“How did you know where I was?” Teresa asked.
Ilich shook his head, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, his voice had more like its usual tone: patient and gentle. The difference was that now she knew it was a mask.
“You had a locator implanted in your jawbone when you were born. There is never a moment when security doesn’t know how to find you, and your safety is part of my sacred duty.”
It was like hearing a language she almost understood. She could pick out the meaning of each word, but she couldn’t quite make sense of the whole. The idea was too foreign. Too wrong.
“Your father felt it was important for you to have some experience of rebellion and autonomy, so he permitted your excursions so long as they didn’t take you too far from the State Building. He said he was solo free-climbing on the surface of Mars at your age, and that he learned things about himself that way. He hoped you would find use in the same independence and solitude.”
Solitude. He didn’t know about Timothy, then. There was nothing on any world that would make her tell him either. She felt the buzz of outrage in her throat. “So you just let me think…”
The flier passed over the outer wall of the State Building and curved around to the east. They weren’t heading for the landing pad but the lawn outside the residence. A single figure stood in the gardens, watching them pass. She thought it was Holden.
“I respected your autonomy and your privacy to the extent that security protocols permitted,” Ilich said. “But I needed to be able to find you in case there was an emergency.”
“There’s an emergency?”
“Yes,” he said. “There is.”
Her father smiled at her, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes deeper than she remembered them. The opalescence in his iris was more pronounced, and something seemed to glow from under his skin. His study had been a bedroom, back when he’d still slept. That hadn’t been for years. Now it had a desk hand carved from Laconian wood with a grain like sedimentary rock, a wide table, a shelf with half a dozen physical books, and the divan where he was sitting. Where he had been sitting when the change came.
“Father?” Teresa said. “Can you hear me?”
His mouth changed into a little o, like he was a child seeing something marvelous. He reached out, patting at the air beside her head. She took his hand, and it was hot.
“Has he said anything?” she asked.
Kelly, her father’s personal valet, shook his head. “A few things, but none of it made sense. After it happened, I came to see him, and he was like this. Just like this.” He nodded to Cortázar, sitting on the edge of the table. “I got Dr. Cortázar as quickly as I could.”
“Your opinion?” Ilich asked. His voice was cool, and her father didn’t react to it at all. “What’s wrong with him?”
Cortázar spread his hands. “I could only speculate.”
“Then do,” Ilich said.
“The… event. The lost consciousness? It seems to match what Admiral Trejo reported from Sol system. The theory I always heard was that it’s the weapon that killed the protomolecule engineers. However their minds were organized, this… effect broke it. Well, the high consul has been making himself more and more like the builders for years now. It might—might—leave him more vulnerable to the attack than the rest of us.”
Teresa’s chest hurt like someone had punched her sternum. She sank to her knees at her father’s side, but he was frowning at something behind her. Or nothing.
“How long before he gets better?” Kelly asked.
“If I had been permitted to have more than one test subject, I might be able to guess,” Cortázar said. It was the same tone of voice he’d used to say Nature eats babies all the time. It made Teresa’s skin crawl. “As things are? He could come back to himself in a moment. He could be like this for the rest of his life, which in his case could be a very long time indeed. If I can take him to the lab and run some tests, I might get more insight into the question.”
“No,” Kelly said, and it was clear from his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “The high consul stays in his rooms until…”
“Until what?” Cortázar said.
“Until we have this situation under control,” Ilich said, firmly. “Does anyone outside this room know about his condition?”
The high consul’s terminal chimed, a high-priority connection request. The three men looked at each other in alarm. Her father scowled, then farted like the blare of a trumpet. The perversity and indignity of it cut Teresa like a blade. This was her father. The man who ruled all humanity through his vision and audacity. Who knew how everything was and was supposed to be. The body in front of her was only a crippled man, too broken to be embarrassed. The chime came again, and Kelly grabbed it with his hand terminal.
“I’m afraid the high consul can’t be disturbed,” he said as he walked out of the room. “I can accept a message for him.”
The door closed behind him.
“I can bring some equipment here,” Cortázar said. “It won’t be as good as having him in the pens where the real equipment is, but I could do… something.”
Ilich ran a hand over his scalp, his gaze flickering from her father to Cortázar to the window that looked out over a bamboo garden in some different universe where the sun still shone and life wasn’t broken. Teresa shifted, and Ilich looked at her. For a long moment, their eyes were locked on each other’s.
She felt a wave of panic. “Am I supposed to be in charge now?”
“No,” Ilich said, as if her fear had resolved something. “No, High Consul Winston Duarte is in charge. He is deep in consultation with Dr. Cortázar on matters critical to the state of the empire, and cannot be disturbed under any circumstances. It’s easy to remember, because it’s true. He specifically ordered Kelly to keep anyone but the doctor here and you, because you’re his daughter, away from the residences until further notice. Do you remember him saying that?”
“I don’t—” Teresa began.
“You need to remember him saying it. He was sitting right here. It was just after the event. We all came back to ourselves, and he told Kelly in front of you that he needed Dr. Cortázar, and that he couldn’t be disturbed. Do you remember?”
Teresa pictured it. Her father’s voice, calm and sturdy as stone.
“I remember,” she said.
Kelly came back in the room. “Something happened at the ring. The Falcon made an unscheduled transit. Now it’s putting out a distress call. A relief ship is on the way, but it won’t be there for hours. Maybe as much as a day.”
“All right,” Ilich said. “We need a secure channel to Governor Song and Admiral Trejo. Someone will have to take over coordinating the military. Apart from them, no one can know anything.
“Until we get the high consul back to himself, our little conspiracy here is the empire.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Naomi
The plume of energy that came from the ring gate was invisible to the naked eye. An optical telescope would have seen at most a few flares of brightness where bits of matter caught in it glowed for a moment as they were ripped apart. Moving at the speed of light, it flared into the space where ships coming into Auberon or preparing to leave it were most likely to be, widening like a wave with distance, hundred thousand kilometers after hundred thousand kilometers, spreading out like a cone. If it became less powerful as it spread, it wasn’t enough to help the San Salvador. The Transport Union ship had been slow moving out of the restricted zone, and almost instantaneously, it and everyone aboard it became a cinder.
Naomi sat in the commissary and played the newsfeed of its loss in a loop, watching the ship flare white and die so quickly the frame rate couldn’t quite make sense of it. She had spent very nearly her whole life on ships and stations. She’d been on six ships that had suffered micrometeorite hits, two that had lost atmosphere from them. Once, she’d had to drop core to keep her reactor from blooming out lik
e a tiny, brief sun. She’d jumped between ships without a suit, and the feeling of breathing vacuum still came to her in nightmares decades after the fact. She would have said she was intimately aware of all the dangers life outside an atmosphere could hold.
This one was new.
“Did they do this, you think?” Emma asked, hunched over her bulb of morning tea. The Bhikaji Cama was in its braking burn now. The one-third g had felt strange until Naomi realized she’d never been in the crewed parts of the ship when there was up and down before. After that it still felt strange, but she knew why.
“They Laconia or they Saba’s people?”
Emma lifted her eyebrows. “I meant the first, but either.”
The crew clumped around the commissary in quiet groups of two or three, and they treated each other with the brittle courtesy of a funeral. Some of them had likely known the crew of the San Salvador, but even if they didn’t it had been a ship like theirs. Its death reminded them of their own, still somewhere down the line, but coming.
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “The point of having the Typhoon in with Medina was always that they could defend every gate at once. Hit the station with its magnetic field projector and all the gates bake anyone that’s too close, but…”
“I saw the data from when they did that. It wasn’t this big.”
“It wasn’t even close,” Naomi agreed.
Emma sipped from her bulb, hunched in a degree more, and lowered her voice. “Did we make a play? Did we try to take the slow zone?”
“If there was an attack planned, I didn’t know about it,” she said, but with a knot in her gut. She didn’t think Saba would have put together something that audacious without her, but maybe he would. She had been arguing for restraint and less violent, longer-term strategies. If all she’d managed was to cut herself out of the loop… She imagined Bobbie and Alex and the Gathering Storm burning in toward the gate with a ragged and improvised fleet. They couldn’t have been that stupid. But even if they had, the gamma burst from the gate had been so much more powerful…
“Can you find where we put my system?” Naomi asked. “If I can rebuild it, I might be able to find Saba’s signals. Get a report.”
“Could hunt it down, maybe,” Emma said. “But we’re putting you on a shuttle for Big Moon in four hours, get you out before we’re in range of the transfer station. Doesn’t leave much time.”
“So we hurry.”
Finding all the spare parts of her former cell was harder now that thrust had changed the nature of the architectural space, but Naomi didn’t need all of it. The physical hardware had some built-in security that made finding the hidden messages easier, but without the keys and information that she kept only in her own memory, they’d have been useless. Her records from the long passages in the storage container were wiped. Even if the Laconians had found the devices, they wouldn’t have been able to pull the secrets of the underground from them. But neither could Naomi.
Emma drove a loading mech, shifting the heavy pallets that they’d moved before, and Naomi found the pieces she needed—the signal processor from her crash couch, a monitor different from the one she’d had but close enough, a hand terminal interface. They set up in a workroom by the machine shop. Neither of them had said it, but they both knew that everything would be broken down again and hidden away when they were done.
The workroom was small and grimy, with long, discolored patches on the fabric walls. The tool racks had been used for so many years that the ceramic was wearing through and the titanium bones glittering under it. It smelled like oil and sweat, and Naomi liked it better than anyplace she’d been on the Cama before.
She looked through all the usual places where Saba hid communications for the underground, but most of them weren’t there at all. Not just empty of hidden messages, but whole channels missing. The Transport Union’s coordination feed—the running record of ship locations and vectors—was just a repeating standby message. The entertainment feed from Medina of a young man talking breathlessly about the three-factor philosophy of design for hours on end wasn’t transmitting at all. Medina’s communications channels were closed for business, covert or otherwise.
“That a good thing, or bad?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know what it is,” Naomi said.
“Got to get you to a shuttle soon.”
“Just another few minutes.”
Emma shifted her weight, trying not to show her impatience. It wasn’t just the time pressure on the shuttle. Everything about the situation itched.
Naomi was almost ready to resign herself to failure when she found the message. It was hidden in false-static fluctuations under a navigation beacon for the repeaters that ferried comm signals across the interference of the gate. The encryption was key based, and it took her six tries to find the right one. When it popped onto the monitor, it was text. No voice, no picture. Nothing to show that it had come from Saba apart from the fact of its existence.
MAJOR INCIDENT IN THE SLOW ZONE. SUSPEND ALL OPERATIONS AND SHELTER DOWN. NO IMMEDIATE THREAT TO THE ORGANIZATION, BUT ENEMY SURVEILLANCE HIGH. NO TRANSITS IN OR OUT OF ANY GATE BY ORDER OF LACONIA. TWO GATES LOST. UPDATE TO FOLLOW.
“‘Two gates lost’?” Emma said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Be patient and find out, sounds like,” Naomi said. She shut down her system, the words blinking into darkness.
The shuttle was a two-couch model. No Epstein drive, but an efficient teakettle good enough for orbital transits that didn’t take more than a month or two. She wasn’t going to be on it for more than a couple of days. It was the kind of thing a new prospector would rent for claim surveys or an old couple for a long, slightly adventurous vacation. Naomi felt Jim’s absence even though he’d never been on board it. As the Bhikaji Cama dropped away behind her and she did her first sustained burn toward Auberon’s lunar outpost, she checked the transponder output. A day ago, the shuttle had been a maintenance and safety vehicle for the Transport Union. Today, it was a rental craft registered to Whimsy Enterprises and had been for the last year and a half. The ship didn’t care what story they told about it. It worked just as well either way.
She set the local censored newsfeed to play for a while, using the thin-faced, cheerful man spouting the Laconian official positions as a kind of white noise while she thought. In the hours she let it play, neither he nor the dour and serious woman who took his place mentioned Medina or the Typhoon or the gamma radiation burst. Or how someone could lose two ring gates. She tried to reassure herself that, whatever was going on, it at least wasn’t Bobbie and Alex charging into the teeth of a Magnetar-class battleship and dying. There was even the chance that the crisis, whatever it was, would open some opportunities for the underground. With her bottles gone, she’d have to find another way to get messages back to Saba.
Auberon was one of the success stories of the new systems. A wide, lush planet with clean water, hundreds of viable microclimates, and a tree of life that coexisted with Earth’s biochemistry in a kind of mutual indulgent neglect. The story was that a farm on Auberon could grow native plant analogs and Terran crops side by side, with each acting as fertilizer for the other. It sounded like an exaggeration, but there was a seed of truth there. Food and water weren’t a struggle on Auberon the way they had been on so many of the other worlds. It had twelve cities with populations over a million and a wide scattering of smaller towns, farms, and research stations. A lunar station that fed cargo and supplies through the near asteroids and a handful of dwarf planets big enough to have civilian populations. It had almost one-tenth of a percent of Earth’s population at its height, and it had been self-sustaining for over two decades.
Naomi found the place a little creepy.
The docks, when she reached them, were cleaner than any she’d seen in a lifetime traveling through Sol system. It wasn’t just the eerie perfection she disliked, though. The void cities that had been, for a time, the dream of Belter culture made real
had been as new and shining and optimistic as Auberon’s lunar base. But they had been rooted in history. Everything in Sol system, from the great port of Ceres to the rock hoppers digging ore and water from asteroids that were hardly more than a hold’s volume of gravel, had come from a shared past. Yes, the expansion into the void had been bloody and cruel and filled with as much violence as cooperation, but it had been real. Authentic.
There were no old levels in the station, because there was no old. On Ceres, there were neighborhoods built in the excavations where the great engines that had spun the asteroid up had been housed. On Ganymede, there were levels of tunnels that had been abandoned in the war and never recovered. On Earth, there were cities built on the ruins of the cities before them, layer after layer back through millennia. Auberon was a theme park version of itself. A prefabricated culture that could have been assembled anywhere with equal cheerfulness. It didn’t feel human.
The Whimsy Enterprises office was a closet-sized door between an ice cream shop and a land claims lawyer. Inside, the air smelled like hydroponics tanks and fresh plastic. A woman her own age with close-cut hair stood at the kind of desk Naomi expected to get takeaway food from.
“Hello,” the woman said with a barely repressed grin.
“I have a ship I’ve brought back,” Naomi said.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman said. “Not your fault. It was a long time ago. I crewed your ship.”
“My ship?”
“The Rocinante, under Captain Holden. Back in the bad old days, when the rocks fell. You were busy at the time, sa sa que? With that fucker Inaros. Looked like you’d been through a recycler when we pulled you off that racing pinnace.”
Naomi’s brain stripped away the years, filled in the woman’s cheeks, undid the gray of age. She was a pilot. She’d worked for Fred Johnson on Tycho. “Chava Lombaugh?”
Tiamat's Wrath Page 23
