The Killing of Worlds (36 page)

Laurent
, it read,
I wish I could start tenderly. But instead I have to warn you of danger.

Zai blinked his eyes, and shook his head at this beginning. All his life, he had been taught that warcraft brought meaning and order to existence, but this conflict with the Rix despoiled everything it touched.

He continued.

The ships sent to rendezvous with the
Lynx
are governed by two sets of orders. The open dictate is to escort you here to Home in safety, but there is also an Imperial writ carried by a few officers. It can be triggered by a single word from the Emperor. If he gives the command, the task force is to destroy your ship and the war prize in a surprise attack.

Laurent Zai straightened. It was just as the Rixwoman had said: The Emperor wanted to destroy him, the
Lynx
, and the object. The dead man’s hunger for revenge was insatiable. What was he hiding?

Zai’s anger quickly turned to concern, however. This was confidential intelligence data from outside the chain of command, from the War Council itself.

“What have you done, Nara?” he whispered, his heart sinking.

Supposedly, the Emperor will only invoke the writ if the object threatens the Empire. But I have felt… I know that he intends to kill you all. I’ve been close to the Emperor since joining the council, and I can read him now.

Of course, Nara had used her empathy on the man. As Zai continued, the realization dawned that Nara’s ability had doomed her. She had broken the hundred-year rule.

He’s terribly afraid of something, Laurent. Something that the Rix mind knows. Something that it discovered on Legis.

The words of his lover echoing those of the Rixwoman sent a chill through Zai.

He’ll go to any length to prevent this knowledge from reaching the rest of the Empire, Laurent. I’ve seen it myself. He even pressed the War Council to approve a genocide. The Apparatus was ready to release a nuclear attack on Legis XV, with dirty weapons. They would have killed hundreds of millions just to destroy the compound mind.

Zai closed his eyes. If Nara was right, then the Rixwoman had told the truth.

He’ll kill you, Laurent. The Emperor so fears the mind, he would destroy a world.

Laurent Zai nodded slowly, straightening as if a weight were lifting from him.

Take care, beloved. Return to me.

Captain Zai nodded again as the missive refolded itself, disappearing to a bright mote of synesthesia against the void. Suddenly, a wave of nausea struck him, and he had to reach out one hand to the blister’s wall to hold himself upright. The plastic felt reassuringly solid and cold. Real.

Still, it was painful. The last shreds of Vadan loyalty were passing from him.

The Emperor had designed to destroy one of the Eighty Worlds.

Zai remembered the catechisms of his childhood. The old relationship between the Emperor and Vada had been formed after the Vadan Founders had fled their ruined previous home. No killing of worlds, the Compact read. And now the sovereign had broken it.

Through his nausea, Zai saw an icon blinking in the lower corner of Nara’s folded message. One of Hobbes’s telltales, indicating that this message had gone through the adept’s hands.

“Damn,” he whispered.

He’d assumed that the document was secure. It carried senatorial privilege, with the full protection of the Pale, but the adept’s writ had somehow opened it.

Nara Oxham would be found out now. The Emperor would know that she had warned him. The final wave of nausea lasted only a few seconds, then Zai felt ready.

He took the slow, measured breaths of a Vadan warrior. He turned from the blackness of space and strode from the blister, glad to hear the ring of his boots on hard metal.

He was smiling.

Strange, that such danger should lighten his soul. But he felt sure and powerful for the first time in months: All his own shortcomings were buried now, overwhelmed by the crimes of his enemy: the Risen Emperor.

“Hobbes,” he signaled.

“Captain?” She sounded half asleep.

“Meet me at Rana Harter’s cabin.”

“Sir?”

“In five minutes. Bring your weapon.”

Katherie Hobbes fastened the seals of her tunic as she ran.

She stopped around the corner from her goal, and checked the time. She had fifty seconds left. Her eyes scanned the black wool of her uniform, checking for imperfections. She pulled up one sleeve to reveal the flechette pistol. Its ammo meter read full, but Hobbes popped the cover to check the needles with her own eyes.

The darts were nestled in their twin magazines, as perfectly aligned as two ranks of tiny metal soldiers.

She walked briskly and calmly around the corner. Zai awaited her with a grim expression.

“Captain, what is it?”

“We’ve been betrayed, Hobbes.”

Mutiny again? She took a deep breath against panic, drew her pistol.

“Not by our crew, Hobbes,” her captain said.

She blinked. What was he saying?

“Just hand me that.” He pointed at the pistol.

What? she thought. The captain could draw his own weapon from stores. But of course that would raise any number of flags with the politicals aboard the ship.

Hobbes handed him the weapon silently.

The captain held the flechette pistol behind his back and opened the door to the dead woman’s cabin. Light spilled between Hobbes and Zai into Rana Harter’s dim antechamber. The dead Adept Trevim herself was here, kneeling with her back to them, her hands working gestural commands.

“Forgive me, Honored Mother,” Zai said.

He shot Trevim with a spray of needles, cutting an X across her heart.

Hobbes gasped, her knees week. This must be a dream, she thought.

“Her symbiant should rise from that,” Zai said.

He turned to Hobbes.

“What was she doing?” he demanded.

Hobbes forced herself to concentrate, probing the
Lynx
‘s diagnostics. The adept’s actions were officially hidden from Navy Al, but there were always indirect signs. The translight grid was cycling out of a transmission.

“It looks as if she sent a message, sir.”

“Did I interrupt her?”

Hobbes shook her head. “It’s stepping down in an orderly way, Captain. She was finished, and the main entanglement grid shows depletion.”

“Home,” he said.

She nodded.

“Damn. Shut it down, Hobbes. The whole grid—cut its power.”

She swallowed, and signaled the com staff to perform the task. This was one trump card the captain held. The Apparatus might have a writ of authority, but the crew of the
Lynx
could still disable the frigate’s components by hand.

The captain opened the inner door of the antechamber, holding the pistol ready.

“Rana Harter,” he called.

Was Zai going to murder the woman? Hobbes wondered. The Adept would reanimate easily from her heart wound, but a shot like that to the head could destroy a risen permanently.

The dead woman stepped from the darkness, blinking in the light. She was small, her hair shorn like the Rixwoman’s. Though she was shorter than the commando, Hobbes could see how their faces were alike. The Legis authorities believed that Rana had been chosen from the militia’s population for her resemblance to Herd, and perhaps for a savant ability to process chaotic data. Hobbes wondered to what uses the compound mind had put Rana’s intellect, and what traces captivity had left in the dead woman before her.

“Please come with me, Honored One,” Zai said.

Harter nodded quiescently. She had none of the usual hauteur of the dead. Laurent Zai went ahead, with Rana after him. Hobbes brought up the rear, reminding herself that this was real.

They reached the Rixwoman’s cell in a few minutes. The gunfire and Adept Trevim’s medical monitors had triggered various alarms aboard the ship, but Hobbes had managed to suppress them as far as she knew.

There was a single marine guard, not the familiar Bassiritz, and one of the lower-ranking politicals on station. The man was living, and Captain Zai shot him in the leg, and kicked him in the head as he fell. The aspirant dropped to the floor unconscious.

Zai sternly ordered the startled guard to return to attention.

The private froze in shock for a moment, then obeyed as crisply as if at parade drill. Zai’s tone of command was stronger than Hobbes had heard it in some time. The sound thrilled her, however bizarre these proceedings.

Her fingers flickered, moving to quell the new alarms. The remaining politicals must already know that something was happening.

“Shall I get a fire team up here, Captain?”

“Good idea, Hobbes. That fast private, for one.”

She nodded, sent commands.

“Secure this area, Private,” she ordered the motionless marine.

Hobbes opened the cell, turning the screwlock and bracing one leg to pull out the massive door.

Zai moved to enter first.

“The shock collar remote, sir,” she called.

“We won’t need it.”

Hobbes followed him closely, wishing that she had another weapon. Straightjacket or no, the Rix commando could probably kill them both easily. She doubted that a half-expended clip of flechettes would even marginally slow down a Rix soldier.

The prisoner stared at them coolly, a hungry look in her eyes. Hobbes felt naked under her hunter’s gaze.

But then Rana Harter followed them through the door, and for a moment Herd seemed utterly human.

“Rana!” she said, stepping forward.

The dead woman walked toward her former captor and lover. The Rixwoman was in for a disappointment, Hobbes thought. The honored dead never held fast to the emotional bonds of their former lives. The transition of the symbiant left them altogether indifferent to the prattle of the living. Hobbes had encountered many of her dead shipmates after their reanimation; they were no longer friends, or even crewmates. Just passengers.

But Rana Harter looked tenderly at the Rixwoman, and smiled.

The expression startled Hobbes; it looked exaggerated on that cold, gray face, like a clown’s painted joy. The dead woman embraced Herd, wrapping her arms around the hypercarbon straight-jacket, and the two kissed as unselfconsciously as adolescents on a Utopian world. The captain and Hobbes just watched, too surprised and respectful of the dead to interrupt.

Finally they separated, pulling apart to gaze into each other’s eyes.

“Rana,” murmured Herd quietly.

The dead woman spoke in return. Hobbes recognized the buzzing syllables of Rix battle language in her speech.

“Preserve us,” she murmured. A risen woman, one of the honored dead of the Empire, speaking Rix. What had Rana Harter become?

“Herd,” Captain Zai said in a level voice. “I’ve come for information.”

The commando kissed Rana Harter once more before answering, and whispered at the edge of Hobbes’s hearing, “Your lips are as cold as mine now.”

Katherie swallowed, wondering again if this was a dream.

Herd turned from her lover and looked at Captain Zai.

“So you want to hear the Emperor’s Secret now?”

He nodded, then said, “I will hear it,” with the measured formality of an oath in military court.

Herd cocked her head, as if listening to some internal voice. Then she smiled, a predatory expression that chilled Hobbes’s soul.

“It will not make you happy, Vadan.”

Zai met her gaze without flinching. He reached back and pulled the door shut behind them. With the heavy metal in place, even the inescapable hum of the ship was silenced.

They were absolutely cut off from the rest of the
Lynx
now.

“Tell us,” Zai said.

The Rixwoman took a breath, then she began.

“Your Empress was killed not by us, but by the Apparatus.”

“Of course,” whispered Hobbes to herself. The records of the battle had suggested as much. The Emperor was a murderer.

“But that fact is not the secret that concerns you, Zai,” Herd added. “Alexander was inside the Empress before she died, through the agency of a machine that was within her body.”

“The confidant,” Captain Zai said.

“Exactly. Alexander took control of this machine, like every other on Legis, and could see inside the Empress. Alexander saw something.”

As the commando went on, her flat voice became almost singsong, as if she were telling a children’s tale. She leaned her head against Rana Harter’s shoulder, and the dead woman stroked Herd’s bound arms.

The story took fifteen slow minutes.

Hobbes had known that her bond to the gray world was broken— by the false Error of Blood, by the
Lynx
‘s travails, and now finally by Zai’s inescapable treasons—but the Rixwoman’s words were something altogether different. They left her captain retching on the floor, unraveled centuries of the history she had been taught, and tore Hobbes’s last convictions from her like a swallowed hook dragged from a fish’s gut.

And after that, everything was different.

Awaiting the closure of the Emperor’s trap, Nara Oxham was very careful.

She knew instinctively that it was only a matter of time before the Apparatus uncovered her communication with Zai. Perhaps they already had, and were merely waiting for an opportune moment to move against her. After a few nervous nights at home, she decided to sleep in her office, remaining within the safety of the Rubicon Pale. As a rule, a senator could not disappear suddenly without explanation, but a case of wartime treason might convince the Apparatus that it could make an exception.

When the trap closed, it did so quickly.

The news swept through the capital’s infostructure quickly, a fire rampant in pure oxygen. It started as a newsfeed rumor, well traveled but patently incredible. Then supporting evidence was released: images of Oxham and Zai meeting at the Emperor’s party ten years ago; the repeater path of her first message to him; a time line of the War Council’s agenda, the debates for which the hundred-year rule had been invoked covered with a broad swath of black. And finally her voice, dictating the first few words of her warning to Zai—this last synthesized for dramatic effect.