

  “Indeed. And interestingly enough, a minority shareholder is Lord Troom Lamong.”

  The Torminel name triggered a faint sense of recognition. “Lamong? How do I know that name?”

  “He is the former minister of right-mindedness.”

  Martinez almost laughed aloud. “Do we know where he is?” he asked.

  “I checked. He’s under house arrest, my lord.”

  “Well,” said Martinez. “We’d better haul him to jail, then.”

  Chapter 12

  “I’ve received information from the Naxids in the Combined Fleet,” said Lord Nishkad. “They are ordered off their ships and are being sent back to Harzapid or Zarafan, wherever it is they came from.”

  Sula wasn’t surprised. “I’m very sorry to hear it,” she said. “They helped to achieve victory, and their contribution should be acknowledged.”

  Nishkad had invited her for a meeting in his suite aboard Parkhurst. The walls were pale green and gold, with landscape paintings in elaborate frames. Nishkad was coiled on a small settee designed for his centauroid species, and Sula sat in a comfortable armchair breathing in the flower scent of the tea that Nishkad had served her. An oblong table with a mosaic top sat between them, and tension simmered in the air.

  “Is this the gratitude we can expect from the new government?” Nishkad asked. “Will nothing change?” Suppressed anger tautened his voice.

  Sula sipped her tea as she calculated an answer. “I think the government is removing a possible source of contention,” she said. “It would be difficult for them to flatly deny the Naxid contribution to the Restoration, and so they strive to limit the opportunities for the contribution to be discovered.”

  “I and my people are a ‘source of contention,’ then?” Nishkad said.

  “A possible source,” Sula reminded him. “When we try to reform the Convocation and the organs of government, it’s best to concentrate on one job at a time. We must get the Convocation we need, and then more things are possible.” She put down her cup, leaned toward Nishkad, and looked into the black-on-red eyes.

  “I have given you a promise that I will do my best to ease restrictions on Naxids,” she said. “And I further promise to give those who worked for the Restoration credit for their accomplishments.” She touched herself on the chest. “I put Naxids on warships,” she said. “I did it on my own authority. I knew it would be controversial, but I knew it was necessary for the success of the Restoration—and you know it as well.” She nodded. “One day everyone will know it. This I promise you.”

  Her arms and legs tingled with the elation of her argument. She knew she was radiating sincerity, and that meant she probably was sincere.

  Nishkad seemed unimpressed by her sincerity.

  “I will submit to this humiliation,” he said, “but only because I must. Yet it is a sad day when our new government cannot even acknowledge our contribution with a mere thank-you.”

  She knew that feeling all too well. And planned to remedy it for both of them.

  The discovery of the warehouse with its booty was widely broadcast on Zanshaa, and video of the spoils and the arrest of Simone Beckwith and former minister Lamong were sent throughout the empire. An investigation of Stellar Properties found two more warehouses filled with plunder, and the money trail showed that Lamong had received nearly 40 percent of the cash from sales of the spoils, a figure that far exceeded his stake in the company.

  The willingness of the Terran chairman of Stellar Properties to plunder her own species became a ten-minute sensation.

  Martinez was surprised that the owners of Stellar Properties hadn’t really bothered to hide their actions. They’d assumed they would be immune to all consequences, they’d assumed they had rights to the plunder, and they’d assumed they’d ride to riches on the backs of the dispossessed. Martinez was happy to disappoint them.

  It was soon discovered that Stellar Properties, as befit its name, owned real property in addition to warehouses stuffed with loot. Confiscated homes had also shuffled to the custody of Beckwith, Lamong, & Co.

  The scandalous revelations were reported daily in all media and served to blacken the Gruum administration’s image. Other revelations weren’t long in coming. Lady Tu-hon was found to have taken kickbacks on contracts to supply and support the Fleet. Lord Minno, the former minister of finance, was found to have used government money to finance his own private speculations and was discovered to have taken bribes to order the government to buy dubious securities. Gruum, the Lady Senior, had charged people who wanted to meet her for the purpose of obtaining contracts or other government business. She was far too proud and imperious to handle the money herself—for that she had minions, who got 10 percent of whatever they could collect.

  She also had bought a number of confiscated Zanshaa City properties for a fraction of what they were worth.

  None of this was exactly surprising—trading favors and the offering of sweeteners to those with the power to give out government contracts was common enough. What was surprising was the scale, the fact that they were all in on it, and that they didn’t even bother to hide the transactions.

  Arrogance and stupidity on a galactic scale—literally.

  The Fleet was able to aid the investigations, mainly by reviewing and processing data. Now that the war was over, the Combined Fleet had a great many communications techs and analysts with very little to do, and they were happy to dig through government files for information that would blight the lives of those who had supported war and the persecution of their species.

  Wei Jian had been equally happy to loan her crews for this duty, in exchange for receiving credit for any revelations. Martinez, used to other people usurping his ideas, didn’t even bother to be surprised.

  With Lord Chen and his sister Michi running the Commandery, Martinez now had a great deal more time to devote to his new hobby of fighting corruption. He led raids in person, usually trailed by cameras from his sister’s Imperial Broadcasting, and was seen frog-marching guilty parties into custody. Such people as he encountered seemed to think well of this. We might be holding you hostage with our many missiles, he thought, but at least we’re arresting bad people and returning stolen property. Which is more than the other side did.

  Mpanza helped put Martinez’s palace in order. Mangahas was installed in the kitchen. Hirelings carried furniture and decorative objects from room to room. Martinez was pleased to rehire Doshtra, the Daimong butler he’d left behind when he fled to Harzapid.

  He had retrieved most of his possessions. A few objects had perhaps been stolen by police, or by employees of Stellar Properties, but nothing of great value was missing. The object he most greatly missed was his portrait by Montemar Jukes.

  In any case, it was perhaps time to have another portrait painted, one alluding to his victory at Second Shulduc. And a second portrait, of a family group, with Terza and his two children.

  In addition to taking back his own home, Martinez also reclaimed the Martinez Palace, the residence of his brother, Roland. The great pink limestone house overshadowed the Street of Righteous Peace in the High City, and it had been confiscated and sold early in the war. The building’s new master had moved to the country after the Combined Fleet appeared in the system, and only a few servants were in residence, which made it easy for the building to be repossessed. Much of the contents had been sold in a series of auctions, and Martinez recovered what he could from yet another stash house. If Roland wanted to track down the rest, Martinez would leave it to him.