As it plumbed the planetary libraries in vain, Alexander slowly began to realize that this confidant had been a secret. It was singular and strangely invisible. No one on Legis XV had ever patented or purchased anything like the device, discussed it on the newsfeeds, scribbled a picture of it on a work tablet, or even mentioned it in a diary entry.
It was, in short, a secret of global—perhaps
Imperial
—proportions.
Alexander felt a warm rush of interest, a scintillation of energy like the fluctuations of the planet's seven private currencies when the markets opened. It knew, if only from the millions of novels and plays and games that informed its sense of drama, that when governments kept secrets, they did so at their peril.
So Alexander began closer analysis of the scant data it had wrung from the confidant in those few moments it had assumed control. The machine had evidently been designed to monitor the Empress's body, a strange accessory for one of the immortal dead. Her health should have been perfect, forever. To Alexander, the confidant's recordings were noise, the data obviously encrypted with a one-time pad. The pad must exist somewhere on Legis, somewhere off the nets. The compound mind remembered its few seconds inside the confidant, before the device had destroyed itself to avoid capture. For a moment, Alexander had seen the world through the machine's eyes.
Starting from that slender thread, it began to reverse-engineer the device, attempting to scry its purpose.
Perhaps there was another hostage of sorts to take, here on Legis XV. Some new lever to use against the Risen Empire, sworn enemy of all things Rix.
INITIATE
The body lay blackened and flaking on the still-table, recognizable as a human only in the grossest aspect of its limbs, trunk, and head. But Initiate Viran Farre stood back, wary of the charred corpse as if it were capable of sudden motion—some swift reprisal against those who had failed to protect it. Three more humans and the Rix commando lay, similarly burned, on the other tables in the room. These were the five who had been killed in the council chamber.
Officially, Initiate Farre and Adept Trevim had claimed possession of their remains in case one of them were fit to rise. But clearly any such reanimation lay beyond the Miracle of the Symbiant; these people had been destroyed. The politicals' real purpose was to cut open the Child Empress's body, and make sure that all evidence of the Emperor's Secret was eliminated.
Farre felt a strange hollow in her stomach, a void filled only with an ominous flutter, like the anxious lightness of sudden freefall. She had performed the administration of the symbiant many times, and was no stranger to dead bodies. But this palpable presence of the Emperor's Secret made war against her conditioning. She wanted to blot out the sight of the Empress's fallen body, run from the room and order the building burned down. Adept Trevim had ordered Farre to steel herself, however; the initiate's medical knowledge was necessary here. And Farre was also conditioned to obey her superiors.
"Which of these saws, Farre?"
Farre took a deep breath, and forced her eyes to take in the array of monofilament incisors, vibrasaws, and beam cutters on the autopsy table. The tools were arranged by kind and size, the backmost raised on the stepped table like a jury, or the excavated teeth of some ancient predator displayed by form and function: here the gnashers, here the renders, here the grinding molars.
"I would stay away from beam cutters, Adept. And we haven't the skill for monofilaments." The confidant was made of nervous tissue, and would be a delicate extraction. They needed to open the body in the least destructive way.
"A vibrasaw, then?" Trevim suggested.
"Yes," Farre managed.
She selected a small one, and set it to its thinnest and shortest cutting width, just enough to slice through the rib cage. Farre handed it to the adept, and winced at the dead woman's clumsy grip on the tool. Farre, who had been a doctor before her induction into the Emperor's service, should by rights be performing the autopsy. But the conditioning was too profound. It was all she could do to assist; actually cutting into the corpse that housed the Secret would bring forth a calamitous reaction from her internal monitors.
The vibrasaw whirred to life in Trevim's hand, its whine like a mosquito caught inside one's eardrum. The sound seemed to put even the fifty-years-dead Adept on edge as she pressed the saw against the blackened corpse. But her strokes were smooth and clean, gliding through the charred flesh like a blade through water.
A mist rose up from the corpse, the faintest blur of gray in the air. Farre shuddered and reached for a medical mask. The mist looked like fine ash dust rising from a burned-out fire; indeed, it was in every chemical sense the same—fire-distilled carbon—but its source was human flesh rather than wood. Farre covered her mouth carefully, trying not to think of the small motes of dead Child Empress that would be trapped between the mask's fibers, or were settling even now into the pores of her exposed skin.
The Adept finished, having done almost too thorough a job. The vibrasaw had been set to undercut the connective tissues, and the Empress's rib cage lifted up easily in narrow strips as Trevim tugged. Farre leaned carefully forward, trying to quell the raging inhibitions of her conditioning. The exposed chest was almost abstract, like the plastic sculptures back in medical school; the titanic heat from the Rix blaster having burned gristle and tissue to a dark, dry mass.
"And now a nerve locator?"
Farre shook her head. "They only work on living subjects. Or the very recently dead. You'll need a set of nervous-tissue-seeking nanoprobes and a remote viewer, along with a troweling rod." She took another deep breath. "Let me show you."
The Adept moved aside as Initiate Farre sprayed the nanoprobes onto the glistening chest cavity. Farre let them propagate, then inserted the rod carefully, watching its readout to make sure she didn't damage the delicate strands of the confidant's skein. The troweling rod's nimble fingers, thin as piano wire, began to work the flesh, teasing the tissue from the Empress's body.
But Farre had only progressed a few centimeters when she realized what she was doing, and a wave of nausea struck her.
"Adept..." she managed.
Trevim lifted the instrument delicately from Farre's fingers as she staggered back from the still-table.
"That will do nicely, Initiate," she heard Trevim say. "I think I see how it works. Thank you."
The images stayed unshakeably in her mind's eye as she sank heavily to the floor. The Emperor's sister, Child Empress Anastasia, Reason for the symbiant, splayed open like a roasted pig.
Vulnerable. Injured. The Secret exposed!
And she, Viran Farre, had participated. Her stomach heaved, and acid bile rose into her throat. The taste destroyed all will, and she retched pitifully as the adept continued to remove the confidant from the fallen Empress.
CAPTAIN
Laurent Zai dropped the single-purpose remote into his pocket. It wasn't actually programmed to do anything yet—he hardly wanted to kill himself
accidentally.
He'd simply wanted to show ExO Hobbes the manner in which he intended to commit suicide. As a warrior, he had always borne the prospect of a messy end, but an awkward changeover of command was unacceptable.
Zai felt a strange calmness as he followed Hobbes to the command bridge. The anxiety that consumed Zai during the hostage situation was gone. Over the last two years, love had compromised his bravery, he realized now. Hopelessness had returned it to him in good working order.
Zai wondered why the
Lynx
had been equipped with two bridges. The warship was a new class, unlike any of the Navy's
Acinonyx
frigates, and a few of its design concepts had seemed odd to Zai. In addition to a battle bridge, the ship had a command bridge, as if an admiral would one day want to command a fleet from a frigate. The second bridge had wound up being used as a very well-equipped conference room.
When Zai and Hobbes entered, the officers present snapped to attention. The command bridge was optimized for flatscreen viewing, the conference table folded out like a jackknife, all seats facing the hi-res screen. The officers' eyes met Zai's with nervous determination, as if they had been planning a mutiny.
Or plotting to save their captain's life.
"At ease," Zai ordered, taking the shipmaster's chair. He turned to Hobbes. "Make your report, Executive Officer."
Hobbes glanced anxiously at the hardkey she'd been worrying in her hand during their discussion in the observation bubble, as if suddenly unsure that it was up to the task. Then, with a grim look, she shoved it into a slot before her.
The vibration of the table's boot sequence shimmered under Zai's hand. He noted the shift of shadows in the room as overhead lights dimmed and the billions of picture elements on the wall warmed to their task. He saw his officers relax a little, as people always did when preparing to watch a canned presentation, no matter how grim the situation. Now that Zai faced death, details had become terribly clear to him. But this clarity was like amplified secondary sight, sharp but somehow distant. The marrow of these quotidian details had been lost along with his future, as if his experiences had become suddenly worthless, like some currency decommissioned overnight.
The screen showed a grainy image, its colors flattened into gray-scale—the unavoidable signal loss of a helmet-sized transmitter narrowcasting all the way to low orbit. The picture seemed stretched, the pulled-taffy visuals of a marine's 360-degree vision. It took a few moments for Zai's visual cortex to adapt to the view, like struggling to understand pre-Diaspora Anglish for the first few minutes of some ancient play.
Then figure and ground sorted themselves out, and he could make out a Rix soldier, a blood-spattered admiral, an off-balance Dr. Vechner, and the body of one Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman. All were frozen, their motion suspended, the horror of the situation oddly aestheticized by the rough grain of the medium.
"This is 67:21:34," Hobbes announced, her airmouse hovering in front of the timecode on the screen. "Exactly fifteen seconds before the stasis field was first activated by Corporal Lao." She named the participants, the air-mouse flitting like a curious hummingbird from one to the next.
"Note that there are no visible wounds on the Empress. Blood is visible on her and the admiral, but it's spread evenly across them. It probably belongs to the Rix commandos, who had been railgunned from orbit with structure-penetrating exsanguination slugs."
The airmouse shifted in response to these words, seeming to sniff the entry wound on the Rix commando. Zai had to admit that it looked like a square hit. Her guts should have been sucked out in buckets. How could she have survived?
"Now, I'll advance it to the point where the stasis field interrupts transmission."
The figures jolted into action, Vechner stumbling, Lao's helmet voice calling
"Come, sir,"
and dragging him toward the Empress. Lao deployed the field generator and her fingers reached for the controls; then the screen went black.
"Now," Hobbes said, "to focus on certain elements. First, the Empress."
The fifteen seconds replayed on the screen, with the Empress's image highlighted. She was shaking uncontrollably, having some sort of seizure. The admiral restrained the Empress as if she were a living child thrashing her way through a nightmare.
"Obviously, the Child Empress is alive. Under some sort of stress, perhaps wounded, but alive. Now, observe the Rixwoman."
The scene replayed, and Zai felt himself gaining familiarity with the short document. The highlighted Rix commando was completely still.
"She's dead," First Pilot Maradonna said to the room.
"Or playing dead," Captain Zai responded.
"That's possible, sir," Hobbes allowed. "The Rix physiology is not pulsitile. Which means they don't take lungfuls of air, they filter it continuously. And their hearts spin rather than beating."
"So they are naturally motionless on the surface, no matter the resolution."
"Yes, sir. But allow me to skip forward to the visuals received when the situation had been secured, when Lao briefly lowered the stasis field. This is from Dr. Vechner's helmet."
The screen was refreshed with a new tableau. Vechner knelt beside the Empress. The airmouse moved to indicate the Rix soldier; she apparently hadn't moved in the interim. Hobbes left this fact unspoken.
"Note the ultrasound wrap around the Empress," Hobbes continued. "As we advance, you can see her heart beating within."
The image moved forward for five seconds, then the stasis field went back up and cut off the transmission again. But the heartbeat was clearly visible. The Empress had still been alive at that point.
Damn,
Zai thought. They'd been so close.
"Why don't we have data from the ultrasound wrap?" he asked. "Shouldn't it have automatically connected with the
Lynx
medical AI?"
"Unfortunately, the security protocols require more than five seconds to complete, sir. There are extensive firewalls against viruses being loaded onto the
Lynx
in the guise of emergency medical data."
Zai wondered who'd tried that little trick in the past. It sounded like typical Tungai sabotage.
"Now from Corporal Lao's perspective again," Hobbes continued. "The new marine in the picture is Initiate Barris. His armor was crashed on captain's orders, as he had just killed another marine with friendly fire."
Barris's motionless armor lay just outside the field area. When the image advanced, Lao reached out and dragged him inside the protective perimeter.
"Lao is moving to protect a fallen comrade," Hobbes said dryly.
Barris rolled over. His face was an appalling mess, a wreckage of tissues damaged by a bad atmospheric entry.
"Rix ... here,"
Barris's twisted face said.
Lao's hand darted for the field generator's controls again, and the image went dark.