Fleet Elements Read online

Vonderheydte laughed. “She might be all wrinkled and hideous under that fur,” he said. “How would we know?”

  Martinez fell into step with Marietta and Vonderheydte. As always, he thought, Vonderheydte made him feel just a little bit old.

  They passed through Corona’s main passenger airlock and the cool, moist air of the yacht carrier wafted over him. The floors were polished, brass fixtures gleamed against a background of dark wood paneling, and the furniture was comfortable and stylish. A display cabinet showed the softly glowing racing trophies that the Corona Club had won in its few years of existence.

  Right in the middle of the atrium was an ornamental waterfall that fell sparkling into a deep pool. There were fountains and ponds that carried exotic fish, and the room echoed to the laughter of water. There was a certain amount of bravado installing open water features on a ship that could find itself floating in zero gee, but Corona’s architects had included ways in which the ship could swallow all the water on short notice, and then—just in case—had waterproofed everything.

  The small party’s footfalls echoed in the atrium. With the exception of Vonderheydte, apparently, all the officers he’d brought from Zanshaa were fully employed on the station, so at this hour Corona was nearly deserted.

  “Join us for a drink, Lord Captain?” Vonderheydte asked.

  “No, but thank you.”

  Vonderheydte and Marietta strolled off arm in arm. Martinez paused to contemplate the waterfall, and he tried to let the chiming of the water soothe away the memory of Sula that still spiked along his nerves. Exotic fish flashed spines, scales, and feathery tails in the water.

  “Hail, ancestor!”

  Gareth the Younger came trotting up with his sketch pad in his hand. He was nine years old, an engaging child whose appearance combined his mother’s celestial beauty and his father’s olive skin and solid physical presence. Martinez looked at his son and felt his anxiety fade.

  “Hail, progeny,” he said. “Have you been drawing?”

  “I’ve been doing graphic taxonomy,” said Gareth the Younger and showed a drawing of a golden tiger-striped fish. “This is a juvenile spotted harelip.”

  Taxonomy was a new word. Martinez had been trying to expand his son’s vocabulary.

  “I spotted the spots at once,” he said.

  Gareth paged through the sketchbook’s display to show one sketch after another. One of the officers had given him drawing lessons on the three-month journey from Zanshaa, and the images were now recognizable as discrete and distinguishable fish, as opposed to colorful torpedo-shaped objects that might be birds, aircraft, or clouds. Martinez took the time to praise each sketch as he looked at them.

  He hadn’t really paid attention to Corona’s fish, so the sketches might be perfectly accurate so far as he knew.

  “There’s ochoba-bean dumplings for lunch,” Young Gareth said, apropos of nothing, and then ran off to find something called a “whiskered Frenella eel.”

  Martinez walked toward one of Corona’s lounge areas for a cup of coffee before settling down to his task designing a new exercise for crew to train on. Most of the Fourth Fleet warships, having been designed for other species, were as yet unsuitable for human occupation, and everyone from commanding officers to fresh recruits were training on simulators.

  On the way to the lounge he caught a whiff of Terza’s vetiver perfume, and he followed the scent to a cabin filled with communications gear and dull-eyed cameras, intended as a staging room for his sister Vipsania’s video reporters broadcasting the yacht races.

  Terza Chen sat at a console, her mouth set in a little frown of concern as she contemplated the display. With her head bent gracefully toward the display, her long black hair drawing a comma on her shoulder, and her body in an attitude of contemplation, she might have been the subject of a pensive little painting by Rhy-to the Elder. She wore the brown uniform of the civil service and had spent the years since the war working for the Ministry of Right and Dominion, the government department that served the Fleet. She looked up as Martinez entered, and he found himself lost for a moment in the sublime perfection of her face, the result of thousands of years of breeding, assurance, and privilege. That breeding showed in the unearthly serenity that surrounded her, so unlike the impatient fury in which Sula charged through life.

  Martinez felt his heart lurch at the steadiness of her gaze. “I, ah, was going to get some coffee,” he said. “Would you like some?”

  “I have tea, thank you.” There was a slight shift in her dark eyes. “Did the reception for Lady Sula go well?”

  “They were all beat to pieces by the long deceleration, so Michi gave them the day off.” He thought it best to shift the subject from Sula. “Do you know anything about Lady Koridun?”

  “Not much other than she’s quite young and that there have been a lot of deaths in her family.”

  “Starting, apparently, with a volcanic explosion on Terra.” Martinez had once joked about the deaths with Lord Durward Li, the husband that Marietta had abandoned on Zanshaa, saying that he was tempted to start a sports book on how long the current Lady Koridun would survive.

  “Lady Koridun seems to be avoiding mortality so far,” he said. “Marietta told me that she’d killed the Legion commander on the trip out.”

  Terza’s eyes widened. “That’s unexpected,” she said. “But then, the Koriduns have a reputation for violence and mental instability, don’t they?”

  “Do they? I didn’t know.” Martinez, his heart still throbbing erratically inside his rib cage, felt a sudden, deep compulsion to linger for a while in Terza’s aura of serenity, and he sat in the chair next to her. Strange, he thought, how he needed his wife to settle him down after an encounter with a woman he’d never forgotten. She reached out to take his hand, her slim fingers enfolding his big, clumsy paw, and then turned her attention to the console.

  “What are you working on?” he asked.

  “Estimates of missile production. We’re ramping up, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “But with missiles we have to make sure that only Terrans are involved in the actual production.” Because, Martinez knew, other species might be tempted by the idea of sabotage.

  “Isn’t it mostly automated anyway?”

  “Some is, some isn’t. But there’s conventional explosive used to trigger the antimatter chips, so that’s a separate production line that has to be rendered safe.”

  “Everything’s been quiet so far,” Martinez said hopefully. Humans were outnumbered five to one on Harzapid, but Michi’s coup had put humanity, for the moment, in charge. He had to hope that the other species would be willing to accept Michi’s assurances that things would return to normal after the emergency ended.

  Terza’s free hand gestured at the interface, and production figures scrolled by. Martinez could see the numbers reflected in her long dark eyes.

  She was a member of the highest caste of Peers, Clan Chen’s heir, and would normally have been far beyond Martinez’s reach. But the Naxid War had upset everything and had made Terza’s father financially vulnerable. Martinez’s older brother, Roland, had used family money to lever Terza out of Lord Chen’s grip, and Martinez and Terza had been married after only a few hours’ acquaintance, and mere days after Martinez’s relationship with Sula had exploded.

  Terza might have had every reason to resent her fate, but to his surprise she had approached marriage and motherhood with the same unruffled competence with which she seemed to approach everything else. Her air of tranquil perfection had made him uneasy—if she hated him, how would he know?—but all doubts had eventually been put to rest. After her father’s finances recovered, she’d had every opportunity to leave Martinez, and she hadn’t. Terza had accompanied him into exile on Corona, and she had been willing to share his fate when it looked as if the cruiser Conformance would obliterate them all with an antimatter missile. She had encouraged Martinez’s plan to destroy Conformance with an improvised weapo
n and awaited her fate with a calm resilience that had earned his admiration.

  For his own part Martinez had taken advantage of the perquisites that came with marrying the Chen heir. He’d accepted Lord Chen’s patronage, and Chen’s sister, Michi, had employed Martinez at a time when few commanders would. If he was now a senior captain instead of an obscure elcap commanding a training school somewhere, it was the work of his in-laws, and when Terza became Lady Chen, he would have the option of becoming Lord Chen at her side.

  The stowaway passenger Marietta Li, Martinez knew, had fled her own arranged marriage to a much older man. Lord Durward Li had lost his heir at the First Battle of Magaria, and needing a new one, he first needed a fertile wife and found one among his clients. At least she’d given him a pair of children before running off with Vonderheydte.

  Martinez had managed, at least so far, to keep his own life from becoming a tale so entirely ridiculous.

  He had also told himself that he wouldn’t dishonor Terza by failing to be a proper consort. She had lowered herself to marry him, and he would not disgrace her. If she was not quite the object of his deepest passion, he would act as if she were. It might have been a marriage hastily arranged at the last minute, but he would make it a real marriage if he could. And so far as he could tell, he’d succeeded.

  All might have been well, if only Martinez hadn’t kept dreaming of Lady Sula.

  Chapter 2

  The battleship Perfection of the Praxis was far from perfect. It was unfinished, for one thing, and gangs of workers were moving material both on and off the ship—on went equipment to make Perfection of the Praxis an effective fighting machine, and off went items intended to transform the ship into a gleaming showcase of opulence for whatever lucky fleet commander got to install herself in its deluxe quarters. So off went uninstalled luxuries: the rare wood paneling, the parquetry, the hand-painted tiles, the gleaming bar fixtures, the crystal chandeliers, two unassembled marble steam baths, the backdrops and scenery for the ship’s theater, and the instruments intended for the ship’s orchestra.

  The woman called Caroline Sula walked through a vast empty space, the ceiling all girders and spray foam, the walls cheap gray resin slabs awaiting the installation of glossy wood paneling, the blazing LED floods mounted on brackets built to resist high gees. Her heels clacked on temporary flooring and echoed in the vast cavern. “What is this place?” she asked.

  Her guide, a staff lieutenant named Sandra Yuen, glanced up at the dim, empty ceiling. “The ballroom, my lady.”

  “Good grief.”

  Eight years before, Sula had watched an entire squadron of Praxis-class battleships annihilated in a storm of antimatter fire at the First Battle of Magaria. The huge ships had carried a massive battery of weapons, but in the face of antimatter missiles they were destroyed as easily as an unarmed pinnace.

  The lesson was clear: the big ships were too vulnerable, and the resources to build one of them was better spent on a squadron of smaller, more flexible vessels that couldn’t all be blasted out of existence by a single missile. But a half-dozen years after the end of the Naxid War, with no more fighting expected, the Fleet’s leaders had found themselves unable to resist building themselves new flying palaces, complete—apparently—with ballrooms.

  And now, ballrooms or not, Perfection of the Praxis was bound for combat. Sula tried to console herself with the thought that the enemy would have more battleships than her own side.

  Sula’s body ached from days of deceleration, and as she walked she twisted her trunk to unkink her spine. She followed Yuen out of the ballroom, down a corridor hung with scaffolding and reeking of solvents, and then through a hatch into a very different world. Luxuries had actually been installed in this room: yellow chesz-wood paneling, indirect lighting, video screens tuned to a shifting array of abstract colors, soft carpets. Sula could only hope it had all been fireproofed, as per regulations.

  Soft music burbled from hidden speakers. Aides passed with trays of drinks and snacks. Prominent in the room stood a half-dozen Terrans in the viridian-green dress uniforms of the Fleet. Sula had escaped to Harzapid in civilian disguise, leaving her uniforms behind, and wore a nondescript jumpsuit of dark gray, rumpled and creased from days of hard deceleration. The jumpsuit was untidy and unprepossessing, but at least the bloodstains had been removed.

  Sula approached a woman with the shoulder boards of a junior fleet commander and braced at the salute, chin high to expose her throat to her senior’s correction. “Lady Fleetcom,” she said.

  “Welcome, Lady Sula. Would you like a coffee, or fruit juice?”

  Lady Michi Chen hadn’t seen Sula since the end of the Naxid Rebellion but had managed nonetheless to remember that Sula didn’t drink alcohol. That, Sula thought, was very professional of her.

  “Tea, Lady Fleetcom. With honey, or cane syrup if you have it.”

  One of the aides was sent to fetch tea. Michi was a stocky woman with a cap of gray hair cut in bangs across her forehead, and recent care and anxiety had jaundiced her complexion and drawn fresh lines at the corners of her mouth. Even though it was Sula who had just undergone twenty-nine days of hard deceleration, it was Michi who looked more careworn.

  Yet there was good reason for her exhaustion. It might be said with perfect justice that the fate of the human race depended entirely on Michi Chen’s decisions.

  Michi looked at Sula’s jumpsuit. “You didn’t bring uniforms?”

  “I traveled incognito. But I’ve sent my measurements to a tailor on the ring, and I’ll have a complete set soon.”

  Michi glanced over the room. “I think you know everybody here except for the Kangas twins.”

  The twins, Paivo and Ranssu, were big-jawed blonds, tall and burly, with large hands and outsized knuckles. They were the sons of Fleet Commander Eino Kangas, who had died leading the Home Fleet to victory at the Battle of Antopone, and they both wore the uniforms of lieutenant-captains.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Lady Sula,” Paivo said. “We’ve just done a brief survey of your Striver.”

  “It’s hardly my Striver,” Sula said. “It belongs to the On-dau Company.”

  “It’s yours now,” said Ranssu. “You took it. And you killed over forty members of the Legion to do it.”

  “Not me personally.”

  “It looked like a real bloodbath,” said Paivo.

  Yes, Sula thought, and I dream about it and wake up screaming.

  “It’s true that an antimatter missile is more hygienic than bombs and firearms,” Sula said. “In any case, if Striver is mine, I happily surrender it to you. I’m glad to be out of it.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Paivo. “The smell alone—”

  His brother nudged him, and he fell silent.

  Paivo’s words had brought a scent-memory to Sula’s senses: the sharp tang of explosives, the smoky odor of propellants, and the deep throat-clogging reek of the Torminel blood that had run down the metal staircase in thick, clotting waterfalls.

  Sula knew she’d have another bad dream tonight.

  An aide arrived with Sula’s tea and honey on a platter. For a brief instant she had a near-overwhelming urge for alcohol, for the relaxation it would bring to her strained muscles, the confidence it brought to her personality, and the obliteration it would bring to her memory.

  Odd that the compulsion was so strong, when she’d only had alcohol a few times in her life, when she was a teen, and hadn’t much cared for it then. But her youth had also been full of the damage she’d seen alcohol inflict on others, and she’d sworn to stay away from it.

  She added a long, slow, fragrant dollop of honey to the tea, then sipped and tried to let its sweetness overcome the memory of blood and death. It failed.

  The noise of the hatch opening announced the arrival of a pair of Sula’s fellow passengers on the Striver. Lieutenant Lady Alana Haz had once been Lord Alan Haz, Sula’s premiere on her frigate Confidence. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and�
�because she hadn’t been traveling incognito—wore one of the superbly tailored uniforms she had brought with her from Zanshaa. With her was Captain Lord Naaz Vijana, who had made his reputation suppressing the revolt of the Yormak natives of Esley, a victory made easier by the fact that the Yormaks had Stone Age tools and Vijana modern weaponry. He was a slender man with a pointed face and caramel skin, and his alert black eyes surveyed the room and paused at each face, as if he were quietly evaluating each officer for his own purposes. Since he’d traveled incognito alongside Sula, he didn’t have a uniform, but he wore neat dark civilian clothes with a Fleet sidearm strapped around his waist.

  Sula sipped her tea while Michi Chen introduced the new arrivals, and then the hatch opened again, and Gareth Martinez entered. He was a larger presence than she remembered, with his lantern jaw and dark brows, and the long anthropoid torso and arms balanced atop comparatively short legs. Perhaps he’d managed to somehow inflate himself since she’d last seen him.

  Hung about his neck on its black-and-gold ribbon was the brilliant disk of the Golden Orb, the empire’s highest decoration. At least he hadn’t brought the Orb’s golden baton itself, which would have required everyone in the room to stand at attention and salute him.

  She’d had weeks to prepare herself for this moment, since Striver had followed Martinez’s ship on its escape to Harzapid. Martinez, founder of the Corona Yacht Club, had ridden to Harzapid on Corona, his club’s yacht carrier, a plush vessel equipped with every luxury—possibly, she thought, even a ballroom. While Sula had been obliged to lead a bloody mutiny against the black-clad Torminel fanatics, Martinez had enjoyed what seemed to be a three-month-long cocktail party interrupted only by the occasional yacht race.

  And along the way, with his unarmed transport vessel, he had somehow destroyed an enemy cruiser. Not that Sula would give him the satisfaction of asking him how he’d done it.

  Behind Martinez came his entourage: Captain Nikki Severin in his blue Exploration Service uniform, Lieutenant-Captain Elissa Dalkeith, a Martinez protégée who had commanded a frigate in the last war, and Lieutenant Chandra Prasad, who during the Naxid War had served as Michi Chen’s tactical officer.