“The… event. The lost consciousness? It seems to match what Admiral Trejo reported from Sol system. The theory I always heard was that it’s the weapon that killed the protomolecule engineers. However their minds were organized, this… effect broke it. Well, the high consul has been making himself more and more like the builders for years now. It might—might—leave him more vulnerable to the attack than the rest of us.”
Teresa’s chest hurt like someone had punched her sternum. She sank to her knees at her father’s side, but he was frowning at something behind her. Or nothing.
“How long before he gets better?” Kelly asked.
“If I had been permitted to have more than one test subject, I might be able to guess,” Cortázar said. It was the same tone of voice he’d used to say Nature eats babies all the time. It made Teresa’s skin crawl. “As things are? He could come back to himself in a moment. He could be like this for the rest of his life, which in his case could be a very long time indeed. If I can take him to the lab and run some tests, I might get more insight into the question.”
“No,” Kelly said, and it was clear from his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “The high consul stays in his rooms until…”
“Until what?” Cortázar said.
“Until we have this situation under control,” Ilich said, firmly. “Does anyone outside this room know about his condition?”
The high consul’s terminal chimed, a high-priority connection request. The three men looked at each other in alarm. Her father scowled, then farted like the blare of a trumpet. The perversity and indignity of it cut Teresa like a blade. This was her father. The man who ruled all humanity through his vision and audacity. Who knew how everything was and was supposed to be. The body in front of her was only a crippled man, too broken to be embarrassed. The chime came again, and Kelly grabbed it with his hand terminal.
“I’m afraid the high consul can’t be disturbed,” he said as he walked out of the room. “I can accept a message for him.”
The door closed behind him.
“I can bring some equipment here,” Cortázar said. “It won’t be as good as having him in the pens where the real equipment is, but I could do… something.”
Ilich ran a hand over his scalp, his gaze flickering from her father to Cortázar to the window that looked out over a bamboo garden in some different universe where the sun still shone and life wasn’t broken. Teresa shifted, and Ilich looked at her. For a long moment, their eyes were locked on each other’s.
She felt a wave of panic. “Am I supposed to be in charge now?”
“No,” Ilich said, as if her fear had resolved something. “No, High Consul Winston Duarte is in charge. He is deep in consultation with Dr. Cortázar on matters critical to the state of the empire, and cannot be disturbed under any circumstances. It’s easy to remember, because it’s true. He specifically ordered Kelly to keep anyone but the doctor here and you, because you’re his daughter, away from the residences until further notice. Do you remember him saying that?”
“I don’t—” Teresa began.
“You need to remember him saying it. He was sitting right here. It was just after the event. We all came back to ourselves, and he told Kelly in front of you that he needed Dr. Cortázar, and that he couldn’t be disturbed. Do you remember?”
Teresa pictured it. Her father’s voice, calm and sturdy as stone.
“I remember,” she said.
Kelly came back in the room. “Something happened at the ring. The Falcon made an unscheduled transit. Now it’s putting out a distress call. A relief ship is on the way, but it won’t be there for hours. Maybe as much as a day.”
“All right,” Ilich said. “We need a secure channel to Governor Song and Admiral Trejo. Someone will have to take over coordinating the military. Apart from them, no one can know anything.
“Until we get the high consul back to himself, our little conspiracy here is the empire.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Naomi
The plume of energy that came from the ring gate was invisible to the naked eye. An optical telescope would have seen at most a few flares of brightness where bits of matter caught in it glowed for a moment as they were ripped apart. Moving at the speed of light, it flared into the space where ships coming into Auberon or preparing to leave it were most likely to be, widening like a wave with distance, hundred thousand kilometers after hundred thousand kilometers, spreading out like a cone. If it became less powerful as it spread, it wasn’t enough to help the San Salvador. The Transport Union ship had been slow moving out of the restricted zone, and almost instantaneously, it and everyone aboard it became a cinder.
Naomi sat in the commissary and played the newsfeed of its loss in a loop, watching the ship flare white and die so quickly the frame rate couldn’t quite make sense of it. She had spent very nearly her whole life on ships and stations. She’d been on six ships that had suffered micrometeorite hits, two that had lost atmosphere from them. Once, she’d had to drop core to keep her reactor from blooming out lik
e a tiny, brief sun. She’d jumped between ships without a suit, and the feeling of breathing vacuum still came to her in nightmares decades after the fact. She would have said she was intimately aware of all the dangers life outside an atmosphere could hold.
This one was new.
“Did they do this, you think?” Emma asked, hunched over her bulb of morning tea. The Bhikaji Cama was in its braking burn now. The one-third g had felt strange until Naomi realized she’d never been in the crewed parts of the ship when there was up and down before. After that it still felt strange, but she knew why.
“They Laconia or they Saba’s people?”
Emma lifted her eyebrows. “I meant the first, but either.”
The crew clumped around the commissary in quiet groups of two or three, and they treated each other with the brittle courtesy of a funeral. Some of them had likely known the crew of the San Salvador, but even if they didn’t it had been a ship like theirs. Its death reminded them of their own, still somewhere down the line, but coming.