As when she awoke from coldsleep, Oxham felt overwhelmed by the emotions around her. She felt herself dragged down again toward madness, into the formless chaos of the group mind. Even the voices of the capital's billions intruded; the white-noise scream of unbridled politics and commerce, the raw, screeching metal of the city's mindstorm all threatened to take her over.
Her fingers fumbled for her apathy bracelet, releasing a dose of the drug. The familiar hiss of transdermal injection calmed her, a totem to hang on to until the empathy suppressant could take effect. The drug acted quickly. She felt reality rush back into the room, crowding out the wheeling demons as her ability dulled. The awesome, somber silence returned.
The dead admiral was talking now, giving particulars of the rescue attempt. Troops descending in their blazing smallcraft, a firefight sprawling across the great palace, and one last Rix commando playing dead, killing the Child Empress even as the battle was won.
The words meant nothing to Nara Oxham. All she knew was that her lover was a dead man, doomed by an Error of Blood. He would settle his affairs, prepare his crew for his death, and then plunge a dull ceremonial blade into his belly. The power of tradition, the relentless fixity of gray culture, his own sense of honor would compel him to complete the act.
Oxham pulled the message remote from her sleeve pocket. She felt its tiny mouth nibble at her palm, tasting sweat and flesh. Verifying her identity, it hummed with approval. Nara pressed the device to her throat, unwatched as the council attended to the droning admiral.
"Send," she said, at the threshold between voice and whisper.
The device vibrated for a moment with life, then went still, its purpose expended.
She imagined the tiny packet of information slipping down the thread of its Rubicon gerrymander, inviolate as it passed through the palace's brilliant facets. Then it would thrust into the torrent of the capital's infostructure, a water-walking insect braving a raging river. But the packet possessed senatorial privilege; it would exercise absolute priority, surging past the queue awaiting off-world transmission, flitting through the web of repeaters, as fleet as an Imperial decree.
The message would reach an entanglement facility somewhere buried under kilometers of lead, a store of half-particles whose doppelgängers waited on Imperial warships, or had been transported by near-lightspeed craft to other planets in the realm. With unbelievable precision, certain photons suspended in a weakly interacting array would be collapsed, thrust from their coherent state into the surety of measurement. And ten light-years away, their doppelgängers on the
Lynx
would react, also falling from the knife's edge. The pattern of this change—the set of positions in the array that had discohered—would comprise a message to the
Lynx.
Just reach him in time,
she willed the missive.
Then Senator Nara Oxham forced her attention back to the cold planes of the council chamber, and forcibly banished all thoughts of Laurent Zai from her mind.
She had a war to prosecute.
CAPTAIN
The blade rested in Zai's hand, black against black infinity, waiting only for him to squeeze.
Hard to believe what that one gesture would trigger. Convulsions throughout the ship as it shifted into combat configuration, the dash to battle stations of three hundred men, weapons crash-charged and wheeling as AI searched vainly for incoming enemy craft. Not entirely a waste of energy, Zai thought. War was coming here to the Rix frontier, and it would be good practice for the crew of the
Lynx
to run an unexpected battle-stations drill. Perhaps performing the EVA maneuvers of a body recovery—their captain's corpse—would impress them with the seriousness of being on the front line of a new Rix incursion.
Not that he'd meant this means of suicide as a training exercise. Bringing the ship to emergency status was simply the only way to override the safeties that protected the observation blister.
What a strange way to kill myself,
he thought. Laurent Zai wondered what perversity of spirit had led him to choose this particular blade of error. Decompression was hardly an instantaneous death. How long did it take a human being to die in hard vacuum? Ten seconds? Thirty? And those moments would be painful. The rupture of eyes and lungs, the bursting of blood vessels in the brain, the explosive expansion of nitrogen bubbles in the knee joints.
Probably too much pain for the human mind to register, too many extraordinary violations of the body all at once. At what point was a chorus of agonies overwhelmed by sheer surprise? Zai wondered. However long he stood here facing the blackness and contemplating what was about to happen, his nervous system was unlikely to be in any way prepared.
Of course, the traditional ceremony of error—a dull weapon thrust into your belly, watching as your pulse splattered onto a ritual mat—was hardly pleasant. But as an elevated man, Laurent Zai could choose any means of suicide. He didn't have to suffer. There were painless ways out, even quite pleasurable ones. A century ago, the elevated Transbishop Mater Silver had killed herself with halcionide, gasping with orgasm as she went.
But Zai wanted to feel the void. However painful, he wanted to know what had lurked all those years on the other side of the hullalloy. He was in love with space, emptiness, always had been. Now he would meet it face to face.
In any case, his decision was made. Zai had chosen, and like all command officers, he knew the dangers of second-guessing oneself. Besides, he had other things to think about.
Laurent Zai closed his eyes and sighed. The blister was sealed from the crew by his command. He would be alone here until the end; there was no longer any need to show strength for the sake of his shipmates. One by one, he relaxed the rigid controls he had forced upon his thoughts. For the first time since his error had been committed, Zai allowed himself the luxury of thinking about her—Senator Nara Oxham.
By Imperial Absolute, it had been ten years since he had last seen his lover. But in the long acceleration spinward, the Time Thief had stolen more than eight of those years, leaving Zai's memory—the color of her eyes, the scent of her—still fresh. And Nara also suspended herself in time. As a senator, she spent the frequent legislative breaks in stasis sleep, enfolded in a cocoon of temporal arrest. That image of her, a sleeping princess waiting for him, had sustained him for these last relative years. He'd entertained the romantic notion that their romance would beat time, lasting through the long, cold decades of separation, intact while the universe reeled forward.
It had seemed that way. Zai was elevated, immortal. Nara was a senator, almost certainly eligible for elevation once she renounced her Secularist deathwish. Even the pinkest politicians sometimes did, ultimately. They were two immortals, safe from the ravages of time, preserved from their long separations by relativity itself.
But time, it seemed, was not the only enemy. Zai opened his eyes and regarded the black remote before him.
It was death, in his hand.
Death was the real thief, of course. It always had been. Love was fragile and hapless compared to it. Since humans had first gained self-awareness, they had been stalked by the specter of extinction, of nothingness. And since the first humanlike primate had learned to smash another's skull, death was the ultimate arbiter of power. It was no wonder that the Risen Emperor was worshiped as a god. To those who served him faithfully, he offered salvation from humanity's oldest enemy.
And demanded death itself for those who failed him.
Best to get it over with, Laurent Zai thought. Tradition had to be served.
Zai touched his hands together as if to pray.
His stomach clenched. He smelled it on his hands, that shame from childhood, when he had prayed to the Emperor for taller classmates. He felt the bile that had risen on that afternoon at the soccer field, when he felt with childish surety that he himself had caused the Krupp Reich plague. The heavy-handed Vadan propaganda still informed him somehow. He smelled vomit on his hands.
And instead of praying to the Emperor, instead of saying the ritual words of suicide, he whispered, "Nara, I'm so sorry," again and again.
The remote was hard in his hand, but Laurent Zai didn't reach for death. Not yet.
Message for Captain Laurent Zai,
came the prompt in second sight.
He opened his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.
"Hobbes..." he sighed. He had left specific orders. Would the woman not let him die?
But his executive officer did not respond. Zai looked more closely at the hovering missive, and swallowed. It was eyes-only, under penalty of blood. It had bypassed the bridge altogether, looking for him alone, under senatorial seal.
Senatorial.
Nara. She knew.
The situation here on Legis XV was subject to the highest order of secrecy. The
Lynx's
marines had locked down the planet in the first hours of the crisis, occupying the polar entanglement facility that allowed translight communication. Even the ubiquitous Rix compound mind was cut off from the rest of the Empire.
Among the Senate, only a select few would know that the Empress was dead. The propaganda machine of the Political Apparatus would prepare the body public very carefully for the news. But evidently Nara knew. Senator Oxham must have risen high in the ranks of her party these last ten years.
Or could the message be a coincidence? Surely that was absurd; Nara wouldn't contact him casually with a message sealed under penalty of blood. She had to know about his error.
He didn't want to open the message, didn't want to see Nara's words borne by his defeat, his extinction. Laurent Zai had promised to return, and had failed her.
Use the blade now,
he told himself.
Spare yourself this pain.
But a senatorial seal was an agent of some intelligence. It would know that it had reached the
Lynx
successfully, and that Zai wasn't dead yet. It would report back to Nara that he had rejected it, just as any intelligent missive would. The seal would record his last betrayal.
He had to read it. Anything less would be cruel.
Laurent Zai sighed. A life spent in service of tradition, but he was apparently not destined to die cleanly.
He opened his palm before him as if to receive a gift, that first interface gesture taught to children.
The senatorial seal expanded before him, cut with the crimson bar sinister of Vasthold. Nara Oxham's formal titles were vaguely visible in tertiary sight.
"Captain Laurent Zai," he said to it.
The seal didn't break. Its security AI wasn't satisfied yet. Thin lasers from the
Lynx
proper washed Zai's hands, covering them with a shimmering red patina. He turned them over, letting the lasers read the whorls of his fingertips and palms. Then they moved up and played across his eyes.
Still the seal remained.
"Godspite!" he swore. Senatorial security was far more cautious than the military's.
He pressed his right wrist against the signet on his left shoulder. The smart metal of the signet vibrated softly, tasting his skin and sweat. There was a pause as DNA was sequenced, pheromones sniffed, blood latticed.
Finally the seal broke.
The message spilled out, in senatorial white against the depthless black of space. It hovered there, text only, absolutely still and silent, as clear as something real and solid. Just one word.
The message said:
Don't.
Zai blinked, then shook his head.
He had the feeling that this would not be easy. That nothing would ever be easy again.
EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Katherie Hobbes felt small in the shipmaster's chair.
She had called the command officers to the bridge, wanting her senior staff at their stations when the battle-stations clarion sounded. None of them questioned her. As they arrived, they noted her position at the con, met her eyes briefly, and silently took their positions.
Hobbes wondered how many of the senior staff would accept her as acting captain. She had never fit in with the other officers on board Zai's ship. Her Utopian upbringing was inescapably obvious; the cosmetic surgery that was common on her home planet made her beauty too obvious here on the very gray
Lynx.
The staff looked duly serious, at least. Hobbes had set the temperature of the bridge to ten degrees centigrade, a sign that every member of Zai's crew knew well. Their breaths were phantoms barely visible in the dim, action-ready lighting. She knew there would be no mistakes during the drill, or during the body recovery. However the politicals had screwed up the rescue, this crew felt they had failed their captain once. They were all determined not to let that happen again, Hobbes was confident.
But the shipmaster's chair still seemed gigantic. The airscreens that surrounded her were fewer than at the ExO's station, but they were more complex, crowded with overrides, feedback shunts, and command icons. The airscreens at her old position were simply for monitoring. These had power. From this chair, Hobbes could exercise control over every aspect of the
Lynx.
Such potential power at her fingertips felt perilous. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff, or aiming a tactical warhead at a large city. One nudge to the controls, one sudden movement, and far too much would happen. Irrecoverably.
From the chair's higher vantage, she could see the entirety of the huge bridge airscreen. It showed the
Lynx,
scaled small but ready to come into sudden bloom when Captain Zai unleashed his blade of error. The deployment of the energy-sink manifold alone would increase the vessel's size by an order of magnitude. The
Lynx
would bristle like some spiny, startled creature, the power of its drive flowing into weapons and shields, geysers of plasma readied, ranks of drones primed. But one soft part of its lethal anatomy would be sloughed off, almost as an afterthought. With its integrity field snapped off, the observation blister would explode like a toy balloon.