"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.
Commando
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 modu- , lated 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.