"Senator Oxham?"
"Yes . . . Commodore?" she asked, reading his rank.
"My name is Marcus Fentu Masrui."
She blinked, recognizing the name. Masrui had been Zai's commanding officer on Dhantu. In fact, she'd come close to meeting the man on the night she'd met Laurent, ten years ago.
"Is it true, Senator?" the officer asked.
"What, Commodore?"
"That the Emperor wanted to kill Laurent Zai? After everything?"
She nodded. "Absolutely true. I heard him say the words."
"And that there is no immortality?"
"Yes. It's all true, Commodore. Laurent himself told me."
The Commodore shook his head ruefully. "If any man deserved to live forever, it was Zai," he said.
She felt it then, the emotion the officers had hidden so well. It burst from behind Masrui's discipline, from behind his decades of training and loyalty. The prize they'd all been promised, the Valhalla where their dead comrades had gone for rewards eternal, the very reason many of them had joined the military: All of it was a lie.
The man's face wrenched, as if he were swallowing something awful. Then he took a deep breath, and focus returned to his thoughts.
"And, another thing, begging your pardon ..." "Yes, Commodore?"
Masrui bit his lower lip before speaking.
"Were you and Zai . . . really lovers?"
"Yes, Commodore. We are lovers." :
For a moment, his face was blank. Then he grasped her hand.
"Thank you," he said.
Nara found herself speechless for a moment. Then she pulled her hand from his. "No thanks necessary, Commodore. It was never pity."
"Of course not, Senator. I didn't mean to imply pity. Thank you, though. I wanted ... all of us wanted somehow to restore Zai. He lost too much on Dhantu. After the Legis rescue failed, we thought the Emperor's pardon was real."
"It wasn't."
He swallowed, the bitter taste of another lie showing on his face.
"Commodore, tell me something," Oxham said.
"At your service, Senator."
"Are there enough of you? Enough to fight those who'll follow the Emperor without question?"
"Not yet. But there will be. The truth will turn them."
He looked up at his departing comrades, realizing that he should join them and put this revolution, this righteous treason, this civil war into motion. But he turned back to Nara.
"Laurent Zai's name will turn them," he said.
"And death," Nara added.
"Death, Senator?"
"Death is real again, Commodore. Remind them of that."
Commodore Masrui thought about this for moment, then shook his head.
"It was always real, Senator, for us soldiers. Death out in space rarely left enough for the symbiant. But I suppose that now death is unavoidable, as it always was before the Emperor's lie."
"Spread the word, then," Nara Oxham said. "We're free again."
Fisherman/Pilot
After a long time, the sun and moon stopped wheeling in the sky. The tides were over.
The fisherman looked down at himself. Somehow, he was still here, still whole after having been consumed a thousand thousand times. The fish were placid now, half in the tide pool, half in the bay.
But no, there were more of them ... in the sky.
The dark night seemed to have filled with stars, as if he'd jumped ten thousand light-years closer to the core. But what looked like stars were in fact the little luminescent fish, strewn across the sky to make a galaxy, a milky river of light. The fisherman's thoughts grew clearer, and he understood what had pacified the ravenous schools: They had reached their goal, resplendent and sovereign in the dark.
They were up there, beyond the reach of his spear.
He dropped the weapon and turned toward the opening sky. . . .
Master Pilot Jocim Marx's gummy eyes focused first on the scarred woman.
Her face was blank, as if nerve damage had rendered it expressionless. The hair had been burned from her scalp. But the woman's gaze was bright and intelligent.
And violet, her eyes as bright a hue as stained glass catching the sun.
Had he been captured by the Rix?
Marx started, trying to sit up. The scarred woman moved awav. with the suddenness of a bird cocking its head. He knew from that movement that she was not human.
"Who--?" Marx began, then he saw Hobbes over the woman's shoulder.
"Jocim?" the ExO said. She articulated the two syllables carefully, as if to establish whether he knew his own name.
He did her one better. "How are you, Katherie Hobbes?"
She smiled, "Relieved."
"How long?"
"A month."
"Godspite." To Marx, it had seemed like an eternity, but the memory was already fading when contrasted to the real world. He looked around, and recognized the room as a private sickbay cabin aboard the Lynx. The violet-eyed Rix had moved to the side of a small, gray-faced woman. One of the honored dead? This was too confusing.
"Why is there a Rixwoman here, Hobbes? Have we been captured?"
"No, Master Pilot. She is a ... guest. Or an ally, perhaps." Hobbes sounded only slightly less confused than Marx. "She helped cure you," the ExO added with surety.
He looked at the violet-eyed woman, blinked.
"Thank you, then, I suppose."
The woman's gaze remained both piercing and empty^ as if he were a specimen pinned in a curio case.
"How do you feel, Marx?" Hobbes asked.
He sat up. His muscles had the even tone of artificial exercise. His fingers, chronically suffering mild soreness from the demands of piloting, felt rejuvenated from the enforced break. His head was ...
Different.
"What happened, Hobbes?"
"Everything."
That was Hobbes. Concise, but not always helpful. The passage of weeks must have refreshed his brain, Marx thought. He could see the executive officer's stunning beauty again, as he had before growing accustomed to it over the last two years. As if he'd spent a month on leave rather than in a...coma?
"You were caught in an upload, Jocim," she said. "Alexander--the Legis compound mind, I should say--was transferring itself from the planet to the object. You got in the way."
The object. That word brought a shiver to Marx. Images swirled in his head: a kind of liquid creature below him, its pseudopods reaching out, like those legant members to which a sea creature delegates its kills. Marx recognized from his own discomfort that he was near-ing his last memories from before the onset of coma. He'd been taken, prey.