The Killing of Worlds (8 page)

Tyre put out her trembling and bloody hand to the icon.

Not authorized, the icon blinked.

She swore. Kax was still alive and on-station. As far as the
Lynx
was concerned, he was still in command, and was the only analyst qualified to make this judgment. Tyre cleared her second sight and looked down to where Rogers cradled the data master’s head. Kax seemed hardly to have a face at all. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if he still had second sight, even though his eyes were destroyed.

There wasn’t time to ask. Kax could hardly breathe; he couldn’t be thinking clearly with an injury like that.

“Rogers,” she ordered. “Pull the data master out of the room.”

“What?”

“Pick him up and drag him from the room. Get him off the station.” Tyre said it with all the force she could manage. Her ragged voice gave the words an authority she didn’t feel.

Rogers hesitated, looking at the other two ratings.

“Rogers! The
Lynx
won’t recognize my rank with him in here.”

“But there’s more glass out—”

“Do it!”

Rogers jumped, then stooped to gingerly lift the wounded Kax. He pulled the bloody man toward the doorway, his shredded uniform scraping across the glass and out into the access shaft.

Tyre breathed deep, and touched the priority icon again.

“Please listen,” she murmured to herself.

The icon shifted in the air, folding into a bright point, and requested her missive. She attached the compiled frame showing the host of blackbody drones and gestured the Send command.

A few seconds later, Hobbes’s voice responded.

“My god,” the ExO said. Tyre breathed a sigh of relief at the woman’s tone. At least Hobbes understood.

“Where the hell’s Kax?”

“Injured. Blind, I think.”

“Shit. Get up to the captain’s planning room, then,” the Executive Officer ordered. “And get ready to explain this.”

“Aye, aye.”

“We’ll have to accelerate immediately. We’ll lose the manifold for good,” Hobbes continued, talking half to herself. “You better be on the mark with this, Tyre.”

Tyre swallowed as she pulled herself from the webbing.

If she was wrong, her career was ruined. If she was right, the
Lynx
was in very deep trouble.

They looked up at her with startled expressions, curious and wary. Their eyes reflected the hovering globe that lit her path, igniting with the crimson flash of night predators.

Nara Oxham wondered if small rodents were ever let loose in the Diamond Palace’s darkened halls, entertainment for the Emperor’s pets. Of course, it seemed unlikely that risen animals would make very aggressive hunters. As she passed, the felines remained piled together on the low window couch, regally watchful, but as soporific as fat old toms. Perhaps like dead humans they were content to contemplate black paintings and go on endless pilgrimages. Nara could see the ridges of the symbiant along the felines’ spines, payment for the cruelty their kind had suffered during the Holy Experiments.

They were dead things, she reminded herself.

“Senator.”

The inhuman voice came out of darkness, and Oxham started.

“My apologies, Senator Oxham.” The representative from the Plague Axis stepped to the edge of her globe’s light, but remained politely distant. “My biosuit allows me a certain level of night vision; I had forgotten you couldn’t see me.”

The slight hiss of the biosuit’s filters was barely audible in the silent hallway. Nara tried not to imagine the representative’s diseases straining to escape, to infect her, to propagate across the human species.

“So you can see in the dark? Not unlike the sovereign’s house Pets,” she said, gesturing at the flashing eyes.

There was a pause. Had her insult found its mark? Through the opaque faceplate, the representative’s expression was invisible. They had sat on the War Council together for weeks now, but Nara didn’t even know if the thing inside the suit was male or female.

Whatever it was, it had cast the deciding vote in favor of the Emperor’s genocide.

“Except that those cats will live forever, Nara Oxham. I shall not.”

The people of the Plague Axis could not take the symbiant, which resisted all disease and physical defect as part of its cure for death. For that reason Oxham and her party had counted the Axis on the side of the living, allies against the Emperor. It hadn’t worked out that way.

Oxham shrugged. “Neither shall I.” She turned and walked toward the council chamber.

“Senator?” the representative called softly.

“The sovereign requests we attend him,” she answered without stopping.

The soft, pearly floor of the council chamber glowed coolly in the Diamond Palace’s night. The dead never liked bright rooms at any time, but the lighting in gray places always varied slowly, reflecting daily and seasonal shifts, even equinoctial precession on more eccentric planets.

Senator Oxham and the Plague Axis representative were the last of the nine counselors to arrive. The dead admiral hardly waited for them to settle before beginning her speech.

“There is news from Legis.”

Nara closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then forced herself to watch.

The airscreen filled with a familiar schematic, the decelerating Rix battlecruiser arcing toward Legis, the hook-shaped path of the
Lynx
darting out to engage it as far from the planet as possible. At this system-sized scale, the two trajectories were touching now.

Nara’s sudden dose of apathy would take some time to wear off, so she watched the faces of her colleagues through the translucent image. The other pink senators, Federalist and Utopian, and the plutocrat Ax Milnk wore harried and sleepless looks. Even the Loyalist Henders looked nervous, unready to learn that he had voted for mass murder. The faces of three dead members of the War Council were like stone. The admiral spoke evenly, the general sat at attention, the risen sovereign stared into the middle distance over Nara’s head.

She could feel nothing, but a lifetime spent comparing what eyes and empathy told her had given Nara an instinct for reading bodies and faces. Even with her ability dampened, the aspects of the dead men and woman betrayed disquiet.

Something had gone wrong.

“The
Lynx
and the Rix engaged some thirty minutes ago,” the dead admiral continued. “At last report, the two ships have reached second contact.”

Nara’s jaw tightened. First contact was when the outer drone clouds overlapped, with shots fired between them; second contact meant that the primaries, the
Lynx
and the Rix warship proper, had engaged each other’s drones. Beginning with second contact, human lives were lost.

“The
Lynx
has suffered casualties, but has thus far managed to survive.”

Any of those casualties might be Laurent, Nara thought, but surely the admiral would mention it if the ship’s captain was dead.

“More importantly, the
Lynx
‘s drones have succeeded in the primary goal of the attack, destroying the Rix receiver array. At this point, it seems that the Legis mind will remain isolated, without further action on our part.”

The admiral was silent for a moment, letting the news sink in.

Nara saw her own hesitation on the other living counselors’ faces: None of them believed it yet. They were waiting for some awful reversal in the admiral’s statement. But the dead woman’s silence lengthened, and they realized it was true. There was no reason to obliterate the compound mind. There would be no
EMP
attack, no hundred million dead.

Laurent had saved them all.

The War Council stirred all at once, like people waking from a nightmare. The Loyalist Henders put his head in his hands, an exhausted and undisguised gesture, and even the Plague Axis representative’s biosuit slumped with what had to be relief. The other senators and Milnk turned to Nara Oxham, daring to show their respect.

Nara let nothing she felt reach her face. For her, more than any of them, this had been personal. She would allow herself emotions later.

“We are happy with this victory, of course,” the Emperor said.

He was lying, Nara was certain. She had seen it in him, and in his dead soldiers. They had wanted Zai to fail.

“And more important than any victory, we rest assured that this council was ready to make the necessary sacrifice.” For the first time ever, Nara saw the sovereign’s praise fall flat. None of the living members had been ready to watch what the War Council had voted for.

The Emperor had lost something here.

“We must congratulate this council for having made the right decision, however pleased we are it didn’t come to action.” There was an edge in his voice. Anyone could hear it.

Nara Oxham had grown to know the Emperor, this young-looking undead man, and to understand his fixation with the Rix; their compound minds were a counter-god to his own false divinity. He was as jealous as any petty deity, and Nara Oxham was a politician who understood egomania, no matter how grossly exaggerated.

But over the last few days, she had seen fear in him, not hatred. What could terrify the Emperor of Eighty Worlds so much that only genocide would suffice?

“We owe Zai a debt,” the Plague representative said.

There were nods of agreement. The sovereign turned to look at the biosuit, the movement of his head as slow as some ancient lizard.

“We have already elevated him,” the Emperor said coldly. “And pardoned him after our sister’s death. Perhaps it was his debt to pay.”

“Still, Majesty,” the Utopian Senator said, “an entire world has been saved from grievous harm.”

“Indeed,” the Federalist said.

“I agree,” Ax Mi Ink added.

“May I remind you of the hundred-year rule?” the sovereign said. “None of us can speak of what Zai prevented. Not for a century.”

“But he has still won a great victory,” the Plague representative said. “An auspicious beginning to this war.”

Nara almost let herself smile. For the first time since the council was formed, the others dared to contradict the Emperor. Not only Zai had won this battle, the living members of the War Council had as well.

But the dead admiral interrupted.

“We cannot publicly declare Zai’s victory yet. Third contact will come in another twenty minutes. It seems unlikely the
Lynx
will survive.”

Nara swallowed. Third contact was when the two primaries engaged directly, ship-to-ship, without their drones between them.

“Why would there be a third contact, Admiral?” she asked. “With the array destroyed, surely the
Lynx
will make its escape. It’s smaller, faster.”

The admiral gestured, and the airscreen image zoomed. Vector lines were added, arcing through intersections like crossed scimitars.

“Captain Zai made his attack at a high relative velocity, to get his drones past the Rix defenses and at the array. At this point, the two ships are moving toward each other too fast for the
Lynx
to make much of an escape. In the service of the Emperor and this council, Zai has sealed his own fate.”

“In war, there are always sacrifices,” the Emperor sighed.

Nara forced herself not to utter the cry she felt building. The elation of a few moments ago drained away, her heart turning cold. One way or another, these dead men would have their revenge against Laurent. It was as if the Emperor himself had decreed the law of inertia, just to spite Zai’s heroism and see him killed.

She was utterly selfish, Nara tried to tell herself, to think only of one man when millions had been saved, when the
Lynx
carried three hundred.

But for Nara, the battle was lost if Laurent wasn’t coming home.

The call from Alexander eventually came.

The few phones that h_rd had spared dissection rang in unison, then beeped out a simple coded sequence from the onetime pad she shared with Alexander. The battle in space had gone badly, and her assistance was required. The entanglement facility had to be liberated for the compound mind’s use.

The call hadn’t awakened Rana, h_rd realized with bittersweet relief. The few novels and plays she’d read suggested that the farewell rituals of Imperial humanity and those of the Rix were incompatible. And this would be a deep good-bye. Either of them, perhaps both, might die in the next ten hours.

h_rd pulled herself closer to the woman’s soft, warm body. How humanity raged against its environment, she thought, each body demanding its own pocket of heat, and at a temperature so perversely exact. Five degrees in either direction spelled death. So prideful, yet so fragile.

The rattle in Rana’s breathing sounded worse. The rhythm was even, but h_rd detected the slightest increase of its tempo from a few hours ago. The woman’s breath quickened as the volume of her functioning lung decreased. The pulsatile nature of her lover’s physiology always fascinated h_rd. The rhythms of circulation, breath, menstruation, and sleep had an alien grandeur, like the ancient symmetries expressed in the brief lives of particles or in the stately motions of planets. h_rd was Rix: her heart a screw, her lungs continuous filters, her ovaries in cold storage back on her home orbital. And those cycles of the Rix body that had escaped Upgrade could be modulated as easily as the speed of an engine. But the interlocking patterns that constituted Rana Harter’s aliveness seemed sovereign as nature; h_rd could not imagine them simply winding down into awful, inescapable silence.

Of course, the Rixwoman knew how to save her lover, understood—at least abstractly—the price of the delicate and precious life beside her. She could always surrender to the Imperials, giving Rana to their doctors, and herself to the military. h_rd pondered what it would be like to abandon Alexander at this critical moment. Despite what the Empire called the Rix, they were no cult; members were free to rejoin humanity. Over the last few centuries, a dozen or so even had.

But h_rd would find no freedom in Imperial hands. The Risen Empire had never taken a Rix prisoner of war, unless a few frozen and decompressed bodies plucked from hard space were counted. They would interrogate her, mindsweep her, test her mercilessly, and finally dissect the prostheses that she considered unambiguously to be herself.