Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  “Uh,” Kiem said blankly.

  “Oh, come on,” Aren said, half laughing. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Kiem took a stab. “Because I look great in a uniform?”

  “You use that well, sure,” Aren said, grinning. “It’s more how you were the royal family’s biggest embarrassment a few years ago, and now you get asked to charity galas and interviewed for homemaker magazines and handed a diplomatic marriage.” He folded his arms and leaned back. “Half the planet seems to have bought this ‘turned over a new leaf’ story. I’m serious—if you can pass the physical, I’ll swing you a major’s commission on Kingfisher. We need someone who can work the press.”

  “I don’t—what—” Kiem scrabbled for what to say. He felt faintly sleazy, though it wasn’t as if it was a lie: he and Bel had positioned some stuff based on how the newslogs would take it. “I don’t do that on purpose.” He glanced at Jainan, who had linked his hands in his lap and was staring down at them. “I’m not the military type.”

  “Skies above, now I’ve put my foot in it,” Aren said. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, believe it or not. I’m sorry.” He sat back in his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him, and looked between them, now completely sober. “I get why you asked for the data, Jainan, but I hope you’re wrong. I know you won’t mind me saying that.”

  Aren had a point. Jainan hadn’t voiced any suspicions out loud, but if the crash hadn’t been a chance failure, then the Auditor was right: Taam’s death wasn’t an accident. And if Internal Security hadn’t caught it, they were either incompetent or had decided to cover it up. Kiem felt slightly queasy at the thought. They didn’t have any proof. Yet. “Will you be in trouble for skipping the approvals, Aren?”

  Aren waved a hand. “I’m a forgiveness-over-permission sort. Really, though, don’t send these to the Thean embassy. The new ambassador seems like a good old boy, but every time we’ve told him something, it’s gone straight to those fringe logs I showed you.”

  “No,” Jainan said. “Of course.”

  “Then go ahead,” Aren said. “Knock yourself out. I hope to hell you don’t find anything, but”—he crooked his head to one side, his face wryly sympathetic—“I get it. Forget the politics. No one can fault you for being sensitive about this.”

  Kiem wouldn’t have pinned Jainan as overly sensitive, but Jainan didn’t react to that either, apart from a movement of his throat as he swallowed. “You’ve been … very helpful,” Jainan said. He glanced at Kiem, and Kiem realized this was probably a signal that he didn’t want to talk about Taam anymore.

  “We’ll leave you to the important military stuff,” Kiem said, getting to his feet. “Can’t have civilians underfoot all the time, right?” He leaned over the desk and pumped Aren’s hand.

  Aren grinned. “Believe me, you’re not half as bad as the civil servants. And honestly, I’ve been worried about Jainan. Anything I can do—you only have to ask.” He held out his hand to Jainan, who took it gingerly. “You only ever had to ask.”

  Kiem held himself back until they were outside and in the shadow of the Emperor’s Wing. “So,” he said. “That went … well?”

  Jainan paused. “Taam found Colonel Lunver valuable,” he said abruptly. “Taam did not suffer fools. I think it would be a good idea if you got on well with her and Taam’s unit.”

  “Right,” Kiem said, gathering certainty. “We’re liaising with the military. I’m a model liaison. Should we invite them to dinner? I cook a mean pancake. Only pancakes, though. I suppose we need to make sure we get on with everyone involved in the investigation.”

  Jainan had half smiled, but it faded almost as soon as it appeared. Kiem still couldn’t quite read him. It sometimes felt like a song playing just out of earshot, or a step on a staircase in the dark. “Yes,” Jainan said. “We do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  As the winter deepened, the Resolution and the Empire paced toward Unification Day with the heavy, unswerving tread of two automatons converging. Jainan had listed the ceremonies that led up to the treaty signing; he checked them off as they passed. Most of them took place behind closed doors with the Emperor and her increasingly harried-looking team of aides, but one couldn’t be completed without the vassals: the formal handover of what the Resolution called proscribed material. The remnants. Jainan hadn’t paid much attention to them, but the ceremony must be crossed off the list. Kiem and Jainan were required to attend as the Thean representatives: they would surrender everything found on Thea since the last treaty.

  Jainan spent the four days leading up to that ceremony obsessing over Taam’s crash data. He used to feel his time in the palace drag, but now it slipped through his hands like water. Fortunately Kiem seemed to get invited to every dinner and charity gala in Arlusk, so it wasn’t hard to keep Jainan’s preoccupation away from him. Things had always turned awkward with Taam whenever Jainan became obsessed with something like this; Taam had joked that Jainan should just join a monastery where they’d let him retreat into his own world for years on end.

  Jainan knew on some level that this was displacement. His duty was to attend the ceremonies and represent Thea, not to fool around with log forensics for an investigation that Internal Security already had in hand. But the Auditor’s refusal to instate him and Kiem had shaken him—it must sort itself out, he told himself, nobody could genuinely want to break the treaty—and he needed something to focus on.

  He found nothing in the crash data. Every line of the logs supported Internal Security’s conclusion of a natural compressor failure causing a catastrophic leak of fuel into an adjoining thermal chamber. Any attempt to artificially induce that failure would have stood out like a sore thumb. Jainan wasn’t an expert in landside craft, but he knew the basics; a badly maintained compressor was a common failure point. The data was almost textbook.

  When the remnants ceremony came around, it should have been a relief to give up on the crash logs. Instead, Jainan stared into the mirror as he changed his outfit and felt like a ghost hovering outside his own body. He must look respectable. He and Kiem were to act like a happy couple. The Thean embassy had tried to invite them to a reception afterward; Jainan knew Bel would turn it down as not commensurate with Kiem’s status. Imperial Princes were expected to put the palace first.

  Kiem was late—Kiem was often late; he seemed incapable of looking at the time—and he turned up in a flurry of apologies. Jainan smiled mechanically, the ghostlike feeling floating around him like a layer of film, and accompanied him to the event.

  The remnants ceremony took place in the palace’s largest stateroom, the Chamber of the Hill Enduring. The Hill Enduring was Iskat’s crest, a sparse, instantly recognizable curve, but Jainan had never been told the history. The day before, he had absently asked Kiem about the original hill. “I don’t … know,” Kiem had said, as if just realizing this himself. “It must be on one of the planets the first terraformers came from, but we’ve been here for four hundred years. Probably eroded by now, wherever it is.”

  The shape of the Iskaners’ long-abandoned horizon was emblazoned on two walls of the stateroom. Several hundred beads of light hung from the roof like the dense hearts of galaxies, shedding a soft light on the endless gold braid that adorned the military officers and royals in attendance. The stateroom was set up around a wide ceremonial dais at one end, which currently held an assembly of stands, glass cases, and incongruously heavy lockboxes. Remnants.

  The remnants came in sizes from an obsidian-like stone that could fit on a coin up to an opaque lump of metal the size of a small dog, with compressed strata that seemed to bleed further into each other as you watched. Jainan had seen remnants before, of course. His university had a minor shard on loan in the xenotechnology department, but he had been deep in his own research and uninterested in something with no practical use and so many Resolution interdictions around working on it.

  He was unprepared for the feeling of d
ozens of remnants clustered together, which was like walking into a garden thick with swarming bees.

  The Auditor stood to the side of the dais, quietly conferring with the Emperor’s aides. His staff moved among the remnants, which Jainan realized were grouped by planet: the cases with the Thean remnants had clan insignia showing who was involved in the digs that found them.

  The rest of the room was set up more informally. This was Iskat, so of course there was a meal: the salt course was set out but as yet untouched. Dozens of guests were milling around the tables. Jainan saw a couple of the other treaty representatives. Kiem was in his Imperial family uniform, which was not quite military but showy enough that he could hold his own, while Bel wore a flowing, gold-accented coat with her usual self-assurance. Jainan faded into the background in his blue-gray Thean ceremonials. They weren’t technically correct, but his green-and-gold clan formals were aggressively Thean and would have stuck out.

  “How’s it going?” Kiem murmured as they entered side by side. “With the crash data, I mean.”

  Jainan started. He hadn’t thought he’d been bothering Kiem. But of course Kiem was expecting a result after the fuss Jainan had made over the crash data, and of course Jainan had nothing. He didn’t want to admit he had wasted Kiem’s time. Jainan didn’t know if it was because of the persistent feeling he’d somehow made a mistake in his own analysis, or just an unwillingness to admit defeat. “I would like to do one more check.”

  “Sure,” Kiem said. He looked behind him—Jainan understood the impulse, the remnants felt like a buzzing presence just behind your shoulder, wherever you turned—and shook himself. “I’d offer to help, but you know, I add up two and two and get fried fish.”

  “Fried whitebait,” Bel said absentmindedly. Jainan followed her gaze to the pristine display of food: white seafood with carefully arranged splashes of color from herbs and vegetables in glittering tiered trays. Iskat haute cuisine had an almost forensic air. “Salmon. Is that Eisafan saltfish?”

  “Leave some for us,” Kiem said.

  “If you’re quick.” She flashed both of them a sideways smile. “Oh, and don’t forget you have to leave early. You have the Thean embassy reception straight afterward.”

  The Thean reception. Jainan swallowed on a suddenly dry throat. “I assumed we weren’t going.”

  “Oh,” Kiem said. He stopped in his tracks, his expression suddenly guilty. “Ah. Shit. Sorry. I may have assumed we were. They phrased the invite like you knew about it already. I’ll tell them we had a change of plan.”

  “You’ve accepted,” Jainan said blankly. “Oh. I didn’t mean—I’ll go. Naturally.” He was rattled; he would usually have phrased that more smoothly.

  A gong sounded to signal the start of the ceremony. Jainan shoved everything out of his mind to deal with later. Ambassador Suleri met them at the front of the room; he gave Jainan a crisp, polite greeting and a set of keys. The embassy had arranged everything. Jainan was only required to take the keys to the Auditor.

  The formal part of the ceremony was over quickly. The Auditor dealt with all the representatives exactly the same, from Eisafan’s twenty-person entourage to Jainan and Kiem, unaccompanied, and didn’t show a flicker of recognition. The presence of the remnants was much worse when you were close; all of the representatives kept giving little starts at nothing and glancing at thin air as if they’d just seen someone they knew. The Auditor’s staff took the keys, opening boxes and running handheld scanners across the remnants inside.

  “Now what?” Kiem said under his breath. “What does he do with them? They make my skin crawl.”

  “It was in the briefing,” Jainan said, then realized his mistake when Kiem took on the embarrassed, sidelong look of someone who hadn’t read it. “Ah. The tests take several days. When they’ve finished, they’ll be put in cold storage on the Resolution ship. The Resolution apparently uses an ice planet to store them—it’s a strategy for long-term neutralization.”

  Kiem looked doubtful, but at that moment Bel muttered something under her breath and tapped Kiem’s elbow. “Look over there,” she said. “That’s quite a special guest.”

  “Who?” Kiem said. He scanned the far end of the stateroom, which was crowded with knots of commercial moguls and their guests. Bel indicated a heavyset man in spacer fashion of a style that wasn’t Iskat or Thean.

  “That man is Evn Afkeli.” Bel turned so her back was to the knot of people. “He runs one of the big raider congloms—the Blue Star. He’s the one who spaces merchants whose companies don’t pay ransoms.”

  Raiders. Jainan had to think for a moment before he recognized what Bel was talking about: the organized crime gangs that hopped among the asteroid belts and outer worlds, hijacking ships on minor routes and running their tendrils into planetside businesses. He remembered reading that they found an open harbor in Sefala, where the Empire struggled to keep order.

  “Someone invited a Sefalan pirate to lunch?” Kiem said in a murmur no louder than Bel’s. “How does that work?”

  “Evn Afkeli’s a legitimate businessman,” Bel said. “The Guard doesn’t have anything on him.”

  “What a chance,” Kiem said. He was starting to grin. “Think I’ll go over and say hi.”

  “Don’t,” Jainan said. He didn’t realize how sharply it had come out until he saw Kiem’s sideways look. Jainan was on edge: the buzzing of the remnants behind his shoulder seemed to be trying to materialize into some kind of presence. “Sorry,” he said, making an effort to cover it up. Kiem would do what he liked. “Of course. Would you like me to come?” He couldn’t even put words to the flood of repulsion that welled up in him.

  “You know what,” Kiem said, “I changed my mind.”

  The raider’s face was set in deep, serious lines and barely moved at all as he spoke to a military officer. The lack of expression sent an unpleasant prickle down Jainan’s back. “How do you know his name?”

  Bel shook her head. “She’s being modest,” Kiem said. “She used to work for the Sefalan Guard.”

  “I’m not being modest,” Bel said, “I’m reminding you that raiders are bad news, since you seem to have missed that from all the Iskat children’s animations about them.”

  “Modest and has a full range of helpful tips,” Kiem said cheerfully. “Hey, they’re seating people. Care to accompany me to dinner, Your Grace?” He gave a mock bow and offered his arm.

  Jainan smiled mechanically and took it. Bel slipped off toward the drinks table as Jainan followed Kiem to the other side of the hall from the Sefalan, and steeled himself for the long and awkward meal that was to follow.

  He hadn’t factored in how it would feel to be accompanied by a different partner. Kiem seemed to recover quickly from the eerie aura of the remnants that made all the guests constantly cast nervous glances at empty air, and he promptly made fast friends with the person on the other side of him. He introduced them to Jainan as Master Sergeant Vignar, who ran logistics at Central One HQ. Ten minutes later Vignar and Kiem appeared to have bonded for life over old dartcar races. Jainan concentrated on his food, made small talk with the Kaani treaty representative opposite him, and monitored Kiem with half an ear. At first he split his attention, but as he made his way through the sweet course, he realized he wasn’t going to have to jump in, or run two conversations simultaneously, or field Kiem’s bad mood. He could feel his own state of mind improving as the meal went on.

  The Kaani representative, a tall, elegant person with a habitual air of finding amusement at someone else’s expense, picked at the remains of their sweet course while watching Jainan.

  “It’s good to see you at events again,” they said.

  “Thank you,” Jainan said warily, as if it wasn’t compulsory. Kaan’s representative had come to the palace after him and Jainan hadn’t seen them around much. Kaan scoffed at the concept of gender, but their representative had capitulated to Iskat custom far enough to have a glass bead braided into the hair by their ear. Ja
inan was so out of touch he couldn’t even remember their name.

  “I was starting to think,” the representative continued, “that our hosts had just decided to abandon your treaty.”

  Jainan’s hand tightened around his fork. His first panicked thought was whether Kiem had heard, but Kiem was still embroiled in his dartcar conversation. Jainan kept his voice level with an effort. “Excuse me?”

  “I keep hearing Thea is being stubborn about its resources.” The Kaanan delicately speared a last piece of fruit from the sweet course. “Naturally, in Iskaner terms, that means your negotiators said maybe when Iskat expected them to say yes. You did get allied province status because you were amicable, after all. Do try the passion fruit, it’s very good,” they added. “The hothouses over here so seldom get it right.”

  Kaan liked to stir up trouble. It was how they did politics; Jainan knew this and yet still felt a twinge of disquiet. The stateroom around them was full of Iskaners. “Thea shares its resources generously,” Jainan said. “We’ve been an allied province for decades. We’ve renewed the Resolution treaty several times already. Nothing has changed.”

  “Except the factions on Iskat,” the representative said mildly. “Are we dealing with a commercial empire, a parliamentary system, a dictatorship, a military oligarchy? You can’t say, can you, because Iskat throws all of them at us at different times. I wonder how much of a grip the Emperor really has on everything that’s going on. Of course, Thea’s little gripe about your mining resources takes the heat off Kaan, where we really are stubborn. I am grateful.”

  There were flippant responses and political responses; Jainan discarded all of them. Instead he watched the representative’s eyes, which weren’t part of their affable expression, and said, “Why did you bring up my treaty?”

  “Oh,” the Kaanan said, casually straightening the cuff of their robe, “you’re our test case, if you like. How much do you have to annoy Iskat before you end up as a special territory?”