"Delay them for a while. Then agree to a trial. No witnesses to testify for me except myself. With the broadest possible public newsfeed."
He frowned, concentration replacing despair on his face.
"They'll try to silence you, Senator. Secrets of the Realm." "They can't sequester the whole Senate, Roger. And no lesser body can vote to expel me."
His eyes narrowed. Now that his mind had something to chew on, a sparkle grew in them.
"I suppose not, Senator."
"And I have the right to speak at my own trial."
He nodded. "Of course. Even the hundred-year rule doesn't stand against privilege. They can't truly silence you until after the Senate has expelled you officially."
"Now that I've chosen death, my options multiply," she said.
Nara considered her own words. She could appear at the edge of the Pale right now and address the hovering cameras of the news-feeds, telling them what the Emperor had planned to do on Legis. But the newsfeeds would be bound by the hundred-year rule. Her only shot at revealing the sovereign's plan would be before the Senate.
"I'll wait for the trial to say my piece, when the whole Empire is watching."
"The Apparatus will bury your words."
Nara looked at Niles, and nodded. "Then we'll have to devise a backup plan. A way to publicize the speech if I'm silenced. Something a bit illegal, like we used to spread rumors back on Vasthold."
"It won't be so easy here on Home. The networks are all Apparatus controlled."
She thought for a moment. "I think I know a way to get around the Apparatus. Something I've been saving for a rainy day."
Niles looked puzzled, then a forced smile broke through the heavy cast of his features. "Well, at least I've drummed some little bit of pragmatism into you, Senator."
"Tactics, Niles," she corrected. "Let them hear me, and the Emperor will wish he'd died the true death a thousand years ago."
Adept "I need to send a message," Zai repeated.
Adept Harper Trevim looked at him, trying to pull her mind into the frantic, empty time of the living. It was so much easier to stare at the walls. Even the flat gray of hypercarbon, so bland compared to sensuous black, was rich and compelling here in the fugue of ongoing reanimation.
Trevim's symbiant still labored to bring her back to full animation. Her new heart was not yet whole; the supple cells of the Other were doing much of the work, filling in for the tricuspid and mitral valves. Zai's attack had not damaged her brain, but her lungs and spine had been torn mercilessly by his flechettes.
The adept was barely alive. When she closed her eyes, the darkness behind them was lit by the red horizon, that first sight of the risen.
Trevim forced herself to look at the man, and through the haze of her fugue she managed to scowl at Zai.
"Leave me alone, Captain. You shoot my heart out, and then expect me to commit treason to repay you?"
"The only treason here is the Emperor's," Zai said.
The words caused a start from Trevim, bringing the living world into sudden focus.
"Blasphemy," she spat. "You'll suffer for this, Zai. The tortures you felt on Dhantu will be nothing compared to the Emperor's revenge."
"Adept, I need to send a message. Only you can authorize it." Zai spoke as if to an unruly child, repeating his demand with the calm insistence of the rational adult.
"Your crew will join you in your agonies, Zai," she said.
Anger crossed his face, and Trevim felt distant amusement. He dared to treat an adept of the Apparatus, who had lived four hundred subjective years, as a child? Even if Zai destroyed her, gave her final darkness, she was one of the honored dead. She would not be frightened or manipulated.
His crew. That was Zai's weakness. He had dragged them all into this mutiny with him.
"The Apparatus will pull them to pieces, Zai. One by one, before your eyes and their families'. Traitors all."
The man took a deep breath, then cocked his head and smiled softly. "I know the Emperor's Secret."
A jolt passed through Trevim. Revulsion clenched every muscle in her body. She shook her head reflexively. Zai didn't know. He simply couldn't. The Secret was too tightly bound within the world of the Apparatus; an uninitiated man--and a living one--could never have discovered it.
"No," the adept managed.
"The Rix prisoner explained it to me."
The words sent another shock through Trevim, a violent seizure that threatened the functioning of her half-repaired heart. A wash of physical, biological pain, something she hadn't felt in decades, coursed down her left arm.
Trevim whimpered a little. The Other tried to calm her, but the Apparatus conditioning was an implacable force, a hurricane that raged inside her very cells. These reactions had been laid down like mineral strata over centuries of service to the crown, the ultimate stopgap to prevent a member of the Apparatus from revealing the Secret.
But now the pain was being used against her.
Trevim swallowed, and forced herself to believe her next words.
"You are bluffing, Zai. You know nothing."
"The dead are dying, Adept Trevim."
"Silence!" she shrieked, her vision disintegrating into a cloud of red. She felt a hideous movement inside. For a moment, the Other seemed to retreat from her, its tendrils shrinking from the violent reaction.
Adept Trevim understood vaguely the raw science behind the miracle of the symbiant. The Other's ability to heal and sustain required absolute acquiescence from the body. The calm remove of the honored dead was a means to keep the body and mind from rejecting the life-sustaining ministrations of the symbiant. The tranquillity of the immortals was not merely a spiritual benefit; it was a necessary state. But Trevim's Apparatus conditioning warred with her deathly calm, threatening the mesh of body and Other.
Zai's words could literally tear her in half.
"Silence," she pleaded, gasping. "Just relinquish the writ, Trevim. Release the writ that binds the communications grid."
An action icon hovered before Trevim in second sight. All she had to do was make the sign, and Zai would have his access. He could send a message to Home.
An act of treason.
"No," Trevim said.
"The dead are dying, Adept. Since the beginning."
The pain screamed through her again. And worse than the physical agony was the feeling of the Other pulling away, shying from her body's convulsions. Her heart shuddered, almost failing in her chest.