"Please reconsider, Adept Trevim." She whispered the words, as if the sound might carry through the dozen meters of thermosphere between the courier ship and the Lynx. Not that there was any need to shout. The adept's face was, as it had been for the last four hours, only centimeters from her own. "I should be the one to accompany the rescue effort."
The third person in the courier ship passenger tube (which was designed to hold a single occupant, and not in luxury) made a snorting sound, which propelled him a few centimeters bowward in the zero-gee.
"Don't you trust me, Initiate Farre?" Barris sniffed. His crude emphasis on her rank was typical of Barris. He too was an initiate, but had reached that status at a far younger age.
"No, I don't." Farre turned back to the adept. "This young fool is as likely to kill the Child Empress as assist in her rescue."
The Adept managed to stare into the middle distance, which, even for a dead woman, was certainly a feat in the two cubic meters they shared.
"What you don't seem to understand, Farre," Adept Harper Trevim said, "is that the Empress's continued existence is secondary."
"Adept!" Farre hissed.
"May I remind you that we serve the Risen Emperor, not his sister," Trevim said.
"My oath was to the crown," Farre answered. "It is extremely unlikely under the circumstances that the Empress will ever wear that crown." The Adept looked directly at Farre with the cold eyes of the Risen.
"Soon she may not have a head to wear it," the always appalling Barris offered.
Even Adept Trevim allowed a look of distaste to cross her visage. She spoke directly to Farre, her voice sharp as needles in the tight confines of the courier ship. "Understand this: The Emperor's Secret is more important than the Empress's life."
Farre and Barris winced. Even to hear mention of the Secret was painful. The initiates were still alive, two of the few thousand living members of the Political Apparatus. Only long months of aversion training and a body full of suicide shunts made it acceptable for them to know what they knew.
Trevim, fifty years dead and risen, could speak of the Secret more easily. But she had reached the Adept level of the Apparatus while still alive, and the training never died; the old woman's teeth were clenched with grim effort as she continued. It was said among the warm that the risen felt no pain, but Farre knew that wasn't true.
"The Empress finds herself in a doubly dangerous situation. If she is wounded and a doctor examines her, the Secret could be discovered. I trust Initiate Barris to deal with that situation, should it arise."
Farre opened her mouth, but no words came. Her Apparatus training roared within her, drowning out her thoughts, her will. Such direct mention of the Secret always sent her mind reeling. Adept Trevim had silenced her as surely as if the courier ship had suddenly decompressed.
"I believe my point is made, Initiate," the adept finished. "You are too pure for this tempestuous world, your discipline too deep. Initiate Barris isn't fit to share your rank, but he'll do this job with a clear head."
Barris began to sputter, but the adept silenced him with a cold glance.
"Besides, Farre," Trevim added, smiling, "you're far too old to become an orbital marine."
At that moment, the shudder of docking went through the ship, and the three uttered not another word.
CHILD EMPRESS
Two hundred seventeen kilometers below the Lynx, the Risen Child Empress Anastasia Vista Khaman, known throughout the Eighty Worlds as the Reason, waited for rescue with deathly calm.
Inside her mind were neither worries nor expectations, just an arid patience devoid of anticipation. She waited as a stone waits. But in those childish regions of her mind that remained active sixteen hundred years Imperial Absolute since her death, the Empress entertained childish thoughts, playing games inside her head.
The Child Empress enjoyed staring at her captor. She often used her inhuman stillness to intimidate supplicants to the throne, the pardon- and elevation-seekers who invariably flocked to her rather than her brother. Anastasia could hold the same position, unblinking, for days if necessary. She had crossed into death at age twelve, and something of her childishness had never died: she liked staring games. Her motionless gaze certainly had an effect on normal living humans, so it was just vaguely possible that, after these four hours, it might disquiet even a Rixwoman. Such a disquiet might be disruptive in those sudden seconds when rescue came.
In any case, there was nothing else to do.
Alas, the Rix commando had shown signs of inhuman constancy herself, keeping her blaster trained unerringly on the Empress's head for just as long. The Empress considered for a moment the flanged aperture less than two meters away. At this range, a single round from the blaster would eliminate any possibility of reanimation; her brain would be vaporized instantly. Indeed, after the spreading plasma storm was over, very little of the Empress's body would remain above the waist.
The cheating death--the one which brought no enlightenment nor power, only nothingness--would come. After sixteen hundred years Absolute (although only five hundred subjective, such were her travels) she would finally be extinct, the Reason for Empire gone.
And it was the case that the Empress, despite her arctic absence of desires in any other normal sense, very much did not want that to happen. She had said otherwise to her brother on recent occasions, but now she knew those words to be untrue.
"The room is now under imperial surveillance, m'Lady," a voice said to the Child Empress.
"Soon, then." The Empress mouthed the words.
The commando cocked her head. The Rix creature always reacted to the Empress's whispers, no matter how carefully she subvocalized. She seemed to be listening, as if hoping to hear the Empress's invisible conversant. Or perhaps she was merely puzzled, wondering at her prisoner's one-sided conversation, the Empress's absolute stillness. Possibly the soldier thought her captive mad.
But the confidant was undetectable, short of very sophisticated and mortally invasive surgery. It was woven through the Empress's nervous system and that of her Lazarus symbiant like threads braided into hair. It was indistinguishable from its host, constructed of dendrites that even bore the royal DNA. The Empress's immune system not only accepted the confidant, but protected the device from its own illnesses without complaint, although from a strictly mechanical point of view, the device was a parasite, using its host's energy without performing any biological function. But the device was no freeloader; it too had a reason to live.