The prisoner stared at them coolly, a hungry look in her eyes. Hobbes felt naked under her hunter's gaze.
But then Rana Harter followed them through the door, and for a moment Herd seemed utterly human.
"Rana!" she said, stepping forward.
The dead woman walked toward her former captor and lover. The Rixwoman was in for a disappointment, Hobbes thought. The honored dead never held fast to the emotional bonds of their former lives. The transition of the symbiant left them altogether indifferent to the prattle of the living. Hobbes had encountered many of her dead shipmates after their reanimation; they were no longer friends, or even crewmates. Just passengers.
But Rana Harter looked tenderly at the Rixwoman, and smiled.
The expression startled Hobbes; it looked exaggerated on that cold, gray face, like a clown's painted joy. The dead woman embraced Herd, wrapping her arms around the hypercarbon straight-jacket, and the two kissed as unselfconsciously as adolescents on a Utopian world. The captain and Hobbes just watched, too surprised and respectful of the dead to interrupt.
Finally they separated, pulling apart to gaze into each other's eyes.
"Rana," murmured Herd quietly.
The dead woman spoke in return. Hobbes recognized the buzzing syllables of Rix battle language in her speech.
"Preserve us," she murmured. A risen woman, one of the honored dead of the Empire, speaking Rix. What had Rana Harter become?
"Herd," Captain Zai said in a level voice. "I've come for information."
The commando kissed Rana Harter once more before answering, and whispered at the edge of Hobbes's hearing, "Your lips are as cold as mine now." Katherie swallowed, wondering again if this was a dream.
Herd turned from her lover and looked at Captain Zai.
"So you want to hear the Emperor's Secret now?"
He nodded, then said, "I will hear it," with the measured formality of an oath in military court.
Herd cocked her head, as if listening to some internal voice. Then she smiled, a predatory expression that chilled Hobbes's soul.
"It will not make you happy, Vadan."
Zai met her gaze without flinching. He reached back and pulled the door shut behind them. With the heavy metal in place, even the inescapable hum of the ship was silenced.
They were absolutely cut off from the rest of the Lynx now.
"Tell us," Zai said.
The Rixwoman took a breath, then she began.
"Your Empress was killed not by us, but by the Apparatus."
"Of course," whispered Hobbes to herself. The records of the battle had suggested as much. The Emperor was a murderer.
"But that fact is not the secret that concerns you, Zai," Herd added. "Alexander was inside the Empress before she died, through the agency of a machine that was within her body."
"The confidant," Captain Zai said.
"Exactly. Alexander took control of this machine, like every other on Legis, and could see inside the Empress. Alexander saw something."
As the commando went on, her flat voice became almost singsong, as if she were telling a children's tale. She leaned her head against Rana Harter's shoulder, and the dead woman stroked Herd's bound arms.
The story took fifteen slow minutes.
Hobbes had known that her bond to the gray world was broken-- by the false Error of Blood, by the Lynx's travails, and now finally by Zai's inescapable treasons--but the Rixwoman's words were something altogether different. They left her captain retching on the floor, unraveled centuries of the history she had been taught, and tore Hobbes's last convictions from her like a swallowed hook dragged from a fish's gut.
And after that, everything was different.
Senator
Awaiting the closure of the Emperor's trap, Nara Oxham was very careful.
She knew instinctively that it was only a matter of time before the Apparatus uncovered her communication with Zai. Perhaps they already had, and were merely waiting for an opportune moment to move against her. After a few nervous nights at home, she decided to sleep in her office, remaining within the safety of the Rubicon Pale. As a rule, a senator could not disappear suddenly without explanation, but a case of wartime treason might convince the Apparatus that it could make an exception.
When the trap closed, it did so quickly.
The news swept through the capital's infostructure quickly, a fire rampant in pure oxygen. It started as a newsfeed rumor, well traveled but patently incredible. Then supporting evidence was released: images of Oxham and Zai meeting at the Emperor's party ten years ago; the repeater path of her first message to him; a time line of the War Council's agenda, the debates for which the hundred-year rule had been invoked covered with a broad swath of black. And finally her voice, dictating the first few words of her warning to Zai--this last synthesized for dramatic effect.
Across the wee hours of morning, the treason of Senator Nara Oxham moved from the back pages of gossips and conspiracy theorists to blaring headlines crawling the periphery of every channel of second sight.
The newsfeeds were forbidden even to speculate about what secrets the Senator had revealed to her warrior lover, but the hundred-year rule itself bore the weight of proof: This young and headstrong senator had betrayed the Emperor's trust.
The morning that the story broke, the psychic frenzy itself awoke her, the growing fury of the city bleeding into her head like a wake-up alarm invading a sleeper's dreams. For a moment of unprotected madness, Nara could see the bloated body of the capital convulsing, the beached whale shaking off carrion birds with some grotesque, after-death spasm. And before wheeling back to feast on the war economy, the scavengers swirled toward a new target.
The treasonous senator: live prey.
The empathic vision waned in power. Senator Oxham could feel her own body, and a hand at her wrist: someone adjusting her apathy bracelet. She opened her eyes, furious at this presumption. It was a grim-faced Roger Niles kneeling next to her.
She blinked once.
The dose was strong, and Oxham's mind became coherent in seconds. She instantly understood what had happened; she'd been expecting it. This was the trap the Emperor had set. She had walked into it full knowing.
"What have you done, Nara?" Niles asked.
Oxham put both hands to her face, rubbing it to confirm the reality of her body. She pulled herself up into a seated position. Her back ached in the particular way that always resulted from sleeping on her office couch.