The Risen Empire (31 page)

A few minor injuries had occurred on the
Lynx
in the first few days of acceleration. Ankle fractures and knee sprains were common, a young marine's arm had broken without apparent cause, and burst blood vessels were visible in the eyes of a number of her shipmates. Katherie herself had suffered an unbearable and sudden headache the day before. It had passed quickly, but the intense pain was unnerving. With the ship's doctor dead, there was little hope for anyone suffering brain damage from some wayward tendril of gravity passing through their head.

Hobbes walked carefully, and reached the black lacquer table without spilling any of the water.

Setting the glass on the table, she sat and watched the water's surface. It loomed just above the lip, quivering slightly. Was that some perturbation of the easy gravity field? Or simply the ambient vibration of the
Lynx
under high acceleration, marking the egress of photons from its churning engines?

The water shuddered once, but the surface tension held. A few drops condensed on the side of the glass and traveled slowly downward. Nothing seemed to be out of order in that tiny segment of space.

It gave Katherie a secure feeling to observe this localized example of soundness and normality.

After a minute of watching, Hobbes picked up the glass and poured it slowly onto the table.

The water seemed to turn black against the ebony lacquer. It formed into rivulets and small pools, seeking the imperceptible valleys of the table's contours. None was absorbed into the shiny blackness; the water's surface tension kept the drops large and rounded.

On a dry island in this shallow sea she placed the diamond Laurent Zai had given her, a bright spot against its blackness.

Hobbes set the half-full glass down and regarded the results.

At first, the liquid seemed to come to rest, gathered in spattery puddles, with one tiny river reaching the edge and running from table onto floor. Then, Hobbes saw something move across the blackness, a wave of force, as if the table had been kicked. A few seconds later, one of the tendrils of water flexed in agitation, twisting like a beached fish. A single, isolated droplet moved a few centimeters, as if momentarily inhabited by a live spirit, and engulfed the tiny diamond. Then the water was still again.

Hobbes waited patiently, and more flutters of motion came. Spread across the table's two dimensions, its passage on the lacquer almost friction-less, the spilled water writhed visibly with the microshifts of artificial gravity coursing through the
Lynx.
In its sinuous motion, it revealed gravitic lines of force like iron filings rendering the patterns of magnetism.

It eased Katherie's mind to watch the water move. Now that she could actually see the invisible forces that had tortured her crewmates for the last week, Hobbes felt a bit more in control. She gazed at the black table, trying to scry some understanding from the patternless figures there. But easy gravitons were chaotic, complex, unpredictable: like the ancients' concept of the gods, whimsical and obscure, pushing tiny humans around according to some incomprehensible plan. Not unlike, Katherie Hobbes reflected, the political forces that moved the
Lynx
across the black and empty canvas of space, placing them here at this nexus of a new war, condemning the captain, pardoning him, then sending them all careening toward death.

Like the drops of water before her, the crew of the
Lynx
wriggled blindly against this void. An emotion that had seemed immense to Hobbes had become suddenly infinitesimal, laughable. On the scale of the universe, the aborted love of one executive officer for her captain made no ripples at all.

Still, at this moment, Hobbes knew she hated Laurent Zai with all her heart.

When her door sounded, Katherie Hobbes started, banging her knee against the table's leg.

"Come," she said, rubbing the leg, her latest wound.

Second Gunner Thompson entered, taking slow, careful steps, like a practiced alcoholic. He smiled when he saw the water-covered table.

"Spill something? I've been doing that all week."

"Just an experiment," she said.

He shrugged, and pointed to the chair opposite her. She nodded. Thompson lowered himself carefully, mindful of the poltergeists of gravity all around them.

It occurred to Hobbes that the second gunner had never been in her private cabin before. He had always been friendly, but perhaps a bit too familiar, as if he felt that his aristocratic roots entitled him beyond his rank. And Hobbes was aware of the effect she had on some crew. Her Utopian upbringing had casually included a degree of cosmetic surgery that gray parents would never countenance. She was overwhelmingly beautiful to many of them, and to others a woman of cartoonish sexuality, like a whore in some ribald comedy. She had considered counteractive surgery to make herself more average-looking, but that seemed the ultimate affectation. Hobbes was what she was.

The man sighed when he reached the safety of the chair.

"I'm sore all over," he said.

"Who isn't?" Hobbes answered. "Just be glad you can't feel the real ten gees.
Then
you'd be sore. Dead by now, in fact."

Thompson's head rolled back slowly in exhaustion; his eyes closed.

"The worst thing is," he said, "1 can't quite place where it hurts. It's like when you turn an ankle, and wind up limping for a few days. Then the
other
ankle gets sore from taking up the slack."

"Collateral injuries," she said.

"Right. But I seem to be
all
collateral injuries, like I can't remember where the original damage was. Very disquieting."

Hobbes looked down at the table. Her collision with it had spattered the water evenly across the black expanse, and now it revealed nothing but the ship's ambient vibration.

"I know what you mean," she said. "I've been trying to get a hold of it myself. To place it... in perspective."

Thompson opened his eyes, squinted at her. Then he shrugged.

"Ever been in high acceleration this long before, Hobbes?"

She shook her head. Few of the crew had. High gees were usually reserved for battle, a few hours at most.

"Makes you wonder what we did to deserve it," Thompson said.

Something about the man's voice made her look up from the spattered table. His eyes were narrowed.

"We lost the Empress," she answered flatly.

He nodded deliberately, as if wary of gravity even in this simple motion.

"A debt that wasn't paid," he said softly.

A slow disquiet took form in Hobbes's stomach, joining the nausea that lay there. "What are you talking about, Thompson?"

"Katherie, do you really think the Navy wants to sacrifice the
Lynx?"
he asked. His voice was as soft now, just above a whisper. "Simply to prevent one compound mind from communicating with one Rix ship?"

"So it would seem, Thompson," she said.

"But we can't keep the mind cut off forever," he said. "It's a whole
planet,
for the Emperor's sake. The Rix'll find some way to talk to it."

"Maybe. But not while the
Lynx
is here."

"However long that is," he said.

She looked down at the table, unable to think for a moment. The water looked different now. The surface tension seemed to be reasserting itself; droplets and puddles were forming again. It didn't make sense, this spontaneous organization. Was entropy giving way to order, the arrow of time in reverse?

What was Thompson talking about?

"Tell me what's on your mind, Second Gunner," Hobbes ordered.

"It's obvious, Katherie," he said, "why the
Lynx
is being sent on this mission. We're being sacrificed, to cover the debt not paid."

Hobbes closed her eyes. She only had a few seconds to respond, she knew.

Katherie Hobbes had been an above-average student at Academy, but not the best. Coming from a Utopian world, she didn't have the discipline of her gray peers. She didn't think herself truly brilliant, just savant at certain types of tactical calculations. But even in her greatest moments of self-doubt, Hobbes always prided herself on one thing: she made decisions quickly.

Katherie Hobbes made a decision now.

"Thompson, are you the only one thinking about this?"

He shook his head, so slightly that it would have been imperceptible in a low-resolution recording.

"Tell me what you're thinking, Thompson."

"We've been friends, right, Hobbes?"

She nodded.

"So you give your word that you'll be ... discreet?"

Hobbes sighed. She'd hoped it wouldn't come to this. But her decision was made.

"The way I see it, Thompson," she said, "we're all dead anyway."

He smiled ruefully, folding his hands and shifting in his seat toward her.

"Maximum privacy," she told the room, and leaned forward to listen.

MILITIA WORKER

As Rana Harter approached the sniffer, she felt like an impostor.

The red wig tight on her head, the coarse militia fatigues against her raw skin, the military ID bracelet—it all felt like a costume, a ruse that might be discovered at any second. In the burnished metal walls of the facility her own reflection was only distantly familiar, a holo from childhood. It was as if she were impersonating a previous self.

The sniffer created a bottleneck as the workers entered the array facility. Rana felt a moment of panic as she joined the crowd. The week she'd spent alone with Herd in the prefab seemed like months now—the lengthened memory of some summer idyll. Isolation had a purity about it, a calm order that was hard to leave behind. The jostling crowd offended her new sensibilities.

She wished that Herd were here with her, a familiar presence to guide her through the strange facility. The commando had impersonated Rana for the last week, and knew her way within these walls. But the sniffer would no doubt take umbrage at
two
Rana Harters entering together.

There was a slight updraft in the short passageway of the sniffer, slow fans assisting the human thermal plume, carrying skin cells and dust upward. With these particles the device could not only DNA-type the entering workers, but also detect the effluvia of concealed explosives or weapons, and search frayed hairs and skin cells for signs of drug or alcohol abuse. It could even sniff theft; valuable pieces of equipment in the facility were given phero patches. Whatever you were up to, the sniffer smelled you out.

Rana held her breath as she passed through. Would the device notice the difference between herself and Herd? The thought of being stopped and questioned terrified her. She might be Rana Harter down to the bone, but she felt utterly false.

She hoped her epidermis had recovered sufficiently to satisfy the machine's appetite. Herd had worked a healing balm into her skin all night, trying to restore the cells the commando had mined so pitilessly for her own use. The balm seemed to have worked, taking the pink rawness from her skin—but after the last week, any attempt to put the old Rana Harter back together seemed woefully insufficient. She felt half Rix now.

The sniffer, however, let her through without comment.

Herd had drawn a map on a piece of flash paper. Rana held the paper carefully: any friction and it would incinerate itself. She followed the map through narrow, dimly lit hallways. The tight hypercarbon spaces down here felt like the corridors of an overcrowded ship, and smelled of damp and humanity. The facility was overstaffed by half, Rana knew. Herd had said that a fresh load of newcomers had arrived two days ago, along with news of another approaching Rix warship. The signs of organizational confusion were everywhere: equipment stacked in carry-cases crowding the halls, breakrooms filled with impromptu workstations, newly assigned workers moving through the hallways carrying order chits and looking lost.

The repeater array that collected the planet's com traffic for offworld retransmission was being refitted to assist Legis's orbital defenses. The changeover from communications to intelligence gathering was taking place at breakneck speed.

When Rana mot other workers in the hall, she found herself moving like Herd. Another imitation, in case any of the passersby had met the commando in her Rana Harter guise. The avian motions—sudden and tightly controlled, each joint an isolated engine—came to Rana with an unexpected ease. In a week of living with the commando, she had internalized the woman's gait, copying her avian power and unpredictability. The impersonation seemed to work, even though there was a decimeter difference in stature between herself and her captor. A few of the other workers nodded with recognition or said her name in greeting.

Rana responded to them with Herd's cryptic smile.

It would, of course, be easy to escape the Rixwoman now. She could announce herself to the facility's security forces—pulling off the wig would certainly get their attention. And she was safe from retaliation. Alexander was absent here. The links from the planetary infostructure to the entanglement facility had been physically cut by Imperial edict. The usual ghosts of second sight—timestamps, newsfeeds, and locators—were oddly absent. There was nothing Herd or Alexander could do to her.

But if she betrayed them, the happiness would go away.

Herd had already injected her with the antidote for the dopamine regulators. The nanos' influence had diminished already, the joy she had floated upon for the last week slowly winding down. Herd had insisted, and it was true, that with the gauze of happiness gone she would be more clearheaded for this job. But her undrugged mind threatened to return to its former state of indecision and fear. She could already glimpse that wavering, all-too-human Rana Harter waiting in the wings. The confident, hybrid creature she had become could crumble at any moment.

She knew she would not betray her new allies. Rana wanted to keep this reborn self. The Rixwoman and her omnipotent god had erased a lifetime of marginal existence, borderline depression, and unfulfilled potential. They had done more for Rana Harter in a week than the Empire had in twenty-seven years.