"How long until we're safe?" he asked the ensign at the chronometer.
"Twelve," she said.
"Count it," he ordered.
The bridge grew silent as the numbers diminished. There was nothing any of them could do. A gravity beam worked its deadliest magic against the crew of its target: snapped spines, crushed brains, ruptured internal organs. Without an energy sink to deflect the Rix weapon, dozens, perhaps hundreds of their crewmates were about to die.
Zai couldn't even warn his crew, but at least he could address the bridge.
With five seconds left, he waved the ensign quiet.
But he found his tongue stymied. All the usual Vadan words invoked the Emperor, and that would be too ridiculous an epitaph for Laurent Zai.
"Thank you for your service," was all he managed.
Zai sighed, waiting.
The time passed. It must have.
"The shot missed us," the captain said quietly. The sensor officer stared into his headsdown in disbelief.
"Not an accidental miss, sir. They changed their targeting. Attacked a debris field six kilometers away. Tore it to pieces."
"But. . . whyV Zai stammered.
"It was lit up, sir. Some heat, microwaves, and a high-strength transmission."
"Transmission?"
"An Imperial SOS. A personal beacon."
Zai shook his head. It was too much to believe. A diversion, at the right moment. A member of the Lynx's crew had somehow wound up out there, kilometers away, and had died for the ship. But who?
"They had us, sir," the sensor officer continued. "Why would they go for anything else? It was only a few sparks out there, relative to the hit they'd put on us."
"We were too easy," Zai said. "Too obvious. Hobbes's transmission was too blatant. They must have thought that we were the decoy."
A tremble began in the ship, a low moan that rose and fell.
"They're targeting us now, sir. Switched their fire from the debris to the Lynx. But we're outside effective range. The gravity cannon is at half-charge, wide aperture. Five thousand gravitons per."
Zai sighed. Barely enough to give a man skin cancer. He could feel the weapon's passage with his sensitive inner ear, a mild nausea at worst.
"Give me internal diagnostics," he ordered. "And order the crew to remain in pressure suits." The frigate was unstable, and the low-intensity chaotic gravity bombardment might continue for a while, growing ever more diffuse as the ships drifted apart.
Again, they had survived.
TEN YEARS EARLIER (IMPERIAL ABSOLUTE)
House Over many decades, the house had grown in all directions.
Though perched on a mountain peak, it extended deep enough into the mantle of Home to draw geothermal power. Now that summer had arrived, the views from six balconies revealed gardens and artificial waterfalls all the way to the horizon. The house had littered neighboring peaks with outpost colonies of self-sustaining butterflies, their mirror wings reflecting sunlight to keep plants alive and water flowing, cast artful shadows, and bring the pale reds of the arctic sunset to three hundred sixty degrees of vista. Its processors were everywhere, buried in the rocky passages of the mountain, backed up in rented remote locations, distributed across the snows for a hundred kilometers. Between polar isolation, the senatorial privilege of its mistress, and its vast size, the house was a world unto itself.
And yet a certain anxiety haunted the house today, a sense of inadequacy and self-doubt that ran like a subtle tremor through its ter-aflops. A new situation had arisen, one that it had considered and modeled for decades, but never experienced. For the first time, there were two people here at once.
The mistress had a guest.
The house scanned the underground food gardens, the special supplies brought in by suborbital for the lieutenant-commander's visit, the emergency stores that had lain untouched for a century. It tallied, of course, far more food than two people could eat in four years, much less four days. But the disquiet remained. This visit was the house's chance to show the mistress what it had accomDlished over lonely decades of abandonment, to display the results of its long independent expansion program.
Dinner was already planned, the steamy growing levels just above the geothermal plant raided of produce for a tropical banquet. Fermented plantains had been basted with relish of green tamarind. Cabbage pickled and formed into delicate flower shapes, then flash-fried in a microsecond plasma field. A species of brine shrimp that purified the house water supply simmered for hours in caramel. A pudding of sticky rice and palm sugar blackened with coconut ash to match the lieutenant-commander's naval uniform. And to clear the palette, twenty milliliters of vodka to end each course had been infused with lychee, rambutan, papaya, and mangosteen in turn.
But perhaps this was too much, the house now despaired. The rules of etiquette were clear: The last dinner of any visit should be the grandest, not the first. With Laurent Zai staying longer, it would have to outdo itself four more dinners in a row! And what if the mistress changed her mind again? No amount of processor power, no number of contingency plans, no acreage of machinery--nothing was sufficient to withstand human caprice at its worst.
What were they talking about now?
The house returned its attention to where the mistress stood with the newly promoted Captain Laurent Zai. They were on the western balcony, holding each other, looking out at a trio of small peaks capped with patterns of algae-reddened snow, just now struck with the slowly setting sun. (Quite a composition, the house thought smugly.) The mistress was still smiling from the kiss they'd shared after she had invited him to stay.
"Four days seems so little, Nara," Zai said. (The house disagreed. Twelve meals to create; four sunsets to compose!)
"We can make them last."
"I hope so." His eyes fell to the garden of insect-shaped ice sculptures below. "We've so many technologies for making Absolute time pass quickly. Stasis, relativistic travel, the symbiant. But none to make a few days seem longer."
The mistress laughed. "I'm sure we'll think of something." She moved closer.
"You already have?" "Yes, I have. Perhaps dinner can wait."
The house followed their progress to the bedroom, mutely appalled.
Senator
As the summer's brief night fell across the room, Nara Oxham thought to herself: An entire day without apathy. It had been too long. She needed more of these respites from the capital, needed to set her mind completely free of the drug without the crowd coming in.