The Killing of Worlds (32 page)

Not one for eating sticks, Enman speared the dumplings one by one with his spoon’s short tines. Each broke into a different flavor— soft potato surrounding a whole garlic clove, crisp red pepper, a small round piece of dry, spongy bread. Over the centuries, it seemed, the Navy had learned to incorporate every imaginable foodstuff into stew.

The sub-rating ate voraciously, appearing to ignore the senior crew around him. He always showed for meals at the same times, as silent and regular as a monk attending the hours of the mass. Each day the other denizens of the mess grew a bit less aware of his presence. After a few minutes of silence, Enman felt himself sinking into the background. The gunners’ conversation had been particularly intense before his interruption, and they wanted to get back to it. The sub-rating kept his eyes focused into his stew.

“Did you see the CW today?” a third gunner with big ears said.

This was their shorthand for Katherie Hobbes, the frigate’s stunningly beautiful executive officer. It had taken weeks of eavesdropping for Enman to identify the nickname’s referent, but he had no idea of its derivation. The gunners were a very circumspect lot.

“Where? Down here in mortal country?” an ordnance specialist asked.

Bigears nodded. “Inspecting the hardpoint armor. ‘Checking the seams,’ she said. Had a shitload of scanning gear.”

There were nods and grumbles. Bigears made the gestural code for cargo, his motion deliberately sloppy so that the ship’s interface wouldn’t pick the hand sign up. Enman stared into his stew. The gunner was suggesting—in a way that no recording of this conversation would reveal—that Hobbes had been checking for contraband stashed between the newly installed plates of armor. Sidearms, and anything that might be made into a weapon, were still very tightly controlled on the
Lynx
.

“Seemed satisfied, though.”

“Waste of time.”

“Not giving us much credit.”

“Gives her something to do.”

“When she’s not servicing the old man.”

There was a grumbling laugh in the mess. Enman’s eating slowed as he listened. This was a new thread in the gunners’ talk, at least when he had been within earshot. He wondered if he should take the risk of expressing a careful measure of interest.

“CW?” he asked innocently.

His question was met with scowls. Faces turned away from him. He swallowed, willed himself to blush like a boy rejected by older men, and bent back to his stew. The room was silent for the rest of the meal. Enman cursed himself. He had spoken too soon. The gunners were still too paranoid to talk in front of a newcomer. This would be a game of months, or even years.

But when the watch chime rang, Bigears grasped Enman’s shoulder as the sub-rating rose to leave. He handsigned the table to purge, fully resetting the mold culture. Sometimes, like an aquarium with water gone bad, the stews went funny, and had to be started over from scratch.

As the hiss of a steam-cleaning thundered through the mess, a few wisps of vapor rising from the sealed pots, Bigears leaned close, his lips almost touching Enman’s ear.

“Captain’s Whore,” came his whisper, almost lost in the hiss of steam.

Enman nodded just a bit, allowing his face to show a faint smile.

The mess cleared, and the sub-rating returned to his gunnery post in the ship’s nose, spending a watch operating close-in-defense lasers against the few small fragments presented by the Legis system’s thin asteroid belt. The flush of his accomplishment in the mess helped his aim; over the two hours, Enman managed the highest hit-rate of any Legis-drafted gunner yet.

By the time watch ended, he was aglow with satisfaction. The path from forward gunnery to his cabin led past the Apparatus section of the frigate. Most crew avoided the political quarter, preferring any route that avoided the black-walled halls and the cold stares of the dead interlopers onboard ship. But Enman took the straight course this time.

He soon found himself in an empty corridor. With a quick look in both directions, he stopped at a small door and announced himself.

“Aspirant Anton Enman, reporting.”

The door opened quickly, and the aspirant slipped furtively inside.

The four prisoners hung from the ceiling.

They were trussed with an elastic rope. Like everything in this gray moment, the pattern of their bonds was prescribed by ritual. The rope pulled tight against their red brig fatigues, and sectioned the prisoners’ torsos like cutlines painted on cattle prepped for slaughter. This particular type of rope was derived from the long chain proteins of spider thread, and she, Katherie Hobbes, had been their Arachne.

“Any statements?”

Silence. Thompson, Hu, Magus, and King had already been put to the question, and their wills had held against drugs, against threats to their families, against pain. Their loyalty to their fellow mutineers had proved unshakable.

Hobbes reached up to the prisoners’ throats to check the vorpal shunts again. With the marine doctor dead, the shunts had been implanted by medtechs never trained in the procedure. But the shunts looked fine. They pulsed visibly with the prisoners’ heartbeat. Katherie checked the lengths of rope that stretched to the floor from the four mutineers’ ankles. They looked fast, tight in their hypercarbon rings.

Finally, Hobbes glanced up at the four wide-mouthed ceremonial platters bonded to the ceiling. Each was in its correct place.

There was nothing else to do.

“Ready, sir.” She stepped back across the yellow-red stripe of the gravity line. Sudden inversion, those colors meant.

Captain Zai nodded. He said some appropriate prayer, his voice sinking into the rolling glottal fricatives of Vadan. A few of the marine guards muttered prayers in their own tongues. Then, without further ceremony, Zai made the signal.

Nothing happened yet. In theory, the captain’s gesture was not the trigger that killed the prisoners. No one person did the Emperor’s work in this regard, but the universe itself. Zai had commanded the
Lynx
to watch for a certain occultation, an astronomical event that would inevitably occur within a few minutes. When the
Lynx
made the observation—a star of a specific class disappearing behind some random asteroid in the Legis belt—the executions would unfold.

They waited.

A timeless minute later it must have happened, a tiny and momentary blackness amid the river of light on which the
Lynx
moved, a drifting closed of some sleepy god’s eye.

Gravity inverted in the other half of the room, the prisoners suddenly levitating before Hobbes’s eyes. The bonds around their ankles snapped taught, like a fall halted by a noose, their vorpal shunts opening as one. Four thin streams of blood shot toward the ceiling— the floor in their frame of reference—striking the ceremonial platters with a sound like piss hitting a metal bowl.

The prisoners didn’t struggle. Supposedly, this form of execution was relatively painless, the limbs growing quickly cold. Oxygen would cease to reach the body’s cells, but like suffocation by carbon dioxide, there would be no frenzied gasping for breath.

Their faces grew pink at first, as the inverted gravity brought blood down from the feet to the head. But Katherie could see the mutineers’ bound hands turning white already. Eventually, their faces would blanch and grow expressionless. Blood pooled in the ceremonial bowls, the metal-ringing, splattery sound replaced by the gurgle of liquid into liquid.

Katherie stood at attention. She felt light-headed, as if the gravity inversion were losing integrity, suffusing across the yellow-red stripe, its tendrils finding her. She blinked, and nausea rose in Hobbes. Her old nemesis vertigo threatened as her eyes read the clear signs of up and down reversed on the other side of the room, a few wisps of Magus’s hair flailing upward, the lines of Thompson’s face pulled wrong.

Then the flow of blood began to slacken. The prisoners’ faces grew white. It was almost over.

And then something terrible happened.

The four hanging bodies suddenly jolted toward her, as if kicked from behind. She and Zai jumped back. Magus’s hair pointed directly at Hobbes now. Gravity inside the inversion zone had shifted by ninety degrees, a malfunction of the
Lynx
‘s ailing generator.

Hobbes looked at the ceiling with horror.

The blood already collected in the ceremonial bowls was spilling out, pouring across the ceiling in a sanguine waterfall, rolling toward the yellow-red stripe almost above her head.

Katherie barely had time to cover her face.

The liters of blood reached the normal gravity zone, a red river that was cleaved by the sudden directional shift. It sprayed upon her and Laurent Zai like a warm summer rain.

Katherie Hobbes awoke gasping, clawing at the strands of her own hair in her mouth.

A dream. Just a dream. The executions had been more than a month ago. Nothing so horrible had happened. In the real event, the ritual had unfolded with admirable military precision.

Hobbes coughed, wiping sweat from her face, which tasted as salty as blood. She pulled her knees to her chest and breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.

Then she realized it: This had been her first real dream in months.

Katherie Hobbes had just gone back to natural sleep, her usage of hypersleep having exceeded the recommended maximum by more than a hundred percent. The ship’s new doctor, an earnest civilian from Legis’s storm-swept equatorial archipelago, had given her drugs to help the transition. But Katherie had left them untouched, relying on exhaustion to get her to oblivion.

Clearly, that had been a bad idea. Hobbes had grown addicted to the instantaneous drop into hyperdreams, the familiar, symbolic process-narratives that reliably reconstituted her brain. Falling into natural sleep had taken a thrashing, anxious hour. And when Katherie Hobbes finally slipped into a restless unconsciousness, it was only to discover this long-suppressed nightmare.

A moment after she awoke from the execution dream, the entry chime sounded from Hobbes’s door, an insistent summons dragging her fully awake. The access icon glowed in second sight: an Apparatus subpoena in brilliant red.

Without waiting for a response, three politicals entered her cabin. Two honored dead and a living woman.

“Katherie Hobbes.” Even in the dark cabin, Hobbes recognized the flat voice of Adept Harper Trevim.

This was serious, Katherie’s addled brain slowly realized. Trevim was the ranking political on board the
Lynx
. What had happened? Hobbes sat up, and quickly ran the frigate’s top-level diagnostics in synesthesia. Nothing seemed out of place.

“Yes, Honored Mother?” she managed with a dry voice.

“We must talk with you.”

She nodded and rose shakily to attention. In an odd moment of embarrassment, she hoped the politicals wouldn’t notice her bedclothes. The natural worm silk of her sheets was a guilty pleasure from home. Hobbes kept it covered with a blanket of Navy wool during the day. The politicals looked only at her body, however, a bit of discomfort showing on the living woman’s face. Having grown up on a Utopian world, Hobbes felt no discomfort in nakedness. The dead, she assumed, were similarly unflappable.

“Yes, Adept. At the Emperor’s pleasure,” she answered.

“We must speak of your captain.”

Of course. They were still after Laurent. They always would be.

“Yes, Honored Mother?”

“New information has come to us about his rejection of the blade.”

Hobbes could barely hide her disgust. She spoke rudely. “He was pardoned by the Emperor, Adept.”

The dead woman nodded. The precise, expressionless movement reminded Hobbes of her protocol instructor when she’d been a staff officer. She’d learned the gestural cues of a dozen cultures from the man, but he had never seemed fully human himself. The adept had the same neutral presence, as if this were all some strange ritual. Indeed, the whole scene was so surreal, Hobbes wasn’t sure she wasn’t still dreaming.

“Yes, it was fortunate that he did not take the blade before pardon was given,” Trevim said. “But we are concerned about his motivation for delaying the ritual.”

Hobbes couldn’t see where this was going. She blinked, trying to will away the cobwebs of sleep in her mind. “Honored Mother?”

“What is the exact nature of your relationship with Laurent Zai?”

For a moment, Katherie could not answer. Her silence stretched and redoubled itself, until it was a hand over her mouth.

She finally forced herself to speak. “What do you mean?”

“We have heard troubling rumors.”

Hobbes felt the flush at her breast, the heat in her face. She was angry, humiliated, enraged at her own inability to respond. This had to be another nightmare: naked, her head groggy with sleep, called on the carpet by the Emperor’s representatives.

“I don’t know what you mean, Adept.”

“What is your exact relationship with Laurent Zai?”

“I’m his executive officer.”

“Is there anything more?”

Hobbes willfully forced emotion from her mind, and let herself be ruled by the dictates of gray talk, as if she were making a military report. She only had to tell the truth. Anything else between them had only ever been in her own mind. “I have the utmost respect for the captain. There is nothing unprofessional in our friendship.”

“Friendship?”

“Friendship.”

“Do you know why he rejected the blade?”

“I don’t—” Hobbes choked herself off. She did know, she realized. “There is no reason for Captain Zai to die. And he was pardoned.”

“Was it because of his affair with you?”

“There is nothing between Laurent and me,” she said. Somehow, it seemed harder to tell the truth than it would have been to lie.

“Laurent?” the adept noted.

Hobbes took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She felt the heat of another blush travel across her exposed body. Hobbes realized that if they were polygraphing her, they had every advantage. She was naked and exhausted, without defenses.

But she was telling the truth, after all.