INVESTMENTS

 

 

Walter Jon Williams

 

 

Copyright (c) 2004, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form.

 

 

 

Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

 

Novels

Hardwired

Knight Moves

Voice of the Whirlwind

Days of Atonement

Aristoi

Metropolitan

City on Fire

Ambassador of Progress

Angel Station

The Rift

Implied Spaces

 

Divertimenti

The Crown Jewels

House of Shards

Rock of Ages

 

Dread Empire's Fall

The Praxis

The Sundering

Conventions of War

Investments

 

Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

This Is Not a Game

Deep State

The Fourth Wall

 

Collections

Facets

Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

 

 

 

With thanks for technical assistance to Michael Rupen, Kristy Dyer, Bob Norton.

 

 

 

Investments

 

 

The car sped south in the subtropical twilight. The Rio Hondo was on Lieutenant Severin’s right, a silver presence that wound in and out of his perceptions. As long as he stayed on the highway the rental car, which knew Laredo better than he did, implemented its own navigation and steering, and Severin had nothing to do but relax, to gaze through the windows at the thick, vine-wrapped trunks of the cavella trees, the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, and the occasional sight of a hovercraft on the river, fans a deep bass rumble as it carried cargo south to the port at Punta Piedra. Overhead, stars began to glow on either side of the great glittering arc of Laredo’s accelerator ring. The silver river turned scarlet in the light of the setting sun.

The vehicle issued a series of warning tones, and Severin took the controls as the car left the highway. Severin drove through an underpass, then up a long straight alley flanked by live oaks, their twisted black limbs sprawled like the legs of fantastic beasts. Overhead arced a series of formal gateways, all elaborate wrought-iron covered with scrollwork, spikes, and heraldic emblems, and each with a teardrop-shaped light that dangled from the center of the arch and cast pale glow on the path. Beyond was a large house, two storeys wrapped with verandahs, painted a kind of orange-rust color with white trim. It was covered with lights.

People strolled along the verandahs and on the expansive lawns. They were dressed formally, and Severin began to hope that his uniform was sufficiently well tailored so as not to mark him out. Practically all the other guests, Severin assumed, were Peers, the class that the conquering Shaa had imposed on humanity and other defeated species. It was a class into which Severin had not been born, but rather one to which he’d nearly been annexed.

At the start of the Naxid Rebellion Severin had been a warrant officer in the Exploration Service, normally the highest rank to which a commoner might aspire. As a result of service in the war he’d received a field promotion to lieutenant, and suddenly found himself amid a class that had been as remote from him as the stars that glimmered above Laredo’s ring.

He parked in front of the house and stepped from the car as the door rolled up into the roof. Tobacco smoke mingled uneasily in the air with tropical perfume. A pair of servants, one Terran, one Torminel, trotted from the house to join him. The Torminel wore huge darkened glasses over her nocturnal-adapted eyes.

“You are Lieutenant Severin?” the Torminel asked, speaking carefully around her fangs.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Rio Hondo, my lord.”

Severin wasn’t a lord, but all officers were called that out of courtesy, most of them being Peers anyway. Severin had got used to it.

“Thank you,” he said. He stepped away from the car, then hesitated. “My luggage,” he said.

“Blist will take care of that, my lord. I’ll look after your car. Please go up to the house, unless of course you’d prefer that I announce you.”

Severin, who could imagine only a puzzled, awkward silence following a servant announcing his presence, smiled and said, “That won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

He adjusted his blue uniform tunic and walked across the brick apron to the stairs. Perhaps, he thought, he should have brought his orderly, but in his years among the enlisted ranks he’d got used to looking after his own gear, and he never really gave his servant enough work to justify his existence.

Instead of taking his orderly with him to Rio Hondo, he’d given the man leave. In the meantime Severin could brush his own uniforms and polish his own shoes, something he rarely left to a servant anyway.

Severin’s heels clacked on the polished asteroid material that made up the floor of the verandah. A figure detached itself from a group and approached. Severin took a moment to recognize his host, because he had never actually met Senior Captain Lord Gareth Martinez face to face.

“Lieutenant Severin? Is that you?”

“Yes, lord captain.”

Martinez smiled and reached out to clasp Severin’s hand. “Very good to meet you at last!”

Martinez was tall, with broad shoulders, long arms, and big hands; he had wavy dark hair and thick dark brows. He wore the viridian green uniform of the Fleet, and at his throat was the disk of the Golden Orb, the empire’s highest decoration.

Severin and Martinez had been of use to each other during the war, and Severin suspected that it had been Martinez who had arranged his promotion to the officer class. He and Severin had kept in touch with one another over the years, but they’d never been in the same room together.

Martinez was a native of Laredo, a son of Lord Martinez, Laredo’s principal Peer; and when Martinez had returned to his home world, he’d learned that Severin was based on Laredo’s ring and invited him to the family home for a few days.

“You’ve missed dinner, I’m afraid,” Martinez said. “It went on most of the afternoon. Fortunately you also missed the speeches.”

Martinez spoke with a heavy Laredo accent, a mark of his provincial origins that Severin suspected did him little good in the drawing rooms of Zanshaa High City.

“I’m sorry to have missed your speech anyway, my lord,” Severin said in his resolutely middle-class voice.

Martinez gave a heavy sigh. “You’ll get a chance to hear it again. I give the same one over and over.” He tilted his chin high and struck a pose. “‘The empire, under the guidance of the Praxis, contains a social order of unlimited potential.’” The pose evaporated. He looked at Severin. “How long are you on the planet?”

“Nearly a month, I think. Surveyor will be leaving ahead of Titan, while they’re still loading antihydrogen.”

“Where’s Surveyor bound, then?”

“Through Chee to Parkhurst. And possibly beyond even that . . . the spectra from Parkhurst indicate there may be two undiscovered wormholes there, and we’re going to look for them.”

Martinez was impressed. “Good luck. Maybe Laredo will become a hub of commerce instead of a dead end on the interstellar roadway.”

This was a good time to be in the Exploration Service. Founded originally to locate wormholes, stabilize them, and travel through them to discover new systems, planets, and species, the Service had dwindled during the last thousand years of Shaa rule as the Great Masters lost their taste for expanding their empire. Since the death of the last Shaa and the war that followed, the Convocation had decided again on a policy of expansion, beginning with Chee and Parkhurst, two systems that could be reached through Laredo, and which had been surveyed hundreds of years earlier without any settlement actually being authorized.

The Service was expanding to fill its mandate, and that meant more money, better ships, and incoming classes of young officers for Severin to be senior to. The Exploration Service now offered the possibility of great discoveries and adventure, and Severin— as an officer who had come out of the war with credit— was in a position to take advantage of such an offer.

A Terran stepped out of the house with a pair of drinks in his hand. He strongly resembled Martinez, and he wore the dark red tunic of the Lords Convocate, the six hundred-odd member committee that ruled the empire in the absence of the Shaa.

“Here you are,” he said, and handed a drink to Martinez. He looked at Severin, hesitated, and then offered him the second glass.

“Delta whisky?” he asked.

“Thank you.” Severin took the glass.

“Lieutenant Severin,” Martinez said, “allow me to introduce you to my older brother, Roland.”

“Lord convocate,” Severin said. He juggled the whisky glass to take Roland’s hand.

“Pleased you could come,” Roland said. “My brother has spoken of you.” He turned to Martinez. “Don’t forget that you and Terza are pledged to play tingo tonight with Lord Mukerji.”

Martinez made a face. “Can’t you find someone else?”

“You’re the hero,” Roland said. “That makes your money better than anyone else’s. You and my lord Severin can rehash the war tomorrow, after our special guests have left.”

Martinez looked at Severin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There are people here concerned with the Chee development, and it’s the polite thing to keep them happy.”

Since the Chee development concerned the settlement of an entire planet, and the special guests were presumably paying for it, Severin sympathized with the necessity of keeping them happy.

“I understand,” he said.

Roland’s eyes tracked over Severin’s shoulder, and he raised his eyebrows. “Here’s Terza now.”

Severin turned to see a small group on the lawn, an elegant, black-haired woman in a pale gown walking hand-in-hand with a boy of three, smiling and talking with another woman, fair-haired and pregnant.

“Cassilda’s looking well,” Martinez remarked.

“Fecundity suits her,” said Roland.

“Fecundity and a fortune,” Martinez said. “What more could a man ask?”

Roland smiled. “Pliability,” he said lightly, then stepped forward to help his pregnant wife up the stairs. Martinez waited for the other woman to follow and greeted her with a kiss.

Introductions were made. The black-haired woman was Lady Terza Chen, Martinez’ wife and heir to the high-caste Chen clan. The child was Young Gareth. The light-haired woman was Lady Cassilda Zykov, who was apparently not an heir but came with a fortune anyway.

“Pleased to meet you,” Severin said.

“Thank you for keeping my husband alive,” Terza said. “I hope you won’t stop now.”

Severin looked at Martinez. “He seems to be doing well enough on his own.”

Lady Terza was slim and poised and had a lovely, almond-eyed face. She put a hand on Severin’s arm. “Have you eaten?”

“I had a bite coming down in the skyhook.”

She drew Severin toward the door. “That was a long time ago. Let me show you the buffet. I’ll introduce you to some people and then— “ Her eyes turned to Martinez.

“Tingo with Mukerji,” Martinez said. “I know.”

She looked again at Severin. “You don’t play tingo, do you?”

Bankruptcy doesn’t suit me, he thought.

“No,” he said, “I’m afraid not.”

*

Terza took Martinez’ arm in both her own and rested her head on his shoulder. “It was time you came home,” she said. “I’ve never seen you with your own people.”

He looked at her. “You’re my people, now,” he said.

Terza had spent most of her pregnancy on Laredo, but without him— that had been in wartime, with the Convocation in flight from the capital and Martinez fighting with the Fleet. After that, with the rebels driven from Zanshaa and the war at an end, the family had reunited in the High City to bask in the cheers of a thankful population. Chee and Parkhurst had been opened to settlement under Martinez patronage. Roland had been co-opted into the Convocation.

Now, three years later, the cheers of the High City had faded. Enmity on the Fleet Control Board kept Martinez from command of a ship or any meaningful assignments. Terza led an active life that combined a post at the Ministry of Right and Dominion with a full schedule of High City diversions: receptions, balls, concerts, exhibitions, and an endless round of parties. Martinez was feeling more and more like his wife’s appendage, trailed around from one event to the next.

The choice was stark: either go home or write his memoirs. Sitting down to write the story of his life, like an old man at the end of his days with nothing to offer to the empire but words, was an image he found repellent. He arranged for passage to Laredo on the huge transport Wi-hun, and embarked his family and their servants.

Before he left, Martinez applied to be appointed Lord Inspector of the Fleet for Laredo, Chee, and Parkhurst, thus giving his journey an official pretext. The appointment was approved so quickly that Martinez could only imagine the joy on the Fleet Control Board at the news that Senior Captain Martinez had been willing, for once, to settle for a meaningless task.

The appointment kept him on the active list. It gave him the authority to interfere here and there, if he felt like interfering. Maybe he would interfere just to convince himself that the postwar arrangement hadn’t made him irrelevant.

“Captain Martinez! Lady Terza! Are you ready for tingo?”

Martinez decided that he wouldn’t submerge into irrelevance just yet, not as long as games of tingo were without a fifth player.

“Certainly, Lord Mukerji,” he said.

Lord Mukerji was a short, spare Terran with wiry grey hair, a well-cultivated handlebar mustache, and all the social connections in the worlds. He had been brought in as the President of the Chee Development Company in order to provide the necessary tone. Opening two whole worlds to settlement was beyond the financial capabilities even of the staggeringly rich Lord Martinez, and outside investors had to be brought in. It had to be admitted that the Peers and financiers of the High City preferred to hear about investment opportunities in tones more congenial to their ears than those uttered in a barbaric Laredo accent.

And Lord Mukerji had certainly done his job. Investment had poured into the company’s coffers from the moment he’d begun spreading his balm on the moneyed classes. Important Peer clans were signed on to become the official patrons of settlers, of cities, or even of entire industries. Company stock was doing well on the Zanshaa Exchange, and the bonds were doing even better.

Martinez and Terza took their seats as a tall figure loomed above the table. “Do you know Lord Pa?” Mukerji said.

“We’ve met only briefly, before dinner,” Martinez said.

Lord Pa Maq-fan was a Lai-own, a species of flightless birds, and was the chairman of a privately-held company that was one the prime contractors for the Chee development. From his great height he looked at Terza and Martinez with disturbing blood-red eyes and bared the peg teeth in his short muzzle. “All Lai-own know Captain Martinez,” he said. “He saved our home world.”

“Very kind of you to say so,” Martinez said as Lord Pa settled his keel-like breastbone into his special chair.

It was always heartening when people remembered these little details.

“I haven’t kept people waiting, I hope.” Lady Marcella Zykov hastened into to her place at the table. She was a first cousin of Roland’s bride Cassilda, and the chief of operations for the Chee Company, having been put in place to look after the money the Zykov clan was putting into the venture. She was a very short, very busy woman in her thirties, with a pointed face and auburn hair pulled into an untidy knot behind her head, and she absently brushed tobacco ash off her jacket as she took her place.

“Shall we roll the bones, then?” Lord Mukerji said.

All players bet a hundred zeniths. The bones were rolled, and they appointed Marcella the dealer. She ran the tiles through the sorting machine and dealt each player an initial schema.

“Discard,” said Terza, who sat on her right, and removed the Three Virtues from her schema.

“Claim,” said Lord Mukerji. He took the Three Virtues into his schema and smiled beneath his broad mustaches. He waited for Marcella to be dealt a new tile, then touched a numbered pad on the table. “Another two hundred,” he said.

Martinez thought it was a little early in the game to raise, but he paid two hundred for a new tile just to see where the game would go. Two rounds later, when Lord Mukerji doubled, Martinez and Terza both dropped out. The game was won by Lord Pa, who had quietly built a Tower that he dropped onto Lord Mukerji’s Bouquet of Probity.

“Roll the bones,” said Mukerji.

The bones made Mukerji the dealer. As he ran the tiles through the sorting machine, Marcella looked up from the table.

“Will you be traveling to Chee, Captain Martinez?”

“I’m Lord Inspector for Chee,” Martinez said, “so I’ll be required to inspect the skyhook, the station, and the other Fleet facilities.”

“And Parkhurst as well?”

“There’s nothing in the Parkhurst system at the moment but a Fleet survey vessel. I can wait for it to return.”

“I can offer you transport on the Kayenta,” Marcella said, “if you can leave in twenty days or so.” She turned to Terza. “That way Lady Terza can accompany you without the discomforts of a Fleet vessel or a transport.”

Martinez was pleasantly surprised. He’d been planning on booking a ride on one of the giant transports heading to Chee— they carried immigrants as well as cargo and had adequate facilities for passengers— but Kayenta was the Chee Company’s executive yacht, with first-class accommodations and a crew that included a masseur and a cosmetician.

He turned to Terza, who seemed delighted by the offer. “Thank you,” he said. “We’ll definitely consider the option.”

“Are you going out to Chee yourself, Lady Marcella?” Mukerji asked.

“Yes. They’re beginning the new railhead at Corona, and Lord Pa and I will need to consult with Allodorm.”

Martinez caught the surprise that crossed Terza’s face, surprise that was swiftly suppressed. Terza took up her tiles.

“Is that Ledo Allodorm?” she asked.

Lord Pa’s blood-red eyes gazed at her from across the table. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know that gentleman?”

“Not personally,” Terza said, as she looked down at her tiles. “His name came up, I don’t know where.”

Martinez noted with interest that his wife wore the serene smile that experience told him was a sure sign she was telling less than the truth.

“Shall we roll the bones?” asked Lord Mukerji.

Mukerji doubled three times on the first three rounds and drove everyone else out of the game. Martinez realized he’d found his way into a very serious and potentially expensive contest, and began to calculate odds very carefully.

Terza won the following game with the Six Cardinal Directions. Lord Pa won the next. Marcella the game after. Then Lord Pa, then Martinez with a Bouquet of Delights over Lord Mukerji’s Crossroads.

“Roll the bones,” said Lord Mukerji.

Lord Pa took another game, then Terza, and Marcella won three games in a row. In the next game, the bones rolled six, so the stakes were doubled and the bones rolled again, and this time proclaimed Martinez dealer. He discarded Two Sunsets, only to have Lord Mukerji claim it, which argued that Lord Mukerji was aiming at filling a Bouquet of Sorrows. Mukerji in his turn was dealt, and discarded, a South, which Martinez claimed to add to his East and Up to make three of the Six Cardinal Directions. On subsequent turns, Martinez was dealt a South, needing only a North and a Down for six. Mukerji claimed Four Night Winds, doubled, kept a tile he was dealt, doubled, was dealt and discarded Two Ancestors, then doubled again anyway. Terza and Lord Pa dropped out of the game during the doubling, turning over their tiles to reveal unpromising schemas.

Martinez looked at the total and felt his mouth go dry. He received a generous allowance from his father, but to continue the game would be to abuse his parent severely.

His contemplation of the score made him a critical half-second late when Marcella, dropping out of the game, made her final discard, a Down.

“Claim,” Mukerji said.

Mukerji had claimed the tile simply to thwart him. Martinez, the word already spilling from his lips, had no choice but to let Mukerji take the tile he badly needed to complete his hand.

“Double,” Mukerji said, his eyes gleaming.

Martinez looked at his schema, then scanned the discards and the tiles of the players who had dropped out of the betting. Neither of the two Norths was revealed, and neither was the second Down.

He looked at his own tiles again. Beside the Directions he had Three and Four Ships, a Sunlit Garden, and a Road of Metal. If he got Two or Five Ships, he’d have a Small Flotilla. A Flotilla plus the Cardinal Directions equaled a Migration.

He scanned the discards and reveals again, and saw singletons of Two and Five Ships, which meant other Ships were still in the sorting machine.

Or already in Lord Mukerji’s schema.

Martinez decided it was worth the risk.

Without speaking Martinez dealt himself another tile. It was Four Ships, and he discarded it. Lord Mukerji ignored it and took another tile, which he discarded.

Five Ships. Martinez claimed it, discarded his Road of Metal, then dealt himself another tile, which he discarded.

He was suddenly aware that the room had fallen silent, that others stood around him, watching. Roland watched from amid the spectators with a frown on his face, and Cassilda with her hands pressed protectively over her swelling abdomen. Lord Pa’s red eyes were obscured by nictating membranes. Marcella was frozen in her seat, but her hands formed little fists and her knuckles were white.

Terza, on his right, had the serene smile that she wore to conceal her thoughts, but he saw the tension crimping the corners of her eyes.

Lord Mukerji was dealt and discarded a tile, and then Martinez dealt himself an Angle, which he discarded.

“Claim,” Mukerji said in triumph.

He laid down his completed Bouquet of Sorrows, then added the Angle to his Point and his Coordinate, making a Geometry. His grin broadened beneath the spreading mustache as he pushed the odd Down into the discard pile.

“That’s a game for me, then,” he said.

“Claim,” said Martinez.

He turned over his tiles to reveal the incomplete Migration, which he completed by adding the Down and discarding his Sunlit Garden. From the room he heard a collective exhalation of breath.

He looked at Mukerji, who was suddenly very white around the eyes. “That’s a limit schema,” Mukerji said.

Honesty compelled Martinez to speak. “And the bones came up six, if you remember, so the limit is doubled. And I’m dealer, so that doubles again.”

Lord Mukerji surveyed the table, then slowly leaned backwards into his chair, draping himself on the chair back as if he were a fallen flag.

“What is the limit?” Martinez heard someone ask.

“Ten thousand,” came the reply.

“Fucking amazing,” said the first.

“Well played,” said Lord Mukerji. “I do believe you let me have that Cardinal Direction on purpose.”

“Of course,” Martinez lied.

Mukerji held out his hand. “You must give me an opportunity for revenge,” he said.

Martinez took the hand. “Later tonight, if you like.”

There was applause from the crowd as the two clasped hands.

“I need to visit the smoking lounge,” Marcella said, and stood.

Martinez rose from the table. His head spun, and his knees felt watery. Terza rose with him and took his arm.

“That was terrifying,” she murmured.

“Ten thousand doubled twice,” Martinez breathed. “For forty we could buy a small palace in the High City.”

“We already have a small palace.”

“I could have lost it tonight.” He passed a hand over his forehead.

Roland loomed up at his other elbow. “That was well judged,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“But you were lucky.”

Martinez looked at him. “I am lucky,” he said. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t have been a senior captain before he was thirty.

“Just so you don’t go counting on it.” A mischievous light glowed in Roland’s eyes. “You’re not taking up tingo as a substitute for the excitement of combat, are you?”

“Combat’s easier,” Martinez said. He looked at his brother. “That isn’t true, by the way.”

“I know.”

A thought passed through Martinez’ mind. “Mukerji wasn’t playing with our money, was he?”

“You mean the Company’s? No. His presidency is ceremonial; he doesn’t have access to the accounts. He doesn’t even take a salary.”

Martinez raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Roland said, “we gave him lots of stock. If the Chee Company does well, so does he.”

“He may have to sell some of his stock after tonight.”

Roland shook his head. “He can afford a lot of nights like this.”

“How many, I wonder?” Terza said. She stroked Martinez’ arm. “I should make sure Gareth’s got to bed. If you’re all right?”

“I could use a drink.”

“Absolutely not,” Roland said. “Not if you’re committed to an evening of high play.”

Martinez let go a long breath. “You’ve got a point.”

Terza smiled, patted his arm, and went in search of the children. Martinez went to the bar with Roland, ordered an orange juice, and poured it over ice.

Roland ordered champagne. “You don’t have to rub it in,” Martinez said, and turned to find Severin at his elbow.

“You’re finding your way all right?” Martinez asked.

“Yes. There’s a Cree band tuning in the ballroom. I’ll dance.”

“Good.”

“I hear you’ve done something spectacular at tingo. Everyone’s talking about it.”

Martinez felt a tingle of vanity. “I made a mistake early on,” he said, “but I calculated the odds correctly in the end.”

He explained the play as he made his way back to the parlor. They came to Mukerji, who was speaking with Lord Pa. “If the geologist’s report was in error, then it must be done again, of course,” he said. “I’m sure Cassilda will— ” He broke off, then looked at Martinez. “Lord captain,” he said. “Shall we resume the game?”

“We seem to be without a few players as yet,” Martinez said. “May I introduce Lieutenant Severin? He saved the empire at Protipanu, and saved me a few months later, during the battle there.”

Pa looked down from his great height, nictating membranes clearing his red eyes as he gazed at Severin with studious intensity. “I don’t recall any of that in the histories,” he said.

“The wrong people wrote the histories,” Martinez said. Those same people had decided to keep Severin’s contribution to the war a secret. He had used a trick of physics to physically move a wormhole out from under a Naxid squadron, and since the empire depended for its very existence on the wormholes that knit its systems together, the censors had decided not to remind people that such a thing could be done.

“In any case, lord lieutenant, I am pleased to meet you,” said Pa to Severin.

“So am I,” Mukerji said. His long mustache gave a twitch. “You wouldn’t care to join us for a game of tingo?”

“Thank you, my lord,” Severin said, “but I don’t play.”

“Don’t play tingo?” Mukerji said, blinking with apparent astonishment. “What do you do in those officers’ clubs or wardrooms or whatever you call them?”

“Mostly I do paperwork,” Severin said.

“Perhaps we should actively search for a fifth player,” Martinez said. “I’m not certain that Terza will return from putting Gareth to bed anytime soon.”

He spoke quickly. He knew that, as someone promoted from the ranks, Severin was unlikely to possess the large private income normal for most officers. Very possibly the unfortunate man was forced to live on his pay. A game of tingo played for high stakes wasn’t simply unwise for a man like Severin, it was impossible.

Best to get him off the hook as quickly as possible.

Pa and Mukerji went in search of a tingo player, and Martinez asked Severin about his last voyage, several months in which Surveyor had been in the Chee system, making one rendezvous after another with asteroids, strapping antimatter-fueled thrusters onto the giant rocks, and sending them on looping courses to Wormhole Station One, where they were used to balance the mass coming into the system on the huge freighters. The task was both dull and dangerous, a risky combination, but the voyage had been successful and the wormhole station wouldn’t need any more raw material for a year or more.

“Fortunately the mass driver on Chee’s moon is taking over the job of supplying the wormhole stations, “ Severin said, “so we’re available for other duties.”

“Excellent. Your voyage was uneventful otherwise?”

“Our skipper’s good,” Severin said. “No one on the trip tore so much as a hangnail.”

“Do I know him?” Martinez asked.

“Lord Go Shikimori. An old Service family.”

Martinez considered, then shook his head. “The name’s not familiar.”

Marcella returned from the smoking lounge brushing ash from her jacket. Pa and Mukerji arrived with an elderly, fangless Torminel named Lady Uzdil.

“I seem to be caught up in the game,” Martinez told Severin. “My apologies.”

“I think I hear music,” Severin said.

“Enjoy.”

What did Severin do with himself in his ship’s wardroom? Martinez wondered. He probably couldn’t afford most of an officer’s amusements.

And judging by his uniform, he couldn’t afford much of a tailor, either.

Martinez settled in to play tingo. Lady Uzdil seemed to be shedding: the air was full of graying fur. Martinez played conservatively, which meant that he frequently allowed himself to be driven out of a round by Mukerji’s insistent doubling. He held firm when fortune gave him good tiles, though, and managed a modest profit on top of the forty thousand he’d won earlier. Lord Pa did very well, Cassilda well enough, and Lady Uzdil lost a modest amount. It was Mukerji who lost heavily, plunging heavily on one bad venture after another. Though he didn’t run afoul of any limit schemas, and he didn’t lose another High City palace, Martinez calculated that he lost at least the value of a sumptuous country villa— and not one on Laredo, either, but on Zanshaa.

After two hours Martinez considered that he’d done his duty in giving Mukerji a chance to win his money back, and left the game. Mukerji protested, but Cassilda and Pa were happy with their winnings and left the game as well.

“I’m glad he doesn’t have any financial control in the Chee Company,” Martinez told Terza later, when he was abed. “Not if he runs a business the same way he gambles.”

“I’m sure he has no idea whatever of how to run a business,” Terza said as she approached the bed. “That’s what Marcella’s for.” She wore a blue silk nightgown, had bound her long black hair with matching blue ribbon into a long tail that she wore over one shoulder. The look gave her a pleasing asymmetry. Martinez reached out one of his big hands and stroked her hip with the back of his knuckles.

Their marriage had been arranged by their families, one of Roland’s more elaborate and insistent conspiracies. Martinez felt free to resent Roland’s interference, but he had decided long ago not to resent Terza.

“What about Ledo Allodorm?” he asked.

Terza’s almond eyes widened faintly. “You noticed?” she asked.

“I saw you react to the name. I doubt the others know you well enough to have seen what I did.”

“Move over. I’ll tell you what I know.”

Martinez made room on the bed. Terza slipped beneath the covers and curled on her side facing Martinez. Her scent floated delicately through his perceptions.

“I found out about Allodorm when I was asked to review some old contracts left over from the war,” she said. The Ministry of Right and Dominion, where she was posted, was the civilian agency that encompassed the Fleet, and dealt with issues of contracts, supply, Fleet facilities, budgets, and support.

“Allodorm is a Daimong from Devajjo, in the Hone Reach,” she continued. “During the war he received a contract to build four— or was it five?— transport vessels for the Fleet. The war ended before he could deliver the ships, and the contract was canceled.”

“So what did he do?” Martinez asked. “Convert the transports to civilian purposes? That would be allowed, wouldn’t it, if the government didn’t want them anymore?”

Terza frowned. “There was an allegation that he never built the ships at all.”

Martinez blinked. “He took the money and did nothing?”

“Other than commission some architects, print some stationary, and recruit some staff and some high-priced legal talent, no.” She looked thoughtful. “It was possible to make a calculation that the war would be over before he had to deliver. If we won, the contracts would be canceled; and if the Naxids won, they wouldn’t care if he’d started work or not.”

“Didn’t the Investigative Service climb all over Allodorm’s operation? Couldn’t the ministry at least have asked for its money back?”

Terza offered a mild shrug. “After the war the IS was involved in purging rebels and their sympathizers, and didn’t spare a thought for the people who were supposed to be on our side. When the file finally came across my desk I recommended an investigation, but the ministry decided against it. I don’t know why; it’s possible that Allodorm is politically protected.”

“So now Allodorm is on Chee, and Marcella and Lord Pa are traveling to consult with him.”

“Maybe he’s a sub-contractor.”

“That doesn’t speak well for the prospect of the Chee Company’s balance sheet.”

“The Chee Company may be all right,” Terza pointed out. “It’s Lord Pa and the Meridian Company that’s the prime contractor. If anyone’s being gouged, it’s probably them.”

“Either way, it’s my family’s money.” He shifted closer to Terza’s warmth and she rested her head on his shoulder and put an arm across his chest. “Our balance sheet has improved anyway. What shall we do with Mukerji’s cash?”

He could sense her amusement. “Buy something preposterous, I suppose. You’ve always talked about taking up yachting.”

Martinez felt a twinge of annoyance. “They wouldn’t let me into the Seven Stars or the Ion Club,” he said. “A provincial can’t past their august doors, no matter how many medals he’s won.” He kissed Terza’s forehead. “Or how many high-placed ministry officials he’s married.”

“So join a lesser club,” Terza said, “and beat the pants off the Seven Stars in every match.”

Martinez grinned at the ceiling. “That’s not a half-bad idea,” he said.

He felt Terza’s warm breath on his neck as she spoke. “Is this the room you lived in as a child?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Same furniture, too, but the model Fleet ships that I hung from the ceiling are gone. And so are the uniform guides to the various academies that I’d tacked up on the walls.”

Her low chuckle came to his ear. “So joining the Fleet was your idea, I take it.”

“Oh yes. I had a lot of romantic ideas— must have got those from my mother. And my father didn’t mind, because in the Fleet at least I’d learn some useful skills.”

He remembered, before the war, when speaking with— with a certain person, a woman he preferred not ever to think about, a woman with pale hair and milky skin and blazing green eyes— he’d expressed his frustration at being in a meaningless service, a club not unlike the Seven Stars but less useful, a club devoted to ritual and display and serving the limitless vanity of its commanders.

The war had changed that, at least for a while.

What hadn’t changed, apparently, were the politically-connected contractors who gouged the government while delivering shoddy, late, or nonexistent work.

That, he supposed, was the government’s business. What concerned Martinez was that if Allodorm were stealing money now, he was no longer stealing it just from the government, but the Martinez family.

In which case, it had to stop.

Terza pressed closer to Martinez on the bed. She kissed his cheek. “I wonder,” she said, “if when you were a boy in this bed, you ever imagined— “

Martinez sat up, displacing Terza’s head and arm. “Comm,” he said. “Wall display: on.”

The chameleon-weave fabric of the display normally matched the geometric pattern of the wallpaper, but now it brightened into a video screen displaying the Martinez crest. “Comm: search,” Martinez said. “Ledo plus Allodorm plus Meridian plus Company. Begin.”

In a half-second data flashed on the screen. Martinez chose the first listing, and saw a page from the Meridian Company’s official prospectus of the Chee development. He absorbed the information.

“Allodorm’s chief engineer for the Meridian Company,” he said. “He’s in charge of all their projects on Chee. All of them.”

He turned to Terza and saw her pensive expression. “Something wrong?” he said.

A serene smile crossed her face, the one he knew for its falsity.

“Nothing at all,” she said.

*

“Daddy says I’m a genius. Daddy says I’m going to do great things.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Severin.

“I’m going to smash Naxids.” The dark-haired child raised a hand over his head. In his fist was a toy warship. He flung it on the polished asteroid material of the verandah. “Bang!”

“Good shot,” Severin observed.

He’d grown with a pair of younger sisters, and knew how to keep a young child entertained. Lord Gareth Chen— who bore his father’s first name but the surname of his mother, who was the Chen heir and ranked higher— picked up the warship and flung it again. Wet explosive sounds came from his pursed lips.

“But what if the Naxids come from this direction?” Severin asked, and leaned out of his metal whitewashed chair to threaten the boy’s flank.

“Bang!”

“Or from here?” The other flank.

“Bang!”

“Or here?” Overhead.

“Bang!”

Lord Gareth the Younger was at a stage of life where this could go on for quite a while before he got bored. Having nothing better to do, Severin was content to continue the game, though his thoughts were elsewhere.

He had awakened that morning with a dream clinging to his memory like a shroud. In the dream he had been driving up the oak alley toward the house, beneath the series of iron arches, and somehow one of the arches had transformed itself into a proscenium, and he’d stepped through the proscenium onto a stage that was the house.

The house had been covered with lights, and a party had been under way. The guests glittered in fine clothes and uniforms. Severin knew none of them. Their conversation was strangely oblique, and Severin kept feeling that he could understand them if only he listened a little harder. At some point he discovered that they were not people at all, but automata, smiling and glimmering as they spoke words that had been pre-programmed by someone else.

In the dream Severin hadn’t found this discovery horrifying, but intensely interesting. He wandered through the party listening to the conversation and admiring the brilliance of the puppets’ design.

When he woke he was still under the spell of the dream. He breakfasted alone on the terrace— apparently his hosts were not yet awake— and he found himself thinking about the strange conversations that he’d heard, and trying to work out the obscure story behind them.

He thought about going back to bed and hoping to pick the dream up where it had left off, but at this point Gareth Junior arrived, and the battle with the Naxids began.

He was rescued in time by Martinez, who came out of the house and lunged at his son, scooping him up in both arms and whirling him overhead as the child shrilled his laughter.

Following Martinez from the house came his older brother Roland, who carried a cup of coffee in one hand. Both wore civilian clothes, which made Severin more conscious than usual of his shabby uniform.

“I suppose it won’t be long before I’m behaving like that,” Roland said as he watched Martinez twirling his son.

“I suppose it won’t,” Severin said.

Roland sipped coffee. Martinez tucked his son under one arm and turned to Severin. “Has the boy prodigy been bothering you?”

“He’s been mashing Naxids, mostly.”

Martinez grinned. “Exercising tactical genius, eh? Just like his father!” Young Gareth still under his arm, Martinez sprinted into the house as the child waved his fists and laughed aloud.

“Perhaps I won’t behave like that, after all,” Roland decided.

Martinez returned a few moments later, having delivered his offspring to the nursemaid. He combed his disordered hair with his fingers and dropped into the whitewashed metal chair next to Severin.

“I saw you dancing last night,” he said. “With a curly-haired girl.”

“Lady Consuelo Dalmas,” Severin said.

“Consuelo.” Martinez blinked. “I thought she looked familiar. I used to see her older sister, when we were all, ah, much younger.”

“She’s invited me to a garden party tomorrow afternoon.”

Martinez smiled. “Have a good time.”

“I will.” He considered offering a resigned sort of sigh and decided against it. “Of course,” he added, “sooner or later either she or her parents will discover that I’m not a Peer, and have no money, and then I won’t see her again.” Severin clasped his hands between his knees. “But then I’m used to that.”

Martinez gave him an unsettled look. “You’re not regretting your promotion, I hope.”

“No.” Severin considered. “But it’s made me aware of how many locked doors there are, doors that I once had no idea even existed.”

“If there’s anything I can do to open them . . . “ Martinez ventured.

“Thank you. I’m not certain there’s anything that can be done.”

“Unless we have another war,” Roland said. “Then all bets are off.”

Smiling lightly to himself, Roland walked to the verandah rail and looked out into the oak alley, raising his head at the honeyed scent of the o-pii flowers floating on the morning breeze. “Consuelo’s not right for you anyway, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he said. “Too young, too much a part of the fashionable set. What you need is a comely widow, or a young woman married to a dull old husband.”

Martinez looked at him. “You don’t have anyone in mind, do you?”

“Let me put my mind to it.”

Martinez gave Severin an uneasy look. “Better make your wishes plain. Roland has disturbing success as a matchmaker.”

There was something in the air, Severin felt, some history between the brothers that made this an uncomfortable moment.

“I’m only here for a month,” Severin said.

“Narrow window of opportunity,” Roland said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Martinez looked at Roland. “Apropos conspiracy,” he said, “do you know anything about Allodorm, Meridian Company’s chief engineer?”

“I’ve met him on Chee Station,” Severin said. “Though I haven’t conspired with him.”

“I haven’t met him at all,” Roland said. He turned around, eyes mild as he contemplated his brother. “I appreciate your confidence in my omniscience, but what I really do is look after family interests in the Convocation. I’m not really connected to the Chee development business.”

“Terza thinks that Allodorm’s a swindler,” Martinez said. “And if she’s right, he’s in a perfect place to walk off with a lot of our money.”

Roland absorbed this with a distracted frown. “What does Terza know, exactly?”

“During the war, he took the money to build five ships and then didn’t build them.”

Severin felt a moment of shock. As an officer in government service he was familiar enough with waste and theft, but five whole missing ships seemed extreme.

There was a moment of silence, and then Roland turned to Severin.

“I’d appreciate your discretion,” he said.

“Certainly,” Severin said.

“There may not be anything in this,” Roland said.

“Of course,” Severin said.

He found himself fascinated by the interactions in this household, the delicate play between the decorated Fleet officer and his politician brother. Since his promotion he’d had the opportunity to observe several Peer families, and none had been quite like this one.

“I wish I knew who hired Allodorm,” Martinez said pensively.

“Lord Pa, presumably,” Roland said. “The question is whether Lord Pa know about the Fleet ships, or cared if he did.” He pulled another of the metal chairs toward Severin and sat. “Would you tell us about this Allodorm?”

Severin shrugged. “He’s a Daimong. Youngish, I think, though with Daimong it’s hard to tell. When Surveyor first docked at Chee Station, he was on hand to make sure we got everything we needed. I thought that was very good of him.”

“Were you treated well?” Roland asked.

“Yes. Since I’m the exec, the lord captain assigned me to work with Allodorm, and it was first-class all the way. Supplies came aboard within hours of submitting our requests. The victuals were fresh. Allodorm put one of the worker hostels at Port Vipsania at the disposal of our liberty crew, and he hosted a dinner for the officers.”

“Nothing odd?” Martinez asked. “Nothing a little off-center in the way the station’s run?”

“Other than it being first-class, no,” Severin said. “In the Exploration Service we’re used to things being more worn and shabby— it’s not like we’ve got the Fleet’s prestige or budget— but everything on Chee Station was new and shiny and efficient. The facilities were bigger than they needed, but then there are plans to expand.”

The brothers contemplated this. “I don’t suppose we should tell our father.”

“What would we tell him? We’ve got dozens of inspectors on Chee anyway— what can he do that they can’t?”

Martinez gave a little shrug. “Not get bribed?” he said.

“Father’s supposed to open the meeting of the Petitioners’ Council in something like fifteen days.” Roland gave a tight little smile. “If he abandons his task and goes charging off to Chee on the Ensenada to expose the wicked, that’s all the warning Allodorm or anyone else is going to need. Everything would be tidied up by the time he gets there.”

“And you?”

“I’m not going anywhere until Cassilda has our baby, after which the whole family will leave for Zanshaa so that I can sit in Convocation.”

Martinez sighed. “I’m the Lord Inspector, aren’t I? I suppose it’s up to me to inspect.”

Severin thought again about the two brothers. They knew each other well, they worked together deftly, they had a shared history and vocabulary. It occurred to Severin, however, that perhaps they didn’t like each other.

“Lady Liao,” Roland said suddenly.

Martinez looked at him. “Beg pardon?”

Roland turned to Severin. “Lady Liao, wife of Lord Judge Omohundro. She’s perfect for you. Her husband’s on the ring tied up in a long series of hearings, and I’m sure she’s looking for amusement.”

Severin could do nothing but stare. Can you do that? he wanted to ask.

Roland looked at him. “Shall I invite her to tea?” he said.

*

“We are holding at five minutes,” said Lord Go Shikimori, captain of the Surveyor.

“Holding at five minutes, my lord,” said Severin.

Surveyor awaited final permission from Ring Control to launch on its mission through Chee and Parkhurst to the possible wormholes beyond. Encircled by the round metal hoops of his acceleration cage, Severin glanced down at the pilot’s board before him— it was he who would steer Surveyor from the ring and into the great emptiness beyond. Not that the job was particularly difficult.

The lights of the pilot’s board glittered on the ring Severin wore on the middle finger of his right hand. Nine small sapphires sparkled around a central opal. The ring had been a parting gift from Lady Liao, one sapphire for each night she and Severin had spent together.

For a moment he was lost in reverie, memories of smooth cool sheets, silken flesh, Lady Liao’s subtle scent. Wind chimes that saluted the dawn on the balcony outside her room.

Lord Roland Martinez, he thought, was very, very intelligent.

“Message from Ring Control, my lord,” reported Lord Barry Montcrief, who sat at the comm board— he had the drawling High City accent that Lord Go preferred as the official voice of his ship. “Permission granted to depart the station en route to Chee system.”

“Resume countdown,” the captain said.

“Countdown resumed,” said Warrant Officer Lily Bhagwati, who sat at the engines station.

“Depressurize boarding tube. Warn crew for zero gravity.”

“Depressurizing boarding tube.” Alarms clattered through the ship. “Zero gravity alarm, my lord.”

Severin checked his board, took the joysticks in his hands, rotated them. “Maneuvering thrusters gimbaled,” he said. “Pressure at thruster heads nominal.”

“Boarding tube depressurized.”

“Withdraw boarding tube,” said the captain.

“Boarding tube . . . ” Waiting for the light to go on. “ . . . withdrawn, my lord.”

“Electrical connections withdrawn,” said Bhagwati. “Outside connectors sealed. Ships is on one hundred percent internal power.”

“Data connectors withdrawn,” said Lord Barry. “Outside data ports sealed.”

“Main engines gimbaled,” said Bhagwati. “Gimbal test successful.”

“Hold at ten seconds,” said the captain. “Status, everyone.”

All stations reported clean boards.

“Launch in ten,” Lord Go said. “Pilot, the ship is yours.”

“The ship is mine, my lord.” Severin released and clenched his hands on the joysticks.

The digit counter in the corner of his display counted down to zero. Lights flashed. “Clamps withdrawn,” Severin said. “Magnetic grapples released.”

Severin suddenly floated free in his webbing as Surveyor was cast free of Laredo’s accelerator ring. Surveyor had been moored nose-in, and the release of centripetal force from the upper ring, which was spinning at seven times the rate of the planet below, gave the ship a good rate of speed that carried it clear of any potential obstacles.

Severin checked the navigation display anyway, and saw no threats. He thumbed buttons on his joysticks and engaged the maneuvering thrusters. An increase in gravity snugged him against his chest harness. He fired the thrusters several more times to increase the rate at which Surveyor was withdrawing from the ring.

It was very illegal to fire Surveyor’s main antimatter engines, with their radioactive plumes, anywhere near the inhabited ring. Severin needed to push the ship past the safety zone before Surveyor could really begin its journey.

Again Severin checked the navigation displays. He could see the Chee Company yacht Kayenta outbound for Wormhole Station Two, carrying Martinez and Lady Terza to the newly opened planet. Surveyor would follow in their wake, fourteen days behind. A chain of cargo vessels were inbound from Station One, many of them carrying equipment or settlers for Chee, all of them standing on huge pillars of fire as they decelerated to their rendezvous with the ring. The closest was still seven hours away.

The only obstacle of note was the giant bulk of the Titan, which orbited Laredo at a considerable distance for reasons of safety. Titan was full of antimatter destined for Chee and Parkhurst, and even though the antimatter was remarkably stable— flakes of antihydrogen suspended by static electricity inside incredibly small etched silicon shells, all so tiny they flowed like a thick fluid— nevertheless, if things went wrong the explosion would vaporize a chunk of Laredo’s ring and bring the rest down on the planet below.

It would be a good thing for Surveyor to stay well clear of Titan.

Severin looked at the point of light on the display that represented Titan and wondered about the conversation he’d had with Martinez and his brother, the one where Allodorm’s name had first been raised. Titan was a Meridian Company ship leased long-term by the Exploration Service. The growing settlements on Chee required antimatter to generate power, and as yet had no accelerator ring. Cree Station, with its skyhook that ran cargo to the surface, required power as well.

The wormhole stations at both Chee and Parkhurst, with their colossal mass drivers that kept the wormholes stable, required an enormous output of power.

Since Chee could not as yet generate its own antimatter, it had been decided to ramp up antihydrogen production on Laredo’s ring, fill Titan with the results, and move the whole ship to a distant parking orbit around the newly-settled planet, on the far side of Chee’s largest moon so that even if the unthinkable happened and Titan blew, none of the energetic neutrons and furious gamma rays would reach Chee’s population. When one of Chee’s installations needed antihydrogen, they’d send a shuttle to Titan and collect some. By the time Titan had been depleted, an accelerator ring— a small one, not the vast technological wonder that circled all of Laredo— would have been built in Chee orbit.

Severin wondered if it truly made economic sense to use Titan that way, or whether it was a complex scheme to fill Allodorm’s coffers.

Surveyor finally reached the limit of Laredo’s safety zone, and Severin rotated the ship onto a new heading, his couch sliding lightly within the rings of his acceleration cage.

“We are on our new heading, my lord,” Severin said. “Two-two-zero by zero-zero-one absolute. Mission plan is in the guidance computer.”

“I am in command,” Lord Go called.

“The lord captain is in command,” Severin agreed. He took his hands off the joysticks.

“Engines, fire engines,” the captain said. “Accelerate at two point three gravities.”

Severin felt a kick to his spine and his acceleration couch swung within its cage as the gravities began piling on his chest..

“Accelerating at two point three gravities,” Bhagwati said. “Course two-two-zero by zero-zero-one absolute.”

They would accelerate hard until they’d achieved escape velocity from Laredo, then slacken for most of the journey to a single gravity, going to harder accelerations for an hour out of each watch.

Severin looked at the displays and saw Kayenta again, outbound and approaching the wormhole that would take it to Chee. It was a pity that Surveyor wouldn’t travel to Chee, but merely pass through the system on its way to Parkhurst and the possible new wormholes. A pity not only because Severin wouldn’t see Martinez and Terza again, but because he’d probably never find out how the Allodorm thing worked out.

He’d just have to find something else to amuse him for the next few months, and he thought he knew what it was.

He’d been unable to entirely forget the dream he’d had at Rio Hondo, and he’d loaded his personal data foil with articles on puppets, puppeteers, marionettes, automata, shadow puppets, and recordings of performances.

People on long voyages found many ways to occupy their hours. Some gambled, some drank, some drew into themselves. Some concentrated obsessively on their work. Some watched recorded entertainments, some had affairs with other crew members, some played musical instruments. Some worked as hard as they could at making everyone else on the ship miserable.

Perhaps, Severin thought, he would be the first to plan a puppet theater.

Certainly it was a field that seemed to have a lot of room to expand.

*

“Are you all on virtual?” asked the astronomer Shon-dan. “I’m transmitting the outside cameras on Channel Seventeen.”

“Comm: Channel Seventeen.” Terza’s soft voice came to Martinez’ ears from the nearest acceleration couch.

Martinez was already on the correct channel, his head filled with the stars as viewed from the Kayenta as it passed the final moments of its twenty-day acceleration out of the Laredo system. The virtual cap he wore to project the image onto his visual centers was lighter than the Fleet issue, which required earphones and microphone pickups, and he sensed other differences as well: the depth of field was subtly different, a bit flatter, perhaps because the civilian rig required less precision.

The stars were thrown like a great wash of diamonds across the midnight backdrop, silent and steady and grand. They were the home stars under which Martinez had spent the first half of his life, and his mind naturally sought the familiar, comforting constellations in their well-known places. Laredo’s own star, this far out, was hardly brighter than other bright stars. The software had been instructed to blot out Kayenta’s brilliant tail so as to avoid losing the stars by contrast, and the result was a flickering, disturbing negative blot occupying one part of the display, a void of absolute darkness that seemed to pursue the ship.

Martinez and Terza were in Kayenta’s main lounge, the softly-scented center of the yacht’s social life. Shon-dan, an astronomer from the Imperial University of Zarafan who had come aboard as Marcella’s guest, was about to show the reason why an astronomical observatory had been placed on Chee Station, and why she had spent months journeying here.

“Ten seconds,” Shon-dan said. “Eight. Five.”

Kayenta was traveling too fast for Martinez to see the wormhole station as the ship flashed past, or the wormhole itself, the inverted bowl-of-stars that was their destination. The transition itself was instantaneous, and the star field changed at the same instant.

A vast, lush globe of stars suddenly blazed across Martinez’ perceptions, occupying at least a third of the sky, the stars so packed together they seemed nearly as dense as glittering grains of sand stretched along an ocean shore. Martinez felt himself take an involuntary breath, and he heard Terza’s gasp. The closer Martinez looked, the more stars he saw. There seemed to be vague clouds and structures within the globe, each made up of more and more brilliants, but Martinez couldn’t tell whether the clouds actually existed or were the results of his own mind trying to create order in this vast, burning randomness, seeking the familiar just as it had sought out constellations in Laredo’s sky.

Gazing into the vast star-globe was like drifting deeper and deeper into a endless sea, past complex, ill-defined shoals that on closer inspection were made up of millions of coral structures, while the structures themselves, looked at with greater care, were found to be composed of tiny limestone shells, and the shells themselves, on examination, each held tiny specks of life, a kind of infinite regression that baffled the senses.

“Now you see why we’ve built the observatory.” Shon-dan’s voice, floating into Martinez’ perceptions, was quietly triumphant. “Of all the wormholes in the empire, this one leads to a system that’s closest to the center of a galaxy. This is our best chance to observe how a galactic core is structured. From here we can directly observe the effects on nearby stars of the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center.”

With an effort of will Martinez shifted his attention away from the glowing globe to the rest of the starry envelope that surrounded Kayenta. By comparison with Laredo the entire sky was packed with stars, with an opalescent strip that marked the galaxy’s disk spiraling out into endless space. The Chee system was actually within the galactic core, though on its periphery, and stars on all sides were near and burning bright. Chee’s own star, Cheemah, shone with a warm yellow light, but other nearby stars equaled its fire.

“The stars here are very dense,” Shon-dan said, “though not as dense as they are further in. The Chee system has seven stars— or maybe eight, we’re not sure— and the orbits are very complex.”

“Do we actually know which galaxy we’re in?” Terza asked.

“No. We’re scanning for Cepheids and other yardsticks that might give us an indication, but so far we haven’t found enough to make certain of anything. We could be anywhere in the universe, of course, and anywhere within a billion years of where we started.”

Martinez heard footfalls enter the room, then the voice of Lord Pa. “Looking at the stars?” he said. “You’ll get tired of them soon enough. Between the galactic core and the other six stars in Chee’s system, there’s no true night on the planet, and we’ve had to install polarizing windows on all our workers’ dormitories just so our people can get some rest. I’ve just stopped looking at the sky— galactic centers are nasty violent places, and the less we have to do with them, the better.”

“Stars are packed pretty closely here, true enough, my lord.” Shon-dan’s deference to a wealthy Peer did not quite disguise her disagreement. Clearly she was not about to tire of gazing at this sky anytime soon.

“I’m going to sit and play a game of cinhal,” Lord Pa said. “Don’t let me disturb you.”

Martinez returned his attention to the great, glowing galactic core while he heard Lord Pa shuffle to a table, then give it the muted commands to set up a game.

“So far you’re only seeing the light in its visible spectrum,” Shon-dan said. “I’m going to add some other spectra in a moment. There will be some false colors. I’ll try to fix those later.” Martinez heard the Lai-own give a few muted commands, and then the galactic core shifted from a pearly color to a muted amber, and the great sphere was suddenly pierced through by an enormous lance of light, shimmering and alive, a giant pillar that seemed to stretched from the foundations of the universe to its uttermost heaven.

Martinez gave an involuntary cry, and he heard Terza’s echo.

“Yes.” Triumph had again entered Shon-dan’s voice. “That’s the beam of relativistic particles generated by the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. If you look closely, you’ll see it has fine structure— we didn’t expect that, and we’re working on theories of the phenomenon, but so far we don’t have an explanation.”

In his virtual display Martinez coasted closer to the great burning pillar of energy, and he saw the pillar pulse with light, saw strands of opalescent color weave and shift as they were caught in some vast incomprehensible flow of power, a hypnotic dance of colossal force.

For the next hour Shon-dan showed Martinez and Terza features within the galactic core, including the four giant stars now in a swift death spiral around the central black hole. “The black hole is feeding now,” he said. “Sometimes the supermassive black holes are actively involved in devouring neighboring stars and sometimes they aren’t. We don’t know why or how they shift from one state to another.”

“Nasty, as I said,” said Lord Pa, from somewhere outside the universe that occupied Martinez’ head. “I have to say that I prefer nature a good deal less chaotic and destructive. I like games with rules. I like comfortable chairs, compound interest, and a guaranteed annual profit. I prefer not to think of some cosmic accident readying itself to jump out of hiding and suck all my comforts right out of the universe.”

“We’re perfectly safe from the black hole, my lord,” Shon-dan said. “We’re nowhere near the danger zone.”

Martinez quietly turned off the virtual display to take a look at Lord Pa. He sat in a Lai-own chair that cradled his breastbone, and was bent over the room’s game board. The light from the display shone up on his face, on the short muzzle and deep red eyes.

Behind Pa the yellow chesz wood panels, inset with red enjo in abstract designs, glowed in the recessed lights of the lounge. A heavy crystal goblet sat near one hand, filled with Lai-own protein broth.

Comforts, Martinez thought. Guaranteed profit. Right.

“Perhaps we should break for now,” Shon-dan said. He had noticed Martinez leaving the virtual display.

“Thank you,” Terza said. “That was breathtaking. I hope we can do it again.”

“I’d be delighted,” Shon-dan said, rising. She was a Lai-own, with golden eyes, and wore a formal academic uniform of dark brown with several medals of scholastic distinction. She was young for all her honors, and the feathery side-hairs on her head were still a youthful brown.

“We have another twenty-three days to Chee,” she said, “and the stars will be there the entire time.”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” Martinez said.

He rose from his couch and walked to the bar, where he poured himself a brandy. He idled toward Lord Pa, who was still bent over his game. Martinez scanned the board, spotted at once the move that Lord Pa should make, and began to point it out before he decided not to.

On the twentieth day of the voyage, Kayenta’s passengers were beginning to get on each other’s nerves a little.

The first part of the trip had been as pleasant and social as possible, given that Martinez suspected one of the party of stealing from his family. Marcella, Lord Pa, Martinez, Terza, and Shon-dan had dined together each day. Tingo and other games had been suggested, but interest in gambling waned after it became clear that Terza and Martinez weren’t attracted to high play, and that Shon-dan’s academic salary didn’t allow her to play even for what passed for small change amid Peers.

The conversation during and after meals had ranged far and wide, though Terza had cautioned Martinez about raising the kind of questions he burned to ask, detailed questions about the financial arrangements between the Cree and Meridian companies. “It will sound like an interrogation,” she said.

Martinez confined himself to a few mild queries per day, beginning with broad questions about the progress of the Chee settlements, then going into more detail as the conversation developed. Marcella and Pa seemed pleased enough to talk about their work, and Martinez found himself genuinely interested in the technical details; though Martinez made a point of breaking off when he saw a slight frown on Terza’s face, or felt the soft touch of her hand on his thigh.

Shon-dan talked about astronomical subjects. Martinez told his war stories. Terza avoided the subject of her work at the Ministry, but spoke of High City society, and brought out her harp and played a number of sonatas.

But now, by the twentieth day, the conversations had grown a little listless. Marcella spent much time in her cabin, working on Cree Company business, smoking endless cigarettes, and playing spiky, nerve-jabbing music that rattled her cabin door in its frame. Lord Pa received and sent detailed memoranda to his crews on Cree, and otherwise spent a lot of time puzzling over his game board.

Martinez sent frequent videos to his son— the three months aboard Wi-hun with a small and lively child had been challenging enough for all concerned, so Young Gareth had been left on Laredo with his nursemaid and his doting grandparents. The videos that Martinez received in return were full of excitement, for Lord Martinez had introduced his grandson to his collection of vintage automobiles, and had been roaring around on his private track with Young Gareth as a passenger.

“Gareth’s favorite is the Lodi Turbine Express,” Martinez told Terza. “At his age I liked that one myself, though I liked the Scarlet Messenger better.” And then, at her look, said, “My father hasn’t had an accident yet, you know.”

“I’ll try to be reassured,” Terza said. She had just come from her dressing room, where she’d prepared for bed: her black hair had been brushed till it glowed and then tied with ribbon, and her face was scrubbed of cosmetic and softly sheened with health. Over her nightgown she wore a bed jacket that crackled with gold brocade.

After Shon-dan’s astronomical exhibition they’d retired to their suite, glossy light behl wood paneling veined in blood-red, a video screen in a lacy Rakthan frame, a bathtub hacked out of a single block of chocolate-brown marble and which— to avoid gooseflesh on entering— was warmed by hidden heating elements of a vaguely sonic nature.

“My father could have worse hobbies,” Martinez pointed out. “Racing pai-car chariots, say.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll try to keep that in mind, too.”

Twenty days on the small vessel had, perhaps, begun to unravel slightly the serenity that Terza carried with her, the unearthly tranquility that Martinez had come to admire as her greatest accomplishment. He rose from his chair and stood behind her, his big hands working through the crisp silk of her jacket to loosen her shoulder muscles. She sighed and relaxed against him.

“You miss Gareth, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes. Of course.”

“So do I.”

They had not spent so much time apart from the boy since he had been born.

“This has got to be dull for you,” Martinez said. “Maybe we should have left you on Laredo.”

“Dull?” Her tone was amused. “Reviewing contracts in hopes of discovering hidden felonies? Surely not.”

He smiled. “Won’t it be exciting if you actually find one?”

“But I won’t find one. Not in the contracts. Lawyers have been all over the contracts to make sure no hint of impropriety will be found. If there’s anything to be found, it will be in interpretation and practice.”

He hadn’t been able to obtain any of the contracts that the Cree Company had signed with their prime contractor— neither he nor Terza nor Roland were officers of the company. But in his capacity as Lord Inspector he’d acquired the entire file of the dealings the Meridian Company had with the Fleet, for building Fleet installations on Cree and in Cree orbit. But Martinez hadn’t enough experience to understand the contracts particularly well, and so Terza had been pressed into the job.

“Escalator clauses are always suspect, and the contracts have plenty of them,” Terza said. “On a big job there are always a thousand places to hide illegitimate expenses, and this job is literally as big as a planet. Meridian is allowed to revise the estimates if unexpected conditions cause their own costs to rise, and there are always unexpected conditions. A little to the right, please.”

Martinez obliged. “Surely they can’t jack up their expenses forever,” he said.

“No. In the case of the Fleet contracts, the local Fleet representative has to agree that the rises are justified.”

“According to the records she almost always did,” Martinez said. “And now she’s received her captaincy and has been posted to the Fourth Fleet, so I won’t be able to ask her any questions.”

Amusement returned to Terza’s voice. “I’m sure that if you saw her, she would of course immediately inform you of any unjustified cost overrides that she’d personally approved. I think you’re better off with the new commander. He won’t be obliged to defend his predecessor’s expenses.” She stretched, raising her arms over her head, torquing her spine left and right. Martinez could feel the muscles flex beneath his fingertips.

He left off his massage as she bent forward, flexing her spine again, pressing her palms to the deep pile carpet. She straightened, sighed, turned to face him.

“Thank you,” she said. She put her arms around him, pillowed her head on his chest. “This could still be a pleasant vacation, you know.”

I’ve been on vacation for three years, he wanted to say. Digging around in old Fleet construction contracts was the most useful thing he’d done in ages.

But he knew what Terza meant. “I’ll try to remember to look at the stars now and again,” he said.

Her arms tightened around him. “I had thought we might make good use of the time.”

Martinez smiled. “I have no objection.”

Terza drew her head back, her dark eyes raised to his. “That’s not entirely what I meant,” she said. “I thought we might give Gareth a brother or sister.”

A rush of sensation took his breath away. Martinez’ marriage had been arranged, not an uncommon phenomenon among Peers— and in Martinez’ case, Roland had arranged the marriage with a crowbar. For all that Martinez had genuinely wanted a child, Young Gareth had been arranged as well. Martinez knew perfectly well that Terza had been lowering herself to marry him— Lord Chen required significant financial help from the Martinez clan at the time— and Martinez had always wondered just what Terza had thought of the long-armed provincial officer she’d been constrained, on only a few hours’ acquaintance, to marry.

Wondered, but never asked. He never asked questions when he knew the answers might draw him into sadness.

He had watched with increasing pleasure as Terza floated into his life, supported by that quality of serenity that was, perhaps, just a bit too eerily perfect. He had never been completely certain what might happen if Lord Chen, his finances recovered, ordered his daughter to divorce. It was always possible that she would leave her marriage with the same unearthly tranquility with which she’d entered it. He had never known precisely what was going on behind that composed, lovely face.

Until now. A second child was not part of the contract between their families.

He and Terza were writing their own codicil to the contract, right now.

“Of course,” Martinez said, when he got his breath back. “Absolutely. At once, if possible.”

She smiled. “At once isn’t quite an option,” she said. “I’ll have to get the implant removed first. Kayenta’s doctor can do it, or we can wait till we get to Chee.” She kissed his cheek. “Though I’d hate to waste the next twenty-three days.”

Kayenta’s doctor was a sour, elderly Lai-own who had scarcely been seen since the beginning of the journey, when he gave the obligatory lecture about weightlessness, acceleration, and space-sickness. Whatever the quirks of his personality, however, he was presumably competent at basic procedures for interspecies medicine.

“I think you should see the old fellow first thing tomorrow,” Martinez said. “But that doesn’t mean we should waste tonight.”

Her look was direct. “I hadn’t intended to,” she said.

Hours later, before the forenoon watch, Martinez woke from sleep with a start, with a cry frozen on his lips. Terza, her perfect tranquility maintained, slept on, her head pillowed on his chest.

He hadn’t had one of these dreams in at least two months. For a moment, blinking in the darkness of Kayenta’s guest suite, he had seen not Terza’s black hair spread on his chest, but hair of white gold, framing a pale face with blazing emerald eyes.

His heart thundered in his chest. Martinez could hear his own breath rasping in his throat.

There were several reasons why he hadn’t asked what Terza thought of their marriage.

He had his own secrets. It seemed only fair that he allow Terza to keep hers.

*

The cable of the elevator descended from geostationary orbit, a line that disappeared into the deep green of the planet’s equator like a fishing line fading into the sea. On the approach, what Martinez could see of the elevator itself was a pale grey tower of shaped asteroid and lunar material, the massive counterweight to the cable. The tower terminated in a series of sculpted peaks that looked like battlements, but which were actually a kind of jigsaw mechanism to lock additional weights into place should they be needed.

Ships docked at the elevator terminus at the base of the tower, in zero gravity. Passengers then traveled down a weightless tube to the hub of the residential and commercial areas of the station, where they could shift laterally to either one of two fat rotating wheels of white laminate that contained living quarters for workers, Fleet personnel, Shon-dan’s astronomers, and anyone in transit from Chee to anywhere else.

Martinez thanked Marcella and Lord Pa for the ride on Kayenta. He made a point of offering his thanks before they all left the ship, since he knew that once he transferred to the station, the awesome role of Lord Inspector would descend on him, and a long series of rigid protocols would take place.

Which in fact they did. As soon as Martinez floated out of the docking tube, one white-gloved hand on the guide rope that had been strung from the tube into the bay, he heard the bellow of petty officers calling the honor guard to attention, and the public address system boomed out “Our Thoughts Are Ever Guided by the Praxis,” one of the Fleet’s snappier marching tunes.

The honor guard were all Lai-own Military Constabulary in full dress, with the toes of their shoes tucked under an elastic strap that had been stretched along the deck to keep everyone properly lined up in zero gravity. Standing before them, braced at the salute, was Lieutenant-Captain Lord Ehl Tir-bal, who commanded the station, and his staff.

Lord Ehl was young, and short for a Lai-own— he and Martinez could almost look level into one another’s eyes. Lord Ehl introduced his staff, and then turned to the cadaverous civilian who stood behind the party of officers.

“My lord,” he said, “may I introduce Meridian Company’s chief engineer, Mister Ledo Allodorm.”

“Mister Allodorm,” Martinez said, and nodded.

“An honor to meet you, my lord.” Allodorm’s face, like those of all Daimong, was permanently fixed in the round-eyed, open-mouthed stare that a Terran could read either as surprise or terror or existential anguish. His voice was a lovely tenor that sounded like a pair of trumpets playing in soft harmony, and Martinez could see his soft mouth parts working behind the grey, fixed bony lips as he spoke.

Martinez performed a ritual inspection of the honor guard, after which Martinez, Terza, their servants and their baggage were loaded into a long, narrow viridian-green vehicle that would carry them to their lodging. Lord Ehl and Allodorm both joined them, and Ehl pointed out the features of the station as, on little puffs of air, the vehicle rose and began its journey down the docking bay.

The post of Chee’s station commander was Lord Ehl’s first major assignment, and his delight in his new command showed. He pointed out the features of the station, which was fresh and glossy and, to Martinez’ mind, rather overdesigned. Every feature, from the cargo loaders to the computer-operated ductwork on the air vents, was of the largest, brightest, most efficient type available.

“The air purifying and circulation systems are custom designed,” Ehl said. “So is the power plant.”

“We didn’t just take a thousand-year-old design off the shelf,” Allodorm said. “Everything on this station was rethought from basics.”

Custom design is very expensive, Martinez thought. “It’s very impressive,” he said. “I’m not used to seeing new stations.”

“The first new station in nine hundred years,” Allodorm said. “And now that the Convocation’s begun opening new systems to expansion, we can expect to see many more.”

“You’ve done all this in a little over two years,” Martinez said. “That’s fast work.”

And awfully fast for such custom work. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t custom after all.

How would anyone know? No one had built an orbital station in eons. You could take an old standard design and change a few minor specifications and call it custom work.

All he knew was that, even if the circulation system was custom designed, the air smelled the same as it did on every other station he’d ever been on.

The vehicle jetted down the connecting tube to the hub of the two wheels, where it entered a large elevator and began its descent to the living areas. “You’ll be the first occupant of the Senior Officers’ Quarters,” Ehl said. “There will be a full staff on hand to look after you. Please let one of them— or me— know if anything is unsatisfactory.”

Gravity began to tug with greater insistence at Martinez’ inner ear. “Thank you, lord elcap,” Martinez said. “I’m sure everything will be satisfactory.”

Gravity had been restored by the time the elevator reached the main level of Wheel Number One. The staff of the Senior Officers’ Quarters were lined up by the exit, as if for inspection. Ehl gave an order, and the staff scurried to the vehicle to unload the luggage and to help Terza and Martinez from their seats. The luggage was placed on motorized robot carts, and Martinez and Terza walked followed by the carts and Lord Ehl and the staff and Allodorm.

“My lord,” Allodorm said, “I hope you and Lady Terza will accept the hospitality of the Meridian Company, two nights from now. The company’s executive and engineering staff would be honored to meet you.”

“We’d be delighted,” Martinez said.

Lord Ehl and the Fleet officers on station were dining with him tomorrow night, and he’d already been sent a rather ambitious schedule involving trips to various Fleet installations. He recognized Ehl’s plan well enough, which was to keep him so busy going from place to place, viewing one engineering wonder after another, and receiving toast after toast at banquets, that he would have precious little time to do any actual inspections. There wasn’t necessarily anything sinister in this scheme— it was the sort of thing Martinez might do himself, were he in charge of an installation and saw a Lord Inspector bearing down on him.

Ahead was the bright new corridor, curving only slightly upward, walls that looked as if they were made of pale ceramic, lighting recessed into the tented ceiling. Martinez looked down at the polymerized flooring beneath their feet. It was a dark grey and rubbery, giving slightly under his shoes, the standard flooring for an installation of this type.

“There was some confusion with this flooring, as I recall?” Martinez asked. His review of the Fleet contracts had told him that much.

“Yes, Lord Inspector, there was,” Allodorm said in his beautiful voice. “A consequence of our not rethinking something— we hadn’t worried about anything so basic as station flooring. But when we looked at the standard station flooring we’d ordered, we found that it was inadequate to the stresses of a developing station, the vehicle traffic and weights we’d have to move along it these corridors. We’d have to replace it all within ten years, and of course we couldn’t afford to shut down the station to do that, not with our deadlines. So we had to special order new flooring from Zarafan, and ship it out by high-gee express.”

“That Torminel crew must have knocked years off their lives getting it here,” Ehl said, and made a deliberate, shivering motion of his hands— his hollow-boned species abhorred high gravities.

“Well,” said Martinez, “at least the problem was corrected.”

He tried to sound offhand, and he wondered how he could get underneath the flooring to take a look at it.

The Senior Officers’ Quarters were as overdesigned as the rest of the station, with dark wood paneling and polished brass fittings. Aquaria glowed turquoise along the walls, filled with exotic fish from the planet below, and below the tall ceilings hung chandeliers that looked like ice sculptures. Everything smelled new. Ehl and Allodorm retired to allow their visitors to “recover from the rigors of the journey,” as if traveling forty-three days by private yacht were as taxing as crossing a mountain range on the back of a mule.

That left Terza and Martinez alone in the entrance hall, standing on the wood parquet that formed a map of the empire, with Chee a small disk of green malachite and Zanshaa, the capital, a blood-red garnet.

They looked at each other. “They’ve given us separate bedrooms,” Terza said.

“I noticed.”

“I’ll have Fran move my things into your room, if that’s all right.”

“Please,” Martinez said. “That huge room would be lonely without you.”

Their palace in Zanshaa High City didn’t have bedrooms as large. The Fleet must have paid a pretty penny for these accommodations, but on the other hand the Fleet wasn’t exactly known for depriving its officers of their comforts.

There was an hour or so before dinner. Martinez had his orderly, Alikhan, find him some casual civilian clothes, and he changed and left his quarters through the kitchen entrance, surprising the cooks who were preparing his meal.

This was a free hour on his schedule. He might as well make use of it.

He walked to one of the personnel elevators, then went to the unfinished wheel. He found an area still under construction, where Torminel workers straddled polycarbon beams just beyond portable barriers, working on pipes and ducts, and the flooring waited on huge spools taller than a Lai-own. Martinez quietly made some measurements, then ventured across the barriers to the point where the flooring dropped away to reveal an expanse of plastic sheeting, followed by open beams and the workers.

If the Torminel noticed Martinez making his measurements, they gave no sign. Martinez finished his task and returned to his quarters.

“Not custom-made, not at all,” Martinez said over dinner. “They’re just laying a second layer of the standard flooring over the first.” He raised a glass and sipped some of the Fleet’s excellent emerald Hy-oso wine. “The Meridian Company’s pocketing the money for all that flooring.”

“I’d suggest not,” Terza said. “I think the flooring exists. That express ship came out here with something. I think the flooring’s been diverted to another project, one owned a hundred percent by the Meridian Company.”

“I wonder how many people know,” Martinez said.

“Quite a few, probably,” Terza said. “Not the work gangs, who I imagine just do what they’re told. You can’t do corruption on this scale without a good many people figuring it out. But I’m sure the company keeps them happy one way or another.”

“Does Lord Ehl know, I wonder?” Martinez asked. “He’d have to be remarkably incurious not to notice what’s happening with the flooring, but perhaps he is incurious.”

Terza gave Martinez a significant look. “I suggest you not ask him,” she said.

Martinez looked at his plate and considered his roast fristigo lying in its sauce of onions and kistip berries. The berries and vegetables were fresh, a delight after his forty-three days in transit— the settlements must have got agriculture under way. “I wish we knew who owns the Meridian Company. But it’s privately held, and the exchanges don’t know because it’s not publicly traded . . . “ He let the thought fade away. “As Lord Inspector I could demand the information, but I might not get it, and it’s an indiscreet way of conducting an investigation.”

“Lord Pa must be one of the owners, and very likely the whole Maq-fan clan is involved,” Terza said. “But unless we get access to the confidential records of whatever planet the company’s chartered on, we’re sunk . . . “ She looked thoughtful. “You know, I could find out.”

Martinez turned to her. “How?” he said.

“Meridian does business with the Fleet, and law requires them to give the Ministry a list of their principal owners. The names are supposed to remain confidential, but—“ She gazed upward into a distant corner of the room. “I’m trying to think who I could ask.”

“Your father,” Martinez pointed out. “He’s on the Fleet Control Board, he should have the authority to get the information.”

Terza shook her head. “He couldn’t do it discreetly. An inquiry from the Control Board is like firing an antimatter missile from orbit.” She smiled. “Or like a command from a Lord Inspector. People would notice.” She gazed up into the corner again for a long moment. “Bernardo, then,” she decided. “He’s got access and is reasonably discreet. But I’ll owe him a big favor.”

“Ten days for the query to get to Zanshaa,” Martinez said. “Another ten days for the answer to return.”

The communication would leap from system to system at the speed of light, but Martinez still felt a burning impatience at the delay.

A smile quirked its way across Terza’s face. “I’ve never seen you work before. Half the time you’re frantic with impatience, and the rest of the time you’re marching around giving orders like a little king. It’s actually sort of fascinating.”

Martinez raised his eyebrows at this description of himself, but said, “I hope you can manage to sustain the fascination a little longer.”

“I think I’ll manage.”

Martinez reached across the corner of the table to take her hand. Terza leaned toward him to kiss his cheek. Her voice came low to his ear. “My doctor once told me that a woman’s at her most fertile in the month following the removal of her implant. I think we’ve proved him right. For the second time.”

He felt his skin prickle with sudden heat as delight flared along his nerves. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Well no,” Terza said, “I’m not. But I feel the same way I felt last time, and I think experience counts in these things.”

“It definitely should,” Martinez said.

Fecundity, he thought. What more could a man want?

*

“The harbor looks a little bare,” Martinez said. He sat, awaiting breakfast, beneath an umbrella on the terrace of the Chee Fishing Club, where he had been given an honorary membership, and where he and Terza were staying. No Fleet accommodation on the ground had been judged worthy of a Lord Inspector, and the only deluxe lodging on the planet were at the club— conveniently owned by Martinez’ father, part of a sport-fishing scheme.

“The commercial fishing boats are out, and the shuttles aren’t coming in any longer,” the manager said. He was a Terran, with a beard dyed purple and twined in two thin braids. He wore a jacket with padded shoulders and of many different fabrics, all in bright tropical colors, stitched together in a clashing melee of brilliant pigment. Martinez hadn’t seen anyone else similarly dressed, and he suspected the manager’s style was peculiar to him alone.

Steam rose as the manager freshened Martinez’ coffee. “Without the shuttles we’ve only a small fishing fleet and a few sport boats,” he said, “though more will come in time. We can build up an enormous fishery here— though we may have to export most of the catch, since everyone here ate nothing but fish for the first year and a half and they’re all sick of it.”

Martinez gazed down a lawn-green slope at three bobbing boats dwarfed by the huge grey concrete quay against which they were moored. Two flew Fishing Club ensigns, and another a private flag, probably that of an official in the Meridian or Chee companies. Across the harbor was the town of Port Vipsania, named after one of Martinez’ sisters, and beyond that, stretching up into the sky, was the cable that ran to geosynchronous orbit and Chee Station.

Port Vipsania, like all the early settlements, was built on the sea, because before the skyhook had gone into operation the previous year, workers and their gear had been brought to the planet in shuttles powered by chemical rockets, shuttles that had landed on the open water and then taxied to a mooring. Supplies, too, had been dropped into the sea in unmanned containers braked with retro-rockets, then towed to shore by workers in boats. The huge resinous containers, opened, also served as temporary shelters and warehouses.

Once the skyhook could bring people and cargo from orbit at much less expense, the shuttles were largely discontinued, though Port Gareth, in the north and as yet unconnected to the expanding rail network, was still supplied by shuttles and containers dropped down from orbit.

A bare three years after the opening of the planet to exploitation, the Chee settlements were growing with incredible speed, fueled by even more incredible amounts of capital. The investment was vast, and as the work had only begun the inflow of capital would have to continue. Lord Mukerji’s work in attracting ceaseless investment was vital, as was the work of many lesser envoys; and of course the work of Lord Martinez himself, raising funds from his own considerable resources.

The resources of a whole planet were more than enough to repay any investment over time, but the scale of the payouts ran in years, and mismanagement and theft were still dangers to the Chee Company. If investor confidence were lost the company could go bankrupt whether it owned a planet or not . . .

“I’d like to see a fleet of boats on that quay,” Martinez said.

“So would I,” the manager said. “The business would be a lot better.” He grinned. “And after all the trouble building that quay, I’d like to see it in use.”

“Trouble?” Martinez asked.

“They shipped down the wrong king of cement for that pier,” the manager said. “They need De-loq cement, that sets underwater and is immune to salt-water corrosion. But they sent down the ordinary stuff, and a special shipment had to be made from Laredo.”

“What did they do with the other cement?” Martinez asked.

“Condemned,” the manager said. “They couldn’t use it. Ah— here’s your breakfast.”

Martinez’ breakfast arrived, a grilled fish needle-sharp teeth, a pair of eyes on each end, and with plates of armor expertly peeled back from the flesh. Martinez’ eyes rose from the fish to Port Vipsania, to the rows of white concrete apartments that held the Meridian Company’s workers.

“Pity they couldn’t find a use for it,” he said.

*

Martinez found that he couldn’t resist the lure of the town his father had named after him. After ten days on Chee, Martinez escaped the endless round of formal banquets and receptions by taking a Fleet coleopter to Port Gareth, north in the temperate zone.

The coleopter carried him over land that was uniform— while the oceans thronged with a staggering variety of fish, life on land was primitive and confined to a few basic types: the only fauna were worms and millipedes, and plants were confined to molds, fungus, and a wide variety of fern, some as tall as a two-storey building.

All of which were going to face stiff competition, as alien plants and animals were being in introduced in abundance. Herds of portschen, fristigo, sheep, bison, and cattle had been landed and allowed more or less to run wild. Without any predators to cull their numbers, the herds were growing swiftly.

Vast farms, largely automated, had also been set up in the interior, upriver from the settlements, or along the expanding railroads. Because no one yet knew what would grow, the farms were simply planting everything, far more than the population could conceivably need. If things went reasonably well, the planet could become a grain exporter very quickly and start earning a bit of profit for the Chee Corporation.

Within a couple centuries, it was calculated, the only native plants a person would see would probably be in a museum.

The coleopter bounded over a range of mountains that kept Port Gareth isolated from the rest of the continent, then dropped over a rich plain that showed rivers of gleaming silver curling amid the green fern forest. The coleopter fell toward a green-blue ocean that began to creep over the horizon, and then began to fly over cultivated fields, the sun winking off the clear canopies of the harvesters.

Port Gareth was very possibly outside the mandate of a Lord Inspector, as it contained no Fleet installations, but Martinez had decided that the railroad that would connect the town to the settlements farther south was a matter of state security, and therefore of interest to the Fleet.

The turbine shrouds on the ends of the aircraft’s wings rotated, and the craft began to descend. On the edge of the pad was yet another reception committee.

The coleopter’s wide cargo door rolled open. Martinez took off his headset, thanked the pilot, and stepped out onto the landing pad. The brisk wind tore at his hair. As Alikhan stepped from the coleopter with Martinez’ luggage, the reception committee advanced behind the Lady Mayor, a client of the Martinez family who Martinez vaguely remembered from childhood. She was a Torminel, whose grey and black fur was more suitable to the bracing climate of Port Gareth than to the tropics of Port Vipsania.

In short order Martinez was introduced to the Mayor’s Council, and the local representatives of the Meridian and Chee companies, and then a familiar figure stepped forward from the long, teardrop-shaped car.

“Remember me, my lord?” the man leered.

Martinez could hardly forget. Ahmet had been a rigger on Corona, Martinez’ first command. He had spent a considerable portion of the commission under arrest or doing punishment duty; and the rest of his time had been occupied with running illegal gambling games, brewing illicit liquor, and performing the occasional bit of vandalism.

“Ahmet,” Martinez said. “You’re out of the Fleet, I see.”

This was only good news for the Fleet.

“I’m a foreman here on the railroad project,” Ahmet said. “When I heard you were coming, I told everyone I knew you, and asked to be part of the welcoming committee.” With one sleeve he buffed the shiny object pinned to his chest. “I still have the Corona medal, as you see. I’ve been assigned as your guide and driver.”

To Martinez, employment of Ahmet in any position of responsibility was proof enough of criminal negligence or worse. But he smiled as stoutly as he could, said “Good to see you,” and was then carried off toward his lodging in the Mayor’s Palace, after which he would endure yet another banquet. He had a healthy respect for himself that some considered conceit, but even so he was beginning to grow weary of all these meals in his honor.

Still, he was pleased to discover a statue of himself in the main square, looking stern and carrying the Golden Orb. He was less pleased to see a pump jack in the overgrown green park behind the statue, its flywheel spinning brightly in the sun.

“What’s that?” he asked. “Petroleum?”

“Yes,” the Lady Mayor said. “We found it close to the surface here— lucky, otherwise we couldn’t have brought it up with the equipment we’ve got.”

“What do you use it for?”

“Plastics. We’ll have a whole industry running here in a few years.”

“How is the railroad progressing?”

The railroad would eventually connect Port Gareth to the south: supersonic trains would speed north from the skyhook, bringing migrants and supplies, and carrying away produce and plastic products for export. The rails were being laid from each end toward a common center, and would meet somewhere in the mountains.

“There were some delays last month,” the Lady Mayor said. “But the track’s still ahead of schedule.”

“Delays?” Martinez said. “There’s nothing the Fleet can do to expedite matters, is there?”

“Very kind, but no. It turned out that the early geologists’ reports were incorrect, or maybe just incomplete. The engineers encountered a much harder layer of rock than they’d expected, and it held up the work for some time.”

Martinez decided that though he didn’t know much about geology, he was going to learn.

Next morning Martinez rose early, took the cup of coffee that his orderly handed him, and called Ahmet.

“I’d like to get up to the railhead,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“Absolutely, my lord.”

“I also don’t want a fuss. I’m tired of delegations. Can we go, just the two of us, with you as my guide?”

Martinez sensed a degree of personal triumph in Ahmet’s reply. “Of course, lord captain! That’s easier than anything!“

The trip to the railhead was on a train bringing out supplies, and Martinez spent the ride in the car reserved for the transport crews. He wore civilian clothes and heavy boots, which he thought disappointed Ahmet, who wanted a fully-dressed military hero to show off to his colleagues. As it was, Martinez had to put up with Ahmet’s loud reminiscences of the Corona and the battle of Hone-bar, which managed to imply that Martinez, under Ahmet’s brilliant direction, had managed to polish off the Naxids in time for breakfast.

“That’s when we swung onto our new heading and dazzled the Naxids with our engine flares, so they couldn’t see our supports,” Ahmet said, and then gave Martinez a confidential wink. “Isn’t that right, my lord?”

“Yes,” Martinez said. And then, peering out the window, “What’s up ahead?”

The track for the supersonic train was necessarily nearly straight and quite level. It approached the mountains on huge ramps, built by equally huge machines and pierced with archways for rivers and future roads. Terraces had been gouged into mountains to provide the necessarily wide roadbed, and tunnels bored through solid rock. The gossamer-seeming bridges that spanned distant valleys were, on closer inspection, built of trusses wider than a bus and cables the thickness of Martinez’ leg. The trains themselves, floating on magnetic fields above the rails, would be equipped with vanes that canceled out their sonic shockwave, but even so the tunnels had to be lined with baffles and sound suppressors to keep the mountain from being shaken down.

At the railhead Martinez was treated to a view of the giant drilling machine that bored the tunnel, and the other machines that cleared the rubble, braced the tunnel, and laid the track. The machines were sophisticated enough, and their operators experienced enough, that everyone seemed confident that their tunnel would meet the northbound crews, coming from the other side of the mountain, well ahead of schedule.

“So we can earn that big completion bonus from the Chee Company,” Ahmet grinned. “Isn’t that right, my lord?”

“Good for you,” Martinez said. He waited for a moment alone with Ahmet before he asked the next question.

“Wasn’t there a big delay a month or so ago? Can we stop there on our way back?”

Ahmet gave Martinez a wink. “Let me talk to the engine-driver.”

They took a ride back on a small engine that was shuttling rails to the construction site, and the Lai-own driver was amenable to a brief delay. “Marker 593,” Ahmet told him, and the engine slowed and braked. Ahmet, an electric lantern in his hand, hopped off into the dark tunnel, and Martinez heard a splash.

“Careful, my lord,” Ahmet said. “It’s a bit damp here.”

Martinez lowered himself to the roadbed and followed the bobbing lantern. Upheaval of the mountain range had tipped the geologic strata nearly vertical here. “They called it a pluton, or a laccolith, or something like that,” Ahmet said. “Whatever it is, it’s damn hard. The drill couldn’t get through it. There it is.” He brandished the lantern.

A deep gray stripe lay along the strata, a river of mica flecks gleaming in the lantern like a river of stars. “That’s it?” Martinez asked. He could span the layer with his two arms. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a pluton.

“Yes, my lord. They had to do a redesign of the drill head.”

Couldn’t they blast it? Martinez bit back the question.

Of course they could have blasted, he thought; but explosive wouldn’t have added a hefty enough overcharge. Then Martinez remembered, during the party held in his honor at Rio Hondo, a conversation between Lords Pa and Mukerji. Something about the geologist’s report ...

Suddenly Martinez wondered if Mukerji— the plunging gambler— been the Chee Company official responsible for approving the cost overruns. He was president of the company, after all, very possibly he could approve such things.

But Mukerji had never been to Chee— the requests would have had to chase him all over the empire as he went off on his quests for funds. Mukerji had never been to Chee, and wouldn’t have been available to fill most spending requests.

Unless . . . unless Mukerji was part of the conspiracy. Receiving payments from the conspirators in order to relieve his gambling debts.

“Interesting,” Martinez said.

Ahmet’s eyes glittered in the lamplight, the admiration of one thief and confidence man for a job well and professionally done. “Fascinating,” he said, “isn’t it? Geology?”

*

The question was how to reveal to Eggfont the relationship between Lord Mince and Lady Belledrawers. If Eggfont was told by the valet Cadaver, that would tell Eggfont something about Cadaver that for the present should remain hidden. Yet how else could Eggfont find out in time for the Grand Ball ...?

A token, Severin thought. A mysterious token, which Eggfont would understand but which would be opaque to anyone else. But introduced by who?

Severin tapped Lady Liao’s ring on the arm of his couch in slow accompaniment to his thoughts. He had to admit that his invention was flagging. It was three hours past midnight in Surveyor’s official twenty-nine-hour day, and Severin was tired. He could call for a cup of coffee from the wardroom, he supposed, but that would mean waking up someone.

Perhaps Severin should put his puppet show aside and find something else to occupy his thoughts. Commanding the ship, for instance.

Surveyor’s control room had the usual stations, for navigation, for controlling the engines, for communications, for the captain and the pilot and the sensor tech. Each station featured a couch balanced carefully in its acceleration cage, and each couch was equipped with a hinged control board that could lock down in front of the occupant.

At the moment the sensor station was occupied by a very bored Warrant Officer Second Class Chamcha, and the screen that occupied his desultory attention wasn’t tuned to the spectacular starscapes of Chee’s system, but to a game called Mindsprain, which he was losing through inattention. The sensor station had only been crewed because regulations required it, just as regulations required someone at the engine station, at the moment Lily Bhagwati, another at communications— Signaler Trainee Jaye Nkomo— and yet another, qualified to stand watches, in the captain’s couch— Severin himself.

The ship had completed the hour out of each watch dedicated to hard acceleration, and breakfast was still hours away. Severin’s attention drifted vaguely over the smiling pictures of Lord Go’s family that the captain had attached to the command board— the captain was lenient that way, and each station in the control room was decorated with personal items belonging to the various crew who served at that station. Pictures of family, notes from loved ones, paper flowers, jokes, poems, pictures of actors and singers and models, someone pretty to dream about when you were three months away from the nearest ring station.

Severin wished he could put a picture of Lady Liao on the board, as provocative a picture as possible. But then she was married to a prominent Peer and jurist, and Severin could hardly advertise their relationship that way.

Severin realized that he’d been staring for many minutes at Lord Go’s family, the smiling wife and waving children, proud parents, the pet dog and the stuffed Torminel doll. He raised his head, shook it violently to clear his mind, and scanned the other stations. Nothing seemed to warrant his attention. No alarms sounded, no violent colors flashed on the displays.

He called up Warrant Officer Chamcha’s game onto his own display, saw the comprehensive rate at which Chamcha was losing, and sighed. Perhaps when Chamcha conceded, Severin would challenge Chamcha to a game of hyper-tourney, or something. Anything to keep awake.

While waiting for Chamcha’s position to collapse he called up the navigation screen. Surveyor, heading straight from Wormhole One to Wormhole Two, was well outside of the normal trade routes that ended at Chee.

No navigational hazards threatened.

Severin looked at Chamcha. Hadn’t he lost yet?

Something flashed on the sensor screens, and Severin looked down at his display, just as the lights and the display itself went off, then on . . .

“Status check!” Severin shouted, as the lights dimmed again, then flashed bright.

Warrant Officer Lily Bhagwati gave a sudden galvanic leap on her acceleration couch. There were shrill panicky highlights in her voice. “Power spike on Main Bus One! Spike on Main Bus Two!”

Severin’s fingers flashed to his display, tried to get the ship’s system display onto his board.

The lights went off, then returned. The image on Severin’s displays twisted, slowed.

How very interesting, he thought distinctly.

“Breaker trip on Main Bus One!” Bhagwati said. “Main engine trip! Emergency power!”

Whatever was happening to the ship was happening too fast for Bhagwati’s reports to keep up. Automatic circuits were responding to protect themselves faster than the Terran crew could possibly act. Severin did catch the words “main engine trip” and had time to register their impact before the all-pervading rumble of the engine ceased, and he began to drift free of his couch.

He reached for his webbing to lash himself in and every light and every display in the room went dark, leaving him in pitch blackness save for the afterimage of his displays slowly fading from his retinas.

“Emergency Circuit One breaker trip!” Bhagwati shouted unnecessarily.

In the ensuing silence Severin heard the distant whisper of the ventilation slowly fade, like the last sigh of a dying man.

This never happens, he told himself.

And because it never happened, there were no standard procedures to follow. An absolutely cold startup of all ship systems, including the ones that had been mysteriously damaged?

This also never happens, he thought.

“Everyone stay in your cages!” he said. “I don’t want you drifting around in the dark.”

He tapped Lady Liao’s ring on the arm of his couch while he tried to think what to do next. Little flickers of light, like fireflies, indicated here and there where battery-powered flashlights waited in their chargers. These weren’t intended for emergencies, because the emergency lighting wasn’t supposed to fail— rather the lights were intended getting illumination into odd corners of the displays that were undergoing repair.

The flickering lights were inviting. Severin thought he should probably get a flashlight.

“I’m going to get a light,” he said. “Everyone else stand by.”

His fingers released the webbing that he’d never quite fastened down, then he unlocked his display and pushed it above his head, out of the way, a maneuver that also pushed him more deeply into his couch. Now free, he reached out, found one of the struts of his cage, and tugged gently till his head and torso floated free of the cage.

With careful movements, he jackknifed to pull his legs out of the cage, a movement that rolled the cage slightly. He straightened his body and his feet contacted the floor.

He couldn’t push off the floor to approach the flashlights: that would send him the wrong way. Instead he flung the acceleration cage with both hands, a movement that sent the cage spinning on all three axes while he drifted gently to the nearest wall. Severin reached out a hand and snagged the handle on the battery charger.

He became aware that was breathing hard. Even this little exertion had taxed him.

There was a distant thump. Then another. Severin realized that someone outside the control room was pounding on the heavy shielded door, slowly and with great deliberation.

He released the flashlight from the charger that was designed to hold it at high gee. He turned it on and flashed it over the control room.

Three sets of eyes stared back at him. The others were awaiting his orders.

From outside the command room door, Severin began to hear the muffled sound of screams.

*

Screams could still be heard faintly through the door.

Severin shone his light on Chamcha long enough for the sensor operator to work his way out of his cage and push across the room toward another flashlight. Then he turned to the problem of the door. He pulled and locked down a hand grip installed for the purpose, then— floating on the end of the handgrip— opened an access panel, removed a light alloy crank, and inserted it into the door mechanism. With one hand on the grip, the flashlight stuck to the wall on an adhesive strip, and a foot braced against the bottom of an instrument panel, Severin began to crank the door open.

The screams had stopped. Severin didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or not.

By the time Severin had cranked open the heavy door he was puffing and throwing off beads of sweat that floated like drops of molten gold in the light. The control room crew clustered around him, hanging by fingertips onto cage struts or instrument displays, and their lights were turned to the outside corridor. Severin heard a series of gasps, and the single cry, “Lord captain!”

Severin looked out and saw Lord Go hanging weightless in the flashlight beams. He was wearing turquoise satin pajamas. His skin had turned bright red, and his eyes were hidden amid scarlet swellings. Large blisters were forming on his face and hands. His expression was slack.

Burns, Severin thought. His mind whirled with the idea of a fire so fierce and sudden that it could knock out the ship and burn the captain before a single call for help could be made. But he saw no fire and could smell no burning.

“My lord!” Severin called. With one hand still on the grip, he swung himself toward Lord Go, reached out, and took his captain’s hand. Another crew member, he saw, was hovering motionlessly a short distance down the corridor, and from the golden hair that floated in the absence of gravity he knew it was Lady Maxine Wellstone, the ship’s junior lieutenant.

Severin drew Lord Go toward him by the hand, and his stomach queased at the slippery way the captain’s flesh felt under his fingers— it felt unattached, as if he could peel the skin from Lord Go’s hand like taking off a glove. He tried to brake Lord Go as gently as he could and brought him to a motionless halt just inside the door.

“Bhagwati,” he said. “Tether the lord captain to an acceleration cage or something. Try not to touch him.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Nkomo, go find the doctor and bring her here.”

Surveyor’s doctor was no doctor at all, but a Pharmacist First Class. She would have to do.

“Very good, my lord,” Nkomo said. He made an agile dive into the corridor over Severin’s head, and Severin pushed off to Nkomo’s acceleration cage, where Lily Bhagwati was tethering Lord Go to a cage strut with her belt. Severin held himself a short distance from his captain’s face, and tried not to look too closely at the scalded, weeping flesh.

“My lord,” he said, “do you know what happened?”

Bloody eyes moved beneath the swollen lids. Lord Go sounded as if he were trying to talk past a tongue twice its normal size.

“Don’t . . . know,” he said.

“Was there a fire?”

“No . . . fire.” Lord Go gave a long sigh. “Hurts,” he said.

Severin bit his lip. “You’re in pain, my lord?”

“Hurts,” the captain said again.

“The doctor’s on his way.”

“Don’t know,” Lord Go said again, and then fell silent, lids falling on his dull eyes. His breathing was harsh. Severin looked at Bhagwati and saw his own anxiety mirrored in her wide brown eyes.

He had to get the ship working again.

“Right,” he said. “Bhagwati, Chamcha, check the main breakers. We’ve got to get power on.” He remembered the flash of blonde hair in the corridor outside. “I’m going to check on Lieutenant Wellstone.”

He pushed off the floor with his fingers and drifted into the corridor outside. He tried not to look at Wellstone’s burned, tortured face as he touched her neck in search of a pulse.

There was none. When he returned to the control room, he felt a tremor in his hands.

“My lord,” Chamcha said as Severin returned to the command cage. “My lord, it’s radiation.”

Severin’s heart turned over. He turned to Chamcha. “You were monitoring the sensors. Did you see the spectra?”

“I saw spikes, but I didn’t get a clear idea of what was happening before everything blew out.” Chamcha licked his lips. “But it’s got to be radiation, my lord, not a fire. It’s the only explanation.”

Severin felt a cold finger touch his heart. Chamcha was right.

There were several areas on the ship that had heavy radiation shielding. The control room, and also engine control. There were also hardened radiation shelters where the crew could hide in the event of a solar flare, but they were small and crowded, and unless there was a radiation alert the crew never slept there.

“We’ll look at the recordings once we get power,” Severin said. “Get busy with the breakers.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Radiation, Severin thought. But what kind? And from what? They were alone in space, in transit from one wormhole to another, bypassing the one inhabited planet in the system. There were no other planets nearby, no stations, no other ships.

The electronic failures could be explained in terms of a solar flare. The fast protons had a deadly habit of actually traveling along electric field lines until they could find something to blow up. But a solar flare so massive that it could knock out all electric systems in a ship the size of Surveyor, plus seriously irradiate any unshielded crew, and do it all in a very few seconds, had to be a solar flare larger than any recorded in history.

A solar flare so huge it might be ripping the atmosphere off Chee right now.

Such a flare, however, seemed very unlikely. Normally under a radiation alert the crew had plenty of time to get into their cramped shelters. Plus, Surveyor when under way generated an electric field from metallic strips planted along its resinous hull, a field intended to help repel any high-energy charged particles coming their way.

Which left uncharged particles . . .

“My lord!” Bhagwati called. She’d pulled her head out of a access hatch, and her face was angry. “These breakers are slagged. Whatever hit them destroyed them before they could even trip. We can’t just reset them, they have to be replaced.”

“Get replacements, then,” Severin said.

Severin turned as he caught the gleam of a light dancing in the corridor outside. A grey-haired woman floated past the doorway, and reached out one hand to snag the door sill in passing. The woman halted and drew her body into the control room, and Severin recognized Engineer First Class Mojtahed.

“Reporting, my lord,” Mojtahed said. She was a burly, middle-aged, pot-bellied woman with her hair trimmed short and a prominent mole on one cheek. Severin felt relief at the very sight of her: at least one of the two principal engineers had been in the shielded engine control station when Surveyor had been hit.

“What’s the situation?” Severin asked.

“A power spike tripped the engine,” Mojtahed said. “We’ve reset breakers, and replaced some others, and I’ve ordered the engine countdown started. We’re at something like twenty minutes.”

“You’ve got enough power for that?”

“Emergency batteries are good, so far.” She glanced around the darkened control room, and realized that Severin wasn’t in any position to be able to command the ship, and wouldn’t be for a while.

“We can stop the countdown at any point,” she said.

“Hold at one minute, then.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Severin looked at her. “How many were in engine control with you?”

A hard sadness settled onto her face. “Minimum engine crew on this watch, my lord. Two.”

That gave Severin at least seven people he knew of who had been in hardened areas of the ship when the radiation hit.

Seven, out of a crew of thirty-four.

Mojtahed hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “May I speak with you privately, my lord?”

“Yes.” Severin turned to Chamcha and Bhagwati, who were still hovering by the access panel. “Bring the breakers,” he said.

The two crewmen made their way out. Severin turned to Mojtahed.

“Yes?” he said.

Mojtahed pushed off from the door and brought herself to a stop a short distance from Severin. She glanced at Lord Go, and her face hardened. She turned to Severin and spoke almost angrily.

“Have you considered that we may have just been attacked?”

“No,” Severin said, though he found himself unsurprised by the question. His thoughts hadn’t yet stretched to that possibility, but they would have reached it in time.

“Gamma rays and fast neutrons,” Mojtahed said. “That’s what we’d get with a missile burst.”

“We saw no signs of a missile incoming,” Severin said. “No missile flares, nothing on radar. And there’s no sign of a fireball.”

“A missile could have been accelerated to relativistic velocities outside the system, then shot through a wormhole at us.”

Severin thought about this. “But why?” Surveyor wasn’t a military ship, or particularly valuable, and it was engaged in crossing a system from one wormhole to another, outside any trade routes. As the target for the opening salvo of a war, Surveyor hardly rated.

“Why,” Mojtahed repeated, “and who.”

Severin’s mind raced. “If it’s an attack, the first thing we need to do is get a message to Chee Station and to the wormhole relay station for passage outside . We’ve got to do that before we light the engine, before we maneuver, before anything. Because if an enemy detects a sign of life, they may finish us off.”

Mojtahed took in a breath, held it for a moment between clenched teeth, then let it out in a big, angry sigh. “If they’re attacking the likes of us, I don’t hold much hope for Chee Station or the wormhole relay station.”

The silence had reached into its third second when Nkomo stuck her head through the door.

“Doctor’s dead, my lord. I looked for her assistant and— “ Nkomo hesitated. “He’s no better off than the captain.”

“Thank you,” Severin said, but Nkomo wasn’t done.

“Lieutenant Wellstone’s dead in the corridor just outside, my lord,” she said as she came into the control room. “And I checked in Lieutenant Montcrief’s cabin, and he’s in his rack. He’s alive, but I can’t wake him.”

“Thank you,” Severin said again. He turned to Mojtahed. “Get back to engine control and lock yourself in, just in case we’re hit again. I’ll concentrate on getting communications gear up before anything else.”

“Very good, my lord.” Mojtahed began to push off, then paused. “Could it have been Titan?” she asked. “If Titan blew, we’d get a hell of a lot of radiation.”

Mojtahed’s theory would have explained everything so conveniently that Severin hated to dispose of it.

“Not unless Titan was nearby,” he said, “and it wasn’t. Titan isn’t even in the system yet.”

Mojtahed apparently regretted the loss of her hypothesis as much as Severin. “Too bad, my lord.” she said, and then another idea occurred to her. “Could it be something that happened in nature? We’re close to the core of this galaxy. Could something have blown up in the galactic center and the radiation just reached us?”

“I don’t know,” Severin said. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

Mojtahed pushed off the acceleration cage lightly, with her fingers. Even so that was enough to cause the cage to roll, and Lord Go, tethered to it, woke with a gasp.

“Hurts!” he cried, and Severin’s nerves gave a leap. He pulled himself closer to his captain.

“Medicine’s on its way, my lord.”

“Hurts!”

Afraid to disturb Lord Go again, Severin let go of the cage and touched the deck with one shoe. He pushed toward a wall, pushed off again, and snagged the door sill.

“We’re going to the pharmacy,” Severin told Nkomo. “Then we’re going to start looking after the crew.”

On Nkomo’s face was a look that combined anxiety and relief. “Yes, my lord,” she said.

Severin looked at the body of Lieutenant Wellstone. “Let’s get her to her cabin,” he said, and he and Nkomo carried the body a short distance down the corridor. They put Wellstone in her rack, then raised the netting at the sides to keep her from floating away.

On their way to the pharmacy they encountered Bhagwati and Chamcha returning with boxes of replacement electric parts. Severin told them to try to get the comm station working first, then led aft through a bulkhead. The pharmacy was in a shielded area of the ship: if the pharmacist had only been at her duty station instead of asleep in her rack, she would have survived.

Two crew had come to the pharmacy in their agony, but had been unable to open the locked door. One was unconscious now, and the other curled in a ball, whimpering. Severin used his lieutenant’s key to open the pharmacy door and then the medicine locker. He pulled out a med injector, then began looking through the neatly-labeled white plastic boxes slotted into the heavy metal frames that guarded the contents against heavy accelerations. He found Phenyldorphin-Zed, pulled out one of the boxes, and handed it to Nkomo. He took another box, opened it, slotted a vial into the injector, and stuffed the rest of the vials into one of the leg pockets of his coveralls.

Severin switched the med injector on. A tone sounded. Colors flickered on the display. A tiny bubble of air rose in the clear vial, and the injector flashed an analysis of the contents and a range of recommended doses.

The software in the injectors was as idiot-proof as the Exploration Service could manage.

He floated toward the nearest of the two crew, the one that whimpered with each breath, and he anchored his feet against the frame of the pharmacy door, pulled the woman toward him, and gently tipped her chin back with his fingers. He placed the med injector against her neck, waited for the display to signal that he’d placed the injector correctly, and fired a dose straight into her carotid.

The woman’s eyelids fell. The whimpering stopped, and her breathing grew regular. Severin floated to the unconscious recruit and treated him likewise. Then he offered the injector to Nkomo.

“You go to the female recruits’ quarters and then take care of the petty officers. I’ll look after the male recruits, the warrant officers, the lieutenant, and the captain..”

Nkomo looked at the med injector without touching it, her dark eyes wide. “What about doses? What about— ?”

“The highest recommended dose,” Severin said. “I’ve already set it on the injector.”

Nkomo didn’t move. “Isn’t that dangerous, my lord? Because these people are so sick, I mean.”

Severin felt a sudden blaze of hatred for Nkomo. Nkomo was going to make him voice a thought that he hated himself for thinking, let alone for speaking out loud. The anger showed in his voice, and it made Nkomo start and stare at him.

“Nkomo,” he said, “does it look to you as if the quality of life for these people is going to improve anytime soon?”

Nkomo was cautious. “Ah— no, my lord.”

“They’re dying,” Severin said. “We can’t do anything about it except try to make them more comfortable. If you give someone an accidental overdose, then as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. It just means that she won’t have to spend days dying in agony. But use whatever dose you want, I don’t give a damn.”

He held out the injector again. Nkomo hesitated, then took it with fingers that trembled.

“Yes, my lord,” she said, and left very fast.

Severin floated in the corridor shaking with rage and badly wanting to hit something, but he knew that if he punched the wall in this weightless state he’d just start ricocheting around the corridor. It wasn’t Jaye Nkomo’s fault that she was eighteen and had been in the service for less than a year. It wasn’t her fault that an officer had given her an order, an order fraught with all the weight of authority and the regulations and the awesome power of the Praxis, who told her to give massive doses of narcotics to the dying women she’d been laughing with and serving with and sleeping alongside, and that if she killed any of them by accident that was all right. Nothing in Jaye Nkomo’s training had ever prepared her for this.

Nothing in Severin’s training had prepared him giving such an order, either, and the knowledge made him furious. He went back to the pharmacy, found another med injector, loaded it, and went to the male crew quarters.

The smell of it was unforgettable. It wasn’t quite the smell of burning and wasn’t quite the smell of roasting. It was the smell of ten men dying, and it came with moans and cries. The ones who weren’t crying were listless with the apathy that was a symptom of a heavy dose of radiation. Severin went from one rack to the next and administered the doses of endorphin-analog, and by the time he’d finished his anger had passed. He only had the energy left for emotions that might be useful. The emotions that would track down the enemy, whoever they were, and somehow— somehow, given that he was in a crippled, unarmed ship with only seven crew— somehow destroy them.

He went to the warrant officers’ cabins, then to that of Lord Barry Montcrief, and then he returned to the control room.

In the control room the emergency lights were on. More than half the displays were glowing softly. Bhagwati sat at the comm board with the lid of the board raised. She was replacing fuses. Chamcha was bent over the sensor board, a puzzled expression on his face. Both were trying to ignore Lord Go, who was curled into a fetal ball and crying.

Severin floated to the captain and placed the injector against his neck and touched the trigger. Lord Go gave a long, ragged sigh, and his clenched body relaxed.

Severin went to the command cage, took the picture of the captain’s family, the children and wife and parents and stuffed Torminel, and he returned to the captain and put the picture in Lord Go’s hand where he would see it if he ever woke.

“Report, please,” Severin said.

“Replaced breakers in Main Busses One and Two,” Bhagwati said, “but the engine isn’t lit, so we can’t get power from anything but the emergency batteries. Battery power should be enough to send a message, though, so I’m trying to get the comm station up.”

“I’m looking at the spectra from just before we got fried,” Chamcha said. He turned to Severin, his wiry hair floating around his moon face. “There was nothing, and then wham!— x-rays.”

“X-rays?” Severin said. A missile wouldn’t produce x-rays. He kicked off and floated gently toward the sensor station.

“They came in pulses.” Chamcha’s voice was puzzled. “Eight pulses in the first three-quarters of a second, and then the fuses blew and it stopped recording.” He looked at Severin anxiously. “Could someone have hit us with an x-ray laser?”

“Pulses,” Severin repeated, and his heart sank.

This wasn’t an enemy he could fight with a crippled ship and seven crew. Nor was it an enemy he could hope to vanquish were he a Senior Fleet Commander, with a dozen squadrons of warships under his command.

This was an enemy that could wipe out entire civilizations without even noticing them.

“Chamcha,” he said, “what exists in nature that sends out twelve massive bursts of x-rays in one second?”

Chamcha’s eyes narrowed as he searched his memory. Then the eyes widened, and the color drained from his face.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Great Masters help us.”

*

After replacing a fuse in the navigation station, Severin located the enemy within half an hour. One of the seven, or possibly eight, stars in the large system of which Chee’s star was an element had been catalogued, over eight hundred years ago, as a brown dwarf, a large gaseous body that wasn’t quite large enough to have properly ignited as a star.

That categorization was now demonstrably incorrect, and so was the estimate of the number of stars in the system as a whole. There were not seven, or possibly eight, but rather eight, or possibly nine.

The alleged brown dwarf wasn’t a brown dwarf, but a degenerate star. It had once been much larger, and had a companion star that was larger still, forming between them a binary pair that rotated about each other as they moved in even more complex orbits around the other six, or possibly seven, stars of the greater Chee system.

The companion star, nearing the end of its life, had exploded as a supernova, hurling vast clouds of its outer shell into space. Much of this material had been absorbed by its neighbor, making it larger still. The companion, dying, collapsed into a neutron star, and began a deadly dance with gravity, spiraling closer to its neighbor with every orbit. Eventually the neutron star had fallen close enough to begin stripping the outer layers of hydrogen gas off its attendant, drawing the infalling matter into a disk. As the material drew closer, the enormous magnetic fields of the neutron star drew the material inward, compressing and heating it, eventually transforming the infalling matter into powerful beams of x-rays that shot from the magnetic poles.

The neutron star spiraled in, closer and closer, until its orbit was nearly within its companion’s outer envelope. The period of its orbit was less than three hours. It had so consumed its companion star that the companion was now indistinguishable from a brown dwarf, especially if the star was being observed from far away, hundreds of years ago, by surveyors who were far more interested in habitable planets.

“Right,” Severin said. “Now the question is, what else is the pulsar going to hit?”

He and Chamcha sat side-by-side in the sensor cage. Severin called other displays onto his own, piloting and astrography displays, and an estimate of the angle of the x-ray beam when Surveyor had been hit, which would provide a figure for the tilt of the pulsar’s magnetic pole and a judgment of what other objects the beam might intersect.

The computer simulation of the multi-sun system, with the pulsar now added, ran briefly, then stopped. A tone sounded.

Chee.

“Well of course,” Severin said. He was surprised by his lack of surprise.

Chee and the eight, or possibly nine, suns of its system weren’t all in the same plane. The pulsar’s course was to galactic north of Chee, and the beam fired from its southern magnetic pole would intersect the planet for all of three seconds, long enough to kill any unshielded animal life-form either in orbit or on the planet’s surface.

Severin compiled the information into as terse a message as he could. “Send to Chee Station Command,” he said, “with copies to Lord Inspector Martinez and Astronomer Shon-dan at the Imperial Observatory.”

“Very good, my lord,” said Nkomo. She had returned to the control room without speaking a word, and had taken her place at the comm board. She looked down at the board. “Comm laser three powering up and— we’ve lost it, my lord.”

Severin turned to stare at her. “Lost it? Lost what?”

Nkomo looked uncertain. “Lost the laser, my lord. It’s . . . malfunctioned somehow.”

“Use another laser.”

The second laser also failed. Severin thought that perhaps the x-ray flux had turned the metal on the ship brittle as glass, and that the metallic semiconductors used to generate the lasers were blowing part under the strain of excitation.

When a third laser died, Severin decided that his theory was confirmed.

“Try a VHF antenna,” Severin said. “Use the emergency channel.”

They were going to get their message to Chee, Severin thought, one way or another, even if he had to build an antenna himself.

*

When Martinez returned to his lodgings at the Mayor’s Palace, the Lady Mayor herself bustled toward him as he got out of the car.

“I wondered where you had been today, my lord,” she said. She looked in surprise at his muddy boots and informal clothing. “There are a stack of invitations that have come in for you.”

“Rigger Ahmet was showing me the sights,” Martinez said. He turned to Ahmet and winked. “Right, Ahmet?”

Ahmet grinned broadly. “Absolutely, my lord.”

The Lady Mayor hesitated. Martinez smiled at her, and then his sleeve comm chimed.

“Pardon me, my lady.” He answered.

The chameleon weave on his sleeve shimmered to an image of Lord Ehl. The feathery dark hairs on the sides of his head were standing oddly, as if he’d just suffered an electric shock.

“My lord,” Ehl said. “We’ve just received a transmission from Surveyor, and— well— I’d be obliged if you could get back to the station as fast as you can.”

*

As the coleopter began its descent into Port Vipsania, Martinez looked at Shon-dan in the crystal-clear image of his sleeve display and said, “Do you mean to tell me that despite your entire crew of overpaid astronomers at Chee Station, you failed to detect two beams of deadly energy each over a light-year long?”

Shon-dan gazed at Martinez with wide golden eyes. “My lord,” she said, “we’re cosmologists. We haven’t looked at anything within a hundred light-years of this place.”

Martinez looked balefully at the image of Shon-dan, and then realized he was grinding his teeth. He unclenched and spoke.

“Tell me what’s going to happen, and how long we’ve got.”

“We’ve got nine and a half days, my lord. Then Chee will move into the path of that beam, and— “ Shon-dan clacked her peg teeth nervously. “Anyone without proper shielding will, ah, be very much in jeopardy.”

“The atmosphere won’t be shield enough?”

“Not for beams of this intensity.” Shon-dan tried to look hopeful. “We’ve worked out the orbital mechanics, by the way, and this should happen to Chee only once every forty-nine thousand years.”

Which, Martinez thought, explained the relatively primitive life-forms on the surface of the planet as compared with the superabundant life in the sea. Every forty-nine thousand years any complex species on land was wiped out.

Those fern forests were a clue, if anyone had bothered to read it.

“So,” he said, “we’ll have nearly fifty thousand good years if we manage to survive the next ten days.”

The avian’s tone was apologetic. “Ah— there will be problems after the ten days, my lord. Electronics may be destroyed. Food crops may not survive. Metals may turn brittle. And— well, I don’t know what will happen to the station and the elevator. I’ll have to think of that.”

“You do that. I need an estimate of how much shielding people are going to need to hide under.”

“Ah— yes, my lord.”

Martinez ended the transmission. The coleopter was making its final approach to its landing pad. Martinez thought of people rising from shelters to find the world above destroyed— crops burned in the fields, no communication, buildings with metal frames unsafe, transport liable to fall apart, those beautiful bridges on the railroad collapsed because the support cables could no longer carry them.

And possibly Chee Station destroyed. There was plenty of radiation shielding on the station, but it was all on the outer rims of the habitation wheels and in other parts calculated to protect personnel against a solar flare. The x-ray beam would be coming in at an angle, from galactic north, and very little of the station would be safe.

The wheel and other large structures were made of a tough resinous material, and thus wouldn’t be subject to metal fatigue, but even so enough critical components were made of metal that the structure might be in jeopardy. If it came apart under stress the elevator cable would drop into the atmosphere, where it would burn up, but if the cable dragged enough of the station with it, Chee could be subjected to a dangerous bombardment of large objects burning their way through the atmosphere to strike the surface.

And crashing with the station would be Chee Company stock, to the ruination of his father and family.

Helpless anger burned in his thoughts as the coleopter settled to a landing.

Terza waited by the landing pad with a big Fleet car and a driver. She was wearing her brown Ministry uniform. Martinez walked across the pad and kissed her. Her lips were soft, her eyes hard.

“You’ve heard?” he asked. He had to speak over the sound of the coleopter’s turbines.

“Marcella told me.”

He took her arm and walked with her to the car. “We’ll get you on the first ship out.”

“I can stay,” Terza said. “I’m an administrator, remember, and I’m sure they’ll find an adequate shelter for us.”

They paused by the car. Martinez put a large hand over Terza’s abdomen. “I don’t want x-rays getting anywhere near the next generation of Clan Chen.”

Terza made a face. “I was so looking forward to seeing you in action,” she said. “But I suppose caution may be indicated, since the doctor confirmed just this morning there is a next generation on the way.”

Despite the oppressive weight of his thoughts a flame of joy kindled in Martinez’ heart, and he kissed her. “What happens next?” he asked. “I’m not quite sure how this pregnancy business works, since I wasn’t around the first time.”

Terza took him by the hand and drew him into the automobile. “It’s going to be very difficult and taxing, I’m afraid.” Her tone was businesslike. “I shall require first-class pampering from you for, oh, several years at least.”

“Starting now?” he said hopefully.

Terza gave a sigh. “I’m afraid not. You’ve got a meeting.”

*

“We’ve got power in most of the ship,” Severin said. “Communication between engine control and main control have been restored. Enough of the computers have been brought online so that we can do what we need to. The injured are being made as comfortable as possible for the deceleration, and we’re fighting dehydration with intravenous drips. Since we’re uncertain how the ship will respond to a resumption of gee force, we’ll start with a tenth of a gravity, then gradually increase power to one gravity.”

Severin paused for a reply, and when none came went on.

“When I tried to turn the ship with the maneuvering thrusters, the thruster heads blew out— metal fatigue in the joints won’t let them hold pressure. That means we’re going to have to maneuver with the main engine, which is of course designed to resist hard radiation, so if you feel some unusual accelerations at first, that’s what they’ll be.”

He paused again, then licked his dry lips. “May I have permission to begin deceleration, my lord?”

There was a long pause before a single word came from the captain’s lips, so soft it was almost a sigh.

“Proceed.”

“Very good, my lord.” Severin checked the captain’s intravenous drip, then spun in the air with a flip of his hands and kicked off for the door.

He didn’t know how much of his report the captain had understood, but Severin felt better for having delivered it. Lord Go was a good captain and deserved to know what was happening in his ship, and perhaps Lord Go himself felt better for knowing.

The captain had been returned to his bed prior to the commencement of acceleration. Dehydration was a serious problem with radiation burns and Severin and the other six uninjured crewmen had spent the last few hours giving the surviving victims intravenous drips, an arduous process because they had to learn the technique first, practicing on each other by following the steps in a manual.

Severin had debated with himself over whether the step should be taken at all. Prolonging the lives of the victims was only to extend their suffering without a chance of altering the outcome.

But Severin wanted to be able to look at himself in a mirror. He wanted to be able to tell the families of the victims that he’d done everything he could for them. He didn’t want to have to say, “I let them die without trying to help them.”

He made his way to the control room and worked his way into the command cage, then pulled the display down in front of him and locked it there. Bhagwati, Nkomo, and Chamcha were all strapped into their acceleration couches.

“Engines,” he told Bhagwati, “sound the acceleration warning.”

“Yes, my lord.” The warning clattered through the ship.

“Engines,” Severin said, “prepare to maneuver with the main engine.”

“Yes, my lord.” Bhagwati looked at her board. “Gimbal test successful, my lord. Engine on standby.”

“Course one-five-seven by one-five-seven relative.”

“Course laid into the computer, my lord.”

“Begin maneuvering.”

The thrust was gentle, and Severin heard the engine fire only as a distant rumble that seemed to come up his spine. His couch swung lightly in its cage, and a faint whisper of gravity reached Severin’s inner ear. The engine faded, then fired again. Severin’s cage rattled. His stomach gave a little lurch.

“Come on,” Bhagwati urged. The main engine really wasn’t intended for this kind of maneuvering.

The engine fired again, a more sustained burst. Severin found himself waiting for the sound of something falling.

Nothing fell. The engine fired thrice more, each minor adjustments. There was triumph in Bhagwati’s voice when she announced, “One-five-seven by one-five-seven relative.”

“Commence acceleration at point one gravities.”

The engine lit, a sustained distant rumble, and Severin’s cage swung again. A gentle hand pressed him into his couch.

“Systems check,” Severin ordered, just to make certain nothing had broken.

Nothing had. Severin had no worries for the hull, which was tough resin stiffened with polycarbon beams, but there was still enough metal in the ship to cause him concern. There were metal shelves, metal hinges, metal fittings, and the sick crew lay on mattresses placed on metal racks. Pipes and conduits were secured by metal strips. Valves with metal parts pierced the hull to bring in water or electricity from stations, or to discharge waste.

All Severin needed right now was a hull breach.

Severin added gravity a tenth of a gee at a time until the ship was decelerating at one full gravity. Only once did he hear a crash, when a shelf gave way in the captain’s pantry.

“Systems check,” Severin said.

Nothing was destroyed, nothing breached. Severin began to feel proud of Surveyor. It was a tougher craft than he’d expected.

He would get Surveyor to Laredo, where there would have to be a complete refit. Surveyor was twenty-eight days out from Laredo, so it would take twenty-eight days to reverse the momentum that had built, plus another twenty-eight days to return to port.

By that time all the afflicted crew would be dead. Severin would be conducting funerals every day for many days to come, and in addition Surveyor would have a front-row seat for what promised to be a first-class planetary catastrophe.

Severin unlocked his display and pushed it up over his head, out of the way. He unwebbed and stepped out of the cage.

“Bhagwati, you have the ship,” he said. “Nkomo, Chamcha, it’s time to make the rounds of the sick and make sure they’re coping under gravity.”

Severin would report to Lord Go that Surveyor had done well under acceleration.

He hoped the captain would be pleased.

*

“Life is brief, but the Praxis is eternal,” Severin read from the burial service. “Let us all take comfort and security in the wisdom that all that is important is known.” He looked up at Engineer Mojtahed.

“Proceed,” he said.

Mojtahed pressed the override button that blew from the cargo airlock Captain Lord Go Shikimori, Lieutenant Lord Barry Montcrief, and four other crew. Since Surveyor’s engine was blazing a huge radioactive tail during the deceleration, and since the bodies, once out of the airlock, were no longer decelerating, the captain and his crew would be cremated within seconds.

Severin and the four others— two remained on watch— remained at rigid attention until the airlock display stopped blinking. Mojtahed looked through the window on the inner airlock.

“Airlock’s clear, my lord.”

“Close the outer door and repressurize.” Severin said. He turned to the others. “Detail dismissed.” He began to walk away, then stopped. “Mojtahed, Chamcha, please join me for dinner.”

Though Severin was now the acting captain, he hadn’t moved into the captain’s quarters, and didn’t intend to. He brought Mojtahed and Chamcha to the wardroom, where he sat them at the table normally reserved for lieutenants.

The pulsar had killed all of Surveyor’s cooks and the meals had become haphazard, mostly stews of things emptied into the pot from cans, and all cooked by microwave because the metal burners on the galley stove were so brittle they failed if anyone turned them on. Severin and his guests were served by today’s cook, an apprentice from Mojtahed’s engine room department, who fled before any of them had a chance to taste his handiwork. Severin opened a bottle of wine from the wardroom stores. Till now he had tasted the wine only occasionally, because he’d been unable to afford the sort of private stores the other lieutenants were used to, and he didn’t want Lord Barry and Lady Maxine to think he was a leech, drinking from the bottles that would have cost him half a month’s pay apiece.

But now Lord Barry and Lady Maxine were radioactive dust floating in the general direction of Wormhole Two, and Severin had conducted his second mass funeral in two days and wanted a drink.

He had two goblets of wine while the others sipped theirs and ate a few dutiful bites of stew. Then he spoke.

“We’ve done a good job of saving the ship,” he said. “Now I’d like to try to save Chee.”

*

There was silence at the wardroom table, and then Mojtahed wiped a bit of gravy off her chin and said, “Beg pardon, my lord?”

“I want to save Chee,” Severin said. “And to do that we have to turn off the pulsar, and I think I know how that can be done.”

There was another moment of silence. Mojtahed and Chamcha exchanged glances.

Mojtahed, the senior surviving petty officer. Chamcha, who was a highly-trained sensor operator trained to detect wormholes, and the closest thing Surveyor had to an actual scientist.

“Very good, my lord,” Mojtahed said.

“Bear with me,” Severin said. He called up the wardroom’s wall display, and put up a simulation of an x-ray pulsar he’d got from An-ray’s Catalogue of Astronomical Objects.

“The x-ray pulse is driven by matter infalling from the accretion disk,” Severin said. “So if we can turn that mechanism off, the x-rays will turn off as well. Unlike an electromagnetic pulsar, an x-ray pulsar can’t work in a vacuum.”

“My lord,” Chamcha ventured, “we’re dealing with something the mass of a star. A pulsar is one of the most dense objects in the universe, and about the deadliest— how can you hope to stop it with our resources?”

“The pulsar’s mass is colossal, yes,” Severin said. “But the accretion disk is nothing but hydrogen gas. So what we do is fire an antimatter missile into the accretion disk, and the antimatter wipes out the inner band of hydrogen.” He grinned at them. “The pulsar’s shut down for a few critical hours, Chee is saved, we all get medals. What do you think?”

Chamcha blinked. Mojtahed’s response was more practical. “We don’t have any antimatter missiles.”

“We’ll use one of the lifeboats. Pack the crew spaces full of antihydrogen if we have to, and sent it out on automatic pilot.”

Chamcha hesitantly raised a hand, as if he was in a classroom.

“Yes?” Severin said.

“I see two problems,” Chamcha said. “First, I don’t think we have nearly enough antimatter . . . ”

“So we’ll jump in the lifeboats and then shoot Surveyor at the pulsar,” Severin said.

“And the other problem,” Chamcha said indomitably, “is that when the antihydrogen hits the accretion disk, it doesn’t just wipe it from existence, it turns into radiation. The radiation directed at the pulsar won’t shut it off, it’ll heat the pulsar up, and the x-ray emissions will radically increase in power. And the radiation directed outward, into the accretion disk, will heat up the accretion disk, so when that falls onto the pulsar, you’ll get another super-powerful burst of x-rays.” Chamcha made a kind of exploding gesture with his hands. “And then Chee gets really fried.”

Severin felt himself mentally rock back on his heels. When the idea had first occurred to him, shaving in his bath that morning, it had seemed like a brilliant strike of lightning, and subsequent consideration had only made it seem better. He rubbed his chin for a moment as he considered.

Mojtahed, who apparently considered the discussion at an end, took a long, relieved drink of wine.

Severin decided he wasn’t done yet. “But between the two big bursts,” he said, “there’s nothing, right? The pulsar will actually turn off.”

An stubborn expression came onto Chamcha’s moon face. “For a short time, yes,” Chamcha said. “But I doubt that it would last more than a few seconds, not even if we threw all Surveyor at it. And if we got the timing wrong, Chee gets cooked.”

“And we don’t get medals,” Mojtahed pronounced.

“A few seconds is all Chee needs,” Severin said. He turned back to the display on the wall, and called up rows of figures and the Structured Mathematics Display. “Before breakfast I sent a message to Astronomer Shon-dan at the Chee Observatory,” he said, “requesting all available information on the pulsar— its mass, its accretion disk, the power of its x-ray beam. The reply just arrived, so let’s do the math.”

The math, when it was done, was discouraging. Even if Surveyor were packed with antihydrogen fuel, it would barely produce a blip in the pulsar’s x-ray yield.

“Sorry, my lord,” Chamcha said. “It was an ingenious idea, but it just didn’t work out.”

Mojtahed finished her stew and rattled the spoon in her bowl. “Yes, my lord. Sorry.” She had clearly dismissed the idea from her mind.

“Titan,” Severin said.

The others looked at him.

“Titan is a very large ship and it’s packed with antimatter and it’s just entered the system,” Severin said. “And Titan’s on lease to the Exploration Service, and Warrant Officer Junot is in command, and I outrank him. So— “ He smiled. “Maybe we’d better do the math again.”

*

There were six hundred people on Chee Station, and eight hundred forty thousand on the planet below. Two cargo ships were docked at the station, and if they discharged all their cargo they could take perhaps four thousand people, assuming the people were packed closely enough and a sufficient number of new toilets were installed.

Which left in excess of eight hundred thirty-six thousand people in danger on the planet’s surface, and that meant Martinez attended a lot of meetings.

Antiradiation shielding was scavenged from the station, and several of the manufacturing plants on the surface thought they could convert in time and produce some more, but most of the people on the planet were going to have to hide from the pulsar the old-fashioned way, in a deep hole, with a lot of dirt piled on the roof.

There was heavy equipment and construction material to provide enough shelter space for everyone, but the population wasn’t unanimous in their cooperation.

“The railroad workers want to take their families up the line and into the tunnels,” Allodorm told Martinez. “They think they’ll be safer with a mountain on top of them.”

Martinez glared from the window of his office on the station down at the blue-and-green planet below. His own reflection, heavy-browed and scowling, glowered back at him. Chee rotated slowly in the window frame as the station wheeled on its axis.

“They’ll be safer,” Martinez said, “until they try to leave.” He felt his voice rising in frustration. “How are they going to get their families down from the mountain over bridges that are brittle as icicles? On vehicles floating on electromagnets that may explode the second a current runs through them?” He looked at Allodorm and spoke with finality. “The railroad workers go into the bunkers like everyone else.”

“Yes, lord inspector.” Allodorm’s beautiful voice showed no sign of agitation at any point in the crisis. Martinez had to give him credit for that.

And even if he was a thief, Allodorm was working as hard as anyone to shelter Chee’s inhabitants. Martinez had to give him credit for that, too.

“I’ve heard from the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth,” Marcella said from around the cigarette she held fiercely between her teeth. “She has a plan to save the shuttles.”

The shuttles were designed to ferry cargo from low orbit to the surface, and were unable to achieve escape velocity and get far enough from Chee to avoid the pulsar. They would remain on the ground, with most of the other heavy equipment, and be subjected to x-ray bombardment and probably ruined.

Martinez hoped the Chee Company had good insurance.

He left the window and dropped heavily into the chair behind his desk. Pneumatics gave an outraged hiss.

“Is the Lady Mayor any kind of aeronautical engineer?” Martinez asked. “Has she actually consulted with the shuttle pilots?”

Marcella smiled. “The answer to the first question is no, and as for the second, I doubt it. She wants to put the shuttles in geosynchronous orbit on the side of Chee away from the pulsar.”

“That won’t work,” Martinez said. “The pulsar beam isn’t coming in along the plane of the ecliptic, it’ll come at an angle from galactic north. Anything in geosynchronous orbit will be fried. In order to get the planet between the shuttles and the beam, they’d have to go into a polar orbit and get the timing exactly right . . . “ He paused for a moment. “Wait a minute, that’s a good idea. Tell the shuttle pilots that they can proceed with the polar orbit, but they’re forbidden to take passengers. It’s too dangerous.”

As the provisional governor had declared a state of emergency, Martinez as the senior Fleet representative had become the absolute ruler of the Chee system. It was as if all the power of the Shaa conquerors had become invested in his person.

If the situation weren’t so desperate, he would be really enjoying himself.

“By the way,” Marcella added, “can you make use of the Kayenta? I’m happy to offer it, though it won’t hold very many refugees.”

“Thank you,” Martinez said. “Let me think about it.”

At another meeting, with Lord Ehl and the captains of the two merchant vessels, there was a discussion of who was going on the ships and who wasn’t.

“We should bring off the representatives of our company,” one of the captains said. “And then paying passengers, of course.”

“You will bring off gravid females,” Martinez said, “and children under the age of fifteen, each of whom will be accompanied by one parent. If there’s any room left, we can discuss allowing slightly older children aboard.”

There probably would be extra room: there weren’t many children on Chee, as the workers had been recruited chiefly from the young and unattached, and settler families hadn’t really started arriving yet.

“My owners will protest!” the captain said.

“That will be their privilege, after this is over.” Martinez turned to Lord Ehl. “You will place members of the Military Constabulary on the ships’ airlock doors and hatches,” he said. “I don’t want unauthorized people sneaking on board.”

“Yes, my lord.” Martinez thought he heard satisfaction in Ehl’s voice.

“No Fleet personnel will leave Chee till this is over,” Martinez said to Ehl later, after the captains had left. “It’s our job to stand between the citizens and danger, and if that means sucking up x-rays, so be it.”

“Er— yes, my lord.” Martinez thought he detected rather less satisfaction in Ehl’s tone than had been there a few moments before.

“I’m going to be the last person off Chee Station,” Martinez said. “You’ll be the next-to-last, so we’ll share an elevator.”

“Yes, my lord.” A question glowed in Ehl’s golden eyes. “We’re not staying in Station Command? It’s shielded.”

“There might be a structural failure of the station. If there isn’t, we’ll be able to get from the ground back to the station easily enough.”

Then Martinez recalled Marcella’s offer of Kayenta. “No, wait,” he said. “You’ll take the last elevator with the control room crew. I’ll see you off, then depart in Kayenta. That way I’ll be able to return to the station once the pulsar’s passed and make certain everything’s in order before you bring a crew back up the elevator.”

The plan pleased him. Last off the station, and first on again. It was a role that was not only proper for the senior officer in a crisis, but would reflect well on him.

It wasn’t as if he minded looking good.

It wasn’t until he left his office for the walk to the grandeur of the Senior Officers’ Quarters that he found out about another problem. A Terran with a wispy blond mustache and a jacket with a grey stripe came up to Martinez as he walked, and introduced himself as Hedgepath, a stock broker.

“There are brokers on Chee?” Martinez asked.

“Yes,” Hedgepath said, “though most of what I do is invest workers’ pay elsewhere in the empire. But Port Vipsania has its own little stock market, for locally-raised issues. We even have a futures market.”

“Congratulations,” Martinez said.

“Perhaps congratulations aren’t precisely in order.” Hedgepath touched his slight mustache. “There has been an, ah, problem with the market. The futures market in particular. In the hours before the announcement of the threat from the pulsar, there was a lot of selling. Agricultural futures in particular, though there was some selling in industrial and fishery futures as well.”

Martinez found himself nodding. “After word about the pulsar came out, the futures turned worthless.”

“You might understand that my clients have been complaining. And since you now seem to represent the civil authority now as well as the military, I thought I’d pass the complaints to you.” He touched his mustache again. “I couldn’t seem to make an appointment, by the way. I’m sorry I had to stop you on the street.”

Martinez considered this. Hedgepath’s lack of an appointment wasn’t necessarily an element of a deep conspiracy— a lot of people were trying to set meetings with him, and the Lai-own secretary that Lord Ehl had assigned him might well have assigned Hedgepath a low priority.

“I’ll look into that,” Martinez said. “In the meantime, I’d like to give you some names. Ledo Allodorm. Lord Pa Maq-fan. Lady Marcella Zykov.”

Hedgepath seemed surprised only by Marcella’s name “I can assure your lordship that Lady Marcella hasn’t done any selling that I know of,” Hedgepath said. “But there were sell orders from other Cree Company officials— Her-ryng and Remusat, for two.”

Martinez couldn’t put any faces to the names, though he’d very possibly met them at one or another of the banquets in his honor.

“I’d like you to retain all information of the trades,” Martinez said. “Things are urgent right now, and I won’t be able to deal with this till after the pulsar’s passed. Make sure the data is in hard as well as electronic form.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Can you give me contact information?”

Hedgepath sent his information to Martinez from his sleeve display, and Martinez told him that he would be in touch.

“By the way,” he said. “How’s Chee Company stock doing?”

“It’s worth about a third of what it was worth two days ago.”

Martinez told Terza this over supper. “I’d been starting to think well of Allodorm and Lord Pa,” Terza said. “They’ve been so responsive in the crisis.”

“And all the more responsive for knowing their money’s safe. And of course they’re working to save their own skins, and their company’s assets.”

There was a low chime from Martinez’ sleeve display. He gave a snarl; he’d forgotten to turn it off at dinner.

“Apologies,” he said to Terza, and answered.

The orange eyes of his Lai-own secretary gazed back at him from the display. “I beg your pardon, my lord. A communication has arrived from Lieutenant Severin, logged as personal, confidential, urgent, and immediate.”

Martinez exchanged glances with Terza. Severin wouldn’t use such a bundle of impressive adjectives without reason.

“Send it,” Martinez said.

When Martinez’ display indicated that the message had been downloaded, he broke the connection to his secretary and played the message.

“This is going to be complex,” Severin said, “and I’d be obliged if somewhere along the line you could check my math.”

*

Severin had considered not telling anyone of his plan to use Titan to shut off the pulsar. He was afraid that someone, frightened of the super-powerful bursts of x-rays that would both precede and follow the pulsar’s brief time of quiet, would refuse him permission to act.

He certainly knew better than to ask his own superiors on Laredo. The Exploration Service was an organization that had been starved of funding for ages: every time the government was reminded that the Service existed, it had only inspired them to trim the budget still further. The entire institutional culture of the Service was based on not calling attention to itself, and the culture hadn’t changed even though the budget had grown. Throwing away a whole ship full of antihydrogen was calling for attention, and with a vengeance: if Severin approached them with his scheme, their first instinct would refuse to do anything.

Yet it would be hard to carry out the operation secretly. Titan wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and when its crew took to the lifeboats while the giant ship itself burned for the pulsar at an acceleration that would have killed anyone aboard, someone might well take notice.

So Severin had decided to contact Martinez personally, trusting that the relationship that had developed in the war would continue to function. In the meantime he had told Titan’s crew to prepare to abandon the ship and to place it under remote control, and also ordered them to keep their orders secret for the present and not to transmit anything but routine messages to Chee or to anywhere else.

Severin didn’t want Titan asking their superiors for advice, either.

He was sleeping in his cabin when Martinez’ reply arrived. Severin was dreaming of warships that were also, secretly, submarines, submarines that fought a lonely covert war in the chill seas of watery planets like Hy-Oso, and he slowly became aware that the insistent chiming he heard wasn’t the sound of sonar, but his sleeve display.

The sleeve display was Severin’s only electronic contact with the universe, because the comm unit in his cabin was still nonfunctional. Severin called for lights, then remembered that fuse hadn’t been replaced either, and groped through the dark cabin for the uniform jacket that had been hung over the back of a chair. He triggered the display, heard from Chamcha that Lord Inspector Martinez had send him a message logged personal, urgent, and confidential, and told Chamcha to send it.

“Permission is tentatively granted to proceed with your project,” Martinez said. His face appeared upside-down in the display, and Severin craned his neck to get a better view.

“I’m ordering complete secrecy on this matter,” Martinez said. “You will censor all communication off Surveyor and order censorship on Titan as well. Absolutely nothing must get out. I’m going to explain Titan’s movements as a maneuver ordered by the Exploration Service high command.”

Severin could only stare at the inverted image.

Martinez’ eyes took on a more confiding glance. “Let’s hope you’re right about all this. I’ll check the math, and enjoy talking with you when it’s all over.”

The orange End Transmission symbol flashed into place on Severin’s sleeve. Thoughtfully he felt his way across the cabin and turned on the lights manually.

Total secrecy, he thought. Now that was interesting.

Clearly he wasn’t the only one here with a scheme up his sleeve.

*

“Total secrecy,” Martinez told Shon-dan. “I want this to be strictly between the two of us.”

“Yes, my lord.” The astronomer clacked her peg teeth in thought, then spoke hesitantly. “May I ask your lordship the reason for the secrecy?”

“People might be less than committed to the evacuations and the shelter-building program if they thought the shelters weren’t going to be needed. Even if the math checks there’s still too much that can go wrong with this scheme, and if the plan blows up, those shelters will be necessary.”

Shon-dan hesitated again. “Very good, my lord.”

“I want you to check these figures,” Martinez said, “and I’ll check them as well. And no one else is to know. Understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Because if anyone else finds out, I’ll know who blabbed, and I’ll throw you into that x-ray beam with my own hands.”

After hearing a series of heartfelt assurances from Shon-dan, Martinez ended the conversation. His dinner lay cold on the table before him. Terza lowered the cup of coffee from her lips and said, “I hope this means I’m not going to have to take that refugee ship.”

Martinez considered this. “No,” he decided, “you’re going aboard.”

Her mouth tightened. “Why?” she asked.

“Because you’re the Chen heir and mother of the next Chen heir,” Martinez said. “And so you will go on board the refugee ship and be gracious and accepting and thoughtful and considerate of the other passengers, because that’s what people expect of the next Lady Chen.”

Terza looked cross. “Damn,” she said.

“Just as I’ll be last off this station,” Martinez said, “and first on, because it’s what people expect of a war hero.”

Reluctant amusement tugged at Terza’s lips. “I haven’t noticed that you find being a hero much of a hardship.”

Martinez sipped his cold coffee. “Well,” he said, “not yet. But when I’m old and mumbling in my rocking chair by the fire, and multitudes of citizens come to me begging to be rescued from some cosmic menace or other, I’m probably going to find it all very inconvenient.”

“No doubt,” Terza said.

Martinez signaled to Alikhan to fill his coffee cup.

“You’ll have to excuse me for the next few hours,” he told Terza. “I have to confirm all of Severin’s calculations.”

Terza rose from her chair. “I’ll start the job of being gracious and accepting, then, and leave you to your work.”

*

Martinez’ calculations supported those of Severin, and more importantly Shon-dan’s supported them both. Martinez called Ring Command to tell them that Titan and Surveyor would be engaged in a series of maneuvers, and that the sensor operators should be told to disregard them. “Put a memo on the sensor display,” Martinez said. “I don’t want to get a call from Command whenever a new sensor operator goes on watch.”

Then it was back to the endless series of planning meetings. Shelters were being dug with furious efficiency, roofed, and then covered with dirt. The accommodations were primitive, but few conveniences were required by a population that would be in the shelters for less than an hour.

The first of the two refugee ships was sent off, with four thousand aboard, mostly children. The ship would boost far enough away to be safe from the pulsar, and could then return to Chee or continue on to Laredo, depending on whether Chee Station survived or not.

The second ship left two days later. Martinez kissed Terza goodbye at the airlock door, and watched her drift aboard in an elegant swirl of grace and gallantry. Martinez paused for a moment of admiration, and then turned to drift past long lines of refugees patiently waiting to board, each tethered to a safety line as they floated weightless in the great docking space.

Some unused to weightlessness looked green and ill. Martinez sped past them before the inevitable consequences began to manifest themselves.

He made his way to Command, and encountered Lord Ehl leaving. Ehl braced in salute as he drifted past, then recovered in time to snag a handhold on the wall. He made a nervous gesture with his free hand, then stuffed a sheet of paper in a pocket.

“Is something wrong?” Martinez said.

“No,” Ehl began. “Well, yes. There have been some arrests, people who got onto the refugee ship that weren’t supposed to be there. Officials of the shipping company, apparently.” He lifted the paper from his pocket, then returned it. “I have their names, but they’ll have to be checked.”

“Do you need my help?”

“No, my lord, I thank you.”

“Very well. Once you find out for certain who they are, ship them down the skyhook and put them in the deepest dungeon on Chee.”

There were no dungeons on Chee, so far as Martinez knew, but perhaps they’d build one.

From Command Martinez followed the saga of the stowaways, who were marched off the ship by the military constabulary. The refugee ship was given permission to depart, and the enormous vessel gently backed from the station until it reached a safe enough distance to light its torch.

Martinez said another silent farewell to Terza as the displays showed her ship building speed, then took a covert look at Titan. Titan itself was boosting at nearly twenty gravities toward its rendezvous with the pulsar, a speed that would have killed any crew on board. The icon representing Titan on the sensor displays had a large text box attached to it, saying the ship was engaged in maneuvers. The two lifeboats containing its crew were on their way to their rendezvous with Surveyor, and had been given the cover of a mission to resupply the crippled craft.

If anyone in Command ever bothered to check the ship’s heading and acceleration, they would have had a surprise. But the staff had an emergency on its hands, and much to occupy them; the sensor displays were tuned to the awesome might of the x-ray beam spinning ever closer, and a distant ship that did not call attention to itself was something that floated only on the margins of their attention, like a lily floating in the distant reaches of a pond.

No queries regarding Titan came to Martinez’ attention. One shelter after another was certified, and the population put to rehearsing their evacuation schemes. At the last moment the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth came up with another plan: she wanted to put much of the population of her town into several of the large containers that had brought goods from orbit, and sink them below the surface of the bay for the duration of the emergency. Martinez, torn between irritation and hilarity, told her that it was too late to change the plans, and she should complete all conventional shelters in her town.

Lord Pa and Allodorm were on the ground, coordinating last-minute emergency and evacuation work. Personnel on Chee Station were sent to the surface, leaving a skeleton crew behind. The two huge rotating wheels were braked to a stop, and the antimatter reactor powered down. Even the emergency lighting was turned off in most of the station to keep surges from following the power cables. Kayenta was readied at the airlock, with Marcella and select Meridian Company personnel aboard, a team that would return to the station with Martinez for a survey before anyone else was allowed to return to the station. One by one the displays and work spaces at Ring Command were shut down, leaving live only the boards that would be needed to begin the restart.

Martinez, Lord Ehl, and the other crew left the darkened, eerily silent Command room and floated along guide cables to the entrance to the great elevator car. Martinez accepted their salute, wished Ehl luck, and watched them file aboard. The car began its descent, diving smoothly along the cable to its vanishing point in the green land mass below, and then Martinez headed for Kayenta’s berth.

When Kayenta departed the station, it would go into a polar orbit calculated to place the mass of the planet between itself and the pulsar for the critical few seconds, just as the shuttles were doing. Martinez would be able return to the station after less than an hour’s absence.

With all the ventilators shut down the air was perfumed by the scent of decaying polymers. Empty and without lights the docks were a monumental, indistinct darkness, vast as space itself. The beam of Martinez’ hand flash vanished in the blackness. At a great distance Martinez saw the glow that marked Kayenta’s docking port, lit not by station power but by the yacht’s own power supply. Martinez placed his feet carefully against a wall and kicked off, and was pleased to find that he was straight on course for the airlock.

Two figures bulked large by the door, their feet tucked into handles on the wall, their arms reaching for Martinez. As he drifted closer, he saw they were both Torminel. They wore only shorts and vests over their thick grey and black fur, and their huge eyes, adapted for hunting at night, glittered as they tracked Martinez.

Two of Marcella’s survey team, apparently.

Martinez flew into their arms, and they caught him and absorbed his momentum with ease. A furry hand closed on each of his, and placed his hands on handholds by the airlock.

“Thank you,” Martinez said. He tried to shift his left hand, but the Torminel on his left kept it pinned.

The other Torminel, he saw, had a med injector in his free hand.

He barely had time to register alarm before he felt the cool touch of the injector against his neck.

And then he had all the time in the world.

*

There was silence in the control room, broken only by the sound of his breath, by the pulse that beat a quick march in his chest.

Severin watched from his acceleration cage as Titan flew toward its objective, its engines firing a last series of powerful burns that would inject it into the pulsar’s accretion disk at exactly the right angle.

The colossal gravity of the pulsar would tear the ship to atoms, hurling its cargo of antihydrogen into the spinning disk. A great swath of the disk’s hydrogen would be annihilated in a ferocious burst of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and pi-mesons. A percentage of these particles would fall into the neutron star and pump up its x-ray emissions. Another percentage would fly outward into the accretion disk, heating the hydrogen there to blazing temperatures so that when it fell into the pulsar another fierce megaburst of x-rays would blaze forth.

But in between the two ferocious blasts would come eighteen minutes of silence. The mechanism that produced the life-destroying double lance of the pulsar would be shut down.

Or at least it would if Severin’s calculations were correct.

“Fifteen seconds,” Chamcha reported unnecessarily. The seconds were ticking down in a corner of Severin’s display.

Titan was standing on a vast, blazing tail of annihilated matter. Severin was using the cargo ship as a giant torpedo, aimed straight for a deadly enemy.

“Ten seconds,” Chamcha said.

“Oh shut up,” Severin murmured. Chamcha must have more acute ears that Severin thought, because the sensor tech maintained a resolute silence right up till Titan vanished into the larger blip that was the pulsar and its brown companion.

Severin’s attention immediately turned to the pulsar’s rotating x-ray beam, which his display had colored a lurid green. The reaction was immediate: the beam, rotating twelve times per second, blazed into an emerald fury. If the beam hit Chee now, it would strip the planet down to its mantle.

Severin could only hope that the pulsar would switch off when it was supposed to.

And suddenly he thought: the statue!

That’s how he’d work it. Frenella, the gamine, would send Eggfont the little statue of Lord Mince, and that would tip Eggfont to Mince’s relationship with Lady Belledrawers.

He felt a little shiver of delight as he contemplated the perfection of the device. And, as he waited to see whether his plan for Titan would work, he thought about what Eggfont would do next.

*

There was a faint grey mist that swirled through the air, an insistent electric humming in his ears. His fingers and toes tingled as if he’d rubbed them with sandpaper. A furry animal seemed to have got lodged partway down his throat.

With a convulsive heave of his chest he tried to expel the object in his throat. He made several attempts before he realized that the animal was in fact his tongue. His mouth was absolutely dry and his tongue scraped painfully against the roof of his mouth.

He closed his mouth and tried to summon saliva. He worked his jaw and throat muscles for several long moments before he managed to produce a little moisture.

Having relieved some of his discomfort he then he tried to work out where he was. The grey mist had darkened, and the humming sound had largely faded. He could feel nothing, not even air moving against his skin. It was as if he’d been packed in cotton up to his neck.

He touched himself just to assure himself that he was still there. He felt the familiar uniform tunic, the medal of the Golden Orb at his neck, and he bent— knelt?— to feel his legs in their trousers, with the shoes still on his feet. There was something that bobbed and interfered with his right hand, and he took hold of it and realized it was his hand flash, attached to his wrist with an elastic lanyard.

At this point he came to the realization that he was in free fall. He was in darkness and in free fall and probably he had never left Chee Station, he was floating somewhere in one of its huge overdesigned open spaces.

A jolt of adrenaline hit Martinez then, a sudden hot burning along as his nerves as he remembered the pulsar. If he’d never left the station, then he was still vulnerable to the burning x-rays.

He raised his left forearm before his face and whispered, past his painfully dry tongue and through dry lips.

“Display: show time.”

Yellow numerals flashed onto Martinez’ sleeve, pulsing in time to the speeding of the seconds. Through the grey fog Martinez tried to fit to the numbers to the chronology of the last days, and with a chill of horror he realized that the pulsar’s beam should have struck nearly five minutes before.

Without willing it he began patting himself again, as if in search of a wound. Partway through the action he realized its absurdity, but he couldn’t make himself stop until he had assured himself, again, that his parts were all where they were supposed to be.

He didn’t feel as if he’d been blasted through with x-rays. He felt strange, with the grey fog drifting past his eyes and the deep electric hum a distant presence in his ears, but he didn’t feel ill.

He tried to remember what might have happened to put him in this situation. He recalled leaving Command with Lord Ehl and the last of the station crew. He couldn’t remember anything that happened after that.

Then, with a song of relief that chorused in his bones, he remembered Severin. Severin must have succeeded in his effort to switch off the pulsar.

Good old Severin! he thought wildly. Severin had come through! It made Martinez want to sing the “Congratulations” round from Lord Fizz Takes a Holiday.

Instead he wiped his mouth and tried to summon saliva into his mouth. The yellow seconds ticked by in his sleeve display. He still couldn’t remember how he got here.

He wondered if there had been an accident, but he thought not. An accident would have resulted in more damage, not least to him.

Martinez remembered the hand flash hanging off his wrist, and he reached for it and switched it on, pointing it above his head. The beam vanished into the darkness without encountering anything. He panned the beam down, and at a downward angle the beam found a wall painted a dark grey. Martinez tracked the beam along the wall until he encountered a large sliding cargo door, on which were painted in white the numerals 7-03. Which meant Warehouse Three, Docking Bay Seven.

Bay Seven was where Kayenta had been docked. Apparently he’d got as far as Kayenta’s berth before . . . before what?

Perhaps the yacht had left early and stranded him on the station. But in that case, it seemed odd that Martinez had no memory of it.

The cargo door, Martinez saw, had handholds by it. There wasn’t a lot of point in hanging in midair and waiting for something to happen. Perhaps he ought to get to somewhere where he could make something happen.

He swam awkwardly in midair until he had his back to the cargo door, then he took off a shoe and hurled it as hard as he could in the opposite direction.

Equal and opposite reaction, though unfortunately the masses were unequal. Martinez began drifting very slowly toward the cargo door while pitching backwards in long, slow circles.

Several seconds later, he heard a clang as the shoe hit something on the other side of the cargo bay.

The act of throwing his shoe left him panting and out of breath. Something was clearly wrong with him physically. It was going to take him a while to reach the cargo door, and while he slowly drifted and tumbled he thought about how he had got here, and why he couldn’t remember.

He had been drugged, he thought. He had been drugged and only the fact of his veins being full of narcotics had prevented him from realizing it earlier.

As he tumbled, his hair flying in front of his eyes, he felt a sudden chill as he realized what had happened.

He’d been drugged and left to be killed by the pulsar, but the person who had left him to die hadn’t known that Titan was going to shut off the pulsar, and Martinez had survived.

Which meant that as soon as the person who had left him to die worked out that the x-ray beam hadn’t hit the station, he was going to have to come back and finish the job.

Martinez almost wrenched his neck as his head darted around, staring into the darkness for his attacker. Who could be lurking on the station, and loading his gun or his med injector even now.

The wall rotated closer and Martinez reached out to grab one of the handholds by door 7-03. The drug almost made him miss, but he touched it with his fingertips and that slowed his rotation slightly, so that when he hit the wall and bounced he was able to make another grab for a different handhold and brought himself to a stop.

It occurred to him that his hand flash was very possibly making a target of him, so he turned it off and tried to think where he needed to go next.

The person who had tried to kill him could have hidden easily on the nearly-deserted station, and then from hiding to strike as Martinez moved from the elevator to Kayenta. Wherever the assassin had hidden, though, there was only place the assassin would be now, and that was in shielded Ring Command, where he’d be safe from the pulsar. Martinez should definitely avoid Ring Command.

The problem was that Ring Command had all he’d need to establish contact with the outside world: control of all communications systems, the antennae, and the power supply to start everything up.

Martinez tried to think where else he might find communication gear, and then sudden light dazzled his eyes.

Across the docking bay, the floodlights at one of the ports had just lit. A ship had docked, and was powering up the airlock through its electrical connection.

Kayenta! Martinez felt his heart give a leap. Kayenta had come to rescue him!

He gathered his legs under him, feet pressed against the wall, ready to spring to the airlock and greet his rescuers the second they came through the door.

And then he hesitated. There was something about the sight of the distant airlock, surrounded by its glowing lights, that caused him unease.

Why? Why was someone trying to kill him?

He hadn’t stopped to think about that before.

He had found out that the Meridian Company had been committing massive fraud. That might be worth killing over, he supposed, though assassination seemed an immoderate response.

It was so uncivilized. They might at least have tried to bribe him first.

Kayenta, in any case, wasn’t a Meridian Company ship; it belonged to the Chee Company, owned principally by the Martinez family. Lady Marcella Zykov, a Chee company executive and a near relation of the Martinez clan, was on board and in charge.

But there were Meridian Company personnel on board, to inspect and help restart the station. Some of them might have been given orders concerning Martinez and his health.

Perhaps, Martinez thought, he shouldn’t jump straight to Kayenta. Perhaps he should first hide, and then see who left the airlock, and if they had large firearms.

He glanced around the huge space and found no place to hide. To his left was a corridor, rather distant, that led to Ring Command— and he didn’t want to go that way, in case an assassin was heading in the other direction. To the right was a huge bulkhead door that led to another cargo bay, but that had been closed and it would require station power to open it.

That left one or another of the warehouse spaces. 7-03 was as good as any.

The cargo door would require a power assist, but each warehouse space also had a personnel hatch, and the hatches were extremely well balanced so that weightless people could use them. Martinez pushed toward it and snagged a handhold. The hatch opened in complete silence. Martinez slipped in feet-first, then drew the hatch partly shut, so that he still had a view of Kayenta’s airlock.

The air in the warehouse was close and has an aromatic scent, something like cardamom. Martinez looked over the interior with his hand flash and saw it was packed with standardized shipping containers, all in bright primary colors, stacked atop one another and strapped down to keep them from drifting. Because the weightless conditions permitted it, the containers were strapped to all six surfaces, including those he might arbitrarily designate as walls and ceiling. There was very little open space in the room, only a straight square tunnel that stretched to the back and that would permit a containers to be maneuvered in and out.

No real place to hide, he realized. He should have chosen another storage room.

Martinez was considering a jump to the next warehouse when he heard the airlock doors open and knew it was too late. He peered over the sill of the hatch and strained to see past the glare of the floodlights. There were at least three figures in the airlock, and from their barrel torsos and squat, powerful legs, Martinez knew the first two for Torminel.

An alarm rang in Martinez’ mind. He didn’t like the sight of those Torminel, and even though he couldn’t remember why, he knew very well that he didn’t want to show himself now.

“Lord Inspector?” one of the Torminel called, lisping the words past her fangs. “Lord Inspector, are you there?”

The sound echoed and died away in the vast empty dockyard.

The Torminel turned on bright flashlights and began shining them across the big room. Martinez remembered how well their huge eyes could see in the darkness and shrank from the hatch sill.

“Look!” the other Torminel called. “It’s his shoe!”

While the Torminel were inspecting the mystery of the shoe that was floating by itself in the vast room, Martinez drew the hatch shut and locked it down. Unfortunately the manual lock mechanism could be worked from the outside, but at least it when it began to move it would provide a bit of warning.

What Martinez really needed was a weapon.

He panned along the wall with his hand flash and saw a small locker on the wall. He drifted toward it and opened it.

In the locker were spare light globes, a pad of stick-on labels for shipping containers, a pair of fire extinguishers, pairs of work gloves adapted for different species, large reels of strapping for holding down crates and containers, and tough plastic clamps for tying down the strapping. But what chiefly attracted Martinez’ attention were the two shiny aluminum pry bars, each as long as his leg, that were used to wedge the containers into their proper places. They were octagonal in shape until the business end, where they narrowed into flat, slightly curved blades.

Martinez reached for one and drew it from the clips that held it in place. It was lighter than it looked. He held the bar under his arm and drew out a reel of strapping, thinking that perhaps he could use it to tie down the hatch mechanism and keep anyone from opening the door.

He closed the locker and drifted back to the hatch. He studied the closing mechanism and then the reel of tape.

Martinez did his best, tangling the mechanism in a web of tape. The work left him out of breath, and he panted for air while he gripped one of the handholds next to the door. Once he’d caught his breath he moved to one end of the door, so that he wouldn’t be caught like a fly in a bottle once the door opened. He tucked his feet into the handgrips at the top of the door— the metal chilled his stockinged foot— and he took a few experimental swipes with the pry bar. It cut the air with a particularly nasty hiss. With his feet planted firmly he could be confident in doing a heartening amount of damage if he needed to.

And then he turned off his hand flash and waited in the darkness.

Time passed, over twenty minutes according to the flashing yellow numerals on his sleeve display. From time to time he took a swipe with the bar to keep his muscles warm and supple. He was feeling better and thought that the drug had almost worn off.

Martinez had begun to believe that the Torminel had gone elsewhere when he heard a thump on the far side of the wall on which he was standing, followed by a metallic clang on the door. His heart gave a leap and he felt the sizzle of adrenaline along his nerves. He made sure his feet were firmly in the handholds and cocked the pry bar over his right shoulder.

There were another pair of thuds against the door or the warehouse wall. Martinez felt the vibration against his feet. He heard speech but couldn’t make out the words. Then the latching mechanism began to creak open.

And jammed. The tangle of strapping was working.

He heard voices from the other side, more urgent his time, and then there was a kind of slamming noise from the mechanism, and the hatch popped open.

Martinez blinked in the light pouring in from one of the big hand lights. He was suddenly aware of sweat patches all damp under his raised arms, and the fact that his mouth was painfully dry again. He couldn’t understand why there was so much moisture under his arms when there was none in his mouth.

“It’s him,” one of the Torminel said in an urgent whisper. “He did that, with the tape. He’s in there.”

“My lord?” the other called. “Lord Inspector? You can come out. Everything is safe.”

There was a moment in which the Torminel waited for an answer, and then he told his partner, “Hold my legs while I go in.”

Martinez felt cramp in his feet where they were braced in the handholds. He shifted the pry bar slightly.

The Torminel appeared in the hatch. His back was to Martinez, and he was peering dead ahead, into the long tunnel surrounded on all sides by shipping containers. He had a flash in one hand and a stun baton in the other. A light on the stun baton winked amber.

The blade of the pry bar caught the Torminel in the side of the head and hurled him violently into the hatch coaming. The flash flew from his limp fingers and tumbled, casting wild strobing lights across the expanse of the warehouse. The stun baton tumbled in another direction. A line of irregular crimson blobs flew from the Torminel’s head and resolved themselves as they flew into perfect spherical droplets of blood.

Someone pulled the Torminel out of the hatchway, and then there was a sudden squalling noise that froze Martinez’ blood, and the second Torminel appeared. Her hair stood on end in her rage and her head looked like a giant puffball with huge angry dark eyes and ferocious white fangs. She knew where Martinez was and one hand clutched the sill of the hatch while the other stabbed at Martinez with a stun baton.

Martinez snatched his shod foot out of the hand grip to keep the baton from hitting his leg. He swung the pry bar, but the Torminel managed to cushion the impact with one arm. She flew against the hatch coaming anyway, but bounced back with the stun baton thrust out like a sword blade. Martinez swung again, awkward with only one foot to anchor him.

This time he connected with the Torminel’s head, but the impact jerked his stockinged foot out of the hand grip and sent him spinning slowly toward a side wall. The Torminel drifted limp in the hatchway. Her fur had relaxed and become smooth again.

Martinez hit a bright orange shipping container and bounced. Before he got clear he managed to push wildly with one foot and get himself on a trajectory more or less for the hatchway. His breath rasped in his throat. The pry bar felt slippery in his hands.

Somebody pulled the unconscious Torminel out of the hatchway. Martinez’ heart sank at the knowledge that there was at least one more assassin.

One of the stun batons floated toward him and he snatched at it with one hand, careful to take it by the safe end. He looked at the readouts and saw that the baton was charged and set at maximum.

He looked at the hatch again and he saw that he was going to miss it, drifting past without getting close enough to seize one of the hand grips. For a few seconds Martinez was going to be in plain sight of whoever was on the other side, and then he would have to wait till he hit the far wall and push off again.

His fists clenched around his two weapons. His eyes were fixed on the hatchway as it came closer, at the erratic bouncing light that danced through the opening.

He drifted slowly past and narrowed his eyes against the light. On the other side, Lady Marcella Zykov wrestled with the limp form of one of the Torminel, trying to lash him down to a hand grip with his own belt

Marcella looked at Martinez and with an expression of great annoyance on her face reached into a pocket and came up with a pistol. The pistol was small and made of plastic and red in color.

Martinez threw the stun baton at her. The reaction sent him tumbling slowly backwards. The pistol made a vast noise and Martinez felt the heat of the bullet flying past his chin.

Martinez craned his neck frantically to keep track of what was happening. The recoil of the pistol had pitched Marcella backwards, rotating at much greater speed than Martinez, and as her legs flew up to replace her head the stun baton struck her on the back of the thigh. There was a crackle and a sudden electric snap of ozone. Marcella gave a cry and spasmed into a foetal ball as her stronger flexors won the battle over her extensors.

Martinez lost track of her as he flew past the hatch. He hit a shipping container and jumped off for the hatch. When he arrived at the hatch he checked his motion, lined up on the distant form of Marcella tumbling end over end, and launched himself for her, the pry bar poised over his head like a battle axe.

A battle axe wasn’t needed. He caught Marcella easily enough and found that she was frozen into her ball and barely conscious. With some effort he levered the pistol out of her clenched fist.

Once he had the pistol he was reasonably certain that he was in possession of the only firearm on Chee Station.

He intended to take full advantage of this position.

*

“It was panic,” Martinez said. “Marcella saw the message and panicked.”

“That would be the message addressed to me, from my friend Bernardo in the Ministry,” Terza said. The scent of her breakfast coffee floated agreeably on the air. “The message informing me of the principal owners of the Meridian Company, the answer to the query the emergency we had rather forgotten about. Lord Ehl got a look at the contents as it got routed through the communication center at Meridian Command, and he intercepted it.” She lifted the corner of a napkin tucked around a pastry in a silver wire basket, and offered it. “This is the last. Would you like it?”

“Thank you,” said Severin. He took the pastry and waved away a pair of large purple bees that were hovering over the jam. He spread jam and turned to Martinez.

“But why did Lord Ehl intercept the message?”

“Because his name was on it. He owns something like four percent of the company, and his Tir-bal clan owns more. They’re clients of Lord Pa’s Maq-fan clan, which is heavily invested as well.”

Terza sipped her coffee. “Every time Lord Ehl approved an overrun on Chee Station, his net worth grew that much larger.”

Severin chewed his pastry as he gazed through the oak alley at the distant Rio Hondo. The rising sun had outlined each leaf in silver. The shadows beneath the oaks were very dark. Tart and sweet flavors exploded on his tongue.

“I suppose Marcella’s name was on the list, too,” he said. “That’s why she panicked.”

“Marcella had two percent,” Martinez said.

“Two percent hardly seems worth killing someone over,” Terza said.

Martinez looked at her. “Marcella’s very focused on outcomes,” he said. “Processes don’t matter as much, they’re just a means to an end. If there’s a reward, she grabs it; if there’s an obstacle, she removes it. We should have taken note of the efficient way she cleaned Lord Mukerji of his money.

“And once she was caught,” he added, “once I got her gun and had her tied up with strapping, she began working toward a new outcome, which was a lessening of her sentence. She confessed to everything and blamed it all on Pa and Lord Ehl. So that once I’d restarted the station, and had Lord Ehl and a company of military constables come up from the surface, I was able to put Lord Ehl under arrest as soon as he stepped out of the elevator doors.”

“So far,” Severin said, “our players have four percent and two percent. Who really owns the Meridian Company?

“Allodorm had ten percent,” Terza said. “He got it when the Meridian Company bought out his engineering company. But the largest owner was Cassilda’s father, Lord Zykov, followed by other members of the Zykov clan.”

Surprise murmured through Severin’s veins. “Must be interesting to be robbed by your in-laws,” he said.

“Not just robbed,” Terza said. “Lord Zykov’s plan was to bankrupt the Chee Company, then buy the remnants with its own money.”

Severin turned his head at the sound of footsteps coming out of the house. Lord Roland Martinez strolled toward them, a wry smile on his lips. He was dressed casually, in a blousy white cotton shirt and faded red baggy drawstring trousers.

“How’s Cassilda?” Terza asked.

“The doctor says she won’t deliver for a few hours yet.”

Cassilda had gone into labor the previous evening.

Roland leaned over his brother’s shoulder to peer into the silver wire basket. “Didn’t you leave me any breakfast?”

“We didn’t know you’d be coming,” Terza said. “You can call the kitchen.”

“I don’t have a comm unit on me,” Roland said. “Gare, could you call the kitchens and get me some pastry and a pair of shirred duck eggs?” He sat heavily in one of the whitewashed metal chairs.

Martinez, looking resigned, made the call on his sleeve comm. Severin finished his pastry and freshened his coffee from the silver pot. He looked at Roland.

“Yes?” Roland said.

“Beg pardon?”

“You had a question on your face.”

“I— ” Severin started, and then decided to take a more tactful approach. “It must be hard for you, with Lady Cassilda about to give birth and her father sitting on a pile of money he’s stolen from you.”

Roland grinned. “No. That makes it easier, actually.” He poured himself a cup of coffee, then looked at Severin.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “I don’t know if Lord Zykov gives a damn about Marcella or not, but if he ever wants to see his daughter again, or see his grandchild ever, he’ll do exactly what we tell him.”

Severin felt his mouth hanging open, and closed it. “I see,” he said.

“You understand,” Roland said, “Allodorm and Lord Pa got too greedy— they didn’t just cheat us, they cheated the Fleet. And that’s not civil or corporate law, that’s a violation of the Praxis, and the penalties are torture and death. Cassilda had some stock in the Meridian Company, and we can make a case against her.”

Can you do that? Severin wondered.

Apparently he could.

“Any case is amazingly easy,” Roland went on. “There’s scads of information— we had inspectors on the ground, and other informers as well, but they all reported to Marcella, and she sat on the information and told the others that adjustments were being made.”

“Plus of course the conspirators are all informing on one another,” Martinez said.

“So in return for not laying the information before the Legion of Diligence,” Roland said, “we’re asking for half of Lord Zykov’s interest in the company, plus all of Lord Pa’s, and Allodorm’s, and Marcella’s. Lord Pa will pay us a large fine, enough to knock him flat for some time. Marcella and Allodorm will be locked up until we’re reasonably certain we’ve wrung out of them every zenith they possess.”

“And the first thing I did,” Martinez said, “was procure Lord Ehl’s resignation from the Fleet.”

Roland shrugged, as if this was of no concern. “We’ll have his shares, too, of course.” He adopted a contemplative look. “I’m thinking of having Lord Zykov pass over his elder daughter and make Cassilda his heir. So everything comes to us in the end.”

Martinez looked at his brother with dissatisfaction showing in his narrowed eyes. “Speaking as the one who got shot at,” he said, “I’m not sure I’m happy that everyone gets off with just fines and spankings. I wonder what you’d have done if Marcella had actually succeeded in killing me.”

Again Severin felt a line of tension between the two brothers, and thought again that the two might not like each other very much.

Roland very coolly raised his coffee to his lips. “I suppose that after Marcella was good and bankrupt,” he said, “she might have had an accident.”

Martinez looked at Roland for a moment, then shrugged. Terza reached over and patted his hand.

“Thanks to Commander Severin,” she said, “we’re not concerned with that outcome.”

“Not so much me,” Severin said, “as— ” Then, “Commander?”

A tight little smile played across Roland’s lips. “You will not find us ungrateful, my lord. We’ve spoken to the higher echelon of the Exploration Service here, and explained in some detail our considerable admiration for you, and my understanding is that you’ll be promoted and given Surveyor once it’s out of dock.”

Severin goggled at him. You can do that? he wondered.

“In addition,” Martinez said, “my father is granting you several sections of prime Chee real estate. You should have a very rich estate to retire to when you leave the Service.”

“And I believe there will be a substantial cash reward from the Chee Company,” Roland said. “Though I understand we’ll have to get your superiors’ permission.”

Severin’s mind whirled. “But,” he said, “I didn’t really do that much.”

“Other than save the Chee Company’s entire investment?” Roland smiled.

“I shut off the pulsar, yes, but the reason that Captain Martinez hasn’t joined the Great Masters is that he insisted that what I did with Titan remain secret. I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Martinez grinned. “I had to protect my investments,” he said.

Severin looked at him. “My lord?”

“I took the money I won from Lord Mukerji and bought every futures contract on Chee from the poor fools Allodorm and Pa sold them to,” Martinez said. “Some will be worthless, no doubt, but I believe I’m now a rich man.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled out at the world. “I’ve never actually had money of my own before,” he said. “It’s all come from Terza or my father. I wonder what I’ll do with it?”

“The possibilities are staggering,” Terza murmured.

Martinez looked at his brother. “And of course some of the fines from the conspirators will go to reimburse the investors who were cheated.”

Roland was annoyed. “They were gambling, really. It’s not as if they can complain. It was the futures market, for all’s sake.”

“Roland.” The voice was firm.

Roland flapped his hands. “Very well. If you insist. But if you go on this way, you’re going to make me wish Marcella were a better shot.”

Martinez smiled. “I seek only perfect justice for the entire universe.”

“Ah!” Roland said happily. “My shirred eggs!”

A smiling white-haired servant brought Roland his breakfast and another basket of pastry. Terza looked at Severin from over the rim of her coffee cup.

“Will you be seeing Lady Liao while Surveyor’s in dock?” she asked.

Severin darted a glance to the opal ring on his finger. Does everyone know? he wondered.

“I’ve sent her a message,” he said. “But I imagine a lot will depend on her schedule.” And her husband’s.

“Any plans for the meantime?” Terza asked.

“Well,” Severin said, “I’m thinking of building a puppet theater.”

There was a moment of silence broken only by the calls of morning birds.

“That’s original,” Martinez murmured.

“Do you think so?” Severin asked. “Let me tell you about it.”

And, as the long morning stretched before them, he did.

 

THE END

 

 

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Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

 

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Voice of the Whirlwind

Days of Atonement

Aristoi

Metropolitan

City on Fire

Ambassador of Progress

Angel Station

The Rift

Implied Spaces

 

Divertimenti

The Crown Jewels

House of Shards

Rock of Ages

 

Dread Empire's Fall

The Praxis

The Sundering

Conventions of War

Investments

 

Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

This Is Not a Game

Deep State

The Fourth Wall

 

Collections

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Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories