Their faces grew pink at first, as the inverted gravity brought blood down from the feet to the head. But Katherie could see the mutineers' bound hands turning white already. Eventually, their faces would blanch and grow expressionless. Blood pooled in the ceremonial bowls, the metal-ringing, splattery sound replaced by the gurgle of liquid into liquid.
Katherie stood at attention. She felt light-headed, as if the gravity inversion were losing integrity, suffusing across the yellow-red stripe, its tendrils finding her. She blinked, and nausea rose in Hobbes. Her old nemesis vertigo threatened as her eyes read the clear signs of up and down reversed on the other side of the room, a few wisps of Magus's hair flailing upward, the lines of Thompson's face pulled wrong.
Then the flow of blood began to slacken. The prisoners' faces grew white. It was almost over.
And then something terrible happened.
The four hanging bodies suddenly jolted toward her, as if kicked from behind. She and Zai jumped back. Magus's hair pointed directly at Hobbes now. Gravity inside the inversion zone had shifted by ninety degrees, a malfunction of the Lynx's ailing generator.
Hobbes looked at the ceiling with horror.
The blood already collected in the ceremonial bowls was spilling out, pouring across the ceiling in a sanguine waterfall, rolling toward the yellow-red stripe almost above her head.
Katherie barely had time to cover her face.
The liters of blood reached the normal gravity zone, a red river that was cleaved by the sudden directional shift. It sprayed upon her and Laurent Zai like a warm summer rain.
Katherie Hobbes awoke gasping, clawing at the strands of her own hair in her mouth.
A dream. Just a dream. The executions had been more than a month ago. Nothing so horrible had happened. In the real event, the ritual had unfolded with admirable military precision.
Hobbes coughed, wiping sweat from her face, which tasted as salty as blood. She pulled her knees to her chest and breathed deeply, trying to calm herself.
Then she realized it: This had been her first real dream in months.
Katherie Hobbes had just gone back to natural sleep, her usage of hypersleep having exceeded the recommended maximum by more than a hundred percent. The ship's new doctor, an earnest civilian from Legis's storm-swept equatorial archipelago, had given her drugs to help the transition. But Katherie had left them untouched, relying on exhaustion to get her to oblivion.
Clearly, that had been a bad idea. Hobbes had grown addicted to 257 the instantaneous drop into hyperdreams, the familiar, symbolic process-narratives that reliably reconstituted her brain. Falling into natural sleep had taken a thrashing, anxious hour. And when Katherie Hobbes finally slipped into a restless unconsciousness, it was only to discover this long-suppressed nightmare.
A moment after she awoke from the execution dream, the entry chime sounded from Hobbes's door, an insistent summons dragging her fully awake. The access icon glowed in second sight: an Apparatus subpoena in brilliant red.
Without waiting for a response, three politicals entered her cabin. Two honored dead and a living woman.
"Katherie Hobbes." Even in the dark cabin, Hobbes recognized the flat voice of Adept Harper Trevim.
This was serious, Katherie's addled brain slowly realized. Trevim was the ranking political on board the Lynx. What had happened? Hobbes sat up, and quickly ran the frigate's top-level diagnostics in synesthesia. Nothing seemed out of place.
"Yes, Honored Mother?" she managed with a dry voice.
"We must talk with you."
She nodded and rose shakily to attention. In an odd moment of embarrassment, she hoped the politicals wouldn't notice her bedclothes. The natural worm silk of her sheets was a guilty pleasure from home. Hobbes kept it covered with a blanket of Navy wool during the day. The politicals looked only at her body, however, a bit of discomfort showing on the living woman's face. Having grown up on a Utopian world, Hobbes felt no discomfort in nakedness. The dead, she assumed, were similarly unflappable.
"Yes, Adept. At the Emperor's pleasure," she answered.
"We must speak of your captain."
Of course. They were still after Laurent. They always would be.
"Yes, Honored Mother?"
"New information has come to us about his rejection of the blade." Hobbes could barely hide her disgust. She spoke rudely. "He was pardoned by the Emperor, Adept."
The dead woman nodded. The precise, expressionless movement reminded Hobbes of her protocol instructor when she'd been a staff officer. She'd learned the gestural cues of a dozen cultures from the man, but he had never seemed fully human himself. The adept had the same neutral presence, as if this were all some strange ritual. Indeed, the whole scene was so surreal, Hobbes wasn't sure she wasn't still dreaming.
"Yes, it was fortunate that he did not take the blade before pardon was given," Trevim said. "But we are concerned about his motivation for delaying the ritual."
Hobbes couldn't see where this was going. She blinked, trying to will away the cobwebs of sleep in her mind. "Honored Mother?"
"What is the exact nature of your relationship with Laurent Zai?"
For a moment, Katherie could not answer. Her silence stretched and redoubled itself, until it was a hand over her mouth.
She finally forced herself to speak. "What do you mean?"
"We have heard troubling rumors."
Hobbes felt the flush at her breast, the heat in her face. She was angry, humiliated, enraged at her own inability to respond. This had to be another nightmare: naked, her head groggy with sleep, called on the carpet by the Emperor's representatives.
"I don't know what you mean, Adept."
"What is your exact relationship with Laurent Zai?"
"I'm his executive officer."
"Is there anything more?"
Hobbes willfully forced emotion from her mind, and let herself be ruled by the dictates of gray talk, as if she were making a military report. She only had to tell the truth. Anything else between them had only ever been in her own mind. "I have the utmost respect for the captain. There is nothing unprofessional in our friendship."
"Friendship?"
"Friendship."
"Do you know why he rejected the blade?" "I don't--" Hobbes choked herself off. She did know, she realized. "There is no reason for Captain Zai to die. And he was pardoned."