The orange end-stamp filled the screen. Martinez blanked it in annoyance.

Roland was up to something, and an early visit to Zanshaa was part of it. Martinez didn’t know what his brother’s plot entailed, but he had little to do but speculate. Roland might be plotting another marriage, his own perhaps; or scouting the High City for the location of a new Martinez Palace grand enough for the city’s newest lord convocate; or working to corner some essential supply coming down from orbit.

He only hoped that he himself was not an essential element in Roland’s scheme.

As it turned out, Roland wasn’t the only member of his family leaving Laredo. The next video from Terza informed him that she and Young Gareth were leaving to join her father—the location was a military secret, but it was presumably closer to Zanshaa than was Laredo.

“It’s time my father saw his grandson,” Terza said. Her expression bore its usual serenity, and at once Martinez felt anxiety begin to gnaw at him. He wondered if Lord Chen had expressed some private disappointment in Young Gareth, and if therefore Terza was rushing the child to her father to reassure him…or, he thought darkly, to confirm his suspicions.

He considered forbidding the journey—he could claim that Lord Chen was too close to a possible Naxid attack—but decided against it.

He was too far away to issue his wife orders, but that was only a part of it. The fact was, the only daughter of Lord Chen outranked the second son of Lord Martinez. Young Gareth was Lord Gareth Chen, not Lord Gareth Martinez the Younger. He was the son of the Chen heir and the presumed Chen heir himself.

In other words, Terza could take the child anywhere she damn well pleased, and he had very little to say about it.

Martinez sent Terza a letter in which he wondered whether it was completely safe for her to make the journey, but otherwise made no protest. He bade her to give Lord Chen his very warmest regards.

He dared say nothing else.

From her position in the middle of the van squadron, Sula half drowsed through one of Tork’s maneuvers. After the intricacies and complexities of Ghost Tactics, Tork’s standard exercises were a dreary trudge toward slumberland.

“Enemy missile flares,” said Warrant Officer Maitland from the sensor station. “Flares across the board. Forty—sixty—nearly seventy, my lady.”

The languor in Maitland’s drawling voice as he announced the launch of a host of enemy missiles aimed at the squadron showed that he too was merely going through the motions.

“Comm,” Sula said. “Each ship will fire one battery counterfire. Weapons”—to Giove at the weapons station—“this is a drill. Engage the enemy barrage with Battery Two.”

“This is a drill, my lady,” Giove reported. “Tubes eight through thirteen have fired. We have a failure to launch from tube thirteen. Missile is running hot in the tube.”

Lady Rebecca Giove—short, dark, and kinetic—was incapable of sounding bored by anything. Her sharp voice had a clear ring of urgency even when she was making the most routine report.

“Weaponers to clear the faulty missile,” Sula said.

“Weaponers to clear the faulty missile, my lady.”

Sula could only imagine what the scene would be like in real life—seventy enemy missiles racing for the squadron, each with its antihydrogen warhead ready to rip apart the fabric of matter, the countermissiles lashing out, the faulty missile flooding the missile bay with heat and energetic neutrons, on the verge of destroying the ship, tension tautening the nerves, the scent of rising panic in her vac suit…

Nothing like that here.Confidence was following a script that had been written ahead of time by Tork’s staff. The faulty missile had been planned from the beginning, to give the weaponers practice at clearing a missile from the tube.

Sula sat in her vac suit and recited the lines that the script more or less demanded. She left her helmet off so she didn’t have to feel closed-in. Counterbattery fire destroyed most of the enemy missiles, and point-defense lasers got the rest. Weaponers operating damage-control robots cleared the defective missile from the tube. Light Squadron 17 launched its own attack, which was duly parried by the approaching—and virtual—enemy.

Confidencewas annihilated early in the action, which gave a senior surviving captain practice at commanding the squadron until she too was destroyed. In the end Light Squadron 17 was wiped out, along with the squadron it had engaged.

After losing her ship, Sula had one of the cooks bring coffee and soft drinks to Command, and she added clover honey and condensed milk and drank in perfect contentment while listening to calls between ships.

Confidencehad been wiped out in three of the last four of Tork’s exercises. Sula was inclined to view this as a threat.

It had been clear from the moment Tork had ordered Squadron 17 into the van that he was planning to eliminate her from his long list of troubles. Sula supposed she couldn’t blame him. After all, she had spoiled his attack on Zanshaa by capturing the place without him; she had arranged for the elimination of his choice of governor; and she’d blackmailed him into giving her a ship. Probably he wished he could simply have her shot. But she was too prominent for that, too celebrated. Instead he affected to take her at her word—I desire nothing so much as to once more lead loyal citizens into action against the Naxids—and put her in a place of maximum danger.

She had to admit that she admired Tork’s straightforward ruthlessness.

Still, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t anticipated something like this. She knew she was putting herself in Tork’s hands as soon as she requested duty in the Orthodox Fleet.

There only remained the question of what she was going to do about it.

From her point of view, there was only one possible response.

She would have to become a legend.

The Righteous and Orthodox Fleet of Vengeance continued its awkward orbit around Zanshaa. Reinforcements arrived, two or three or five at a time. Martinez continued to hear from old acquaintances. The arrival of the Exploration Service frigateScout brought greetings from Shushanik Severin, who served as its third officer. Severin and his little lifeboat had spent months grappled to a frozen asteroid at Protipanu in order to provide last minute intelligence to Martinez and Chenforce just prior to the battle there, and as a result had been promoted lieutenant despite being born a commoner. Severin seemed cheerful and comfortable in his new status, and Martinez—who remembered the troubles the commoner Kosinic had experienced—was relieved.

He was also impressed that the down-at-heels Exploration Service had actually gotten a brand-new frigate out of the emergency. It was the first actual warship in the service for many centuries, though it would serve under Fleet command for the rest of the war.

Martinez also received greetings from Warrant Officer Amanda Taen, who arrived in command of a boat bringing supplies to the warships. She was a stunningly beautiful young woman who had shared a pleasantly carnal relationship with him before his marriage, and viewing her message sent a nostalgic charge through his groin.

Her arrival made him wonder just how many of his former lovers were serving with the Orthodox Fleet. He counted four women he had known intimately now circling Shaamah without him, and he felt depressed for the rest of the day.

Terza and Young Gareth joined Lord Chen at whatever secret location was playing host to the Fleet Control Board, driving home the fact that the location was secret to Martinez, but not to his wife. The stream of letters and videos from Terza arrived regularly. Martinez tried to find enough subjects for reply, but new topics of interest were rare on the ship. He began to send Terza word-portraits of his fellow crew, starting with Kazakov and working his way down the list in order of seniority. He wondered what she made of these descriptions of people she’d never met, but reckoned she had to at least give him credit for trying. When he ran out of people he wanted to describe, he began a description of Fletcher’s paintings, beginning withThe Holy Family with a Cat. He had a feeling that his description didn’t do the work justice. He considered sending a picture instead.