"Roger?" she asked. She'd never seen the hard expression now set on his face.
"Did I ever tell you why I went into politics, Senator?"
She tried to recall, but the concept of a Roger Niles before politics was unthinkable. The man was politics. Nara shook her head slowly.
"The love of my life died when I was twenty," he said, forcing the words out slowly. "A sudden hemorrhage. She was from old Vasthold aristocracy, in the days of hereditary elevation."
Oxham blinked. She'd had no idea that Niles was that old. Before she'd become an Imperial senator, he always claimed to spend the time between electoral cycles in coldsleep, only living in the months before elections, extending his life through generations of political battles. But she'd never believed that could really be true.
Hereditary elevation? He must be ancient.
"So when Sarah died, they took her away," he said. "Made her one of them."
He looked out at the window at the bright city.
"I rejoiced, and praised the Emperor," he continued quietly. "I saw her in the hospice, and she tried to say good-bye to me. But I thought it was just ritual. I assumed she would come back. We were 147 closer than all the lovers in history, I thought. But she didn't return. After a few months, I tracked her to the gray enclave where she .. . lived."
"Oh, Roger," Nara said softly. "How awful."
"Indeed. They really are gray, you know, those towns. As gray as a weeklong rain. By then Sarah hardly knew who I was. She would squint when she looked at me, as if there were something familiar about my face. But she would only talk about the steam rising from her teapot. If she looked away for even a moment, when her eyes returned they had to learn to remember me all over again. As if I were some faint watermark on reality, less real than the steam.
"There was no one inside her, Nara. The symbiant is a trick. Death is final. The dead are lost."
"How did it end, Roger?"
"They politely asked me to leave, and I left. Then I joined the local Secularist Party, and buried myself in the task of burying the dead."
"Politics," Nara said. "We're alike, aren't we?"
The old counselor nodded in agreement. Nara Oxham had turned to political life to overcome the demons of her childhood. She had turned madness into perception, vulnerability into empathy, a terror of crowds into raw power over them. Roger Niles had turned his hatred into a tactical genius, his supreme loss into relentless purpose.
Niles was every bit as fixated as the Emperor, Oxham now saw. Plumbing a thousand newsfeeds for every advantage to use against the grays, Niles was exacting his slow revenge against an immortal foe.
"Yes, we are the same, Senator," Niles said. "We love the living rather than worship the dead. And I am glad Laurent Zai is alive."
"Thank you, Roger."
"Just do us all a favor and be careful, Senator, so that you're still alive when the captain returns."
Nara Oxham smiled calmly, and felt newfound power in the expression.
"Don't worry about me, counselor. There are more moral victories to come." Captain
Laurent Zai looked down upon the glowing airscreen with displeasure.
The bridge was alive again, filled with voices and the floating runes of synesthesia, animated by interface gestures and those of human-to-human communication: palms upturned in frustration, fingers pointed, fists shaken.
The airscreen showed the frigate's new configuration. In the aftermath of battle, the Lynx was a different ship. Cone were the gunnery stations and drone-pilot berths, the launch bays and rows of burn beds. Crew cabins and rec space had reappeared. Long low-gee corridors had been created for moving heavy objects up and down the ship, and there were huge new open areas for stripping damaged components down to parts.
Zai shook his head. His ship was half-junked.
What the battle hadn't destroyed, the repair crews were pulling apart, cannibalizing, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Were the Lynx to face an enemy now, they would be utterly defenseless. But the frigate was well past the Rix battlecruiser. The enemy still pursued them, accelerating at its maximum of six gees, but to cancel the 3,000 kps relative velocity between the warships would take the Rix half a day, by which time they'd be 75 million kilometers away. After matching vectors, it would take them another half-day to return to the Lynx.
Well before that moment came, the frigate would have maneuver capability of its own.
The main fusion drive hadn't been touched in the battle. It was, however, the Lynx's only remaining means of creating power. The singularity generator--the frigate's auxiliary energy source--was operable, but the shielding that the engineers had stripped from it now. If the generator were big banged, there wouldn't be 149 enough countermass to keep the black hole in place. Armor was being stripped from all across the Lynx to build new shielding, but that left her gunnery hardpoints less than hard.
Indeed, all the frigate's defensive systems were compromised. With the loss of her bow, the ship had no forward armor; two full-time gunnery crews were required to man the forward close-in defenses, picking off any meteoroids that threatened the hurtling ship. The drone magazine had been damaged by flockers, and its launch rail destroyed by the frigate's last desperate acceleration, so there was no way to field a large complement of defensive drones. Worst of all, the ship's energy-sink manifold was gone for good, scattered across millions of kilometers of space.
Little hard armor, no defensive cloud of drones, no energy-sink, Zai lamented. Come at the frigate with kinetic or beam weapons: Take your pick. He wouldn't have an answer for either.
Processor capability had also been badly hit. No specific system had been lost; the entire system had been designed to "gracefully degrade." Synesthesia was a bit fuzzier, expert Al was sluggish, and the ship's reaction to gestural codes was slightly slower, like the annoying lag of a conversation over satellite link.
The front quarter of the ship remained in vacuum, waiting for the fissures in the cargo bay bulkhead to be stabilized. Hullalloy was the hardest substance the Empire had ever created, but once it had been virally compromised, it was never the same again. No one in their right mind would go forward of the front gunnery bulkhead without a pressure suit until the ship's bow had been completely refitted.
There was also a bad smell aboard the frigate. They were short on water and nitrox, and the bacterial bays that were the basis of the lynx's biosphere had been disrupted. Large sections of the crew quarters were infected with a rampant mold. The bioprocessing chief--killed by flockers--had been reanimated, but the honored dead were never as practical-minded as they had been in life. Samuel Vries had a great love of low-gee bonsai, and Laurent Zai was far too gray to give strict orders to an immortal; Vries would be spending more time on his beloved trees than the ecosystem. So until the Lynx made port, showering would be rationed.