“What about me?”
“Will you be okay?”
Jim smiled, and there was only a little weariness in his eyes. Only a little sorrow. “I played a long, terrible, shitty game, and I won. Then after I won, I made it back home. I’m waking up in the morning next to you. I’m perfect.”
Chapter Fifty: Elvi
The day after Teresa escaped, Elvi spent the hours before dawn watching the feeds. As soon as the violence ended, even before the wounded and the dead were sorted, the stories began taking shape. The differences between the state newsfeeds and the security reports Elvi saw in the aftermath made it sound like there had been two different battles. The separatist terrorist forces, each of them tracked as they fled for the ring gate, had been driven back by the overwhelming power of the Laconian Navy. Or else the enemy had achieved all its apparent objectives and withdrawn of its own accord. The orbital weapons platform network and land-based rail guns had successfully protected Laconia from the enemy’s last-ditch suicide attack. Or else the underlying assumption that the platforms and the base would be support for a naval defense had, in the heat of the moment, been ignored. And the enemy losses, while real, hadn’t been catastrophic. The enemy was in flight, and the threats to Laconia required little more than a mopping up. Or else the Whirlwind was going to be stuck close to the planet for the foreseeable future while a handful of destroyers hunted down the stray torpedoes and rocks that had been launched at the planet, any one of which could cause massive damage.
The most breathtaking lie—the one that put all the others to shame—was that the construction platforms had been taken down before the attack could reach them, and were being brought back to full operation in a secret location to protect them from further attack. The other stories about the battle might be extreme readings of the actual text, but the construction platforms were no more. There was no version of reality that supported the state’s claims that they had survived. The former shipyards of Laconia were a collection of junk scattered in orbit around the planet, and no number of horses and men were going to put them together again.
Added to that were all the things that the newsfeeds simply didn’t mention: That a fast attack frigate had landed within spitting distance of the State Building. That the high consul’s daughter had run away with the enemy in what might perhaps be humanity’s newest record-setting act of teenage rebellion. That the prisoner held in the State Building had also escaped.
Or that one prisoner had, anyway.
“Major?” the young man said. “Admiral Trejo is ready to see you.”
The lobby was a wide space with sandstone-colored columns and enough sofas and chairs to seat a hundred people. She was the only one there.
“Doctor,” Elvi said.
The young man looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“I’d prefer you call me doctor. Major is an honorary rank. I earned my doctorate.”
“Yes, Dr. Okoye. Of course. The admiral…”
“Is ready to see me,” she said, standing up and pulling her tunic straight. “Lead the way.”
The meeting wasn’t in one of the usual rooms. No formal desk, no volumetric display, no small crowd of men bowing to the power of the state and jockeying for their status in it. It was just her and Trejo in a private dining room. He had a simple breakfast of coffee and fruit with a sugar-iced pastry, and another like it set aside for her. A window almost as wide as the whole wall looked out over the snow-covered grounds and the land beyond all the way to the horizon. It felt a little obscene to think about the violence that had shaken it all. That they weren’t both underground in a high-security shelter felt like another kind of lie.
“Admiral,” she said, sitting. The young man left immediately. Trejo poured her coffee himself.
“We found Ilich,” Trejo said instead of hello. “Well, his body anyway. He and two of the state guard were assassinated by the separatists.”
Elvi waited to feel something about that. The familiar, professionally thoughtful man she’d worked with was dead. She would never see him again. It wasn’t the first time she’d lost a colleague. Back before anyone called her major, she’d taught at an upper university that had three of her fellow faculty members die in the same semester. She’d lost most of the science staff of the Falcon, and it had been devastating. This wasn’t. Where the shock and sadness should have been, there was just an oceanic depth of resentment. She wasn’t even perfectly clear whose name belonged on it. Duarte. Trejo. Holden. All of them together.
“Too bad,” she said, because she felt like she ought to say something.
“He was loyal to the empire,” Trejo said. “Whatever his failings were, he was that.”
She didn’t know what she could say to that, so she didn’t say anything.
“Our situation has once again changed,” Trejo said, and paused to blow across the surface of his coffee. He didn’t just look exhausted. He looked ten years older than when he’d arrived, and things had been broken beyond repair back then. Another few years like this, and Trejo would be the oldest man alive, no matter his age. She remembered a myth about someone wishing for eternal life, but forgetting to ask for youth to go with it. In the story they’d gradually shrunk and withered until they turned into a cicada. She wondered if Fayez knew who the story was about.
She realized again that Trejo was waiting for her to respond. She didn’t know what he wanted her to say and didn’t care much either.
“Are you feeling all right, Major?”
“Doctor,” she said. “I think it would be best if you called me doctor. And I’m fine. I’ve had a lot on my plate recently. I’m sure you understand.”
“I do. I most certainly do,” he said. “The construction platforms. The stick moons, they called them. They were what drew the high consul’s attention to Laconia in the first place. Did you know that? He saw them in the first wave of scans that came through when the gates opened. There was a vessel—something like a vessel—halfway built in one of them.”
“I’d heard that,” Elvi said. The coffee was good. The pastry was a little too sweet for her liking.
“They are the foundation of Laconian power.”
Jesus Christ, Elvi thought. Had Trejo always been this sanctimonious and she just hadn’t noticed? Or was she just really irritable right now?