Elvi didn’t mean to laugh. It just happened. Trejo’s professional demeanor slipped for a moment, and she saw the rage and despair underneath it.
“How would I possibly know that?” she said. Her voice was louder than she’d meant it to be, but she didn’t rein herself in. “I don’t know what they are or how they ate the ships they did. Have we had reports? Do we have data? I can’t do anything but speculate without that. And what does any of that have to do with Teresa Duarte?”
Trejo went to his desk, called up a fresh wind
ow, and shifted it to her hand terminal. She looked at the images there. She recognized the Heart of the Tempest. It was the most iconic Laconian ship there was. The images had the hyperreal quality of optical telescopy that had been stabilized and enhanced. A few glittering sparks appeared around it.
“Was there a battle?” she asked, and the image went so white that even coming from the small screen it hurt her eyes.
“It’s already known through the Sol system. It will be known through the whole empire. The Tempest is dead. A separatist terror cell stole secret Laconian technology and used it against us. And now I have one Magnetar-class ship, thirteen-hundred-odd ring gates to keep control over, and the one place where it could actually do that is haunted by…” He gestured at her leg. Whatever the fuck did that.
“I see,” she said.
“We haven’t been able to keep signal repeaters up. Every time I send them out, some rock thrower knocks them back down. The terrorists are sending messages to each other through the gates using the technological equivalent of tin cans and chewing gum, and I can’t stop them. If I can put a fleet of ships into the ring space, I control everything because it’s a choke point. It’s the choke point. If I can’t do that safely, I can’t control the empire.”
“Except if—” she began, but Trejo couldn’t be stopped. His words were like an avalanche. Once they’d started, they kept going.
“Everyone—everyone—on every ship and station and planet is going to be waiting to see what the high consul does. And right now he’s two hallways over, waving his hands like a fucking undergraduate on his first hallucinogenic trip. Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions. And Laconia is looking down the throat of a lot of questions we can’t answer.”
By the end of the speech, his voice had risen. Grown strident. Elvi had the sudden and vivid memory of being a girl in Karhula. The manager of the grocery she and her father went to every week had found out the rent on the property was going up, that he was going to have to move or shut down. He’d had the same tone of voice, the same sense of having been overwhelmed by events, the same anger in the face of implacable reality. There was something weirdly comforting about the idea that a humble grocer and the most powerful man in a galaxy-wide empire could have something so fundamental in common. Without thinking, she reached out and took Trejo’s hand. He yanked it back like she’d burned him.
It took a couple long, shuddering breaths for him to regain his composure. When he spoke again, it was the Trejo she recognized. “Your problem, Dr. Okoye, is that you think the immediate problem before you is the most pressing one. It is not. Whatever else Paolo Cortázar may be—and I have no illusions about that man—he is also indispensable.”
The silence between them stretched out longer than was comfortable. Elvi felt like she was looking over the lip of a cliff she hadn’t understood she was standing on. “You’re telling me it’s okay with you.”
“I will try to keep guards on the girl,” Trejo said. “I will do what I can to make sure the two of them aren’t alone together.”
“But if he comes in here with her head under his arm, you’ll shrug and let it slide?”
Trejo spread his hands. “If he says he can fix this clusterfuck by sacrificing her, I’ll find him a knife. That is my duty. I am an officer of the Laconian Empire,” he said. Then, a moment later, “As are you.”
The air in the room seemed thin. Elvi was having a hard time catching her breath. Either Trejo didn’t see her distress or he chose not to.
“Your focus, Dr. Okoye, is to provide a second set of eyes and experience as a help to Dr. Cortázar. You and he are partners in this. There is no daylight between you. If you find that difficult or distasteful, I don’t really care. We are at a critical moment in history, and you must rise to this occasion.”
“She’s a kid,” Elvi said.
“I agree it would be better if she lived. I’ll do what I can,” Trejo said. “But there can’t be any misunderstanding between us about what our priorities are. The sooner you and he find a way to stir the cream back out of this coffee, the sooner she’ll be safe. Anything that impedes the efforts to heal Winston Duarte is your enemy. Anything that helps is your friend. Are we clear?”
I resign floated at the back of her throat. She could feel the words like they were something physical. She knew the shape of them. And she knew Trejo wouldn’t let her quit. Where she was now, there was no coming back from.
“As clear as an unmuddied lake,” she said. “As clear as air.”
“Thank you for your time, Doctor. My door is always open to you.”
It was, she thought, an ironic way to tell her to leave.
She rose and walked out into the hall, and then the wide lobby, and then the darkness of the gardens. In the east, the first hint of dawn was turning off the dimmest stars. The air smelled like burnt cinnamon. It was the mating display of a species of ground-dwelling grub-like animal native to Laconia. On Earth, it would have been birdsong. She stood for a long moment and breathed it deeply.
She had done fieldwork for decades, traveling to new worlds with her sample bags and testing kits. She was probably the only person living who had seen as many different trees of life as she had. All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world, because things that sensed light were more likely to survive. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without. She’d probably killed and dissected representatives of more individual species than anyone in history in the name of science. And still, she didn’t think of herself as a killer. As complicit in murder. As monstrous.
On the horizon, a plume that looked almost like smoke but was really millions of tiny, green-bodied, screw-shaped worms rose up into the sky and then flattened. They shimmered in the rising brightness, a bioluminescent display. Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different. Why she pretended the same rules that applied to mountain lions and parasitic wasps didn’t also constrain her. Red in tooth and claw, and at every level. In the Bible, even angels murdered humanity’s babies when God asked them to.
The swarm on the horizon finished advertising its quality as a mating cluster, the light going out, their bodies going gray. The clouds took on the pink and red of any planet with enough oxygen to selectively scatter the shorter wavelengths. The cinnamon smell grew stronger.
“Good luck, little grubs,” she said. “Hope it works out for you.”
She headed back into the State Building and then through to the other side of the compound, where a car was waiting for her. She got in without exchanging pleasantries with the driver, and they headed out into the great city where lights were just turning off as the sun rose. High-rises and streets and warehouses and theaters, all of it reminding her of nothing so much as a huge hive.