Hobbes's eyebrows raised. Whenever she thought the old man had succumbed to melancholy, Zai would show his usual tactical brilliance. But she wasn't entirely convinced.
"Even if these sugar cubes are propelled by a railgun, sir? At rela-tivistic velocities--"
"A railgun requires magnetism, Hobbes."
Hobbes grimaced at her own error. Of course. DA believed that the object's alchemical matter was nonferrous and nonfissionable. The thing was limited to chemical propulsion for any weapon, a paltry way to accelerate a kinetic weapon.
"I see, sir. That's why you want the gees: so that we can decelerate fast enough to match velocity." Hobbes saw it now. If the Lynx flew past the object at hundreds of klicks per second, it could simply place a net of alchemical elements in their path. Even a stationary tripwire could be deadly to a running man.
"Exactly, Executive Officer," he answered. "And with six gees, we can escape the battlecruiser after our mission is accomplished."
She nodded.
"But what about energy weapons, sir? We've only got a makeshift heat-sink. The bridge armor also shields us from radiation."
"We've seen no signs of a powerful energy source, Hobbes. But of course you're right. If that thing can make itself into a planet-sized fusion cannon, we're dead."
"Then what should we--"
"Dead, Hobbes, whether or not we have shielding around the bridge. Give me six gees. Captain out."
Katherie heard the connection step down.
She sighed. Perhaps the old man was right. They were traveling toward an incomprehensible set of possibilities, facing a foe of unknown strengths and weaknesses. The Lynx was matched against an enemy that was neither a crewed starship nor a drone, machine nor creature; it wasn't even proper matter. It was an empty signifier in the emptiness of space.
Once again, the survival of Laurent Zai's ship seemed to be out of the hands of its crew.
A few more tons of metal weren't going to make any difference.
Senator
The counselor from the Plague Axis arrived with a thunderous noise.
She had been waiting for hours. The counselor was only twenty minutes late, but Nara's mind had turned to this meeting again and again all day, as if it were some illicit and terrible assignation. There was the aberrance of talking with someone whose face she would never see, the unease at meeting with another counselor outside the chamber, and, underlying it all, the irrational but age-old fear of contagion.
The sound of the counselor's helicopter approached slowly, building from a subliminal shudder to a relentless force that raised a chorus of chattering complaints from Nara's foxbone tea service. The vehicle had called ahead to check the specifications of her building's landing pad; it was a big machine. The counselor's environmental system required heavy transport. It contained the man's affliction, a mobile quarantine.
At Oxham's request, Roger Niles had discreetly determined the gender of the Plague Axis representative. In the chambers of the War Council, the plagueman rarely spoke except to vote, his voice distorted by the filtration system that protected both his delicate immune system from the capital's pollution and his fellow counselors from the ancient parasites that made him their home.
Nara Oxham shuddered for a moment when the pitch of the helicopter's whine dropped, signaling that its landers were secure on the pad above her. Rationally, Oxham knew that she had nothing to fear. Members of the Plague Axis carried death with themselves when they entered the realm of the living. If a biosuit were somehow opened to the fresh air, a layer of phosphorus compounds would immolate its wearer rather than risk exposing the populace.
And her fear was not only unreasoned, it was shameful, a remnant of one of humanity's most idiotic mistakes. The Plague Axis performed a signal service to the Empire. Like most of the human diaspora, the Eighty Worlds possessed only a small gene pool relative to its trillions of inhabitants. The genetic legacy of Earth Prime had been pared down by wars and holocausts, and by foolish edicts of racial purity, which resulted in monocultures taking to the stars together, inbred groups without the stability and adaptability of genetic fusion cultures. But of all the historical errors that had reduced genetic diversity, most damaging had been the effort to engineer a humanity free of faults.
It had taken millennia of misguided genetic manipulation to discover the subtle jape played by evolution: Almost no human traits were universally unfit. Genes that exacerbated a disease in one environment conferred resistance in another. Insanity was married to genius, passivity to patience. Every disadvantage carried hidden strengths. In the wildly variable conditions of the stars, humans would find that they needed greater diversity, not less. And yet it was a diminished humanity that left earth's cradle, enfeebled supermen who met only a local and flawed standard of superiority.
The Plague Axis was an attempt to repair this damage. They were the throwbacks, possessed of legacy genes that had escaped by chance the eugenical pogroms. Descended from the poor, those without access to gene therapies and prenatal selection, they were like discarded junk that had become incalculably valuable as antiques. The people of the Axis had been the ugly, the afflicted, those prone to madness. Now, they existed as reservoirs of ancient treasure, their once-undesirable traits slowly and carefully reintro-duced into the general population over the span of generations.
But still, Nara Oxham hesitated before she signaled for her door to open. She made the gesture with an unsure hand.
The Plague Axis representative paused at the entry, like a vampire waiting to be invited across her threshold.
"Counselor," she said.
The helmet of the biosuit performed a little bow, and the man shuffled in.
Senator Oxham wondered if he would sit. The sunken dais of the council's chamber was suited to the suit's bulk, but the chairs in her apartment were spindly and insubstantial.
He remained standing. So did she.
"Senator," he returned the greeting. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"An explanation is in order, and a promise."
Oxham shook her head slightly in confusion.
"Senator," the man continued, "I must explain my vote of yesterday."
Oxham took a deep breath. He was talking about the Emperor's genocidal plan. She glanced out at the blackness of the Martyrs' Park. The hundred-year rule did not forbid discussion of secrets between counselors, but she felt uncomfortable speaking of the forbidden topic outside the council chamber.