He wasn’t looking forward to the coming interview, and spent the time glaring at blank walls. All the decorative paintings, the three-d star map with Imperial banners floating above the provinces, all the standard equipment of a governor general’s office on a Class One planet, were gone, leaving ugly places on the walls.

The guard motioned him into the office. Admiral Sir Vladimir Richard George Plekhanov, Vice Admiral of the Black, Knight of St. Michael and St. George, was seated at the Governor General’s desk. There was no sign of His Excellency Mr. Haruna, and for a moment Rod thought the Admiral was alone. Then he noticed Captain Cziller, his immediate superior as master of MacArthur, standing by the window. All the transparencies had been knocked out, and there were deep scratches in the paneled walls. The displays and furniture were gone. Even the Great Seal—crown and spaceship, eagle, sickle and hammer—was missing from above the duralplast desk. There had never in Rod’s memory been a duralplast desk in a governor general’s office.

“Commander Blaine reporting as ordered, sir.”

Plekhanov absently returned the salute. Cziller didn’t look around from the window. Rod stood at stiff attention while the Admiral regarded him with an unchanging expression. Finally: “Good morning, Commander.”

“Good morning, sir.”

“Not really. I suppose I haven’t seen you since I last visited Crucis Court. How is the Marquis?”

“Well when I was last home, sir.”

The Admiral nodded and continued to regard Blaine with a critical look. He hasn’t changed, Rod thought. An enormously competent man, who fought a tendency to fat by exercising in high gravity. The Navy sent Plekhanov when hard fighting was expected. He’s never been known to excuse an incompetent officer, and there was a gunroom rumor that he’d had the Crown Prince—now Emperor—stretched over a mess table and whacked with a spatball paddle back when His Highness was serving as a midshipman in Plataea.