Sula managed not to break stride as her glance crossed with Martinez’s. Heat flared suddenly beneath her collar. She managed a nod, and he half raised a hand in greeting, and then Sula was past.
She hadn’t disgraced herself, Sula thought, because she’d expected to see Martinez here. He had the Golden Orb, after all, and she’d be expected to salute him. He would of course be here along with his grasping, pushing, scheming family, and it had been a matter of course that they might meet at some point.
Obviously Martinez had not given the matter equal consideration. She was gratified by the stunned look on his face, as if she’d just walloped him in the forehead with a mallet.
Reflecting on that moment as she walked with Lord Durward, she found more disquieting the reaction of Terza Chen, who had stood with a drink in her hand toward the back of the box, and whose dark eyes had turned from Sula to her husband, then back again as she absorbed the tableau that fate had spread before her. Terza’s lovely, highly trained face betrayed no change of expression, let alone the gloating triumph that Sula imagined lurked behind her eyes.
“He’s fled on his yacht,” said Lord Durward, “though I can’t imagine where he thinks he can run to.”
Sula’s mind tried to reel in the last few moments of conversation. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The band drowned you out. Who are you talking about?”
“Cosgrove, the seaweed man,” said Lord Durward. “He’s bankrupt, and he’s running for it.” He snorted. “As if that will help. If you ask me, it’s unfortunate that the tradition of honorable suicide seems to be falling into disuse.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Cosgrove,” Sula said. She was still thinking of Terza Chen’s eyes, and what shadows might lie behind them.
“Not a lot to know. Pushy little beast, made a lot of money, then lost it all.” Satisfaction glowed in Lord Durward’s voice.
“Here we are,” Sula said. Macnamara, in dress uniform as a constable first class, opened the gate to Sula’s box and braced in salute as she entered. Her other three servants were present, led by Engineer First Class Shawna Spence, the third member of Action Team 491 that had formed the core of the Secret Army during the bitter ground war fought in the capital. Also on hand was Sula’s Cree chef, offering a tray of canapés, and Master Clerk Ty-fran, a Lai-own veteran who served as her personal secretary.
Though Sula had a firm prejudice against having servants cluttering up her life, the last two had proved necessary as she’d eased into her existence as a convocate. Dinners and receptions were her new way of life, and a cook was a convenient accessory. A secretary had been required to handle, or at least supervise, the vast correspondence entailed by her new position, to file all the documents that passed across her desk, and to keep track of her appointments.
Because she was poor by High City standards and a little sensitive about having to fund her own staff, she was happy to draw the cook and secretary from the Fleet and let the Fleet pay their stipend. They allowed a captain four servants, after all.
The air smelled of sunlit grass and grilled meats. Her guests for the afternoon were largely from the military, though not always from the regular military. Fer Tuga, the elderly Daimong who during the war had achieved a deadly reputation as the Axtattle Sniper. The gaunt survivor Sidney, with his upturned mustachios, deep hacking cough, and his pipe of hashish, who had designed cheap, easily manufactured guns for Sula’s Secret Army. Lieutenant Lady Rebecca Giove, who had served as second officer aboard Sula’s frigate Confidence, and who—without the benefit of service patronage—had been unemployed since the Supreme Commander’s malevolence had sent Confidence into dock for an unnecessary refit.
A new acquaintance was Ming Lin, who as a pigtailed teenager had been a half-crazed bomb thrower for the Secret Army and was now a graduate student at the Zanshaa College of Economics. She wore her pale rose-colored hair in a tangled updo and wore as well the commoner’s black drill college gown with the soft round cap of a graduate student—had she been a Peer, the gown would have been silk and the cap would have had a pompon. The cap was tilted at a stylish angle, and she held a highball in one hand. Sula employed Lin part-time as an adviser for her work on the Committee for Banking and Exchange. She was most useful as a translator, rendering the specialized jargon used in economic reports into a language Sula could actually understand.
A counterpart to Ming Lin, Ashok Suresh served as Sula’s legal adviser on the Court of Honor. He was a law professor who had joined the Secret Army early in the occupation, had been severely wounded escaping a hostage roundup, and had spent the rest of the occupation being shuttled from hospital to clinic to safe house, all under different identities, just ahead of the Urban Patrol. During the course of these wanderings he’d lost both legs to amputation, and his family to the executioner. His medical expenses were ongoing, and he appreciated the stipend Sula sent him for his contributions to her work on the committee.
For reasons of prudence Sula hadn’t invited the cliquemen who had fought alongside her, or Lamey either. A public association with criminals would help her with neither the public nor her fellow convocates.
However, Sula had invited two guests who were not associated with her military career: her client Miss Tiffinwala, a robust and cheerful baker who provided pastry; and Lord Durward, simply because she liked him and at present he seemed very lost. Sula supposed most men of Durward’s age would delight in a young, beautiful wife, but instead Lady Marietta seemed only to unmoor him. Both had answered Sula’s invitation, but only Durward had turned up. Sula didn’t know where Marietta was, and possibly Lord Durward didn’t either.
Lord Durward and his wife—his first wife—had always been kind to Sula, and their son had been a captain whom Sula had admired, and one who (unlike the others) hadn’t tried to get rid of her at the first opportunity, to replace her with relatives or the children of cronies. So, though human warmth wasn’t really her specialty, she did her best to be kind in return.
Except for Lord Durward, everyone in Sula’s box was a member of her official family. Each occupied an assigned orbit around her, and some of those orbits—those of Spence and Macnamara—were close indeed. With those invited within the pickets of her official enclosure, she could relax.
For everyone else she wore her dark red convocate’s jacket, but otherwise cultivated a military appearance. The jacket was cut to resemble an officer’s tunic, and she wore her senior captain’s shoulder boards and—on a day as formal as this—her medals. The public knew her as a military leader, and she preferred to underline that fact rather than appear as a junior member of a body that had generally failed to earn her respect.
Sula got a ginger-and-lime from Spence, who was stationed at the bar, then dumped cane sugar into it until it was sweetened to her liking. Carbonation sparkled on her tongue. She greeted all her guests, then found a seat next to Ming Lin.
“Lord Durward tells me that Cosgrove has gone bankrupt,” she said. “I’m sure that’s a symptom of something, but I don’t know what.”
Lin grinned at her. “I don’t know that much about Cosgrove,” she said, speaking loudly over the blare of the band. “But I imagine it’s a symptom of Cosgrove’s own miscalculation. By all reports he was an arch-speculator, and probably heavily leveraged. A man owing so much money, and with so many projects, wouldn’t have to go very far wrong to have the whole enterprise collapse. But I can look into it, if you like.”
“I’d be obliged,” Sula said, and meant to add, if you could have it before the committee meets in eight days, but Ming Lin was already busy with her hand comm, and it was clear that she was pursuing her research without Sula’s encouragement.
The Torminel band came to a triumphant, booming conclusion, and Sula applauded politely. A Lai-own host appeared on the stage—Sula knew him vaguely from video but couldn’t recall his name—and reminded the audience of the solemnity and significance of the occasion, then turned the show over to an orchestra, which played an overture specially commissioned for the event. There followed a performance by a massed Daimong chorus, a Cree band playing tunes alleged to be popular in the Fleet, a Terran ballet in which dancers impersonated warships battling in elaborate formations, and a series of speakers extolling the Supreme Commander, most in exaggerated, florid terms.
One of the speakers was Lord Chen, who offered praise for Tork’s ability at logistics. Sula knew that Chen was not one of Tork’s admirers, and she had to appreciate his tact, as well as his strict adherence to fact. Tork, or at any rate his staff, had done a first-rate job organizing the Fleet that he’d nearly brought to disaster in battle.
Ming Lin reported that she had found little about Cosgrove’s bankruptcy, but then banks were closed on the holiday, as were libraries and sources of data. She’d check first thing in the morning.
“Thank you,” Sula said. “Ah—here’s food.”
Her chef served up a meal of egg dishes. Eggs were something all the species beneath the Praxis could eat, though some preferred theirs in malodorous sauces that Sula wished well downwind.
At a pause, when the orchestra was tuning in preparation for the next event, Lord Durward appeared. “Lady Koridun would like to meet you.”
Adrenaline surged into Sula’s blood. Her first thought was that Lady Koridun, bent on revenge for the loss of so many of her relatives, might have arranged for Sula’s assassination right here at the greatest public event of the year. This was, after all, a scenario that would certainly suit the extravagant, demented, violent style of the Koridun family.
And then she thought: Well, that would spoil Tork’s day. Grinning, she rose and walked with Lord Durward toward the gate, though she detoured to speak to Macnamara.
“Lady Koridun wants to meet me,” she said. “If she tries anything, feel free to shoot her.”
Macnamara was startled. “I don’t have a sidearm,” he said.
Sula laughed. “Throw a drink in her face, then.”
She joined Lord Durward at the gate to her box. There she found a young Torminel female, barely an adult, with gray-and-cream fur and the unusual blue eyes of the Koridun family. She wore a short jacket in pale blue with a standing collar of lace, and elegant braided shorts.
“Lady Koridun,” said Lord Durward, “may I present Lady Sula.”
“I’m honored to meet you,” said Lady Koridun. “I’m a very great admirer of yours.”
This was not what Sula expected, and it took a moment for her to respond. “I knew your—cousin? Lady Tari.”
She remembered the shriek that came from Lady Tari as she charged, the fangs that flashed within a finger-joint’s length of Sula’s throat . . .
“You very kindly recommended her for a decoration after she died,” Lady Koridun said. After I shot her in the face, Sula thought.
“She worked very hard through the Manado crisis,” Sula said. “She deserved the commendation.” It had to be admitted, Sula thought, that Tari Koridun had been a hard worker. Just a demented and homicidal one.
“I wonder . . .” said Lady Koridun, and then her voice drifted away, her blue eyes losing focus. Then she gathered herself and asked her question. “Is it true what War of the Naxid Rebellion said about Light Squadron Seventeen?”
Sula wanted to break out into laughter. If this was some kind of revenge plot, it was clearly the most rococo conspiracy in all history.
“I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” she said, “but for something meant to be entertainment, War of the Naxid Rebellion was quite accurate.”
Which had surprised her. She had cooperated with the project, though once she’d heard the Martinez family was involved she decided her cooperation had been a mistake, and that the purpose of the documentary had been to glorify Gareth Martinez and his kin. Which to be sure it did, but to her surprise the final product had been fair in reporting her contributions to the war, and it supplemented her own recollections with those of people who had fought alongside her, comrades like Fer Tuga, members of the Secret Army, and the Bogo Boys. The documentary had not exactly concealed the way that some of these people made their living but hadn’t sensationalized it either.
“The way your squadron had to fight the enemy without support,” said Lady Koridun, “and still you destroyed so many enemy ships!” She waved a hand and flashed her fangs. “This festival should be for you, not for Lord Tork!”
“I won’t disagree with you,” Sula said.
War of the Naxid Rebellion had made Sula an empirewide celebrity, giving her a status with which she was not at all comfortable. But the documentary had also been a platform for her ideas and exposed Tork’s vindictiveness as well as the rift between the Fleet’s conservatives and innovators. Some of the viewers had taken sides on the issues, and even argued them out in public—which was unusual, since they weren’t officially entitled to an opinion.
And she had acquired fans, as any celebrity gathered fans and supporters. There was a group of amateur enthusiasts who dissected the battles and strategies of the war and who supported one officer or point of view over others. Apparently one of Sula’s admirers was Lady Koridun.
Sula grinned. “Would you care to join me?”
And so she passed a pleasant hour with Lady Koridun, whose brother, uncles, and cousins she’d had murdered. Rebecca Giove offered her own impressions of the Battle of Magaria, not very complimentary toward Lord Tork. Outside the pales of Sula’s box, Tork’s great show went on, bombastic entertainment interleaved with bombastic speeches. The soft spring day turned dark and chill, the black night sky cut by the silver arc of the antimatter ring. The penultimate speech came from the Lord Senior, who came onto the stage with his ceremonial red cloak billowing out behind him. Lord Saïd paused for a dramatic moment while gazing over his beaky nose at the audience, and then he began an address that compared himself with Tork, one in charge of the civil administration, the other the military, both engaged in a desperate conflict to save the empire. “But all my efforts would have been in vain,” he said, “had not the Fleet defeated the rebels in battle. And for that, I must give the Supreme Commander the supreme credit.”
I may be supremely ill, Sula thought.
Lord Saïd then introduced the guest of honor, who came out to the thunder of kettledrums, his expressionless face glaring wide-eyed. Tork’s Golden Orb was held firmly in his gray fist, and the silver buttons on his dress tunic glittered in the spotlights. Applause pummeled the air. Sula took her time rising to her feet and lifting her chin to the salute and was amused that Lady Koridun, who as a private individual was not obliged to stand, remained in her seat. Sula rocked back and forth on her heels to stretch her calf muscles as the applause went on, and when it began to die Tork gestured with the Orb, and the crowd resumed their seats.
Martinez must be pleased, Sula thought. His ovation had lasted a good deal longer than Tork’s.
“It was my honor to build and command the Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance,” Tork said in his beautiful Daimong voice. “I led it to victory, but credit for the victory does not properly belong to me—it belongs to our ancestors, and to the Great Masters who in their wisdom gave us the gift of the Praxis. The Praxis gave us perfect government, good order, and a clear understanding of the lines of authority. Our ancestors bequeathed to us a faultless system of tactics that, properly employed, will guarantee victory in any circumstances. I was merely the ancestors’ instrument in defeating the rebels and restoring the authority of the Convocation.”
In that case, Sula thought, why are we celebrating a mere instrument? Why not just proclaim Ancestor Day?
“The rebels defied the Praxis,” Tork continued. “They defied the example of their ancestors, and the memory of the Great Masters.” Harsh overtones began to clang in his voice. “The rebels’ defeat was inevitable—at least once the genius of our ancestors was properly employed against them. For our ancestors, living directly under the Shaa, constituted the epitome of civilization, and the further we fall from their example, the more failure will plague us, and the more wretched we shall be.
“Let us in all cases condemn the vice of innovation.” Tork’s voice took on a braying quality. “Innovation may seem glamorous or exciting, and it may appear to solve a problem, but the glamor is false, the excitement misleading, and the solution of one problem will give rise to a host of new problems that mere innovation cannot solve. No—we must stand firm as a wall against such false solutions, and adhere without question to the perfection that is our heritage.” He made a violent gesture with the Orb. “Firm as a wall! Firm in our orthodoxy, and sheltered by the rampart of our righteousness! Down with novelty and innovation! Up with the spirit of the Great Masters! And most important of all, long live the Praxis!” He gestured again with the Orb, and his voice took on a metallic shriek. “Long live the Praxis!”
At that cry, rockets launched from behind the stage, their glittering trails forming a shimmering silver wall behind the Supreme Commander. The rockets rose above the stadium and then detonated, shooting brilliant, multicolored sparks across the night sky. Additional volleys of fireworks followed the first. The Torminel band marched out with kettledrums thundering. Lord Tork stood alone on the stage, the actinic flashes illuminating his tall, gangling body and glittering on his silver buttons. The tang of explosive scented the air.
At the climax of the display, rockets were launched from the entire circuit of the stadium, surrounding the spectators with pillars of shimmering light. Detonations boomed overhead, flashes illuminating the upturned faces of the audience. Multicolored lasers cut through the sky and created shifting geometric forms in the billowing firework smoke.
Lord Durward was bent over in his chair with his hands over his ears. The show had begun with explosions, Sula thought, and it would end with explosions.
The last barrage exploded overhead, and silence fell over the stadium. The scent of propellant and incendiaries drifted through the air like a light rain.
Sula’s ears rang. “I feel as if I’ve been made war on,” she said.
“Oh, I think you have been,” said Ming Lin. “That’s the beginning of Tork’s counterattack.”
Sula considered this. What could he do, really? she asked herself. But then a cold finger touched her neck as she realized that all Tork or his friends had to do was investigate her. She was vulnerable on too many fronts: her false identity, her association with cliquemen, the assassination of her superior during the war, and the deaths of so many Koriduns . . . she couldn’t possibly keep all those secrets, not if someone were truly looking into her past.
But who would know to look? Anyone who had shared her secrets was dead or had his own reasons for silence. Tork had no reason to investigate her when he could just use his authority with the Fleet to silence her. If he wished truly to make her vanish, he had only to assign her to a remote post in a distant reach of the empire, so far away that Zanshaa would never again hear her voice.
As her mind worked on the problem, she gradually became aware that Lord Durward was still bent over, his hands still clasped over his ears even though the fireworks had ended. She saw the shine of tears on his cheeks, and she leaned close to him and touched his elbow.
“Are you all right, Lord Durward?”
He shook his head, but he straightened, and he looked at her with brimming eyes. “It made me think of Richard,” he said.
“I understand,” Sula said. Lord Durward’s son had died in a blaze of fire all too reminiscent of the barrage of fireworks that had just thundered over their heads.
Lord Durward shook his head again. “That was all nonsense, wasn’t it?” he said. “Lord Tork’s speech. We can’t go back to the old ways now. It’s all changed. It’s all over.” He bent his head again, put his hands to his face, and began to keen, a strangled whine rising from his throat.
Panic fluttered in Sula. She never knew what to do in situations like these. Human warmth is not my specialty. She gestured to bring Spence to her side, and then she turned back to Lord Durward.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
Durward made an effort to speak, and when the words came they were hoarse. “Just water,” he said.
Spence had arrived, and Sula looked up at her. “Bring Lord Durward some water,” she said.
“Right away, my lady.”
Sula became aware of a half circle of her friends forming a wall between Lord Durward and the audience, the convocates and their guests, who were beginning to file out of the stadium. Standing, she saw the old Daimong sniper, the gun-crafter Sidney with his pipe, Lady Rebecca in her dress tunic, Macnamara and Ming Lin and Ashok Suresh and Master Clerk Ty-fran. All veterans of the Fleet or the Secret Army, all acquainted firsthand with death and terror, all acting now to provide a curtain of privacy, and a modicum of dignity, for one of the war’s victims.
Sula laid a hand on Lord Durward’s back. “We’ll wait for the crowd to leave,” she said, “and then I’ll take you home.”
The sound of raucous celebration echoed from the Fleet Club’s roof beams. Lieutenant Vonderheydte had to lean close to Martinez, and stand on his toes, in order to be heard. “Congratulations on your successful season, Lord Captain.”
“Thank you.”
“It was your best yet, in my opinion.” Lieutenant Vonderheydte turned to Kelly. “And yours too, of course.”
In the last year the Corona Club had scored a decisive victory over its rivals, with more points than in any previous season. Kelly had been the overall point winner, which helped to make up for her stolen win the previous season, and Martinez took second.
Though Martinez had been gratified by the result, he hadn’t found the season as satisfying as in previous years. Severin had been away, shaking down his new frigate Expedition. And Martinez had to admit that he missed Jeremy Foote, if only for the pleasure of thrashing him in one race after another. The other clubs had fielded weaker teams than usual, and while Martinez enjoyed winning, he preferred his opponents to provide more of a challenge.
“And you, Vonderheydte?” Martinez asked. “You’re not tempted to join us in the Corona Club?”
“I never was a pinnace pilot,” said Vonderheydte. “I’ll put up with high accelerations in the course of duty, but I’m not interested in undergoing high gee voluntarily.” Though he seemed pleased enough to be asked.
Vonderheydte—small, blond, fine-boned—had been a cadet on Corona during the perilous escape from Magaria following the Naxid revolt, where he had experienced plenty of high gees, and Martinez had promoted him to sublieutenant afterward. He had been raised to lieutenant automatically after two years and had spent much of the time since with the Third Fleet at Felarus—not aboard a ship, but as a functionary in the Fleet’s vast building program. That he’d been employed at all indicated that Tork hadn’t viewed him as too dangerously close to Martinez. But now the building program was coming to a close, and Vonderheydte was kicking his heels at the Commandery, looking for a new assignment.
The Fleet Club rang with the boisterous elation of its members and their guests. In the aftermath of Tork’s address and the exuberant fireworks finale, the members were happy to dispense with the service’s accustomed formality and settle down to enjoying themselves. The odor of tobacco, leaking out from the overcrowded smoking room, tainted the air. The bar was packed five-deep, and food was flying up from the kitchens as fast as it could be readied. Drunken junior lieutenants offered advice to senior officers, who were just drunk enough to listen. Officers using borrowed instruments improvised dance music in the reception hall, and despite the crowding at least a few people were trying to dance.
In various nooks and corners, reunions were taking place. Kelly and Vonderheydte hadn’t seen each other since they’d served together on Corona, and across the room Martinez had seen Elissa Dalkeith, who had been his flag captain, speaking with Khanh, who had been her first lieutenant. They, too closely identified with Martinez, had been unemployed since the end of the war.
I am a curse, Martinez thought. The price of his friendship was to lose all hope of advancement in the service.
“I’ll be heading to the Corona Club later,” Martinez said. “The drinks are at least as good, the food is better, and it won’t be as crowded. You’ll both be welcome.”
“Thank you, Lord Captain!” Vonderheydte was cheered. “I haven’t had anything to eat since noon. We were marched to our seats in the stadium, but the concessionaires were overwhelmed and out of food by the time I got hungry.”
“I’ll see you both later, then,” said Martinez. “I have to say hello to a few people first.”
Martinez made his way through the crowd toward Dalkeith and Khanh, but he was caught in a rush of Lai-own cadets charging the bar in a wedge formation, and when he extricated himself, he was seized by the arm, and a wet kiss was planted on his cheek. He turned in surprise to see a tall, long-eyed woman with hair dyed a metallic shade of auburn.
“Chandra,” he said, repressing the urge to wipe his cheek.
“Gareth.” Her eyes were bright. Her hands clutched his arm, and he felt her body’s warmth as she pressed up against him. “I applauded you like anything this afternoon! And I didn’t applaud Tork at all.”
“You’d better hope you weren’t seen by one of his minions.”
She barked out a laugh. “Won’t make any difference, I’m already on his list of unemployables. I was your lieutenant and Lady Michi’s tactical officer, after all.”
“Last I heard you were still Lady Michi’s tactical officer.”
“She’s been rotated into a desk job and doesn’t need a tactical officer anymore. No one else wanted me, so here I am, looking for work.”
Chandra Prasad had been a passionate, turbulent force aboard Illustrious when he was its captain, and her relationship with Martinez had been complicated by the fact that they’d had a passionate, turbulent affaire when they were both junior lieutenants. Each had cheated furiously on the other, though they disagreed about whose fault that was. Chandra was the most ardent, high-strung person he knew, and being in her company could be exhilarating, at least until exhaustion set in.
And now here they were, talking as intimates in front of a couple hundred witnesses. Martinez was glad that Terza hadn’t come to the Fleet Club and had instead chosen to attend a reception at the Oh-lo-ho Theater organized by her father.
A lie came easily to his lips. “I’d do something for you if I had a command of my own,” Martinez said. “But of course I’m even more in Tork’s bad books than you.”
“I thought you might have friends,” Chandra said. “You could write me a recommendation.”
“I could,” Martinez said. “But the only one who might be in need of a tactical officer is Pa Do-faq, and you can’t be the only Terran on a Lai-own ship.”
“I don’t have to be a tactical officer,” she pointed out. “I could serve as an ordinary lieutenant. Or conceivably be promoted to lieutenant-captain and given a frigate.”
“Let me contact you once I’ve had time to think,” he said. “I must know somebody.”
Somebody, he thought, at a faraway station.
The front doors crashed as they were flung open, and over mere seconds the room went from boisterous to absolutely silent, from chaos into disciplined order, and everyone was braced to attention. For Lord Tork had arrived, and he carried the Golden Orb.
In silence Tork entered the club, his expressionless black-on-black eyes panning left and right. Staff officers flanked him like wings. He marched past Martinez, then stopped and returned. The staff officers shuffled their formation to accommodate their chief’s movements. The scent of Tork’s dying flesh caught at the back of Martinez’s throat.
“Captain Martinez, you do not carry your Orb,” Tork said. His voice buzzed and crackled as if it came from a broken speaker.
“We are in an informal setting, my lord,” Martinez said.
Tork’s eyes again panned the room, then returned to Martinez. “Your reasoning is flawed,” he said. “This is a day to celebrate the Fleet in all its pageantry and greatness. You wear the full-dress uniform, and part of that uniform is your Golden Orb.” Martinez could see mouth parts moving behind the fixed, parted lips. “This is the sort of undisciplined behavior I have come to expect from you, Captain Martinez. Take care that this does not happen in the future.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Tork stood facing him for another few seconds, as if weighing another reprimand, and then he turned to Chandra, weighed perhaps another comment, then spun about and moved deeper into the silent club, his staff forming and re-forming as he moved among the uniformed statues on the club floor.
“Turns a party into an inspection,” Chandra murmured. “That’s our Supreme Commander.”
“Maybe his title should be Supreme Killjoy.”
After another ten or fifteen seconds Tork released the crowd from attention, and Martinez decided it was time to leave. He could send messages to Dalkeith and Khanh inviting them to join him at the Corona Club in Grandview.
“I’m escaping while I can,” he told Chandra, but he had barely taken two paces through the crowd before he found himself facing a dark-furred Torminel with the shoulder boards of a senior squadron commander on his vest. “Lord Altasz,” he said.
“Martinez!” said the squadcom. “Your Coronas gave us a good season!”
“Thanks in part to you, my lord,” Martinez said. “You were good enough to sponsor Sodak into the club, and she had a very impressive debut year.”
“I had better hopes for the Ions,” Altasz said. “But we’re still in a rebuilding phase. Next year I hope we’ll give you a run for the trophy!”
“I hope so, my lord.”
“Say, Martinez,” Altasz said. “I wonder if what I’ve heard about the Chee Company is true.”
Martinez felt a warning tingle somewhere in the back of his brain. “What have you heard, Lord Squadcom?”
“That you were connected somehow with that Cosgrove rascal, and now that he’s gone smash, you’re overextended and in trouble.”
Martinez blinked. “We’re not connected with Cosgrove in any way.” He sensed a glimmer of skepticism in Altasz’s dark eyes, and so he added, “Cosgrove was a speculator. The Chee Company are contractors. He’s never employed us in any of his projects.” He frowned as another thought occurred to him. “Are you an investor in the Chee Company?”
Once Roland had outmaneuvered and outblackmailed Lord Zykov, his former father-in-law, almost all Chee Company shares were held by the Martinez family. Some had been sold to raise capital, but not enough to give anyone else anything like a controlling interest. These were traded openly, and Martinez didn’t want anything to damage their value.
“I’m not in the Chee Company,” said Altasz. “But I bought some of those Rol-mar bonds you were peddling, and if Chee Company goes in the ditch, it takes Rol-mar with it. So—”
“May I ask the source of your information?”
Altasz waved a hand. “The fellow who handles my business.”
“And who is that?”
“Li-paq at Attfrag Associates.”
Martinez had never heard of either Li-paq or Attfrag, but he thought that perhaps he should find out more about them, so he recorded the names on the sleeve display of his uniform tunic. Then, after he offered more reassurances to Altasz that the Chee Company was sound, he made his way out of the club and summoned his car. While waiting at the curb, he sent a message to Roland.
“Call me. I think we may be in trouble.”