Her captain would tumble out into naked space, and die.
Hobbes reviewed the steps she'd taken to try to save her captain. The images from the short firefight still played in her mind when she closed her eyes. She and the tactical staff had even synthed a physical model of the palace in the forward mess, had painstakingly traced the movement of every commando, every marine during the encounter. Hobbes had
known
that there must be something there to absolve Zai of responsibility, if only she could search harder, longer, build more models and simulations. The possibility that there was simply nothing to find, that the situation was hopeless, had never crossed her mind.
But now she remembered the look on Laurent's face as he had dressed her down, and Hobbes despaired. His anger had broken something inside her, something she hadn't realized was there, that she had foolishly allowed to grow. And the bitter shame of it was that she actually thought Laurent might save himself for her: Katherie Hobbes.
But that foolishness would be lost forever in the next few minutes, along with her captain.
Hobbes's fingers grasped the wide arms of the con. All this power within arm's reach, and she had never felt more helpless.
She looked down at the
Lynx
in the airscreen. Soon, it would unfold into battle configuration, suddenly and terribly beautiful. The deed would be done. Hobbes almost
wanted the
clarion to sound. At least then this waiting would be over.
"Executive Officer."
The voice came from behind her.
"I'll take the chair now."
Even as her mind seemed to crash, the imperatives of duty and habit took over her body. Hobbes stood and turned, taking one respectful step away from the station that wasn't hers. Vision reddened at the edges, as if an acceleration blackout were closing in.
"Captain on the bridge," she managed.
The confused bridge crew snapped to attention.
He nodded and took the shipmaster's chair, and she took careful steps back toward her usual station. She slipped into its familiar contours still in shock.
She looked up at Zai.
"The drill we spoke of is canceled, Hobbes," he said quietly. "Not postponed. Canceled."
She nodded dumbly.
He turned to regard the airscreen, and Hobbes saw the other officers quickly turn their startled faces to their own stations. A few looked at her questioningly. She could only swallow and stare at her captain.
Zai looked down at the image of the
Lynx,
and smiled.
If Hobbes understood him correctly, Laurent Zai had just thrown away all honor, all dignity, every tradition he had been raised upon.
And he looked ... happy.
Her words had made a difference to him. For a long, strange moment, Katherie couldn't take her gaze from the captain's face.
Then a troubled look came over Zai. He glanced sharply down at her.
"Hobbes?"
"Sir?"
"Pray tell me. Why is it so damned cold on my bridge?"
TEN YEARS EARLIER
(IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)
SENATOR-ELECT
Laurent began talking about Dhantu quite suddenly.
Nara could feel his injuries, the strange absences in his body. The prosthetics were lifeless and invisible to her empathy, but psychic phantom limbs overlay them, hovering like nervous ghosts. Laurent Zai's body was still whole in his own mind. One arm, both legs, even the cavity of the artificial digestive tract glowed hyperreal, as if Laurent were a photograph garishly retouched by hand.
The apathy in Nara's system was slowly losing effect as the drug filtered from her blood, her empathy growing stronger by the hour. Oxham's abilities recovered from chemical suppression in two stages: first with a sudden rush of increased sensitivity, then more gradually, a timid animal emerging after a storm.
Even here in the refuge of her polar house, thousands of kilometers from the nearest city, Nara was anxious about complete withdrawal. Laurent's presence in this sanctum was an unknown quantity. He was her first guest here at the polar estate, and the first person in whose presence she had totally freed her empathic ability since coming to the Imperial home world.
She wondered what had possessed her to bring the gray warrior here. Why had she been so open about her childhood? He was, after all, one of the enemy. Nara tasted embarrassment now, the long discussion of her own madness flat and metallic in her mouth. And the sting of Laurent's words:
That's insane.
She was silent now, letting her mind drift while the hearthfire burned itself low.
Nara's polar estate was a kingdom of silence. In the unpopulated south, her unleashed empathy could extend for kilometers, searching for human emotions like a vine seeking water. It sometimes seemed that she could enter the cool, slow thoughts of the plants in the house's many gardens. Away from the capital's throngs, she felt transported back to the empty expanses of Vasthold.
But when Lieutenant-Commander Zai began his tale, her empathy pulled itself back from the wastelands and came to a focus on this quiet, intense man, and on the old pain deep inside him.
"The Dhantu punitive expedition was requested by a local governor," Zai said, his eyes on a distant snowmelt waterfall. It tumbled onto the surface of the great glacier that approached the house from the east, the collision of temperatures raising a misty veil across the slowly setting sun.
"The governor was a sympathizer, it was later discovered," he said. "She came from a very good family, from among the first allies of the Emperor on Dhantu. But she had harbored traitorous thoughts since childhood. She wrote about it before her execution, bragging that she had achieved the office of Governor Prefectural on the power of hatred alone. A household nanny had raised her from birth to despise the Emperor and the Occupation."
"The hand that rocks the cradle," Oxham observed.
Laurent nodded.
"We have no servants on Vada."
"Nor on Vasthold, Laurent."
He smiled at her, perhaps recognizing that the spartan ways of his gray planet were not too different from the austere meritocracy of the Secularists. Though polar opposites politically, neither of them were Utopians. Both monks and atheists trod on bare floors.
Nara realized that Laurent had used the word
occupation
to describe what was officially known as the "Ongoing Liberation of Dhantu." Of course, he had seen firsthand the excesses of direct Imperial rule, and its effect on the Dhantu heart. He was beyond euphemisms.
Zai swallowed, and Nara felt a chill in him, a shudder through the phantom limbs.
"The governor directed us to a secret meeting place of the resistance, whore she said a high-level parley among its factions would take place. We sent a contingent of marines, hoping to capture a handful of resistance leaders."
"But it was a trap," she remembered.
The lieutenant-commander nodded. "The walls of the canyon had been carefully prepared, natural iron deposits configured to baffle our intelligence small craft, to hide the ambush. When the resistance fighters appeared in force, it was as if they had materialized from thin air."
She began to recall the details of the Dhantu incident, which had consumed the media for months, especially on anti-Occupation Vasthold.
"You weren't actually with the landing force, were you, Laurent?"
"Correct. The insertion force was strictly marines. The trap closed quickly, with only a few shots fired. From up in space, we could see through small-craft recon that our marines would be wiped out if they fought. We ordered a stand-down."
He sighed.
"But Private Anante Vargas had been killed in the first exchange of fire," he said.
Nara nodded. She remembered the official narrative now, the hero Zai trading himself for a dead man.
"His armor diagnostics showed that he'd died cleanly, a chest wound. If we could get the body up within forty minutes, he would take the symbiant easily."
"But they wouldn't give him up without an exchange."
Laurent's eyes closed, and Nara felt a deep, anguished tremor from the man. She struggled to pinpoint the emotion.
"There was a confluence of interests," he explained. "The resistance would get another living hostage; we would retrieve our dead. But they demanded a command officer. They asked for a member of the Apparatus, but there were no politicals aboard our ship. They knew that we wouldn't give them the captain, but a lieutenant-commander would do."
"Were you ordered, Laurent?"
"No," he said, shaking his head slowly. "The propaganda version is true. I volunteered."
There was the anguish again, as clear as words.
If only it could have been someone else. Anyone else.
But this regret was entangled with Laurent's guilt at his own thoughts. In Zai's gray world, the honored dead were by any measure worth more than the living.
"I inserted in an up-down pod. Ballistic entry, with crude rockets to get it back up. Not much bigger than a coffin."
"You trusted them?"
"My captain had stated quite clearly that if they reneged on the deal, he'd collapse the whole canyon with a railgun strike, kill us all. So I stepped out of the pod reasonably sure that they'd give up Vargas.
"Two of the resistance fighters brought Vargas's body over, and I helped them load him. For a moment, the three of us were human beings. We carried the lifeless man together, arranged his hands and feet in the jumpseat. Prepared him for his journey.
"Then we stepped back and I spoke to my ship for the last time, saying Vargas was ready. The pod ignited, carried him heavenward. I suppose I began the Warrior's Prayer out of reflex. The prayer is Vadan aboriginal, pre-Imperial, actually. But one of the two resistance fighters didn't hear it that way. He struck me down from behind."
He shook his head, bewildered.
"I had just handled the dead with these men."
Nara felt his horror in waves. Laurent, poor gray man, was still aghast that the Dhanti could have so little respect for ritual, for the Old Enemy, death. That blow from behind had made Zai more bitter than his months of torture, more anguished than having to walk into the trap of his own free will, sadder than watching his fellow captives die one by one. Nara could hear the question inside Laurent: the two guerrillas had handled the dead with him, and they wouldn't let him finish a simple prayer. Were they utterly empty?
"Laurent," she offered, "they'd seen millions die on their world, without any hope of resurrection."
He nodded slowly, almost respectfully. "Then they should know that death is beyond our political feuds."
Death
is
our political feud,
Nara Oxham thought, but said nothing.
The sunset had turned red. Here in the unpolluted air of the deep south, the sunset lasted for two hours in summer. Nara knelt to place more wood on the fire. Laurent settled beside her, passing logs from the fireside pile. The house grew its own wood, a vanilla-scented cedar engineered for fast growth and slow burning. But it took a long time to dry properly, and hissed and smoked when wet. Zai hefted each piece in his hand, discarding those still heavy with water.
"You've built a fire before," Nara said.
He nodded. "My family has a cabin in the high forests of the Valhalla range, just above the snowline. Entirely datablind. It's built of wood and mud, and its only heat comes from a fireplace about this size."
Nara smiled. "My mother's line has a dumb cabin, too. Stone. I spent my winters there as a child. Tending fires is youngster's work on Vasthold."
Laurent smiled distantly, at some more pleasant memory.
"It develops a sense of balance and hierarchy," he said, or quoted.
"Balance, yes," Nara said, leaning a slender log carefully against the central mass of the fire. "But hierarchy?"
"The match ignites the kindling, which feeds the larger pieces."
She chuckled. A typically Vadan interpretation, to see order and structure in the consuming chaos that was a healthy blaze.
"Well, at least it's a bottom-up hierarchy," she commented.
They built the fire together.
"We were well treated at first, during the few weeks of negotiation. Our captors made populist demands, such as medical aid for the tropics, which were in epidemic season. They began playing with the Imperial government. Wherever the government acted against disaster, the resistance would issue demands retroactively, making it seem as if any Imperial aid on Dhantu was a result of the hostage-taking. The resistance took credit for everything. Finally, the Imperial governor-general grew weary of their propaganda. He suspended all humanitarian aid."
Nara frowned. She'd never thought of the Dhantu Occupation as a humanitarian operation. But, of course, occupying armies always brought a certain social order. And most occupying regimes were wealthier than their victims. Bribery followed naturally after conquest.
"After the Imperial sanctions were imposed, the torture began. The strange thing was, our captors weren't interested in pain. Not when they first strapped us to the chairs."
Chairs,
Nara thought. Such a quotidian word. A chill rose inside her, and Nara turned to catch more of the heat from the blazing fire.
"The chairs were experimental medical equipment, fully pain-suppressant," Laurent said. "I felt nothing when they removed my left hand."
Nara closed her eyes, a realization dawning in her. Even without her quickening empathy, she would have heard in Laurent's voice the searching cadence of an unrehearsed tale. He hadn't told this story before. Perhaps there'd been a debriefing, with the dispassionate rendering of a military report. But this was his first human telling of what had happened on Dhantu.
No wonder the psychic scars felt so fresh.
"Only twenty centimeters removal at first," he said. "The prosthetic nervous tissue shone like gold wires. I could even see the muscle extensions flex when I moved my fingers. The blood transports were transparent, so I could see the beating of my heart pulsing in them."
"Laurent," Nara said softly. It wasn't a plea for him to stop; she'd just had to say something. She couldn't leave this man's voice alone in the huge silence of the polar waste.
"Then they moved it farther away. Forty centimeters. Flexing the fingers ached now, as if they were cramped. But that was nothing compared to ...
the disgust.
To see my hand responding so naturally, as if it were still connected. I vowed not to move it, to shut it from my mind—to make it a dead thing. But I could
feel
it. Only the strong pain was suppressed. Not normal sensations. Not the itching."
He looked deep into the fire. "The Dhanti were always great physicians," he said without irony.
Something broke inside the fire, a pocket of water or air exploding with a muffled sound. Sparks shot out at Nara and Laurent, and were repulsed by the firescreen. Bright ingots of flame dropped in a bright line along the stone floor, revealing the position of the invisible barrier.
"Of course, we were fully restrained in the chairs. My fingers and toes were all I could move. Imagine trying not to move your only free muscles for days. The hand began to itch, to throb and grow in my mind. Finally, I couldn't stand it. I would flex my fingers, and have to watch them respond at that
remove."
Nara felt her empathy coming to its highest pitch. Freed from the drug, it responded to the horror coming from Laurent, reached out toward him rather than recoiling. It had been so long since her ability had been fully open to another person; it stretched like a long-sleeping cat awakening. She could see now, empathy fully co-opting the second-sight nodes in her optic nerve. Spirals of revulsion wound through the man, coiling like serpents on his artificial limbs. His gloved hand clenched, as if trying to grasp the phantasms of his pain. Maybe this was too private for her to look upon, she thought, and Nara's fingers moved to her wrist, instinctively searching for her apathy bracelet. But it was gone, left on a doorside table.
She closed her eyes, glad that easy relief was out of reach. Someone should feel what this man had suffered.
"They took us to pieces.
"They pulled my left arm into three, segmented at wrist and elbow and shoulder, connected by those pulsing lines. Then the legs, fused together, but a meter away. My heart beat hard all day, pumped up by stimulants, trying to meet the demands of the larger circulatory system. I never really slept.
"As ranking officer, I was last in line for everything. So they could learn from their mistakes, and not lose me to a sudden mishap. I could see the other captives around me twisted into bizarre shapes: circulatory rings, with blood flowing from the fingertips of the left hand into those of the right; distributed, with the digestion clipped off in stomach fragments to supply each removed limb separately; and utterly chaotic bodies, jumbles of flesh that slowly died.