She looked at Laurent's dozing form. Perhaps she needed a measure of madness every now and then.
After the rush of the first few minutes, the effects of apathy withdrew gradually, Nara's empathy gaining in strength over the slow hours. Her ability had been active all day, moving and adjusting itself, slowly growing comfortable with the man next to her, settling across the pattern of his thoughts like a blanket of snow over one of the house gardens. Laurent seemed to have recovered his balance in the hours since telling her about Dhantu; she could feel his mind aligned by the sureties of his gray religion, his military discipline.
Although Laurent's touchstones sprang from convictions alien to Nara, there was comfort in anything that took away his pain.
Nara wondered if this was a good idea, letting herself bond so strongly with someone she hardly knew, who was by any measure a political enemy.
Who would be gone so soon, for so long.
Laurent stirred.
"A fire?" she asked.
They left the bed and opened up the north wall to the pink night sky and the arctic chill. Nara loved the high arctic summer. The sun hid behind the mountains but never lost its grasp on the horizon. She wondered what it would be like in half a year, when daylight rather than darkness lasted only one hour in ten.
They chose split, dry logs for the fire, building it high and hot enough to push them back a few meters, counterpoint to the chill night air on their backs.
When Laurent slipped away to maintain his prosthetics, Nara asked the house to salvage what it could of dinner and deliver it here. It responded a bit stiffly. Knowing that grays didn't approve of talking machines, Nara had ordered it to keep silent in Laurent's company. She wondered if the house's conversational package needed more practice than it was getting on her infrequent visits.
When Laurent returned, he was dressed. She wrapped herself in bedclothes.
After a silence, she felt his discomfort. He was unsure what to say. This moment always eventually came with new lovers, in those quiet moments between dramatic turns.
What would the pink senator and the gray soldier talk about?
No point in fighting the obvious.
"Do you really think there'll be another Incursion, Laurent?"
He shrugged, but she felt trouble in him. "Until today, I had my doubts about the rumors. But this posting to Legis, right on the frontier . . ."
"Isn't most of the Navy on one frontier or another?" "True. But I'm to take command of a new kind of warship." He paused and looked at her. "But that's classified, of course." He smiled. "You're not a Rix spy, are you?"
Nara laughed. "Laurent, in a few weeks I'll be on the Intelligence Sub-Quorum of His Majesty's Senate. You'd better hope I'm not a Rix spy."
His eyebrows shot up. "You're on the oversight committee?"
Laurent's alarm flared in her empathy, and turned quickly into reflexive withdrawal. Nara could feel the revulsion that military culture held for civilian interference.
"If that's what you call it in the Navy, yes."
He took a deep breath. "Oh, I didn't realize."
"Did you think Secularists never took an interest in the military?"
"An interest? Certainly. But not necessarily a positive one."
"My interest is very positive, Laurent. The Emperor's military forces benefit from oversight by the living, I'm absolutely sure. We're the ones who do the dying for him, after all."
He grimaced, the phantoms of his lost limbs twisting painfully, and she could almost hear his thoughts. What did she, a pink senator, know of dying?
"My assignment may come before the committee," he said flatly. "Perhaps we should restrict our conversation."
Oxham blinked, marveling again at how politically naive military officers could be. Laurent hadn't even bothered to check her portfolio before coming. Her own handlers wouldn't let her attend so much as a cocktail party without memorizing a detailed history of every person on the guest list. After inviting him here, she'd researched Zai's commanders and former crew, his Academy standings, and had digested reams of Apparatus propaganda about the hero of Dhantu. She'd even dipped into the gutter media, the channels who called him the Broken Man.
Of course, that didn't mean she understood him. In all that detail Nara had missed one salient point: the length of his career in real years. After almost a century Absolute of serving the Emperor, decades passing at relativistic speeds, the man was tired of losing friends and lovers to the Time Thief. And now he would be gone for another twenty years at least.
He had every right to be angry. But not at her. She put a hand on his arm and turned away to look into the fire. "Laurent, I don't want to restrict anything we say to each other. And I don't care about the Emperor's secrets. I just asked because I want to know when you're coming back."
He sighed. "As do I."
They were silent for a while, staring into the flames. Nara wondered why she had pressed him. He was probably right; they shouldn't be sharing classified information across the lines of political and military, democratic and Imperial, pink and gray. But somehow she needed to cross the boundaries of their alien hierarchies now, in these early days. Otherwise they never would.
She wanted to be trusted, even though she was a pink. Perhaps it was as simple as that.
Nara felt the change in him before he spoke. He wanted something too.
"I know you're not a spy, Nara. And I'm sure your committee will hear about it soon enough, so you should hear it from me. They've given me a new kind of ship. A frigate prototype."
"Everyone knew you'd get a command, Laurent. A reward for your faithful service."
"Perhaps. But any prototype wants battle-testing. They wouldn't be sending a ship like the Lynx to the Rix frontier if there weren't some promise of action there."
Nara nodded, feeling the certainty in him. And the dread. She was too young to have lived through the Incursion herself, but could always feel the icy memory of Rix terror attacks in those who had. Whole cities razed by gravity weapons. Planets reduced to pre-terraformation by bombardment from space. Even the gray places of the dead attacked, the bodies of the risen deliberately sundered beyond the ability of the symbiant to repair.
"It's a small, fast ship, with hitting power and range," he continued. "A deep raider, a way to strike back against the Rix."