He was back from his quest, no longer heir but Panarch in his own right. That night had not been repeated. She suspected that to him, she was merely the socialite who had weakly allowed herself to be used by the cabal. She had no claim on him but kindness.
She would not beg at his door. He already had hundreds of people doing that. She must prove herself as his political equal, and the rest would fall into place. All she needed was a way—and unexpectedly, Fierin had just offered it to her.
“I know what to do,” she said, and watched the relief relax Fierin’s tense face. “For now, you must say nothing. Leave the chip with me. Or keep it, as you think best,” she amended, seeing the convulsive movement of Fierin’s fingers.
“Whom do I tell? I promised Ranor that I would give it only to Commander Nyberg, but Tau has stopped me both times from trying to reach him, and I couldn’t bear . . .” She closed her eyes, swallowing painfully.
“No.” Vannis took her hand. “Only one person: the new Panarch.”
Fierin gasped. “But if I even try to send him a drop, Srivashti would find out.”
“You won’t send him anything. He’s surrounded by people filtering visitors and drops. Any one of them could be on Tau’s payroll. He will have to be told in person.”
“But how can I get a private interview? Tau would find out if I tried.”
Vannis held Fierin’s thin, tense fingers. “No, and no. The time to talk to Brandon privately is in the most public place possible.”
Fierin’s eyes were wide. “His Accession?”
Vannis smiled, lifting her hand to the girl’s smooth cheek. “Just leave it to me. I promise you will have your chance, and you will be safe.”
Fierin shut her eyes; tears leaked down as she slowly pressed the chip onto Vannis palm. “He’s searched my things. Once he searched me,” she whispered. “But he did not think of my hair. I’ve kept it under my diamond clip ever since.”
Vannis, stroking her cheek, felt a quiver of response in the young woman who had spent too much time among dangerous enemies. She had to go back—and she had to regain control.
With deliberate care, Vannis encircled Fierin’s slender frame with both her arms and buried her face in her cool, sweet-smelling tumble of hair.
TWO
Osri Omilov, active-duty Lieutenant and Instructor in the School of Navigation, put the finishing touches on his dress uniform and then inspected himself from all angles. Satisfied that he would not disgrace himself or the uniform, he reflected on the events that had placed him here subsequent to the recent reshuffle: the only lieutenant on the coveted Phoenix level in flag country.
It made him uncomfortable. He’d turned down promotion to lieutenant commander, offered to him as rescuer of the heir, an encomium he knew to be untrue and undeserved. Truth be told, Brandon had rescued him. And in any case, he preferred not to be sidetracked into academic administration. Teaching was his joy.
But the perquisites came anyway, offered to him as the Panarch’s confidant, a label that had felt equally mendacious until his innate honesty forced him to examine it from the perspective of outsiders—for example, had any been present a few days previous, when Osri was personally delivering his father’s update on the Suneater research to Nyberg. Brandon had unexpectedly showed up in Nyberg’s inner waiting room via a private corridor, and said, “Osri, you here, too? You might as well witness this.”
And so Osri had been the only lieutenant present in the small gathering of rankers as Brandon had promoted Anton Faseult to Rear Admiral, and heard his Oath ahead of the Accession.
Brandon had said, “There have been enough events without precedent to permit one more. I know Ares needs you much more as chief of security than Charvann needs you as an absent Archon. When Eusabian of Dol’jhar is defeated, you may step into civilian life.”
And Osri had seen a visible relaxing not only in Faseult, but in Nyberg and Willsones as well.
When Osri had departed after making his report, he had thought about that incident. It was a mild shock to recognize in himself the same type of status his father had once, and now again enjoyed. That world had always seemed so distant.
Osri looked back into his two-room suite. It was quiet and beautifully designed in the now-archaic Artisan mode: all clean lines in wood that appeared hand-crafted, with muted lighting. Either this good fortune had been suggested by some career-minded Navy person, or the new Panarch himself had intervened. As Osri closed the door and walked toward the transtube, he tried to remember if he had ever said anything to Brandon about how much he disliked being domiciled on a noisy corridor and how much he appreciated space, if not a view. Yes, he recollected something of the sort, but he hadn’t thought anyone would remember his words much past the time it took to speak them.
There was no one to thank. Either it was naval politics, so that talking about his luck would inevitably draw him into those politics, or else Brandon had interfered, but so indirectly there was no polite way to respond.
Which would be the way Brandon wanted it. Osri did not claim to know him well, but one thing he was certain of: Brandon did not like speeches of gratitude.
There were other ways to express it, of course. That is, if a mere lieutenant would have much in the way of opportunities to do anything for someone who was just about to formally assume the leadership of a government that—theoretically, at the moment—encompassed countless planets and Highdwellings and trillions of subjects.
Osri saluted a group of three commanders already waiting at the transtube adit. They acknowledged his salute and continued their conversation.
Here was a bit of irony. Their polite but correct attitude marked them as apolitical. Osri wasn’t fool enough to assume that anyone in this section didn’t know who he was. But the apolitical officers, who would keep rank distance, were the only ones Osri felt comfortable talking to. The condescension of superior officers cultivating him for his connections was wearying.
The transtube arrived and whisked them all away. Osri checked his boswell; five minutes had passed since his last check. Why he should be nervous he had no idea—his part in the formalities about to begin was the simple task of standing in a row.
When the officers debarked, Osri walked in the opposite direction, toward the wardroom that had been taken over by low-rankers, but when he entered he found himself confronted by an impressive display of white uniforms and gold braid.
“Omilov!” A handsome black face emerged from the throng, reminding Osri of Faseult, who would be running security from the background. “You’re barely in time. Only thirty minutes till the cruisers match orbits,” Lieutenant Mzinga said.
Others laughed, though it wasn’t particularly funny. Osri saw in the bright-eyed glances and surreptitious tugs and smoothings of crisply pressed white sleeves and tunics around him that everyone else was nervous, too.
“What’s going on here?” Osri said.
“Prophylactic medication,” Lieutenant Commander Rom-Sanchez said from behind, his lean, hound-dog face steeple-browed in rare irony.
Osri looked around and found expressions ranging from hilarity to a sour disbelief. The hilarity belonged to the friends he had made since his arrival on Ares.
“Ah, Omilov,” Rom-Sanchez exclaimed, “you are reestablishing my faith in my fellow humans. You really are apolitical, aren’t you?”
Osri shook his head. “Politics is too much like a mud fight. I’d rather sit it out. Fewer laundry problems.”
Laughter greeted this, and someone pressed a drink into his hands. He raised the cup, saw other cups raised, and sipped. A mellow brandy fired its way down his throat.
As congenial comments rained around him, Osri did not make the mistake of supposing himself suddenly become a wit. Nerves indeed. But it couldn’t just be the reception.
“We’d better go,” Lieutenant Mzinga said, his quiet voice sharpening.
An exit on the other side of the wardroom debouched into a concourse, where a short w
alk brought them to the appropriate entrance to the reception hall.
Someone had decorated the hall with ancient banners, and the walls displayed holos of famous battles, interspersed with niches holding the busts of famous naval officers. Osri recognized the nearest one: Porgruth Minor, the destroyer captain of 450 years past whose slashing tactics were still the subject of monographs and dissertations.
They got new drinks. Wanting to keep his head completely clear, Osri ordered Falstaf Mineralus in the traditional miniature pot ringed with fire-bright gilding. The crowd of officers scattered around the room clumped into groups. Osri noted several orthogonal categories of status, station vs. space and formal rank being the most obvious.
Next to him, Lieutenant Warrigal looked around, her bony profile pensive.
Fired by the brandy, Osri essayed an attempt at wit. “You could write a tenno for social gatherings.”
Warrigal gave him her habitual flat stare, and said, “I have.”
Humor spiked through him. Osri knew he was socially awkward, but compared to Warrigal he was Douloi grace personified. “Of course you have,” he responded.
She accepted that, as she accepted everything, at face value. “I find it very useful,” she said. “But of late I have had to rework it. It’s much harder in a situation like this than among Naval officers in their well-defined roles under discipline.”
Osri blinked. Come to think of it, she had been more socially adept at the luncheon with Captain Ng, before the attempted coup and then the rescue attempt. Perhaps she really did have a social tenno. He suppressed a sour tang of self-mockery; it seemed he hadn’t lost his talent for underestimating people.
They both looked outward, at the pull of conflicting crowd nuclei that made for an unstable gathering with a great deal of circulation. Osri, at least, had no doubt Admiral Nyberg had intended it this way.
Attempting to make amends, even though he was unsure she’d heard his condescension, he said, “You might be interested in talking to Dyarch Hamun. They pulled him out of Enclave duty because he has an advanced degree in ochlosemiotics.” Anyone with any knowledge of crowd behavior had been pressed into service under the gnostors of ochlology.
“Perhaps,” Warrigal stated. “I doubt he’d have time for me, with Ares so crowded.”
Osri caught sight of Margot Ng, captain of the Grozniy, standing in a circle of other captains gleaming with gold braid. Typically, Ng appeared cool and composed. It was hard to believe that this short, neat woman with her athlete’s body and pleasant face had cold-bloodedly taken on Eusabian’s commander in a horrific action in order to wrest from the enemy one of their superluminal communicators. And not long after that, she had raced against time and a deadly anomaly in space in a heroic but eventually futile attempt to rescue the former Panarch from the death Eusabian had intended for him on Gehenna.
Following his gaze, Rom-Sanchez spoke at Osri’s shoulder. “Koestler’s out of the dispensary now.” Draining his glass, he added, “First meeting with Ng.”
Osri let out a long breath. Now he knew the reason for much of the nervousness around him. Apolitical as he was, even he knew that of all Semion’s cadre of handpicked captains, it was Jeph Koestler who had been on the low orbit to the High Admiralship once Carr had stepped down to a well-deserved retirement.
But Carr was dead now, along with everyone in the former Panarch’s Privy Council.
As if continuing his thought, Warrigal murmured, “No space admirals. We’re on a ship without a con.”
Osri nodded. The long years of peace, broken only by the first war with Dol’jhar and occasional skirmishes with the Shiidra, had inevitably produced a Navy top-heavy with desk admirals. The Navy was spread so thin that it couldn’t afford fleet-strength displays of power, and a battlecruiser was a ship so formidable in its own right, needing escorts only for reconnaissance, that it obviated the need for space officers ranking above captain.
But few of the staff admirals had survived the Dol’jharian attack, and fewer still could be spared from wherever they patrolled or protected now in order to come to Ares, where they would merely swell an already bloated bureaucracy.
There was, subsequently, no one to assume leadership of the Navy, for in time of war, only a space officer, with battle-derived rank points, would be considered for that promotion. Brandon had issued an order to recall the Fleet, but who was to command it?
“Rank points are even,” Rom-Sanchez said low-voiced murmured from Osri’s other side. “Koestler demanded a review, someone told me.”
“Here he comes now,” someone cautioned.
The doors whisked open, framing a tall, well-built man with iron-gray hair and a face that reminded one of a highly bred predator. “Wasn’t he in the bay for Brandon’s arrival ceremony?” Osri asked.
“Insisted on it,” Mzinga replied. “Supposedly drugged to the hairline with painkillers.”
“Gravitational eddy from a skipmissiled ruptor turret,” Rom-Sanchez answered the unasked question that everyone was thinking, as they watched the man walk in, his pace slow, his back uncompromisingly straight. Pain showed in his posture but did not reach his face. “Nearly took one of his arms off. Plus burns from an exploded console. Killed half his bridge.”
“They stayed in the battle six hours after that,” Warrigal added soberly. “I saw the vid before I went to instruct them in the new tenno sems.”
Someone whistled, and another said softly, “Bad, brave, and bloody—but he lost both battles.”
No one attributed that to poor command. All of them had had far too much experience recently of the fog of battle, the when-you-see-is-where-you-are tactics imposed by fourspace, compounded by the weird geometry of ships skipping in and out of fivespace, some armed with weapons thought physically impossible until recently.
Captain Ng did not make the mistake of speaking first.
Koestler was senior in age and had received his commission when Ng was a brand-new middy fresh out of the Academy. Events had placed him far away on maneuvers during the battle at Acheront, and afterward he had spent twenty years at Narbon running the drills that Semion had never tired of. Capable and brave, he had only seen action very early in his career—and very recently.
Now he and Margot Ng had exactly the same number of rank points, and they were both about to be promoted as one of the new Panarch’s first acts.
“Genz,” Koestler said, his voice a low rumble.
The others returned his greeting. Then, as Osri and the others watched in silence, Koestler turned to Ng and held out his one good hand. “Captain,” he said, “I’m going to fight you to my last breath over command of the Suneater mission, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go into this thing together.”
Ng’s small hand disappeared in his big one, but there was no weakness in her stance or face as she returned his grip. “Fair enough,” she said with a smile of real humor. Then she turned to the others, her voice pitched for the entire room. “Well Genz? Shall we present a united front?”
They fell in step, Ng and Koestler leading as the two who were about to become admirals, and the others falling in according to rank.
Osri let out his breath in a long sigh and saw his emotions reflected in the faces of the others.
We have to unite, Osri thought soberly. The enemy is going to be hard enough to fight without feuds among us.
“Let’s go,” Rom-Sanchez said.
o0o
Most of the Douloi slept late the day of the Accession, for their time was to be that evening, and all wanted to look their best, and be at their sharpest. But Vannis rose early, knowing that Brandon was already moving through the last phase of his appointed rounds, finishing his three-day progress through every level of Ares Station.
Soon, he would convene the remains of the old government, and, as was traditional, hear the renewed Oath of Fealty. Afterward he’d host a vast celebration for officers, the highest ranking Douloi, and a selection of civilians chosen by the College of
Archetype and Ritual in conference with half-a-dozen other Colleges, Commander Nyberg, and even—it was rumored—the High Phanist of Desrien. The guest list had been the hottest topic of debate since the news had spread of Gelasaar’s death.
It was time to dress. Vannis’s gown—white for mourning, as was proper for the last official act of the deceased Aerenarch’s consort—was deceptively simple in design, made of costly material that shimmered with the fluid beauty of light through a fountain. Having very nearly reached the end of her resources, she had pawned half her jewels for that fabric. Her hair was bound up with a strand of pure white moonstones; her only other ornament was a ring given her by her mother. Its sea-colored stone brought out the green flecks in her eyes.
She scrutinized her reflection. Everything must be perfect. Touching her bodice, where she kept Fierin’s chip, she left for the new government building. There people were already gathering to watch the Council of Pursuivance assemble, for the new Privy Council would be drawn from their number, just as it had been since the time of the first Nicolai centuries before.
The Marine dyarch in charge of security passed Vannis through with no hint of recognition. Vannis wondered if he remembered as sharply as she did the last time they had seen one another: Vannis had been half-drowned after her disastrous attempt to keep Brandon away from the cabal’s coup.
Oh, yes. He had to remember, but, she reflected, they had both learned something that night, that neither of them could hold Brandon against his will.
Inside, the tianqi were set to Midsummer Morning. At intervals a gentle tone sounded, evocative at times of bells, at times of voices, each time a different timbre and pitch. The atmosphere tingled along her nerves as she surveyed the spacious hall. Designed in the Archaeo-Moderne mode, it deliberately harkened back to the golden age of Burgess II.
The spacious circular walls inexorably drew the eye to the opposite end, where a number of comfortable chairs sat on a slightly raised dais. Only one of them was occupied, by the High Phanist, always a member of the Privy Council since the time of Gabriel and the deposition of the Faceless One. A small woman of maybe eighty years with an unremarkable face, and eyes that seared through to one’s core, she sat to the right of the central chair.
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