The Killing of Worlds (16 page)

After the rush of the first few minutes, the effects of apathy withdrew gradually, Nara’s empathy gaining in strength over the slow hours. Her ability had been active all day, moving and adjusting itself, slowly growing comfortable with the man next to her, settling across the pattern of his thoughts like a blanket of snow over one of the house gardens. Laurent seemed to have recovered his balance in the hours since telling her about Dhantu; she could feel his mind aligned by the sureties of his gray religion, his military discipline.

Although Laurent’s touchstones sprang from convictions alien to Nara, there was comfort in anything that took away his pain.

Nara wondered if this was a good idea, letting herself bond so strongly with someone she hardly knew, who was by any measure a political enemy.

Who would be gone so soon, for so long.

Laurent stirred.

“A fire?” she asked.

They left the bed and opened up the north wall to the pink night sky and the arctic chill. Nara loved the high arctic summer. The sun hid behind the mountains but never lost its grasp on the horizon. She wondered what it would be like in half a year, when daylight rather than darkness lasted only one hour in ten.

They chose split, dry logs for the fire, building it high and hot enough to push them back a few meters, counterpoint to the chill night air on their backs.

When Laurent slipped away to maintain his prosthetics, Nara asked the house to salvage what it could of dinner and deliver it here. It responded a bit stiffly. Knowing that grays didn’t approve of talking machines, Nara had ordered it to keep silent in Laurent’s company. She wondered if the house’s conversational package needed more practice than it was getting on her infrequent visits.

When Laurent returned, he was dressed. She wrapped herself in bedclothes.

After a silence, she felt his discomfort. He was unsure what to say. This moment always eventually came with new lovers, in those quiet moments between dramatic turns.

What would the pink senator and the gray soldier talk about?

No point in fighting the obvious.

“Do you really think there’ll be another Incursion, Laurent?”

He shrugged, but she felt trouble in him. “Until today, I had my doubts about the rumors. But this posting to Legis, right on the frontier …”

“Isn’t most of the Navy on one frontier or another?”

“True. But I’m to take command of a new kind of warship.” He paused and looked at her. “But that’s classified, of course.” He smiled. “You’re not a Rix spy, are you?”

Nara laughed. “Laurent, in a few weeks I’ll be on the Intelligence Sub-Quorum of His Majesty’s Senate. You’d better hope I’m not a Rix spy.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You’re on the oversight committee?”

Laurent’s alarm flared in her empathy, and turned quickly into reflexive withdrawal. Nara could feel the revulsion that military culture held for civilian interference.

“If that’s what you call it in the Navy, yes.”

He took a deep breath. “Oh, I didn’t realize.”

“Did you think Secularists never took an interest in the military?”

“An interest? Certainly. But not necessarily a positive one.”

“My interest is very positive, Laurent. The Emperor’s military forces benefit from oversight by the living, I’m absolutely sure. We’re the ones who do the dying for him, after all.”

He grimaced, the phantoms of his lost limbs twisting painfully, and she could almost hear his thoughts. What did she, a pink senator, know of dying?

“My assignment may come before the committee,” he said flatly. “Perhaps we should restrict our conversation.”

Oxham blinked, marveling again at how politically naive military officers could be. Laurent hadn’t even bothered to check her portfolio before coming. Her own handlers wouldn’t let her attend so much as a cocktail party without memorizing a detailed history of every person on the guest list. After inviting him here, she’d researched Zai’s commanders and former crew, his Academy standings, and had digested reams of Apparatus propaganda about the hero of Dhantu. She’d even dipped into the gutter media, the channels who called him the Broken Man.

Of course, that didn’t mean she understood him. In all that detail Nara had missed one salient point: the length of his career in real years. After almost a century Absolute of serving the Emperor, decades passing at relativistic speeds, the man was tired of losing friends and lovers to the Time Thief. And now he would be gone for another twenty years at least.

He had every right to be angry. But not at her.

She put a hand on his arm and turned away to look into the fire. “Laurent, I don’t want to restrict anything we say to each other. And I don’t care about the Emperor’s secrets. I just asked because I want to know when you’re coming back.”

He sighed. “As do I.”

They were silent for a while, staring into the flames. Nara wondered why she had pressed him. He was probably right; they shouldn’t be sharing classified information across the lines of political and military, democratic and Imperial, pink and gray. But somehow she needed to cross the boundaries of their alien hierarchies now, in these early days. Otherwise they never would.

She wanted to be trusted, even though she was a pink. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

Nara felt the change in him before he spoke. He wanted something too.

“I know you’re not a spy, Nara. And I’m sure your committee will hear about it soon enough, so you should hear it from me. They’ve given me a new kind of ship. A frigate prototype.”

“Everyone knew you’d get a command, Laurent. A reward for your faithful service.”

“Perhaps. But any prototype wants battle-testing. They wouldn’t be sending a ship like the
Lynx
to the Rix frontier if there weren’t some promise of action there.”

Nara nodded, feeling the certainty in him. And the dread. She was too young to have lived through the Incursion herself, but could always feel the icy memory of Rix terror attacks in those who had. Whole cities razed by gravity weapons. Planets reduced to pre-terraformation by bombardment from space. Even the gray places of the dead attacked, the bodies of the risen deliberately sundered beyond the ability of the symbiant to repair.

“It’s a small, fast ship, with hitting power and range,” he continued. “A deep raider, a way to strike back against the Rix.”

“I see,” she said softly, squeezing his non-prosthetic arm. “That would mean going even farther outward, wouldn’t it?”

Her empathy with Laurent remained strong; she felt him sifting thoughts so cold that she couldn’t name them. What was he thinking? “Ten more years out,” he said. “Plus years of raiding, if it comes to war.”

“So you really meant it that you might be gone fifty years?”

“Yes. Fifty.”

An entire senator’s term. Of course, with Nara in stasis most of the year, and Laurent’s time frame stretched out by relativity, it might only be a decade subjective for them both. Still a vast separation, given that she’d hardly known him two days. (Why, she wondered, was it always most terrible being separated from someone you’d just met?)

“It’s not only the years, Nara.”

“The fact that I’m a pink? That I’ll be slashing your budget while you’re at the front?”

He barely smiled. “No. It’s what I’ll do out there.”

That gray Vadan charm again. “Laurent, I can hardly expect fidelity.”

“I didn’t mean … Nara, I’m talking about what I’ll do as a soldier. What the
Lynx
is designed to do.”

“Make war? You’ve done that before. You served in the Dhantu Occupation, after all. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

He turned to her, still full of blackness, and spoke with effort. “I can.”

She quieted herself, letting her empathy work.

It was very small inside him, hard to see clearly. A dark place.

Then she found a way in, and it hit her. Worse than his memories of the tortures he’d suffered on Dhantu, more sovereign. It was a black abstraction, cold potential, like the mindnoise on a Vasthold street corner in the calm just before a political riot—the kind in which people would die. Nara Oxham’s empathy recoiled, her head suddenly spinning, some animal part of her mind knowing ahead of the rest what her empathy would show.

But he kept talking.

“The
Lynx
is a deep raider, Nara. Long-range killing power, fast and expendable.”

Unbidden, true telepathy came, with a glimpse of what he imagined. Rolling satellite imagery: fields and rivers from space, the grid of a city coming into view.

“Against the Rix,” he continued, “we won’t be hitting shipping and logistical targets. The
Lynx
is made to do what we never managed in the First Incursion. To take the war to the Rix worlds.”

“Laurent…” This gray man knew the mechanics of it. He understood the horrific details of how it would be done.

“As they brought war to ours.”

“Stop.” As she said it, Nara’s hand went to her wrist, searching for the apathy bracelet. But she’d taken it off when they’d arrived. She was defenseless against his thoughts.

In any event, he said it out loud.

“My ship is for killing worlds, Nara.”

She swallowed something acid, stood up and went onto the balcony. The rail caught her hands, and she pulled herself up from stumbling. Breathed deeply.

The cold cleared her head. This helplessness was absurd. “House.”

“Yes, mistress?” it whispered in private second hearing.

“Get me my bracelet. Priority.”

“Done.”

Laurent was beside her. “Nara? I’m sorry. You would have heard anyway.”

“It’s just withdrawal. From my counter-empathy drug.”

“I’m sorry.” He held her, pressed close to warm her. She could hardly feel the dark thing in him now. Godspite, where did he hide it?

“It’s nothing, Laurent. It happens sometimes when I come out here. In the capital, I have to take it for the crowds. But here I forget.”

He sighed. “I understand.” He knew she was lying.

“Laurent…”

“Yes?”

She saw something moving. A house serving drone, skittering down the handrail, clutching her apathy bracelet. She took another deep breath, her panic receding at the sight of it.

“Will you do it?” Nara reached out and took the bracelet from the drone.

Laurent clutched her shoulder, and she tasted his struggle, the fight against his conditioning, his upbringing, his own gray soul, against a planetary landscape rolling beneath him, virgin and defenseless.

“I hope not,” he said.

Her fingers closed around the bracelet, and the drone backed away. But Nara didn’t activate the flow of apathy yet.

“Don’t,” she asked.

He looked behind him, as if the Emperor might be listening from the bedroom. But it was just more servos, a small army of them arranging things in front of the fire. In the flickering light, they looked like mad insects building a miniature city.

Laurent Zai nodded quietly and whispered, “All right. I won’t. I promise you.”

Four days to make promises, he had said an hour ago.

Nara slipped the bracelet onto her wrist unused, and swallowed. Godspite, her mouth was dry.

“Dinner, then?” she said.

Above all, a soldier must be willing to die.

—
ANONYMOUS
167

The second rendezvous went considerably better. h_rd successfully jumped from the recon flyer to the dirigible, and over a few hours it lifted her to approximately eighty kilometers altitude.

The commando looked down over the entanglement facility. From this height, it was smaller than a palm at arm’s length. The dirigible’s vacuum sphere had quadrupled in size during the slow ascent. h_rd pressed her face to a rebreather tank. The decline in pressure during the assent had been considerable; her ears were ringing, and she’d felt a blood vessel burst in one eye after an hour of climbing. A Rix commando could take a wide variation of air pressure, but this was the lowest she’d experienced since hull-breach training. There was no weather up here in the mesopause, but it was unbelievably cold. The ablative suit—recovered, like the rebreather, from a supersonic aircraft emergency store—was insulated enough to keep her from freezing. h_rd found, however, that she missed her sable coat.

Well, she would be warmed up soon enough.

The positioning device in her hand beeped, Alexander’s signal to her. It was almost time to drop. The entanglement facility seemed off-center to her, but the compound mind had carefully calculated the wind direction and speed.

With a strangely unRix thought, h_rd hoped that Alexander hadn’t made any mistakes.

She had to hit an area roughly ten meters across, after a fall that would take more than twenty minutes. Alexander had used its weather satellites to find the snowdrift, which filled a thirty-meter deep glacial rift inside the array’s defensive wire. The compound mind had introduced a few nanos disguised as snowflakes into its cloud-seeding efforts. These had fallen into the drift and doped the snow. Over the last few days, the nano colony had changed the structure of the ice crystals, expanding the drift, leaching carbon from the soil for structure, and creating a colloidal foam that would compress smoothly when h_rd struck it. The snow had swelled up into a hill that rose ten meters above the surrounding landscape. Thus, h_rd’s fall would be broken gradually over almost forty meters.

Of course, she had to hit the trench dead center. She held the positioning device firmly in her free hand; it would guide her to the target area.

h_rd prepared herself, swallowing to adjust the pressure in her ears. She checked the straps of her mission pack.

Then the dirigible motors cut. The signal to drop.

She unlocked the muscles in her hand that clung to the dirigible’s payload basket, and slipped into the void.

Weightless again. Freefall was an old friend.

The rush of air built slowly, worsening the cold on the unprotected parts of her face.

Her ablative suit was designed to fight fires onboard aircraft. A few nanos—programmed by Alexander and delivered through a medical pack—had altered it sufficiently to make it invisible to Imperial radar.