“May I speak with Lady Michi, please?” he asked when Coen answered.

In answer, Michi’s image appeared on his display. “Yes, Lord Captain?”

“Can we prod Tork into some action?” Martinez demanded. “Do we have to let Sula fight on her own?”

She looked at him with impatience. “Bywe you meanme, I suppose. You should have an idea by now of how the Supreme Commander responds to prodding.”

“Ask for permission to engage the enemy more closely.”

Michi’s tone turned frosty. “Not yet, Captain.”

Martinez clenched his teeth. “Yes, my lady,” he said, and ended the transmission.

He gazed at the display with burning anger. Sula was on her own.

Sula watched the Naxid squadron’s latest volley of missiles get blown into perfect spheres of blazing plasma by Squadron 17’s counterfire. She sat in her vac suit on her couch in Command, a gray, featureless, metal-walled space that had replaced the more sumptuous room flashed into ruin by a charge of antiprotons at Harzapid. Her neck itched where she’d applied a med patch—she felt a spasm of fear whenever she saw a carotid injector, and she refused to use them.

Her helmet sat in its mesh bag attached to her couch. She hated the damned helmet and the suffocating sensation she got while wearing it; as the captain, she didn’t have to wear it if she didn’t want to.

She would have preferred not to have worn the vac suit either, but supposed she might need its sanitary arrangements by the end of the day.

“Another salvo incoming, my lady,” said Maitland.

“Track and destroy, Weapons,” Sula said.

“Yes, my lady! Track and destroy!”

Giove’s excited response rang off the metal walls. Sula wished Giove would calm down. She would have preferred a little peace in which to contemplate her options.

Tork had put her here to die, that was clear enough. The rest of the fleet wasn’t maneuvering to her support, and Squadron 17 would engage an enemy of equal force on terms that implied mutual annihilation. The woman called Caroline Sula was intended to have a hero’s death within the next hour or two.

The question that most interested Sula was whether Tork, in his simple way, might not have a point. The first act of her life ended with her wresting an entire planet from the claws of the Naxids and reigning over it as an absolute despot. Whatever any hypothetical second or third acts might contain, they could hardly equal the first.

Perhaps she had overstayed her welcome in the realm of existence. Perhaps the fittest trajectory of her life would be that of a meteor, blazing a brilliant trail in the heavens before annihilation.

She couldn’t construct a rationale that justified her own existence, or that of anyone else either. Existence was too improbable to come supplied with a justification, like a book of instructions supplied with a complicated bit of equipment.

She couldn’t work out why she was alive, and it was therefore difficult to work up a reason why she shouldn’t die.

“Comm,” she said. “Message to Squadron: fire in staggered salvo, fifteen seconds apart.”

On the other hand, she thought, there was her pride to consider. The pride that she had instilled in her well-drilled squadron. The pride that didn’t want her effort, and those of others, to go to waste. The pride that rejoiced in her superiority over the Naxids. The pride that wanted Ghost Tactics to triumph over the enemy. The pride that didn’t want to hand Tork a cheap victory.

Vainglory, she wondered, or Death?

It was pride that won the argument.

“Comm,” she said, “message to Squadron. Starburst Pattern Two. Execute at twelve eleven. Pilot, feed Pattern Two into the nav computer.”

A few minutes later the nav computer cut the engines, and Sula’s heart lifted as the ship swung in zero gravity to its new heading, the first in the sequence of bobs and weaves dictated by Pattern 2’s chaos mathematics.

When Tork’s furious message came, she took her time about answering.

“My lord!” This from Bevins, who was at the sensor station with Pan. “Starburst! Squadron Seventeen has starburst!”

Martinez enlarged the tactical display and saw Sula’s command separating from one another, engines firing at heavy accelerations. A gust of laughter burst from his throat.

Sula was surprising them all. Defying the Supreme Commander and her own sentence of death, and setting the rest of the Orthodox Fleet an example.

Admiration kindled a flame in Martinez’s breast.O Lovely! O Brilliant! Sula’s maneuver made him want to chant poetry.

He sent a text message to Chandra.Why can’t wedo that?

Chandra didn’t reply. Perhaps she was making the argument on her own.

Martinez wasn’t the only one sending messages, becauseIllustrious intercepted a message from Sula to Tork. It was a reply to a message thatIllustrious hadn’t received, since Tork’s message was sent by communications laser to Sula at the van of his fleet, andIllustrious was not in position to intercept the tight beam. But sinceIllustrious was astern of the flagship, it was in a position to catch the reply.

“Confidenceto Flag. Unable to comply.” That was the entire message.

Martinez was helpless with adoration. He was even more delighted whenIllustrious intercepted the answer to Tork’s following message.

“Confidenceto Flag. Unable to comply.” There it wasagain.

His joy faded, and a cold chill ran up Martinez’s spine as he considered what Tork might do next. He could order each individual ship back into place, bypassing Sula altogether—or he could simply order one of Sula’s subordinates to slit her throat and take command.

There was a silence from the Supreme Commander that lasted several minutes. Squadron 17 and the enemy continued to rain missiles at each other. The next squadrons astern had begun to fire as well.

Martinez waited, feeling unease in his inner ear for a moment asIllustrious went through a minor programmed course change. The warships were all swooping a bit now, dodging any theoretical beam weapons being aimed at them.

“Message from the Supreme Commander, my lord,” said Choy. A text of the message flashed onto Martinez’s display as Choy read it aloud.

“‘All ships rotate to bearing zero-two-five by zero-zero-one relative. Accelerate one point eight gravities at eleven twenty-three and one.’”

Martinez let out a long sigh of relief, then looked at the chronometer. He had a little less than one minute to complete the rotation.

The Orthodox Fleet was finally going to close with the enemy. Apparently, Tork had decided that Sula’s maneuver compromised either his dignity or his tactics or both, and he had to retrieve the situation.

“Zero gravity warning,” Martinez said. “Engines, cut engines. Pilot, rotate ship to zero-two-five by zero-zero-one relative. Stand by to accelerate on my command.”

As the ship swung, as the acceleration couch swung lightly on its runners, Martinez took the opportunity to shift again to a virtual display. His visual centers filled with the vast emptiness of space, the distant planets and Magaria’s looming sun, the two great formations of ships and decoys and the blazing curtain of antimatter bursts between the lead squadrons. The stars, an unnecessary distraction, weren’t shown. Tucked away in an unoccupied corner of the solar system was a softly glowing display that would allow him to communicate with anyone else on the ship, or call up information from any of the other displays in Command.

“Accelerate at one point eight gee on my mark,” he said. “Three, two, one, mark.”

Illustrious’s great torches lit smoothly. The metal hoops of the accelerating cage sang lightly as the weight came on. Martinez drew a long, hard breath against the gravities that were piling weights on his chest.