The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “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, and 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 stationery, 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 subcontractor.”

  “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 get 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 tha
t 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.

  That, of course, 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 half a 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 up in a family 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 preprogrammed 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.”

  “Apropos conspiracy,” Martinez 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 knew 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?”