Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  “He’s going to regret he ever tried it,” Kiem said. “If I catch him near Jainan, I’m going to haul him out by his shiny collar tabs and dump him on the Emperor’s lap so she can end him. Or on Rakal. No, he’d flatten Rakal. Come and look at this.”

  He enlarged the screen with a jab and threw Gairad’s flight plan up on the wall alongside an image of the cluster. The great bulk of Carissi Station swam among the automated plants and minor habitats like a whale among a gleaming school of fish. The Kingfisher refinery sailed at the edge of the school.

  Bel tapped the refinery. “He has to be here,” she said. “It’s the only military-owned habitat, and we know he’s not on the station. Got an up-to-date schematic?” she added, without much hope.

  “Yes,” Gairad said unexpectedly. She opened up a diagram of the refinery bristling with annotations. “The mass readings are off, but I figured it out. There has to be a section here.” One of the annotations glowed red, showing a storage module slotted in at the back of the central cylinder. “Shielded. But it has to be there or the rotation of the whole habitat would be off.”

  “Nice work,” Bel said approvingly. “Shielded clandestine module. That’s where I’d put my high-value prisoners.”

  Hearing high-value prisoners felt like someone was scraping a nail down Kiem’s spine. He steeled himself not to show that. “If I can get you there, can you break in?”

  “Depends,” Bel said. She traced some of the antennae that extended from the refinery. “I can brute-force most door models, as long as they’re not brand-new. But there’ll be monitoring and alarm fields before we even get there—if our shuttle doesn’t have the right keys built into it, any alarms will go straight to their control room.”

  “So we need a military shuttle,” Kiem said slowly.

  “Yes. Do you have one hanging above your bed?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Kiem said. There was an urgent, fizzing feeling under his skin as possibilities unfolded in his mind. “Listen, if anyone asks you afterward: I ordered you into this. You didn’t have a choice.”

  Bel rolled her eyes. “We’ll have an uphill job to convince them you’re capable of making threats. But keep the kid out of this.”

  “I’m eighteen,” Gairad said. “I’m coming too.”

  Bel opened her mouth, but Kiem got there first. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Just don’t get hurt, or you’re another diplomatic incident.” Bel gave him an exasperated look, and Kiem raised his hands placatingly. “If it were me, I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t go and—and something happened.”

  “Ugh, if we have to,” Bel said. “I’m not arming her, though.”

  “What?” Kiem said. “Arming her?”

  Bel leaned down to open her vacuum capsule. She pushed aside clothes and devices until she reached something at the base and gestured a command sequence. The side of the vacuum capsule clicked open in a way Kiem was fairly sure wasn’t standard—but he recognized that capsule. He was fairly sure she’d had it when she arrived on Iskat. Inside the false compartment nestled two lumps protected by layers of gray sheeting. Bel unwrapped one. “Seen one of these before? It’s an incapacitator gun.”

  The electric feeling in Kiem’s blood grew stronger. This was a bad idea, but he was all out of good ones. He held out his hands and gestured for her to toss it over. “I know what a capper is.”

  “From vids?”

  “My mother.” Kiem caught it when Bel threw it. “She sent me to army cadet camp one horrible month when I was sixteen.” The capper was oddly light in his hands. He’d forgotten what these things felt like.

  Bel eyed him dubiously. “So you can use one?”

  “There was a reason they sent me home early,” Kiem said. He lined up the sight.

  “Don’t hold the trigger like that!” Bel said. Gairad leaned away. “Gods, okay, I’m rethinking my position on arming the kid.”

  Kiem lowered it. “It doesn’t matter. We’re only going to use them for bluffing, okay? Nobody gets hurt.”

  “Sure, that will go down well,” Bel said. “‘Yes, Your Majesty, we did steal a shuttle and break into a military base, but nobody got hurt, so that’s all right.’”

  Kiem forced himself to shrug and reached for a smile. “Here’s the way I see it,” he said, in a totally reasonable voice that for some reason made both Bel and Gairad look at him warily. “If they didn’t want us to break in, they shouldn’t have tried holding Jainan there. Let’s make them reconsider.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “I wouldn’t call it a war,” Aren said.

  There was a terrible brilliance to him, sitting casually with the warehouse lights casting a halo of white around his hair, in the middle of a weapons stockpile that could take out a small continent. Jainan forced his voice to stay under control. “Then what would you call it?”

  “A quick rebalancing of power,” Aren said. “A tactical strike, if you like. No offense, but Thea has the military capability of a preschooler with a hangover. We’d barely have to take two cities before you sued for peace. You set yourselves up for this, you know,” he added. “If you hadn’t kicked up so much fuss about your system resources, Kingfisher might still be a mining operation.” He laughed. “No, I take that back, we’d still have the Resolution to deal with.”

  The remnants. There was a thick lead case beside Aren, the type Jainan had seen protecting radioactive samples. “You stole the missing remnants?”

  “Stole?” Aren said. “I’m offended. Do you know how much money Taam and Fenrik siphoned from the Kingfisher budgets to secure those? We bought the Sefalan ones off the raiders and had to bribe some civilians for the others. You could say we bought them fair and square.” He patted the case. Jainan couldn’t feel anything, but didn’t know if that meant lead worked as a shielding material or not; he felt so wrung-out that he might not have registered it if a full-size link opened up next to him.

  “You don’t just want to start a war with Thea,” Jainan said flatly. “You want to start a war with the Resolution. You’re mad.”

  “Tell that to General Fenrik,” Aren said, grinning. “You can see his point. First we deal with the vassals, then when Iskat isn’t distracted by all this compromising, we get independence from the Resolution. We only have one link to defend, after all—a natural chokepoint. What’s the use of having an army if you never let them fight?”

  “The Galactics will laugh,” Jainan said, with a rising sense of dread that nothing he said was cutting through the madness. “This will help you take Thea, but every weapon in the sector will do nothing against a power that has a million ships. We’re an afterthought to them.”

  “Oh, forget the conventional weapons. These”—Aren made an expansive, dismissive gesture at the military hardware stacked around them—“are going to be obsolete once we’ve dealt with the vassals. The remnants let you get into people’s minds. Give us a few months to develop weapons around them, and imagine what we can do with that. We can defend the link as long as we like.”

  “These were General Fenrik’s orders?” Jainan asked. The drugs made his tongue thick and dry in his mouth. “To annex Thea and sabotage the Resolution treaty?”

  “Fenrik’s an old-school bully,” Aren said reflectively, “but he’s right, you know. Why should we hamstring ourselves when other powers get away with it all the time? The Resolution is a collection of hypocrites. They go after the weak sectors and leave the others to do as they like. Other planets have worked out how to weaponize their remnants, you know. An Orshan commander can take over your mind from across the room. The ruling class of the High Chain are near gods. The Resolution itself uses remnants to train their scouts—how else could they pilot ships through the link? They only enforce the rules on backwaters like us.”

  There were footsteps approaching, but Jainan couldn’t turn his head far enough to see who it was. He swallowed and tried to make sense of the weapons he could see. He knew very little about military hardware, but he coul
d recognize combat drones and energy weapons when he saw them. This wasn’t about him, or Kiem, or even Taam. He could see no way of getting this information out to anyone else. Despair pressed on his chest like a clamp. “You think it’s because Iskat is too timid to take what it wants.”

  “The Resolution never helped Thea,” Aren said. “I don’t see why you’d want to defend them.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m happier if all the power sits with you and your commanders,” Jainan said hoarsely. “This is a war crime.”

  “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, I agree,” Aren said. “Which makes it gloriously hypocritical that when I started skimming my own percentage off the top, Taam found out and threatened to rat me out to Fenrik. Invading Thea without telling the Emperor is fine, apparently, but Heaven forbid someone tries their hand at personal enrichment.”

  So that was why Aren killed Taam, Jainan thought. He felt numb. In the middle of Taam’s grand scheme to bring Thea to heel and start a new, glorious chapter, he’d caught Aren with his hand in the cookie jar and got himself killed for it. Taam had never known when to be subtle.

  Aren slid off the crate and to his feet, looking at someone Jainan couldn’t see. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry, sir,” a gravelly voice said. A woman in a trooper’s uniform came into Jainan’s field of vision, carefully putting on some antistatic gloves. “Came as soon as I got the order.”

  Jainan had thought he was beyond fear, but a thread of it sprang up as she approached. Aren wouldn’t have told him this if he expected Jainan to remain alive to talk about it. He forced himself to keep his eyes on Aren. “What’s the point of this? You can’t expect Internal Security and Fenrik to both blame me. Your evidence is too thin, and my death in custody will look suspicious.”

  “I don’t actually want you to die,” Aren said briskly. He brushed off his uniform fastidiously, as if bringing the conversation to a close. “I just need someone to take the fall for Taam’s death and for the money I borrowed. Then Fenrik can get on with annexing Thea, the Resolution treaty will fall apart, and everything will be back on track.”

  The trooper was doing something to a machine beside him. Jainan felt a coolness spreading from the patch in his arm and started to breathe faster as he realized it was a sedative. The woman picked up something and turned around; Jainan took a second to recognize it as a medical helmet. It was more complex than the ones he’d seen in hospitals.

  He was closer to losing cognitive thought than he’d realized—the new sedative had started to work terrifyingly fast—but he finally put the pieces together with the odd spikes around the bed. “This is the Tau field.” No wonder Aren thought he could get Jainan to take the blame. If he had a genuine trained interrogator, a Tau field could make Jainan believe anything. He would implicate himself.

  “Give the man a medal,” Aren said to the world at large, “he’s finally caught up.” Jainan tried to roll off the bed as the woman approached him with the helmet, but the new sedative on top of the incapacitator shot was too much. The guardrail jammed into his shoulder. At least they haven’t taken Kiem, he told himself. The last thing he heard was Aren in the distance, clear as a bell, say, “Now, if you’ll both excuse me. I have to go and drink champagne with the fucking diplomats.”

  * * *

  The noise was like standing underneath a shuttle burner as it ignited. Jainan floated paralyzed in the sea of hammering sound, convinced every scrap of his consciousness was unravelling piece by piece. He tried to scream. He couldn’t tell if he’d succeeded or not, so he tried again. His throat was raw before he stopped. He shut his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he was upright and standing in front of the palace.

  The sky overhead was the bright, clear blue of summer. Of course it was summer, he thought uneasily, why would it be anything else? He rubbed his shoulder for warmth; a nervous tic he’d developed over his first Iskat winter.

  A flyer was pulling into the driveway. Jainan’s head twitched up for the dozenth time. This time he was rewarded, because when it stopped in front of the palace, the first figure that emerged was Taam’s aide, who held the door and saluted as Taam disembarked.

  Jainan pulled a smile onto his face as he went over and found to his relief it was genuine. They had argued before Taam left—Jainan could not seem to stop causing arguments—but Taam gave a characteristic half smile and beckoned him to hurry. When Jainan reached him, Taam slung an arm around him and clapped him on the back, then pushed him away, holding him at arm’s length. “All right, you don’t have to be all over me.”

  Jainan pulled his hands back, now not sure what to do with them. In the end he let them hang at his sides. “It’s good to see you.” The minute the words were out of his mouth, they sounded flat.

  Taam’s eyes narrowed, half in jest. “Rehearse that, did you?”

  Jainan shut his mouth. That didn’t deserve an answer. But Taam was in a good mood, and Jainan wanted to keep him that way for as long as possible. “Did your trip go well?” The aide was already carrying Taam’s suitcase. Jainan tried to ease Taam’s personal effects bag off his shoulder.

  “Don’t grab,” Taam said, freeing it and pushing it at Jainan. “It was fine. Bloody Theans obstreperous as usual, but we got around them. The drilling starts next month.”

  There was a short silence. Jainan settled the bag on his shoulder and turned toward the palace.

  “Well?” Taam said from behind him. “That’s it? A month away and you can’t even pretend interest?”

  When I ask questions you tell me not to pry, Jainan thought but bit his tongue. He turned back. “Sorry,” he said into the continued silence. Taam hadn’t moved, standing by the drive as the flyer left. “I’m sorry. Who did you meet with?”

  Taam gave him another stare, this one of disbelief, and burst into sudden movement to walk past him. “Never mind. Nelen!”

  “Sir!”

  “What appointments do I have tomorrow?”

  Taam’s aide kept up with them as he carefully consulted his wristband, falling into step with Taam, while Jainan’s footsteps echoed out of time on the marble. “Sir, tomorrow you have a debriefing with General Fenrik at ten, physical training at twelve, then you are free until the Thean embassy reception at six.”

  “More damned Theans?” Taam said. “Why have I got more Theans in my calendar? I’ve only just got away from them.” It was a joke, because he was in a good mood, but that mood seemed to be fraying fast.

  “This was put in your calendar by your partner, sir,” the aide said, with an expressionless glance at Jainan. He barely ever named him. Taam was unpredictably annoyed if Jainan’s Thean title was used in private, but also if his subordinates used Jainan’s first name.

  Jainan retreated into a statement of fact. “The Ambassador requested our presence, Taam.” He could explain further, but it seemed like wasted effort when he knew it was unlikely to help.

  “So he could whinge at me about the Imperial soldiers throwing their weight around in Thean space?” Taam’s voice went high and nasal on the last part. He sounded nothing like the Ambassador. “Heaven, give me some peace here. I’m not going. Neither are you.”

  “But—” Jainan said.

  “Give it a rest, Jainan.” Taam turned the corner to their rooms abruptly. “Anything else?”

  “Count Jainan has offered to help with the Kingfisher accounting,” the aide said. As he said it there was an odd echo to his voice. The air smelled of copper.

  Something in Jainan’s head crunched like two gear wheels colliding. He nearly didn’t hear Taam laugh and say, “So you finally got tired of lazing around, did you?”

  “Did I?” Jainan said blankly. He struggled to remember exactly what he’d said to Taam’s aide about it, because his mind suddenly felt slippery. He couldn’t let the others see he was having trouble.

  Taam waved an impatient hand. “Well, if you’re going to nag me about it, we might as well put you to work,” he said. “I�
�ll get you permissions to our accounting files.”

  Jainan stopped in his tracks. He put a hand out to the wall of the corridor: it felt smooth and solid, but for some reason his nerve endings were lying to him. Everything smelled of copper. “This isn’t real.” He swallowed. “Taam’s dead.”

  The aide’s face flickered, and behind it he saw the features of Aren’s Tau field technician, overlaid like two projections in the same space. There was a sudden stab of pain in his head and his surroundings dissolved.

  * * *

  “—the Iskat Minister for Thea decided he was coming planetside for Unification Day, which caused a huge hoopla as usual, and now he doesn’t like that we’re meeting with out-of-system representatives when he’s not in the room—oh, you know, the usual mess of my life.” Ressid’s grin over the screen was tired but wry. “But I’ve been blathering on. Tell me about your week. Your … month? Has it really been a month?”

  “It was fine,” Jainan said. His head hurt, and he couldn’t remember why. It was starting to hurt all the time. “Sorry, Ressid, could you keep your voice down?” He had the bedroom door shut and the volume down, but Taam was due back soon.

  “Headache?” Ressid said. She made an effort to modulate her voice from her forceful alpha-diplomat tones. “Or something else? You’re quieter every time I talk to you.”

  “I haven’t been well lately,” Jainan said. “I had the flu.”

  There was a pause that was at least a second too long. “I’m kind of worried about you.”

  “Don’t be,” Jainan said. This had to be headed off fast. “I’m much better now.”

  “It’s not that,” Ressid said. She leaned closer to the screen. Jainan frowned and glanced to the side, trying to locate the source of a sudden metallic taste in the air. “You seem to have a lot of money recently, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. I think you’re in over your head.”