The Killing of Worlds (18 page)

But the majority was there, silent and waiting to assert itself against any future genocides.

In his mind-reading way, Niles interrupted her thoughts.

“But if you want some more advice?”

“Earn your keep, Roger.”

He waited another moment, until they had crossed the threshold of Nara Oxham’s private domain. Her offices had been almost doubled in size to match her new council rank, the ever-mobile walls of the Forum pushing against the surrounding senators’ territories, a fat man jostling his way onto an elevator. They walked past a score of staff, half of whose names she didn’t know yet.

When they reached Oxham’s personal office, Niles continued.

“You are restricted by the hundred-year rule, of course.”

Nara nodded warily. She’d explained to Niles why she couldn’t discuss the council’s contingency plan if the
Lynx
had failed. He was allowed to know of the rule’s invocation, but mention of the forbidden topic still made her vaguely nervous.

“But I’m not restricted,” he continued. “I can make suppositions, and give you advice. Let me talk, but don’t confirm or deny anything.”

“Is this a good idea, Roger?”

“Nothing in the rule says you can’t listen to me, Senator.”

She nodded slowly.

“One: You’re happy, Nara Oxham. Because your lover survived, because the war took a good turn. But my guess is that you’re also happy that the Emperor’s contingency plan didn’t have to be enacted. He must have had one, in case the
Lynx
failed.”

Oxham started to nod, but willed herself to absolute stillness. No matter how secure her offices were, there were methods of interrogation which could plumb memories of any conversation. They were playing a dangerous game with an ancient law. And although Nara had senatorial privilege, Roger Niles did not.

“Two: The Emperor’s contingency plan was … extraordinary enough that he decided to shroud it with the hundred-year rule.”

Nara blinked, then looked out the window at the noontime effulgence of the capital.

“Three: I personally believe that anything too extraordinary would not have the vote of Nara Oxham.”

She wanted to thank Roger, or at least to smile, but kept her face still.

“All of which means,” Niles continued, “that you either won the vote, and the Emperor is hopping mad at you, or you lost, and earned some modest displeasure. In either case, Laurent Zai’s victory made this extraordinary plan unnecessary, and His Risen Majesty looks like a monster for whatever he contemplated. And he’s got you to thank for dividing the council. He wanted to spread the guilt.”

Oxham wondered how Niles had realized all this. Perhaps he had read the faces of the other counselors during her speech, or perhaps he’d detected preparations for the Emperor’s plan somewhere among the volumes of data he digested every day. Or maybe the invocation of the rule had been enough, and the rest was Niles’s conjecture.

“In short,” he continued, “you have committed the ultimate sin: winning a moral victory against the Emperor.”

She couldn’t resist. “A
moral
victory, Niles? I thought you said that was an oxymoron.”

“It is, Senator. I believe you’ll discover that your victory contains several internal contradictions. For example, although it has given you more power than you’ve ever had, you’re also in far greater danger.”

“Aren’t you being dramatic, Niles?”

He shook his head. “It couldn’t be more obvious, Nara. If I’m right,
if
I’m not crazy, you’ve directly antagonized the most powerful single man in the coreward reaches of the human expansion.”

She shrugged, returning her face to a neutral mask, and stared out the window. A world had been saved, her lover was still alive. Niles’s warning couldn’t completely overshadow the joys of this bright day.

But it still troubled her that Niles had deduced all this. Did he have spies on the War Council? Nara Oxham looked at the old man, and saw the lines of concern on his smooth face. Then she understood: All the evidence he’d needed had come from Nara herself. He could read her as easily as she could read a crowd. Understanding the masses was a politician’s art, but understanding politicians was the necessary genius of a counselor.

He was an empath’s empath.

“You call that advice, Roger?” she said after a while.

“No, Senator. I call
this
advice: Be careful. Move slowly. Watch your back. Assume that the Emperor is setting a trap, waiting for you to make a mistake. Don’t.”

“Don’t make mistakes? That’s good advice, counselor.”

“It’s damn good advice, Senator. The next one could cost us all dearly.”

She sighed, then nodded.

Roger Niles sat finally, sinking heavily into one of her visitor’s chairs.

“There’s another thing, Senator. I have to apologize.”

Oxham’s eyes widened. “For what, in heaven’s name?”

He swallowed. “For saying that Zai’s death would be for the best.”

“Ah.” Nara thought back on that moment. She’d never been angry at Niles for those words. They’d been his way of alerting her to the peril of loving an officer at the front. It was Niles’s job to warn her of danger, as he had done a moment ago.

“Roger,” she said, “I know you’re glad that Laurent is still alive.”

His eyes darted away. “Of course. No one should lose their lover to war. But at least his death would have been final.”

“Roger?” she asked. She’d never seen the hard expression now set on his face.

“Did I ever tell you why I went into politics, Senator?”

She tried to recall, but the concept of a Roger Niles before politics was unthinkable. The man was politics. Nara shook her head slowly.

“The love of my life died when I was twenty,” he said, forcing the words out slowly. “A sudden hemorrhage. She was from old Vasthold aristocracy, in the days of hereditary elevation.”

Oxham blinked. She’d had no idea that Niles was that old. Before she’d become an Imperial senator, he always claimed to spend the time between electoral cycles in coldsleep, only living in the months before elections, extending his life through generations of political battles. But she’d never believed that could really be true.

Hereditary elevation? He must be ancient.

“So when Sarah died, they took her away,” he said. “Made her one of them.”

He looked out at the window at the bright city.

“I rejoiced, and praised the Emperor,” he continued quietly. “I saw her in the hospice, and she tried to say good-bye to me. But I thought it was just ritual. I assumed she would come back. We were closer than all the lovers in history, I thought. But she didn’t return. After a few months, I tracked her to the gray enclave where she… lived.”

“Oh, Roger,” Nara said softly. “How awful.”

“Indeed. They really are gray, you know, those towns. As gray as a weeklong rain. By then Sarah hardly knew who I was. She would squint when she looked at me, as if there were something familiar about my face. But she would only talk about the steam rising from her teapot. If she looked away for even a moment, when her eyes returned they had to learn to remember me all over again. As if I were some faint watermark on reality, less real than the steam.

“There was no one inside her, Nara. The symbiant is a trick. Death is final. The dead are lost.”

“How did it end, Roger?”

“They politely asked me to leave, and I left. Then I joined the local Secularist Party, and buried myself in the task of burying the dead.”

“Politics,” Nara said. “We’re alike, aren’t we?”

The old counselor nodded in agreement. Nara Oxham had turned to political life to overcome the demons of her childhood. She had turned madness into perception, vulnerability into empathy, a terror of crowds into raw power over them. Roger Niles had turned his hatred into a tactical genius, his supreme loss into relentless purpose.

Niles was every bit as fixated as the Emperor, Oxham now saw. Plumbing a thousand newsfeeds for every advantage to use against the grays, Niles was exacting his slow revenge against an immortal foe.

“Yes, we are the same, Senator,” Niles said. “We love the living rather than worship the dead. And I am glad Laurent Zai is alive.”

“Thank you, Roger.”

“Just do us all a favor and be careful, Senator, so that you’re still alive when the captain returns.”

Nara Oxham smiled calmly, and felt newfound power in the expression.

“Don’t worry about me, counselor. There are more moral victories to come.”

Laurent Zai looked down upon the glowing airscreen with displeasure.

The bridge was alive again, filled with voices and the floating runes of synesthesia, animated by interface gestures and those of human-to-human communication: palms upturned in frustration, fingers pointed, fists shaken.

The airscreen showed the frigate’s new configuration. In the aftermath of battle, the
Lynx
was a different ship. Cone were the gunnery stations and drone-pilot berths, the launch bays and rows of burn beds. Crew cabins and rec space had reappeared. Long low-gee corridors had been created for moving heavy objects up and down the ship, and there were huge new open areas for stripping damaged components down to parts.

Zai shook his head. His ship was half-junked.

What the battle hadn’t destroyed, the repair crews were pulling apart, cannibalizing, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Were the
Lynx
to face an enemy now, they would be utterly defenseless. But the frigate was well past the Rix battlecruiser. The enemy still pursued them, accelerating at its maximum of six gees, but to cancel the 3,000 kps relative velocity between the warships would take the Rix half a day, by which time they’d be 75 million kilometers away. After matching vectors, it would take them another half-day to return to the
Lynx
.

Well before that moment came, the frigate would have maneuver capability of its own.

The main fusion drive hadn’t been touched in the battle. It was, however, the
Lynx
‘s only remaining means of creating power. The singularity generator—the frigate’s auxiliary energy source—was operable, but the shielding that the engineers had stripped from it now. If the generator were big banged, there wouldn’t be enough countermass to keep the black hole in place. Armor was being stripped from all across the
Lynx
to build new shielding, but that left her gunnery hardpoints less than hard.

Indeed, all the frigate’s defensive systems were compromised. With the loss of her bow, the ship had no forward armor; two full-time gunnery crews were required to man the forward close-in defenses, picking off any meteoroids that threatened the hurtling ship. The drone magazine had been damaged by flockers, and its launch rail destroyed by the frigate’s last desperate acceleration, so there was no way to field a large complement of defensive drones. Worst of all, the ship’s energy-sink manifold was gone for good, scattered across millions of kilometers of space.

Little hard armor, no defensive cloud of drones, no energy-sink, Zai lamented. Come at the frigate with kinetic or beam weapons: Take your pick. He wouldn’t have an answer for either.

Processor capability had also been badly hit. No specific system had been lost; the entire system had been designed to “gracefully degrade.” Synesthesia was a bit fuzzier, expert Al was sluggish, and the ship’s reaction to gestural codes was slightly slower, like the annoying lag of a conversation over satellite link.

The front quarter of the ship remained in vacuum, waiting for the fissures in the cargo bay bulkhead to be stabilized. Hullalloy was the hardest substance the Empire had ever created, but once it had been virally compromised, it was never the same again. No one in their right mind would go forward of the front gunnery bulkhead without a pressure suit until the ship’s bow had been completely refitted.

There was also a bad smell aboard the frigate. They were short on water and nitrox, and the bacterial bays that were the basis of the
Lynx
‘s biosphere had been disrupted. Large sections of the crew quarters were infected with a rampant mold. The bioprocessing chief—killed by flockers—had been reanimated, but the honored dead were never as practical-minded as they had been in life. Samuel Vries had a great love of low-gee bonsai, and Laurent Zai was far too gray to give strict orders to an immortal; Vries would be spending more time on his beloved trees than the ecosystem. So until the
Lynx
made port, showering would be rationed.

But for the moment they were all breathing.

Almost all of them.

Zai had lost thirty-two crew. The flockers had killed nine, and twenty-one had fallen in the beam weapon attacks. The Rix range-finding laser had holed one side of the
Lynx
, lancing through to burn, tearing open a swath of the hull to naked space. In the final attack, chaotic gravitons had given half the crew various sorts of cancer. Even now, the medics were injecting nanos into the worst-hit victims (although these were secondaries: nanos that cleaned up their larger cousins, the ones who had actually consumed the amok tissue of a gravity burn). Another mutineer had unmasked herself trying to kill Hobbes, and had died from decompression. And of course there was Telmore Bigz, the engineer-rating who had saved the
Lynx
. A true hero. Unfortunately, along with half of the laser casualties and eight of the flocker deaths, Bigz would never be reanimated. His body no longer existed, except as exotic photons in a sphere that expanded at the constant. In fifteen years, some far-sighted telescope array on his home planet of Irrin might see the flash of his death.

But the
Lynx
had accomplished her mission.

In the hours since the battle, the magnitude of their success—and good luck—had finally penetrated Captain Zai’s exhausted brain. They had destroyed the Rix receiver array, preventing contact between the enemy battlecruiser and the Legis XV mind. And they were still alive.

Captain Laurent Zai had lived to see an Imperial pardon, survived an assassination attempt and a suicide mission. He had Jocim Marx, Katherie Hobbes, and of course Telmore Bigz to thank, so far. But there was still a war on. Their sacrifices and brilliance would be wasted unless Zai and his ship ultimately survived both the Rix and the Risen Emperor’s displeasure.