Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback (18 page)

“I come to you tonight with great news,” Qox continued. “The
constant threat we live with, the threat of enslavement by our malevolent
enemies, has been dealt a great blow.” His expression became firm, that of a
leader struggling with righteous anger. “The latest object of the ruthless
Imperial forces has been Tams Station, one of the Concord’s most vulnerable members.
Yesterday Imperial Skolia attacked the defenseless Tams with no provocation.”

I couldn’t believe it. He was blaming
us.
In the “seat”
next to me, Kurj stiffened. All around us, the Aristos clicked the ornate rings
on their fingers, click, click, click, like a huge insect rattling with
agitation.

Now grief tinged Qox’s voice. “It is with great sorrow that
I bring you this news. Tams lost most of its population. Yes, my people,
four
hundred million
innocent citizens died at the hands of Imperator Skolia.”

Kurj watched the speech with his shielded eyes, his face a
metal mask. But I was an empath, one of his own blood. No matter how thoroughly
he blocked his anger, I still felt it.

Triumph washed over Qox’s face. “But our gallant forces
drove away the warmongers. We saved two hundred million of our brave citizens.”

I gritted my teeth. This was even worse than I expected.

Pride swelled in Qox’s voice. “My people, I cannot take
credit for the rescue at Tams. No, that credit goes to a hero like none other
you have known, a man whose greatness has only begun to shine, a star rising in
what had looked like Tams’s darkest hour.” He motioned to someone out of range
of the camera. For a dramatic moment he stood alone, waiting, his hand
outstretched.

Then Jaibriol appeared at the podium.

Qox gazed out at the assembled aristocracy of his empire. “This
man commanded the mission that saved Tams Station.” He laid his hand on
Jaibriol’s arm. “I present to you Lord J’briol U’jjr Qox. My son. The Highton
Heir.”

“No,” Kurj said.

A collective gasp rose from the Aristos, like a flock of
birds startled from their roosting place, rising into the air with a flurry of
sound and motion. All around us, they clicked their finger rings,
click-click-click, click-click-click.

Jaibriol didn’t respond. He hardly looked like the same man
I had met on Delos. Huge, dark circles rimmed his eyes. He stood next to his
father like a dead statue, grim and silent.

Qox went on to describe how he had hidden his son’s birth;
Imperial assassins had been poised to murder the Highton Heir, but now the
assassins were dead, killed in a fierce battle with brave Eubian soldiers who
had defended Jaibriol Qox at great peril to their lives. He finished up with
another one of his tributes to the greatness of himself and his ancestors and
the Hightons and Eube.

The entire time Jaibriol stood there, unsmiling, tall and
broadshouldered, the image of his revered ancestors, every bit the perfect
hero, the extraordinarily handsome heir to the Qox dynasty. The Traders would
worship him.

Mercifully, the broadcast finally ended, and the assembly
hall dissolved into the reality of my hospital room. I sat in bed, too demoralized
to speak.

Finally Kurj spoke. “He blames us for Tams.”

“He can’t get away with it,” I said. “There are two hundred
million witnesses.”

“Even so.”

Even so.

Maybe this son of his will die a miserable death in battle,
Kurj thought.

I swallowed.
Maybe.
Such a loss would devastate Qox
more than Kurj knew. It would destroy the meticulously laid plans of two generations
of emperors who had sacrificed their damned bloodlines so they could produce a
Rhon heir. It was a risk I knew Qox had no intention of taking. Jaibriol would
never see combat.

I wondered what Ur Qox would do if he knew that the witnesses
to his crimes at Tams existed because his son, the “star rising in Tams’s
darkest hour,” had betrayed his father’s plans to an Imperial Heir.

Rex lay on his back with his eyes closed, his chest rising
and falling under the blankets. His face looked so thin, so much paler than I
remembered. A gold sheet covered most of his body, letting me see only his
shoulders and head. The collar of his blue hospital shirt was open at the neck,
somehow making him look vulnerable.

The bed was a floater, its fabric stretched around a cushion
of air, with a computer chip worked into one corner. The grid of superconducting
rings woven into the fabric let the bed respond to every move he made, easing
his legs here, tightening under his back there. The floater also rocked
slightly, the motion that waves lapping against a boat might make. Most empaths
preferred a floater to nervoplex because the floater felt like an inanimate machine
rather than a living piece of material.

I didn’t know whether to stay, or come back later when he
was awake. I hesitated, then turned to go. As I took a step I heard his voice
behind me. “Soz.”

I turned back around, breaking into a smile. “You’re awake.”

He watched me with a neutral expression. “Apparently.”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

I bit my lip.
Rex
—
I’m sorry.

“For what?” Rex asked. “Saving my life?”

“For getting you—like—” I looked at the outline of his legs
under the blankets. “Like this.”

“Paralyzed,” Rex said. “The word is
paralyzed.”

I flushed. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop it.” He pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and the
bed readjusted, trying to ease his tension. “Stop laying this guilt you think
you have at my feet. I can’t deal with it.”

I started to speak, then realized what I was going to do and
smiled instead.

“You think that’s funny?” Rex asked.

“I was going to apologize for apologizing.”

His face relaxed, almost into a smile. “Please don’t.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, my hip touching his, my body
settling as the floater accommodated my weight. Then I took his hand in my lap.
“Rex, we’ll be all right. We just need time to readjust.”

He curled his fingers around mine. “Soz—”

His voice made me uneasy. Something in it warned me I wasn’t
going to like what he had to say. “Yes?”

“I think we should cancel the marriage.”

“You don’t really mean—”

“Don’t tell me I don’t mean it.”

“The fact that your legs don’t move doesn’t change how I
feel about you.”

He exhaled. “Every time I see you—it will remind me of how
much I’ve lost.”

“We can find new memories.”
Rex,
I thought.

But his mental doors were closed. “You sit there—so beautiful—
whole
—and
I can’t bear—even just to see you.”

I raised his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles. “I
know it will be hard. But we can beat this thing.”

He swallowed. “Not this time.”

Rex, we’re strong together. We can deal with it. We need
each other.

His grip on my hand tightened.
Don’t you understand?

No. No, I don’t understand. You swore you wouldn’t walk
out on me.

“Walk out? I can’t even walk across the room.”

“That doesn’t make me love you any less.”

He gritted his teeth. “Soz, I can’t do the husband thing.”

“That could change.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“It’s you I want to marry. Not your reproductive organs.”

He gave me an incredulous look. “You have the body and
drives of a young woman. You will when I’m a doddering old man. What are you
going to do, spend the rest of your life celibate? But no, you won’t have to.
You’ve never really understood the effect you have.” A muscle in his face
twitched. “I don’t want to watch while you take your lovers.”

I stared at him. “You know me better than that.”

“You’re a human being. Not a saint.”

That certainly wouldn’t get any argument from me. But even
so, he was wrong about the lovers. I spoke awkwardly. “How do I say this? You’ve
got a reputation that’s been touted halfway across the galaxy.”

“What does that mean?”

I smiled. “You of all people should know there’s more than
one way to satisfy a woman.”

“It’s not the same.”

“That doesn’t matter to me.”
Rex.
I tried to reach
him and hit a solid wall.

“I couldn’t give you heirs before,” Rex said. “Now I can’t
give you children at all.”

“You don’t know that.” I was talking too fast again. “Maybe
we’ll need help from the doctors, but we can still do it.”

“Damn it, Soz. Will you listen to me?” He pushed up on his elbow.
“I won’t be the Imperator’s crippled husband.”

“I’m not the Imperator.”

“There’s no comparison between you and your brother Althor.
It’s you who will be Imperator. You need a consort worthy of that position.”

“Don’t tell me that.” I struggled to keep my voice calm. “Even
if I do become Imperator some day, it won’t make a whit of difference. Your
legs—it doesn’t
matter
to me.”

“It matters to me.”

Rex. We can work through this. I’m sure of it.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. Then, finally, he
opened his mind, opened it wide. I felt what it was like for him to lie there
helpless, to remember what we had been in the past, to imagine how our life
would be now. I felt his frustration, his shame, his pain at just the sight of
me. I was like a laser cutting him into pieces. I couldn’t wish that on any
human being, most of all not on the man I loved.

“Goodbye, Sauscony,” he said.

My voice caught. “Goodbye.”

I left his room blindly, unable to see because of the
blurring in my eyes.

The Imperator’s office was huge, and filled with empty
space. It had no rugs, no ornaments, almost no furniture. The walls were
neither glass nor metal, but a smooth surface intermediate between the two.
They glowed orange and gold with desert scenes from the world that had been our
grandfather’s home. Fifty-five years ago, this had been our grandfather’s
office. That was before Kurj—accidentally or not—killed him to assume his
position as Imperator.

Sometimes I wondered how our mother dealt with that, knowing
her first-born son had killed her father. The Assembly ruled it an accident.
But in reading the transcripts of their deliberations, I was never sure whether
they came to that conclusion because they truly believed it or because they
were cowed by Kurj’s power over the Skol-Net and the military.

This much was clear: the passions that had been ripping
apart my family then—Grandfather’s death, my mother’s terrified flight from
Kurj, her secret marriage to my father—those were a direct threat to the
survival of the Skolian Imperialate. If the Rhon destroyed itself the Skol-Net
would collapse, and without it Skolia would fall to the Trader’s superior
military like eggs dropping on the ground. I had no doubt the Assembly did
whatever they felt necessary to ensure the survival of the tempestuous family
that kept the Net alive.

My mother never spoke about Grandfather’s death. Did it torment
her even after all of these years? Had Kurj murdered him so he could assume the
power of the Imperator before his rightful time? Or was it truly an accident?
Only my mother knew the truth.

Whatever it was, and however she felt about it, she still
loved Kurj, I was sure of it. Gods only knew why, but she did.

Kurj sat watching me from his chair. The desk in front of
him stretched the length of the room, a thirty-centimeter-thick sheet of glass
with console screens and controls embedded in it, and in the columns that
supported it. The wall behind him was a window as thick as a fist, its glass
polarized to mute the biting glare of the Dieshan sun. The office was up high,
at the top of a tower, the highest of the high glassy towers in the metropolis
that was Headquarters. Beyond the window I could see a landscape of rectangles,
all towers or squat buildings, all functional, all glass and steel and
rock-hard casecrete. Where the city ended the red desert began, stretching to
the horizon, flat and barren.

A flier appeared from behind a nearby tower, banking in a
smooth arc. Sunlight reflected off its glossy black body. The silver insignia
of Imperial Space Command glittered on its nose, the letters ISC inscribed
inside a triangle, which was inscribed inside an exploding sun.

The window had no drapes. Kurj had no need of them. He used
the window as a tool. He set the polarization of the glass to mute the glare,
but only enough so that it wasn’t blinding. I stood at attention in front of
his desk trying not to squint. Even with my enhanced optic nerves, my eyes
still refused to focus on both the brilliant cityscape outside and Kurj’s
shadowed face in here. He was a dark silhouette in a chair, his face and his
mind unreadable.

“Forshires Hold,” Kurj repeated. “I want you to train JMI cadets.”

I didn’t want these new orders. I had no desire to train
cadets at a military academy. “Permission to speak?”

“Go ahead.”

“I’d like to take the squad out again.”

Kurj continued to watch me. His mind pressed on mine like a
weight.

But I didn’t care. I just wanted to go out and fight and
fight and fight until every Trader had suffered, the way every provider suffered,
the way all of the people the Traders had tortured had suffered. The way Rex
suffered. I wanted to go out and pulverize the bastards.

“So you want another combat assignment,” Kurj said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to fight Traders.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Kill them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Destroy them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kurj regarded me. “I once had this same conversation with
Rex Blackstone.”

That threw me off balance. “Sir?”

Kurj got up and went to the window. He stood with his back
to me, his hands clasped behind him as he stared over the city. His city. His
planet. His empire.